Bad UFOs: Skepticism, UFOs, and The Universe - by Robert Sheaffer

That "Citizens Hearing" on UFO Disclosure Got the Respect it Deserved - (Very Little)

2013-05-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote about the forthcoming "Citizens Hearing on UFO Disclosure" arranged by the Paradigm Research Group, headed up by Steven Bassett.

Parapolitical's photo of Sen. Gravel

In past exercises in UFO "disclosures," the major media were surprisingly passive and uncritical, taking the "revelations" at face value. And some were still credulous this time and could see nothing amiss about these wild claims, for example the New York Times.

But not all of the media were quite so uncritical this time - some reporters actually did their jobs. Some noted the fees being paid to the ex-Congressmen, and the absence of any skeptical witnesses. A full week before the "hearings" began, on April 21, the website Parapolitical had a long and quite cheeky review of the forthcoming proceedings titled "UFO Carnival Returns to National Press Club ." Among its observations were:

What is more significant than the topic of the event, however, is the fact that it marks a first-ever convening of the, hands-down, nuttiest U.S. congressmen who ever lived....Historic Meeting of Lunatics - The hearing panel will be headlined by former congressman Merrill Cook (R – Utah) who was once banned from his own party’s offices after a profanity-laced tirade and was famously plagued during his few years in Congress by reports of erratic behavior leveled by his own staff. “Merrill has taken up permanent residence in whacko land,” Cook’s chief of staff Janet Jenson wrote in an intra-office e-mail in 2000. ”If he asks you to fax his underwear to the speaker’s office, please just do it.”

Joining Cook will be former congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R – Maryland). The 86 year-old raised eyebrows in 2004 when he attended a Unification Church event to receive the “Ambassador of Peace medal” from cult leader Sun Myung Moon who, afterwards, declared himself the Messiah and his wife the Assistant Messiah as Bartlett watched in delight...The crazy train doesn’t stop there. Also appearing is former congresswoman Cheeks Kilpatrick (D- Michigan) who embarrassingly failed to receive her own party’s re-nomination in 2010 owing, in part, to her connections with her son, the disgraced former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (who is facing up to 30 years in prison after being convicted of 24 federal crimes involving stripper parties at the mayoral mansion, funneling city funds to his wife, tax evasion, mail fraud, assaulting police officers, and more).

Rounding out this happy band of lunatics is former senator Mike Gravel (D- Alaska). Since his most recent bankruptcy, Gravel has pathetically taken to making public appearances for anyone who will buy him lunch – his previous engagements have included a conference sponsored by the holocaust denial website Barnes Review. (UFO conspiracies aren’t Gravel’s only angle. He’s also been working the 9/11 Truth circuit and several truther websites have accused him of absconding with donor funds.)

Not surprisingly, perhaps, these probably cash-strapped has-beens are each getting $20,000 to perform at the Paradigm Research “Citizen Hearing.”

In fact, the cost of the entire circus has been pegged at $600,000. Who is paying for all this? There was a lot of uninformed speculation on the internet, but it looks like Parapolitical has nailed it down:

Following much speculation, Steve Bassett – the ringmaster of next week’s UFO carnival – has identified his financial backer for the event as a man named “Tom Clearwater” who lives in Canada. Who is Tom Clearwater? A Twitter account belonging to a “Thomas Clearwater” of Vancouver is filled with tweets containing links to websites that claim a U.S. government laser beam destroyed the World Trade Center. So, yeah … maybe that guy.

The New York Daily News pulled no punches, and showed the "hearings" for what they really were: SPACE CADETS HIT D.C.: UFO buffs beam up to well-paid ex-pols. "Six former members of Congress, who were paid $20,000 each, heard testimony on the U.S. government trying to cover up contact made with extraterrestrial life."


Daily News photo: "Ret. USAF Col. Billie F. Woodard shows off his shirt and Lemurian Crystal headband during the hearing."

Lee Speigel, Weird News reporter for the Huffington Post, sat there at the National Press Club all week long to listen to this thing. He provided live updates during the week. He listened to all this so we don't have to! (Don't feel too sorry for him. He's a reporter, he got paid to do this.). If you want to read his full coverage, his five articles are here:

1. Citizen Hearing On Disclosure: UFO Believers To Testify At Congressional-Style Hearings

2. Citizen Hearing On Disclosure Day 2: England Has Close Encounter, UFOs Tamper With Nuclear Sites

3. Citizen Hearing On Disclosure Day 3: Panel Takes On Animal Mutilations And Roswell Crash

4. Citizen Hearing On Disclosure Day 4: Global UFO Encounters Take The Stage

5. Citizen Hearing On Disclosure: Pilots Testify To UFO Encounters

Lee Speigel (right) with Yours Truly at the 2011 MUFON Symposium

Here are some highlights from Speigel's Live Updates:

"Linda Moulton Howe on reported UFO abductions and the possible manipulation of the human mind. She tells a story about a military person who told her he was on a team that, in 1978, was assigned to investigate a town that was allegedly flooded by extraterrestrials."

"Kilpatrick introduces Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “I am honored today to take on this assignment, and to have one of the leaders here on this topic. I’m honored to introduce Minister Louis Farrakhan.” To which, stood up to mild applause. " [Farrakhan claims to be a UFO Contactee. She also introduced Dick Gregory.]

"Sgt. James Penniston claims a Close Encounter With A UFO Taking Off" (Rendlesham Forest, U.K, 1980). Apparently nobody asked him about that 'binary message' that he supposedly received "telepathically" from the UFO, and wrote down - thirty years afterward.

"Cong. Roscoe Bartlett gets a little testy about the press coverage so far about this week's Citizen Hearing On Disclosure: "I've been looking at some of the press clippings from yesterday's session and the government has been quite successful in relegating this issue to the lunatic fringe." [Does this former Congressman think that the government controls stories in the press?] "I'm going to comment on only one article. [Not specified, but from the Atlantic Wire.] It says 'The mock Congress hearing on aliens is heavy on real-life Mulders and not Scullys.'" [But this is correct: the "hearings" consist entirely of True Believers, and no skeptics.] "The trouble with this week's alien panel (we're an alien panel now) at the National Press Club is that any of the participating members of Congress who might naturally be a Scully have been incentived to suspend their disbelief. Because the Citizen Hearing foundation is paying them $20,000 plus expenses to listen to the testimony.'" "That's just insulting, that we can be bought for $20,000." [What is the going price these days for a has-been former Congressman? Perhaps he feels insulted because he was bought too cheaply?]

Dr. Robert Wood, the principal promoter of recent MJ-12 documents (supposedly revealing a secret government UFO coverup group), said ""The identification of one aspect of a questioned document as being anomalous often results in a skeptic accepting none of the rest of the document, even though it might be filled with accurate information. It seems to be accepted in the intelligence community that faked documents usually -- if not often -- contain much valid information to help get it accepted as genuine throughout." [ In other words, the MJ-12 documents are Fake, but Accurate.]

Lt. Col Richard French (Ret) told the committee about an incident he witnessed in the late 1960s in Alamogordo, N.M.: "While there, I learned of an accident a few miles away in the direction of White Sands [missile range]. A short time later, I witnessed the takeoff of a prototype fighter aircraft that I neither recognized or knew what it was. The aircraft took off at a very high rate of speed and fired a rocket, five inches in diameter and about six feet long... Afterward [I was told] there was an unknown number of humanoids, either killed or injured. The parts of the casualties were taken to base operations at Holloman Air Force Base [in New Mexico]. The only parts of the craft that I was allowed to see had markings that appeared to be Arabic or some language I didn't understand."

Speigel has a follow-up interview with French in which French describes seeing underwater UFOs while standing with a crowd of people on a wharf in St. John's, Newfoundland, where Blue Book sent him. Two glowing underwater UFOs were apparently being repaired by two swimming ETs. (My understanding is that Project Blue Book did not send investigators to foreign countries to investigate UFOs reported there. )

French claims to have been an investigator and paid "debunker" for the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book. However, John Keel has this to say about French in The Mothman Prophecies:

“Did you ever hear of anyone—especially an air force officer—trying to drink Jell-O?” Mrs. Ralph Butler of Owatonna, Minnesota, asked. “Well, that’s what he did. He acted like he had never seen any before. He picked up the bowl and tried to drink it. I had to show him how to eat it with a spoon.“
Mrs. Butler was describing the man who had visited her in May 1967, following a flurry of UFO sightings in Owatonna. He said he was Major Richard French of the U.S. Air Force although he was dressed in civilian clothes and was driving a white Mustang. His neat gray suit and everything else he was wearing appeared to be brand-new.

Even the soles of his shoes were unscuffed, unwalked upon. He was about five feet nine inches tall, with an olive complexion and a pointed face. His hair was dark and very long—too long for an air force officer, Mrs. Butler thought. Unlike Jack Brown, Major French was a fluent conversationalist and seemed perfectly normal until he complained about his stomach bothering him. When Mrs. Butler offered him the Jell-O she suspected for the first time that something was out of kilter.
Richard French was an imposter. One of the many wandering around the United States in 1967. For years these characters had caused acute paranoia among the flying saucer enthusiasts, convincing them that the air force was investigating them, silencing witnesses and indulging in all kinds of unsavory activities—including murder. When I first began collecting such reports I was naturally suspicious of the people making such reports. It all seemed like a massive put-on. But gradually it became apparent that the same minute details were turning up in widely separated cases, and none of these details had been published anywhere ... not even in the little newsletters of the UFO cultists.
There was somebody out there, all right. A few, like Richard French, almost pulled off their capers without drawing attention to themselves. But in nearly every case there was always some small error, some slip of dress or behavior which the witnesses were usually willing to overlook but which stood out like signal flares to me.

They often arrived in old model cars which were as shiny and well kept as brand-new vehicles. Sometimes they slipped up in their dress, wearing clothes that were out of fashion or, even more perturbing, would not come into fashion until years later. Those who posed as military officers obviously had no knowledge of military procedure or basic military jargon. If they had occasion to pull out a wallet or notebook, it would be brand-new ...although most men carry beat-up old wallets and notebooks quickly gain a worn look. Finally, like the fairies of old, they often collected souvenirs from the witnesses ... delightedly walking away with an old magazine, pen, or other small expendable object.

Keel seems to be suggesting that French was an extraterrestrial! Or at least an MIB. While I find both suggestions extremely unlikely, the point being made is that French was an "impostor" and did not represent Project Blue Book, although he may have gone around pretending like he did. Is there any documentation to prove that French actually worked with Project Blue Book? A search for "French" in the Blue Book archive returns nothing except references to the country, or its language. By comparison, a search for "Quintanilla" returns 89 hits.

Continuing with Speigel's updates:

"Possibly the most intriguing testimony offered today so far came from a former 25-year Peruvian air force fighter pilot. Col. Oscar Santa-Maria (pictured below). In 1980, he was ordered to takeoff and shoot down a sphere-shaped UFO that was in restricted airspace near an air base. The encounter lasted more than 20 minutes. "These were 22 minutes where we went up and down, it went around, and it was trying to avoid me while I was pursuing it and I was trying to fire." [A pilot having a 'dogfight' with a supposed UFO has happened before. In 1948, Air National Guard pilot George F. Gorman spent twenty minutes in a "dogfight" with what he described as a "ball of light." The Air Force says he became disoriented while chasing a lighted weather balloon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorman_dogfight ]

"Final Day Of Citizen UFO Hearing Takes Off With Pilot Testimony... Cong. Kilpatrick appeared very moved by the testimony of the private, commercial and military pilots as well as previous panel witnesses during the week... "I was convinced before this morning's panel that there probably is something out there, and I'm willing to work the rest of my life to see that, if it is, how we can enhance the universe to see that we all have a better quality of life." "[ Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the late USAF Project Blue Book consultant and perhaps the best-known and most-respected of UFO proponents, came to exactly the opposite conclusion. On page 271 of his 1977 book The Hynek UFO Report, Hynek wrote, "Surprisingly, commercial and military pilots appear to make relatively poor witnesses."]

"a 15-minute video was a 15-minute video was about to be shown of a 77-year-old man man, in very bad health, who wanted to take the opportunity to reveal a story of what happened to him while he worked for the CIA under Pres. Dwight Eisenhower in 1958.shown of a 77-year-old man man, in very bad health, who wanted to take the opportunity to reveal a story of what happened to him while he worked for the CIA under Pres. Dwight Eisenhower in 1958. This gentleman has received numerous threats from his government not to talk... X goes on to talk about how Eisenhower was upset when he learned that there was activity going on at a base in Nevada (that would later be renamed as Area 51) that the government allegedly had no jurisdiction over. Eisenhower sent X and his boss to the base to find out what was going on there.

Photo of "Mr. X" as shown at the "hearings"

X: "There were different garage door openings and inside they had different saucer crafts. The first one was the Roswell craft -- it was kind of crashed up, but apparently every alien had died except for a couple. Later on we viewed the autopsy film and then the colonel said, 'What we've got in here is we're interviewing a grey alien.'"... X and his superior went back to Washington to meet with Eisenhower and Nixon again.

Is this "Mr X" being interviewed at the International UFO Congress, 2013? (photo by author)

"Leir, a podiatrist, described the numerous surgeries he's performed with a medical team in which they removed unusual small objects from people who claimed to have experienced alien abduction.... by use of a radio wave frequency detector, we were able to detect that certain radio frequencies in the FM band, were being emitted from the object.

Former Canada Minister Of National Defense "Paul Hellyer is widely known and credited for his work to unify the Canadian Armed Forces. In 2005, he made headlines by announcing that "UFOs are as real as the airplanes flying overhead." ...Among the things Hellyer says he has learned and believes is a particular document that concluded at least four species had been visiting Earth for thousands of years"

After the UFO carnival had ended, Parapolitical pronounced its post-mortem:

Results Are In – UFO Carnival a Failure. How bad was it? Google Trends actually recorded a decrease in online interest in the term “UFO” during the carnival. To say this week’s UFO carnival – billed as a “mock congressional hearing” – at the National Press Club was a failure would be an understatement... There are roughly 2,200 television stations in the U.S. Three covered the event. Radio coverage was similarly sparse...A search, by parapolitical, of closed captioning records of U.S. television stations found that only four stories had been filed on the UFO circus – half of them by KLAS-TV (Las Vegas). DC’s WTGG-TV gave five minutes to the subject on their morning news. They then did a segment on acrobatic cats...Bassett managed to secure the singularly nuttiest group of former congressmen to have ever walked the planet, a fact lost on no one except, apparently, the UFO believers. He also failed to organize a costume-check at the front door of the hearing (the New York Daily News photographed ufologists wearing tin foil hats). Self-described “investigative reporter” Linda Moulton Howe even wore a costume to “testify” (it appears she was dressed as a Reptilian-Grey hybrid).

Now Paradigm Research wants to take its show to the U.N.:

Citizen Hearing on Disclosure Committee Seeks UN World Conference on Possible Extraterrestrial Presence
Washington, DC – On May 3, 2013 members of the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure Committee and Hearing witnesses representing ten UN member nations met at the National Press Club to draft a statement seeking United Nations review of evidence of a possible extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.

Presumably they will need a U.N. member nation to sponsor the motion, and the United States shows absolutely no interest in doing so. There was a previous proposal for the U.N. to study UFOs in 1977-78, sponsored by the tiny Carribean nation of Grenada (whose Prime Minister, Sir Eric Gairy, was a UFO buff), and organized by non other than Lee Speigel. As I wrote in my Psychic Vibrations column (in The Skeptical Inquirer) for Spring/Summer, 1978 (page 5 in the paperback book),

This past fall, Gairy braved the hazards of a trip through the Bermuda Triangle to travel to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, proposing that the UN set up a special agency to study UFO sightings. The New York Times reported that as Gairy spoke to the half-empty assembly hall, “the atmosphere was one of somnolence”; more diplomats appeared to be greeting friends or preparing dispatches than listening with rapt attention as the way was prepared for the great quantum leap in science. To build enthusiasm among the delegates, Gairy invited them to a showing of the much-hyped film, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Eagerly awaiting the all-important vote, the tabloid National Enquirer reported that “initial reaction seemed favorable at UN headquarters.” But when Grenada’s proposed UFO agency came to a vote, out of the other 148 member nations of the UN, only one voted with Grenada - Idi Amin’s Uganda.

That time, the proposal to set up a U.N. agency to study UFOs at least was able to present the testimony of seemingly-credible persons like Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallee, and Gordon Cooper. The U.N. still ignored it. This time, they would hear from the likes of Steven Greer, Linda Moulton Howe, and Richard French. Does anyone think this U.N. proposal has even a snowflake's chance in hell of getting anywhere?

Greer's "Sirius" Documentary - no "Bombshell," just Nonstop UFO Claims

2013-04-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

I had previously written about the forthcoming 'blockbuster' UFO documentary movie Sirius, produced by CSETI's Dr. Steven Greer, which promised Free Energy, and a Dead Alien. OK, so I wasted $10 to watch Greer's UFO documentary film Sirius on-line on the night of its Word Premiere in Hollywood. I watched it so you won't have to. First there was the "Red Carpet Coverage" of the Premiere in real-time before the movie, which apparently is no longer available. It was mostly hoopla, with a strong anti-capitalist tone. The first ten minutes or so of the movie were included.

As the film opens, we see Greer going into a college auditorium in Santa Monica, the audience being checked with metal detectors for weapons. "Most people don't know what a Dead Man Trigger is." Very few people need one. But Greer has one - if the Conspiracy rubs him out, lots of sensitive documents get sent out to influential people. Excuse me while I barf - If Greer actually had any documents as hot as all that, he would have given them to the press long ago.

Greer's Dead Alien

Most of what we see after that comes in no particular order. We are given UFO cases and UFO witnesses in a popcorn sort of manner, no sooner does one bounce up than it falls back and another takes its place. There is no time (or need) for exposition, or analysis. Every case, and every claim, is apparently completely solid and needs no further explanation or proof. The "organization" of the film was such that one could have taken almost any segment of it, and switched it with any other, and the change would scarcely be noticed. Some things that we are shown, for the most part quite briefly, include, in no particular order:

President Eisenhower's warning about the Military-Industrial Complex
Dr. Oppenheimer saying, "we have done this (nukes) before."
ancient aliens
Federal reserve conspiracies
Oil company conspiracies
Laurance Rockefeller saying 'disclosure' will change everything
MJ-12 Government UFO coverup conspiracy
STS-48 UFO video
Dr. Lynne Kitei and the Phoenix Lights, which were not military flares
"free energy" claimants, including T. Townsend Brown, Tom Valone, Tom Bearden, Stanley Meyer, John Searl, Eugene Mallove, John Havrilla. Anti-gravity and electro-gravitics claims are made.
automobiles that can run on water
Conspiracies involving the Masons, and the Bohemian Grove

These supposed "inventors," plus the ET technology, offers us unlimited Free Energy, but a conspiracy by those Greer calls the "Petro-fascists" keeps us using coal, oil, and nuclear power. Part of the Conspiracy is to keep us distracted by other things. Even Honey Boo-Boo is depicted as part of the Conspiracy to keep us distracted from ET truths.

The film mentions Greer's May, 2001 Disclosure Project press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Despite its supposedly impressive list of yarn-spinners (many of whom are returning for the forthcoming Citizens Hearing on UFO Disclosure next week), after a few titilating news stories it mostly fell flat with the news media. But an excuse for this was given: just four months later, the attacks of September 11 resulted in wall-to-wall news coverage, leaving reporters with a mere four months to investigate Greer's ET bombshells.

The film does give us some valuable insight into Greer's personality. He mentions having a Near Death experience during an illness when he was seventeen, and describes how he felt a "oneness" not only with the earth, but with the entire universe. Later in the film he said that it is the memory of that NDE that keeps him moving forward in his investigations. I had previously been wondering if Greer is sincere in what he says, or just a huckster who has found a way to make a lot of money off UFO believers. After seeing Sirius I would say that Greer is quite sincere in what he says, and the money aspects comes from effectively taking leadership of an existing group of people who largely think as he does.

