1 Meg File - 1 Minute Download with Broadband
(All articles are bookmarked to the Article Listings)

December 12, 2003

Cleveland Plain Dealer

UFO Buffs Sue To Obtain Data On Pa. Fireball 

by Michael Sangiacomo

Elyria - Were the fiery objects that crashed into Elyria 38 years ago Tuesday part of an unidentified flying object that crashed near the western Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg?

Inquiring minds want to know.

A group of UFO enthusiasts, backed by the Sci-Fi Channel, filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking full disclosure of NASA records regarding the crash of a large, fiery object near Kecksburg.

According to a front-page story in The Plain Dealer on Dec. 10, 1965, smaller fireballs also crashed in the Elyria area, setting 10 small grass fires.

Mrs. Ralph Richards of West River Drive in Elyria told the newspaper she saw a "flaming object about the size of a basketball" crash into a field.

Government officials at the time said the main fireball and the smaller pieces came from a meteorite that broke up on entering the Earth's atmosphere.

But the Coalition for Freedom of Information, a group seeking more government information about UFOs, said witnesses reported watching the huge fireball maneuver through the sky before impact, suggesting it was "either a highly advanced space probe" or some other unknown object from outer space.

"Calling it a meteorite does not explain why the U.S. Army cordoned off the area and kept townspeople out of the site," said Larry Landsman of the SciFi Channel headquarters in New York. "The area was practically under martial law. People have reported seeing something hauled away from the scene, but this was always denied by the government."

The suit was filed in Washington, D.C., by Leslie Kean, of San Rafael, Calif., the investigative director of the Coalition for Freedom of Information. She asked that NASA be forced to release all information it has gathered on the Kecksburg crash.

The coalition was formed last year to concentrate on the "government operations relating to the investigation of unidentified flying objects."

According to the lawsuit, Kean filed a Freedom of Information Act request in January for information and was told that no such records exist.

A spokesman for NASA in Washington, D.C., said the agency had heard about the lawsuit but would have no comment.
 

December 12, 2003

China Daily

Focus: Ufology in mysticism

UFOs, flying saucers and ET conjure up images from Hollywood films and blurred photos in tabloid newspapers. But a number of true believers in China, many of them highly educated, see merit in exploring unidentified flying objects and alien encounters scientifically.

Meng Zhaoguo, a 35-year-old tree grower from Wuchang City in Heilongjiang Province, can still vividly describe the Steven Spielberg-type scenario he claims to have witnessed nearly 10 years ago: As he sat in a huge white, gleaming spaceship, a tall creature with a large head and eyes like light bulbs and clad in an inflated seamless rubber suit perched on a metal sheet that hovered in the air. In a metallic-tinged voice, this interplanetary visitor communicated with a man via a television-like screen, predicting a collision between a comet and Jupiter.

As sensational as it sounds, Meng insists he was taken aboard the ship a month after being shocked by some sort of waves emitted by a silver-coloured object on a mountain he and some other villagers attempted to approach in June 1994.

Such accounts have served to shroud ufology - the study of UFOs - in a kind of mysticism, a word often used when referring to the subject.

The Chinese public first learned about UFOs in 1978, when leading State newspaper the People's Daily ran an article about the phenomenon. Although many accounts of UFO sightings have appeared in the media in the ensuing two decades, the voices of doubt are as strong as people's curiosity.

But despite the cynicism, more than 40 ufology associations across the country have registered some 5,000 believers, not including academicians interested in UFOs. With no State funding and little private sponsorship, the community feels discriminated against and excluded from mainstream scientific
circles.

The sceptics's main demand seems simple enough, but satisfying it is harder: Show me the evidence. A photo or video footage, which can be easily fabricated, is not sufficient. They want to see a real object, a flying saucer, something of a mission impossible for ufologists.

Describing ufologists as Rmantics, Sima Nan, a popular science writer and a leading figure in the country's fight against pseudo-science, says the most important thing in scientific research is to base a study on concrete evidence and avoid subjectivism. Those who alleged to have seen UFOs or had extraterrestrial (ET) encounters, be they an innocent child, sincere woman or down-to-earth farmer or a retired cadre, all lack hard evidence to prove their claims via objective and scientific methods.

"Research work based mostly on imagination is not research at all, "says the writer, adding that the standard telescopes and hand-held video cameras commonly used by ufologists cannot meet the stringent demands of scientific research.

Ufologists, however, believe their research to be as significant as the country's space exploration programme, even if it is not currently being taken seriously. If space exploration includes the search for alien civilizations, they argue, UFO research can serve to supplement it.

Tian Daojun, a professor at the Nanjing University of Aviation and Aeronautics, says that human fantasy is not totally meaningless in scientific research, as some UFO sceptics assume, pointing out that the fanciful notions of human beings did eventually put a man on the moon.

The numerous UFO sightings reported should never be ignored or denied, Tian says. Any information gleaned about the way alien spacecraft function might serve to upgrade scientific research, resulting in breakthroughs in aviation and aeronautics technologies on Earth.

But what upsets UFO researchers most is the suggestion that UFOs are nothing but mythology and ufology is just a new form of pseudo-science.

Ji Jianmin, a UFO enthusiast in Feixiang County in northern China's Hebei Province, dismisses such assertions as too opinionated and unfriendly to UFO researchers and criticizes detractors for their own unscientific approach to the subject.

Ji, a former high school art teacher who currently runs a nameplate design service, became interested in UFOs in the 1980s. He firmly believes in the existence of civilizations on other planets as well as the potential for a kind of psychic connection between residents of Earth and aliens.

A graduate from a local vocational teacher training college, Ji admits that his education falls short of arming him to study UFOs scientifically. But, he adds:" that does not necessarily mean I'mnot qualified to do my part. When it comes to UFO research, everyone is a primary-school pupil, from fans with scant education to established experts in various scientific fields."

The controversy surrounding UFOs is very natural, so long as each side does not force its ideas on the other, according to Wu Jialu, a Shanghai aircraft expert.

Wu also finds it natural for people to become interested in the mysteries of the universe. It's quite nice that people care about things outside their immediate world, as it shows a willingness to expand their vision, and the exploration of the unknown is, after all, both interesting and important. Even within the UFO community, ufologists differ in their approaches to research, although they all consider alien spacecraft and intelligence to be at the very heart of their research.

One school tends to focus on the more practical aspects. Some, like Wu, expect to get inspiration by contemplating the mechanics of alien spacecraft as a means of improving Earth aircraft or even spaceships. Others, including Su Congbo, a seismologist in Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province, are interested in finding out whether there is a connection between UFOs and natural phenomena such as earthquakes.

Beijing-based ufologist Zhang Jingping stands for yet another school of thought in his persistent attempts to prove the existence not only of UFOs but also of alien civilizations.

Zhang, the 30-something owner of an advertising firm who considers ufology his real career, has put a great deal of energy into investigating UFO encounters. A graduate of the Beijing University of Aviation and Aeronautics (BUAA), Zhang says he has no doubt that visitors from other planets have had a considerable amount of contact with people on Earth. Not one to shrink from the courage of his convictions, he even named his advertising company Flying Saucer.

In early September, Zhang invited police technicians and psychologists to subject Meng Zhaoguo to a lie detector test and hypnosis experiments in Beijing. The test results, he says, prove that Meng was telling the truth. Zhang also believes the scars Meng bears from the incident, which doctors said could not possibly have been caused by common injuries or surgery, serve as further evidence of his ET encounter.

But Liu Daoye, a retired expert on national defence based in Nanjing, capital of eastern China's Jiangsu Province, contends that a belief cannot be based on something that cannot be explained, such as the scars Meng says were inflicted during his alien adventure. However exciting the reports of UFO witnesses and however sensational the claims of encounters with ETs may be, Liu says, ufologists must base their studies on serious research and concrete evidence to avoid misleading the public.

"I believe in the probability of intelligent life on other planets, but I doubt such beings have ever travelled to Earth," he says. "To date, no one who has claimed to have encountered an ET can produce concrete evidence, so advocating their existence can only lead UFO research towards mysticism." He says that while the reports of experiences similar to Meng's are not necessarily lies, they are more likely the result of some sort of optical illusion.

Zhang does argue, however, that UFO research should not be fettered by the limitations of modern science and technology.  "We need new conceptions in UFO research, as current science and technology theory also need improving." Cao Lixing, a postgraduate student majoring in computer science at BUAA, says proving the existence of UFOs or flying saucers is important to advancing serious study. "As long as the existence of such phenomena remains unproven, UFO research will never escape the bounds of scepticism," he says.

The young man became interested in UFO research after listening to a lecture Zhang and Meng gave in late September. He also accompanied Zhang to Qinhuangdao, a northern coastal city in Hebei, in early October to look for the landing site of a flying saucer in another alleged ET encounter.

Cao says he appreciates Zhang's enthusiasm and devotion, but admits that it is hard for the average person, himself included, to believe any ET story unless they have such an experience themselves.

A farmer with only five years's schooling, Meng Zhaoguo says he had never heard the term "UFO" before researchers visited him after his story was reported.

After his experience, Meng was sought out by some locals hoping he could cure their diseases, as they reckoned his encounter might have given him special powers. Meng says he refused their entreaties. And more business-minded people wanted to advertise Meng as an attraction to encourage tourism to the region.

Acknowledging the overwhelming doubt he sees in people's eyes when he recalls the incident, the farmer, who has participated in more than 100 interviews with the media and researchers, says that UFOs and ufology, which were originally unknown to him, have disrupted his life and made him feel uneasy.

"But ufologists still take great interest in Meng's UFO encounter nine years on. they hope there will be a conclusion to the UFO phenomenon as soon as possible; only then will I feel released," sighs Meng.
 

December 10, 2003

Alberta Airdrie Echo

Researcher Reports More Sightings

by Paul Wells
Echo Editor

Airdrie Echo — Two recent Airdrie Echo articles on UFO sightings in and around Airdrie continue to spur on other residents to come forward with their stories of strange lights in the sky.

And although he’s investigated thousands of sighting reports over the years, Canadian UFO researcher Brian Vike says the local response has been somewhat unusual.

"It is really interesting to see what has been coming in from your area," said Vike, director of British Columbia-based HBCC UFO Research. "What is really interesting is that other papers have run articles and I never heard a peep about any sightings coming in, so to me this shows that people are seeing strange things in certain areas, such as yours."

Here are the most recent reports from the Airdrie area that Vike has received.

Airdrie
Date: Sept. 15, 2003
Time: 11:20 p.m.

"The witness’ e-mail is below: I also called the witness in Airdrie to gather more information on this sighting. My report after talking to her is below also," Vike said.

"A week before the first article came out in the Airdrie Echo newspaper about sightings, I came home from work about 11:20 p.m. and I let the dogs outside and I was also watching a few northern lights off my deck," said the witness in her e-mail. "I live on the east side of Airdrie ... so we have a hill behind my place with a walkway that goes towards the highway. I looked over to my left toward the west – and I know what I saw – it was a big circle of lights twirling around and hovering on the walkway and then it just went down, not up. I grabbed my dogs and headed into the house. The next week, I read the article in the paper."

Vike said that during his phone conversation with the witness, more information was gathered.

"The witness said it could not have been children twirling lights as, for one thing, the circle of lights was very large in size, plus she could not see anyone in the area," Vike said. She also compared the size to a 10- or 12-foot round C-Band satellite dish. She explained that it looked to her as if it was a ring-shaped object with a lot of white lights running all around the outside of it. She also said it appeared that there was not just one set of lights, but layers of them.

Airdrie
Date: Early July 2000
Time: Late evening

According to Vike, "A gentleman called to file a report. He first told me he lives in the next town north of Airdrie (Crossfield). Back in the year 2000, he was living in Calgary and they had just purchased a home north of Airdrie. The fellow works evenings, so one night when he finished off his shift at work, he asked a good friend if he wanted to take a drive and have a look at his new home he had purchased. He told me it was a beautiful evening and they decided to take the trip to look at the new home. They headed out, both men discussing the distance they would be travelling from Calgary to the new home. The driver thought they would be travelling some 40 kilometers, but his friend thought it would be a little further than that. The driver hit the button on the odometer, which set it at zero kilometers. This way they would know just how far they were about to travel one way. The two men arrived safely at their destination and had a look around and took some time talking. It was starting to get later into the evening, so they thought it best to get back on the road heading towards home. The passenger in the vehicle mentioned to the driver that he had in-laws living in Airdrie and would it be OK if they swung by to show the driver their home. As they drove along the highway outside of Airdrie, the driver noticed some very bright lights coming up from behind them. The lights were very bright, and as the passenger turned around to look he commented on the brightness and how fast the lights were approaching them. Both men, thinking this was a vehicle, never gave it a lot of thought, other than these lights were almost blinding to the driver.

"Now here is where the story takes a strange twist. All of a sudden the fellows came upon a large sign. It read Country Hills Boulevard, which is the first exit to Calgary. What is puzzling is that from when the strange lights came up from behind them and to the sign which read Country Hills Boulevard, there is a possibility that some time had gone missing. Both men do not recall driving through Airdrie at all. The driver took a look at the odometer and he noticed they may be missing 20 kilometers.  As he mentioned to me, he never gave any of this much thought, but did find it rather strange. The driver also said he has driven this stretch of highway many times and nothing like this has ever taken place. I asked the man if he or his friend had ever had any vivid dreams and he said no. As far as he knows, nothing out of the ordinary has happened to him other than this one strange event. The driver did mention that his friend did lose a little sleep over the experience."
 

November 26, 2003

Alberta Airdrie Echo

More UFO sightings Reported
Additional witnesses come forward after recent article

Paul Wells
Echo Editor

A British Columbia-based UFO researcher says a story which appeared in the Echo in September regarding sightings in the Airdrie area has spurred others to come forward with their experiences with strange lights in the sky.

Brian Vike, director of HBCC UFO Research and a regular contributor to TV and radio shows as a UFO expert, said numerous sightings of unidentified objects in the area over the past months has ensured that Airdrie has entered the lexicon of the UFO community.

"I do a weekly radio show (in B.C.) and I mentioned to the host that I have received a number of reports from the (Airdrie) area and we talked about the latest one, which came in on air," Vike said.

"I have been doing many radio shows (in Canada and the U.S.) and I always include information about the sightings in your area."

The original article contained a rundown of three of the most recent sightings in the area which occurred from July through September. That article can be found at www.airdrieecho.com under the archive section.

Since that time, Vike has received reports of more sightings which have occurred recently. These include:

o Aug. 18, 2003, 2:30 p.m. According to Vike, a man called HBCC UFO Research s toll-free UFO hotline to report a strange sight he witnessed while driving on Highway 2 from Calgary to Airdrie.

"He watched a small white light cross the highway in the distance ahead of him and the ball of light turned in his direction. The witness said he observed the light getting closer and all of a sudden the object stopped still a ways away from him and changed from a ball of light into a craft of some type. He reported no sound being heard. I asked if he might be able to determine the size of it and he said that when it was in the distance, it could have been approximately the size of his fingernail but when it headed in his direction and got very close, in his words, It was huge. "

The witness said the object came to a complete stop and sat stationary for a period of time before he lost sight of it.

o Sept. 15, 2003, 8:33 p.m. (The following is an e-mail report received by Vike.) "I noticed an article in the Airdrie Echo the other day and wondered if you had an explanation for something my daughter and I saw Friday night (Sept. 26). We were looking west of the Big Dipper and saw what looked like an exceptionally bright star (brighter than anything I have seen before).

"We were trying to figure out if it was a planet or something, and it just dimmed out to nothing in a matter of 10 seconds or less. It didn t move at all, just dimmed to a faint point, then we couldn t see it anymore.

o Oct. 27, 2003, 11 p.m. Vike said a man called him Nov. 3 to make a report after reading the Echo article.

"He was talking to his neighbours and they asked him if he had witnessed anything strange on Oct. 27 at around 11 p.m. He said no and asked what it was these folks saw.

"The couple said they were outside of their home looking west toward the mountains and witnessed five very bright flashes in different parts of the sky. All the flashes that were witnessed were very low in the horizon and at least 100 times brighter than a regular flash one would see from a camera.

"Also, the flashes were very large in size. They also mentioned the lights were at a great distance away from their location."

Having been a UFO researcher for many years, Vike said his routine is to first attempt to offer such rational explanations as weather patterns, satellites or meteors for such sightings.

"I do know that (UFO sightings) is sometimes a very strange topic ... but I honestly do look for rational explanations for such sightings," he said. "Most times, I can offer an explanation of what the folks witnessed, but then I have many cases which also go unsolved."
 

November 21, 2003

Diario El Tribuno (Argentina)

UFO Follows Three Mechanics in Salta for Two Hours

"I'd never been so scared," said one of the protagonists of the strange and extraordinary adventure.

A team of three mechanics from Salta, who had ventured out to rescue a minibus belonging to a Canadian scientific expedition on the Chilean side of the Andean region bordering the provinces of Salta and Jujuy, had an unexpected brush with the unusual: an unidentified flying object (UFO) of considerable size, spherical, and having an "impressive white luminosity" followed them for over two hours on a straight road that links the communities of Susques and Punamarca through the international Jama Pass.

"I'd never been so scared. That thing didn't belong to this world. It moved at an impossible speed and at one point came so close to us we thought it would collide," said Raul Eduardo Oviedo Tomas of the "Forani" mechanic shop in Salta. The North American researchers were stranded at San Pedro de Atacama. Headed by Dr. Randall, the scientists were conducting a survey of Cordilleran flora.

"We left Saturday on 4:45 from Salta toward the Cordillera. I asked two friends--Marco Figueroa and Alejandro--to accompany me so I wouldn't have to do either the work or the journey alone. This was the first time I had driven those roads, and I was truly impressed, not just by the landscape and the desolation, but by the hardship. One has to climb a 70 kilometer-long incline to reach Chile, which can destroy the engine of any unit driven by a inexperienced motorist," said Oviedo Tomas, 37, with an athletic build.

He added: "We reached San Pedro de Atacama around 14 hours on the same day, but [upon reaching the site] we realized that it would be impossible to tow the Canadian minibus with my S10 Chevy--it weighed over 5000 kilos and one good look at its structure and equipment sufficed to establish that the only way to get it out of there would be using a "mosquito truck" or something similar. We therefore decided to return home."

Without hesitation, taking deep drags of a cigarette, Oviedo Tomas went on: "The road on the Argentinean side is trully horrible, especially when contrasted with the Chilean side, which is like a paved pool table, with signage and road markings. At that point, shortly before reaching Susques, the stones caused us a blowout, which caused us to continue the trip under stress, since there was no other spare tier. We thought to repair it in the little town [Susques] but the tire repairman was on holiday, so we had to continue regardless. It was still Saturday."

"At around 20:00 we left Susques for Punamarca. We were listening to music and remarking about the impressive darkness and loneliness of this area, which is an upland plateau. Suddenly the lights and radio went out. I braked because I couldn't see anything at all due to the darkened. "Stop fooling around!" Alejandro told me from the back seat."

"Meanwhile, I was moving all of the knobs and to see what had happened. Nothing worked, only the engine. Suddenly, on my right and at an [undetermined] distance, I saw a strange light. It was a small sphere that irradiated an intense white light. 'Did you see that?' asked Marcos. I never got to answer, even though I thought [the light] was what they call 'la luz mala' (the evil light), because it started moving swiftly toward us until it became enormous. It stopped and remained static. 'Don't look at it!' I told my friends, although I don't know why. I accelerated and poured on as much speed as possible, however, that 'thing' started to fly again in a perfect straight line. It didn't make a single sound. Suddenly, it gained speed and in less than a second it vanished toward the bottom of the plain."

"We were quiet and didn't make a single remark, although all of us asked each other many times 'Did you see it? Did you see it?'. We went on in silence, although not for long, because other things happened that were truly unbelievable."
 

November 14, 2003

Western Daily Press (UK)

The Boys In Blue & Their Little Green Men

Ello 'ello 'ello, what's goin' on 'ere then? There seem to be rather a lot of spaceships hovering in the West's night skies.  More than 200 police officers have come forward to say they have seen UFOs flying over the British countryside, a detective revealed yesterday.

And according to the bobbies' X-files experiences, for the past 50 years the West has been a buzzing hotspot for extra-terrestrial activity.

One of the first recorded incidents out of the 84 recorded on the Prufos (Police Reporting UFO Sightings) website, comes from 1963 when PC Anthony Penny, on duty and wearing his uniform, saw an orange shape zoom over the sky and disappear into a field.

A few days later, when a large crater was found in the meadow, a bomb disposal team was sent to investigate, and the incident was even mentioned in Parliament.

Det Con Gary Heseltine, who works for the British Transport Police in Leeds and runs the database, feels the sightings are particularly credible because they all come from serving or retired officers.

"To my logical, police-trained mind, the officers provide excellent witness testimony promoting the 'nuts and bolts' evidence that supports the extra-terrestrial hypothesis," he wrote in a special report for this month's UFO Magazine.

And yesterday, the 43-year-old said he believed the sightings were only the tip of the iceberg.

"Many officers are worried about saying anything in case it affects their jobs or careers. That's why many sightings are only reported to me after officers have retired or if there are multiple sightings that several officers have seen," he said.  "The police are trained observers, they are out 24 hours a day."

A firm believer in extra-terrestrial life, Det Con Heseltine has himself had two UFO experiences. But one of the most dramatic brushes with a UFO was reported by two off-duty policemen at dusk on an October day in 1967, in Lytchett Minster, Dorset.

A large cigar-shaped spaceship, that was changing colour and form, was hovering over the village. As they watched, it split in two, disappeared and reappeared, and then shot from view.

And PC Roger Willey was one of two officers in a patrol car who reported giving chase to a cross-shaped spaceship in Okehampton, Devon. Their official report filed after the flying saucer sighting said it hovered over Salisbury in Wiltshire for almost a minute.
 

October 27, 2003

Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville)

Kelly green men documentary filmed this weekend in L.A.

by Michele Carlton

A documentary film featuring the 1955 invasion of "little green men" in the Christian County community of Kelly began filming this weekend in the Angeles National Forest just north of Los Angeles.

Barcon Video Productions, based in Glendale, Calif., filmed the dramatization of the local legend to include as part of a documentary entitled "Monsters of the UFO."

A Barcon production crew conducted eyewitness interviews in Hopkinsville last December to include in the film.

"I've wanted to do this film since I was a teenager," said producer/director Barry Conrad in an interview from Los Angeles last week. "I've wanted to try to bring the Kelly green men legend to life."

The local legend took root when the small town residents reported the landing of a space ship near the home of Cecil "Lucky" Sutton on Old Madisonville Road at the edge of Kelly on Aug. 21, 1955. Sutton and other family members said 12 little men landed in a spaceship and

then battled them at the house for hours.

Although the invaders are now known as the "little green men of Kelly," the original stories reported they were silver.

Actor Paul Clemens portrays Elmer "Lucky" Sutton and Mark Irvingsen plays Billy Ray Taylor in the re-enactment, Conrad said. Other character actors portray other true life persons who were present during the actual alien siege at Kelly.

Conrad said much of the film will be based on rare documents found at the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago created by the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who served as the Air Force's official consultant to the media regarding sightings of UFO's. Dr. Hynek later worked with Steven Spielberg on the 1977 blockbuster documentary, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Bryan Moore, a special effects artist who created many of the monsters used in the old Laurel Entertainment series, "Tales From the Darkside," is designing the aliens to be used in the Kelly story, Conrad said.

The documentary, "Monsters of the UFO," is a one?hour anthology special focusing on three stories involving close encounters with unexplained phenomenon. In addition to the Kelly green men, the film will explore first?hand accounts of the Mothman legend in Point Pleasant, W.Va., and the Flatwoods Monster in Flatwoods, W.Va.

Conrad and co-producer Lisa McIntosh are also planning a special DVD release later next year on the legend of the Kelly green men.

The director said to complete the DVD, Barcon needs additional photographs from Hopkinsville and Kelly circa 1955 and old film footage of the area.

"An Unknown Encounter" and "California's Most Haunted" were recently broadcast by the Sci Fi Network. Sci Fi executive Ray Cannella said these two documentaries garnered the highest ratings in the their history for the Tuesday prime time slots featured on its "Tuesday Declassified" series, a Barcon news release said.

Barcon film crews expect to return to Hopkinsville in December to conduct some final research and interviews, Conrad said.  "Monsters of the UFO" will most likely air on the Sci Fi Channel next year.
 

October 27, 2003

New York Post

Sci Fi: We Got Secret UFO Files

by Don Kaplan

THE SCI FI Channel has cracked open the file cabinet containing the real-life version of "The X-Files."

SCI FI pressured NASA into releasing top secret records about a 1965 UFO incident that took place in Kecksburg, Pa. and won.

Now about 36 pages of classified documents that have been kept under lock and key for almost four decades are being exposed to the public.

The release is part of an ongoing effort by SCI FI - along with a D.C. lobbying firm and former Clinton chief of staff, John Podesta - to pressure government agencies into making public top-secret records of various UFO related incidents that are over 25 years old.

"I think its fair to say that we have truly entered the realm of science fiction in Washington, D.C.," said Podesta.

"When it's fair game to disclose the identity of a clandestine CIA agent but not the records of an unexplained crash in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania that occurred 38 years ago."
 

October 14, 2003

Florida Today

UFO Expert Comes To Brevard 

by Billy Cox

George W. Bush raised a few eyebrows during the 2000 presidential campaign when he responded to a question about releasing government files on unidentified flying objects. "It'll be the first thing he (Dick Cheney) will do," Bush said. "He'll get right on it."

