ufo magazine #20-1. march, 2005

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Vol. 20 No. 1

February /March 2005

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HE SHOWS WHERE NASA HIDTHE BODIES!

Alien Autopsy Exposé Part I

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UFO �February • March 2005

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Welcome to Volume 20!

We are very proud to celebrate 20 straight years of investigating the strange, the fun, the ephemeral.The things that go bumping and flickering into the

night.The things that hide behind the normal.

The things that really matter.The things that we

all know arereal.

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UFOFebruary • March 20052

10 21stCenturyNews13 VaenianAbductions14 ViewFromABrit18 Exopolitics21 NewsGuy24 OnAssignment27 EarleyIndications30 CoasttoCoastAM80 IGettheLastWord

columns

contents 4 Publisher’sNote 5 Editor’sNote 8 Letters 29 ConferencesComingUp BookReviews: 69 The Alien Files

70 The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident

71 Connecting the Dots

72 SightingsbyDate 74 Classifieds 78 SightingsMap

UFOM A G A Z I N E

Volume 20 • Number 1

UFO February • March 2005 �

UFOM A G A Z I N E

features

38RankingRussiansDenyUFOIncidents Suddenly, it’s turned very very cold in Russia. byVickiEcker

42ThroughtheSovietLookingGlass A little trip down memory lane, before everyone forgets. byGeorgeKnapp

February • March 2005

48 InterviewWithRyanWood A discussion about some of the earliest disclosures and some old family ties. byPaulDavids

32 Building265 This is the most amazing story you will read all year! Maybe ever! byJosephRichardGutheinz,Jr.

43 SecondAnnualCrashRetrievalConference The world’s most prestigious garbage pickers find something to lecture about. bySkylaireAlfvegren

54 AlienAutopsy:10YearsAftertheFact? Part I of a series. Why did they do it? Who was behind it? Are there tiny grains of truth? byDonEcker

61 NationalSecurityStateUnveiled:RichardDolan Big Brother lives! And breathes down our neck. bySeanCasteelandJohnWeigle

UFOFebruary • March 2005�

From the Publisher

William J. Birnes

Jim Moseley, the publisher of that eminently scholarly publication Saucer Smear, on one of his rare occasions got it right a year ago when he said that UFO Magazine “staggered” into print. That we did. With a redesigned look and a new editorial focus we made it into print and spent 2004 taking risks on the kinds of stories we thought would excite a larger audience of readers, UFO enthusiasts, and people who like to follow news of the paranormal. We were out to please our existing audience, but also to make new friends. And in the process we made some friends, but, as we’ve done many times before, also managed to offend some old friends.

Accordingly, I would like to issue a collective UFO Magazine apology to all those whom we offended for whatever reason we offended them, reasons that are known to us and reasons that aren’t. Sorries to all the readers who didn’t like our choice of paper stock. We couldn’t afford the shiny stuff. In fact, even if we could have afforded it, the big pa-per mills began rationing the glossy stock to the catalog printers. Likely we couldn’t have obtained enough even if we wanted to print on it. So, a big sorry to all of you who wrote us or called saying you didn’t like the change from 2003.

We had to change the way we managed subscriptions in 2004. Couldn’t afford the old subscription service. So, sorry for the lost magazines and for all the subscribers who went missing between September 2003 and April 2004. And if you’re still lost, you know the address (PO Box 11013, Marina del Rey, CA 90295).

There were some readers who complained about our stories, our columnists, and our covers. We decided to take risks, so we have to take the knocks, too. If you didn’t like the orbs, the Jim Marrs photo (he loved it), or the photocopy of the alien (he wasn’t real), sorry you were offended. If you didn’t like the book reviews because you like the book and the reviewer didn’t, or vise versa, sorry about that. If you didn’t like what some of our columnists wrote because you felt it was aimed at you, it wasn’t, but sorry about that anyway. Let’s start a new year.

This is a year in which we’re still going to offend many more people, so let me say sorry to all those who’re not yet offended but most likely will be. UFO is looking forward to a big year as we hit volume two-oh, taking us to our twen-tieth anniversary in 2006. Here’s some of what’s in store: we’re starting up a publishing partnership with our friends in Brazil. That’s right, we’ll be working with A. J. Geveard and UFO Brazil in translating some of their exciting stories into English and publishing them here. We’re even talking about publishing an electronic edition of UFO Brazil, and, of course UFO Magazine USA. We hope to be able to reach out to our English cousins this year and re-establish the Gra-ham Birdsall tradition of UFO Magazine U.K. Time will tell, but for all those readers on the other side of the Atlantic, a mailing will be coming your way soon. And we hope that this will be a year of Disclosure, with a capital D that rhymes with T, which stands for Truth, right here on these very pages.

UFO Magazine is the most interesting magazine in the world. We will prove it to you, again, in 2005.