I found interesting the part about CSETI's CE5 training session, "human-initiated contact," which involves, among other things, meditation and remote viewing. They go into the desert or some other remote place, and shine a flashlight or laser at any light they see in the sky. If it appears to flicker back, that counts as an instance of interstellar communication. Many of the ET craft are "trans-dimensional," and thus are not visible to the human eye. However, they can be seen using night-vision equipment, which apparently has the capability to make trans-dimensional things visible. I once spoke with a fellow at a UFO meeting who had been through Greer's "training," and he was very impressed by it. He explained that, at first, he could not see any of the ET craft that Greer was talking about. But as the training progressed, he learned how to perceive them.

Stud muffin Dr. Steven Greer at one of his CSETI UFO watches. Definitely the Alpha Male of the group.

One of the longest expositions of a UFO claim is that of the Big Sur missile-zapping UFO in 1964, as told by Bob Jacobs. This case has been totally picked apart by Kingston George in the Skeptical Inquirer.

"We have acquired an EBE!", boasts one of Greer's CSETI colleagues, and the analysis of this little guy - just six inches long - is the principal "news hook" for the film. We are told that this little body was dug up in the Atacamba Desert in Chile, and ended up in Barcelona, Spain. 3D scans reveal its internal organs, apparently very human-like. Now here is the biggest "bombshell" that the film has: DNA from this creature has been analyzed by Dr. Garry P. Nolan of the Stanford University Medical School. You can read his conclusions here:

Morphologic features include that the specimen has only 10 ribs, mild mid face hypoplasia, and shows abnormalities of the skull. The observed abnormalities do not fall into any standard or rare classification of known human pediatric disorders. As represented by a specialist in pediatric human bone and growth disorders (see attached report), the 6 inch specimen is a human that was likely 6-8 years of age at the time of death (age based on epiphyseal plate X-Ray density standards). X-Ray imaging and CT scan results confirmed the specimen is biological and is not a non-human primate. The specimen was concluded by the medical specialist to be a human child with an apparently severe form of dwarfism and other anomalies... Reconstruction of the mitochondrial DNA sequence and analysis shows an allele frequency consistent with a B2 haplotype group found on the west coast of South America, supporting the claimed origination of the specimen from the Atacama Desert region of Chile. Sequence analysis definitively rules out the specimen as an example of a New World primate.

So, supposedly the little critter is a human child, at least 6 years old, and only six inches long. This sounds almost as implausible as an ET. I am wondering what precautions have been taken against deliberate DNA contamination? In the case of the Metepec, Mexico humanoid that was promoted by Jaime Maussan, the hoaxer Urso Moreno Ruiz confessed, "It’s just the corpse of a skinned squirrel-monkey. I took its ears out and involved it with all the hair and fluids of all animals I could find, then I dried it. All samples they take of it will come out as being of different animals." Is is possible that something similar has happened with the Atacama humanoid?

In the end, no halfway intelligent person will be swayed by this film. The only people who will be impressed will be those who breathlessly await each new episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel.

That "Citizen Hearing" on UFO "Disclosure"

2013-04-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

According to the pro-ET lobbying group Paradigm Research Group,

An event with historical implications will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC from April 29 to May 3, 2013. At that time as many as forty researchers and military/agency witnesses will testify for thirty hours over five days before former members of the United States Congress... The Citizen Hearing on Disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race will attempt to accomplish what the Congress has failed to do for forty-five years - seek out the facts surrounding the most important issue of this or any other time.

But of course, to lobby for "disclosure" implies that there is something to "disclose," which is highly dubious. And to hold a valid "hearing" implies that witnesses are queried under oath, which of course will not be the case, leaving them free to fabricate as much as they please without fear of repercussions. The five former members of Congress are being paid a reported $20,000 each by Paradigm to participate in this circus.

"Former Alaska senator and presidential candidate Mike Gravel [Dem/Lib,AK] is participating in a forum that seeks to prove that aliens have visited earth"

“I agreed to participate,” Gravel told CBS 11 via telephone. “I have my own views and skepticism, but I'm reading up on the subject, and like anything else, the more you read up on the subject the more you become surprised. I have no preconceived ideas that there are or aren't extraterrestrial influences as to things that are going on, and I'm curious. I do a lot of reading and studying about what's going on, especially as I get older, and so I'm curious if there is something out there that they can prove to skeptical eye.”

Former Rep. Merrill Cook, [R-Utah] says he "doesn’t believe aliens have made contact with Earth, but he promises to keep an open mind as he participates in 30 hours of testimony in a mock hearing".

Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick

Another is from Michigan: "A group hoping to prove alien contact with Earth has tapped former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick to help convince the federal government to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrials. The Detroit Democrat will help preside over 30 hours of congressional-style hearings."

The other participants are former representatives Lynn Woolsey [D-CA], and Roscoe Bartlett [R-MD].

As for those giving "testimony," it's mostly the usual suspects whose stories we've heard over and over.

Sgt. Jim Penniston (USAF-Ret) claims to have not only seen a UFO land at Rendlesham, UK, but to have received a binary message from it, telepathically, that is now being deciphered. Although the incident occurred in 1980, these details were just revealed (or, more likely, just made up) in 2010.
Dr. Steven Greer, whose new documentary movie Sirius promises Free Energy and a Dead Alien. "The Earth has been visited by advanced Inter-Stellar Civilizations that can travel through other dimensions faster than the speed of light," according to Greer.
Nick Pope, who worked, part time, on the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense UFO investigations twenty years ago, and has been making a career as a UFO celebrity from it since. Pope has spent the last year or so denying his own statements made about forthcoming 'alien invasions.'
Richard Dolan, whose most recent talk at the International UFO Congress was about 'mysteries' of ancient pyramids, UFO crash retrievals, reverse-engineeered alien technology, a "secret space program," human-alien hybrids, telepathic alien contact, and mind control.
Linda Moulton Howe, who routinely makes all kinds of wild claims, such as that aliens are using lasers to remove body parts from dead cows.

Actually, there is nothing "historic" about this farcical "hearing." Every couple of years, something like this comes down the pike, and impresses nobody.

2010 'UFOs and Nukes' Press Conference in DC

On September 27, 2010, UFOlogist Robert Hastings organized a "Disclosure Conference" also at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Many claims were made about UFOs supposedly interfering with U.S. nuclear missiles, as if the aliens were pacificsts. (However, the Russian-born UFOlogist Paul Stonehill has elsewhere claimed that UFOs attempted to launch Soviet missiles, as if the aliens were war mongers.) A rebuttal to one of Hastings' main cases is here.

On April 20, 2009, Bassett and Paradigm Research hosted a "disclosure" press conference at the National Press Club. Among the speakers then were Edgar Mitchell, Nick Pope, Richard Dolan, and Roger Leir, who are all also speaking in 2013.

On April 21, 2008, Bassett and Paradigm Research held a UFO-related Press Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Among the speakers were Richard Dolan and Grant Cameron, who will both be speaking again in 2013.

On Septermber 17, 2007, Bassett and Paradigm Research held a press conference at the National Press Club,

to demand that presidential candidates support a "truth amnesty" to end the "government-imposed truth embargo on the facts confirming an extraterrestrial presence."

Among the participants was Alfred Lambremont Webre, who recently has been claiming that Barack Obama was teleported to Mars in the 1980s. Bassett presented Webre with a Lifetime Achievement award in 2007 for his work for 'disclosure,' although Bassett has since distanced himself from Webre's Mars Teleportation claims.

November, 2007 UFO Press Conference

On November 12, 2007, James Fox and Leslie Kean hosted a press conference in Washington, DC, with many of the same witnesses, many of the same claims. The tales told at this press conference were made into the documentary movie I Know What I Saw. Among Paradigm's 2013 speakers Penniston, Pope, and Santa-Maria also spoke then.

On May 9, 2001, with much ballyhoo Steven Greer launched his UFO "Disclosure Project" with a press conference at the National Press Club. The 2013 Paradigm speakers who also spoke in 2001 are Nick Pope, Edgar Mitchell, Robert Salas, George A. Filer, Robert Wood, and Steven Greer. It is unclear if these "witnesses" will have anything substantial to add to the claims they made in the 2001 press conference.

So clearly, in the matter of 'Disclosure,' there is "nothing new under the sun." I hope I didn't forget any other "UFO disclosure" press conferences. If I did, please let me know!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The above is Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC for April 12, largely devoted to what she describes as these "fake hearings."

Greer Documentary "Sirius" Promises Free Energy and a Dead Alien

2013-04-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

The official World Premiere of the movie Sirius, directed by the Emmy-award winning Amardeep Kaleka and based upon the claims of UFO celebrity Steven Greer, takes place on April 22. Produced by J.D Seraphine and narrated by actor Thomas Jane (HBO series Hung), Sirius "will have its contributor, VIP & celebrity premiere on April 22 in Hollywood, CA. The movie premiere will be followed by a limited theatrical release and concurrent VOD launch via the Yekra video on demand platform on SiriusDisclosure.com." As for the premiere itself,

When: Monday, April 22nd at 7:30 pm (PST)
Where: Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE Stadium 14 in the Premiere House Theater
1000 West Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles 90015
Thank you all for your enthusiastic response to the "Sirius" premiere. We have sold out of the main theater, but have another theater in the same complex. You can still be a part of the Red Carpet excitement and the Sirius Premiere. Tickets for theater B now available for only $15.

The movie's message is summarized as follows:

The Earth has been visited by advanced Inter-Stellar Civilizations that can travel through other dimensions faster than the speed of light. They use energy propulsion systems that can bring us to a new era. Humans have also developed these systems but those in power have suppressed them in order to keep us at the mercy of fossil fuels... “This really is the greatest story never told” says Dr. Greer, “Once people understand that classified projects have figured out how UFO’s operate, they will realize we no longer need oil, coal and nuclear power. This is the truth that has driven the secrecy.”

Greer delivers a similar message in the highly-controversial conspiracy-oriented movie Thrive. The bizarre and conspiratorial political message of that movie has riled both the left and the right.

Greer receives a hug from one of his admirers, Leda Beluche

As I noted in previous Blog postings, funding for the Sirius movie was obtained through crowd sourcing. Last year on July 28, Greer announced meeting his fundraising goal of $250,000. But he still needed more money because, you see,

supposed alien skull from Sirius press release

There is a chance that we may be able to include in the film “Sirius” the scientific testing of a possible Extraterrestrial Biological Entity (EBE) that has been recovered and is deceased. This EBE is in the possession of a cooperative institute desiring further scientific evaluation of the possible ET. We cannot reveal at this time the location of this being or the name of the person or persons who possess it.

Dr. Jan Bravo- who is a [MUFON] STAR Board member and a fellow Emergency Physician- and I have actually visited the group that possesses this EBE and have personally and professionally examined the being. It is indeed an actual deceased body, and most certainly is not plastic or man-made. It has a head, 2 arms and 2 legs and is humanoid . We have seen and examined X-Rays of the being. Its anatomy however is not homo sapien (modern human) or any known hominid (predecessors to humans).

This little alien is only six inches long. The money was, indeed, duly raised.

Voila, it's Bijou

The movie now promises "the paradigm shifting physical evidence of a medically and scientifically analyzed DNA sequenced humanoid creature of unknown classification found in the Atacama desert, Chile." Remarkable, if true. It will be fascinating to learn how DNA sequences that allegedly evolved on an alien planet compare with our own. 'Informed sources' are saying that Greer's dead E.T. is actually an immature spider monkey. I cannot confirm that, however it sounds a lot more likely than a dead E.T. Recently Greer said that he now has a friendly 'alien familiar' name Bijoux, who has been following him around. I hope that Greer didn't accidentally run over Bijou in his truck?

Is this guy E.T.?

UFO Sightings Debunker Claims UFOs Are Not Real!

2013-03-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

On Friday, March 22 I did an internet radio interview with the pro-UFO site Third Phase of Moon, the largest UFO-related channel on Youtube. Some of their videos have been viewed several million times. The interview was broadcast live on Blogtalkradio.com, and is now archived on their YouTube channel (below). I had met up with internet radio broadcaster John Ilias at the recent International UFO Congress, who arranged to have me interviewed by Blake Cousins, the owner of that YouTube channel.

Actually, the Third Phase channel does not have a good reputation even among many UFO proponents. A forum on the pro-paranormal Podcast Paracast calls them the "third phase of the moon fraud group." And Ufo-blogger.com speaks of "UFO hoaxer Blake Cousins," suggesting that his goal is to make money from subscriptions to his YouTube channel. Despite my skepticism I was treated very courteously by the Third Phase people.

Also participating in the show was Joe Rodriguez of Los Angeles, a part-time magician and UFO spotter, who has his own UFO-related YouTube Channel. In the process I discovered another Fly UFO video, that Joe had taken, in the video below. In this video he has "bright UFOs," and "Dark UFOs." The "bright UFO" appears to be a white balloon, with something hung below it. It's never in good enough focus to see it clearly. The "dark UFOs," which move so fast that they need to be seen in slow motion, are obviously Fly UFOs, exactly like Leslie Kean's much-hyped Fly UFO video from Chile, and the now-famous Denver Fly UFO videos. (Even Blake Cousins was dismissive of the Denver Fly UFOs.) Now we have the Los Angeles Fly UFO to join them. When I explained this, at first Joe accepted that it was a fly, but later insisted it could not have been.

Blake explained that they had over 600 UFO videos on their website. How could I say they were all fakes (or ordinary objects) if I hadn't analyzed them all? I explained the principle of the 'UFO hierarchy' as developed by Philip J. Klass: don't waste precious time investigating low-value UFO claims. Instead, wait for the UFO proponents themselves to declare which UFO cases are the best, then focus in on those. After all, if the "best" cases, as selected by the UFO proponents themselves, are wobbly, how much less credible must be those cases that even the proponents largely ignore!

Surprisingly, the discussion took a religious turn. Joe said "I'm not a religious person," then went on to cite Bible passages and suggest that UFOs represent the fulfillment of prophecy. (Apparently some of his religious comments were edited out of the broadcast.) I asked him, if he is not a religious person, why does he think that Bible verses tell us anything about the future? Asked about my own religious beliefs, I simply said that I don't have any, and pointed out that each major literate civilization has its own religious writings, and they all contradict each other. Blake mentioned something about what "our Creator" wanted, and I said I didn't believe we were "created," but are here as the result of unguided Darwinian evolution.

The comments being made about my interview are very enlightening! A random sample:

I can't stand listening to debunkers, & am surprised the government is? still using them, & if their not working for the Government & actually believe the dribble they say, then you have 2 excuses 1. Religion or 2. Total Ignorance of Reality, & both indicate some severe Pathology.

Blake: Why didn't you challenge Robert Schaeffer [sic] on his ridiculous assertion that the Phoenix lights were military? flares? He made it sound so matter of fact (it clearly isn't). It was infuriating to listen to him not being challenged on that.

flare drop my ass!! just government trying? to make up excuses

Maybe if that guy had a visit from The grey's he'd hum a different tune! [Yes, probably I would!]

Seriously, the evidence is everywhere. Just like spirits/ghosts. Evidence is key. You also have to see it to believe it. People nowadays who don't believe in spirits/ghosts and especially UFO's? fascinate me, they fascinate me because of how people are still close minded.

The NSA has many agents that? make a living from being a skeptic. One is Phil Plait, the other is Bill Nye the science guy…they got him to manipulate the thoughts of their fans. The only way they could make money from doing this is if they were paid by the NSA…there is no money in it otherwise.

this guys a dummbass i saw a perfect saucer shaped object that took off that? it looked like star track.hes stupid.

he is a moron!? An they are here 24 -7.

It been very enjoyable listing to a paid? US government operative weave the web of propaganda. We all know MOFON [MUFON] is a Government controlled org.

Hey Robert......explain Betty Hill's map (drawn BACKWARDS) from the VISITORS PERSPECTIVE, and the fact that? some of those stars weren't even KNOWN back when she drew that map!!! And the fact that it took YEARS for anyone to recognize that star system (Zeta Reticulum) drawn backwards!! ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE!!! [This guy is obviously not reading BadUFOs.com!]

And how about the implants that have been removed from people (worldwide) that contain elements NOT KNOWN ON EARTH!!! You fella, are in SERIOUS DENIAL!!! [More to come on this in future postings.]

And I learned some interesting things: in trying to set up a longer future debate on a different internet radio channel, there was a difficulty in finding a UFO proponent willing to debate me! The UFO fabulist Stan Romanek flatly refused. This recalls the situation some years ago, when a number of famous UFO proponents, including J. Allen Hynek and Whitley Strieber, firmly refused to go on any TV or radio show if Klass was participating, and it looks like I am now carrying on that fine tradition. But I also understand that the indomitable Flying Saucer physicist, Stanton T. Friedman, is unafraid to debate. So we will probably see such a debate in the coming weeks. I'm looking forward to this immensely, because Friedman has said so many absurd things over the years that I will greatly enjoy making him eat them.

UFOs in the Desert, Part 5 (final)

2013-03-19T14:16:00.001-07:00

Sunday was the fifth and final day of the 2013 International UFO Congress in Fountain Hills, Arizona, the largest UFO conference in the world. My previous Blog posting covers the fourth day. Here is a link back to the first posting about the conference. And it looks like I did write a long, five-part report on this Congress, which I earlier said I didn't want to!

Paul Stonehill

Sunday began with Paul Stonehill, who was born in the Soviet Union, speaking on "UFOs of Russia and USSR."He explained that there were all kinds of UFOs in the Russian territories, ancient and modern. UFOs are depicted in ancient rock carvings, and there are "out of place" artifacts in ancient rock strata. The KGB was very interested in UFOs and paranormal phenomena, but Stalin had the records destroyed. Later there was an official Soviet military program for recording and studying UFO reports. In 1982, a UFO almost started World War III by initiating a nuclear missile's launch sequence for 15 minutes. Unlike UFOs in the U.S., which are reported to be peaceful and try to interfere with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, in the USSR UFOs apparently are warlike, and try to launch such missiles.

Stonehill also talked quite a bit about USOs - Unidentified Submersible Objects. Soviet divers have found themselves next to underwater humanoids working on recovering something, wearing no breathing apparatus.

John Greenwald, Jr.

The final speaker was John Greenwald, Jr., who spoke about "A Common Sense Reality Check on the UFO Phenomenon." A television producer and director, Greenwald has filed over 3,000 Freedom of Information requests on the UFO subject. He talked about mostly well-known cases, like Roswell, the 1952 Washington, DC sightings, and the 1976 air and ground sighting in Iran. He spoke about the 1985 Bob White encounter in western Colorado (he said, near Las Vegas). White supposedly recovered a piece that fell from the UFO, and kept it in the trunk of his car for many years. Eventually it was analyzed, and supposedly found to consist of completely unknown material. Greenwald forgot to mention that, according to a 2011 article in Skeptic Magazine, a professional in the steel industry states,

The object in question is made of accreted grinding residue. It forms in a manner similar to a common stalagmite when metal castings are “cleaned” on large stationary grinders.

But I suppose letting in a few relevant facts might spoil Greenwald's talk.

Karyn Dolan getting ready to play UFO Jeopardy

Immediately after the Greenwald talk, it was time to help test out a new game, UFO Jeopardy. Its rules are exactly the same as regular Jeopardy, but all categories are about UFOs or related subjects. The plan is to have the game ready to be played in public at the next Congress, or elsewhere. Micah Hanks was supposed to play in this round, but was unable to do so because he ended up on a panel at the same time. I was talking with him when that transpired, so he suggested that I take his place. The other two contestants were Greenwald, and Karyn Dolan, the wife of Richard Dolan. I actually ended up winning that round, although all three scores were quite close. I left someone take my place for the next round, and went back to see what was left of the final event on the program, the panel.

UFO Jeopardy with John Greenwald, Jr. (wearing tie) and Karyn Dolan.

On the final panel on Sunday Afternoon, "UFOlogy in the 21st Century" were Stanton Friedman, Richard Dolan, and Micah Hanks. Hanks sounded somewhat reasonable when he and I were talking not long before this, but in front of the audience he denounced "skeptibunkers," who propose outrageous explanations for credible UFO cases. Stanton Friedman admonished people not to be afraid to speak out, people will listen to your message. And Dolan worried whether UFO groups are doing enough to reach out to women and minority communities (echoing some of the same concerns certain skeptics have been saying!).