Immediately upon assuming office, however, the Bush administration exhibited an impulse for even tighter controls on government information, long before the 9/11 security clampdown. From Bush's immediate suspension of the 1978 Presidential Records Act to Cheney's refusal to comply with a General Accounting Office request for the names of the Vice President's Energy Task Force members, patterns of concealment are consistent. Just last month, Bush signed Executive Order 12958, which gave the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy the unprecedented authority to declare information "Top Secret."

"They didn't explain a rationale for it," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project in Washington, D.C. "The only way to know for sure how significant it is, is to come back a year from now and see how many times it's been exercised."

UFO declassification proponents thought they were building momentum for congressional hearings with a forum of witnesses in May 2001 announcing their willingness to testify. Then, the roof fell in. "The Saudi Arabian flying circus came to town, and the U.S. declared an open-ended war against this term, this noun, called terror," recalls lobbyist Stephen Bassett. "All the attention and all the headlines got sucked up by 9/11, and all the political work went into suspended animation."

But UFO reports never stopped. Nor did calls for government accountability. Friday, one of the leading advocates -- Stanton Friedman -- will discuss what he calls the "Cosmic Watergate" at Brevard Community College's Titusville campus.

Author of "Crash at Corona" and "Top Secret/Majic," Friedman was among the first to revisit the 1947 Roswell Incident, in which military authorities initially announced the recovery of a flying saucer, only to reverse themselves amid the ensuing media clamor. But from his home in New Brunswick, Canada, the American-born researcher blames contemporary media passivity for enabling a cover-up.

"The only way we'll make any progress with this issue is when the press gets off its duff and takes a serious look at all the documents that have been in the public domain for years," says Friedman. His background in nuclear physics landed him 14 years' worth of work on nuclear rockets, much of it classified. "I'd like to see them spend just 10 percent of the energy they invested in covering Gary Condit, Elian Gonzales and Monica Lewinsky."

Friedman contends government documents already in the public domain are loaded with smoking guns, not the least of which is the famous Bolender Memo. In 1969, just as the Air Force was terminating its public investigation of UFOs called Project Blue Book based on their negligible impact on national security, Brig. Gen. C.H. Bolender, deputy director of development for the USAF chief of staff, illuminated a backdoor policy: "Reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security. . . . are not part of the Blue Book system."

"The media needs a commitment to the truth and to ignore the crap," says Friedman. "There was a conference in Chicago in 1997, on the 50th anniversary of Roswell, and one guy shows up wearing alien antennae on his head. CBS was covering the event and -- wouldn't you know it? -- the guy with the headgear is the one who makes the news that night. This is typical."

Next April, during the presidential primary campaigns, Friedman and a host of investigators will join Bassett, founder of X-PPAC, the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, in Washington for yet another effort to forge UFOs into political dialogue. Bassett was on hand in 2001 when an initiative called the Disclosure Project pressed for immunity for whistleblowers whose testimony would violate their security oaths.

Among the most impressive insiders assembled by the Disclosure Project was a retired USAF captain who -- supported by Strategic Air Command documents -- was in a Wyoming ICBM silo in 1967 when a UFO drained the power from launch complexes housing 10 nuclear-tipped warheads. Another was a Federal Aviation Administration accidents division chief who, despite being told by a CIA agent to keep a lid on it, presented a box full of records concerning a harrowing, 30-minute encounter involving a UFO and a Japanese airliner off Alaska in 1986.

Although the Bush presidency apparently has no intention of addressing UFOs, its attitude is part of a bipartisan continuum by chief executives to avoid the issue. Jimmy Carter, for instance, filed a report of his own UFO sighting with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and promised an open investigation during his 1976 campaign. But as president, Carter never followed through. Bill Clinton, according to the memoirs of former deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell, directed him to get to the bottom of UFOs.  Hubbell failed.

Repeated efforts by Florida Today to interview both Democrats about UFOs have been unsuccessful.

Last year, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta announced his partnership with the Coalition for Freedom of Information --funded by the Sci Fi Channel, a client of his PodestaMattoon law firm -- to try to end UFO gridlock. For CFI research advisor Ted Roe, the issue is compelling, but so delicate he refers to the mystery in broader terms: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAEs.

Roe is the executive director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) in Vallejo, Calif. In order to improve flight safety, NARCAP, a private outfit, collects data on everything from ball lightning to plasma disturbances, as reported by pilots, radar operators and air traffic controllers. But getting these sources to cooperate is dicey, due to the exotic nature of many UAEs.

"The really strange ones involve cylinders, discs, spheres, red lights and white lights, V-shaped or boomerang-shaped objects. Some of them are huge," says Roe, whose colleague, Dr. Richard Haines, authored a controversial report in 2000 analyzing more than 100 incidents, entitled "Aviation Safety in America."

"Some of them seem to demonstrate an alteration of magnetic fields, which can cause compasses to turn up to 20 degrees off direction. They can have transient or permanent effects on avionics systems, such as shutting off transmitters."

In early September 2001, NARCAP sent survey questionnaires on UAEs to 300 pilots of a major airline carrier. "We couldn't have picked a worse week," says Roe. "Two days later, the (World Trade Center) towers fell." Still, NARCAP got a 24 percent response, with one of every six subjects reporting having seen something so bizarre they couldn't identify it. "But not a one of them reported it to management," Roe adds.

Roe says retirees are more likely to talk than active pilots, which isn't a surprise. "The airline facilitator who was trying to promote our survey wound up getting two psychiatric evaluations," he says. "There are 500,000 people in our target culture, the aviation community, who are very interested in this subject. But these experiences become toxic when they manifest into (pilots') environment."

Only constant media pressure, says Friedman, will force authorities to respond to public curiosity. After all, 72 percent of Americans responding to a Roper Poll conducted last year believes the government isn't telling everything it knows about UFOs.

"I read that with Watergate, the Washington Post had something like 16 people working that story at one time," says Friedman, who'll also be signing copies of his work at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Merritt Island on 7 p.m. Thursday. "It's going to require that sort of effort. You can have all the seminars and lectures in the world, but if the press doesn't come and follow it up, then you haven't had much of an impact."
 

October 10, 2003

Mississippi Press (Pascagoula)

Observers Question UFO Experience

by Donna Harris

MOSS POINT -- More than a decade before Charles Hickson claimed an intergalactic encounter, Fritz Breland had his own brush with an object of an unidentified sort.

"You could feel the hair rise up on the back of your head," said, Breland, an 80-year-old retired commercial fisherman from Moss Point.

Even though the Moss Point man has his own UFO story, he's not sure if he can believe Hickson's claim. However, he doesn't want to call him a liar either.

"I don't dispute people's word if they have anything to say," he said. "Evidently, I saw something and he did too."

Breland's tale, so far untold, started on Gray Bayou on Three River Lakes in the 1950s. He was casting for bass on the bow of his boat, when he noticed the trees on the right side of the Pascagoula River had lost their leaves. That's when he noticed three objects, like blurry clouds, speeding through the sky.

"I don't know how I saw it because it was moving so fast," he said. "I couldn't swear to it, but it sounded like it made a swooshing sound."

Breland fished with his father as a child, and continues his treks on the water today. Never in all that time has he seen that sight repeated, he said.

"I saw that one thing that I couldn't explain, but I never saw anything else. And I didn't tell anybody about it," he said.

When Hickson's story made the national news, Breland thought about his own sighting.

"To this day I'm not sure what I saw," he said.

Hurley resident Lynn McCoy, a tour guide on the Pascagoula River, never saw a UFO near the water. Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster have been no-shows too, but McCoy said that doesn't mean they don't exist. They could be out there, he said, so he shouldn't doubt their existence, just because he hasn't seen them.

"I never really looked for them either," he said.

McCoy thinks Hickson and his fishing buddy, Calvin Parker, may have seen a UFO that night. "I ain't never seen nothing like
that," he said. "I believe something happened. I don't know what happened though. I heard they were really shook up."

McCoy has spent hundreds of nights on the river without extraterrestrial interference. "I've never seen anything I couldn't explain," he said. "I ain't saying they ain't there, but I've never seen them."

He still looks into the night sky though, wondering if he might catch a glimpse of a hint of another world. "Oh yeah. I guess we all do that sometimes," he said.

When Hickson went public with his story, Regina Hines of Ocean Springs, now a columnist for The Mississippi Press, was the first to land an interview with him. She met the shipyard worker soon after his abduction and wrote about the encounter.

"I don't know what happened, but I really think something did happen to them," she said. "I can't say if it was extraterrestrial or not, though."

She said she doesn't know if she fully believes that Hickson and Parker were abducted by aliens.

"Those were two pretty frightened men," she said. "I can't say it was a UFO, but it was something."

Donna Harris can be reached at 934-1495 or at
 

October 5, 2003

Sun Herald (Gulfport, MS)

Pascagoula UFOs

PASCAGOULA - Thirty years ago this week, UFO pandemonium broke out.

Folks feared an invasion from outer space. Others thought there was much ado about nothing. Everybody wanted more information.

From a newsman's view, I have never seen before or since so many people caught up in such a frenzy. It was over a report by Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker that a spacecraft had landed on the banks of the Pascagoula River and taken them onboard briefly.

"Everybody was seeing UFOs," recalled retired Mississippi Press Managing Editor Don Broadus.

A Pascagoula city councilman said he saw a luminous UFO the same night of Hickson's and Parker's report on the way to a church service in Vancleave.

"That's our story and we're stuck with it," E. P. Sigalas said.

Pascagoula Patrolman Bill Gennaro stopped on Beach Boulevard to talk with a group of people and they saw an oblong-shaped, blue-haze object zip to the north.

About 3,000 motorists from Mobile blocked Interstate 10 when they heard of a possible rendezvous with UFOs at the Mississippi line.

A cab driver in Biloxi said a UFO caused his taxi to stall out on U.S. 90.

Ocean Springs aldermen failed to pass a motion to make it illegal for a UFO to land in the city. Mayor Tom Stennis broke a 2-2 tie, saying, "Let's welcome them."

Then-Sheriff Fred Diamond's view: "Those men saw something. They underwent a dreadful experience."

UFO enthusiasts and news crews from all over the world called and many came to Pascagoula to gather more information about the stunning visit by a spacecraft.

"I estimate that we have received more than 2,000 telephone calls from news reporters from around the world wanting information, and from people in the area who wanted to report a sighting," Diamond said.

It was a media frenzy. Networks and national publications showed up. The reports got wild and woolly. It was too much for two shipbuilders who had never been in such demand. They put out a memo: No more personal interviews. Our attorney, Joe Colingo, will arrange a news conference next week.

The space encounter was in the news for weeks. Hickson went on talk shows such as "The Dick Cavett Show." Parker went into seclusion.

I've followed the UFO account for 30 years and am amazed that Hickson and Parker have been so consistent with their account of what happened Oct. 11, 1973. Being a typical newsperson-skeptic, it's still too much to fathom.
 

October 4, 2003

Houston Chronicle

Scientist says UFO tales far out
Saucer-buster's research data material finds home at Texas A&M

by Allan Turner

First came the UFO, a massive, saucer-shaped craft hovering low over the Pacific Northwest in the spring of 1967. Then, two days later, came the beeping - a steady, two-beeps-to-the-second sound coming from no discernible source. Locals, some bearing rifles, flocked to the woods to hear, to puzzle, to perhaps solve the mystery.

The night-time beeping continued for weeks. Police even thought they heard it on their radios. When the beeping began, cows and dogs grew agitated, then quiet. Even the loud-mouthed frogs shut up. Civil defense experts prowled the woods to no avail. Bird-call experts analyzed poor-quality tapes of the sound and came up blank. Finally, at wit's end, local authorities turned to their last hope: the crack saucer-busters at the University of Colorado.

Within days, physical scientist Roy Craig, an investigator with the university's Air Force-financed Condon Project - the nation's largest, most systematic investigation of UFOs to date - was dispatched to the scene.

What he found was the stuff of history.

Now, for the first time, scholars and others interested in the data that led Craig and other Condon Project scientists to conclude flying saucers probably don't exist can peruse Craig's field notes at Texas A&M University's Cushing Memorial Library.

Included in nine boxes of files are Craig's investigative jottings, correspondence and photographs as well as popular and scientific articles related to alleged visits by space aliens. Also available for examination are objects - aluminum shavings, globs of metal and a lawn mower muffler - found at the sites of purported UFO landings. Craig's papers join material on ranching, military, poetry and one of the nation's top science-fiction collections at the Cushing. And part of their value lies in the scientific insight they can provide students of  science fiction. "If you say the Condon report is absolute foolishness, that there's nothing behind it, well we have nine boxes behind it," said Hal W. Hall, curator of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection at A&M. Thirty-five years after its release, the Condon Project report, compiled under the supervision of respected University of Colorado physicist Edward U. Condon, continues to generate controversy. In 1969, the year man first set foot on the moon, the Air Force used the report as the basis for its decision to stop monitoring reported UFO sightings.

Despite the study's thumbs down on verifiable visits by space creatures, interest in extraterrestrials, fueled by movies and other media, remains high. An Internet search for UFO-related Web sites last week turned up more than 64,000 entries. An estimated 1.5 million viewers recently tuned in to a television special on the purported 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M.

"UFOs are popular things," Craig said in a telephone interview from his Ignacio, Colo., home. "I think UFOs really have had an impact on our culture. I'm not unhappy about that. I think that's fine."

Craig, 79, who was co-author of the three-volume Condon report, abides the controversy, which labels him an instrument in an egregious government cover-up, with good humor.

Once, Craig was visited by a UFO researcher who was certain the preserved bodies of 16 space creatures removed from a flying saucer said to have crashed at Aztec, N.M. - a short distance from Ignacio - were stored at the scientist's ranch.

All the visitor found were several dozen llamas Craig raises for the pet market. But the visitor was undaunted." 'If it weren't true, why would Roy Craig be here?'" Craig recalled. "I confirmed all of his suspicions. He wrote a 500-page book about it."

Craig is not above having fun with folks from outer space. Shortly after the university report's release, he authored a tongue-in-cheek psuedo-folk song dealing with flying saucers. Above an accompaniment of guitar and beeps and whines, a syrupy-voiced songstress intones the virtues of galactic travelers to
Earth.

Craig also is author of UFOs: An Insider's View of the Official Quest for Evidence, published by University of North Texas Press.

Craig admits that he entered the Condon Project hoping to find persuasive evidence that space creatures have visited Earth. "I was looking for physical evidence," he said. "I was hoping that it was more than just something in somebody's mind. I would like to have found a vehicle or some strange alien. But it didn't turn out that way."

Although the Condon Project report is more than three decades old, Craig said he doesn't think there's a need for a new, comprehensive probe. "Not unless something different happens. The report's not really outdated. It's pretty firm," he said.

Colm Kelleher, administrator of the Las Vegas-based National Institute for Discovery Science, sharply disagreed. "I do believe the UFO phenomenon is still with us and worth an impartial investigation using scientific methodology," he said.

In some ways, Kelleher's organization is a privately funded version of the Condon Project.

In 1999, the group set up a UFO hot line, receiving more than 5,000 accounts of purported encounters with space vehicles.

"We very quickly discarded 80 to 90 percent of them as not worthy of investigation - Vandenberg Air Force Base launches,  space shuttles, Venus low on the horizon. You name it and people will report it," Kelleher said. But some of the remaining cases proved tantalizing.

"We haven't found any smoking guns," Kelleher said. "But with sufficient resources and sufficient persistence, scientific investigation will eventually yield results. It's a slow process. We think true believers and debunkers are in the same camp. Neither produces anything particularly useful. The true scientific approach is to focus on the data rather than the interpretation. We are drowning in way too much interpretation with very little data."

In his investigations, Craig encountered a wide variety of people. "They were all over the spectrum," he said. "Some were businessmen. Some of them held dependable, responsible jobs and they seemed like normal people. They generally seemed to believe what they were saying."

In the fall of 1967, Craig interviewed a man who claimed his car stopped suddenly, its radio and lights failing, as a flying saucer passed overhead early one morning as he traveled a lonely rural road.

Craig ultimately dismissed the middle-age businessman's claims, though, when scientific tests showed the auto had not been subjected to a strong magnetic field and that its chipping paint and pitted windshield could be logically explained. Craig's conclusion was buttressed by inconsistencies in the man's story.

In the summer of 1967, a 50-year-old general machine handyman and his 11-year-old son told Craig they had snapped two Polaroid photos of a spacecraft after a strange noise attracted their attention.

"They looked in the direction of the noise and saw a UFO about 60 feet in diameter some 500 feet away, moving about 30 to 40
mph at an altitude of 500-600 feet," Craig wrote later. "Mr. A snapped two pictures during the 15-20 seconds before the object departed at a speed estimated to be 2,000 mph."

Craig noted that the spacecraft in the photos strongly resembled a pot lid atop a pie plate.

Careful examination of the photos, measuring the size of the UFO's image and factoring in the degree of focus of other objects in the picture, indicated the spaceship had not been 60 feet in diameter as claimed - but about the size of a pie plate.

Time and again Craig's hopes would rise when he learned of a promising UFO sighting, only to be dashed when he investigated. Was he ever almost convinced of the reality of UFOs?

"I don't think you could say I was ever `almost convinced' in any of these cases," Craig said. "There was always some discrepancy that just didn't add up."

In the case of the mysterious beeps, Craig said, researchers quickly dismissed the reported UFO sightings as insubstantial. But the strange noises were another matter.

Arming themselves with an array of high-tech gadgetry --military infrared sniper scope; tape recorders; directional microphone audio detector; and cameras loaded with infrared, ultraviolet and conventional high-speed film - Craig and his colleagues staked out the woods.

Throughout the night they heard the beeps.

"It lasted not more than 10 seconds and seemed to come from a direction different from its usual location," a clearly perplexed Craig wrote.

The next night, Craig and his team packed their gear to another wooded spot.

Nary a sound was heard.

A morning chat with the sheriff solved the mystery.

Sometime in the night, a local farmer, alarmed at the endless beeping around his house, blasted into the treetops - and brought down an owl. Recorded calls of the elusive saw-whet owl matched perfectly the recorded mystery beeps.

The tiny owl, only 6 inches long, easily was overlooked in dense forest foliage, Craig noted in his report, allowing beep hunters "to conclude that the sound came from a point in space that was not occupied by a physical object."
 

October 3, 2003

Portland Tribune

Reach Out And Touch The Extraterrestrial

by Eric Bartels 

The difference between the now-defunct 24 Hour Church of Elvis and the Portland Alien Museum is that nobody at the church really believed Elvis was alive.

Museum Director Lawrence Johns, on the other hand, doesn't just accept the existence of extraterrestrial life. He's preparing for contact.

"We're trying to build up a database," Johns says of the museum's Center for Alien Studies. "It's becoming more mainstream, the whole idea of making contact."

In June, Johns and business partner Stephen Hanns opened the museum in a Craftsman-style home off Northeast Sandy Boulevard in the Hollywood district. "There are over 150,000 people in this country who believe that UFOs are real," Johns says. "There's a tremendous interest in UFO information.

"There are some fascinating stories coming into the museum. It becomes a meeting point for people. A lot of people have experiences, and they've been afraid to talk about it.

"We've had a good number of people from the military come by," Johns adds, refusing to elaborate. "In this field, one has to protect confidences. We're a serious research facility, but it's surrounded by a unique and interesting attraction."

Unique indeed. Several "contact-inspired" artworks with four-and five-figure price tags hang within reach of plastic "E.T." dolls. With bare spots separating eclectic exhibits, the former gallery space manages to look both Spartan and haphazard at the same time.

In other words, precisely the kind of attraction that could become a local institution, like the Church of Elvis.

"Portland has a national reputation for being a little offbeat," says Deborah Wakefield, director of public communications for the Portland Oregon Visitors Bureau. "This may be one of those quirky things that makes Portland fun."

Museum visitors watch themselves shrink in the world's first artificial vortex and enjoy a new display on different types of aliens. The museum's library features a reference section, an impressive collection of vintage sci-fi magazines and comics, and assorted television and movie props, including a phaser weapon that Johns says was used in the original "Star Trek" series.

The 3-D video thrill ride, in the "theater," was an immediate hit, Johns says.

A kitchen was converted into a children's play "wing," replete with two old school desks, a smattering of action figures and a 13-inch television.

There, writer Nick Nelson fiddled with a device designed to produce "Mars water." It consists of a small funnel and tube passing through what looks like a petrified bagel. "There is water on the surface of Mars," Nelson says. "There used to be a civilization. NASA's covering it up."

The author of the 2000 book "The Golden Vortex," Nelson was in town for a speaking engagement at the museum. "About 20 years ago I came up with a theory of natural portals that UFOs may or may not be using," he says. "If there are UFOs out there, they're probably using the planet Earth the way people in Washington use Oregon to get to California."

Inside the front door of the museum, a full-color poster depicts the fleet of saucers that streaked past Mount Rainier in 1950, just off the left wing of pilot Kenneth Arnold's plane. Arnold's book, "Behind the Flying Saucers," rests in a display case.

On another wall is a reproduced front page of the McMinnville Telephone Register from June 8, 1950. A banner headline reads: "At Long Last -- Authentic Photographs of Flying Saucer (?)." Below it are two famous photos taken by Yamhill County farmer Paul Trent that capture a tilting, silvery disc an indeterminate distance from his barn. The Life magazine issue with a one-page story on the incident is nearby.

"This was and is the hotbed for sightings," says Randy Haragan, owner of theufostore.com, the Beaverton-based Internet vendor that consigns items to the museum's gift shop. "With the UFO history in the Northwest, it's a natural thing to open some sort of museum."

Contact Eric Bartels at: ebartels@portlandtribune.com
 

August 8, 2003

Suffolk Evening Star (UK)

UFO Sighting Excites Alien Hunters 

UFO investigators are targeting Suffolk in their quest to find alien life.

The county has become the focus for alien hunters, in a case worthy of X files agents Mulder and Scully, after a strange sighting of an apparently alien craft in the skies over east Suffolk.

Eagle-eyed residents living along the banks of the River Orwell may have witnessed a close encounter of the third kind if they had glanced up at the starry sky.

A strange yellow D-shaped object was spotted overhead by a man in his garden at Freston.

He watched in wonder as the UFO changed shape before it altered course and flew off at around 11pm on August 5.

But instead of phoning home, like Steven Spielberg's ET, the man called the operator who put him through to Contact – an organisation based in Oxfordshire that records and researches UFO sightings.

They treat all reported sightings in the strictest confidence so were not prepared to identify the witness.

The object could not have been very high as the witness saw an aeroplane flying above it, but he knew it was not the moon as he could see this clearly.

It was not the police helicopter either. According to a police spokeswoman the helicopter was not in the area that night.

Contact spokesman, Michael Sopher, said: "It would interesting to know if anyone else saw the same thing.

"Any sightings over the Ipswich area are of great interest to us due to the historic events at Rendlesham. New evidence recently released from the government admits that this event was a proper UFO landing."

Rendlesham is renowned worldwide for the events in 1980 when American airmen claimed a UFO landed in the forest at their airbase.

The events remain unexplained although recently someone came forward claiming to have hoaxed the strange events.

However Mr Sopher believes no one could have damaged leaves hanging 50ft up in the trees or caused the surge in radioactivity measured in the area.

He added: "In East Anglia reported sightings differ from other areas.  There are lots of reports of strange objects flying inland from the sea and then back again.

"There was a wave of UFO sightings in Birmingham in June. Many people reported seeing lights zig-zagging in the sky near the airport.

"At the time there was a geomagnetic storm which we believe causes people to be more spontaneous and tends to make people who see something more likely to report it."

N Did you see the strange object? Write in to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN or email eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk or visit the forum at www.eveningstar.co.uk.

FACTFILE

Rendlesham – Britain's most famous UFO encounter.

Happened during three nights over Christmas in 1980 when it is a UFO crash landed in Rendlesham Forest close to the American airbase.

Two airmen went to investigate strange lights in the forest and came across a metallic glowing object which manoeuvred through the trees and disappeared.

Animals on the nearby farm were said to have gone into a frenzy.

Two nights later the object reappeared – base commander Lt Col Halt reported in a memo to the Ministry of Defence that he had seen a red sun like object which divided into five.

On the third night the men taped their panicked conversation as they again started to see lights moving through the trees.

The forest is still an attraction for Ufologists today, some of whom will spend whole nights there.

August 8, 2003

Voice of America

Roswell, New Mexico is 'UFO Capital of the World' 

by Robin Rupli

Roswell - New Mexico, described as the "Land of Enchantment," might just as well be called the "land of mystery." The town of Roswell, a farming and ranching community in the southeastern part of the state, has come to be associated with unidentified flying objects. This stems from an incident 56 years ago when a strange, flying object crashed from the sky into a rancher's field. Eyewitnesses reported seeing everything from dead aliens to unusual materials and hieroglyphic-type writing. Officials at the nearby military base maintained that the wreckage was fallen weather balloons. But inconsistencies in the story has kept the mystery of Roswell alive for over half a century.

The residents of Roswell clearly have a sense of humor. Along the town's main street, the Crash Down Diner has a replica of a silver spaceship attached to the roof; there's a bookshop that advertises "Just say 'No' to Aliens"; and a furniture store announces its "UFO-Sale" with a line of little cardboard alien creatures waving from the window. But for those with memories of the events of July 1947, Roswell's alleged extraterrestrial experience is serious business.

"See I never told this story until 10 years ago," said Glenn Dennis. "No one knew. Because if I had told this about aliens and all that, they probably would have figured I sniffed too much formaldehyde. So I just kept my mouth shut."