UFO February • March 2005 5

Vicki Ecker

From the Editor

When you’ve been dabbling or drowning in the UFO game long enough, the proffered “play” frequently becomes altogether tedious—but never because of the phenomenon itself. In fact, UFOs remain a profoundly arousing enig-ma that drives the gamer in the manner of Tom Petty’s lyrics in his rocking anthem, “Runnin’ Down A Dream”—

Workin’ on a mystery, Goin’ wherever it leads …

While the UFO phenomenon itself never ceases to attract and intrigue, beguile and baffle, the tedium in the game itself arises when the mystery leads to a clash of cultures, as it were; divided geographies attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. And while UFOs might easily do that, individual humans with widely diverse agendas simply cause a ruckus in the mind of a neutral observer. (Or, one attempting to remain neutral!) Scam art-ists and bonafide witnesses who both claim to have important UFO data will spread their wares before a credulous public. Sit back and see what happens. Building 265 (current) and the alien autopsy footage (past) each press in on their audience. But guess which one ends up dominating?

The challenge presented in this issue is to calculate the odds of what’s real and what’s not. Any reader of our magazine knows that since the middle of last century, much has been lined up against the UFO phenomenon to divert attention from historical fact and diminish the impact of what can only be determined as huge national security breaches, at the very least.

Ever since then, courageous, determined souls have tried their mightiest to let everyone in on a special secret. The tiniest and flimsiest of hoaxes or wild goose chases or silliness will capture the public imagination instead, heedlessly overshadowing earnest truth tellers.

That’s the way of this world. Maybe it will always be this way. So, seeing no change after years and years, life comes down to the comfort and warmth from those we love. We’ll still play the game, mind you, but at a more relaxed pace and with far less expectation: the only way we can stay in the game.


February/March 2005, Vol. 20, No. 1 uFo ISSN # 1043-1233 uSPS # 007-068

UFO Magazine is published bi-monthly at 8055 West Manchester Ave., Suite 310,Playa del Rey, CA 90293 • Printed in U.S.A. •

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Send information, submissions, and art to UFO Editorial, PO Box 4252, Sunland, CA 91041-4252 or call 818 896-4204. Advertising: Jay Eisenberg, 800 356-9193.

Questions regarding your subscription call 310 306-5667, or write UFO Magazine, Subscription Department, PO Box 11013, Marina del Rey, CA 90295

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Opinions and factual statements expressed herein are the responsibility of authors and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by this magazine; advertisements do not constitute endorsement by the magazine or its publishers. UFO Magazine regrets that no responsibility can be accepted for unsolicited material, which cannot be returned unless a stamped, addressed envelope is included, and will become the property of the magazine.

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Copyright © 2004–2005 UFO Magazine, All rights reserved.

E D I T O R I A LP U B L I S H E RWilliam J. Birnes [email protected]

E D I T O R - I N - C H I E FVicki Ecker

[email protected]

D I R E C T O R O F R E S E A R C HDon Ecker

[email protected]

D E S I G N D I R E C T O RNancy Birnes

[email protected]

C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R SSean Casteel, George Earley, Jan Hester

C O L U M N I S T SSteve Bassett, Don Ecker, Zoh & Dr. Bob Hieronimus, Guy Malone, George Noory,

Nick Redfern, Peter Robbins, Jeremy Vaeni

C O N T R I B U T I N G W R I T E R SSkylaire Alfvegren, Sean Casteel, Paul Davids, Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr.,

Don Ecker, Vicki Ecker, Scott Holloway, Keisha Kanabo, George Knapp,Scott J. Santa, James Taylor, Pat Uskert, John Weigle

D I R E C T O R SWilliam J. Birnes, Nancy Birnes

Don Ecker, Vicki Ecker

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UFOM A G A Z I N E

About the CoverJoseph Gutheinz, a U.S. deputy marshal

attached to NASA and an investigator for the Office of the Inspector General, lays out the elements of a fraud investigation for his team.

Gutheinz tells the story of the mysterious Building 265 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where, years ago, a strange elderly man wearing a long-expired NASA badge told him how a live extraterrestrial was extricated from the crash at Roswell and taken to a facil-ity near White Sands.

It was there that scientists who conducted an autopsy were literally disintegrated by lethal levels of radiation that emanated from the ET’s cadaver. Years later, he himself vis-ited that camouflaged building at White Sands, picked the lock to gain entrance, and, with his own eyes, saw spread out on the floor, two hazmat suits with the disintegrated remains of those who wore them still inside.

Is Joe Gutheinz yet another figure in the ever-evolving story of Roswell? Read the story and see for yourself.


Editor:I am writing to thank you for your gift of the maga-

zine you sent to our group. Some of those in our group are excited and are getting telescopes to search for UFOs. Some of them talked about being able to walk again if aliens can cure them of their injury. All of us are in wheelchairs from a spinal cord injury and it was nice of you to send your magazine. It really boosts up the morale of those who have wild imaginations, and the conversations that came up were unreal, to say the least. Thank you again, and may God bless you!

Joseph Gianninom, presidentThe Spinal Cord Foundation

Editor:Unless you will send the UFO Magazine in a plain

brown wrapper, I will not get another subscription! I live in a small retirement home and everybody in the place I live in is nosy. I don’t want any of them to know I get the magazine. You know: narrow-minded people!

Name WithheldWarren, PA

Editor’s note: It just so happens that our current en-velopes, when we do use them, are plain, and brown. Coincidence?