At this point, I packed up and headed off to Tucson, where I stayed a few days as the guest of James McGaha, where we did some astronomy and watched science fiction movies. Then I headed off to Old Tucson Studios, where I was in a group participating in a SteamPunk event, and then finally, home.

But now, a few photos from the UFO Congress, in no particular order:


James from the Future

This man is a time traveler, James from the Future. He says he does not know what year he has come back from, but it is after the New Age or whatever you call it has already occurred, that great Transformation in Consciousness that will be happening any day now. (Many people expected it to occur in 2012, but were disappointed.) James says he does not know why he was sent back, but he thinks it is to act as a historian to make better records about what was happening before the Transformation.

Leda, the "Glamour Queen" of the UFO Conference

This is Leda Beluche, the unofficial "Glamour Queen" and "Social Director" of the UFO Congress. I first met her here the previous year. She makes a lot of friends, and also tries, when possible, to smooth over perceived conflicts and disagreements. Leda realizes, as many others do not, that people can disagree about things but still be friends.

Her claim that she received several cell phone calls from her alien hybrid children, after last year's conference but before this one, attracted a lot of attention, and even some envy, from "experiencers" whose hybrid offspring are apparently less communicative. I'm sure Leda is sincere about this, but I told her somebody must have been playing a joke on her. How could they break into my cell phone calls? Not knowing the circumstances of the calls, I could not say.

Leda was examined for signs of alien activity by Steve Colbern of Alien & Scalpel Research, as she was last year. A photo of the 'open' part of that exam is in Part 3 of this report, in the middle. I am told that the people with Alien & Scalpel were very nervous when they saw me taking pictures. Here is my photo showing the A&S tool box, and examination room.

Alien & Scalpel's tool box, and examination room

Leda says that four "implants" were discovered that were transmitting. Presumably there might have been more that were temporarily switched off. Then she was 'scanned' using some ultra-violet device, and was told she had the most "dye" in her body of anyone at the Congress. I did not know that Aliens were injecting dye into peoples' bodies. Since Colbern sometimes reads this Blog and comments on it, I invite him to explain to us exactly how these discoveries were made.

Leda was quite worried about this "dye" when she related it to me afterward. I told her this was silly, and not to worry about it, as did James McGaha who was also there. She had been told that there was also an 'ancient symbol' on her thigh, and markings that seemed to show the imprint of presumably alien hands around her neck and wrist. She was told to come back for a follow-up examination the first thing next morning. She did, and was told that the "dye" had, thank goodness, disappeared, as had the 'ancient symbol.' She said that A&S had promised her drawings and photos illustrating their findings, but when I spoke to her on March 18 they still had not yet arrived.

Ben Hansen

Ben Hansen of the SyFy channel's "Fact or Fake" show. He is working with Night Optics USA, a Bushnell company, to promote its night vision devices. He is a very friendly fellow. The night vision skywatch at the conference was free for attendees, but on other occasions Hansen participates in sponsored skywatches that are paid events for the participants.

The author with Dr. Lynne

I also met Dr. Lynne Kitei, the indefatigable crusader for the Phoenix Lights. (If you Google "Phoenix Lights," her website is listed first. It is a cornucopia of questionable UFO claims.). At the Congress she was certainly a force to contend with in her leather outfit and stiletto heels. She came up to me to say hello, asking, "Do you know who I am?" "Certainly, Lynne, I was just looking at your website a little while back." Dr. Lynne, as she is fondly called, is friendly and personable, and certainly fully sincere. When I referred to the "first part" and "second part" of the Phoenix Lights sighting, she corrected me: there was no "first part" or "second part," it was just all UFOs, all night long. Even at sunrise, crews coming into work at Sky Harbor Airport saw a giant UFO a mile in diameter hovering above the airport, but unfortunately no photos were taken, and it didn't turn up on radar. I'm very glad that no aircraft collided with it! Dr. Lynne somehow manages to see more UFOs than just about anyone, in Phoenix or anywhere else, and she does it with panache.

UFOs in the Desert, Part 4

2013-03-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the fourth day of the International UFO Congress in Fountain Hills, Arizona, the largest UFO conference in the world. My previous Blog posting covers the third day. Here is a link back to the first posting about the conference.

Ben McGee

The first speaker on Saturday morning was Ben McGee, speaking on "Galactic Deep Time, Xenoarchaeology, and the case for Physical Artifacts as 'First Contact.'" He is best known as the skeptic guy on National Geographic Channel's dreadful Chasing UFOs which, I am happy to report, will not be renewed for another season. He has his own spaceflight consulting company.

He began by noting that at present, we can only scientifically demonstrate one kind of life: that of earth. But 'extremophile' life abounds on earth, suggesting that life can exist in a wide range of conditions. He described the history of life on earth in terms of "galactic years," the time required for one full rotation of our galaxy (220 million years). Hence "deep time" is important to think about in terms of the prevalence of ETI. Earth has had five major extinction events in the last 2.5 galactic years, and two within the last G.Y. So how long would a civilization last in our galaxy? L, or lifetime, is a term in the famous Drake Equation for estimating ETI, and choosing a longer or shorter value drastically alters the result. Isaac Asimov estimated, using the Drake Equation, that there are only 10 planets in our galaxy now that have advanced civilizations.

If drastic extinction events are common, then an estimated 325 million planets would contain not an actual civilization, but the ruins of one. Hence, Xenoarchaeology, the study of artifacts from extraterrestrial civilizations, which would require different methods than conventional archaeology. He did not explain how we are supposed to get to the places where Xenoarchaeology will be performed, although we may possibly encounter such artifacts in our own solar system, the remains of ancient visitations.

Later in the day I had a chance to speak with Ben (we had already been in contact by email). A woman was excitedly telling him about supposed "orbs" that appear in some of her photos, and he explained to her, with infinite patience, how this was the result of close-up dust particles in the air being illuminated by the flash. I semi-apologized to him for having to write such unkind things about the National Geographic's Chasing UFOs (as did nearly everyone else). He said he was disappointed in the show, too. The show was originally presented to them as a 'sightings investigation' type of program, but different producers took over and made it into a 'ghost hunters' type of loopy action show. I asked him what was he working on now, and he told me about a new series on the Weather Channel called "Forecasting the end," which premieres March 21. It deals with issues in geology, astronomy, and radiation science. It should be interesting.

James Fox

The next speaker was the documentary film director James Fox, who also was one of the regulars on Chasing UFOs (he was "the believer," to Ben's "skeptic.") He describes his work as a UFO documentary film producer (Out of the Blue, I Know What I Saw) as promoting the fulfillment of the public's "right to know" what is going on. "If we can get Michael Shermer to agree that 'structured craft' are real, then we're getting somewhere." This apparently refers to Shermer's unfortunate endorsement of Out Of The Blue as "one of the very best films ever produced on this, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of science." I beg to disagree: it is a totally one-sided Crockumentary. Fox spent a great deal of time talking about and illustrating the news coverage that he has received, and he showed some examples of his "gorilla marketing" of his films (I suspect he meant "guerilla").

Fox explained that he had arranged to interview Buzz Aldrin about the UFOs that supposedly followed him to the moon, but Aldrin backed out at the last minute because he feared losing funding from Paul Allen for SETI. Here is a YouTube video where Fox makes this same claim.

I did not realize that former Arizona governor Fife Symington's belated confession that he, too, saw the big V-shaped UFO of the Phoenix lights, ten years after the fact, was made while Fox was interviewing him. Later I had an opportunity to talk to Fox, and told him that there is good reason to believe that Symington is lying about his me-too sighting. (Symington was, after all, convicted on seven felony counts of fraud, overturned on a technicality, then pardoned by the outgoing President Clinton.) The first UFO event of the evening, the V-shaped lights (actually five Air National Guard A-10s flying in formation from Las Vegas to Tucson; Tim Printy has more about this) occurred from just before 8:00 PM until 8:45. The second event, that Fox agreed was a flare drop from different Air National Guard planes, began at 10:00 and lasted at most ten minutes. I reminded Fox that Symington claimed to have seen news coverage of the lights on TV, then went outside to look. He says he walked down to where the news crews had been filming the lights (the flare drop), and then saw the V-shape fly over, big and mysterious. However, there was no news coverage of the sightings before the planes landed about 8:45, and there could have been nobody filming the "lights" prior to 10:00, because the flares had not yet been dropped. Therefore Symington's claimed sighting occurred after 10:00, probably well after, and hence is an obvious fabrication. "No, he saw it at 8:20. It was 8:20," Fox insisted. "How could he have seen news coverage of this by 8:20?", I asked. "Maybe he heard chatter on the radio or something," Fox said. "How could there have been news crews filming this by 8:20?", I asked? Fox was having no more of this conversation. "Why would Symington have made this up?", another man asked me. "Because of the news coverage it gave him, and feature stories in which he talks about his new business ventures. It would have cost a lot to buy the publicity he got for free by claiming a UFO sighting."

Fox announced that his next UFO Crockumentary project was under way: 701 - The Movie. This, he says, is the number that the government does not want you to know - the number of Blue Book "unknowns." What Fox does not realize is that this number has already shrunk upon further analysis, and is set to shrink still further (see Tim Printy's Sunlite for more details).

Stanton Friedman

The next speaker was the inevitable Stanton T. Friedman, who promised "A New Look at the Cosmos," although very little in his talk was new. The rate of change in his presentation, if any, is glacial. He began talking about scientific mistakes of the past. To Friedman, rejecting UFOs is another of science's great mistakes. He presented the equations of fusion, without working out the actual results of those equations as did Dr. Edward M. Purcell, proving that interstellar travel using nuclear fusion is preposterous.

He termed SETI the "silly effort to investigate." After all, why look all across the cosmos for ETI when they're here right now? Friedman says that as part of a program on a cruise ship he debated two skeptics on the subject of UFOs. Against Seth Shostak, he claims he won the debate according to 58% of the audience, and against Michael Shermer by 80%.

People say that if the government had UFO secrets, they would have leaked out by now. Freidman claims that governments can keep secrets, and for his example he cites the Corona spy satellite program of the early 1960s, that supposedly was unknown until it was declassified in 1995. BZZZZT! Wrong-o, Stanton. In 1971 your good buddy Philip J. Klass, drawing upon what he learned in his work as Senior Avionics Editor at Aviation Leak magazine, wrote Secret Sentries in Space (Random House), which contains a detailed description of the then top-secret classified Corona program, explaining exactly what it is and how it works. Aviation Week magazine was the original Wikileaks. Klass always insisted that, if there were any government secrets about UFOs, he would have picked up on them long ago through his extensive network of sources. Friedman says that at least three out of over 100 supposedly leaked MJ-12 government UFO documents are authentic, meaning he concedes that some energetic hoaxer has produced the other 97%. I say it's 100%. We almost agree.

Interestingly, Friedman did not mention the Fish Map (a supposed extraterrestrial star map sketched by Betty Hill), but did go on about Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli, the supposed home stars of the UFOnauts, according to that map. It was good to see that he seems to have finally capitulated to the facts, and abandoned, at least in part, the famous Fish Map. However, for reasons that make no sense, he still clings to Zeta1 and Zeta2 as stars allegedly being the home base of the UFOnauts. Of course, once you concede that the Fish Map pattern means nothing, then the Zetas mean nothing, as well. So we should applaud Friedman for having taken little baby steps in the direction of truth. Not surprisingly, in view of the above Friedman was not exactly happy to see me.

Here is more bad news for Friedman from astronomers: Far-infrared observations have revealed "A flattened, disk-like structure with a semi-major axis of~ 100 AU in size is detected around zeta^2 Ret. The resolved structure suggests the presence of an eccentric dust ring, which we interpret as an exo-Kuiper belt." Which suggests that there are no planets around Zeta2, or they would have swept away this dust ring through constant collisions with its particles. But wait, there's more: Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 are not Main Sequence stars at all, but sub-dwarf stars, Class VI (Main Sequence stars are Class V). The Fish Map was supposed to exclude all non Main Sequence stars. If you don't understand all these terms, don't worry. It just means that the two Zetas are not really solar-type stars, and should have been excluded from the Fish Map. Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli.

Alain Boudier

The next talk, by Alain Boudier, was potentially the most significant and newsworthy of the entire Congress. It is the only one that promises genuinely new and historically significant information. Boudier said that the 3AF is the most prestigious organization of its kind in France. It is an aerospace organization, not a government body, equivalent to the American AIAA (which had its own flirtation wqith UFOs over forty years ago, and thankfully not since). The UFO report of the 3AF Sigma Commission is set to be released in a few months. Until then, he said, he cannot discuss it, and then he proceeded to do just that.

This report, he promised, will be different than the “official” history of UFOs. It appears that the intent of the report is to push the entire UFO chronology back, before Arnold, to include the World War II era. He talked about foo fighters, the Battle of Los Angeles, and some pre-Arnold sightings in the Pacific before moving on to Roswell, which he accepts as a genuine alien crash.

The report’s conclusions were that the U.S. military made its first UFO crash retrievals in 1941 (by the Navy, off the coast of San Deigo), and on Feb. 26, 1942 (by the Army, in the San Bernardino mountains). Supposedly a document from FDR mentions the retrievals. The U.S. formed an “Interplanetary Phenomena Unit” to manage these retrievals. This allowed the development of otherwise-unknown technology, which he suggested was used to defeat Japan. You heard it right, folks: reverse-engineered alien technology was used to build the atomic bomb.

Alain Boudier and Antonio Huneeus

A lot of people at the conference seem to have missed this bombshell announcement. Boudier was speaking in French, with Antonio Huneeus translating (who did extremely well considering that his native language was neither French nor English, but Spanish). Still, with the inevitable delays the talk was difficult to listen to, and many people left the auditorium. Based on what Boudier told us, when the 3AF UFO report is finally released, the 3AF will no longer be considered “prestigious,” but a laughingstock.

David Hatcher Childress

The final speaker of Saturday was David Hatcher Childress, whose talk was titled “Tesla, UFOs, and Atlantean Technology.” He was described as a “co-star” of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and a “real-life Indiana Jones.” It looked to me like he had the biggest audience of any speaker, which tells you a lot about who is attending this conference.

He started talking about the ancients’ apparent levitation of heavy stones, and the use of power tools. At this point I left, having heard such stuff many times before on Ancient Aliens. I didn’t stay to find out if Tesla stole his discoveries from the Atlanteans, or vice versa.

UFOs In the Desert, Part 3.

2013-03-05T09:10:00.002-08:00

Friday was the third day of the International UFO Congress in Fountain Hills, Arizona, the largest UFO conference in the world. My previous Blog posting covers the second day. Here is a link back to the first posting about the conference.

Dr. Michael Dennin

The first speaker Friday morning was Dr. Michael Dennin, professor of physics and astronomy at UC Irvine. He explained many basic physics and astronomy concepts to the audience, such as light years, conservation of energy, general relativity, etc. Putting it all together, the prospect of interstellar travel looks pretty implausible for any society, no matter how advanced, so long as it must obey the laws of physics. Given how difficult interstellar travel is, Dennin said it is hard to imagine secret visits.

But he did throw a few bones to the pro-ET crowd, that he admits to be "pure speculation."

1. A "warped highway" might permanently warp the space between objects by putting mass between them. He didn't say how many solar masses this might require.

2. We might find a wormhole. (There is no evidence whatever that wormholes are real vs. merely theoretical, and a lot of good of physics to say they are virtually impossible.)

3. Some societies may become relativistic nomads, and take extremely long interstellar voyages at relatively low speeds. Such voyages would be measured in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.

Richard Dolan

Next came UFO author Richard Dolan, speaking on "UFOs for the 21st Century." He mused about the past twenty years that he has been investigating UFOs. The internet, he says, has raised the noise-to-signal ratio, and he also noted the rise of non-physical, non-ET theories. (I've been investigating UFO claims for over forty years, and I know that non-physical theories were popular back then - Vallee's Passport to Magonia, Jerome Clark, John Keel, etc.) UFO "Disclosure" would truly rock our world.

Dolan managed to bring in just about every loopy idea that has come up in recent years: ancient pyramids, crash retrievals, reverse-engineeered alien technology, a "secret space program," alien hybrids, telepathic alien contact, and mind control. Mention this the next time somebody refers to Dolan as a "conservative UFOlogist." The reason for the UFO cover up, he suggested, is because the secret of the UFOs' alien propulsion system threatens petroleum interests, the same claim that Steven Greer makes in the wild conspiracy movie Thrive.


Are you ready for another 'alien encounters' TV series?

Marc Dantonio

The next speaker was the very interesting Marc Dantonio on "Photo and Video Anomalies: 2013 Update." He is MUFON's chief photo/video analyst, and president of FX models. His company makes UFOs and other implausible things - for TV. Dantonio has upset some people in the UFO field, simply because his investigations of purported UFO photos and videos are so good. As an expert in special effects, it would be extremely difficult for a hoaxer to fool him. As I mentioned in Part 2 concerning the Thursday panel, Huffington Post Weird News reporter Lee Speigel receives many purported UFO photos and videos. He sends the interesting ones to Dantonio, who told Speigel that he had not yet sent over anything that's unidentified.

He showed us photos and videos that show lens flares, aircraft operation, solar balloons, the blinking lights on a vehicle, a reflection on a windshield, blowing snow, a flock of geese, digital skywriting, a butterfly, and views of a tower from Google Earth, directly above it.

Dantonio says that the testimony of the witnesses often does not match the submitted photo or video, so the witnesses often are unwilling to accept his analysis, insisting "I know what I saw!" He resolves the dilemma by explaining that his comments pertain to the photograph, not to the observation. "The purpose is not primarily to debunk the footage, but to illustrate that we must be very hard on the data in order to find the holy grail of UFOlogy." Amen, brother!

This might make it sound like Dantonio is a skeptic, but he is not. He said that about 15 years ago, he had a traumatic encounter event, in which he awoke at night, paralyzed, and was menaced by terrifying creatures. I regret that, when I spoke to him later, I forgot to mention the well-known phenomenon of sleep disorders and hallucinations, which his experience describes to a "T." Wikipedia says, "Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are symptoms commonly experienced during episodes of sleep paralysis." However, we did discuss some other weird science ideas that he suggests make interstellar travel possible, like the Alcubierre Drive, that supposedly moves space out of the way, and pushes it behind the craft. This supposedly would enable us to effectively travel faster than light.

Dr. Roger Leir

Next were Dr. Roger Leir and Steven Colbern, on "Alien Implants: The Tip of the Iceberg." Leir spoke first. He has performed 16 surgeries to remove implants from alleged alien abductees. His Alien & Scalpel Research is incorporated as a 5013c company, and does not charge for any of the surgeries.

Leir described at length some weird events associated with surgery #15. The man had a small puncture wound on the underside of his toe, although this entry point is hardly necessary as aliens can "disassociate matter" and even move through walls. A&S went into full Ghost Hunter mode at the man's house, with radio frequency scanners, magnetometers, and radiation detectors. Many anomalies were discovered, including a magnetic monopole (something sought more eagerly even than unicorns), and magnetized wood and plastic. The man's wife was in a "constant state of denial" about all this.

During the man's surgery, his implant kept moving away from the scalpel. It broke into twelve pieces; one disappeared. 48 hours after their removal, the remaining pieces reassembled themselves.

Steve Colbern examines Leda Beluche for alien markings at the Alien & Scalpel table.

Steve Colbern talked about the supposed alien implant removed during surgery #15. It is similar in appearance to a meteorite, and consists of carbon fiber nanotubes, a manufactured nanotechnology device of unknown purpose. 32 trace elements were detected, including iridium, and meteoric iron. One magnetic pole of the object is stronger than the other (which I think makes it a magnetic monopole, as well).

Lee Speigel, David H. Childress, Antonio Huneeus, Dr. Michael Dennin

The last session of Friday was a panel on "Ancient Aliens" with David Hatcher Childress, Dr. Michael Dennin, and Open Minds reporter Antonio Huneeus substituting for Jason Martel. If you've watched Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, you've seen Childress many times. He talked about out-of-place artifacts in rock strata millions of years old. But he said that they might have been planted by time travelers. Huneeus suggested that life on earth may have been seeded from space - deliberately. Dr. Dennin cautioned that round objects in the sky seen in old drawings and paintings are simply "generic" shapes. They are not structured, complex shapes - that would be more significant.