Mr. Dennis is co-founder of the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, which attracts more than 200,000 visitors a year. In 1947 Mr. Dennis was a young mortuary worker contracted to the military when he got a call from an official at the Roswell Army Airbase asking about childsize caskets and how to preserve tissue exposed to the elements.  More strange things followed, he says, including running into a nurse at the base who was "very upset" and told him she had accidentally walked in on the autopsy of a decomposing alien. He says she made a sketch for him of what she saw.

"When she walked into this supply room, that's where these guys were examining this crash bag," he said. "She was recording it and then she just flew all to pieces. Started screaming and by 3:30 p.m. that afternoon she was gone. And none of us have found her to this day."

What is certain about what happened is this: Around July 4, 56 years ago, a Mac Brazel, a rancher employed on the Foster Ranch outside of Roswell comes up upon a field, about a kilometer long, of unrecognizable debris, that appears to have fallen from the sky. He reports this to the nearby military base and officials go to the ranch to investigate. On July 8 the Roswell Army Air Field's public information office issues a press release across the country.

Headline edition, July 8 1947: The Army Airforce has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile, found sometime last week, has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico and sent to Wright Field Ohio, for further inspections.

Within hours of the press release, higher military officials retracted the statement, saying it was a mistake, that the real crash content was a weather balloon. Jesse Marcel, Jr. is the son of Major Jesse Marcel, who was first called out to investigate the debris field. Mr. Marcel, who was 11 at the time, recalls something very different.

"My father was called out one night to the ranch where this thing had landed, picked up some of the debris, loaded it into the back of our 1942 Buick and swung by the house to show my mother and myself what he had out there," he recalled. "He put it on the kitchen floor, woke up my mother and myself and said, 'Come look at this.' I looked at the debris on the floor, there was just a lot of metallic parts, some black plastic material. He wanted us to look for electronic equipment. I found something unusual. You could see some sort of writing, sort of purple, metallic geometric shapes.

"So the story died three days after it happened and didn't start again until 1978," said Dennis Balthaser, a consultant and researcher for the UFO Museum in Roswell. He says it wasn't until the 1970's that several books came out that began to re-examine the Roswell incident. He says many of the eyewitnesses interviewed said they were warned by the government never to speak to anyone about what they saw. Mr. Balthaser says his own relentless research made him too, the target of government surveillance.

"I was told by a retired intelligence man that I'm being monitored," he said. "That's fine. I'm not doing anything to violate national security.  I'm sitting here with you telling you what I know. And if this is violating national security, then tell me what happened. Because it wasn't a weather balloon. Not if I'm violating national security. If Roswell is a hoax, prove it to us. If it's a hoax then I'll go fishing."

In 1997, the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident, the U.S. Airforce released their final report to address questions about reported bodies found at the Roswell crash site. No longer stating it was "weather balloons," Colonel John Haynes said the bodies were probably "project test dummies carried by Air Force high altitude balloons" related to something called "Project Mogul." The only problem with that explanation, say UFO researchers, is that Project Mogul did not start until 1953, six years after the crash.

Today most of the residents of Roswell, New Mexico embrace their reputation of being known as "UFO Capital of the World." Every July 4 holiday, the town holds its annual UFO Festival. Festival coordinator Carl Lucas puts it this way: "There are always those grumps and those nay-sayers who are embarrassed who say, 'I don't want to be known as the UFO Capital of the World.' Sure, Roswell has a cheese factory where all the mozzarella cheese you can eat anywhere in the United States of America is made right here in Roswell. But we're not the Wisconsin of the desert. We're the UFO Capital of the World, that's what we're known for," he said.

And now, an archeological team with the University of New Mexico has returned to the Roswell crash site to begin new research on soil samples using the latest technologies. The results of the dig will be the subject of a new cable television documentary to be aired on the Sci-Fi Channel later this year, possibly bringing to light the truth about what really was found on the Foster ranch in 1947.

 

July 28, 2003

Amite Daily Star ( Louisiana)

Albany Man Searches For UFOs

By Sylvia Schon 

ALBANY - Scott Arnett looks, talks and acts as normal as anybody. He is, in fact, disarmingly down to earth, considering his avocation.

Arnett, 49, is a state section director and field investigator for Mutual UFO Network, Inc., an international organization dedicated to compiling, analyzing and publishing reports of unidentified flying objects.

Is he nuts?

"I'm not going to deny that I'm crazy. Nuts? No. I think I approach this with a pretty logical outlook. Like I said, you have to go down the middle of the road," Arnett said.

Crazy or not, Arnett has lots of company. Average, everyday people, radar technicians, nuclear scientists, physicists, anthropologists, chemists, medical doctors, psychologists, ham radio operators, and many other professionals and non-professionals have joined MUFON or have at least contacted members to report an unusual experience.

Arnett himself is a retired paramedic from the New Orleans area and is working on a two-year degree from Southeastern Louisiana University in occupational safety and health.

His interest in UFO reports actually began as an interest in astronomy while he was in his teens. After reading one of Frank Edwards' books on UFO reports, Arnett's own interest in the topic took hold.

The book was a series of straightforward reports on sightings by witnesses who appeared to be credible.

Straightforward and credible remain the keywords in his work as an investigator.

"Ninety-six to 98 percent of the reports are explainable as normal aircraft, swamp gas or even the planet Venus which can be very bright," Arnett said. "It's that other 2 or 3 percent I wonder about. When you are questioning a witness, you can't be judgmental. You can't let that interfere. You have to keep an open mind that this could be as much bull as fact. What makes an investigation hard is if you've got somebody who is so UFO pro that everything in the sky is a UFO. On the other hand, you have the debunkers that there is no way and everything has to be Venus or swamp gas. They will always find a reason why. So you've got to come to the middle and you've got to use good judgment and have an open mind."

Arnett said he has personally never seen a UFO, but after years of talking to witnesses and reading other accounts, he does have a general point of view.

"I think something's going on, but I couldn't tell you what," Arnett said. "I have talked to some very credible witnesses in the past who have seen things and were very frightened. They were cautious about reporting it, too, but it was just so frightening to them that they had to tell somebody."

One of those occurred in 1976, when he went out on his first case as an investigator.

Hunters had reported an object hovering and at times moving erratically over the swamp about two miles from the Michou facility in New Orleans east.

The hunters described the object as about 40 feet in diameter, that it glowed and changed colors as they watched.

Four days later Arnett was part of a team that accompanied one of the hunters back to the site.

They found a 14-foot wide pattern of reeds twisted and smashed in a circular pattern. The trees above had been scorched. Some of the branches had actually burned and fallen to the ground. The reeds on the ground were not burned, however.

"I noticed right away that our feet were muddy and the ground was very soft. I could see no track of any vehicles," Arnett said.

A geologist with the team took samples of the soil and reeds back to a New Orleans lab for testing. No radiation was found, and there was also no trace of any known fuel.

The hunter who accompanied them was very calm and soft-spoken, Arnett recalled.

"He wanted to be believed and he wanted to help," Arnett said.
That is often the case with people who call in reports to MUFON who might not otherwise report it to local authorities.

"MUFON is where they can vent this incredible thing that has happened to them without worrying about whether their names will wind up all over the newspaper or police blotter of whatever," Arnett said. "We will only publish names with their permission.  It is protected. We guarantee it."

A pair of Pascagoula shipyard workers went public with their own encounter in 1973, causing a great commotion nationwide. The two reported seeing a bluish glowing object moving along the river where they sat fishing on a dock. The object silently appeared behind them, and one of the men claimed he was taken into the "ship" by a pair of the ship's occupants and later released.

Calvin Parker, who was 19 at the time, agreed to a followup interview with Arnett years later. Parker told Arnett of seeing two tall creatures emerge and take his friend before he passed out.

Arnett said after talking to him, he believed Parker's account, which was dramatic but less so than the man who claimed he was abducted.

"He just did not seem the kind of person to seem to be shaken easily," Arnett recalled.

Generally, however, Arnett is not impressed with the vast majority of abduction claims.

"I get off the boat with a lot of people on this subject. I notice that the abduction phenomena with your typical 'gray' with the big black eyes and large head, things like that, have only started after the movie "Close Encounters" came out," Arnett said.

He suspects many of those reports to be someone craving attention, having nightmares or mental problems.

He also questions a Yale researcher's claim that one in four people have been abducted.

"Give me a break," Arnett said. "The largest majority of people that report abductions have to undergo these very invasive probes. On our level, our technology is such that we can scrape a cell off somebody's arm and know everything. So you are telling me these 'people' are so advanced, they can do these amazing things in the sky, come from thousands or billions of light years away and have to stick probes up our wazzoos? Once they got a hold of one of us, they would know everything. They would just need a skin sample, so I just don't see it."

This area was "hot" in the 1970s and 1980s for UFO reports, but it has been quiet in the area for a number of years, Arnett said.

The current "hot" areas are South America and the northeast where there have been "flaps" of reports of triangular-shaped craft.

"They have some very good multiple witnesses on that one," Arnett said.

Multiple witness are the best kinds of reports. About 60 percent of reports occur during night events and about 40 percent during the day, he said.

One of those occurred in Slidell several years ago when someone called the police to report an object hovering over his house.  Deputies arrived and saw the object and also recorded static radio interference every time the object moved, Arnett said.

The most common shapes of crafts are the saucer shape, similar to two bowls put together, the "cigar" shape and an egg or round shape. But there have also been reports of triangular, diamond and other shaped craft.

The "saucer" name came from the news media in the 1940s when a airplane pilot flying around some mountains reported seeing what appeared to be alien craft.

Arnett noted that pilots and radar operators are probably more reluctant than most to report UFO sightings.

W.L. "Barney" Garner, the former Louisiana MUFON director, was a radar operator who became interested in UFOs after an incident where he and the pilot he was monitoring where watching things "that cannot be" from their own particular spots - the pilot in the air and Garner on the ground in front of a radar.

Arnett also noted that Dr. J. Allen Hynek founded the forerunner of MUFON right after the U.S. Air Force ended its famed "Blue Book Project." Hynek, now deceased, was in charge of that project.

"He wanted to let the public know what is really going on with these sightings. He couldn't say there were little green men. He didn't know. But he could say what the witnesses were telling them," Arnett said.

Arnett and his wife, Joann, live in Albany with their children.  He said his wife is tolerant of his interest in the topic.

To find out more visit MUFON's Web site at mufon.com or call
Arnett at (225) 567-6315.
 

July 27, 2003

Brisbane Courier-Mail (Queensland, Australia)

Alien 'Experts' Converge On Perth

Video footage purporting to show the surgical removal of implants from people abducted by aliens will be one of the highlights of an extraterrestrial conference in Perth today.

The Hidden Truths Conference, hosted by the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network, will be attended by people who claim to have had contact with aliens, as well as experts on aliens and extraterrestrial activities.

Network founder and Perth resident Mary Rodwell said people who claimed to have been taken aboard spacecrafts by aliens would give personal accounts of their experiences.

She said there would also be discussions about an allegedly lost civilisation in Australia, explanations about changes in human evolution and how changing earth frequencies affects human behaviour.

However Ms Rodwell said the highlight would be a presentation by American surgeon and author Dr Roger Leir.

"Dr Leir will show authentic footage documenting the surgical removal of implanted objects from individuals who said they had been visited by extraterrestrials," she said.

Ms Rodwell said she has provided counselling to more than 800 Perth people since 1997 who claim to have had contact with aliens.

She is the author of the book Awakenings which is highly regarded by those interested in the phenomenon.
 

July 27, 2003

New York Times Magazine

A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane
 

by Bruce Grierson

It is not considered good judgment to wade into the issue of recovered memories without skin as thick as permafrost and caller ID on the phone. Rare is the academic field in which colleagues on opposite sides of a debate - people with international reputations - dismiss the very foundations of one another's work, sometimes not so privately, with common barnyard epithets; in which two of the most prominent reference books are almost Jesuitically contradictory; in which more than a decade of fairly sound research has done little to settle a debate that has raged ever since Freud popularized the term "repression."

Yet this is just where Susan Clancy found herself eight years ago when she joined the psychology department at Harvard University as a graduate student. At one end of the field of "trauma memory" were people like her new professors and future co-authors, the clinical psychologist Richard McNally and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter, chairman of the Harvard psychology department and one of the world's leading experts on memory function. At the other end were Harvard-affiliated clinicians, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Daniel Brown, whose scholarly writing on the psychological effects of trauma remains highly influential.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic events can actually be repressed - completely forgotten - and then "recovered" years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

Clancy, now 33, wasn't fully alive to the schismatic politics back then. She simply saw a puzzling, inviting gap in the data. "You had two groups in opposite camps that were battling each other out" over the validity of recovered memories, Clancy says.  "But nobody was doing research on the group that was at the center of the controversy - the people who were reporting recovered memories. Memory function in that group had never been examined in the laboratory."

So she decided to devote herself to that task, which would end up occupying her pretty much full time for the next seven years. Interview subjects, mostly women but some men, all with recovered memories of child sexual abuse, would come to her office in William James Hall - a 15-floor concrete cracker stack among the brick heritage buildings of Harvard. They would settle in and, shifting their gaze from Clancy's blue eyes to the John Hancock Tower in the distance, tell her their stories as the tape in her recorder unspooled.

The stories were troubling. Often she found herself, somewhat inappropriately, tearing up. Clancy's upbringing - feminist, lapsed Catholic - had prepared her to believe what she was hearing. But as her interviews went on, she came to the conclusion that many of the most elaborate, most terrifying tales she was hearing had an air of confabulation about them. "There was a moment where I said, 'Oh, my God, I'm not sure this really happened,"' she recalls.

Though the term "false memory" is slippery and inadequate, there is now little doubt that the phenomenon exists. A rash of satanic ritual abuse claims in the 1980's and 90's - claims that were never substantiated but destroyed families and ruined reputations - demonstrated fairly conclusively that both adults and children sometimes report things they think happened that didn't.

Still, genuine memories of real sexual abuse are often prosecutors' only tools to combat what remains a significant social problem. To distinguish, in some definitive way, then, true memories from false memories is a trick with enormous personal and political and public-policy implications.

Clancy guessed that there was a category of people who are prone to create false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test. Her strategy was to present a list of semantically related words, like "candy," "sour" and "sugar," to those who purported to have recovered memories. Then she would test their recall of those words. On the test, she would throw in words that weren't on the list but were like the words on the list - "sweet," for example. Her hypothesis was that these people would be especially inclined to "remember" seeing the word "sweet" - in effect creating a recollection out of a contextual inference, a fact from a feeling. In the end, the data strongly supported her thesis. She published her findings in 2000 in the scientific journal Psychological Science.

But her work was criticized by some, in large part because it contained a hidden snare: even if Clancy's "false memory" recoverers were prone to fictionalizing memories of abuse, that didn't necessarily mean that their specific memories of abuse were made up; there was no way to know whether these people were actually abused. Clancy had anticipated this cavil while still in the design stage of the study, and so she rounded up a second control group - people who had incontrovertibly been abused and had always remembered that abuse, in contrast to the "recovered memory" group. When people in this group took the word-recall test, they tended to "remember" words that weren't on the list with no greater frequency than the average person, and she was sure she had cracked the nut.

The critics, though, had another objection. What if the traumas that the recovered-memory group had experienced were horrific enough not only to repress the memory but also to cause cognitive impairment that showed up as memory distortion in the lab?

Meanwhile, hate mail started pouring in, in quantities Clancy would eventually measure "by the ton." The reaction was not altogether surprising. The moral dimension of research on child sexual abuse makes it uniquely explosive in psychology, and almost from Day 1 Clancy had, beyond the safe zone of her own department, taken heavy flak for even suggesting that memories of abuse can be faulty. The simple act of conducting research into the matter struck some as an enterprise "designed to cheer on child molesters," as one anonymous letter writer wrote, "and ridicules the suffering sustained by children who are abused as well as therapists who are knowledgeable about the effects of trauma on children's minds and bodies." Clancy was a "bad person," according to another letter writer, to question such reports. Yet another suggested that she was probably an abuser herself.

In 2000, when Clancy was invited to give a lecture at Cambridge Hospital, the chairman of the hospital at the time told her that several members of its psychiatric department had protested her appearance. Her colleagues told her that she had probably ruled herself out of future academic positions in any psychology department, Harvard pedigree or no.

Clancy says she thought she could fix the problem by fixing her word-recall test. She was close, she reckoned, but she needed to find a different, methodologically cleaner, subject group than victims of child sexual abuse - people whose memories virtually everyone could agree were false. But whom? She considered options: people who remembered their own deaths? People who recalled past lives? No, there was just enough doubt in those instances to taint the results. She would have to go further afield.

"Have you been contacted or abducted by space aliens?" read the ad that ran in a number of Boston-area newspapers. "You may be eligible to participate in a Harvard memory research study." Clancy's new plan - and it seemed unimpeachable - was to round up folks who thought they had been beamed aboard spaceships, or who actually recalled the experience, and give them the same memory test she had given the others. If they, too, got high scores, it would establish that there are indeed people who are prone to false memories - which might eventually help scientists better understand how false memories are created. Finally, she figured, she had the makings of a sound study. Out she went into the community to recruit.

For two years, Clancy advertised in bookstores, visited Internet chat rooms and haunted U.F.O. conferences, handing out fliers for her memory study. At one point, in pursuit of appropriate subjects, she spent three days at a meeting of a group of supposed alien abductees at an old seaside Victorian inn in Newport, R.I. She sat in the hot tub with them as they cheerfully told her their stories - an astonishingly consistent set of narratives involving bright light through bedroom windows, inexplicable time blackouts, encounters with bobble-headed small gray people with large black eyes and, often, invasive sexual medical experimentation. Among themselves, the experiencers talked business. There was a consensus about how stupid and misguided scientists were not to believe their accounts. Someone related a skeptic's theory that the explosion of U.F.O. sightings in New Jersey the previous year was caused by migrating birds, and the crowd exploded into guffaws. Clancy smiled through gritted teeth.

Finally, she scraped together 11 willing subjects, ran them and a control group through a battery of tests and collated the data, which demonstrated, in her view, that "individuals who are more prone to develop false memories in the lab are also more likely to develop false memories of experiences that were only suggested or imagined." She submitted her study to the notoriously stringent Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It sped through the review process and, to her great relief, was published. Her problems looked to be solved.

"I thought, Thank God, man," she recalls. "With alien abductees, I'm never going to have to deal with the criticism that it might have actually happened."

In a mustard-colored suit - the only suit he owns - John Mack stands on the stage of the theater inside Boston's Museum of Fine Arts with a light shining on his face, like a museum exhibit of the moon. The documentary film "Touched," by Laurel Chiten, a Boston filmmaker, has just received its world premiere, and Chiten and Mack, her main subject, are up there to field questions. Through interviews, the film conveys what it's like to be coerced into sexual congress with alien beings - and, in at least one case, to become an unwitting participant, apparently, in a kind of intergalactic hybrid breeding program.

Mack, a quiet and erudite man, is a veteran of the Harvard medical faculty whose blue-chip career took something of a William Jamesian turn toward the mystical in the 70's. In 1994, he published the book "Abduction," which immediately piqued interest because Mack seemed to accept the abduction phenomenon as literal fact. The book was a huge best seller. Mack's Harvard imprimatur jacked the credibility of abduction accounts into another orbit. Chris Carter, creator of "The X-Files," used Mack's work to help sell his show to Fox.

Clancy's study was, of course, a clear rebuke of the abductee experience - and it was met with derision at Mack's nonprofit organization, the Center for Psychology and Social Change.  Clancy had drawn a number of her test subjects from the institute's ranks, and they may have felt poleaxed by the disarmingly genial researcher who seemed to listen so nonjudgmentally to their tales. The campaign to discredit Clancy began in earnest.

"Obviously there's a mammoth leap of faith involved in generalizing from a mistake on a word list to the assumption that whole memories for extended, anomalous events can be created more or less arbitrarily," wrote a doctoral student named Catherine Reason on an Internet discussion group. Just who was Susan Clancy, asked another, to challenge the work of people whose theories of memory and trauma were cited by the United Nations when discussing whether recovered memories of torture were admissible as testimony in an international war-crimes tribunal? Some simply viewed Clancy's 11 "abductees" as too small a sample size.

Mack and Clancy seem to have nothing against each other personally, though the gulf in their worldviews appears unbridgeable. Clancy describes Mack as "good-hearted," an "old-school gentleman" who was insufficiently aware of the memory-distorting effects of the hypnosis he used over the years to expand upon abduction memories in many of his more than 200 patients. Mack is sanguine about the Clancy study, but blunt. "I smell a rat," he says in his light-filled Cambridge home a short walk from Harvard Yard. "Not that Susan's the rat, but in that a small word-association test gets to be used, by whomever, to say, 'This is simply memory distortion."'

The abductees, in some ways, posed a more bewildering challenge to Clancy than her previous memory-recoverers. "Very few of them endorsed the repression hypothesis," she says. They don't believe their conscious minds repressed the memories of abduction trauma out of self-protection. Rather, she says, "you'd get extraterrestrial interpretations." The reason they had no memories of those terrifying events until years or decades later, the abductees usually say, is that the aliens, for everybody's protection, erased or otherwise controlled them.

When I met with her in Cambridge, Clancy still seemed genuinely surprised, almost awed, at the breadth of controversy her work has caused. "Every academic talk I give," she told me as we made our way to lunch near Harvard Square, "someone raises their hand and says, 'Who the hell are you to say these stories aren't true?"'

Not long ago, Clancy appeared as a guest on a nationally syndicated radio show that takes a broad-minded view of the paranormal. For nearly 20 minutes, she was called on that very question. The host pressed: "Why do you think that the only life forms are on earth?" Clancy said she could feel her blood pressure rising.

"I don't necessarily believe that we're the only life form out there," she said. "I can entertain the possibility that there are other life forms out there without accepting your story that a spaceship picked you up!"

Many scientists have offered a simple explanation for the phenomenon: abduction experiences, they maintain, are all about the mind pumping for meaning after a bout of sleep paralysis -- a scary but fairly common experience in which the part of the brain that inhibits motor messages during REM sleep fails to disengage as the sleeper wakes up. The sensation is of being pinned to the bed, often accompanied by hallucinations of some spectral entity at the bedside.

Some three million Americans believe they have had some kind of encounter with space aliens. If everyone who experienced sleep paralysis came to that conclusion, the number would be a hundred or so times as high. What you have in an abductee, Clancy suspects, is someone who is predisposed to believe. "Here's someone who reads science fiction. They watch 'The X-Files.' Then one night they have a sleep-paralysis experience. It's weird and it's scary, and it becomes one of a multitude of events that create that wonder."

As the subject tries to remember what happened, "source" errors creep in. "You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie," Clancy said. "Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in." The warnings that experiencers report receiving from aliens, the Australian sociologist Robert Bartholomew has pointed out, have changed over time - from nuclear destruction during the cold war to, more recently, ecological doom. These are simply stories, he says, that give shape to our fears.


Ten years from now, Susan Clancy may remember 2003 as a year of agreeable spadework in the trenches of academic inquiry. But if she does, it will be a false memory. The truth is that Clancy's research, which she hoped might mend fences - at least partly vindicating both sides' positions - has managed to tick off just about everyone: sexual-abuse survivors, therapists, experiencers, even a creationist or two.

Daniel Brown, the trauma therapist, is convinced that there's a "political agenda" to Clancy's abduction study. As he told one reporter, "It's all about spin." Her own brother - a corporate lawyer for a top New York firm - has ripped into her about the abduction study for assuming outright that none of the abductions occurred.

From his vantage point a few dozen feet away in the Harvard psych department, Richard McNally has watched Clancy, his former grad student, face trial after trial. "She's very thick-skinned, certainly for someone at her stage of her career," McNally told me. But inside, it was getting to her.

When we first spoke, about six months ago, Clancy said she believed she could weather the storm. "I don't think so anymore," she said recently. "When I was on the phone with lawyers two weeks ago and had to be concerned that I was going to get brought up on ethics charges, it really caused me to rethink what I'm doing here."

She seemed immensely relieved, therefore, to be getting out. Clancy has accepted a visiting professorship at the Harvard-affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua, and will leave later this summer. There she will continue to study how trauma affects people, but the trauma will be verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines.

Oh. And she will do a little cross-cultural research on... abductees. It turns out, just as John Mack has said for years, that this is a truly universal phenomenon. "Supposedly it's extremely common through Central America," Clancy said.

When she returns, she will shop around her resume. She hopes people will still remember her.
 

July 12, 2003

Kentucky New Era

Congress Pressured To Probe UFOs

by Cecil Herndon
editor@kentuckynewera.com

Straight & Simple

There are precious few genuine mysteries left in the world, the rest having been explained more or less plausibly by science.

Now the Sci-Fi Channel reportedly is putting the heat on Congress to launch a full-scale investigation of one of the few remaining mysteries, the unidentified flying object phenomenon.

At the very least, UFO believers want the federal government to release all the information they think it long has hidden on space aliens and their flying machines.

Although the government in fact has issued reports of past investigations of UFOs that concluded they don't exist, many Americans continue to believe the government is covering up the truth about airborne visitors from outer space.

Whether the government or its agencies actually are actually withholding pertinent information on the subject is anyone's guess, or at least the guess of anyone in no position to know.

The Sci-Fi Channel recently aired a two-part series on UFOs, for the most part a rehash of old reports on the subject, including the alleged long-ago crash of a UFO near Roswell, N.M., and the recovery of alien bodies.

The details of that long-familiar story need no retelling here. Suffice it to say, the alleged Roswell incident has become the centerpiece of UFO lore. It includes the testimony of several apparently credible witnesses.

While we are intrigued by the UFO mystery, if indeed there is one, we've never heard a logical explanation of why the government would hide any information it might have about them.   But, then, who knows why government agencies do many of the things they do?

One thing seems beyond: If indeed Earth is being visited by intelligent beings from outer space, they and their technology are far advanced over anything known on our own home planet.

This reality prompted the following comment recently by a non-believing TV pundit: "If these alleged beings are so far advanced, why do they make contact only with someone named Bubba?"

But those who claim to have seen UFOs include many besides this world's "Bubbas." Sightings have been reported by commercial and military pilots, astronauts, trained police observers, and even former President Jimmy Carter. Never mind that Carter also once reported being attacked by a rabbit.

We don't anticipate any congressional investigation of UFOs, and we doubt one would change anyone's mind. Perhaps it's just as well, too. People love a government conspiracy theory only slightly less than they love a good mystery. In regard to the UFO phenomenon, they can have it both ways.

Cecil Herndon is a columnist for the Kentucky New Era. His column runs regularly every Wednesday and Saturday, He can be reached at 887-3232 or at editor@kentuckynewera.com.
 

July 7, 2003

Detroit Free Press

Conventioneers Share Alien Theories
Dearborn discussion is UFOs, crop circles

by Zlati Meyer

While millions of Americans were enjoying traditional July 4 weekend amusements, a few hundred of them took part in that Earthling pasttime -- discussing alien lifeforms.

They swapped Thomas Jefferson for the Mutual UFO Network's 34th Annual International conference held at the Hyatt Hotel in Dearborn from Friday through Sunday.

Jay Benson traveled from Atlanta to attend. The 40-year-old IT consultant, quoting his favorite lecturer Neil Freer, said the aliens who "jump-started our DNA," the Annunaki, wanted to make humans a slave race to mine gold for Annunaki leaders living on planet Nibiru.

The attendees were believers - and those who wanted to hear the facts about other-worldly visitors. Audience members included an Oakland County psychologist and an aspiring police officer.

"I think it's real; I think things are out there," said Jerry Beekel, 53, a steel-foundry worker from Pittsford, near Hillsdale, who was wearing a UFO-emblazoned T-shirt. "Anyone who believes in God believes He made things other than man. I believe there's a cover-up."

Beekel's comment coincided with a speech entitled, "Cosmic Watergate," by presenter Stanton Friedman.

Friedman suggested that a directive to "get the heck off our planet" made President Richard Nixon nix Apollos 18 and 19. Friedman hypothesized that aliens come to Earth to monitor their "neighbors," whom he described "as idiot Earthlings," who killed thousands of their own in World War II and created destructive atom bombs, V2 rockets and radars.

"They make sure we don't get out there. Would you want us out there? We don't even have someone to speak for the planet. Would aliens want us in an intergalactic agency?" Friedman asked his audience.

Lecturers filled their well-attended talks with pseudo-science theories such as the existence of a magnetic-propulsion system that could move saucer-shaped vehicles, and that the star over Bethlehem the Bible says shone on the night Jesus was born was likely a UFO.

The convention program listed dozens of Ph.Ds as MUFON consultants, but Bruce Maccabee, who has a doctorate in physics from American University, was the only person with an advanced degree presenting.

Crop-formations expert William C. Levengood's bio didn't list any academic credential. In his lecture, Levengood explained, "Energies come down in very precise patterns and penetrate the soil. The soil changes properties - I won't get into that - which, in turn, enhances the seeds."

His multimedia presentation included aerial photographs of the mysterious formations, pictures of flies "not associated with wheat plants" on the same plants, pieces of corn that germinated before their husks open and burned kernels next to untouched ones.

In a makeshift marketplace down the hall, vendors hawked books and remote-viewing training sessions on video for $110.

Other items included an audiotape titled "How the War on Terror Interrupted ET Contact;" 144 pages of newspaper and magazine articles about mind-control for $22; a music CD subtitled "A Soundtrack to My Abduction," and a children's picture book to introduce the concept of extraterrestrials.

And even on this holiday weekened when Americans rejoice in freedom from royal rulership, the King made an appearance. The book "Elvis' Search for God" shared tablespace with a Tennessee accountant's memoir of her abductions.

Tony Sivalelli runs the Weight Station gym in Mt. Clemens.

"I don't think people are ready for the bigger picture, for understanding," he said.

Contact ZLATI MEYER at 734-432-6503 or meyer@freepress.com
 

July 6, 2003

New York Times

Word For Word
The C.I.A.'s Cover Has Been Blown?
Just Make Up Something About UFOs

by Stephen Kinzer

The State Department recently issued a collection of previously classified documents that shed new light on the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the June 1954 coup in Guatemala that ousted the president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Mr. Arbenz had clashed with the United Fruit Company, which for many years exercised decisive influence in Guatemala, and the Eisenhower administration feared that he was leading his country toward Communism. The coup brought Col. Carlos Castillo Armas to power and set off more than three decades of civil conflict and repression in which hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were killed.

Here are excerpts from documents related to the coup plot, which was code-named PBSUCCESS.  

Telegram from C.I.A. headquarters to a C.I.A. station, whose location remains classified, Jan. 26, 1952:

Hq. desires firm list top flight Communists whom new government would desire to eliminate immediately in event of successful anti-Communist coup.

Memorandum for the record, Sept. 18, 1953:

At 1500, 18 September 1953, a meeting was held at the office of [Allen W. Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence] to discuss the present status of PBSUCCESS and to consider future plans for this operation. . . . Cabell [Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the agency's deputy director] stated that he concurred in approval of the general plan but felt that the budget estimate should be increased to $3,000,000 to provide more adequately for contingencies. Mr. Dulles agreed.

Memorandum from Col. J. C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere division, C.I.A. Directorate of Operations, Sept. 25, 1953:

Tasks for Chief of Station, Guatemala

a. Controlled penetration of the Communist Party.

b. Controlled penetrations of the major labor unions.

c. Controlled penetrations in the major anti-Communist organizations.

d. Controlled penetrations in the armed forces, or controlled agents with access to current planning both in senior and junior officer groups.

e. Controlled agents with access to high-level Guatemalan Government political propaganda planning. . . .

The station will prepare a list of the 25 most dangerous Communists and pro-Communists and attempt to gather data re these targets which could be used for character assassination..... More pictures of comparisons of living conditions of the top Commies and the peons will be of special value.

Memorandum for the record, Oct. 29, 1953:

Station Guatemala has been directed to take the following actions:

1. Transmit all rumors re Arbenz officials, the Guatemalan Army, revolutionary activities and Communist activities.

2. Prepare a weekly "psychological barometer" report on local conditions.

3. Make a continuing study of morale factors among students, laborers, army officers, enlisted men, government officials, farm owners, and business and professional men. . . .

Paramilitary Action: An initial shipment of approximately 15
tons of arms and ammunition is now ready for shipment from [DELETED] and subsequent transshipment to [Colonel Castillo Armas in] Nicaragua. . . . This material is intended for use by [Colonel Castillo Armas] in his Nicaraguan training center and to test facilities for clandestine introduction of arms into Guatemala.

Memorandum from C.I.A. headquarters, Nov. 5, 1953:

Station was instructed to mail "mourning cards" for 30 successive days to Arbenz and top Communist leaders. Cards were to mourn the purge or execution of various Communists in the world and to hint forthcoming doom to recipients.

Telegram from PBSUCCESS headquarters in Florida to C.I.A. headquarters, Jan. 30, 1954:

White Paper [issued by the Guatemalan government] has effectively exposed certain aspects of PBSUCCESS . . . If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area to take play away.

Memorandum for the record, March 2, 1954, from Colonel King:

At 1910 on 28 February, I picked [Pseudonym] up in my car at the corner of Massachusetts and Wisconsin. We drove for about an hour out River Road and I am certain were not observed. [Pseudonym] expressed his regrets for the compromise of the five paraphrased cables, and in a manner which appeared to be entirely sincere. I asked him how it was possible, with all of the security indoctrination which he had had, plus the great emphasis on secrecy based on all phases of PBSUCCESS, to have done such an unpardonable thing as to leave sensitive papers in a hotel room. He replied that he had no explanation, that it was a stupid, unpardonable thing to do, but that it was an act of thoughtlessness and carelessness. . . . It was agreed that for the next month [Pseudonym] will remain in Chicago. We discussed two general areas where he could bury himself after that date _ Alaska and the Pacific Northwest . . . He has never been in the
Northwest and suggested as a possibility that he get a job until fall as a fire watcher on a mountain top where he would meet very few people.

Memorandum from PBSUCCESS headquarters to C.I.A. station in Guatemala, Apr. 28, 1954:

Consider it highly important to mobilize anti-Communist activities of the Catholic Church dignitaries and of Catholic lay organizations. . . . This could be done, for instance, by describing graphically how the local church would be turned into a meeting hall for the "Fighting Godless," how the reader's children would have to spend their time with the "Red Pioneers," how the pictures of Lenin, Stalin and Malenkov would replace the pictures of the Saints in every home, and the like.

Dispatch from PBSUCCESS headquarters to all PBSUCCESS stations, June 13, 1954:

Rumors, combining fact and fiction, which ought to be circulated, may include the following (not every rumor is applicable to every group of people and to every situation; select from the following suggestions whatever is suitable for given moment and audience):

A group of Soviet commissars, officers and political advisers, led by a member of the Moscow Politbureau, have landed. . . . The government has issued an order devaluating the quetzal at the rate of 1:10. Use your money immediately to buy food and durable goods. . . . In addition to military conscription, the Communists will introduce labor conscription. A decree is already being printed. All boys and girls 16 years old will be called for one year of labor duty in special camps, mainly for political indoctrination and to break the influence of family and church on the young people. . . . Food rationing is about to be introduced. . . . Arbenz has already left the country. His announcements from the National Palace are actually made by a double, provided by Soviet intelligence. . . . An educational reform is being prepared. There will be no longer any religious instruction at state expense, but on the contrary lessons in atheism, Soviet style.

Add rumors of your own, following the day-by-day changes in the situation.

Telegram From C.I.A. headquarters to PBSUCCESS headquarters, June 24, 1954:

We now prepared authorize bombing specific targets in [Guatemala City] area since you and [John E. Puerifoy, the American ambassador to Guatemala] feel this now the most effective move to achieve success. Targets should be selected with a view to having desired effect on army and regime morale with minimum political cost to [the United States].

Telegram from C.I.A. headquarters to PBSUCCESS headquarters, June 30, 1954:

Heartiest congratulations upon outcome developments past forty-eight hours. A great victory has been won.
 

July 1, 2003

Detroit News

UFO Convention Lands In Dearborn
Network expected to draw 500 believers to 34th annual event

By Joel Kurth

DEARBORN -- The quest for proof of intelligent life in outer space is coming to the land of Coney Island hot dogs and the giant freeway tire.

As many as 500 true believers are expected to attend the Mutual UFO Network's international convention, which runs from Friday to Sunday at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn. Among the subjects of the science-heavy symposium: crop circles, UFO activity in Brazil and alleged alien abductions.

The 34th annual event comes as so-called "UFOlogists" try to gain credibility for what many consider pseudoscience. A 1997 Time/CNN poll claimed 80 percent of Americans think the government conceals evidence of aliens, but organizers complain their studies are still lumped in with efforts to find Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster.

"It's taken seriously, but not as seriously as it should," said Jean Waskiewicz, 55, of Livonia, who operates the Michigan chapter's Web site, www.mimufon.org.

"It still has a stigma. You still have a lot of people who don't want the word 'UFO' attached to anything. I still get my fair share of looks."

Michigan continues to be a hotbed of UFO research.

The National UFO Reporting Center claims it has logged 513 sitings in the state; and last year, enthusiasts investigated four cases of supposed crop circles from Bad Axe to Eaton Rapids. One of the field's top crop circle experts, William Levengood, lives near Jackson.

Membership in the UFO Network's Michigan chapter has increased to about 110 from 70 in the last few years, said Rich McVannel, 59, a building material salesman from Boyne City who says he's been abducted repeatedly and has piloted spaceships.

"People care about UFOs. Behind sex, UFOs get the most hits on any Internet search engine," Waskiewicz said.

A Google query for "UFO" netted 2.1 million files and 199 million for "sex."

The convention is open to the public, but includes fees for listening to speeches. For information, visit the group's Web site: www.mufon.com.

You can reach Joel Kurth at (313) 222-2610 or jkurth@detnews.com
 

June 8, 2003

Mohave Daily News

Bullhead City Man Says His Home Was Visited By UFOs

By Kay Jenney

BULLHEAD CITY - Approaching the one-year anniversary of an extraordinary UFO sighting over Bullhead City and Laughlin, a local man has decided to come forward with his story.

"It slithered over the roof of my house. It blocked out all the stars and was a glistening dark metallic color. I looked for any sort of propulsion or flames. There were none and there was no noise," Bill Hartinett said. Except for the sound of chalk being scraped on a chalk board. He said there were no signs of air turbulence and no flashing red, or green lights used by conventional aircraft. Hartinett said he did not think it was one of ours.

"I could have thrown a rock and hit it," he said.

The sighting happened about 1 a.m. June 12, 2002 when Hartinett, who says he is an amateur astronomer, was out in his back yard to view the stars with his telescope in the foothills above Bullhead Parkway.

He said there were three UFOs apparently being chased by a military-type helicopter.

"Three white lights came from the east," Hartinett said. The one "slithered" over the roof of his home, straight over his head, while one shot strait across the river over Laughlin and the third maneuvered towards the granite mountains across from Lake Mohave. Hartinett said he recognized the military helicopter as he has had military experience.

As one craft swept over his home, the helicopter, which was making a lot of typical noise, flew down the ravine next to his house as fast as it could fly.

"Somebody must have seen or heard something," Hartinett said. He said he thought he would see something in the paper or on television soon afterwards, but there was nothing. He said he thought he should tell his story now and he will be watching the skies this Thursday, June 12 and Friday, June 13.

The following day after the sighting his wife, June, called a friend in Las Vegas who told her "everything that could fly" was in the air that night. She said it seemed Nelis Air Force base had scrambled aircraft. Also, their real estate agent had told them there was a lot of activity in the skies over Lake Havasu City that night June said.

Hartinett said a neighbor who was staying in apartments further down the hill reported being awakened during the night by her windows rattling.

Hartinett has been a amateur astronomer for 23 years and last Oct, 6, at 1:58 a.m. he caught "something unusual" on a digital camera attached to his telescope. Two streaks of light appeared about 10 minutes apart using time-lapse photography. Hartinett said he had his telescope pointed at Galaxy NGC1055 at the time and his computer gave him the coordinates. He traced the entrance of the streak to one star with no other stars in that trajectory. Likewise, the ending of the streak was in the path of another solitary star with no others. Hartinett said he would like scientist to see his pictures and recalculate the coordinates.

"I thought it was an asteroid at first," he said. Hartinett said his telescope and camera will be aimed at both those stars this October to see if he can capture the object again. He said NASA explained another streak recorded by an amateur astronomer in El Centro, California as space rocket debris in the December 2002 edition of Sky and Telescope magazine.

Hartinett said the SETI website on the internet has recently acquired a large grant to do optical studies of the skies, plus its research to listen for radio waves that may indicate intelligent life.
 

June 4, 2003

London Free Press (Ontario)

Searching For UFOs A Life-Long Obsession

by Ian Gillespie

The woman on the phone sounds excited. "I've got some significant evidence of something you'll be very interested in," she says.

An hour later, I'm in a Hamilton Road house, sitting in a tiny room crammed with radios - I count eight of them - plus computers, printers, videotapes, maps and posters. Some of the posters depict big-eyed aliens and the characters Mulder and Scully from the TV show X-Files. There's also a filing cabinet labelled: UFO Files Only - Top Secret.

I'm in the headquarters of the Lansdowne Five UFO Research Committee. And committee member Diane Cryer can hardly contain her excitement.

Cryer says she was sitting on the patio of Williams Coffee Pub on Richmond Street on the afternoon of May 24 when several patrons exclaimed, "What's that?" Cryer says she looked up and saw a large, wingless object fly silently overhead.

Cryer grabbed her camera and started snapping. Later, she developed the film and showed the results to friend and committee president Richard Cote.

Cote has a notebook filled with similar photos sent to him. The photos purportedly show UFOs, but Cote has discounted every one.

This one, he says as he flips the plastic-coated pages, is a sink plug suspended in mid-air. That one, he says, is a lampshade. This one is a flare gun and that one is a helicopter's searchlight.

"This here is two styrofoam cups put together," he says, pointing to another photo. "That's the weirdest one I've got."

Over the years, Cote says he's examined about 80 purported photos of UFOs and he's never seen a legitimate one.

Until now.

"When she showed me this, I was up all night, looking at it with a magnifying glass," says Cote, staring at an enlarged version of Cryer's photo. "I was just amazed."

I ask Cote how much time he devotes to studying paranormal phenomena. He says that, apart from his work as a musician, it's pretty much a full-time obsession.

"I've basically devoted my life to finding out what I saw in1977," he says.

"And I won't stop until I'm satisfied."

What did he see in 1977?

Cote was 17 years old. He says that one clear morning, his mother woke him up and told him to hurry outside. Hovering above the horizon, he says, was a glowing orange shape that splintered into smaller pieces, then re-assembled.

"It listened to my thoughts," says Cote.

"Because I said, 'I wonder how fast that thing can go?' And it just went - fooosh - straight up, so fast. And then I said, 'I hope it comes back.' And it came back."

Cote says he and his mother watched the objects for about 15
minutes.

"I knew that it was going (away)," he says.

"And I felt so close to it - I don't know why, I can't explain why to you. It was so personal. When I got the sense that it was leaving, I felt like I'd lost my parents. I felt like I lost something I was truly attached to for a long, long time."

As he says this, Cote appears close to tears.

"It left me a thought that I'll never forget," he says.

"I'll die with that message it left in my head."

What was the message?

"I said, 'Will I ever see you again?' " says Cote.

"And it said, 'One day, we're all going to be reunited into one.' That's the thought it left. And then it tilted nicely (away), like a gentle tilt. It was so beautiful.

"Until they tell me what I saw in 1977, I won't stop (searching)," says Cote.

"This is something I'm going to die with."

The next day I call London historian Chris Doty, who says the sighting, which was documented in the Free Press, occurred April 15, 1977.

The newspaper reported 10 red and white objects were seen hovering over London, but added scientists at UWO's Cronyn Observatory argued the UFO was a hoax perpetrated by engineering students. The officials said the lights were likely flares attached to army surplus weather balloons.

I doubt that explanation will satisfy Cote. But I hope he finds something that will.
 

May 20, 2003

Florida Today

Pilot's Book Causes Stir

by Billy Cox

The periscope inside the museum that the blockhouse at Pad 14 has become works like a prop from a submarine movie. But swimming into view during the two-handled, 360-degree swivel comes some unexpected symbolism. The massive firing rooms that once ignited America's earliest space shots hump out of Canaveral Air Force Station's dense scrubby wilderness like cement anthills. A flashback to the spectral pyramids of the Yucatan passes quickly.

On this white-hot Sunday morning, history is re-materializing around a dismantled gateway to the cosmos. Official history, that is. Meaning that certain subjects are simply not talked about. Even if the pioneer initiates the discussion.

Forty years ago, Gordon Cooper strapped himself into a Mercury capsule named Faith 7, then rode a pillar of fire into "Right Stuff" legend aboard an Atlas rocket. Today, the supporting cast has reunited, dozens strong, perhaps for the last time, beneath a tent within a stone's throw of Pad 14. With admiration, Lt. Col. Thomas Eye of the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base revisit's Cooper's claims to immortality:

The Faith 7 mission logged more than 34 hours, more than the five previous Mercury astronauts combined. Two years later, Cooper became the first pilot chosen for a second orbital flight, in the Gemini sequence. The "trailblazer" was on the cutting edge of a communications revolution when, in orbit, he chatted with Mercury colleague Scott Carpenter, 205 feet beneath the California waves in Sealab II. It is an impressive tribute.

Access to Cooper is a traffic jam. They want to shake hands, to chat, to get autographs. But no one submits a copy of his controversial autobiography, published in 2000. In fact, a spot check of half a dozen old-timers fails to find anyone who's read it, although they've heard the buzz. There are chuckles, puzzled brows.

"I don't believe there's anything such as UFOs," offers Cal Fowler, former Atlas launch director and longtime acquaintance of Cooper. "They've never landed, anyway. Maybe they came and left after they didn't find anything here to exploit."

Cooper's memoir, "Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey Into the Unknown," takes a fearless, if not downright exuberant, plunge into the taboo waters of unidentified flying objects. Although "Leap of Faith" scuttles enduring urban legends contending he and other early astronauts observed UFOs in orbit, the retired Air Force colonel is convinced of their existence and calls for official dialogues and government transparency. In 1978, he lobbied unsuccessfully for the United Nations to play a leading role in future studies.

Not only does Cooper elaborate on his 1951 sightings of metallic discs while serving with a jet fighter squadron in West Germany, he details his role in a UFO landing at Edwards Air Force Base in 1957. The latter, he says, was photographed by two military photographers, with stills and 35 mm footage. Before dispatching the images to the Pentagon, from which they never re-emerged, Cooper got a look at the negatives and reports the object was a "classic saucer" extruding tripod landing gear before it took off.

UFO skeptics such as Jim Oberg of Houston have teed off on "Leap of Faith." He can find no Air Force colleagues to verify Cooper's West German encounters. Advocates such as Stanton Friedman of Canada credit Cooper for being "gutsy" but lament his association with one of the UFO contactees, whom Friedman calls "a phony."

Surrounded by impatient co-workers, none of them addressing the autobiographical indelicacies, Cooper manages to find a few moments. He looks frail, but his mind is calculating. He blows off his critics with a shrug.

"UFOs, assuming they're real, are not going to show us what they've got until they're ready to show us," the old astronaut says. "Until then, we're not going to force it."

Liberated by history to speak his mind, the enigma is escorted into the air-conditioned bunker, where they will talk of other things.
 

May 11, 2003

Washington Post

UFOs: The Truth Is Out There, But Are the Witnesses, Too?

You know that crazy great-uncle who tells you tales about the UFO that crashed more than 50 years ago in New Mexico? Don't write him off too quickly - he's just the type of person two researchers are currently on a quest to find.

Stanton Friedman and Scott Ramsey are looking for anyone with details about two purported UFO crashes in the late 1940s.  They're certain some people have stories to tell about flying discs that allegedly met their doom near the New Mexico towns of Roswell, in 1947, and Aztec, in 1948.

But because those with firsthand information would be getting on in years, Friedman and Ramsey say their mission gets more urgent each day.

"It's a race with the undertaker at this point," said Friedman, a nuclear physicist who was the first civilian investigator of the Roswell ranch where some believe a UFO crash-landed. Ramsey, who owns a magnet wire company in North Carolina, has been researching the Aztec crash since 1989.

Friedman said he believes the U.S. government has long concealed information related to the crashes, amounting to what he calls a "cosmic Watergate."

"These are crucial events in recent history," Friedman said. "It means that aliens aren't perfect, the government is capable of keeping secrets and people have been laughed at for a long time because of cover-ups."
 

May 5, 2003

Raleigh News Observer

UFO researchers looking for witnesses to N.M. crashes

AZTEC, N.M. (AP) - Were you looking into the New Mexico sky in 1947 or 1948? Did you see little green men or the smoldering wreckage of a strange ship? A pair of researchers trying to uncover the secrets of two purported UFO crashes wants to pick your brain.

Stanton Friedman, a ufologist and nuclear physicist, was the first person to investigate a farmer's field in Roswell where many believe an alien spacecraft crash-landed in 1947. He's also gathering facts from a lesser-known purported UFO 1948 crash in Hart Canyon north of Aztec.

Friedman is hunting for people who may have witnessed either craft's flight or wreckage, but he knows time is running out.

"We're dealing with important real, earth-shaking events. These are major events in man's history, in New Mexico's history," Friedman said.

"The kicker here is we're racing the undertaker. There are people who know about these events, but don't know who to talk to."

Friedman is joined in his quest by Scott Ramsey of North Carolina, who was one of the initial researchers of the Aztec crash.

"We really need people to come forward," said Ramsey, who has found declassified military documents about the Aztec crash during more than six years of study.

Ramsey said a former Air Force intelligence officer told him everyone who knew about the military investigation in Aztec was sworn to secrecy for 50 years - a deadline that has now passed.

The men are searching for raw data, any memories or information a person may have about the Roswell or Aztec crashes.

"We all have that old memory stuck in the back of our brains," said Friedman. "It's important to get the data before it's gone."
 

April 29, 2003

Omaha World-Herald

Reward grows in mutilation of cattle

By Paul Hammel

VALPARAISO, Neb. - A reward fund rose Monday to $6,000 and investigators enlisted the help of a Las Vegas organization in hopes of solving two mysterious cases of cattle mutilation northwest of Lincoln.

Saunders County Sheriff Chuck Lacey said that, so far, there were few clues about who killed and mutilated two 1,200-pound cows and a bull calf at the Benes Cattle Co. on April 5 and April 7.

Lacey and an official with the Las Vegas-based National Institute for Discovery Science said the Valparaiso cases have an advantage over dozens of other reported cases of cattle mutilation - vehicle tracks and footprints.

"It's unusual in cases that we know of to find tracks of any type," said Dr. Colm Kelleher, administrator of the 7-year-old private science institute that investigates anomalies such as cattle mutilations.