In the evening there was a free Skywatch, hosted by Ben Hansen of SyFy's Fact or Faked?, and sponsored by Night Optics USA, a Bushnell company. Their hope was to sell some very expensive night vision equipment to UFO enthusiasts (their products cost thousands of dollars each). I suspect that they were disappointed.

John Rao, the founder of Open Minds, drives his UFO spotting vehicle to the evening skywatch.


The vehicle has two cameras. One is infrared, the other isn't.

I have written before about the new fad for night-vision devices among UFO enthusiasts. Let's just say that many people are using devices they do not understand, and are making incorrect conclusions about what they are seeing. A good pair of binoculars will show you at least as many objects, and at far better resolution, than a night vision device.

The audience watching Night Optics' displays, hoping to see UFOs.

People stood in line for their turn to personally look through the different night vision devices. Meanwhile James McGaha and I had brought our portable telescopes, and offered views of Jupiter, the Pleiades, and the Orion nebula. On the big screen, a satellite or something was briefly noted but nothing of UFOlogical significance was seen all night.

The cameras of the UFO spotting vehicles was pointed to the south. This ATV has been customized with dual cameras in the back. However, I am given to understand that these are not astronomical cameras, but instead are security cameras as are used by the Border Patrol to look for illegal border crossers, and do not have the resolution that is typical of astronomical cameras.

Electronics in the UFO-spotting vehicle. Note "orb" on the screen.

In the photo you can see the round object that Rao suggested was an "orb." It slowly drifted from left to right across the screen, and he would repeatedly bring it back to the left side again. It was obviously an out-of-focus star image, moving from east to west because the camera does not have celestial tracking to compensate for the rotation of the earth. Orbs don't usually last this long, he remarked, they disappear quickly. I had a green laser pointer, and laid it against the edge of the camera. The beam pointed exactly to Epsilon Canis Majoris (Adhara), a star of magnitude 1.5 (brighter than the stars in the Big Dipper) due south about 25 degrees up. This was his orb. James McGaha came by, and tried to show him how to focus the image. When that was done, the "orb" shrank down to a pinpoint size.

UFOs In the Desert, Part 2

2013-02-28T22:18:00.000-08:00

Thursday was the second day of the International UFO Congress in Fountain Hills, Arizona, the largest UFO conference in the world. My previous Blog posting covers the first day.

The first speaker of the day was Micah Hanks, author and researcher and another very glib speaker, talking about "The UFO Singularity." Futurists like to talk about the coming "singularity," meaning that as our machines' artificial intelligence continues to increase, for precisely one moment of time their intelligence will equal ours - and then forever afterward, theirs will be greater. Intelligent machines will then be the dominant force on this planet, and this may lead to a heaven on earth, or perhaps a hell (as in the movie The Matrix). This, of course, has nothing to do with UFOs.

Micah Hanks

Or does it? Hanks suggests that UFOs may represent a "post-singularity technology," probably originating here on earth, that somehow "transcends temporality." Sounds fancy. Micah says, "I'm known as the guy who says UFOs come from earth." This somehow ties in with Nazi saucers and other World War II developments, by way of a very circuitous path. He acknowledges, however, that UFOs might also represent a post-singularity extraterrestrial technology.

A Post-Singularity technology might know how to "reverse entropy," and then there is no telling what they might be able to do. They may have a technology that "evades temporality altogether," which might be easier than it sounds since time does not exist, it is an illusion.

Dr. Leo Sprinkle

The next speaker was the venerable Dr. Leo Sprinkle, psychologist and pioneering UFO abductionist,. His talk was titled "Memories of an ET Experiencer and Spiritual Pigtailer." Sprinkle has been hypnotically regressing supposed ET experiencers for over forty years, and still looks vigorous and spry at age 82. Only in recent years did Sprinkle reveal that he believes he is an ET experiencer himself.

Sprinkle had his first UFO sighting in 1949. He told about some childhood experiences that he now interprets in terms of ET abduction. He said you can analyze the "meaning" of any UFO sighting you might have by looking into your soul, by evaluating your feelings about it. The UFO is a "sign" for you. He talked a good bit about reincarnation. He believes he had a past life as a woman, who was not allowed to read books. His proof of reincarnation is in his feelings; he talked a lot about feelings. Perhaps, he suggested, these paranormal experiences herald the end of Partiarchy and of the male God.

one of Jaime Maussan's presentations in Mexico

Jason Martell had been scheduled to speak next about Ancient Astronauts. However, he was injured in some sort of accident (I don't have any more information about that), so the also-venerable Jaime Maussan was pressed into service. Maussan is the best-known UFO personality in Mexico, and is famous for his blockbuster videos and photos that are extremely remarkable, if true.

Maussan said that worldwide UFO sightings have increased dramatically recently because of December 21, 2012, and aliens are now sending us messages by creating meteorological formations in the sky. He showed what were supposedly "vortexes" in meteorological charts, "messages" he says of "the new time."

He showed many blurry photos and videos. There was a huge black sphere sucking energy out of the sun - probably a Mothership, he suggested. NASA's Spirit rover photographed a human figure on Mars, and also a "little house." We saw objects (probably satellites in nlow earth orbit) crossing the face of the moon. Russia, he says, now has the greatest number of UFO sightings of any country, and he showed Russian videos of supposed "motherships." He also played videos having very low-pitch "unexplained" sounds or hums. Maussan's talk was loony, but the audience loved it.

Dolores Cannon

The next speaker was Dolores Cannon, another hypnotherapist, with over 50 years' experience. "She is also a published author of many books composed in part of transcripts from past life regression sessions." She knows a great deal about our spirit guides, "The Watchers." They help us arrange each of our lives. ETs created us by manipulating the genes of the ape. ETs are not trying to take over the earth - they already own it.

You probably know, she suggests, that Star Trek is not fiction - it is real. The ETs try not to interfere in a civilization unless it gets too violent, which is what happened to the Atlanteans. And it is always the men who mess things up by getting too violent. This forces the ETs to step in and wipe them out.

The final session of the day was a panel, "Investigating UFOs," with James Fox, Nick Pope, Marc Dantonio, hosted by Lee Speigel. If you have been reading Speigel's articles in The Huffington Post, you know that he has been receiving quite a few purported UFO photos and videos, and he has been sending them to Dantonio for analysis. Marc Dantonio is MUFON's chief photo/video analyst, and president of FX Models, a model making and special effects company. His company makes UFOs - for TV and movies. While Dantonio believes that some UFO cases are authentic, he is actually a very skeptical guy. We must remove all of the possible 'knowns,' he said, if it's a close correlation to something we already know, he concludes it is that. And he said something that amazed me: "Lee, you haven't yet given me anything 'unknown.'" He says, "I am harsh on the data," even though witnesses insist "I know what I saw!" But Dantonio tells them that my comments are directed toward the data - the photo or video - not toward what you saw.

Lee Speigel, James Fox, Nick Pope, Marc Dantonio

Pope said that people give more credence to sightings by pilots, and that is proper, but we should not dismiss sightings by ordinary folk. Fox said he had offered some commercial pilots who had UFO sightings $10,000 to come forward and tell their stories; they declined, saying they would lose their jobs. Speigel related how skeptic James Oberg had said to him that pilots actually make rather poor witnesses, which he felt was wrong; Pope pronounced Oberg to be "dead-pan wrong." I had a chance during the Q&A to point out that Oberg did not originate that idea: it was actually stated by J. Allen Hynek (which seemed to take the entire panel by surprise). On p. 271 of the 1977 book The Hynek UFO Report, the former Blue Book scientific consultant said, "Surprisingly, commercial and military pilots appear to make relatively poor witnesses."

Fox claimed that NASA's photos of Mars are all pretty clear, except when the camera points toward the Cydona area (which supposedly contains a Face on Mars). In that case, the photos are all blurred.

In the evening, I attended the U.S. Premiere of a film called Solar Evolution. It suggested that the December solstice in 2012 (which had not yet happened) would usher in certain great changes, and somehow the sun would play a role in all this evolutionare New Age stuff. Beware of the coming Solar Maximum, it warned - even though the current solar cycle is the feeblest in about a century!

UFOs In the Desert, Part 1

2013-02-27T23:01:00.000-08:00

For the second year in a row, I find myself at the International UFO Congress near Phoenix, Arizona. Last year I wrote a detailed five-part account of the conference. I told myself I wouldn't write as much this year, but it looks like this resolution may be broken.

Lee Speigel

When I arrived Tuesday evening, February 26, I ran into Lee Speigel in the restaurant, the 'weird news' reporter for AOL/Huffington post, who is the Host of this Conference, and who I have known for years. I would call Speigel a "skeptical believer," meaning that while he thinks some UFO cases may be beyond our present knowledge, he realizes that the great majority of UFO claims are frankly not worth much. Speigel was with Ben Hansen of Fact or Faked on the SyFy Channel, who was the first speaker Wednesday morning, and who takes a similar position.

Ben Hansen

The next morning, after Speigel's introduction, Ben Hansen spoke on "Profiling the Hoaxers." He explained that his background in law enforcement prepares him well for forensic evidence of UFO and other 'paranormal' evidence. He describes himself as neither a believer or skeptic, but a "verifier." He explains that hoaxes abound in UFOlogy, and that there can be big money in making bogus ET claims, although he will not name any names. He set forth the following "Hoaxer Subtypes," based on his experience in law enforcement and with paranormal claims:

1. Clinical Con Artist. Charismatic, lacks conscience. Claims of persecution by federal agencies - a red flag, there is so much red tape for intelligence actions that these claims are not at all credible. Some of these people have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The mentally disordered tend to gravitate to "our field," i.e. UFOlogy.

2. Legendizers, seeking fame and/or financial gain. May have had a legitimate experience, but you can only tell the same story so many times, so they add more and more 'excitement' each time it is told.

3. Commercial Campaigners. Publicity stunts. They are not in it for the long-haul, the hoax usually only lasts a few weeks. This damages the credibility of the UFO field, it makes people dismiss legitimate cases.

4. Self-amused pranksters. Motivated by the challenge of pulling it off.

5. Disinformation agents, the rarest type. The government changed its story on Roswell, repeatedly. The 1956 documentary movie UFO was part of a debunking contingency plan. (This category sounds dubious to me).

When a story or a video is crafted to capture emotion, this is a sign of a hoax. You have to think like a movie director, if the crafting of a video appears to be planned out to demonstrate credibility, this is dubious as a real video would be taken without preparation or warning. Also, cerftain technical errors in the creation of a video reveal a hoax. Bigfoot videos tend to show the creature moving left-to-right much more than the opposite. Either Bigfoot walks in circles, or else it is staged to look this way. But he believes that some Bigfoot sightings are valid, as are some UFO sightings.

It's obvious that Hansen is a bright guy. I think that "verifiers" and "skeptics" can work well together.

The second talk was "UFOs Over Native American Land," by Stanley Milford and John Dover, who are current or retired law enforcement (respectively) for the Navajo Nation, an area that mostly lies between the Grand Canyon and Four Corners, and is larger than ten states. (The UFO Congress takes place on an Indian Reservation, hence the attached Casino.) They spent the first part of their talk illustrating the work they normally do: performing rescues, battling wildfires, assisting with accidents, etc. But these two officers headed up the Rangers' Special Projects Unit, which "managed the investigation of those cases that would be deemed 'paranormal,' such as witchcraft, Bigfoot sightings, hauntings, and UFO sightings," although these are only about 1-2% of the cases of Special Projects.

In the "Ol'Man Case," an elderly Navajo claimed that a brilliantly-illuminated UFO circled his remote desert house. He then saw, looking out the window, four aliens walking around with flashlights. The Rangers also received reports of Bigfoot sightings and tracks, witchcraft, and Shapeshifters (similar to werewolves). Such beliefs, they explained, are very prevalent on the Reservation. If there's something strange, in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Navajo Rangers!

With the passing of Budd Hopkins and John Mack, that leaves Barbara Lamb, licensed psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and regression therapist, as one of the leading 'UFO Abduction researchers' in the world. She has performed more than 2,100 "regressions" on hundreds of individuals, "regarding details of encounters they have had with a variety of extraterrestrial beings." In fact, says Lamb, there are many different alien species abducting Earthlings. Her talk was about ET/Human Hybrids, and it was essentially the same talk I heard her give to the MUFON Symposium in 2011.

Many women, says Lamb, have "missing pregnancies" where the fetus is extracted by aliens, up to 3 months' term. Many of these alien races are dying out, including the Zeta Reticulans (that abducted Betty and Barney Hill), and must pilfer our breeding stock to replenish theirs. She seems not to realize that our DNA is much closer to that of a dandelion than it would be to whatever genetic code might have been evolved by beings on a completely alien world. It's worse than trying to rebuild a Chevy engine using Ford parts - much, much worse.

One man came into therapy because he was no longer able to have sex with his wife. Ms. Lamb determined the cause of his problem to be that during a UFO abduction, he had been tricked into having sex with a particularly repulsive Reptilian female. Some women, she asserts, have a long-term companion who is an 'extraterrestrial husband,' in addition to a normal earthly one. Many of them are pleased with this arrangement. She showed drawings of supposed ET/human hybrids, in various stages of integration into the human genome, as well as photos of persons alleged to be late-stage hybrids who are (mostly) successful at passing for human. Some are fashion models, whose gaunt, angled face is said to demonstrate alien ancestry, although anorexia and heroin might produce the same effect. A few people actually claim to be human/ET hybrids; apparently it gives them a certain notoriety.

Nick Pope

The next speaker was Nick Pope, who supposedly ran "the British Government's UFO Project," although in reality he didn't run anything, and worked part-time on the UFO Project from 1991 to 1994. He began his talk on the defensive, emphasizing that he did not actually predict an alien invasion, as many news stories and blogs reported last summer. I was, he said, merely promoting a space war type of video game, and reporters took my comments out of context. I wrote a Blog entry about this last August 22. Comments like, "The government must - and has planned - for the worst-case scenario: alien attack and alien invasion. Space shuttles, lasers and directed-energy weapons are all committed via the Alien Invasion War Plan to defence against any alien ships in orbit." Sorry Nick, that excuse doesn't work, as anyone can tell if they Google "Nick Pope Alien Invasion," which also brings up a story from October 12, 2012, "Britain has alien-war weapons, says former government adviser," and even "Aliens Could Attack at Any Time" from 2006. Stop trying to fool us, Nick, and admit you said these things.

Pope promised to discuss some of the most interesting cases in the MOD files, but mostly used the time relating anecdotes of the UFO Project. There are "interesting gems," he said, hidden among thousands of pages of mostly worthless stuff. He hinted at the destruction of military records pertaining to UFO sightings. He warned several times that UFOs are a potential hazard to aviation.

Grant Cameron

Grant Cameron has been active in UFO and paranormal research for almost forty years. He has become something of an expert at digging up documentation that has greatly assisted our understanding of many UFO cases, especially "presidential UFOs." He spoke on "Consciousness and UFOs." He explained that he is convinced that no real progress in knowledge about UFOs will be made until we successfully contact the beings involved, which he is sure is possible. He noted that one person claiming mental contact was the former Democratic Congressman, Dennis Kucinich, who not only had a sighting that lasted several hours [how can you watch something like that for hours without getting cameras, binoculars, the neighbors, the news crew, the police, etc?], but also said that he "felt a connection" with the UFO that he and the others sighted. "You have to make contact, you can't watch from a distance," says Cameron. He feels that the idea of UFO contact has been made disreputable because of certain people whose famous claims of contact are not credible. He showed photos of three persons he was implying to be phonies: Billy Meier, George Adamski, and Steven Greer. (No argument there!)

Cameron spoke at length about a well-known but still somewhat mysterious figure in the early history of UFOlogy: Wilbert Smith, a Canadian radio engineer. In 1953 Smith somehow convinced Canadian authorities to allow him to set up a small project to investigate flying saucers, having supposedly determined that the American government considers the subject of the highest priority and secrecy. Smith was among those who supposedly experienced 'contact' with the extraterrestrials.

Cameron's argument is: If you can show that the idea of mental contact with UFOs predates the earliest contactee, Adamski, then you have shown that it is not derivative from them. This argument is quite correct, even ingenious, and indeed he demonstrates his claim. But the problem is, you still haven't proven that the "contact" is real; all you've proved is that Adamski didn't make it up. Cameron is a dynamic speaker and obviously sincere; he brought the audience to its feet.

Ingo Swann (1933-2013) - Psychic Astronaut

2013-02-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Ingo Swann, remote viewer and psychic astronaut, died on February 1 at the age of 79. Many skeptics today probably won't even recognize the name, but Swann played a major role in several "classic" parapsychology experiments, including the Pentagon's "Remote Viewing." His "accomplishments" are mentioned in the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. (A book I highly recommend! You can't imagine the crazy stuff that went on.) In the 1970s Swann worked extensively with Targ and Puthoff at SRI International, the team whose loosey-goosey 'validation' of Uri Geller's magic powers has been soundly criticized. Swann was always considered among the the "best" of the Remote Viewers.

Ingo Swann awes J. Allen Hynek (The National Enquirer, Sept. 9, 1975).

Swann's best-known parapsychological feats were when he and psychic Harold Sherman took Psychic Voyages to Mercury and Jupiter (just ahead of the Pioneer 10 probe). The Enquirer reporter interviewed the most famous UFOlogist in the world, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, former scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, who said "These are things that Mr. Swann couldn't have guessed or read about. His impressions of Mercury and Jupiter cannot be dismissed... I was fascinated by the Jupiter findings of Pioneer 10 when I compared them with Mr. Swann's. His impressions of Jupiter, along with his experience with Mercury, most certainly point the way to more experimentation." (For more about Hynek's weird beliefs, see "The Secret Life of J. Allen Hynek" by John Franch in the January/February 2013 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer. Also see my earlier Blog entry, Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and the "Pentacle Memorandum." )

Carl Sagan's evaluation of Ingo Swann's "Psychic Voyages"

However, another astronomer looked at the results of Swann's psychic space travel, and came to a very different conclusion: Carl Sagan. Philip J. Klass sent Sagan a copy of this National Enquirer article - Sagan's reply is above. He calls the results "dreadful - sort of vague remembrances of sixth-grade general science." In the "little book" to which he refers, Sagan writes of "two courageous American mystics" who made an "astral projection" trip to Jupiter. "If their reports had been submitted in my elementary astronomy course, they would have received grades of "D" .... they were filled with the most obvious misunderstandings both about Jupiter and about Pioneer 10."

Sagan's comments in his book Other Worlds.

In 1975 Swann wrote To Kiss Earth Good-Bye, which contains some really fascinating stuff. He makes the usual predictions of an impending ecological disaster. (The exact nature of the disaster changes from time to time, but that ecological disaster is always there in the near future, waiting for us.) Swann tells how he first established an ESP connection with one of his houseplants, asking it what was wrong when it was not doing well. The plant replied by projecting mental images to him.

Later Swann got together with Clive Backster, the man who discovered the "Backster effect": ESP with plants hooked up to a polygraph. (When "UFO abductee" Travis Walton and his pals were trying to set up a mutually-agreed upon polygraph test for them with Philip J. Klass, Backster was their choice.) They hooked the polygraph to a philodendron, but had poor results because, according to Swann, the plant was too strong-minded. They later tried hooking the equipment up to a piece of "rubberized graphite." They found it had no mind at all, but Swann gave himself headaches trying to communicate with it, anyway. The book is filled with all kinds of wild psychic visions and experiences.

Swann's website is still up at http://biomindsuperpowers.com/ .

"Psychic Vibrations" Now Available as an e-Book from JREF!

2013-01-31T13:16:00.000-08:00

Good news! My latest book Psychic Vibrations, taken from my columns of that name published in The Skeptical Inquirer, is now available as an E-Book from JREF, the James Randi Educational Foundation.

The E-Book is available in all three major E-Book formats: Kindle, Nook, and I-books. The cost of the E-Book is $7.99. For more information, see http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/37-static/1414-ebooks.html

You can, of course, still get the paperback edition of the book. Follow the book icon at the top right of this page, and be sure to include the discount code SPK8R6GT to get 25% off. Your cost will be $14.96. Plus shipping of course: unlike electrons, books made of paper cannot be shipped for free!