Kelleher said he is unaware that any case of cattle mutilation has been solved since the incidents first made headlines in the 1970s.

"Tracks are a good start," he said. "So is the reward."

The $6,000 reward for information is being offered by Nebraska Crime Stoppers, Saunders County Crime Stoppers, the Saunders County Livestock Association, the Nebraska Cattlemen's Association, and the Benes family. It is twice the initial reward.

Lacey said the reward reflects how seriously the mutilations are being treated by cattle producers.

"There's no brotherhood among burglars and thieves, so I can't believe we don't have a constructive lead yet," he said. "Maybe it's coming."

So far, Lacey said, he has gotten only one small lead.

"Mainly it's people from all parts of the United States telling us it's the government . . . but nothing constructive," the sheriff said. "We know it's people and they drive cars."

Three separate sets of footprints and vehicle tracks were found in the snow on April 7, when a 2-year-old cow was found dead at the Benes farm.

The animal appeared to have died of electrocution, and an attempt had been made to cut off one of its teats.

Two days earlier, a cow and a bull calf were found dead in the same pasture. The testicles, anus and meat from its hindquarters were cut off the calf, which appeared to have had its blood drained.

The cow, which appeared to have been electrocuted, had one teat cut off.

The sheriff said the Las Vegas group may be able to shed more light on how the cows were killed. Particular toxins, Lacey said, have been associated with cattle mutilations.

Kelleher, whose organization investigates scientific anomalies such as cattle mutilations and alleged UFO sightings, said his group will analyze tissue samples from one of the dead cows as well as photographs of the mutilated animals.

He said only minimal tests will be possible because the tissue arrived so long after the incident.

Kelleher, a doctor of biochemistry, said the Valparaiso case is intriguing because of the burns left in the cows' mouths and the discovery of the tracks.

He said there is no proof that such mutilations are linked to UFOs, but there was a rash of UFO sightings during some mutilation cases in Montana in the 1970s.

Although he wouldn't rule out cult activity in the Valparaiso case, Kelleher said previous mutilations have not been linked to occult groups.

He said his group's goal is to investigate scientific anomalies that mainstream organizations ignore in hopes that it will lead to new discoveries.

Anyone with information about these crimes is asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 422-1494.
 

April 9, 2003

Gulfport Sun Herald

Author Recounts His Book On UFO
 

by Gary Holland

GAUTIER - Charles Hickson, who made international news with an account of his encounter with robots and an unidentified flying object, recalled the Oct. 11, 1973, incident at a book signing Tuesday night.

"I have a gut feeling that it won't be many more years until everyone is going to understand there are other worlds out there with life, and I'll be glad when that time comes," he said at the Gautier Library before meeting a roomful of UFO enthusiasts.

Hickson, 72, a Gautier construction contractor, wrote his book, "UFO Contact at Pascagoula," in the 1980s and makes appearances to talk about it.

He doesn't fear the aliens.

"If they come, we shouldn't attack them, thinking they mean harm," he said. "It wouldn't do any good. They could destroy us and this world if they want to."

Hickson's book recalls the afternoon when he and his fishing partner, Calvin Parker Jr., left work at Walker Shipyard and were fishing in the Pascagoula River just south of the U.S. 90 drawbridge. In the account of his encounter, a craft hovered over the bank and three robot-like creatures took them aboard and scanned them with an eye-like instrument, let them go and flew away.

"I don't know anything else to tell you," he said. "That's what happened almost 30 years ago."

He said he had a couple of occasions where he again saw space crafts and through communications, which he doesn't explain, they let him know they would stay in contact.

"I still hear and see things but I don't talk about it. There is no reason to talk," he said.

Hickson thinks the aliens are closer than any distant galaxy. He agrees with psychic Jeane Dixon, who talked with him about his experience, that they came from a small planet just past Jupiter.

"They are a lot further advanced scientifically than we are," he said. "They could come here for a purpose, possibly to help us. I believe they were concerned about a threat of an atomic war between Russia and the United States that could cause a nuclear reaction that would affect them. The Cold War is over, but there is still the Middle East and North Korea."

Hickson said he is a Christian.

"I believe there is a God, not only the creator of this world but the creator of all of those out there."
 

April 3, 2003

Dallas Observer

Contact
A half century later, witnesses insist little green... or maybe brown-men crashed in New Mexico

by Carlton Stowers
carlton.stowers@dallasobserver.com

It was a snow-covered December in 1995 when President Bill Clinton, visiting Northern Ireland in support of the country's new and fragile peace process, spoke to a large gathering that had arrived for a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The president opted to dismiss politics and keep the mood of his speech light. At one point, he drew laughter as he referred to a letter he'd recently received from a 13-year-old boy in Belfast.

"Ryan," the president said, "in case you're out there, here is your answer: No. As far as I know, no spaceship crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And if the Air Force recovered any extraterrestrial bodies, they did not tell me."

Such is the widespread and ongoing fascination attached to a legendary event that many believe actually took place on the late J.B. Foster's sheep ranch more than a half-century ago. What has transpired since that Independence Day weekend when a "flying saucer" was allegedly recovered by military personnel from Roswell Army Air Field has fueled a debate that continues 56 years later. Is it possible that such an unearthly event really occurred? The question has spawned an industry of books--well more than 100 at last count--and documentary films, inspired popular television shows and sci-fi movies, a prospering museum business in Roswell and insistence by many researchers that an ongoing government cover-up of the historic discovery puts Watergate to shame.

Perhaps Clinton should have visited with Midland's Anne Robbins before giving his answer. The widow of a career military man stationed in Roswell at the time, she might have changed his mind. She would probably have shared the description of the saucer that her husband, Technical Sergeant Ernest Robert Robbins, told her he helped recover long ago and the three small "men"--one dead, one near death and another very much alive--found outside the spaceship.

But we're getting ahead of the story.

Was the arid Lincoln County region actually visited by inhabitants of another world? If so, why has the government refused to admit it? And could it be true, as some now claim, that many modern-day technical advancements--from lasers to fiber optics, integrated circuit chips to Velcro--have evolved from scientific examination and reverse engineering studies of a now hidden spacecraft?

As the story goes, William "Mac" Brazel, who leased the Foster Ranch at the time, was on horseback herding sheep when he happened onto a large field of strewn debris unlike anything he'd ever seen. He would later tell neighbors Floyd and Loretta Proctor it was clearly something that had fallen from the sky; perhaps the cause of the too-loud-to-be-thunder boom he'd heard during the previous night's rainstorm.

Brazel allegedly showed the Proctors some of the pieces he'd collected, metallic but thin as tinfoil. They watched in amazement as he wrinkled one, laid it on a table and saw it immediately smooth to its original shape. And there were the pieces of stick-like material, no heavier than balsa wood, bendable but impossible to break or cut with a knife. On some were what he later compared to Indian petroglyphs, series of strange symbols and pastel-colored drawings.

The neighbors, aware of the flying-saucer mania then sweeping the nation, suggested he tell authorities. Thus, two days later, on the morning of July 7, 1947, Brazel made the 60-mile drive to Roswell and told Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox of his discovery, showing him several pieces of the strange debris he had collected. Wilcox phoned Major Jesse Marcel at the nearby air base and suggested he might want to speak with the 48-year-old rancher.

After examining the material and hearing Brazel's description of the size of the debris field--three-quarters of a mile long and 200 to 300 feet wide, with a lengthy "gouge" in the ground at its north end--Marcel arranged to meet Brazel at the ranch.

Thereafter the story becomes a blur that historians are still attempting to sort out. According to evidence gathered by numerous researchers--both scientists and laymen collectively calling themselves UFOlogists--a small, elite group of military personnel was assigned to guard the area, collect the debris and take it to the base. There, orders had already been received from Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force, that everything recovered was to be flown immediately to what would later become Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth.

Still, the story might never have created a worldwide frenzy had the base public information officer, Lieutenant Walter Haut, not issued a startling press release that appeared beneath a banner headline in the next day's edition of the Roswell Daily Record: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region."

Haut's press release, ordered by Colonel William Blanchard, the base commanding officer, made it clear that something more than pieces of scattered debris had been found. "The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer," it read. The release went on to explain that "Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and discovered the disc."

Soon, calls were coming to Haut from news agencies throughout the world.

Now 80 and co-founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, Haut says, "After meeting with Colonel Blanchard in his office and getting the information for the press release, I wrote it and went to town around five that afternoon to deliver it to the radio and newspaper people.

"That done, I went on home and was having dinner when people from all over the world started calling. Finally, about midnight, my wife, who was getting a little unhappy with the flood of calls, just took the phone off the hook and told me we were going to bed."

Then, just as quickly as the excitement had developed, it came to a crashing end with a Fort Worth news conference called by General Ramey the following day. Despite claims by Marcel to investigators years later that the amount of debris loaded onto the B-29 that was flown from Roswell to Fort Worth "was enormous," half filling the huge plane, reporters and photographers who gathered in the general's office were shown only tattered remnants of a weather balloon and given a smiling apology for all the unwarranted excitement. In attendance was Major Marcel, admitting he had been mistaken.

The official version of the Roswell incident thus became that a military weather balloon launched to detect wind velocity and direction at high altitudes had come crashing down on Foster Ranch. End of story. The headline in the next day's Roswell paper was as definitive but not nearly as exciting as the one published the day before: "Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer." In a more innocent and patriotic time, with World War II still fresh in the public's mind and trust in the government blindly indisputable, the explanation was good enough. For most. For a time.

Anne Robbins, who until now has never spoken publicly on the matter, says what her late husband saw 56 years ago was hardly a downed weather balloon.

Seated in a meeting room at the newly opened Odessa Meteor Crater Museum, the 84-year-old Robbins clearly recalls a July night when her husband received a call to report to the base. She would not see or hear from him for 18 hours. And when she did, he told her bits and pieces of a bizarre story that has puzzled her for a lifetime.

"We had been to a dinner party at the NCO [non-commissioned officers] club on the base," she says, "and didn't get home until 10:30 or 11. We'd already gone to bed but weren't yet asleep when everything outside lit up like it was daylight. It was like that for what seemed like several minutes, and we both assumed that it was probably helicopters from the base with searchlights on."

Soon thereafter, the phone call came to their home and her husband told her he had to report to the base.

"I just assumed that there had been a plane crash somewhere nearby," she says. "But I couldn't figure why my husband, a sheet-metal man who repaired planes, was called in."

She was even more puzzled when he returned home the following evening, his uniform wrinkled and damp. "I asked him what had happened to him, why he was so wet, and he told me he'd had to go through the decontamination tank at the base. I asked, 'In your clothes?' and he said, 'They were what I was wearing when I was out there.'"

Still assuming that he'd been called to the site of a plane crash, she quizzed him further. "He told me, 'Well, I guess you might as well know; it's going to be in the papers. A UFO crashed outside of Roswell.'"

Her response? "I told him he was crazy."

"No," Sergeant Robbins replied, "I'm not." Then he showered and went to bed.

"I don't remember him being particularly shocked or very emotional about it," she says. "In fact, he seemed cool as a cucumber. He just made it clear to me that he wasn't going to talk about it."

The following morning she continued to press for details. "I asked him again if it was really true and he said, yes, it was." When she asked what the UFO looked like, he explained that "if you took two saucers and put them together, that's what it looked like." On the top layer, he told her, there were oblong-shaped windows all the way around the craft. And, no, he said, he had not looked inside the crashed ship.

"I asked him if there was anybody on it. He said, 'I can tell you this much: There were three people. One was dead and two were still alive. I can't tell you anything more.'"

It was not until several days later that Sergeant Robbins finally agreed to drive his wife out to the crash site. By then, all debris had been cleared away and neither a spaceship nor signs of military personnel was evident. "He didn't say much of anything until we got to a place where there was this big burned spot, a perfect circle so black that it was shiny. No normal fire could have made something like that." It was, she says, as if the sand had been melted and turned into a sheet of black glass.

"This," Sergeant Robbins said, "is where I was for 18 hours."

"On the drive home," she says, "I asked him what happened to the spaceship, what happened to the people who were on it. Her husband's reply: "I can't tell you that; don't ask me any more."

It was the last time her husband spoke of "the Roswell incident" until long after he'd retired from the service. Until his death of a heart attack two years ago, he never told his wife who was with him that night or what role he had played.

Following his retirement from the Air Force in 1961, they moved to Saginaw, near Fort Worth, and he worked first for General Dynamics, then LTV, as an aircraft repairman.

"It was years later, when our kids were in high school, that our son Ronald was working on some kind of report on unidentified flying objects and asked his father to tell him about what happened back in Roswell. He didn't say much, basically just what he'd told me years earlier," she says.

"But you know how kids are. Ronald kept asking questions, like what the men found at the crash looked like. Finally, Papa [as she referred to her husband throughout their 57-year marriage] got a pencil and drew this pear-shaped head with large black eyes. Their skin, he said, was brown and they had no nose, no mouth.

"When Ronald asked him what their bodies looked like, all he would say was, 'Son, you don't want to know about that.'"

The Robbins' son, now living in Arizona, could not be reached by the Dallas Observer. "He wouldn't talk to you about it, anyway," his mother insists. Neither of her children, in fact, has ever spoken publicly of their father's alleged involvement in the Roswell incident. "Barbara, my daughter, tells me, 'Daddy's dead, don't bring it up.'"

"All I remember," says Barbara Wattlington, "was Dad saying he was stationed in Roswell and that a UFO crashed there."

The last time Anne Robbins remembers any conversation about the matter was a few years before her husband's death in January 2000, when they sat in their Saginaw living room one evening, watching television. A show whose title she can't recall was on, re-creating the Roswell event and posing the question of whether it was an ageless hoax or the well-hidden truth. "I asked him, 'Was it a hoax?' and all he said was, 'It's the truth. It did land.'

"I asked him, 'Well, if it did, where is it?' He again said he couldn't tell me that."

Her husband, she says, was never one to embellish or lie; neither prankster nor teller of tall tales. "He was a good, Christian man. He loved the military and his country and never spoke bad about either." No, she says, he would never have made up such a story. Nor, if ordered not to, would he have ever talked of matters he was told to keep secret. "That's just the way he was," she says. "On the day he died, the last thing he told me was that he wanted me to promise to fly the flag in front of our house until I drew my last breath."

Though she insists she has never researched the numerous theories of the Roswell crash presented in the countless books or documentaries, she does admit that she has lingering questions she hopes will one day be answered. "That UFO they found didn't just fly away," she says. "So where is it? And what happened to the people on it? I still say the Air Force knows what happened. Someday, I hope, we might find out the truth."

Two years ago she did get an answer to one question that had long bothered her. "I could never figure out why an airplane repairman would be called out in the middle of the night to participate in the investigation of a crashed UFO," she says. Only after filing her husband's death certificate with military officials in Washington, D.C., did she learn that he had intelligence clearance during his Roswell tenure.

Still, if Anne Robbins had embarked on a thorough study of the massive collection of research done on the fabled Roswell crash, she would not find her husband's name among any of the "witnesses" who have come forward over the years. Yet the sketchy details he gave her generally mesh with most of the reconstructed stories found in the ever-growing volume of literature devoted to the crash investigation.

It was not until 1978, three decades after the brief flurry of interest in the crashed UFO-turned-weather balloon, that Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had been at the center of the original event, came forward with a story far different from the one told attendees of the Carswell news conference.

The material flown from Roswell to Fort Worth was never actually shown to the media, he confided to nuclear physicist-turned-UFO investigator Stanton Friedman. It was, instead, quietly delivered to a research laboratory at Wright-Patterson Army Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Marcel's revised recollections of the 1947 event, along with those of others who had finally chosen to speak out, ultimately appeared in the 1980 book The Roswell Incident co-authored by William Moore and Charles Berlitz, setting off a renewed appetite for information. Soon it came in a virtual flood of eyewitness reports and recollections of family members who, like Anne Robbins, began revealing secrets they had long been told to keep. The Roswell story exploded into the best-known alleged UFO encounter in history.

According to the story now told by researchers, ranging from the serious to those writing for the supermarket tabloids, things far more bizarre had already occurred before Mac Brazel discovered the debris field. Those who have written about the event in the years since suggest a fascinating sequence of events that occurred in the early days of that July:

For several nights, Roswell residents had reportedly seen a strange flying object in the night sky. Though no one would know about it for 30 years, two Franciscan Catholic nuns, working at the local St. Mary's Hospital, even made notations in their diaries that at some time after 11 p.m. on July 4, 1947, they had seen a large flash in the night sky, assuming that it was a plane in distress.

What Roswell AAF radar operator Frank Kaufmann said he saw was even more remarkable. On that same evening he was tracking the strange movement of a mysterious object flying at an incredible rate of speed. Suddenly it began losing altitude and the blip on the radar screen enlarged into a large starburst pattern that suggested an explosion had occurred. It was estimated that the event had occurred somewhere within a 100-mile range northwest of the base and a search team was immediately dispatched.

Jim Ragsdale would later tell of seeing what occurred at much closer range. He and his girlfriend, on a rock-hunting trip, were parked at a secluded campsite on what was known as Boy Scout Mountain, when they saw a flash, then heard a thundering explosion. Within seconds, Ragsdale would later tell researchers, the UFO skipped along the desert not far away, then came to rest at the base of a nearby bluff. Grabbing flashlights, he and his girlfriend made their way to the crash site where he says a saucer-shaped vehicle had come to rest. Not only did he eventually tell of seeing the crashed UFO but the bodies of several "childlike" passengers. After picking up a few pieces of debris from the wreckage, the young couple decided to return to their pickup and wait until daylight for a better look.

When they did return, Ragsdale later wrote in a sworn affidavit, they saw a military convoy arriving and briefly hid to watch before deciding to leave (taking with them pieces of the debris he says they later showed to numerous people in a nearby bar). Had they remained, the story goes, they would have eventually seen the UFO hoisted by crane onto the bed of a flatbed truck and the bodies placed in another military vehicle that was ordered to quickly return to the Roswell base hospital.

The actual crash site, then, had been swept clear by military personnel hours before Mac Brazel rode up on the debris field several miles away. Later, researchers would assume that the craft had apparently first hit on the Foster Ranch, sliding along fr a distance, then had briefly managed to become airborne again before crashing.

If the material found in such books as The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Crash at Corona, Beyond Roswell, and Alien Contact: Top Secret UFO Files Revealed is to be believed, the interplanetary visit was, in many respects, a pretty poorly kept secret from the get-go. The only problem is, it was years before folks would talk about it.

Yet, before their deaths, numerous people or their descendants recounted anecdotes of involvement in and observations made during the strange event.

For instance, long after his father's death in 1986, Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr., 66, still tells of Major Marcel stopping by the house on an early July morning in 1947 to show him and his mother pieces of the crash debris that he had collected. Eleven years old at the time, Dr. Marcel recalled his father bringing pieces of the downed "flying disc" from his car and spreading them on the kitchen floor. He recalled handling the aluminum foil-like material and seeing the unusual symbols on what he said looked like pieces of black plastic.

Now living in Helena, Montana, Dr. Marcel says the most remarkable memory he has of the pieces his father showed him was of the geometric-like symbols on some of them. "I've always referred to them as I-beams," he says, "though I have no idea what they really were.

"My father was very excited about what they had found," Dr. Marcel says, "and since our house was on the way to the base, he just decided to stop by and show it to us. Then he took it on out to the base."

Major Marcel's excitement, however, was quickly muted. "The next day," his son remembers, "he sat down with my mother and me and told us we were never to talk about what he'd shown us. He said, 'Don't think about it. It didn't happen.'"

Today, Dr. Marcel remains convinced that the material his father showed him came from another world.

Then there is the story that the late Sergeant Melvin Brown waited until 1970 to tell his daughters. Retired and living in England, he said that he had been at the crash site in '47 and was assigned to guard the alien bodies as they were being transported back to the base. Though sworn to secrecy, he finally told of being ordered to ride in an "ice-filled truck" that was to take the bodies to a hangar. On the trip, Brown told his daughter Beverly Bean, he had lifted a tarp and seen "two, possibly three bodies."

And there were others who would eventually tell of seeing the alien bodies, including Roswell AAF radar operator Kaufmann, who would later claim to have been among those ordered to the crash site where, he later told researchers Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, authors of UFO Crash at Roswell, he saw five small aliens, all clearly dead.

Oliver "Pappy" Henderson, a World War II pilot assigned to the Roswell Army Air Field at the time, allegedly told friend Dr. John Kromschroeder during a fishing trip in 1978 that he had flown much of the debris--and the bodies of what he only described as "those little guys"--to Wright-Patterson aboard a C-47. Shortly before his death in 1986, Henderson also told the story to his wife.

In his book, The Day After Roswell, retired Colonel Philip Corso is far more graphic as he writes of a night a sentry urged him to enter an off-limits Wright-Patterson building where more than 30 crates of Henderson's cargo had been stacked against a wall, draped by large tarps. When the sentry pointed to a particular crate he'd already looked in--in clear violation of orders he'd been given --Corso opened it and shined a flashlight on its contents.

"My stomach rolled right up into my throat, and I almost became sick," he writes. "[Inside] was a coffin, but not like any coffin I'd ever seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light blue liquid...

"At first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But it was no child. It was a 4-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands--I didn't see a thumb--thin legs and feet and an oversized incandescent light bulb-shaped head...the eyesockets were oversized and almond-shaped..."

Perhaps the most provocative story came not from a member of the military but, instead, a Roswell mortician named Glenn Dennis. Twenty-two at the time and director of the local Ballard Funeral Home, he told of receiving a telephone call from the base on the afternoon of July 5, 1947, asking if he could provide several "small," hermetically sealed caskets. Thirty minutes later, he would eventually recall to numerous researchers and journalists, he answered a second call, this time with a series of questions about the techniques of embalming and preserving dead bodies and if such processes would alter the chemical contents of blood and tissue. Finally, he reported, he was asked what happened to body tissue after it had been exposed to the elements.

Curious, Dennis says he asked if there was something he could help with and was told the questions were only "for future reference."

Later that day, Dennis recalled, he had driven an injured airman to the base infirmary. While there, he noticed an unusual amount of activity at the base hospital. Encountering a nurse named Naomi Selff in the hallway, she was clearly surprised to see him and warned that "he wasn't supposed to be there and had better leave immediately."

Minutes later, his story went, he was escorted by two military police all the way back to the funeral home.

It was not until the following day that he learned what had been happening. He phoned nurse Selff and they agreed to meet for lunch. Obviously distraught, she told him of seeing three small bodies, two of which were badly mutilated, and of being ordered by attending military doctors to take notes while they conducted their examinations. The stench of the corpses, she allegedly told him, had been almost more than she could stand. Before he returned her to her barrack, Dennis recalled, she drew sketches of the aliens on a prescription pad and gave them to him with a warning that he should "show them to no one."

That, the mortician says, was the last time he ever saw her. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to reach her by phone, he learned several days later that she had suddenly been reassigned to duty in England. Shortly thereafter, he was told that she had died there in a plane crash.

Co-founder of the Roswell museum with Haut, Dennis is currently in poor health and was unable to speak with the Observer about his well-chronicled story.

But for every true believer there are skeptics, researchers who have picked away at the colorful, unimaginable stories in search of their flaws. And they have found many. Among the debunkers is Kal K. Korff, author of The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know. He not only questions why so many waited so long to come forward with the stories but points out that many of them are, like that of Anne Robbins, hand-me-down tales allegedly kept secret until the firsthand witnesses were dead.

Korff's questions are valid: Why have some of the reported witness accounts described the downed UFO as "saucer-shaped" while others remember it being "triangular-shaped with small wings?" While most who claimed to have seen the bodies recall there being three, others say they saw as many as five. Some say all were dead, others that one or more was still alive. Descriptions of the color of the small bodies range from gray to brown. How could mortician Haut have "lost" something as important as the drawings he says his nurse friend made and gave to him? And if, in fact, so many civilians collected pieces of the strange-looking debris, why has not a single piece of it ever surfaced?

It was not until 1994 that an Air Force investigation into the aging Roswell affair resulted in an announcement that the material found on the Foster Ranch was, in fact, a crashed high-altitude test balloon that would eventually be able to monitor Soviet nuclear testing. Actually a chain of radar-equipped balloons, it had been launched on July 4, 1947, and was tracked to within 17 miles of the Foster Ranch before disappearing.

When the explanation failed to satisfy many "believers," the Air Force released yet another report in '97, this one titled The Roswell Report--Case Closed, in which it attempted to answer the lingering question of the "bodies" allegedly seen at the crash site. What the so-called witnesses had seen, according to the report, were nothing more than crash-test dummies that were part of a military experiment in parachute and ejector seat designs.

That, too, failed to satisfy those determined that the governmental cover-up continued. Such tests, several military researchers argued, had not even begun until the mid-'50s.

"The reason the interest in the Roswell case remains and, in fact, seems to grow," says Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies, "is the fact the government has never given a reasonable explanation of what occurred that summer of 1947."

Thus it continues, an unexplained event that has turned into an industry. What happened or didn't happen 56 years ago has lured 1.3 million to the International UFO Museum and Research Center since it opened in 1992. A guided tour of the desolate "crash site" is now available. Then, there was the long-lost film of the "autopsy" of one of the Roswell aliens that was shown on television worldwide before being discounted as fake, and a stream of new books and articles that continues to flow.  Clearly, the public loves the mystery. According to a recent poll, a large percentage of the U.S. population continues to believe something unworldly occurred that July on the Foster Ranch.

Walter Haut, one of the few major figures in the long-ago story still living, is among them. "I'm sure," he says, "that over the years much of the story has been exaggerated. But, yes, I believe that something happened out there in 1947." And he's not speaking of a weather balloon crash.