More Physics vs. UFOs

2013-01-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

Let's continue the theme of two recent postings, the clash between what we know about physics, and UFO claims and beliefs.

In Is there a Warp Drive In your Future? (December 2), UCSD physics professor Tom Murphy examines the claim, "If it can be imagined, it can be done." He reports, "It took me all of two seconds to violate this dictum as I imagined myself jumping straight up to the Moon... I wondered how pervasive this attitude was among physics students and faculty. So I put together a survey. The overriding theme: experts say don't count on a Star Trek future."

Then in Is Interstellar Travel 'Preposterous'? (December 29), we examine three "classic" papers written by physicists in the 1960s, discussing the feasibility of interstellar travel. Nobel laureate Edward M. Purcell examines the difficulties posed not by technological limitations, but by fundamental laws of physics, and pronounces the idea "preposterous."

E-Skeptic's illustration accompanying the Gainer article (by Nancy White)

Another article in this same vein recently appeared in E-Skeptic, the email newsletter from the Skeptics Society. It is titled The Physics of UFOs - How Realistic is it for spacecraft to travel interstellar distances to earth? Its author is Dr. Michael K. Gainer, Emeritus Professor of Physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, PA.

Echoing the points made fifty years ago by Purcell, Von Hoerner, and Markowitz, Gainer reminds us

The basic principles of physics are applicable independently of where in the galaxy a stellar system is located and will not change over time. Newton’s three laws of motion and the conservation of energy are descriptions of the manner in which different parts of a physical system interact. Consequently, a model based on an exploratory expedition leaving Earth would apply equally to all planetary systems in our galaxy. Any culture, no matter how advanced in technology, would face the same constraints imposed by physics.

He starts with the assumption that a vessel to make such a trip would need to have a mass at least about 100 times that of America's late Space Shuttle, with its living quarters, life support, nuclear fusion reactor, etc. Assume we want to travel to a star system 10 light years away at 0.5c, a trip that would take about 20 years, "For propulsion of the hypothetical spacecraft the blast energy would have to be converted, with near 100% efficiency, to a constrained unidirectional particle beam with thrust pulses of 1.8 megatons per second for 174 days." But here is the rub (and here is what upsets the Star Trek Skeptics crowd): "There is no possible material construction that can constrain and direct the thermal and blast energy of the nuclear fusion rate required for interstellar travel. Consequently, I conclude that alien spacecraft cannot exist." This agrees exactly with what the physics Nobel Laureate Edward M. Purcell explained to us fifty years ago.

But some people who self-identify as skeptics don't want to hear anything like this. Immediately following Gainer's E-Skeptic article is a "rebuttal" to Gainer by Peter Huston, whose degree is not in the physical sciences, but in Asian Studies. Huston objects,

To a non-physicist such as myself, the obvious questions are “Why is such a material impossible?” and “Why is thermonuclear power the only feasible power source?”

To answer these questions, he turned to science fiction writer Carl Fredrick, who is also a retired physics professor. Summarizing Fredrick's response, Huston writes:

First, to assume that something is impossible because current technology, as opposed to the known laws of physics, doesn’t allow it is “silly.” Other points were that there is a great deal of research being done into controlled fusion and that might considerably change the way in which a thermonuclear spacecraft engine might work. Furthermore, as there are now indications that quantum physics might allow a spacecraft to draw energy from the vacuum as it travels, the thermonuclear engines might not be the only source of fuel. Additionally, Frederick said that the Gainer assumed that nuclear fusion is the best form of energy. He disagreed saying that particle / anti-particle annihilation was a better alternative. Finally, he said, there’s no reason one couldn’t go slower and use less fuel, if you, for instance, freeze the crew.

If Dr. Fredrick knows how to obtain antimatter to use as fuel, and how to control and constrain it, we would be very interested to know this. "Zero point" quantum energy from space is a common woo-physics claim (see, for example, Dr. Harold Puthoff), but is not accepted by mainstream physics.

Huston adds a few more lame suggestions, such as "Couldn’t it use solar sails catching photons and the gravitational forces of planets and other astronomical objects to help slow itself?" He obviously doesn't have a clue concerning the magnitude mass and the momentum of the craft. One could much more easily use solar sails to stop a speeding freight train than a massive spaceship traveling at half the speed of light. Huston concludes, "We [skeptics] are supposed to be the people who read, question and think—not the ones who blindly repeat assertions that fit our pre-conceived notions. I think we, as skeptics, need to be more careful of such statements and false conclusions. They only hurt us in the end." As if the need to obey the laws of physics were a 'pre-conceived notion.'

Gainer's response to Huston is in the following issue of E-Skeptic, and begins by noting the difference between "belief systems and science... A belief system need not concern itself with objective reality. This contrasts with science in which theories are subject to objective evaluation by repeated experiment and measurement. Science assumes a priori the existence of a measurable objective reality. Indeed, science is the delineation of this reality." He continues, "any spacecraft, whether from present or future technology, would have a significant inertial mass. Ten thousand years from now conservation of energy will apply anywhere in the galaxy as well as it does today."

As for the objection that magical future technologies could somehow build substances that can be used to constrain fusion reactions, "because of the maximum cohesive force that electrons can create between protons no substance will remain solid above 5000ºC. " The temperature of a nuclear fusion reaction is on the order of 10,000,000 degrees C. That has nothing to do with present-day, or future technologies. It is because the energy of the strong nuclear force released in the fusion reaction is overwhelmingly more powerful than the weak electromagnetic bonds that hold atoms and molecules together. But the Star Trek Skeptics don't want to hear this. They want to believe that some future technological wizard will invent a super-glue whose atomic binding is even stronger than the strong nuclear force. Gainer concludes, "It is not present or future technology that negates interstellar travel—it is the nature and structure of matter and the universe."

Is Interstellar Travel "Preposterous"?

2012-12-29T20:22:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that a solid statement of the case against the feasibility of interstellar travel is not easily available, and hence is not well-known to the public. Following on my recent posting Is There a Warp Drive in your Future?, which considers the question of what technologies are or are not likely to exist in the future, let us now examine the general question of the feasibility of interstellar travel. In this inquiry, we are not concerned with technological difficulties or breakthroughs, but with fundamental laws of physics. Even if the only limits we faced were those of physics, not technology, what are the prospects of making interstellar travel a reality?

Stanton Friedman, the “Flying Saucer Physicist,” is confident that interstellar travel is not only possible, but likely. In his essay UFO Propulsion Systems, Friedman writes,

a one-way trip of thirty-seven years (the distance to Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli) at 99.9 percent c would take only twenty months’ crew time; at 99.99 percent c it would take only six months’ crew time. Thus even a trip to a distant galaxy such as Andromeda, two million light-years away, would take under sixty years’ crew time if the intergalactic ship somehow could manage to keep accelerating at one G, using some yet unknown technique.

various proposals for fusion-powered rockets

Ah, that pesky little “yet unknown technique.” Now this is all perfectly true, but it blithely ignores some very fundamental problems that are not related to any level of technology. A trio of “classic” papers written in the 1960s by physicists examine the fundamental physics involved in proposed interstellar travel, and explain the formidable obstacles: obstacles imposed by fundamental laws of physics, not by limits of technology. Note that nothing here rules out the possibility of travel within our solar system, even to its edges, or rules out non-relativistic interstellar travel, taking thousands of years to reach one's destination. But the notion that we will someday travel between stars the way we now sail between seaports is pure fantasy.

These articles sufficed to convince the scientific community that the concept of interstellar travel is utterly implausible, and explanations for UFO sightings must be sought elsewhere, in psychology and sociology, not in physics. However, in recent years these articles have largely been overlooked, so I think it’s very important to examine each one in some detail and explain its consequences.

1. Radioastronomy and Communication Through Space by Edward M. Purcell. (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Report BNL-658, reprinted in Cameron, A.G.W. (editor), Interstellar Communication. New York: W.A. Benjamin, Inc., 1963.) Purcell (1912-1997) was in the physics department at Harvard University, and shared in the 1952 Nobel Prize for physics. He was a pioneer in radio astronomy, the first to detect the famous 21-cm radio emission line from neutral hydrogen in the galaxy. He also is credited with the discovery of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

Edward M. Purcell

Most of the paper is uncontroversial and explains then-recent discoveries in radio astronomy. But in the section titled Space Travel, Purcell examines claims that someday we will travel to the stars at almost the speed of light. “The performance of a rocket depends almost entirely on the velocity with which the propellant is exhausted,” he notes. Thus, “the elementary laws of mechanics – in this case relativistic mechanics, but still the elementary laws of mechanics – inexorably impose a certain relation between the initial mass and the final mass of the rocket in the ideal case… It follows very simply from conservation of momentum and energy, the mass-energy relation, and nothing else.” (Emphasis in original.)

“For our vehicle we shall clearly want a propellant with a very high exhaust velocity. Putting all practical questions aside, I propose, in my first design, to use the ideal nuclear fusion propellant… I am going to burn hydrogen to helium with 100 percent efficiency; by means unspecified I shall throw the helium out the back with kinetic energy, as seen from the rocket, equivalent to the entire mass change. You can’t beat that, with fusion. One can easily work out the exhaust velocity; it is about 1/8 the velocity of light. The equation of Figure 13 tells us that to attain a speed 0.99c we need an initial mass which is a little over a billion times the final mass.”

A billion times the final mass?????!!!!!!! In fact, the exact figure is 1.6 X 10^^9. So in the ideal case, where you had somehow mastered nuclear fusion with 100% efficiency and could control and direct the energy in whatever way you choose, you still will need 1.6 billion tons of fuel for each ton of payload! Surely, such a rocket has never been built, and never will be built, in our solar system, or any other. Thus Purcell has demonstrated, beyond any possibility of doubt, that all proposals to reach near-light speed using nuclear fusion propulsion are complete absurdity.

But supposing some other, more energetic reaction could be found? Nuclear fission produces an even lower exhaust velocity than fusion, so it’s less plausible still. Is there any reaction more energetic than nuclear fusion? “This is no place for timidity, so let us take the ultimate step and switch to the perfect matter-antimatter propellant…. The resulting energy leaves our rocket with an exhaust velocity of c or thereabouts. This makes the situation very much better. To get up to 99 percent the velocity of light only a ratio of 14 is needed between the initial mass and the final mass.” That sounds very much better. If I can “somehow” procure sufficient antimatter, “somehow” store it, and “somehow” control its reaction with matter, and “somehow” direct the resulting energy where I want it to go, I need only 7 tons of matter, and 7 tons of antimatter for each ton of payload. That sounds almost possible. But Purcell points out that all that buys you is a one-way ticket out of the galaxy: you have no way to slow down and stop when you get where you want to go. So to stop when you reach your destination requires a fuel-to-payload ratio of 196. And if you want to someday return, unless you know of a convenient matter-antimatter fueling station at your destination, you will need to square that again, for a fuel-to-mass ration of almost 40,000.

And even if you could “somehow” construct such a vehicle, your problems are not over. “If you are moving with 99 per cent the velocity of light through our galaxy, which contains one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter even in the ‘empty spaces,” each of these hydrogen atoms looks to you like a 6-billion-volt proton, and they are coming at you with a current which is roughly equivalent to 300 cosmotrons per square meter. So you have a minor shielding problem to get over before you start working on the shielding problem connected with the rocket engine.” Also, “In order to achieve the required acceleration our rocket, near the beginning of its journey will have to radiate about 10^^18 watts. This is a little more than the total power the earth receives from the sun. But this isn’t sunshine, it’s gamma rays. So the problem is not to shield the payload, the problem is to shield the earth.”

“Well, this is preposterous, you are saying. That is exactly my point. It is preposterous. And remember, our conclusions are forced on us by the elementary laws of mechanics.” Nothing else needs to be written about the possibility of relativistic travel – Dr. Purcell has shown it to be completely preposterous. Purcell concludes his paper, however, by demonstrating that interstellar communication using radio waves is perfectly possible. His final words are, “All this stuff about traveling around the universe in space suits – except for local exploration, which I have not discussed – belongs back where it came from, on the cereal box.”

Sebastian von Hoerner

2. The General Limits of Space Travel by Sebastian von Hoerner (Science 137, 18, 1962; reprinted in Cameron 1963). Immediately following Purcell’s paper in the Cameron volume is this related paper by von Hoerner (1919-2003), a German radio astronomer who was influential in early discussions and proposals for SETI. He examines the physical difficulties of propulsion for space travel, including possibilities not covered by Purcell. Von Hoerner considers ion thrust propulsion, but concludes that “nuclear reactors and all the equipment needed to give a strong ion thrust are so complicated and massive, as compared with the relatively simple combustion equipment, that there is no hope at present of reaching, with reactors, the value of P [engine power to mass ratio] already attained with combustion rockets.” He also considers proposals for a huge “scoop” or funnel for a rocket to fuel itself as it goes along, scooping up galactic hydrogen. But he notes that interstellar matter has very low density, and “in order to collect 1000 tons of matter (10 times the fuel of one Atlas rocket) on a trip to a goal 5.6 parsecs away, one would need a funnel 100 km in diameter; we will rule out this possibility.”

After several pages of equations covering much the same ground as Purcell, Von Hoerner concludes, “there is no way of avoiding these demands [for power], and definitely no hope of fulfilling them…space travel, even in the most distant future, will be confined completely to our own planetary system, and a similar conclusion will hold for any other civilization, no matter how advanced it may be. The only means of communication between different civilizations thus seems to be electro-magnetic signals.”

William Markowitz

3. Physics and Metaphysics of Unidentified Flying Objects by William Markowitz (Science 157, 1274, 1967). Markowitz (1907-1998) was an Austrian-born astronomer who worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory, and also taught astronomy and physics at Pennsylvania State University and Marquette University. He was a pioneer in the use of atomic clocks for astronomy, and specialized in precision time measurement issues. Markowitz wrote, “Aristotle wrote on natural phenomena under the heading ‘physics’ and continued with another section called ‘metaphysics’ or ‘beyond physics.’ I use a similar approach here. First I consider the physics of UFO’s when the laws of physics are obeyed. After that I consider the case where the laws of physics are not obeyed. The specific question to be studied is whether UFO’s are under extraterrestrial control.” By the laws of physics, he is concerned with only the simplest and best-known ones, like those of motion, gravitation, conservation of energy, and the restrictions of special relativity. He points out an obvious but seldom-noted problem: “Apart from propeller and balloon action, a spacecraft can generate thrust only by expelling mass.” And something that uses propellers or balloons is an aircraft, not a spacecraft.

UFOs are sometimes reported to land, and take off again. “If an extraterrestrial spacecraft is to land nondestructively and then lift off, it must be able to develop a thrust slightly less than its weight on landing… if nuclear energy is used to generate thrust, then searing of the ground at 85,000 deg C should result, and nuclear decay production equivalent in quantity to those produced by an atomic bomb should be detected. This has not happened. Hence, the published reports of landing and lift-offs of UFO’s are not reports of spacecraft controlled by extraterrestrial beings, if the laws of physics are valid.”

“We can reconcile UFO reports with extraterrestrial control by assigning various magic properties to extraterrestrial beings. These include ‘teleportation’ (the instantaneous movement of material bodies between planets and stars), the creation of ‘force-fields’ to drive space ships, and propulsion without reaction. The last of these would permit a man to lift himself by his bootstraps. Anyone who wishes is free to accept such magic properties, but I cannot.”

To those who were following the controversy at that time over the proposal championed by J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee for a “scientific study of UFOs,” an ‘ulterior motive’ for the Markowitz article was immediately apparent. The previous year Hynek had a letter published in Science, arguing that UFOs were worthy of scientific study (Science 154, 329, 1966). Markowitz carefully notes several instances where Hynek and his colleagues were contradicting themselves in their statements about UFOs. For example, in his letter in Science, Hynek wrote, “Some of the very best, most coherent reports have come from scientifically trained people.” But Markowitz noted that Hynek had written quite the opposite in his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964: “It appears unreasonable that spacecraft should announce themselves to casual observers while craftily avoiding detection by trained observers.” Markowitz further noted that Vallee’s 1966 book Challenge to Science presents the “classic” 1948 sighting of pilots Chiles and Whitted, who reported a dramatic close encounter with a huge metallic object while flying a DC-3; “the book fails to mention that Hynek had identified the object as an undoubted meteor in his report of 30 April 1949 to the Air Force… This omission is curious because Hynek wrote a foreword to Challenge to Science.” These and other self-contradictions, carefully noted by Markowitz, showed that the Hynek/Vallee case for the UFO was utterly lacking in intellectual rigor. Markowitz unmasked the real Hynek: disorganized, indecisive, and confused. This revelation, published in the peer-reviewed pages of Science, was fatal to the credibility of Hynek’s proposed “scientific study of UFOs.” There were, and still are, a few scientists who took Hynek’s UFO theorizing seriously, but they have always been a tiny minority.

What About “Wormholes”?

Some theorists of interstellar travel are quite aware of the extreme difficulties involved in actually traveling to interstellar destinations, in the sense of going from Point A to Point B. So they hypothesize easier ways to reach interstellar destinations, without the pesky problem of traversing every point between them. Maybe we can warp space so that the distance between earth and the Andromeda galaxy is not two million light years, as in ordinary space travel, but far, far less? Suppose there is a wormhole with one end where we now are, and the other where we want to go?

The “Bohemian physicist” Jack Sarfatti of San Francisco is a colorful figure. He has written papers claiming that wormholes can be used not only to travel through space, but through time as well. (He has also studied Uri Geller.) He suggests that UFOs are real, and travel through wormholes to reach us from some other place or time.

Unfortunately for Sarfatti, according to Wikipedia,

Wormholes which could actually be crossed, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them. (Many physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and others believe that the Casimir effect is evidence that negative energy densities are possible in nature.) Physicists have not found any natural process which would be predicted to form a wormhole naturally in the context of general relativity, although the quantum foam hypothesis is sometimes used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck scale, and stable versions of such wormholes have been suggested as dark matter candidates. It has also been proposed that if a tiny wormhole held open by a negative-mass cosmic string had appeared around the time of the Big Bang, it could have been inflated to macroscopic size by cosmic inflation.

supposed travel through a wormhole

So yes, a wormhole is something that might theoretically exist, although their actual existence is frankly extremely dubious. There is no reason to think that they could occur naturally, and no observational evidence that they actually do exist (unlike Black Holes). Even if they do exist, they may exist only on the Planck scale (subatomic quantum size). It seems extremely dubious that traversable wormholes exist in nature, and even if they do, we still have seemingly insurmountable problems. How do we find wormholes? How do we determine whether they are stable? How do we know where their destination is? If we go into one, is it possible to return? There is also the problem of simply getting to the wormhole’s mouth. If a wormhole were near our solar system, we would already detect its disturbing effects of warped space. And if it is far from our solar system, we need to develop interstellar travel simply to travel to the wormhole’s mouth!

Can we create a wormhole to go from where we are to where we want to be? Perhaps in theory we might, but the reality of a recipe for creating a wormhole will undoubtedly be something like this:

Take 100 solar masses. Bake at one million degrees for ten thousand years. Stir in 100 solar masses of exotic matter with negative energy density. Stretch out the mix from desired source to destination. Let cool for one million years.

So the idea of using wormholes as a convenient transportation network to wherever in the universe we want to go is, well, fanciful and implausible in the extreme. We can’t proclaim it completely “impossible,” but the person who proclaims it as a reality had better have extraordinarily good evidence that such a thing exists.

Friedman's Frenzy

2012-12-17T15:55:00.002-08:00

I just learned, to my great honor, that I am the main subject of a full two-page enraged diatribe by Stanton T. Friedman in the December issue of The MUFON Journal. Throughout this piece, he refers to me as "Bobby." It's not entirely about me. Friedman, who calls himself "the Flying Saucer Physicist," directs some of his invective against Joe Nickell, with little arrows fired at Carl Sagan, Donald Menzel, and Seth Shostak. That puts me in pretty fine company, I'd say.

Stanton Friedman speaks to MUFON

Titled "Debunkers Running Out of Material?", it mainly talks about my Blog posting of October 29, The Pseudo-Science of Anti-Anti UFOlogy. (He doesn't give the full URL). The Blog posting is a reprint of my Psychic Vibrations column of that title, published in The Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 2009. Hence Friedman's suggestion that we "debunkers" must be running out of material. Sorry, Stan, that's not it. There's plenty of new junk to debunk. The reason I posted the 2009 column is that it describes the total invalidation of the famous Betty Hill UFO Star Map, and that information had previously not been available on-line, only in print. Friedman has made the Fish version of the supposed Star Map a major focus of his public lectures for over forty years. Now that large numbers of UFO followers have found out that Stan's precious has been mortally wounded and he is taking heat for not admitting it, he is thrashing about in a blind rage. We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little debunkers. Wicked, tricksy, false!

Must have The Precious!

Friedman begins his screed by vigorously objecting to my statement

Stanton T. Friedman, who calls himself the “Flying Saucer physicist,” because he actually did work in physics about fifty years ago (although not since).

He says, "I received my MS degree in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1956. Fifty years earlier than the 2009 date would have been 1959." He explains that he worked full-time as a physicist until 1969. OK Stan, I was wrong about that: It hadn't been 50 years since your primary career as a physicist ended, only 40 years. And you even did some physics consulting work on the side during the time you were the world's most prominent full-time UFOlogist. My apologies.

Friedman continues,

Bobby is unhappy about my criticism of Joe Nickell, noting that "he is a former magician and of course the stock in trade of magicians is intentional deception with another sterling example being The Amazing Randi."

About which statement I wrote, "So by Friedman logic anyone who has practiced prestidigitation can never be trusted in anything," to which Friedman replies, "Of course I said no such thing." True enough, Stanton, but you certainly are implying it by suggesting we should expect "intentional deception" from current or former magicians.

Friedman says, "my primary criticism of Nickell was that his three degrees were in English, so there seemed little background in science." Stanton, if that is your primary criticism of anybody, you are a fool. English majors can learn science like anyone else, and Nickell consults with specialists and experts when appropriate. Friedman continues, "Bobby likes Joe's [Roswell] explanation of a Mogul balloon train. That account (July 9) was published after Brazel had been taken into custody and given a second story to recite." Got that? Mac Brazel, who first found the Roswell debris that looked like "tinfoil and sticks," was taken into custody by the military and forced to learn and recite a false 'cover story' to cover up the truth. This was just two weeks after the first "flying saucer" sighting of Kenneth Arnold - that Saucer Coverup program must have been put together in record time! This 'taken into custody by the military' story was a late addition to the Roswell yarn, long after Brazel was dead, and is of course entirely without proof.

Stanton also proclaims "Bobby doesn't like my mentioning the Aztec case of 1948 and Frank Scully's book... obviously he would like to ignore the incredibly detailed investigation of that case as reported by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey in The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon." Stan doesn't explain how my 2009 article could have discussed a book not published until 2011. But don't worry, Stan: if you look in the November/December 2012 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, you'll seen my very detailed debunking of the Ramseys' new book. In fact, I'm not alone in that. UFO proponents Kevin Randle and Jerome Clark have each written their own reviews of that book, and while the three of us might agree on little else, all three reviews agree that The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon is not credible or convincing. What's amazing is that there is virtually no overlap in the approaches taken in the three reviews. Three entirely separate lines of investigation lead three very different UFO theorists to the same conclusion. Practically the only well-known UFOlogist who believes The Aztec Incident is Stanton Friedman.

Friedman also objects to my dismissal of the significance of the 1955 report Blue Book Special Report 14, which to him seems ironclad proof that "unidentified" UFO reports are different from "identified" ones. I will only repeat here the quote I used from Alan Hendry, an investigator formerly with the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies: “If the Battelle group [Special Report 14] had had a real appreciation for how loose the data were, they never would have bothered with a statistical comparison to begin with” (UFO Handbook, Doubleday, 1979, p. 266). [For more on Blue Book Special Report 14, see my discussion of Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and the "Pentacle Memorandum."]

The Precious!

But the real root of Friedman's rage is my explanation of how his precious Fish Map - the supposed identification of an alleged star map drawn by Betty Hill after her "abduction" on board a UFO - is now entirely invalidated by newer data. Friedman writes, "Bobby wants me to renounce all of Marjorie's work because there is better data now." No, Stan, that's a gross misrepresentation. I expect you, and anyone else who claims to be "scientific," to renounce the Fish Map because the pattern it claims to find is now known to be incorrect.

The supposed match of the Fish pattern with Betty Hill's sketch was never very good to begin with. Compare the "Hill Map" at top right with the "computer generated map" below it. Do they look like a "match" to you? (The "computer generated map" shows the Fish pattern plotted correctly, using the old Gliese catalog data.). As noted in 1976 by Steven Soter and Carl Sagan, the only reason that the patterns seem to match is because of the way that the lines are drawn.

The inclusion of these lines (said to represent trade or navigation routes) to establish a resemblance between the maps is what a lawyer would call "leading the witness".

Eliminate the lines, and the patterns of dots look as different as could be. And that is the Good News for Stanton Friedman. Now the situation gets even worse.

Betty Hill's "UFO Star Map" contains twenty-six stars, while the Fish "identification" of it contains only fifteen stars. What happened to the remaining eleven stars? They were insignificant 'background' stars, not connected by lines, and hence ignored. Except for three "important" background stars in a triangle. As noted in my book UFO Sightings (p. 70-73) there are several ad hoc practices used in constructing the Fish Map. And that's the Good News for Friedman. It gets worse.

Special Zeta Reticuli Incident issue of Astronomy magazine, 1976: Without the lines drawn, there is no resemblance between the two at all. (And this is using the old star data!)

Nearby stars in the volume of space represented by the Fish pattern are included, or excluded, by certain criteria. A star must be a single star, not multiple (except for Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli, which are widely-separated). They must be main sequence stars similar to the Sun, and they must not be variable. "Every one of the stars on the map are the right kind of stars, and all of the right kind of stars in the neighborhood are part of the map," according to Friedman (ignoring a few ad hoc problems).

As explained in my earlier Blog posting, the newer and much more accurate astronomical data shows that at least six of the fifteen stars must now be tossed out, under the same rules that once included them. Two are close binaries, two more appear to be variable, and two more are not even in the volume of space in question, their distances having been erroneously measured in the older data. So from fifteen stars supposedly matching the twenty-six Betty drew, subtract six more. Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli. "Bobby doesn't bother to stress the fascinating results especially the identification of the base stars Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli.... the closest to each other pair of sun-like stars in the neighborhood." Sorry Stanton, forget it - game over. The only reason to think that Betty's sketch has anything to do with the two Zetas is that dubious match, using the forty-year old astronomical data, where the patterns sort of maybe look similar if you squint and close one eye, but really don't. Now re-draw the map according to the same criteria, using the most accurate present-day star catalog data, and six of the fifteen stars disappear, leaving you with nine stars to try to match Betty's twenty-six. Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli.

But Friedman has invested so much time and effort into convincing the world that his precious Fish Map is proof of extraterrestrial visitations that he is simply incapable of admitting the obvious: that it has no validity whatsoever. There is no way he can go to MUFON or any other UFO group and say, "I'm sorry folks, I've been wrong for these past forty years. The Fish Map does not prove anything."

While we are talking about Zeta Reticuli, one interesting question is: What did Betty Hill intend to represent at the bottom of her "Star Map" where we see two large globes, connected by several parallel lines? The best suggestion I have heard comes from star map researcher Charles Atterberg (more about him is in my book UFO Sightings). He suggested that the two globes represent an old planetarium projector, similar to the one you see here. It makes perfect sense. When Dr. Simon asked Betty to draw, as best she could, the "star map" she claims to have seen, her mind wandered back to a planetarium show she presumably saw years earlier. She drew the stars she saw, and also the projector below them!

An old Zeiss planetarium: Is this what Betty Hill
drew at the bottom of her "Star Map"?

Is there a Warp Drive in your Future?

2012-12-02T22:35:00.000-08:00

We regularly hear UFOlogists claiming that, while reported UFO encounters cannot be accepted as consistent with present-day science, future science will be able to accomodate them, and so therefore we should not reject the claims. As astronomer and Project Blue Book consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek famously said to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in 1968,

I cannot dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug. The "hard data" cases contain frequent allusions to recurrent kinematic, geometric, and luminescent characteristics. I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th-century science to forget that there will be a 21st-century science, and indeed, a 30th-century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different. We suffer perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek makes a cameo appearance in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind

And echoes of this statement are commonplace among UFO proponents. The situation is further confused by Arthur C. Clarke's famous statement that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," which people interpret to mean "reports of something that seems to be magic must be an example of an advanced technology." (Sometime I need to write an entry about some of Clarke's really loopy predictions for future breakthroughs, like how wheels and roads will soon be obsolete because we'll all be riding in hover cars.)

A landed UFO is alleged to simply take off from the ground and zoom away, without expelling anything in the opposite direction. Momentum has been created - how? The UFO has acquired kinetic energy as it speeds away. Where did that energy come from? Magic, perhaps? So it would appear that "future science" will no longer be limited by simplistic concepts such as conservation of energy or momentum. Even many skeptics fall into this trap. Once I was being interviewed by a well-known skeptic for a podcast, who suggested that 'before long, our technology will be able to do the things that these UFOs are reportedly doing.' And I replied that's not true, unless you are willing to cavalierly toss out fundamental physical laws.

I was very interested to read in the San Diego Union Tribune a December 2 story by science reporter Gary Robbins titled "Flying cars and teleporters aren't in your future," based upon an interview with UCSD physics professor Tom Murphy. Murphy relates how one day when he was talking with a group of physics students, one of them said, "If it can be imagined, it can be done." Other students nodded their heads in agreement. Said Murphy, "It took me all of two seconds to violate this dictum as I imagined myself jumping straight up to the Moon... I wondered how pervasive this attitude was among physics students and faculty. So I put together a survey. The overriding theme: experts say don't count on a Star Trek future."

Prof. Tom Murphy

Murphy designed a survey on Futuristic Physics to determine physicists' expectations of the likelihood of hypothetical future breakthroughs. The details are in his Blog Do The Math. One, "autopilot cars," already exists today: Google has built one, and it seems to work well. But the survey asks about a lot of other things: practical personal jetpacks; a flying car; teleportation; warp drive; wormhole travel; visiting a black hole; artificial gravity; time travel, etc. Estimates were solicited from physics undergrads, physics grad students, and physics professors. For each "breakthrough," survey participants were asked to choose one of six answers, from "likely within 50 years" to "<1% likely to ever happen, or impossible."

As might be expected, undergrads are the most optimistic about future "breakthroughs," grad students less so, and physics professors the most pessimistic of all. It seems that the more you know about physics, the less likely you are to accept the far-out stuff. However there was one dissenting faculty member:

Note the optimistic outlier in the faculty ranks. We saw this individual stand out on the wormhole question. Examining this person’s responses, it’s all 1, 2, and 3 responses, save one 4 for time travel. Nothing is off limits to this professor, and most things deserve a timescale. This individual is clearly out of step with the cohort, and tying the most optimistic undergrad: forever young.

Participation in the survey was anonymous for invited persons, but if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that Prof. Michio Kaku probably participated. (He praised Leslie Kean's problem-ridden UFO book as the "gold standard" of UFO research.) Murphy notes,

The biggest differences between faculty and grad students crop up on questions pertaining to flying cars, cloaking, and studying astrophysical objects up close. The largest graduate-undergraduate discrepancy appears for the question about artificial gravity. The largest end-to-end discrepancies (faculty to undergraduate) relate to flying cars, artificial gravity, and warp drive.

The physics faculty members' expectations of the likelihood of certain developments, from most to least probable, is as follows:

Autopilot Cars likely within 50 years

Real Robots likely within 500 years

Fusion Power likely within 500 years

Lunar Colony likely within 5000 years

Cloaking Devices likely within 5000 years

200 Year Lifetime maybe within 5000 years

Martian Colony probably eventually (>5000 yr)

Terraforming probably eventually (> 5000 yr)

Alien Dialog probably eventually (> 5000 yr)

Alien Visit on the fence

Jetpack unlikely ever

Synthesized Food unlikely ever

Roving Astrophysics unlikely ever

Flying “Cars” unlikely ever

Visit Black Hole   forget about it

Artificial Gravity   forget about it

Teleportation forget about it

Warp Drive   forget about it

Wormhole Travel   forget about it

Time Travel forget about it

So to those who are proclaiming that UFOs are real, and that 'future physics' will explain how they operate via wormholes, warp drives, teleportation, or time travel, the message from physics professors is: forget about it.

James W. Moseley (1931-2012)

2012-11-27T19:09:00.000-08:00

James W. Moseley in 1980

As most of you have probably heard, the well-known UFO satirist, hoaxer, and occasionally serious investigator James W. Moseley died of cancer in Key West, Florida on November 16, at the age of 81. A noted “trickster” figure, his career in UFOlogy spanned sixty years (!!). He attended Princeton University, but did not graduate. Having inherited sufficient money to be able to pursue his own interests, Moseley never worked a conventional career. He spent much of his time traveling to UFO conferences, interviewing UFO witnesses and personalities, and traveling to Peru to engage in what he called “grave robbing” of pre-Columbian artifacts. Later he opened a shop in Key West to sell the antiquities he had imported before he had to beat a hasty retreat out of Peru. The shop did not do well, and so Moseley donated the artifacts to the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History in Dania, Florida, where they are on permanent display.

In late 1953, Moseley began a great odyssey “tracking the elusive flying saucer.” He drove from his home in New Jersey to Washington, DC, to ask at the Pentagon to see the saucer cases that the Air Force had investigated. To his astonishment, he was allowed to do so, with no clearance required. He interviewed the famous saucer author Major Donald E. Keyhoe, and “I wasn’t impressed. I felt – correctly, I still believe – that Keyhoe routinely made too much out of too little, at least in part just to sell books.” From there it was on to interviews in South Carolina, Georgia, then west to Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, and finally Mt. Palomar, California, where “Professor Adamski was holding court” in his hamburger stand. George Adamski was famous as the man who first made contact with the Venusians, and he had a sizeable, uncritical following. (Amazingly, he still does. Adamski’s current followers held an anniversary gathering on that same spot, ironically on the very day after Moseley’s death.) Moseley was not impressed by Adamski, and riled some saucer believers by debunking Adamski’s claims.

He drove on to Hollywood where he interviewed best-selling author Frank Scully, who vigorously defended the Aztec, NM “crashed saucer” story given him by Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. On the way back Moseley interviewed Newton in Denver. Moseley wasn’t impressed by Scully or Newton, either. He contacted the office of former president Truman in Independence, Missouri, asking for an interview about flying saucers. Amazingly, even though this was just over a year after the famous and controversial 1952 “flying saucer invasion” of Washington, DC, while Truman was still president, Moseley’s request was granted. Truman took Moseley into his private office, where the former president joked around with him a bit, then told him that he’d never seen a saucer, and didn’t know anything about them.

In the decades that followed, Moseley traveled many other places tracking the elusive saucers. He was the longtime chairman of the National UFO Conference and attended most of them. He gave many lectures about flying saucers, and even made several trips to Giant Rock in the California desert, a sort of Woodstock for UFO contactees and their followers.

Moseley became close friends with another UFOlogical “trickster” figure, the late Gray Barker, who was instrumental in launching the now-classic legends of the Men in Black, and Mothman. As might be imagined, when they got together they were frequently up to mischief. Moseley admitted to at least one hoax (there were obviously more) - the famous Straith Letter to Adamski. Barker and Moseley forged an authentic-looking letter from the U.S. Department of State, purporting to be from a nonexistent person named R. E. Straith. In it, Straith tells Adamski that the U.S. government knew that his claims of meeting Venusians were true, and planned to release that information soon. The crafty Adamski loved to show off the letter to visitors.

One of the most interesting UFO books ever written

Having begun publishing Saucer News in 1954, Moseley sold it to Gray Barker in 1968. Moseley then began publishing Saucer Cruise, Saucer Booze, and Saucer Jews (dedicated to his longtime friend Gene Steinberg). Finally, he settled on Saucer Smear, “Dedicated to the highest principles of UFOlogical journalism.” Many of these issues are now being sold at http://www.martiansgohome.com/smear/ (they used to be free!). It became the longest continuously published UFO journal in the world. When UFOlogists were feuding (as they almost always were), Moseley loved to run the vitriolic letters one would send in denouncing the other. In 2002, Moseley co-authored, with the late Karl Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth – Confessions of a Grave-Robbing UFOlogist (PrometheusBooks). If you are interested in the subject of UFOs, you simply must read this fascinating book.

Many “serious” UFOlogists were irritated by Moseley, who never hesitated to state his opinion about a major UFO case. The irascible John Keel once castigated him, “You are a boil on the ass of UFOlogy.” Moseley proudly placed this tribute at the top of numerous issues of Saucer Smear. Don Berliner was even more graphic: Saucer Smear is "like a turd on the living room floor.” Moseley wrote that, at one UFO conference, upon seeing Moseley the UFO abduction guru Budd Hopkins flipped him “the bird.” I suggested to Moseley that this might possibly make him a member of UFOlogy's famous Aviary?

The pompous "serious UFOlogist" Jerome Clark, whose ego is larger than many galaxies, wrote "Moseley, whom I knew well and with whom I corresponded up till the end, was not a skeptic by any definition. He thought UFOs to be some kind of extradimensional phenomenon, and he did not like skeptics, whom he regarded as bores and worse, all that much.... I am still trying to process the news, however sadly expected, of Jim's death. I will have more to say on his life and career at some point. For now, I mourn the loss of a friend." Excuse me while I barf! The notion of Clark sitting at his desk too emotional to write, sadly mourning his dear friend Moseley, positively oozes bullshit out of every orifice. Just a few years earlier, Clark had belittled Moseley in his UFO Encyclopedia as having "entertained just about every view it is possible to hold about UFOs, without ever managing to say anything especially interesting or memorable about any of them." Every regular reader of Saucer Smear knew that Moseley intensely disliked Jerome Clark. The reasons are not difficult to see. However, as Curt Collins, Saucer Smear "contributing editor" notes in a comment, Moseley and Clark did reconcile in the last few years.

Moseley about to be "levitated" at a UFO Conference

It's quite true that Moseley was not a "skeptic." However he was a "skeptical believer," and was not afraid to "call Bullshit" wherever he thought necessary, no matter how sacred the cow (including the Roswell crash and the famous British case he always wrote as “Rendle-SHAM.”). As for Clark's claim that Moseley "did not like skeptics," that's news to me. I first met Moseley at a Fortean convention in Washington, DC in the1970s. He visited me several times during his travels to California, and we met numerous times at various conferences. I have dozens of postcards from him (his favorite means of communication, many of them marked "top secret" on the front side). We remained in frequent contact until his death. Moseley was also on friendly terms with Philip J. Klass, James Oberg, Gary Posner, Lance Moody, Tim Printy, and Michael Dennett, to name a few skeptics. It is true that in later years Moseley had come to dislike James "the Amusing" Randi (as Moseley typically called him), with whom he was originally friendly. Moseley appeared as a frequent guest on Randi's late night radio show in New York City during the 1960s. (Randi a forerunner of Art Bell's late-night paranormal weirdness radio talk show? Unbelievable, but true!) "At the time, Randi was relatively open-minded about saucers and other weirdness. We became friends" (Shockingly, p. 189). But Moseley became irritated by what he considered Randi's inflexible skepticism about paranormal claims, in part because Moseley had experienced several incidents himself that he felt might be paranormal.

Moseley was among the last survivors of the very beginning of the saucer era, to whom Arnold’s sighting and the Mantell crash were not historical events, but personal memories. He also belonged to the age of the typewriter, never using a computer. Until his death each issue of Saucer Smear consisted of eight pages of typed text, interspersed with some humorous cartoons, news headlines, or offbeat photos. Moseley's "contributing editors," as well as others, sent him late-breaking material printed out from what Moseley always called the "cursed internet."