 

March 17, 2003

Seattle Times

Professor Questions Study, Then Others Question Her

by Susan Kelleher

Elizabeth Loftus was suspicious.

Having spent years at the University of Washington twisting people's memories and making them "remember" things that had never happened to them, Loftus was sure that the doctor lecturing nationwide about a traumatic memory recovered by one of his clients was doing some truth twisting of his own.

The University of Cincinnati child psychiatrist, had videotaped his interviews with a girl, first when she was 6 and then when she was 17. Together, the tapes presented a compelling case for the controversial theory that the mind can bury painful memories, then recover them.

But Loftus didn't buy it. She set out to investigate the research. By the time she finished, she had cast a shadow not only on the psychiatrist, but on the integrity of case studies that have shaped the field of psychology for more than a century.

Darkened too, however, was Loftus' relationship with her own university. Colleagues there questioned the methods she had used in her challenge, and recommended she take an ethics class.

Ultimately, Loftus _ the queen of the UW Psychology Department, who last year ranked 58th in a list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century _ left Seattle in anger to take a post at the University of California, Irvine.

Until now, the controversy surrounding Loftus' departure has been confined mainly to university offices and boardrooms. It is a story not just of one professor's battle against another, but of the treacherous academic territory Loftus tread in challenging someone else's work.

'Diva of Disclosure'

Exploring dangerous ground is nothing new for Elizabeth Loftus.

For more than a decade, she has challenged prevailing views of memory, demonstrating that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable. In experiments, she showed that through suggestion and reinforcement, people can be made to believe they had experienced something that had never actually happened.

Her work helped change methods used by police, social workers and therapists, especially around allegations of abuse.

In 2001, the American Psychological Society gave her its most prestigious award, calling her research "ingenious," and noting that "the quality of basic-memory research and the fairness of the criminal-justice system have advanced substantially" because of her science. A 1996 article in Psychology Today magazine dubbed her "The Diva of Disclosure."

But Loftus' work also created enemies, people who put her in the same league as the accused killers, rapists and child molesters on whose behalf she has testified in court. The Psychology Today article quotes a letter from an incest survivor: "Please consider your work to be on the same level as those who deny the existence of the extermination camps during WWII."

Few hate Loftus more than those involved in the spate of lawsuits and criminal trials that began in the 1980s, when it seemed as if childhood sexual abuse and satanic-ritual abuse were becoming nationwide epidemics.

Parents and child-care providers were hauled into court for sexual abuse, even murder, on the basis of memories recalled decades after the alleged events. The cases grabbed headlines until a 1992 presentation by Loftus cast doubt on some claims.

"While certainly there have been enormous tragedies due to real crimes against women and children," Loftus wrote, "there have also been equally enormous tragedies of false accusations.  Families have been destroyed, miscarriages of justice have occurred, and more than a few innocent people have been sent to prison."

The topic of so-called "repressed memory" remains charged with emotion and controversy, mostly because it is impossible to absolutely prove or disprove scientifically.

Researchers can't ethically torture a group of people and then check back with them 20 years later to see if any of them forget and then remember the abuse. The most they can do is evaluate instances in which such remembering has reportedly occurred.  Those instances are written up as case studies and presented in professional journals.

Loftus was reading such a journal, Child Maltreatment, in May 1997 when she came across the case of reported abuse that roused her suspicions. In psychology circles, the case is widely known as "Corwin's Jane Doe."

Lack of memory

In the article, Dr. David Corwin, a well-regarded child psychiatrist who now teaches at the University of Utah and heads the Child Protection Team at Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City, described this situation:

A young girl was caught in a child-custody dispute between divorcing parents. Corwin was called in to assess abuse allegations made by 6-year-old "Jane." In his third videotaped interview with Jane, she folded her tiny fingers into a three-fingered Brownie salute and swore she was being truthful when she accused her mother of abusing her in the bathtub and of burning her feet on the stove.  After reviewing reports from police, doctors and social workers who already had examined and talked to Jane, Corwin concluded it was likely that Jane's mother had sexually abused the girl. A judge awarded custody to her father and stepmother, terminating the mother's visitation rights.

Jane's father divorced about three years later, and within seven years became incapacitated by a health problem. Jane was living in foster care when he died.

Before the father's death, Corwin called him to see if it was still OK to show the videotape of his interview with Jane for educational purposes. When the father became ill, Corwin called Jane herself to get permission. She asked him if she could see the taped interview from when was 6.

Jane was 17 when she saw the tape. She told Corwin she remembered accusing her mother of abuse but didn't remember if the abuse actually occurred. As she pondered her lack of memory, she suddenly recalled her mother abusing her once in the bathtub. Corwin was taping Jane at the time, and he asked for and received her permission to show that tape, too, for educational purposes.

When Corwin showed the videotapes at professional conferences, clinicians who routinely dwell in the wreckage of other people's traumas dabbed at their eyes.

But Loftus, clearly predisposed to doubt recovered memories, pounced on this one. She was struck by what she saw as a dearth of evidence cited by Corwin to support his finding that Jane had been abused as a child.

She spoke with a colleague, Melvin Guyer at the University of Michigan, and together they decided to do their own investigation.

"I think people have to be very suspicious of case histories, and be aware that this is half of the story and one person's opinion," Loftus said. "The problem is, as with many aspects of life, the vivid case histories that have a story and a face are always more persuasive than cold, hard statistics."

Omissions

From the start, the methods used by Loftus and Guyer in re-examining the case were unorthodox.

Instead of going to Corwin for more information or permission to talk with Jane, Loftus and Guyer picked up on clues _ her real first name, locations, the year of her parents' divorce and her father's death _ and figured out Jane's full name and whereabouts.

With the help of a private investigator, they dug up divorce records and interviewed three women who knew Jane: her birth mother, foster mother and stepmother.

The results of their investigation appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer, a mass-circulation magazine devoted to scrutinizing what it calls "pseudoscience." Their article alleged that Corwin had omitted important facts about Jane's family and her case history.

Among the omissions:

ò Failing to note that a county child-protective agency had investigated the allegations when they were first made and had recommended that no action be taken.

ò Not mentioning that a clinical psychologist had reviewed the case and had concluded that, while abuse may have occurred, the nature and source of any abuse was unknown and that Jane may have just been repeating suggestions from her father.

ò Ignoring the contentiousness of the custody battle, which lasted five years. In a taped interview with Loftus, Jane's stepmother said she had worked hard to "get" Jane for her then-husband, and noted that they finally succeeded with the "sexual
angle."

The information revealed by Loftus and Guyer didn't disprove the claim of abuse. But it raised doubts about both the original claim and the memory Jane said she later recalled.

The significance of that doubt extended beyond Jane's case: Corwin's finding already was being cited in other court cases as evidence in support of recovered memory.

In a recent interview, Corwin conceded he had selectively edited facts in presenting Jane Doe's case and said it was appropriate to do so. A case study need not be an exhaustive recitation of every fact but rather should include information that supports the author's conclusions, he said.

Besides, he said, "We don't know with absolute certainty what happened (to Jane), and we don't assert that we did."

Corwin said professional ethics prevented him from providing further information about Jane's case, even if it meant not being able to defend himself against Loftus and Guyer's criticisms.

Gray zone

Loftus expected laurels for shining light on this case. Instead, she found the light shined into her own eyes, as Jane herself complained to the administration of the UW that Loftus had violated her privacy.

Once university officials began their 21-month investigation of Loftus' "case study of a case study," they discovered how difficult it is to regulate research that falls outside traditional boundaries, as Loftus' did.

"We're in the grayest of the gray zones I've ever been in my entire life," said David Hodge, dean of UW's College of Arts and Sciences.

University rules for research involving human subjects were written mainly for medical experimentation. But, as Hodge and others found, they are much more tricky to apply outside that area, especially if someone is challenging a case study.

Faculty members conducting research are required to submit proposals to an institutional review board, or IRB. The IRB sets rules to protect research subjects from harm and to ensure they're fully informed before they agree to participate.

Loftus had submitted a proposal to the UW's IRB early on, but then had ignored the board's follow-up questions after her partner, Guyer, received the go-ahead from the University of Michigan's IRB.

Had Loftus gone through the UW board, it's unlikely she would have been allowed to challenge Corwin's work the way she did, according to John Slattery, who was director of the UW's Office of Scholarly Integrity at the time.

Slattery said Loftus would have had to seek the university's permission before contacting people for interviews. She would likely have been required to give the IRB a list of questions she planned to ask and a form explaining the potential risks of being interviewed.

She probably would have been required to contact Corwin for permission to review records and to interview Jane.

Such rules make challenging a psychological case study much harder than presenting one.

Psychological case studies are, by design, shrouded in secrecy. Although studies are reviewed by experts before publication, those experts do not know subjects' names and rarely see documentation.

Still, Loftus feels justified in deliberately penetrating Corwin's efforts to hide Jane's identity. Secrecy rules adopted to protect the privacy of patients or research subjects should not be used to obscure the truth, she said.

Loftus was already well into her investigation when she took a colleague's advice and spoke with Corwin about contacting Jane. He told her he would be happy to connect the two, but then told her Jane wanted to communicate through him. Loftus eventually exchanged an e-mail with Jane to put her in touch with her mother, but she said they never discussed the abuse claims or Corwin's article.

Calling Loftus' methods unethical, Corwin said, "I have no reason to hide anything. She could have asked me, and I would have gone through the steps that would have left Jane Doe feeling less violated."

Jane told UW officials that she objected to Loftus tracking down her mother and stepmother for interviews.

Loftus admits to befriending Jane's biological mother, and confesses that she was motivated in large part by a desire to unite mother and daughter. In an e-mail to Loftus, Jane's mother wrote: "You have helped me heal when I thought it was not possible. I value your caring friendship. I am truly thankful that you are in my life."

Loftus' ongoing friendship with Jane's mother complicated the UW investigation, which was conducted by an ad-hoc committee consisting of three faculty members.

The committee ultimately cleared Loftus of wrongdoing but required her to get permission from the IRB before contacting Jane's mother again. The panel also wanted Loftus to take an ethics class.

Angry, hurt and humiliated by the investigation, Loftus accepted an offer from the University of California, Irvine, which offered her more research money and a "distinguished professor" title. She began teaching there in September.

"I cried for a week before I made the decision and a week after," Loftus said. "I felt so betrayed by my university."

The University of Michigan gave no such scrutiny to Guyer, Loftus' partner in the research.

Meanwhile, Loftus has received letters of support from prominent psychologists and researchers from around the country, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, applauding her efforts to make case studies more transparent and expressing anger at how the UW treated her.

Hodge, the UW dean, said the university is looking at a different system for evaluating the kinds of challenges that Loftus' investigation represented.

"We always want to allow challenges to other people's research. It's really about at what point does a relationship become a scientific relationship? That's where it becomes difficult," he said. "It's not clear where the line is between professional scientific research and non-scientific research."
 

March 16, 2003

Farmington Daily Times (New Mexico)

Researchers:  Aztec UFO crash is something to look at

By Debra Mayeux/Staff writer

AZTEC Eyewitnesses have never been located. The incident is shrouded in mystery.

Whether a UFO crashed in 1948 near Aztec has received a good deal of interest from both believers and skeptics. Those wanting to discuss the possibility of the event will converge on the small northern New Mexico town for a three-day symposium March 21-23 at the Aztec Civic Center, 101 S. Park Ave.

The symposium, which began six years ago, has grown significantly over the years, so has the list of speakers.

This year there will be a number of noted ufologists, journalists and historians who have studied the UFO phenomenon with the goal of proving or disproving the idea of extraterrestrials visiting our planet.

Rob Swiatek, of the Fund for UFO Research, cannot prove there are extraterrestrial spacecraft, yet he does believe there is something there for scientists to study.

"Something strange has been going on for the last 50 years," Swiatek said in a telephone interview Friday. "It's an enduring mystery. We haven't been able to make the case for the scientific community, but there is a core of evidence there that can not be explained away as mundane."

Journalist Nick Redfern agreed.

He has been studying strange sightings and occurrences in both the United Kingdom and the United States since the late-1990s.

"My goal has been to chase down the paper trail," Redfern said.

He has worked to declassify FBI files and government papers in an effort to discover the facts behind the UFO folklore.

"There was an attempt to discredit people in the media looking into this," he said, adding he takes an unbiased approach to the topic. "I'm putting the information out there that I have obtained with the hopes others will come forward to speak about it peeling away the layers of the onion to get the story."

In his first three books, published by Simon and Schuster, Redfern has been attempting to find out the history behind the crashes and promote what has been hidden from the public.

"I'm interested in mysteries and conspiracies in general," Redfern said.

He has spent his time documenting government documents on all types of cases in order to determine their credibility. Swiatek does the same thing.

"I have a whole bunch of the (Project) Blue Book microfilm," he said adding he has spent countless hours studying this topic.

He became interested in UFOs in the late-1960s, when reports on the subject could be found on the front page of major newspapers across the country.

"I was completely intrigued by what I read," Swiatek said. "I haven't lost my fascination after all of these years."

The UFO researcher believes wholeheartedly in the Farmington Armada flyover of 1950.

"That seemingly did occur and is a fascinating case," he said. "The few people who looked at it seemed to have pretty good documentation that it did happen."

Swiatek is not as convinced about Aztec.

"There may not have been a crash in Aztec, but certainly Farmington has a role to play in the greater UFO phenomenon," Swiatek said.

The concern over the Aztec crash is not so much a denial of the event on the researcher's part. He just hasn't seen many documented reports or interviews with eyewitnesses regarding the
alleged crash.

As far as Aztec is concerned, Redfern has not made up his mind.

"The FBI has quite an extensive file on the case," he said.

The file consists of documents on the men, who first broke the story of a crashed disc in Hart Canyon Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer. The investigation into these two was not because of their UFO crash story, but because they were known con men.

"The file on GeBauer is 400 pages long," Redfern said. "Only 200 pages have been declassified."

The author believes the problem with Aztec is not "that there aren't files on it. It is a lot of the it can be tracked back to Newton and GeBauer," Redfern said.

"Inadvertently, because of who they were destroyed the credibility of the case," he said.

Despite the fact that the story was made public by these two con men, the Aztec story is continuing to grow and receive interest.

Even Redfern believes there could be something to it. Exactly what happened there remains the mystery.

"Some accounts could have been spread to discredit actual cases," Redfern said. "Someone in the Pentagon may have spread rumors."

Why, one might ask. Redfern has an interesting answer. It may have been "psychological warfare," which would have made the Russians believe the U.S. had its hands on advanced extraterrestrial technology.

Historian Rich Dolan believes that is exactly what could have happened. In fact, his theory is the UFOs may have been unmanned spacecraft captained by artificial intelligence.

"Where they are from, and who they are I don't have the answers," Dolan said. "I have come to the conclusion this isn't our technology."

Dolan became interested in UFOs 10 years ago.

"I didn't have anything to do that day," he said in a Friday telephone interview.

Being a historian, he questioned why there were no references to UFOs in the history books.

"I wondered why it was absent from Truman's memoirs," he said. "I began a personal project and hunted down information on it (using the Freedom of Information Act.)

Dolan became an author, writing a 500-page book, "UFOs and the National Security State." He is currently working on another book.

He will speak in Aztec on his theory concerning artificial intelligence and UFOs from 9-10:30 a.m. March 23.

Redfern will speak on a comparison of UFO incidents in England with the Aztec crash at from 8-9:30 a.m. March 22.

Swiatek will speak on the mystery of the UFO phenomenon from 3-4:30 p.m. March 22.

Tickets to the symposium are $50 for both days or $35 for Saturday and $20 for Sunday.

Information: The symposium hotline, (505) 334-9890 or 1-877-823-5810.

Debra Mayeux: debram@daily-times.com

 

February 25, 2003

Dundee Evening Telegraph (Scotland)

19 'Close Encounters' In Fife Being Probed

An appeal for witnesses to a string of alleged 'close encounters' in North East Fife has led to a "massive public response" with UFO investigators currently looking into 19 reports in Fife and a string of unexplained sightings across Central Scotland.

Ex-navy submariner Lee Close, who is chief investigator with the Anglo Scottish UFO Research Agency (ASUFORA), revealed today that since the local Press highlighted alleged UFO sightings last year, the number of calls and emails to him continued flooding in.

He remained open minded as to whether many of these reports could be explained by astronomical or aircraft factors. It was also his team's job to sift out any potential hoaxes.

Encouraged

But he was encouraged that people seeking answers were still prepared to come forward and share what they had seen -especially when many individuals often felt embarrassed to do so.

Speaking from West Lothian, Mr. Close said, "The reports keep coming in and some go back many years.

"They include a 'small gold sphere' seen from Dundee about five miles off RAF Leuchars, and a man who said that on two or three occasions he saw several large, cigar-shaped objects hovering and then disappearing in the Ladybank area when he travelled daily between Dundee and Glenrothes between 1989 and 2002.

"We are also looking at an astonishing case from Ballingry in 1958. A lady, now 80, can recollect the event like it happened yesterday.

Aliens

"She said an orange, long, cigar-shaped object followed a jogger called John Hodge. It was witnessed by several 12 year-olds."

Seven years ago two local women made headlines around the world after claiming they encountered aliens at Drummy Wood, Freuchie.

UFO enthusiasts are now being drawn to the area in renewed numbers following a new "sighting" by a retired US army captain and his family during a visit to the area last summer.

Mr Close said this was still being investigated, but he was also intrigued by the number of other alleged unexplained sightings in the area.
 

February 8, 2003

Mohave Daily News

UFO convention speaker says we must become 'galactic citizens'

by Kay Jenney

LAUGHLIN - Shakespeare's conundrum "to be, or not to be?" is still being pondered in various ways. One of the leading researchers in the field of extraordinary experiences announced a new way of perceiving reality Thursday at the 12th Annual International UFO Congress Convention and Film Festival held at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.

Dr. John Mack began his journey delving into human consciousness as a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now through his years of research on a number of nontraditional subjects, foresees changes on the horizon for all societies.

"There will be a restructuring of reality. It's arrogant to put it in a box," Mack said.

Mack has investigated Unidentified Flying Object (UFOs) and subsequent reports of alien abductions, near death experiences, spiritual/mystical aberrations, organ transplant memory, magnetic shifts, zero energy power sources, cold fusion, spirit visitation and more. These studies, he said has led him to conclude the extraordinary experiences of individuals will lead to changes in how the world population views reality. Mack called it a "world view shift in consciousness."

Mack said there will be changes across the board in every aspect of society.

"All institutions will be affected," Mack said.

He said the mental health profession will view extraordinary experiences not as pathological conditions, but rather as a starting point for personal growth and learning. Philosophically, people will understand the universe as one teeming with life forms, some seen, some unseen Mack said.

"It's arrogant to believe human beings are the pinnacle of success," Mack said. He said people will understand the oneness of the world while appreciating the differences.

Science, Mack said, will study subjects now considered taboo. He said politics will be changed most of all. Mack said the economy will move away from a war-based economy. He suggested the military should be used to build infrastructure instead of making war.

"We need leadership that thinks beyond borders," Mack said. "Nationalism in its malignant form would become unthinkable." Mack said keeping political power meant keeping an enemy in front of the subjects at all times. If the people question that, they are accused of lack of patriotism.

"Does that sound familiar?" Mack asked.

Mack said people who have experienced alien abductions understand his views, "They get this," Mack said. He said "we must become galactic citizens and so far we have not done very well.

"There must be councils (of extraterrestrial aliens) trying to figure out what to do with us without exterminating us. They've been very tolerant," Mack said.

First-time visitor to a UFO convention, Paul Harrison of North Carolina, said he is a skeptic.

He said he only came to this conference because his son, who he said is a government agent "is into this stuff" and urged him to attend.
 

February 5, 2003

Times of London

Salut, Earthlings

by Adam Sage

If the truth really is out there, the French are taking serious steps to find it

ON A cold Monday morning 22 years ago, Jean-Jacques Velasco was sitting in his office when a gendarme rang to tell him about a strange incident. Renato Nicolai, a retired technician, had been working in his garden in Trans-en-Provence, near Nice, when he saw a dark, round object come down from the sky, settle on the ground and take off again, the gendarme said. Over the years, Velasco has heard many such stories, and disproved most of them. But this one was different âÇ" this one was credible, he believes. Something seems to have landed in Trans-en-Provence, he says, and that something has never been identified.

But who is Velasco? Another crackpot determined to find a flying saucer? A follower of Claude Vorilhon, the Frenchman who founded the Raelian sect amid claims that he was the son of an extraterrestrial being? No, he is a scientist working for the state-run National French Centre for Space Studies (CNES), where he heads a department responsible for analysing what are commonly called unidentified flying objects (UFOs) but what are officially known as unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAP).

It is a unique department, the only permanent government-financed scientific project set up by a developed country to unravel fact from fiction in the debate about UFOs.

In an area that draws the deranged and the dreamers, this is a serious research programme. "We have shown that there is a category of events that are not part of the classical physical scheme of things," says Velasco. These may be a light, or an object moving across the sky on "an abnormal trajectory", sometimes noiselessly.

"In some cases, there is a feeling that the phenomenon is adapting its behaviour to the environment. In others, people claim to have seen small material objects very close to them, which may even land. In the most extreme cases, people claim to see objects with beings next to them."

A neatly-dressed, bespectacled man, Velasco talks with the careful precision of an academic who is keen to be understood. He is not saying that he has come across visitors from another planet; he is saying merely that events occur for which science has yet to find an explanation, and which merit further inquiry.

"Two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Science said meteorites did not fall to Earth, that the phenomenon did not exist," he says. "Now we know it does."

Velasco's department was set up in 1977, the year that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released amid a global UFO fever. Across the world people thought they saw strange figures, flying saucers and bright lights. Sects such as the Raelians claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrial life. And amateur associations pledged to shed light on the burning question: are we alone? But there were few serious attempts to probe the issue. The US authorities had studied it ten years earlier and concluded that it was a waste of taxpayers' money. Most other countries, including Britain, thought likewise. Only France took the matter seriously, partly because it has the centralised state apparatus necessary to do so, and partly, no doubt, because of a vainglorious belief that if a UFO is to be found, France should be the one to find it.

The CNES duly set up the Service for Expert Appraisal of Atmospheric Re- entry Phenomena (Sepra). Based in Toulouse, the department is as pedantic as its title sounds: the staff are state-employed scientists, shaped by a prudent, rigorous and somewhat bureaucratic culture. In France such bureaucracy can often be cumbersome and painfully rigid. Yet in this domain at least, this rigidity offers a guarantee of impartiality that is rare as far as UFOs are concerned.

Last year, when the CNES was told to reduce its 1.3 billion franc(£853 million) budget, the organisation's president, Alain Bensoussan, ordered an audit into Sepra's work. A wide range of French scientists was asked whether it was worth continuing research; almost all said yes.

One reason is because, unlike most other UFO-hunters, Sepra's staff are neither seeking publicity nor peddling an obscure belief in extraterrestrial civilisation. They say they do not know whether extraterrestrial beings exist or not, and look disparaging when you ask them to voice their hunches on the question.

They do not have hunches, only statistics. Yet the statistics that Velasco has made public are eloquent. Since, 1977, Sepra has received some 6,000 reports of alleged UFO sightings. Of these, 110 are from civil or military aircraft crew, and the rest from ordinary French people who have almost invariably contacted their local gendarmerie. In 21.3 per cent of cases there is a clear, indisputable and banal explanation: a firework display, a novel lighting system involving a luminous balloon, a cloud above the Pyrenees that is shaped like a flying saucer. In 24.9 per cent there is a probable explanation, and in 41.3 per cent the information is too vague to be of use. But in 12.5 per cent of cases "about 750 sightings since 1977" the evidence is precise, detailed and inexplicable, and is thus categorised as an unidentified phenomenon.

Before reaching such a conclusion, Velasco conducts an extensive investigation using a method dubbed exemplary by Peter Sturrock, a British academic who founded the Society for Scientific Exploration. It involves inquiring into the psychological and social background of the person claiming to have seen a UFO, checking the initial witness statement against all other available evidence and working with different branches of the French administration. For instance, Sepra has a formal procedure to be followed by every gendarmerie that deals with an alleged sighting. Officers seal off the area, take ground samples and ask pre-established questions to weed out the mad and the drunk.

But most alleged UFOs are spotted by the sober and sensible, says Velasco. "In all our statistics on the personalities of the people who see these phenomena only one in 1,000 is not credible because of alcohol. People go to gendarmerie spontaneously; in 99 per cent of cases it is because they genuinely want to know what they have seen."

Yet a witness's good faith is not enough, and the story must be corroborated. "What interests the scientist is not so much the tale that is told, but to go further and check the tale against objective data, to measure these phenomena," says Velasco. So he has established links with laboratories that analyse samples found at the scene, and an agreement with the civil and military aviation authorities to provide radar details of any unidentified flights.

Consider, for instance, a case reported in 1994, when the crew of an Air France flight from Nice to London saw a dark, 300m (1,000ft)long object over the Paris region. The object disappeared before the aircraft had got near it, and the flight continued without difficulty. A few days later Velasco travelled from his office in Toulouse to the military aviation control centre outside Paris, where he was given a read-out of the radar information from the day in question. It revealed that an unknown object had indeed flown over the French capital.

Consider, too, the Trans-en-Provence case. Velasco went through the usual checks with the gendarme who had rung him. Was the witness, Nicolai, reeking of alcohol or babbling incoherently? The answer was no. Was there any evidence to back up his story? The apparent answer was yes, since there were marks in the grass where the object had supposedly landed.

Velasco drove to Trans-en-Provence and took ground samples. These showed that the area had been heated to between 300C and 600C, that it had been compressed by something weighing up to a tonne and that the plants there had been affected by a strong electromagnetic field. Velasco concluded that Nicolai had indeed witnessed a strange happening.

So should we conclude that little green men were taking a look at Provence from their spaceship? Velasco dismisses such ideas. "We cannot say whether there is a link between the question of extraterrestrial life and that of non-identified aerospace phenomena," he says adding: "But we can show that UFOs exist. The problem is interpreting them, and I hope that scientists, and other people, look at this question more seriously."

A guide to alien French:

Un OVNI (objet volant non identifié): a UFO (unidentified flying object).
Une soucoupe volante: a flying saucer.
Les extraterrestres sont parmi nous: the aliens are among us.
Rencontres Rapproches du Troisieme Type: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
C'etait un petit bonhomme vert: it was a little green man.
C'est quoi, cette etrange lumiere dans le ciel?: what's that strange light in the sky?
Les extraterrestres essaient de communiquer avec nous: the aliens are trying to communicate with us.
Amenez-moi à votre chef: take me to your leader.
 

January 30, 2003
 

East Anglian Daily Times (Essex & Suffolk UK)

Documentary On Suffolk UFO Sightings

Documentary makers hope to shed new light on the alleged sighting of a UFO near a Suffolk air base nearly 20 years ago.

The programme-makers are reinvestigating the mysterious goings-on at Rendlesham forest around December 27 and 28, 1980, for a BBC documentary which will take a fresh look at "Britain's Closest Encounter".

It aims to explore various explanations for what occurred, and makers have appealed for local witnesses as they try to piece together what happened.

The programme is being made by Mentorn, the company responsible for Question Time and Queen and Country, and is timed to coincide with BBC2's screening of the Spielberg sci-fi series Taken on Saturday night. It is expected to be screened on BBC3 on March 15, and BBC2 the following week, and followed by an on-line discussion.

It will feature witnesses to the events, UFO experts and sceptics, conspiracy theorists and scientists, and newly analysed audiotapes recorded during the sightings.

Steve Carsey, executive producer of the programme, who is also executive producer of BBC2's Robot Wars, said he felt the time was right to revisit the much-debated sightings.

"In recent months, a lot of official papers and memos and MoD documents have been released," he said. "After 20 years of denial, the fact that these papers have been released justifies our desire to revisit the story and reinvestigate the story to see if anything new has come to light in the last 20 years."

The last programme on the subject was made about ten years ago, he said.

"We are getting some new things already, interestingly enough," he said. "We have got some new revelations and some new testimony."

The programme would look at various explanations for what occurred and how the story had developed over the years, he said.

"We are as interested in the story itself and as interested in the birth of a story and how it develops and how it grows," he said. "We are coming at this in a completely journalistic sense."

Mr Carsey, who said he was fascinated by the subject of UFOs, said they were not taking a sensational approach.

"What we can definitively say with the release of these documents is something happened," he said. "We are going to leave the viewers to come to their own conclusions."

They hoped local people who had not come forward previously would feel able to contribute. Mr. Carsey said that as they visited the forest this week it was interesting how much people were aware of the story of the sightings.

"Everyone had an opinion," he said.

The team behind Britain's Closest Encounter is looking for local witnesses in the Rendlesham area, or family members and friends of witnesses, to get the widest possible selection of views on what might have happened.

It is also asking local people to come forward with photographs and video footage. If you are interested in taking part, or claim to have evidence, you can contact Riva Marker on 0207 258 6873.
 

January 11, 2003

London Daily Mail

After 50 years of ridicule, denial and cover-up, is the real truth about alien abductions about to be revealed?

by Geoffrey Wansell

On a hot, sticky July afternoon in 1987 Jason Andrews is celebrating his fourth birthday at his family's cottage near Slade Green in Kent when the heavens open.

As the thunder crashes all around, there is a single flash of lightning. Suddenly, a stream of numbers starts pouring out of Jason's mouth: fantastic numbers, complex mathematical equations, even algebra - all from a boy who struggles to count to ten.

Seconds later the windows and doors begin to shake violently and the four-year old announces to his mother, father and elder brother: "They're waiting for me. I have to go.'

Jason's father, Paul, grabs his son and stops him from walking out into the downpour, but the boy struggles violently, and as he does so the house shakes to its very foundations until, finally, he seems to wake from a trance and the shaking stops.

It is the first sign that Jason Andrews is no ordinary little boy and, in the eight years that follow, that is dramatically confirmed.

It wasn't until 1995, when he was almost 12, that Jason told his astonished parents exactly what had been happening to him -aliens had been abducting him from his bed at night.

"It's always the light that comes first", he confessed to his mother, Ann. "Then I see the tall one rise up at the foot of the bed.

Suddenly there's lots of little ones everywhere. They're fuzzy and indistinct, and they move very fast. I can't move or speak, but I'm awake and I can see and hear and feel. I want to scream and run, but the sound doesn't come out and my body doesn't move.

I hate them. I hate them", the boy sobbed. "I have to go with them.

They take me to an operating theatre, like at the hospital. It's all white and shiny Some times it's a circular room with It's always cold.

"They're there. The big one touches me but I don't feel it, like as if I've had an an aesthetic."  Then he added poignantly: "But you don't believe me, you just think I'm making it all up." In fact, Ann did believe him, and went on to explore the phenomena affecting her son's life in a hook, Abducted. This decent, uncomplicated wife and mother came to the conclusion that we may not be alone.

Now, the rest of the world may be about to agree with her After five decades of ridicule, official denials and alleged cover-ups, the possibility that aliens. may have visited Earth is beginning to be taken seriously - and not just by sci-fi fanatics and UFO freaks.

Scientific researchers are increasingly convinced that thin, grey-skinned beings about 4ft tall, with large almond-shaped eyes set in an oval, hairless, head, may not only have landed on earth, but have also abducted human beings for bizarre experiments; while all the time there has been an official conspiracy to keep their visits secret.

Tonight American filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the man who brought the world Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET, will bring those convictions - and aliens - to life in his new mini-series, Taken, on BBC2.

A cunning mixture of. fact, conjecture and fiction, based on the latest research, it tells the story of how aliens affected the lives of three American families over the past half century.

A massive hit in the U.S., where it was broadcast on consecutive nights last month, Spielberg's series is the most expensive TV science faction drama ever made - with a budget of more than £25 million - and it's certain to re-ignite public debate on this forever-contentious subject.

But surely all this talk of aliens is far-fetched? As a natural sceptic, I've always believed so, but over the past weeks and months of reviewing the evidence I've come to the conclusion that it does, in fact, warrant the closest investigation.

There certainly seems to have been an official conspiracy to keep the facts secret.

In the past few months, for example, firm evidence about unexplained events connected with Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and extraterrestrial phenomena has begun to appear for the first time as governments around the world have released previously secret documents.

And, for the first time, politicians have started to admit that evidence on the possibility of extraterrestrial life has been concealed.

In October last year, for example, former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who worked for President Clinton, called on the U.S. government to de-classify "records that are more than 25 years old" and "to provide scientists with data that will assist them in determining the real nature of this phenomenon."

Only four years ago, former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher hinted to British UFO researcher Georgina Bruni that there was considerable secret information on the subject, adding mysteriously: "You can't tell the people."

Bruni was so struck by the remark that she used it as the title for her 2001 book on alien sightings in Suffolk in 1980. Shortly afterwards, former Tory Secretary of State also confided to her on the subject: "I know a lot, but I tell a little."

After a campaign by Bruni and other researchers, the Government last month released scores of secret files on UFO sightings in this country, all of which suggest that aliens can no longer be dismissed merely as the product of fevered imaginations.

Certainly the majority of the public now seem to believe that aliens do exist. As the editor of the British UFO magazine, Graham Birdsall, points out: "Sixty years ago, 90 per cent of the population thought the idea was "absolute rubbish.

Now every single opinion poll on the subject shows that millions of people firmly believe in UFOs."

Last June, for example, when it was announced that Bonnybridge in Scotland boasted more UFO sightings than any other place in the world, a Sky News poll showed 65 per cent of its viewers believed in UFOs.

Five years earlier - in one of the biggest telephone polls ever conducted on TV - 100,000 viewers phoned ITV to answer the question "Have aliens already visited Earth?" and 92 per cent voted "Yes."

"There's strong evidence to suggest that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence", insists Birdsall.

"And after my own research I am prepared to admit that it is no longer possible to dismiss people such as Birdsall as 'cranks'."

Spielberg, whose film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind dramatically raised the issue of alien encounters for a global audience, is certainly convinced they've happened.

Fascinated by the possibility from childhood, he's devoted part of his life to discovering the truth and has become an authority on the subject as a result.

But there is a striking difference between Spielberg's approach in his TV series Taken and the one he took two decades ago in ET.

This time the aliens he is depicting are not trying to phone home they're here to subvert, and ultimately control, the human race.

And the new TV series, his first since the award-winning Band Of Brothers, is not only about the arrival of aliens, it's also about 'alien abductions'.

"I thought I couldn't do justice to this genre in a two-hour movie", Spielberg explains.

"We would need a lot more time to do justice to the history of alien abductions, starting back in 1947, right through to today."

Watching the first episodes, it's clear that Spielberg has done everything in his power to create a fictional series' on the edge of fact. This is no sci-fi comic book, no Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, but a compelling and all-too-plausible - drama.

British UFO expert Mike Soper, of Contact International, is as convinced as Spielberg that alien abductions have happened.

"The telling fact is that there are features common to all the people's stories", he maintains. "They all remember being taken to a craft, and often talk about being 'examined'..... "Many talk about something being 'implanted' in their bodies, and when they return they often have triangular marks on their bodies and aren't wearing exactly the same clothes they were before the abduction."

Ministry of Defence civil servant Nick Pope, 37, agrees.

"Abductions most definitely do occur", he says. "And although the phrase 'alien abductions' is a gift to those people who want to deride it, there are genuine, ordinary people who believe they have been in extraordinary situations."

Pope isn't a man with an anorak and a slightly weird look in his eyes. He is a down-to-earth civil servant who had no interest in aliens at all until 1991, when the MOD asked him to investigate reports of UFOs, alien abductions and other strange phenomena.

"The 100 or so people I interviewed about being abducted by aliens weren't publicity seekers merely after their fifteen minutes of fame", he explains.

"I came to the conclusion that some of these people had to be telling the truth. And if just one of the abductees' reports is true, the implications for the human race would be profound and disturbing."

One person who helped to convince Pope was 37 year old British -born make-up artist Bridget Grant, whom he met seven years ago.

She addressed an audience of 750 people at the British UFO conference in Leeds in 2001, where she talked about her abduction. She explained that in February 1993, when she was living in Los Angeles; she was driving with a friend in the Brentwood area at 5.50pm one bright, sunny day when she drew up at a set of traffic lights.

"I suddenly saw this silver tip out of the corner of my eye", she explained. "Then, I saw that it was a solid silver craft, with a red-orange colour underneath it, about 35 - 45 ft in diameter. It came right above the car and I leaned towards the steering wheel and looked up."

The craft "flew really, really low" over her head, she said, and away to the west, Her friend Jane, sitting in the passenger seat, saw it, too.

Grant was so disturbed by the experience that in September 1998 she went to see the American UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, of the Intruders Foundation in New York, to undergo four sessions of 'regressive hypnosis'.....

She wanted his help to remember the exact details of what happened on that afternoon in 1993 because she thought she had forgotten something. It appeared that she had. For when this pale young 'woman, with shoulder length dark hair; addressed the Leeds audience she told them she'd not just seen the spacecraft but had been abducted by it, even though she thought she was in her car the entire time.

"There is often a time shift element in the stories of abduction, where the individual doesn't realise that time. has passed", explains Nick Pope.

"My hands were gripping the steering wheel", Grant explained to the conference. "But then I felt a pressure, like my body was being sucked. It felt like all the atoms of my body were going through the steering wheel.

Then I saw this being. I was fascinated by its appearance - it was transparent, had white hair and was carrying a baby."

Hard though it may be for some to believe, and Grant is reluctant to discuss the events further, there is no doubt that the artists' impression of the being which she said she saw looks uncannily like many of the other descriptions of aliens that have surfaced in recent years.

However, as sceptics point out there have been so many depictions of 'space creatures' with dome heads and large oval eyes that it is hardly surprising that this has become something of a stereotype.

When Spielberg was researching the aliens for Close Encounters, he held lengthy consultations with the veteran American astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek - a once-fierce critic of UFOs and alien phenomena who changed his mind completely after he became a consultant on the subject for the United States Air Force.

Hynek assembled the authoritative American dossier on alien encounters, Project Blue Book, and advised Spielberg what aliens looked like.

But the idea that little grey - rather than green - men with elongated fingers, legs and neck, sounds incredibly far-fetched - until you talk to Georgina Bruni. "When I interviewed Lady Thatcher a few years ago,' Bruni explains, "I was describing to her the fact that US military personnel here in Britain had reportedly had contact with, aliens, and an alien spacecraft, in Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in December 1980. I expected her to tell me that I'd been watching too many episodes of the X Files, But she didn't look shocked at all. She just said, twice: 'You can't tell the people.'"

With Bruni's encouragement, in the wake of this conversation Lord Hill-Norton, a former Chief of the Defence Staff tabled 18 Parliamentary questions in the House of Lords - as a result of which the Government released more than 200 previously secret files concerning UFOs and aliens.

One of the files revealed that then Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill wanted the matter investigated in 1952.

He sent a memo to his scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, asking: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"

After several months, Tizard reported that all the sightings were "explicable by natural events", although shortly afterwards the Government explicitly banned RAF personnel from discussing sightings with anyone not from the military.

The U.S. Government had adopted a similar policy of official secrecy five years earlier, in the wake of a spate of incidents near the US Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1949 - incidents that Spielberg uses as his starting point for his TV series.

And so the modern history of UFOs, aliens and official coverups was born.

British UFO researcher Jenny Randles, who has spent more than 20 years investigating UFO and alien phenomena, maintains that in more recent times alien kidnapping has become much more common, "An ever growing tide of people suspect that they may be alien abductees", she says.

So is it fact or fiction? I'm not certain, but the evidence of witnesses such as Jason Andrews and Bridget Grant is hard to ignore. And it's clear that, as the 2lst century begins, opinions are changing.

The Government announced recently that it was "open-minded' about the "existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms' a markedly different official position from the one taken half a century ago.

Perhaps the politicians are beginning to accept that we are not alone.

Steven Spielberg certainly does.
 

December 30, 2002

Globe & Mail (Canada)

E.T., call Canada: one in five thinks there is life out there

by Alanna Mitchell

The stolid, long-suffering Canadian of national myth may exist, but a new poll suggests that hidden under that pedestrian exterior lurks a heart longing for hope, faith and proof of extraterrestrial life.

A national poll published yesterday by Ipsos-Reid found that 22 per cent of Canadians trust that life on another planet will be discovered in their lifetime.

Among those 18 to 34 - the crowd that grew up with Star Trek and The X-Files - that figure rose to 33 per cent. For people 55 and older, it was just 13 per cent.

Regionally, those living in Alberta, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces were most likely to support the scenario of life on another planet. Levels of household income, usually a proxy for levels of education, did not affect the degree of trust in life far, far away.

"Is this hope chasing reality? It's quite possible," said John Wright, senior vice-president of Ipsos-Reid, adding that this was the first time his firm asked this question.

Last year, though, the polling outfit asked Canadians whether they believe that extraterrestrials visit Earth on a regular basis. The answer? Fully 20 per cent said yes. (by comparison, just 3 per cent said they believe Elvis is still alive.)

The poll published yesterday was taken between Sept. 25 and Nov. 7, 2002, long before last week's headlines about Quebec's Raelian group, their belief that humanity came from another planet and their assertion that they have produced the first human-born clone.

The survey results suggest that 1,007 Canadians polled are conscious of the huge leaps made in science and technology, and that many have formed otherworldly expectations of them.

"It's become less science fiction and more of a reality," Mr. Wright said.

But that's not all Canadians told the pollsters they have faith in. A majority - 51 per cent - said they trust that angels exist. That faith was highest in women at 60 per cent, compared with 40 per cent of men. It also showed up stronger in people 55 and older (54 per cent) than in those younger than 35 (47 per cent).

But the biggest angelic surprise was that 71 per cent of those polled in Saskatchewan and Manitoba said they trust that angels exist. The province with the least trust was Alberta where the figure reached only 46 per cent.

Canadians' level of household income appeared to predict their degree of trust in the immortal helpers of God. The lower their income, the more likely they were to trust that angels exist.

A majority also trust that God exists - 61 per cent. But older Canadians were much more likely (71 per cent) to trust in the existence of God than younger ones (52 per cent of those 18 to 34).

In all, the Ipsos-Reid poll captured a serene population. More than half said they had trust that the economy would grow and that they would earn more in 2003.

Roughly three-quarters said they trusted that they would not lose their jobs in the coming year, that they would spend more time with their children, that the coming year would be a good one and even that they would get together with their families for the year-end holidays next Christmas.

The poll's findings are considered accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times in 20.
 

December 30, 2002

Macleans Magazine (Canada)

UFOs: Looking For Little Green Men In Shag Harbour

Becky Harris

Douglas Shand points to the grey sky above the Irish Moss Plant in Shag Harbour, N.S. "That's where they saw it," he says. For the small fishing community, located 250 km southwest of Halifax, the only government-documented UFO sighting in the world is what put the town on the map. On the evening of Oct. 4, 1967, claim some residents, a bowl-shaped object, about 20 m long, fell from the sky. In the investigation reports, both the RCMP and Royal Canadian Air Force call the dark object a "UFO".

Years later, in spring 2001, the town's post office unveiled a unique postmark: a blue-ink image of a UFO hovering over a lighthouse and a boat on the water. Now, says Shand, a 43-year-old automotive refinisher, people are making the trek from as far away as Europe to hunt little green men. Says Shand: "People plan their vacations around coming here." Postmaster Cindy Nickerson flips through the hundreds of letters people from around the world have sent over the last year and a half. They all want their letters, postcards, books and even in some cases, teddy bears, stamped with the alien marking. For some, however, even that's not enough. "Every time we put up a road sign, it disappears," she says. "We've lost five or six already."

There hasn't been another sighting in Shag Harbour. But one witness to the '67 event isn't surprised. David Kendrick, 53, thinks the orange lights he saw hovering in the sky have something to do with the U.S. or Canadian air force. But tourists, don't despair. "If they don't see some aliens," says Kendrick, "they'll see some beautiful countryside."
 

December 13, 2002

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Open UFO Files To Rest Of Us Earthlings

by Leslie Kean
Pacifica Radio

As Steven Spielberg's TV series "Taken" raises public interest in government secrecy about unidentified flying objects, the Washington Post reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft has tightened the lid on the Freedom of Information Act. Ashcroft gave federal officers the green light to bend or perhaps break the information act if they want to withhold records, and he'll even defend them in court.

Two-thirds of the American people believe their government is withholding information about UFOs, and 60 percent of adults want the information declassified if it is not a national security risk, according to a September Roper Poll commissioned by the Sci Fi Channel.

So far, declassified records and scientific investigation clearly show that some UFOs are not science fiction. Unexplained objects have been well documented by trained observers such as pilots and military personnel. Some have landed and left ground traces in England, France and the United States.

"People have been digging through the files and investigating for years now. The files are quite convincing. The only thing that's lacking is the official stamp," says Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

As a result, the Sci Fi Channel is publicly calling for the declassification of government documents on UFO activity.

In October, network President Bonnie Hammer joined President Clinton's former chief of staff, John Podesta, to support a new information act initiative requested by me and the Washington law firm of Lobel, Novins and Lamont.

"I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark, on the question of government investigations of UFOs," Podesta said at a Washington news conference. "We ought to do it because... the American people quite frankly can handle the truth, and we ought to do it because it's the law."

The request seeks documentation on the crash of an object of unknown origin in Kecksburg, Pa., in 1965. The U.S. government denies anything fell from the sky, despite the signed affidavits of firefighters, radio journalists, dozens of witnesses at the scene and newspaper reports to the contrary.

In 1969, the U.S. Air Force stated that "no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security" to justify closure of its investigation. The government still takes this position, despite routinely refusing to comply with information act requests about UFO cases on the basis of national security. In fact, some UFO incidents have obvious national security implications, although this would not appear to justify the withholding of information about them.

According to North American Aerospace Defense Command logs, U.S. fighter jets attempted to pursue UFOs in 1975. Defense Department reports state that UFOs were also pursued after hovering over three supersensitive nuclear missile launch sites that same year.

And as recently as last July, two F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled in the sky over Washington after radar detected an unknown aircraft. Military officials said they do not know what the jets were chasing, because whatever it was disappeared.

This month, the British Ministry of Defense released files on a famous multiple-witness case at Bentwaters Air Base in 1980. A memo by U.S. Deputy Base Commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt and a tape recording at the scene detail the landing of a glowing triangular craft that left three circular depressions and radiation 10 times higher than normal in a nearby forest.

Echoing the U.S. line, the British government also dismisses the phenomenon by claiming that the event was "of no defense significance." However, Britain's former Chief of the Defense Staff, Adm. Lord Hill-Norton, says that whether this represents the hallucination of men with the responsibility for guarding nuclear weapons or "the entry of a vehicle from outer space," it "cannot fail to be of defense interest."

There is no longer an acceptable justification for the withholding of reports on UFO incidents decades old, whether they are of defense interest or not. Nor is it acceptable for the attorney general unilaterally to refuse to enforce information act. The American people should not have to rely on Spielbergian science fiction for answers.

Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter and producer for Pacifica radio, is research director of the Coalition for Freedom of Information.
 

December 11, 2002

Greenville Daily Reflector

Unidentified object spotted over Grifton

by Jana Clancey

Creatures from outer space may have been checking on the affairs of Pitt County residents Friday night.

Several people from Farmville to the southern tip of Pitt County reported an odd light racing across the night sky.

J.K. Butler, a former Grifton volunteer firefighter, was sitting in the old Red and White parking lot about 11 p.m. Friday. He was there with three fire department friends when the sky around them lighted up, coloring everything from the ground to the trees to themselves a strange shade of green and blue.

The light passed over them, he said. And when they looked up, it was so blinding they couldn't identify the object.

"We all just looked at each other like, 'What in the world was that?'" Butler said. "I've seen meteors and space junk and satellites. I ain't never seen anything that color.

"It had some good size to it, too, and it was up in the air pretty good," he said.

His first thought: the light had come from a UFO. His second: another country was firing missiles in the direction of Pitt County.

"Maybe it was government-related. If it was, we'll never know," he said.

Over the fire-rescue scanners mounted in the volunteers' trucks, calls came in from Ayden and the Pitt County Sheriff's Office. Butler heard patrol cars being dispatched to check for something that had fallen from the sky in the area of Jolly and Abbott Farm roads.

Sgt. Marty Burroughs sent three of his deputies to survey for damage, or possibly, a spacecraft between the Ayden Police Department and the two rural roads. They didn't find a thing, not even a small piece of space tin.

"The main thing we checked were houses to make sure nobody had been hit by anything," he said.

Deputies found the houses to be safe and left the area.

Burroughs had a dispatcher contact Lenoir and Greene county sheriff's departments to see if a craft had crashed beyond the county line. But nothing was reported.

A deputy in Ayden and several Greenville officers reported seeing the peculiar light near Pitt Community College at Fire Tower Road and N.C. 11

"They just said it was moving and it appeared to be descending," he said.

Asked if he thought the light was a UFO, Burroughs said, "It could have been. I don't know. I can't explain it.

Sheriff Mac Manning jokingly chalked the sighting up to the work of a shiny red sled and nine flying reindeer.

"I thought it was maybe Santa Claus making an early run, but we ruled that out pretty quick," Manning said.

Apparently, he said, the light was bright enough and big enough to attract quite a bit of attention.

Manning said the sighting of whatever-it-was isn't a big deal. Deputies patrolling remote areas of the county report seeing things in the sky all of the time, he said.

Whatever it was, it scared J.K. Butler - and his buddies. For two hours they watched the night sky, looking for something, anything that could help complete the puzzle to what they had seen; whether that be little green men or a plane with similar lights.

He was asked if he'd recently been watching the Sci-Fi Channel's series on UFOs called 'Taken'. He said he'd never heard of it, and after being informed of the show's angle on alien abductions, he said there's no way he's watching it now.
 

December 6, 2002

Evening Telegraph (Dundee, Scotland)

Fife UFO Witnesses Respond To Appeal

UFO investigators have had an "absolutely astonishing response" to an appeal for witnesses to a string of alleged close encounters in north-east Fife, writes Michael Alexander.

Lee Close, chief investigator with the Anglo Scottish UFO Research Agency (ASUFORA), revealed today that since last Thursday the group had received 11 phone calls and four e-mails concerning unexplained sightings over the past few years.

As a result of the newspaper publicity he said ASUFORA had also now been asked to take part in a documentary about UFOs and alien abductions in Scotland.

Meanwhile, a number of independent UFO investigators across Scotland have also come forward wanting to collaborate their efforts and join the team.

Mr Close said, "There has been an astonishing response since last week. We have had at least 10 sightings reported to us from the Fife area.

"These include a sighting in Dundee in 1994, one over RAF Leuchars, Burntisland on November 28, and Ballingry on the June
1.

"There have also been sightings in Kirkcaldy, Glenrothes and several other locations including Freuchie."

ASUFORA made its appeal for witnesses last week following a new report of a UFO sighting in the Freuchie area.