The front page of a typical issue of Saucer Smear

The last postcard I received from Moseley. I had written him that while perusing UFO books on Amazon.com, "I somehow came across Jim Moseley’s Book of Saucer News, where an autographed paperback copy was selling for $675.00!!!! (Plus $3.99 shipping).... A copy of that same book without the (precious) autograph sells for a mere $381.15. Therefore, your autograph is worth exactly $293.85." It may be worth more soon.

The Apocalypse Made Easy

2012-11-17T22:12:00.000-08:00

Now that the 2012 Apocalypse is fast approaching, here is a simple, easy-to-use guide to the impending End of the World.

Why is the world ending?

Because the Mayan Calendar is running out. Or so some people say. Other people, however, contended back in 1987 that the Mayan Calendar was ending then. As I wrote in my Psychic Vibrations column (Skeptical Inquirer, Winter, 1987-88, on p. 213 of the paperback book), "According to some astrologers, the ancient Mayan calendar, after allegedly counting more than 6,000 years (meaning the Mayans must have started it a few years before Creation Week, if Bishop Ussher's chronology is correct), came to an end on August 16, 1987."

But even if it is "running out," so what? The calendar on my wall showing scantily-clad women runs out on December 31. That doesn't mean anything is ending, it just means there will be different scantily-clad women on the wall come January.

What about the Planet Nibiru? I hear it's visible in the Southern Hemisphere? I've seen a picture of it!

Nibiru (sometimes called "Planet X") is a made-up object. People can talk about it all they want, but it's no more real than the Land of Oz. I've seen pictures of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and Space Aliens, too; the supposed photos of Nibiru are as authentic as those. Hundreds of millions of people live in the southern hemisphere. There are world-class astronomical observatories there, and major cities with professional news organizations. That's an awful lot of cameras and videos and telescopes. If Nibiru were real, we'd know all about it by now.

Oh no! The Apocalypse is almost here!!

What About the Galactic Alignment?

There is no galactic alignment: see my earlier Blog entry about this claim. But even if there were, it would not matter. Modern astronomy takes little note of "alignments," because they are meaningless. For example, last night I saw Jupiter "aligned" with Aldebaran and the Hyades cluster. What is the significance of that? It was pretty.

But What About the Sun's Alignment with the Maya Birth Canal?

What about it? At any given time, the sun is always aligning with something. In this case, at the time of the solstice it's the dark rift in the Milky Way that is supposedly the "Maya Birth Canal." But remember that "alignments" don't matter. See my earlier posting on The "Cosmic Alignment" and the Maya Birth Canal.

The demise of Twinkie is the first step to fullfilling Mayan prophecy. (C) (from The Beer Party on Facebook)

What about this guy who is going to leap off a rock at the time of the Solstice?

That would be Peter Gersten, of Sedona, Arizona, a retired lawyer and longtime UFOlogist. I posted earlier about Peter Gersten's Leap of Faith. He writes, "On December 21, 2012 an 11:11 portal will open at Bell Rock in Sedona Arizona. The portal will lead to the galactic center." At that precise moment, he plans to leap off Bell Rock.

Peter Gersten

Is he still planning to leap? Gersten hasn't posted much in the time since that Blog entry was written. On January 26, 2012 he posted, "An Uncontrolled Growth of Abnormal Cells - Today I was diagnosed with an unusual form of cancer. An ironic start to 2012 for me don’t you think? I assume my programming is ensuring that I complete my leap of faith. Bring it on! Stay tuned! My story is getting very interesting." His only related posting after that was on April 6: "My 70th Birthday Present: The Mark of the Dolphin." He explains how he went swimming with the dolphins at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, and one of them bit him on the right hand. "It was bleeding and there were three 1/2-inch deep scratches with a smaller one next to them." He later realized that the dolphin was trying to write "1111" (the time of the solstice) on his hand. He suggests, "Could it be that I will need the “dolphin stamp of approval” to get through the portal?"

On November 17 I contacted Gersten by email, asking him if he had perhaps changed his plans. He said that he would go up Bell Rock at the appointed time, but would not leap unless he saw an "extraordinary event" occur - something "supernatural." I was relieved to hear that. I think he will live to see the following day!

Earth, left; Nibiru, right. Good night all!

Gersten told me that he would be atop Bell Rock by 11:00 (AM, I presume), and stay at least until midnight. I reminded him that the solstice will be at 11:11 UT, which is 4:11 AM in Arizona. He replied that the important part was not the solstice, but the "symbolism." He wondered why people would rather say "I told you so" than see a "supernatural event" manifest, and he invited me to come out to Sedona and make the trek up to the top of Bell Rock with him. I replied that there is nothing I would rather see than a "supernatural event" manifest itself, and perhaps I would! Sedona is about a six hour drive from San Diego, but I'll see what I can arrange.

[I did not drive to Sedona. Gersten did not jump, and is still alive in 2013.]

UFOs Infest Denver, According to Fox News Affiliate

2012-11-11T13:50:00.001-08:00

Some people have long been accusing Fox News and its affiliates of practicing Tabloid Journalism. The Fox affiliate in Denver, KDVR, seems determined to prove them correct. On November 8, they broadcast a video of an ill-defined, very fast moving object, that they described as a "mile high mystery," and proclaimed "nobody can explain what it is." Only one problem - this "UFO" is obviously an insect - probably a fly. This is very similar to the Chilean Fly video that Leslie Kean has been promoting as being perhaps "the case UFO skeptics have been dreading."

KDVR received some supposed "UFO" videos from a man who does not want to be identified, which to any seasoned reporter should immediately raise a red flag. The videos were taken on a hilltop in Federal Heights, at 84th and Federal, looking south toward downtown Denver. The "UFOs" appear at least several times a week, we are told, usually around noon to 1 PM. Most flying insects become more active during the warmest part of the day. The anonymous photographer, who has been filming these objects for months, believes that the UFOs are being "launched" from someplace around 56th and Clay in Denver, which is a residential area.

The "UFO" is said to be flying too fast to be seen by the naked eye; it's necessary to slow down the video. The object is seen to dive down toward the ground, between the ground and the camera (for example, at 1:29 into the video; also at 1:40 and 2:40). As in the case of the Chilean Fly videos, we are not shown the entire, unedited video. If we were, it would very likely be obvious how small the object is when it is seen clearly against the nearby ground.

The supposed "investigative" reporter Heidi Hemmat contacted an aviation "expert." Steve Cowell is described as "a former commercial pilot, instructor and FAA accident prevention counselor." As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with optics, video photography, still photography, insects, or, for that matter, UFOs. Cowell proclaimed that the object was no kind of aircraft, helicopter, or bird, which any fool could tell. He also proclaimed that it isn't an insect, although how he could rule that out was not stated. The FAA and NORAD were consulted, and both reported that there was no air traffic in that area. "And it's not a bug," said Hemmat, "people keep saying it's a bug." Perhaps you should investigate that possibility? But no, an "expert" has spoken, and Hemmat would never question that. If I had a nickel for every time some "expert" said something idiotic about UFOs, I'd be rich.

KDVR sent its own cameraman to the spot, and he, too, photographed at least one fly. This was taken as confirmation that mysterious UFOs are buzzing around Denver on a regular basis. This story is a serious contender for the stupidest news report of 2012, although there is a lot of stiff competition for that honor.

Speaking of Leslie Kean, even she is admitting on her Facebook page that "The object in these (KDVR) videos looks like the one from Chile at the El Bosque AF Base." She has traveled to Chile twice in recent months to meet with the Chilean UFOlogists of the CEFAA, the promoters of the infamous Fly video. She has promised to bring back important new information, but she hasn't shared any of it yet. She still has not stated whether or not the "experts" in Chile have determined whether or not this video shows just an insect. However, she did admit as of October 17 concerning the now-confessed Belgian hoax photo from Petit-Rechain , touted as solid UFO evidence in her book, "Yes, this photo seems to be a fake, unfortunately. Belgian researchers have looked into it. I have to update this in my book." Well, I guess that's a step in the right direction. There are still a few dozen other UFO cases in her book that need to be acknowledged as mistakes or as hoaxes, but then she wouldn't have much of a book left.

Mysterious flying object filmed in Denver! This is Lucilia Sericata, the common Green Bottle fly.

Are UFO Enthusiasts 'Giving Up' on UFOlogy? Get Real!

2012-11-06T15:32:00.001-08:00

Very likely you have seen the article in The Telegraph of London November 4 titled "UFO enthusiasts admit the truth may not be out there after all." The main point of the article is a statement by one Dave Wood, chairman of something called "the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (Assap)," who said that a "meeting had been called to address the crisis in the subject and see if UFOs were a thing of the past."

The Telegraph's illustration accompanying this article

I read the article's sub-headline "Declining numbers of “flying saucer” sightings and failure to establish proof of alien existence has led UFO enthusiasts to admit they might not exist after all," and I asked myself: where did this reporter get a crazy idea like that? Anyone who knows the field of UFOlogy knows that dedicated UFO believers are impervious to reason and fact. Indeed, they would not have reached the conclusions they have, and stubbornly maintained them, unless that were so. Who is this guy who is telling us that UFO sightings are fading away (when I know that they are not), and that widespread outbreaks of reason are causing longtime UFOlogists to question the Faith?

To be truthful, while I stay pretty current on the UFO literature, I had never heard of this guy before, or his organization ASSAP. And yet here he is being cited in a major publication as a spokesman telling us the future of UFOlogy. What's with that? I tried to find something on the web about Dave Wood and UFOs predating the Telegraph article, and couldn't find anything. I did find something about ASSAP investigating a haunted house. So why are we supposed to care about what he says concerning UFOs?

Well, it turns out that this "meeting" he is talking about is not some emergency get-together to address a UFOlogical Crisis of Faith. Instead it is called "Seriously Unidentified? ASSAP's First UFO Conference," and it looks like most other UFO conferences. Nothing in it suggests a 'crisis of faith' for UFOlogists, and the fact it's described as ASSAP's "first UFO conference" suggests that they expect to be holding more. Indeed, this looks like "business as usual," with speakers ranging from skeptic Ian Ridpath to Cal Cooper, author of a book titled Telephone Calls from the Dead. (The late parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless co-authored a similarly-titled book Phone Calls from the Dead; see my book Psychic Vibrations, p. 136.) The only thing on the conference schedule even hinting at the supposed 'crisis of faith' is a fifty-minute "Round table discussion on the likely future of British Ufology and possible future trends." Panels like this are common at UFO conferences, and that wording could mean anything.

As you might imagine, some people on the pro-UFO side are quite miffed by this claim. "Reached at his Cincinnati headquarters office today, MUFON Executive Director David MacDonald said ufology was alive and well. 'The fact is that MUFON is receiving on average more than 700 cases a month,' " In 2006, MUFON was receiving an average of less than 150 cases a month. This doesn't sound to me like UFOs are a 'dying belief.' Skeptic Dr. David Clark, quoted in the Telegraph article, asks in his Blog whether the UFO subject is dead again. He concludes that it's at a dead end, which is obvious. But that has always been the case, and that never seemed to matter before.

Interest in UFOs will be with us for a very long time. It is true that the emphasis of UFOlogy is shifting from groups and publications to electronic media. Most UFO believers today get their UFO thrills from cable TV programs like UFO Chasers and Ancient Aliens, from podcasts, websites, and Facebook pages. Indeed, there have been times in recent months when the National Geographic Channel was serving up back-to-back UFO programming as if there were nothing else to present. They would not be serving it if the audience wasn't eating it up.

The way this article was picked up and taken at face value by a number of skeptics is, to me, rather troubling. To be a skeptic means to evaluate claims skeptically, not just to adhere to a certain "party line." When confronted by an article that seems "too good to be true," the skeptic should not just take it as confirmation of what he or she has long believed. Instead, the skeptic should ask a question like, "Who in the hell is this guy Dave Wood, and why should we accept his claim about UFOlogists having second thoughts?"

The Pseudo-Science of Anti-Anti-Ufology

2012-10-29T22:05:00.000-07:00

[This is reprinted from my Psychic Vibrations column in The Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 2009. It answers Friedman's critiques of "debunkers," and it explains how Betty Hill's "UFO Star Map" has crashed and burned. Friedman knows this (I discussed it with him), but he has gotten too much mileage from that "star map" to ever give it up, no matter how bogus it turns out to be.]

Stanton Friedman

Many readers are surely familiar with the author and pro-UFO lecturer Stanton T. Friedman, who calls himself the “Flying Saucer physicist,” because he actually did work in physics about fifty years ago (although not since). Well, Stanton is upset by the skeptical writings contained in SI’s special issue on UFOs (January/February, 2009), and elsewhere. He has written two papers thus far denouncing us, and it is the subject of his Keynote Address at the MUFON Conference in August (2009).

In February (2009), Friedman wrote an article, “Debunkers at it Again,” reviewing our UFO special issue (http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/02/debunkers-at-it-again.html). “In actuality, the active writers and “investigators” aren’t skeptics. They are Debunkers doing their best to pull the wool over the eyes of a curious public. They know the answers, so don’t really need to investigate. Proclamation is more their style. Deception is the name of the game.”

Friedman goes on to name names: He critiques Joe Nickell’s article “Return to Roswell ” by noting that Nickell is a former magician, and “of course the stock in trade of magicians is intentional deception with another sterling example being the Amazing Randi.” So by Friedman-logic, anyone who has ever practiced prestidigitation can never again be trusted in anything. He criticizes Nickell for raising “the baseless Project Mogul explanation” for Roswell, which cannot be correct, says Friedman, because it does not match the claims made in later years by alleged Roswell witnesses (although it does match quite well the account of Mac Brazel, the original witness, given in 1947).

He moves on to my critique of the Betty and Barney Hill case, where I note the resemblance of their “hypnosis UFO testimony” to Betty Hill’s post-incident dreams. I said, “Barney had heard her repeat [them] many times,” which he claims is “nonsense.” According to Friedman, “Barney read Betty’s dreams once, and the notes were put in a drawer,” and that settles that. He conveniently forgets the passages in John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey, the first book about the incident, describing the long sessions Betty and Barney spent with several UFOlogists, “beginning at noon and running almost until midnight” (Chapter 3), in which all aspects of the incident were discussed again and again. He also forgets that Barney told Dr. Simon, the psychiatrist who interviewed and treated them both, that his wife had told him “a great many details of the dreams,” and that Dr. Simon had concluded that the dreams of Mrs. Hill “had assumed the quality of a fantasized experience” (Chapter 12).

Friedman next attacks Dr. David Morrison, NASA senior scientist, for the “absurd” suggestion that if intelligently-controlled UFOs were here, we might pick up radio transmissions from them, or from their home planets. “Maybe secret NSA listening devices pick up alien signals, but then the NSA doesn’t release info about what signals it receives,” said Friedman. He also attacks Dave Thomas, “a scientist in New Mexico and president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason”, saying “Dave has certainly demonstrated his lack of knowledge of both the Roswell and Aztec UFO crash retrieval cases.” Thomas has conducted in-depth interviews with Dr. Charles Moore, the chief scientist of Project Mogul, whose balloon caused the Roswell crash scare in 1947. The “Aztec crash” case that Friedman seems so keen on is taken from a 1950 book by Hollywood writer Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers, exposed as a hoax more than fifty years ago by newspaperman J.P. Cahn. Friedman concludes with, “the Skeptical Inquirer provides many examples of the intellectual bankruptcy of the pseudoscience of anti-ufology.”

Friedman was still hot under the collar in May, when he followed this up with a second article titled the “Pseudo-Science of Anti-Ufology” (http://www.theufochronicles.com/2009/05/pseudo-science-of-anti-ufology.html ). He says that skeptics’ arguments “aren’t scientific, but rather represent research by proclamation rather than investigation.” Given that SI’s special issue on UFOs contained detailed investigative reports on the 1984 Minsk, USSR UFO sightings, the Big Sur UFO of 1964, an update on Roswell developments, and the Stephenville, Texas sightings of 2008, if this is mere “proclamation,” then I can’t imagine what “investigation” would look like. “Proclamations and attacks, often given the appearance of being scientific, have been launched at every aspect of the phenomena. Despite an enormous array of real evidence and data, we have been treated to false claims, false reasoning, bias and ignorance.” Of course, if Friedman or anyone else could produce even one piece of “real evidence and data,” the UFO debate would have been over long ago.

Friedman has long been obsessed with the little-known and even less-read Project Blue Book Special Report Number 14, a statistical analysis of UFO reports released by the Battelle Memorial Institute way back in 1955. However, he carefully picks and chooses the quotes that he uses from that report, implying it to be some hidden pro-UFO gem, deliberately ignored by skeptics. However, Friedman never reveals this quote from the Summary of BBSR14: "It is considered to be highly improbable that reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent observations of technological developments outside of the range of present-day scientific knowledge" (page viii), which means that the Report says exactly the opposite of what Friedman wants us to think it does. “Why isn’t BBSR 14 cited in the debunking books?” he pointedly asks. Probably because it is over fifty years old, and contains little that is interesting or relevant today, although Alan Hendry (not a “debunker” but a very skeptical UFOlogist) did spend several pages of his UFO Handbook (Doubleday, 1979) critiquing its approach. Hendry concluded, “If the Battelle group had had a real appreciation for how loose the data were, they never would have bothered with a statistical comparison to begin with” (p. 266). [For more on Blue Book Special Report 14, see my discussion of Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and the "Pentacle Memorandum."]

Freidman concludes, “If one makes an appropriately objective and careful examination of the pro and anti-UFO arguments, one finds that the evidence is overwhelming that Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles of extraterrestrial origin and that only pseudo-scientific arguments of a vocal but small group of debunkers stand in the way of reaching that conclusion.” It’s truly remarkable what we, a small group of skeptics writing for SI and similar publications, have supposedly been able to accomplish. Even though the number of people we reach in our publications is far fewer than Friedman reaches on any one of his many appearances on TV and radio programs such as Larry King Live, Coast to Coast AM, etc., he claims that the only reason that Extraterrestrial Visitations have not been accepted by the mainstream of science and the media is because we noisy negativists keep chattering against them. The reality is, of course, that if his supposed “UFO evidence” were nearly as good as he claims it to be, then nothing would be able to stand in its way.

Betty Hill's sketch of a "UFO star map"

Since Friedman loudly claims to represent “scientific UFOlogy,” then like all scientists he must revise or even discard his hypotheses when new data comes in and invalidates them. One such instance has clearly occurred of late: the complete invalidation of the Fish Map, supposedly an extraterrestrial navigation map that Betty Hill saw during her celebrated “UFO abduction” in 1961. For at least 35 years, Friedman has been claiming that researcher Marjorie Fish’s supposed identification of the dots Betty Hill drew as being potentially habitable nearby stars proves the extraterrestrial nature of the Betty and Barney Hill “UFO abduction.” He has made the Fish Map one of the central points of his lectures and writings. The similarity between the Hill drawing and the Fish Map was actually never very good, but folks who were so inclined could point to a number of points of correspondence between the two. (For a detailed discussion, see my paper “There Were No Extraterrestrials” in Encounters at Indian Head (Pflock and Brookesmith, eds. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2007) ).

The Fish interpretation is supposedly correct because it consists of single, non-variable stars that all lie inside this box. But using the newer and more accurate data, two stars are actually much farther away, and nowhere near this box. Two are actually variable, and two more are close binaries. Poof!

But today the Fish Map is no longer viable whatsoever. In her research beginning in 1966, Fish made the wise choice to use the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars, which was then the most accurate available. But that was over forty years ago, and science never stands still. Astronomical researcher Brett Holman recently checked out what the Fish Map would look like if it were built using the most accurate astronomical data available today. His answer is in his article in the British publication Fortean Times (#242, November 2008): "Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli" (the supposed home solar system of the UFOnauts). Holman writes, “In the early 1990s the Hipparcos satellite measured the positions of nearly 120,000 stars 10 times more accurately than ever before – including all of those that appear in the Fish interpretation. The results of this work, and much else besides, is available online now, and can be easily queried using websites such as SIMBAD at the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory.”

Fish excluded all variable stars and close binaries to include only supposedly habitable solar systems – but the new data reveals two of her stars as suspected variables, and two more as close binaries. So there go four of her 15 stars. And two more are much further away than earlier believed, removing them completely from the volume of space in question. Six stars of that supposedly exact-matching pattern, definitely gone, excluded by the very criteria that once included them using the forty-year-old data. Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli.