Six years ago two local women made headlines around the world after claiming they encountered aliens at Drummy Wood, Freuchie.

Now UFO enthusiasts are being drawn to the area in renewed numbers following a new "sighting" by a retired US army captain and his family during a visit to the area last summer.

Mr Close said it was now his team's job to assess whether the latest reports could be explained by astronomical or aircraft factors, or whether there might be something more supernatural at work.

Sighting-report forms had now been sent out to all the individuals and he was awaiting replies.

Mr Close said he was still keen to hear any other reports, including photographic and video evidence.

And he again offered assurances that anyone who did so would be treated with the strictest confidentiality.

He said ASUFORA was also hoping to expand as a professional group and was looking for equipment and financial support.

He added, "We are currently looking for things like electromagentic field detectors, access to Geiger counters, digital cameras, night vision field glasses and recording equipment."

Anyone with information or who can help can phone the ASUFORA hotline on 07796 095480.

Further information can be found at www.geocities.com/asufora or by e-mailing Lee Close on asufora@hotmail.com
 

December 5, 2002

Phoenix New Times

To Spite the Face: Researchers accuse ASU's THEMIS of fraud and cover-up on latest image of 'Face on Mars'

BY Quetta Carpenter

Under the surface of Mars lies an ancient, nuclear-powered city left by Martian citizens. At least, that's what a group of space researchers think. And they're trying to prove it by invoking a little-known remnant of President Clinton's last days called the "Data Quality Act" that went into force in October of this year. The filing, dated October 31, 2002, gives NASA 40 days to address the complaint that there is faulty data on Arizona State University's THEMIS Web site.

THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) is the crown jewel of ASU's science department that takes and analyzes images from an infrared camera on NASA's Odyssey satellite and releases them to the public.  THEMIS also conducts expansive educational programs for students, scientists and interested observers. But its reputation is now being trashed in almost every Mars or space-related Web site on the Internet with headlines like, "Is NASA Capable of Lying?" and "Odyssey Slaps the Face on Mars."

The heated controversy that has incited the faithful conspiracy congregation - led by a charismatic "preacher" named Richard Hoagland - concerns one image that was released in July of this year, and the software manager at THEMIS, Noel Gorelick.

The image in question is the first high-resolution infrared image of a region called Cydonia - which houses the so-called "Face on Mars." This has been the most hotly contested region of Mars since a 1976 Viking image showed what clearly appeared to be a human face on the planet's surface. But subsequent images from NASA have cast a web of suspicion on the region, the "face," and the other structures surrounding it, inciting almost epic conspiracy theories all over the world.

The reason the infrared, or "IR," images are so important is that they show temperatures, allowing for a more definitive analysis of the origin of structures on Cydonia.

Hoagland claims to have proof that ASU's Gorelick swapped the July 24 Cydonia image for a manipulated one in order to keep people off the scent - or get them on it. And Hoagland's arguments are not falling on deaf ears - starting a five-month feeding frenzy on the Web and on a popular conspiracy radio talk show hosted by Art Bell. The image in question has been viewed 120,000 times from a link on MSNBC mentioning Hoagland's beef with THEMIS.

Given his involvement with unorthodox scientific research, Hoagland is surprisingly difficult to throw into the crackpot category. His lengthy dissertations are reminiscent of the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files, but his résumé doesn't read like a typical conspiracy theorist. He was the recipient of the Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science in Stockholm, Sweden, a colleague of Carl Sagan, and a former science adviser to CBS News and Walter Cronkite.

His pet project, The Enterprise Mission - where he goes by "The Captain" - monitors all of the data from NASA and does research in excruciating minutia. Its early '90s school education program, The Enterprise Classroom, received a Points of Light Award from Barbara Bush and was featured on NASA's Spacelink --even getting a visit from the space shuttle Atlantis crew. But Hoagland and The Enterprise Mission's research now focuses almost exclusively on SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

According to Hoagland, an image of the Cydonia region was released on July 24 via Web download to Keith Laney, a NASA Ames Research Center consultant who works with The Enterprise Mission. Laney claims that he did not alter the image, but when he compared it to the image on the THEMIS Web site, he realized the two were different.

"Science, if you do it right, does not lie," says Hoagland. "But here, the evidence tells a different story than [the people at THEMIS] do."

Enter vast conspiracy theory.

Hoagland and his horde say that there is little surprise when NASA releases misleading or purely false images. Several images have been released of the Cydonia plane since the original Viking expedition - some making the "face" appear completely flat as though nothing is there, and others that present alternate views that look less human. Hoagland thinks these images have been released to kill public interest in the issue.

And Hoagland doesn't think it's just Mars. He also has theories of cover-up conspiracies on Europa (a moon of Jupiter), the dark side of Earth's moon, Mars moon Phobos, and a host of other topics.

As far as Hoagland is concerned, NASA is not trustworthy on anything because of a study produced by the Washington, D.C., think tank The Brookings Institute in 1963, before the Viking expedition. This report, known as The Brookings Report, asserts that the government should hide evidence of life on other planets - if it finds any - to avoid religious and overall societal breakdown. Assuming that this report was made a part of internal NASA policy, Hoagland now dedicates himself to searching for any and all possible manipulations of NASA images and information. "The people of this country pay good money for this research, and they should get what they pay for," says Hoagland. "The pattern of deception would only exist if there was something there."

It is Laney and Hoagland's assertion that ASU's Gorelick "bamf'ed" or redirected Laney to the "real" Cydonia image in order to send up a red flag that THEMIS' information was being purposefully flawed. Hoagland admits it sounds bizarre, but asks, "If we're crazy - or have consciously perpetrated a fraud here - why bother? Who's ultimately going to listen to seriously ill people for long?"

And many people are still listening to Hoagland.

THEMIS officials contradict Hoagland's allegations. "There is no scientific validity to anything Hoagland says about this," claims Dr. Philip Christensen, the principal investigator at THEMIS. "Their image is completely fabricated. It takes about six steps on Photoshop to make our image look like theirs."

Hoagland wants THEMIS to release the image exactly as it comes to them, with no processing. "If they have nothing to hide, why won't they show us the raw data?" Hoagland demands.

Christensen has a simple answer. "The reason we don't release the so-called raw-data' is that you can't read raw data. We give people as close to unaltered as humanly possible, short of saying, Here's a line of ones and zeroes.'"

But Hoagland believes ASU's Gorelick has a motive for the alleged image-swap. "Read between the lines. It's all code," he claims. Hoagland's basis for this belief is anomalous image dates, and a collection of numbers he feels to be significant indicators of a complex code. "The image is 333 pixels across and 1,947 pixels long. Those numbers have meaning - they are very important.

"Forget what's in the image; look at the other things. It's a meta-message."

Realizing how cloak and dagger he sounds, Hoagland remarks, "When you're dealing with Spooksville, you have to be a little James Bond." Hoagland maintains that Gorelick logged more than 1,000 hours on The Enterprise Mission Web site during the controversy over the image. "Why would he do that?" Hoagland wants to know. "It's bizarre unless he is playing a very sophisticated game."

Gorelick himself (who goes by the handle "bamf" on Web chat rooms) says that the accusations are "totally false." Gorelick admits to frequenting both Hoagland's site and other Mars-related sites for personal interest reasons, but is less than happy with being characterized as a fraud and a liar. "I think it shows paranoid delusion," remarks Gorelick when asked whether he was sending secret messages to Hoagland and Laney. "Laney claims I was goading him into [analyzing the image]. But I wasn't even talking to him."

As far as Laney's image, Gorelick says, "My opinion is that Laney invented that image through intentional or unintentional manipulation," and believes Hoagland's crew is using him as a scapegoat in order to legitimize their cause. "Hoagland is getting good results with this sensationalism. He gets money, resources, and he's on the radio all the time."

Christensen echoes Gorelick's sentiment, saying, "Anything we do, that group is going to complain about it. You can't win."

But these protestations are not taken at face value by Hoagland's camp. "Why put this stuff out - unless it's a cry for help? They want to get caught," says Hoagland.

Hoagland says ASU's Gorelick, and others like him, are unhappy with the fact that they cannot release complete data to the public - and this "bamf'ed" image is his way of fighting back. "It only takes one white crow to prove that not all crows are black," Hoagland explains. "That's what I think [Gorelick] is trying to give us - one white crow."

Gorelick laughs in response, "I actually like this part. He gives me more credit than I am probably worthy of - that I could engineer such a thing."

In any case, Gorelick says that THEMIS is not bound by the federal Data Quality Act. "It's not a NASA Web site, it's an ASU Web site. And it's not a NASA image, it's an ASU image.

"Even if it were relevant, we would respond that Laney's data was incorrect and that the Web site has the correct image - or more likely claim it's frivolous."

An answer on the filing is due on December 11. Hoagland is hopeful, saying, "If [Gorelick] sent Laney to a bamf to get another image, he has to admit what he did."

Either way, the response is unlikely to satisfy Hoagland. "If you begin to believe that the government can lie, why would they keep their grubby hands off of this?" Hoagland asks.

But THEMIS and her crew are not alarmed. Says Christensen, "[Hoagland] can go on and on for a long time - but every now and again there's some interesting conjecture. The scientific community needs someone to keep them thinking on their toes."
 

December 4, 2002

Australian

UFOs In 15th Century Paintings

by Richard Owen

ITALY'S Old Masters were recording flying saucers and UFOs in their paintings as far back as the 15th century, according to a scientist in Rome.

Roberto Volterri argues that artists dating back to 1406 included evidence of "strange objects in the sky" for later generations to see. He says that far from being the product of the paranoid Cold War years, UFOs were documented but overlooked because they were often extraneous to the subject of the painting and could only be explained as "testimonials of something seen or heard about".

Volterri, 56, an archaeologist by training, specialises in the measurement and analysis of metallic objects. He said he had spent his working life in a thoroughly down-to-earth environment of cold and rational calculation and sophisticated and precise instruments, but he was convinced science did not have all the answers.

"I have been fascinated by the inexplicable since I was a boy," he said. "Scientists tend to dismiss what cannot be rationally explained as belonging to the realm of fantasy. But it is the job of science to examine what seems mysterious, not to dismiss it out of hand."

He has published a book, As the Ancient Chronicles Relate, in which he claims to show that past generations have also wondered whether there is life beyond that on earth.

Perhaps the most striking example is The Madonna and St John, attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) and kept at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. In it a man and a dog are clearly gazing up at a UFO-type object behind the Virgin Mary's shoulder. No less baffling is a painting by Masolino da Panicale (1383-1447), The Miracle of the Snow, painted in 1429 and kept at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. "The painting shows a real event in Rome in the second half of the fourth century AD," Volterri said. "But what are these strange, dark, elongated clouds in the shape of UFOs?"

Volterri said he had compared these with photographs taken in 1955 in Namur, Belgium, which purport to show cigar-shaped UFOs. by contrast, Glorification of the Eucharist, by Bonaventura Salimbeni (1567-

1613), in the church of San Lorenzo in San Pietro, at Montalcino near Siena, shows "what looks very like a satellite such as the Russian Sputnik".

Volterri said that in La Tebaide, by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), objects in the sky were identical to photographs taken of supposed UFOs in the US in the 1950s and 6Os.

But Martin Kemp, professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, said the "Renaissance UFOs" had a perfectly rational explanation.

"Many artists used their imaginations to represent celestial or sacred powers," he said. "The objects in Masolino da Panicale's painting were not UFOs at all but merely clouds schematised to fit in with his perspective."
 

December 3, 2002

BBC

UFO Case 'Blocked' by MOD

Details of one of Britain's most famous UFO scares was among information repeatedly suppressed by government defence chiefs, according to a Westminster watchdog. Parliamentary Ombudsman Ann Abraham said the Ministry of Defence (MoD) broke open government rules three times in recent months over cases including the Rendlesham Forest UFO scare.

Complaints about the MoD's refusal to list countries prioritised for arms sales or reveal details of an armed services survey were also up-held.

Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said the examples outlined in the report on the Ombudsman's work between May and October were symptomatic of a "culture of secrecy" in the MoD.

"It is one of those departments that have always opposed freedom of information and are not very attuned to what is required in a modern, open and accountable government," he said.

"Other departments and Whitehall as a whole have a problem with openness but the MoD is on of the more incorrigible cases of government by secrecy," he said.

Details of the alleged sighting at a Norfolk RAF base more than 20 years ago were released last week after the Ombudsman ruled the MoD were wrongly suppressing them.

The "Rendlesham File" concerns a sighting of a "glowing" triangular object by US Air Force police in Rendlesham Forest, near RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk.

The documents have only previously been made available to around 20 people who used the American Freedom of Information Act to gain access to them.

In the early hours of 27 December, 1980, a number of US Air Force men witnessed the object hover in the darkness, transmitting blue pulsating lights and sending nearby farm animals into a "frenzy".

While the actual documents had not been released, the details were widely known, the Ombudsman said in her report.

"Given their age and the fact that these documents contained no information not already in the public domain, the Ombudsman saw no reason why they could not be disclosed," the report said.

The Ombudsman also partially upheld complaints against the Cabinet Office, DVLA, Driving Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions, the report revealed.

Restrictions on the MoD's "Rendlesham File" were dropped as part of an opening-up of the inner workings of Whitehall.

Ministers are attempting to lift the official veil of secrecy by repealing or amending a raft of legislation banning access to information.

Government departments will now be required to release information on the internal workings of Whitehall, including minutes of meetings of top civil servants.

Ministers say they will repeal or amend up to 100 items of legislation which are currently prohibited from disclosure.

*** For the full text of the Ombudsman's judgement go to:

www.ombudsman.org.uk/pca/

click 'What's New' and then 'Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration - Access to Official Information - Investigations Completed May-October 2002.

Ministry of Defence - Case A29/02 - Refusal to release information relating to the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident can be found on pgs 9-11 of the file in pdf format.

December 3, 2002

Florida Today

UFO Denials Never Die

by Billy Cox

Beneath the fictional guise of "Taken," the 20-hour UFO series under way on cable's Sci-Fi Channel, is a rock-hard initiative no one's been able to pull off in more than 30 years -- a renewed government study of unidentified flying objects.

But a chat with Air Force veteran Bud Evans, 78, provides some insights into the longstanding resistance to official candor. Evans was on the front lines of the Cold War when, confronted with state-of-the-art military hardware, the phenomenon apparently replied with an ostentatious display of arrogance.

Now retired in Indialantic, Evans opens an old scrapbook and turns to some aging newspaper articles with headlines such as "P-51 Blows Up, Killing Hero Over Franklin" and "Chase for Flying Disk Blamed in Crash Death." The only reason he saved them, he says, is because he knew the pilot, Thomas Mantell, when the two served briefly together in the Kentucky Air National Guard.

Mantell's death in 1948 sparked the beginning of a controversial Air Force inquiry into unidentified flying objects that ended with the termination of Project Blue Book in 1969. Although Mantell reported pursuing a metallic-looking object before he presumably lost consciousness at 33,000 feet, the official explanation was that he died chasing planet Venus -- in the middle of the afternoon. When the Navy's high-altitude Skyhook balloon project was declassified several years later, Skyhook was substituted as the guilty culprit.

Either way, Evans never gave UFOs much thought until 1949, when he was a flight commander with the 9th Fighter Squadron in Misawa, Japan. Situated directly across from the Soviet Union, the unit belonged to the 49th Fighter Group, which was replacing its World War II-era P-51 Mustangs with brand-new F-80 jet fighters. That's where Evans got scrambled after something that appeared to be openly mocking American training exercises.

While vectoring toward an aerial gunnery target -- a 30-foot long, 8-foot tall banner with bulls-eye markings, suspended by an 800-foot cable from a P-51 tow ship -- two pilots making separate approaches radioed, "We've got a target, but no tow ship." Ground radar confirmed the unknown bogey and dispatched Evans for a look-see, but the intruder disappeared before he could reach it.

During debriefings, the pilots described the rectangular UFO as three times the size of the gunnery target. Upon flanking this broad, flat object no more than a few inches wide, they also noted it resembled translucent glass, as they could see the silhouettes of each other's planes on opposite sides. The thing bolted forward suddenly, then "went straight up and out of sight," Evans says.

Not long afterward at Misawa, with the band and honor guard assembled in anticipation of the midmorning arrival of the Fifth Air Force brass for a base inspection, a rectangular object dropped in from the east and cruised directly above the runway. "I knew as soon as I saw it that this is what the guys had seen before, and it was right ahead of where the C-54 (ferrying the headquarters team) was going to come," Evans recalls. "It was quite large."

Although his recollections contrast somewhat with Evans, the essential details of what Indian Harbour Beach resident Clyde Good saw on Misawa match up. "It was coming in pretty slow, and at first, we all thought it was a tow target, but we couldn't see what was holding it up," says the 83-year-old, retired lieutenant colonel.

"So I'm looking for its power source, and there were no props, no jet engines, no visible means of propulsion, and it doesn't make a sound. But it was definitely under the control of somebody or something, because then it pulled straight up, like a bat out of hell, and took off. Just disappeared."

Some time afterward, Evans and a wingman were scrambled by ground radar to intercept an intruder flying at erratic speeds over northern Hokkaido. Evans missed it, but his colleague, Lt. James Harvey, reported it was a huge but thin, broad rectangle that allowed him to get close enough for a good look before it vanished in a blink, vertically, through the cloud cover.

What Evans and Good also agree on is the incidents were all classified and eyewitnesses were ordered to shut up. But if their Misawa encounters ever made it into the public domain, neither Evans nor Good are aware of it.

"They all knew about it because they sent three, four people in from FEAF (Far Eastern Air Forces) headquarters to interview people and file their reports," says Good. "I'd sure like to know more about it, because it was extraordinary, it was something you never forget, and I'm not going to live forever.  But nobody ever talks about it. It's like everyone's in denial."

So, like, what's new?
 

December 2, 2002

Fresno Bee

UFO Sightings Are No Secret

by Rick Bentley

Manuel Amparano talks about sighting an unidentified flying object at 3:32 a.m. May 13, 1978, as if it happened only days ago. Coming face-to-face with a UFO creates vivid memories.

Amparano's sighting is one of the most detailed of the many accounts of UFO sightings in the Fresno area documented over the years in The Fresno Bee and on Web sites.

The Fresno resident was working as a Kerman police officer.

"It was just a routine patrol," Amparano says of the encounter 24 years ago.

His early morning sweep took him past Kerman High School. At Del Norte and California avenues, Amparano saw "a circular-type thing, similar to a round fireball or a setting sun, about 100 to 150 feet off the ground."

He knew local teens had been setting palm trees on fire, and he thought he had caught some young vandals red-handed.

"Then I realized there were no palm trees in the area. The fire seemed to be inside of an oak or maple tree. This thing started lifting up," Amparano says.

The officer started adjusting the spotlight on his patrol car to get a better look at the object. But just before he turned on the light, there was a bright blue flash. Then the object made a sharp turn and moved away toward the southwest at a rapid speed.

Amparano had not left his car. And the windows were rolled up because it was a cold evening. He did not hear any other noise except for the engine of his car.

The Air National Guard, weather bureau and the Fresno Air Terminal told Amparano nothing unusual showed up on any of their radar screens that night. The encounter might have been dismissed as an optical illusion, if not for the burns Amparano suffered on his face and chest.

"It was like a sunburn when you fall asleep at the pool. There were white blisters on the parts of my body facing that light. I also had trouble with sunlight. It was like right after you have your eyes checked and they are sensitive to light. That lasted about a week," Amparano says.

Doctors at Fresno Community Hospital told Amparano the burns appeared to be caused by microwaves.

An immediate search of the cotton field where the sphere had been sighted revealed no evidence. But for years, nothing would grow in a round area in the field. Today the spot is part of an almond orchard.

Amparano went back to work a few days later. The only after-affect of the close encounter was calls from "a lot of women who wanted to have lunch and dinner with me." He continued to work in local law enforcement until 1992, when he was hurt while breaking up a bar fight.

He's had more than two decades to think about that glowing sphere. Amparano is certain it was a UFO.

"What I am not certain about is whether it was some kind of government project or something from out there," Amparano says.

Other newspaper and Web site accounts of local UFO sightings include:

March 14, 1980: Two residents near the Fig Garden Village shopping center see a bright yellow ball dripping flames. The object is identified as a candle under a helium-filled balloon.

May 20, 1980: Mary Phillips, Caruthers, spots a disc-shaped object with red and green lights floating northwest over Fresno. The Lemoore Naval Air Station receives two calls about the object.

May 29, 1997: At about 10 p.m., a Fresno woman, identified at "Mrs. Liv S," reports that while looking at a clump of stars in the southeast portion of the sky, one of the stars begins to move in an odd fashion.

Sept. 22, 1998: A Fresno couple, identified as Vikki and Joseph R., spot at 9:40 p.m. a triangular-shaped object with lights set at regular intervals. The object appears to be a pyramid shape. It makes no sound.

July 23, 2002: About 9:45 p.m., one member of a family camping at Sequoia National Park points out a huge craft in the form of a V with red lights flying slowly over. They are able to see the object for about two minutes. It makes a humming sound. Numerous campers see the craft.

July 23, 2002: At 10:30 p.m., four Exeter churchgoers see a huge UFO in the shape of a triangle with red lights rimming the edge of it. The ship flies south.

The reporter can be reached at rbentley@fresnobee.com or at 441-6355.

December 1, 2002

Washington Post

A Tale of UFOs and Alien Abduction

by Alan James Frutkin

First-person accounts of alien abductions are still the stuff of supermarket tabloids. But in the hands of Steven Spielberg, those stories become a major TV event. At least, that's what the folks at cable's Sci Fi Channel are hoping.

Beginning on Monday at 9 p.m., the cable network premieres "Taken," a 20-hour, 10-episode miniseries about UFO sightings, extraterrestrials, and alien abductions. Spielberg is the executive producer.

The miniseries follows three families over the course of 60 years. It begins during World War II, when U.S. bomber pilots flying over France reported what may have been the first contemporary sightings of unidentified flying objects. The action also centers on Roswell, N.M., where, legend has it, a UFO crashed in 1947.

In fact, "Taken's" storyline is based primarily on legends that have emerged regarding the subject of extraterrestrials. "It's a modern mythology," said Leslie Bohem (pronounced Bo-heem), the executive producer who wrote the series. "If you say all of this is true, that's amazing. If it's not true, it's even more incredible."

More incredible, Bohem added, because "for thousands of years, people have been telling similar versions of the same story."

Bohem said he was drawn to the project because of its subject matter and its scale. "Taken" was four years in the making and cost roughly $40 million. At 20 hours, it is the longest miniseries ever to air on TV.

But with the project spanning nearly six decades, and four generations of families, "Taken's" size also proved daunting. Actors who figure prominently in the early episodes soon move offscreen once their characters' descendants come into view. Filmmaker Tobe Hooper ("Poltergeist"), who directed "Taken's" premiere episode, said that during filming, he shot almost 300 screen tests for future roles in the series.

"It was one of those situations where if you had examined it and asked questions before you went into it, you may have found it overwhelming," the director added, chuckling. "So it was better to just put the parachute on and jump. If it opens, it opens."

Size isn't "Taken's" only distinction. The Sci Fi Channel will air the first five installments this week-- one two-hour episode Monday through Friday at 9 p.m.--and five more installments next week, Monday through Friday, as well. It's an unusual scheduling move, but Sci Fi President Bonnie Hammer said it's worth the risk.

"To dilute this as a weekly series over ten weeks would take away some of it specialness," she added. "It's an experiment, but we really believe that high risk equals potentially high rewards."

Clearly, the reward Hammer is looking for is ratings--big enough, once and for all, to put the oft-neglected cable network on the map.

"Unfortunately, many people over the years have believed that the Sci Fi Channel is not necessarily for them," Hammer said. "Even if they enjoy science fiction, they don't equate themselves with being science fiction aficionados."

Sci Fi has tasted success in the past. In 2000, the cable network's first miniseries, "Frank Herbert's Dune," drew its largest audience to date, averaging approximately 4.5 million viewers.

With Spielberg's name attached to "Taken," Hammer said she hopes the miniseries will reach an even larger audience, creating "an awareness that we haven't had before about the bigness and the quality of what we do."

And quality is the word most often tossed around when speaking of "Taken." Hooper said that each installment of the special effects-laden series looks more like a feature film than a typical TV show. He added that the visual style of each episode also reflects the decade in which it takes place. For example, the first show has a sepia-toned look, the second highlights the Technicolor style of the 1950s, and the third has more of a 1960s black-and-white TV look.

Despite all of its technical wizardry, Hooper said the strength of the series still comes from its character-driven storylines. Rather than have his actors mimic the cardboard-cutout style of many sci-fi films, he said, "I wanted these people to be real, and to be responding to the reality of their situations."

In creating realism out of what remains for many a surreal subject, Bohem said he zeroed in on three different aspects of the so-called mythology, represented by the show's three families. First, there are the Keys, a typical American family torn apart after several of its members are abducted. Young Allie Keys, played by Dakota Fanning, is the series' narrator. Then there are the Crawfords, a military family.

But the Clarkes, Bohem said, reflect a traditionally under-represented subject: debunkers. "It's one of my favorite parts of the mythology," he said. "Guys who, for complex reasons, are dedicated to proving it was all a bunch of hooey."

Of course, the subject of alien abductions is nothing new to television. Bohem noted that for nine seasons, Fox's "The X-Files" covered that subject matter admirably. So when it came time to portray the military's purported role in the coverup of alien sightings, Bohem wanted to take a different tack than that of "X-Files" creator Chris Carter.

Wherea