Kathleen Marden, Stanton Friedman, and Robert Sheaffer at the MUFON Symposium 2011

Since scientists are obligated to repudiate their hypotheses should subsequent data contradict them, if Friedman is practicing “scientific UFOlogy” as he claims, he will have to admit that he was wrong about the Fish map. But that will never happen. Arguing with Friedman is like arguing with a Creationist, who keeps using discredited arguments to impress new audiences, and seizing upon minor misstatements of his critics and attributing to them the very worst of motives, while completely ignoring their strongest arguments. His arguments rely heavily on the ad hominem attack – his critics are such terrible persons – a sure sign of somebody trying to defend emotionally a position that can’t be defended logically. (Whenever you see the strong reliance on the ad hominem – my critics are such terrible persons – it’s almost like a red banner proclaiming, “my arguments don’t hold up.”) Another major UFO case with a strong endorsement from Friedman is the 1996 Yukon UFO, conclusively shown to be the re-entry of the Cosmos 2335 second stage rocket booster. But Friedman refuses to acknowledge that he was wrong about that case, either.

From this moment on, every time that Friedman speaks of the Fish Map, except to say “I was wrong about it,” his own words brand him a hypocrite.

[There is a follow-up posting to this one, dated December 17, 2012: Friedman's Frenzy.]

"U.S. News" Proclaims UFOs a "Danger to Aviation"

2012-10-26T12:56:00.002-07:00

The next time you get on a plane, don't worry about the terrorist who might have smuggled explosives on board inside his rectum. Instead, you should be worrying about UFOs, according to this story by Michael Morella in the News section of U.S. News and World Report (October 19, 2012):

UFO Sightings Pose Danger to Aviation
Flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects can distract pilots and cause accidents

the illustration from the U.S. News article

Before you get too concerned, remember that the number of fatalities in airline accidents caused by UFOs equals the number of motorists killed in vehicle collisions with unicorns (although the private pilot Fredrick Valentich appears to have perished in a graveyard spiral while distracted by what he thought was a UFO).

Following this bit of remarkable stupidity, the rest of the article is basically a completely uncritical review of Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record. She presents supposedly "unexplained" UFO cases involving either a pilot, a general, or a bureaucrat. But as I showed in my review of this book, her cases are only "unexplained" if one ignores all explanations. Philip J. Klass and others have published thousands of words explaining most if not all of Kean's supposed "unexplained" cases. She pretends that other interpretations don't exist, and thus ensnares too-trusting reporters into her UFO net. Good reporters, recognizing that controversial stories have two sides, would interview a knowledgeable expert with a different view, and present both sides. He might have even uncovered the ridiculous story of Leslie Kean and the Fly, and asked her to explain that. Unfortunately, good reporting is quite rare. The piece is rounded off with more UFO advocacy by Richard Haines and John Alexander, with just the briefest objection presented by Seth Shostak.

Morella had previously written "Mysteries of Space" for a special issue of U.S. News (April, 2012). A cover teaser promised to explain "Why UFOs are dangerous," but the text didn't deliver on that promise.

This is not the first time that U.S. News and World Report has embarrassed itself by publishing UFO stories that turned out to be simply foolish.

“Before the year is out, the Government perhaps the President—is expected to make what are described as 'unsettling disclosures' about UFOs” - U.S. News & World Report, April 18, 1977.

There were no "unsettling disclosures," and still have not been, thirty-five years later. Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter famously promised to release all of that UFO files, if elected. This set up something like a Millennial frenzy among UFO believers, expecting the official announcement of alien visitations to come at any time. After Carter was elected, he probably found out that the Blue Book files had already been declassified and released; Phil Klass and I had already been reading them in the National Archives before Carter took office.

Then there is this doozy:

“FLYING SAUCERS—THE REAL STORY: U.S. BUILT FIRST ONE IN 1942. Jet-propelled disks can outfly other planes ... By choosing which [jet] nozzles to turn on or off and the angle of tilt, the pilot could make the saucer rise or descend vertically, hover, or fly straight ahead, or make sharp turns… a big advance in the science of flying... No official announcements are being made yet, but about the only big secret left is "who makes them." Evidence points to Navy experiments... ” - News “scoop” in U.S. News & World Report, April 7, 1950.

It would seem that about every thirty-five years, U.S. News is determined to publish something monumentally stupid about UFOs, something that is a profound and lasting embarrassment to any professional journalist. Like clockwork, they've done it again.

New Developments in the Frederick Valentich Disappearance: An Airplane Abducted by a UFO?

2012-10-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

Valentich and his aircraft

A famous "unexplained" UFO case (or more precisely, a case where the solution is probable, but not clearly proven) is the 1978 disappearance of Fredrick Valentich, a 20 year old pilot in Australia. On October 21 1978 he was piloting a Cessna 182L light aircraft over Bass Strait in Australia. He intended to land at King Island and return to Moorabbin Airport.

However, he never made it to King Island, 127 miles away. The final exchanges between Valentich (DSJ) and air traffic control are as follows: (from Wikipedia)

19:06:14 DSJ [Valentich]: Melbourne, this is Delta Sierra Juliet. Is there any known traffic below five thousand?
FS [Flight Services; Robey]: Delta Sierra Juliet, no known traffic.
DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, I am, seems to be a large aircraft below five thousand.
19:06:44 FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, What type of aircraft is it?
DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, I cannot affirm, it is four bright, and it seems to me like landing lights.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet.
19:07:31 DSJ: Melbourne, this is Delta Sierra Juliet, the aircraft has just passed over me at least a thousand feet above.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, roger, and it is a large aircraft, confirmed?
DSJ: Er-unknown, due to the speed it's travelling, is there any air force aircraft in the vicinity?
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, no known aircraft in the vicinity.
19:08:18 DSJ: Melbourne, it's approaching now from due east towards me.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet.
19:08:41 DSJ: (open microphone for two seconds.)
19:08:48 DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, it seems to me that he's playing some sort of game, he's flying over me two, three times at speeds I could not identify.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, roger, what is your actual level?
DSJ: My level is four and a half thousand, four five zero zero.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet and you confirm you cannot identify the aircraft?
DSJ: Affirmative.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, roger, stand by.
19:09:27 DSJ: Melbourne, Delta Sierra Juliet, it's not an aircraft it is (open microphone for two seconds).
19:09:42 FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, can you describe the - er - aircraft?
DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, as it's flying past it's a long shape (open microphone for three seconds) cannot identify more than it has such speed (open microphone for three seconds). It's before me right now Melbourne.
19:10 FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, roger and how large would the - er - object be?
19:10:19 DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, Melbourne, it seems like it's chasing me.[21] What I'm doing right now is orbiting and the thing is just orbiting on top of me also. It's got a green light and sort of metallic like, it's all shiny on the outside.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet
19:10:46 DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet (open microphone for three seconds) It's just vanished.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet.
19:11:00 DSJ: Melbourne, would you know what kind of aircraft I've got? Is it a military aircraft?
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, Confirm the - er ~ aircraft just vanished.
DSJ: Say again.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, is the aircraft still with you?
DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet; it's (open microphone for two seconds) now approaching from the south-west.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet
19:11:50 DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, the engine is rough-idling. I've got it set at twenty three twenty-four and the thing is (coughing).
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet, roger, what are your intentions?
DSJ: My intentions are - ah - to go to King Island - ah - Melbourne. That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again (open microphone for two seconds). It is hovering and (open microphone for one second) it's not an aircraft.
FS: Delta Sierra Juliet.
19:12:28 DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet. Melbourne (open microphone for seventeen seconds).

It was Valentich's first and only night flight over water. And neither Valentich nor his aircraft was ever seen, or heard from, again.

An artist's conception of Valentich pursued by a UFO

But at last, we have some new information on this puzzling case:

"Adelaide researcher Keith Basterfield has been following the case since the disappearance in 1978, but had been told by the Government in 2004 the official file had been lost or destroyed. He "found" it when searching through an online National Archives index on an unrelated topic. The file has since been digitised and uploaded on the archive's website."

So we have skeptic Keith Basterfield to thank for the recent government "document dump" that gets this new information 'out there.' Basterfield explains that the newly-released files reveal that "parts of aircraft wreckage with partial serial numbers were found in Bass Strait five years after the disappearance." Also, one pilot searching at the right time and place saw debris that appeared to be from a Cessna, but before he could get a good fix on its position it apparently sank. This makes it extremely likely that Valentich's aircraft simply crashed into the water in the darkness, although it falls short of conclusive proof.

Those interested in reading the 315-page official file still need to go out of their way to find it, however, via a seven-step process outlined by Mr Basterfield, which he perhaps charitably denies is another attempt to hide information. He says: 1. Go to National Archives of Australia. 2. Click on search the collection 3. Click on Begin your search 4. Up comes RecordSearch 5. In the keywords box type VH-DSJ 6. Up comes this file 7. Click on the View digital copy icon. (Miles Kemp, Adelaide Now, Fri, 06 Jul 2012)

If that is too complicated, and you really don't want to read all 315 pages in this maddeningly slow way, there is a nice summary of these findings in Basterfield's Blog entries of June 28, July 3, and August 24, 2012. You can also download the first set of documents from scribd. From the documents:

A number of reports of a fast moving brilliant white light were received from various parts of the country. Mt Stromlo observatory advised that the night of the 21st was the peak of the meteorite stream with 10-15 sightings per hour achieved.

The question of why Valentich took this somewhat risky night flight is a separate matter. According to Wikipedia,

His stated intention was to fly to King Island in Bass Strait via Cape Otway, to pick up passengers, and return to Moorabbin. However, he had told his family, girlfriend and acquaintances that he intended to pick up crayfish. During the accident investigations it was learned there were no passengers waiting to be picked up at King Island, he had not ordered crayfish and could not have done so because crayfish were not available anyway.

So clearly Valentich was being evasive about something. The late Philip J. Klass suggested that Valentich may have been involved in drug smuggling, a suggestion which has infuriated some people and for which there is no proof. However Valentich's stated explanations for making this night flight make do not check out. Some have also suggested that it was Valentich's intention to commit suicide.

Also, it turns out that Valentich was a UFO True Believer, and hence probably inclined to assume anything as a "UFO" that he could not immediately identify. He actually worried about what to do if a UFO attacked him!

from the recently-released Australian documents

Assuming that Valentich became disoriented and thought that Venus, or perhaps a meteor, was flying above him and chasing him, his average life expectancy at that point was about three minutes. This chilling pilot PSA video from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association shows exactly what happened to Valentich (as well as to JFK Jr in 1999). Watching this video made my blood run cold, but it's absolutely realistic.

In any case, we can be quite sure of what happened to Valentich, even if we cannot say why he made that fatal flight.

Smithsonian-Affiliated "National Atomic Testing Museum" Promises UFO "Secrets" Revealed

2012-09-06T14:26:00.001-07:00

The National Atomic Testing Museum is a relatively new, and seemingly professional, museum a few miles east of the Las Vegas Strip on Flamingo Road. I visited it about two years ago, and was very impressed by its powerful and relevant exhibits on the subject of atomic testing and the Cold War.

Now that museum, which is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, is getting heavily into claims about Area 51 and UFOs. It has a special exhibition on "Area 51," which requires a separate admission ticket. I did not see this exhibit, but I understand that it depicts ongoing classified projects, which would seem to place the museum in the same business as Wikileaks. Whether a Smithsonian-affiliated museum ought to be doing this is a serious moral and legal question. I thought that the Area 51 exhibit restricted itself to aerospace-related matters, but Lee Speigel writes in the Huffington Post, "Among the many items displayed are materials presented as "Authentic Alien Artifact" -- samples of small objects originating from an alleged UFO crash in Russia." So if you want to see an "Authentic Alien Artifact," the National Atomic Testing Museum claims to have one.

Lee Speigel's photo of an "Authentic Alien Artifact."

Not satisfied with that absurdity, the National Atomic Testing Museum is now getting into full-fledged promotion of UFO claims. On September 22, they are sponsoring an "Area 51 Special Lecture - Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed." There is nothing whatever skeptical about this panel.

The entrance to the National Atomic Testing Museum

One of the speakers is Nick Pope, who for years has been warning about an "alien invasion." Most recently, just before the London Olympics Pope warned, "The government must - and has planned - for the worst-case scenario: alien attack and alien invasion. Space shuttles, lasers and directed-energy weapons are all committed via the Alien Invasion War Plan to defence against any alien ships in orbit," he said, apparently unaware that America's Space Shuttle orbiters have been dispersed to various museums, and the rest of the system scrapped.

Another speaker is Col. Charles Halt (USAF Retired), who was the deputy base commander of the Bentwaters U.S. Air Force Base in England, and a major witness to the supposed Rendlesham "UFO landing" in December, 1980. As noted by the British skeptic Ian Ridpath, the tale told by Col. Halt about this incident has "improved" dramatically over the years. In 1980, he claimed only to have witnessed "starlike" objects in the sky. By 2010, his account had expanded so that the objects zoomed up over his head and sent down a laser-like beam at his feet. The audience at Las Vegas will surely hear the new and improved version of Col. Halt's tale, with no hint of any reasons to question it. As Ridpath wrote in reference to a posting by Dr. David Clarke,

Halt’s superior officer at the time of the events, Col Conrad, has been scathing of his claims, saying: “He should be ashamed and embarrassed by his allegation that his country and England both conspired to deceive their citizens over this issue. He knows better.”

Former intelligence officer Col. John Alexander (U.S. Army Retired), is also speaking. He probably organized this lecture event. Alexander is a bit unusual among UFO proponents in that he absolutely does not believe that the U.S. Government is covering up any "UFO secrets," or is engaged in any "UFO conspiracy." So that rules out belief in the Roswell Crash (which got him jeered while speaking at the MUFON Symposium last year). Yet Alexander apparently believes in a British UFO cover-up, as he is a strong proponent of Col. Halt and the other supposed witnesses at Rendlesham. James McGaha and I each told Alexander personally about Col. Halt's changing UFO claims, and asked how could he continue to have confidence in Halt's story? But Alexander does not seem troubled by Halt's inconsistency in the least, or by the dressing-down of Col. Halt by his superior officer, Col. Conrad; why give up on a UFO story as good as this one??!!!

Also speaking are retired Air Force Cols. William Coleman and Robert Friend. Col. Friend was the director of the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book. Coleman, an Air Force public information spokesman, was the producer of the former NBC-TV program "Project UFO," which ran two seasons (1978 and 1979). The show was so bad that, as I wrote in Psychic Vibrations (SI Fall 1979; book, p. 15):

Edward Winters, one of the stars of the series, explained how the writers for Project UFO got their material: “As I understand the story, the Air Force finally got tired of looking at us, because they said, ‘Anything your writers can dream up, we can find … There are over 12,000 cases in the Blue Book report.’ So instead of finding it first and then writing about it, they let the writers write it and then they go find one like it!”

If either of these gentlemen, Col. Friend or Col. Coleman, ever actually had any "UFO secrets," they should have appeared in the Blue Book files. Or at least in Project UFO.

James McGaha contacted the Director of the National Atomic Testing Museum, Allan Palmer, to get an explanation of why such sensationalist material was being presented under the auspices of the museum, but received no clear explanation. His attempts to get a comment on this matter from the Smithsonian has thus far been likewise unsuccessful.

For whatever reason, we are now seeing once-respected names dragging themselves through the swamp of UFO and alien claims. First the National Geographic, embracing UFO claims as if there were no tomorrow, with Chasing UFOs merely the most egregious example. Now even a Smithsonian-affiliated museum is shamelessly promoting entirely uncritical UFO claims. What will be next: Bigfoot exhibits? Astrological displays? Are museums to be the next venue for tabloid entertainment? If America's museums are willing to shed all scholarly rigor and self-respect to bring more visitors through the doors, then it will be a sorry day for science education in America.

CIA-CSI Connection Finally Laid Bare by Robert Hastings

2012-08-24T20:15:00.002-07:00

Often UFO proponents hint that the government, and the CIA in particular, must be behind skeptics' knee-jerk debunking of every major UFO sighting. But nobody has come right out and argued the point as directly as has Robert Hastings, the UFOlogist who is best-known for revealing how UFOs have repeatedly zapped our nuclear missiles, and the government has covered it up.

Robert Hastings

On July 29 with his article CSI Skeptic Robert Sheaffer doubts the U.S. Government Uses the Media to Debunk UFOs , Hastings hinted at the truth but did not fully tie everything together. I replied on August 9 with CSI and CIA: Hastings' Hyperbole, still desperately attempting to hold onto a bit of cover.

But then on August 21 Hastings wrote Robert Sheaffer's Bogus Claims on Nat Geo's "Secret History of UFOs": Incompetence or Disinformation? :

Highly relevant to this discussion is my research into Sheaffer’s affiliation with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) which was previously named The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). As journalist Terry Hansen has argued in The Missing Times, the historical role of CSICOP (now CSI) strongly suggests it has been performing as an intelligence community “front organization”—pumping anti-UFO propaganda into the media without revealing its true source or motivation.

This is actually CSI's secret Logo, given out only on a need-to-know basis

Hastings is most concerned about the biased and misleading information I gave to the public in the recent show The Secret History of UFOs on the National Geographic Channel. For me it was all in a day's work, but he observed:

Well-known “skeptic” Robert Sheaffer’s performance in Secret History of UFOs, the National Geographic network’s latest debunking-disguised-as-documentary, begs the question: At what point does the systematic presentation of half-truths and outright falsehoods about the UFO phenomenon cross the line from incompetent scholarship to intentional disinformation?
As I noted in my last article, given the extremely biased and propagandistic treatment of the UFO subject one consistently finds on Nat Geo, it might reasonably be argued that the network has been working behind the scenes with the CIA to debunk the phenomenon.

Hastings' Press Conference: Disclosure, not Debunking!

I am not the only one Hastings singles out. James Oberg, Ken Frazier, and James McGaha are all taken to task for their roles in misinforming the public, and covering up the truth. There is no point in further dissimulation. Hastings has laid it all out in a perfectly logical fashion, the first to do so. Now Roger Marsh, the director of public relations for MUFON, has written Hastings speaks out: Could a TV network be working with the CIA? making it pointless to continue further denial. Everything Hastings says is true.

Last year I began working on a UFO debunking effort with the National Geographic Channel at the request of CIA director David Petraeus. (Next year we planned to begin similar programs on Animal Planet, and the Playboy Channel.) I came up with the idea of a UFO investigations show that would be so foolish, an obvious insult to everyone's intelligence, that it would discredit the very idea of UFO investigations. The result is Chasing UFOs, and I don't mean to boast, but this was a stroke of genius. Then we realized that we'd also need some more sophisticated debunking programs, so I dictated the outline for The Secret History of UFOs, in which a little bit of debunking is mixed with a little bit of UFO truth, to keep everyone confused.

What did I gain from this, apart from the obvious great wealth and cool jetpack? I believed I was helping my country, by protecting people from panic over the fact that not only are the alien abductors, who we are helpless to stop, aroused by our naked bodies, but that they also eat children. Now that you know this, I hope you can still sleep.

the author flies his CIA-supplied jetpack

I don't mean to imply that I have been doing all this work by myself. In between his spy missions to Russia and North Korea, James Oberg has done splendid work explaining away the many alien spacecraft that have been following NASA space missions. James McGaha, a retired Air Force intelligence officer who is in reality still part of the official debunking squad, has done great work spreading disinformation about the UFO that landed in Rendlesham forest, and deciphering the binary message that it sent out telepathically. Dave Thomas helped keep the lid on New Mexico landings and crashes, and would have done more if he didn't have to spend so much time planting thermite in the World Trade Center. And I shouldn't forget Ben Radford, who Hastings takes to task in this earlier column. Congratulations, Gentlemen, now that Disclosure has arrived you can bask in the recognition you have earned!

Now that I have revealed all this, I know that my CIA handlers will be upset with me. They won't "disappear" me because I am too well-known, and they will not arrest me because the trial would reveal too much dirt about the long-standing UFO Coverup which, I understand, is now set to end a week from Tuesday. Gone for sure will be my $1 million-plus annual Debunker First Class salary from the CIA. But I am not going to give back the jetpack!