Editor:I see in your last issue (Vol. 19, No. 6), Don Ecker

accuses me of keeping him from speaking at the recent National UFO Conference. I had nothing to do with lining up speakers or vendors. As far as I am concerned, even a s***head like Ecker has a right to be heard! Continue to keep your eye on the sky!

Jim MoseleyKey West, FL

Don Ecker responds: I didn’t directly state that Jim prevented me from speaking at NUFOC—only that our publisher was told (by a third party) that if I came, Moseley might choose not to attend. Maybe Jim should smoke less and read with his glasses on!

Editor:Thank you for the wonderfully thought-provoking

article by Michael Horn in your October/November issue. In regard to the Billy Meier case: Gary Kinder’s 1987 book Light Years does not conclude that the Meier case is real—or false. It just presents the facts of the case and lets the readers make up their own minds as to its verity or falseness.

Having spent over 30 years traversing the many different spiritual paths available on Earth and finding them all wanting, I have come to believe that real spirituality is exactly what the Pleiadians/Plejarens say it is: All life is of an unimaginably great Oneness and we are each part of that All-Oneness, and our spiritual evolution is totally our own individual responsibility. Semjase, the Pleiadian/Plejaren woman who met with Billy Meier has said, “If Earth humans would only love one another, your planet would be a paradise.”

Gene AndradeCarmel, CA

Editor:Re: “Mysterious Sky Craft” article, pp. 52–55 (June/

July, 2004). My brother saw this, also. It was about 300 yards south of the northern part of a golf course, and was at the same time in 1985. He and dozens of others traveling south on the Parkway pulled over and stopped to watch for a few minutes. It was described as a huge—much larger than a football field—triangular craft with red lights, and flying only about 200 or 300 feet up in a southeasterly direction.

Why is nothing ever reported here in Westchester? Others had to have seen it. Its flight path would have had to have taken it over a very busy area of roads,

shopping areas and people. I believe in 1) the existence of UFOs, 2) the media cover-ups, and 3) the government “untruth” about any of this. Of the above three, I don’t know which is more amazing.

E.A.M.Westchester, NY

Editor:I received a UFO Encyclopedia and couldn’t believe

that Walter Webb, who investigated the Betty and Barney Hill case, was not included. He also wrote a UFO book and spent a long time on UFO matters. He still does the astronomy column in the MUFON Journal. I think he deserves the recognition he has earned.

Shirley FoxFt. Myers, FL

Editor:Thanks to all of you for making serious inquiry into

the most fascinating issue of our age that is otherwise ignored, at least by the mainstream media. I don’t think they will consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously until they can poll them and sell them beer.

Billy WalshRockville, MD

UFO February • March 2005 �

Editor:Regarding the articles by Ron Garner, George Knapp, Jarred Schenke, and Bill Birnes, Vol. 19, No. 4:To George Knapp: What right do you have calling my son Danny “a phony-baloney goofball”? You wanted more

information at that time and Danny was not able to give it to you, so you called him “phony.” In 2002 I asked for your help. You said you would call me back. Well, it is now 2004 and no call yet. You do not keep your word, so you must be phony also. I do not lie about things; of our son Danny, I want the truth out one way or another.

Now about the lie you wrote in your article. You mentioned that I said I had never seen Danny being picked up. I told you that Danny was picked up by men in suits and military right in front of our apartment. Danny would wait for them in front, pacing back and forth. Pacing back and forth did not mean he walked down the street to be picked up. Get your facts straight. Danny’s high school years: Danny lived with us. He attended school in Eng-land to complete the rest of his high school. He was away at school for a while, just like any kid who goes away to school. But he still lived with us. Danny’s PhD: He did earn a PhD. But as I’ve said, his wife Debra took it off Danny’s bedroom wall, telling me she wanted to make a copy. But making a copy was not her intention. She stole it and as of July 17, 2004, admits stealing it on audio and video on the Internet. I have the proof.

Cancer Research: First of all the ingredient Danny used was not Clorox, it was Purex. Danny used this ingredi-ent with his own solutions he had put together. Danny did not call this so-called “news conference” at UNLV. His professor did. One of his professors wanted the solution for himself to make big $$. He wanted Danny to falsify his research numbers. Danny would not do that, and so his B.S. in biology was out the door. Danny refused to falsify his work, so he changed his major to psychology. I ask you, George, what would you have done, falsify the numbers to get your B.S. in biology?

To Ron Garner: Danny did get his high school diploma in England. UNLV did not want to accept it and told Danny to take the general equivalency exam. Danny did just that. And as for his financial problems, Danny was never much into taking care of his financial responsibilities. His wife, Debra, took over. Take this into account. Danny’s work was usually paid in cash under the table. Debra had the financial responsibilities.

To Jarred Schenke: Now someone else is writing something false once again. Jarred states that Danny stopped attending meetings at the Los Angeles Micro Society in 1977. That is not true. In 1977, 1978, 1979, we drove Danny to his meeting in Los Angeles each month. In 1979 we moved to Las Vegas. We flew our son Danny from Las Vegas to Los Angeles many times for his meetings. This continued even after he left in England in the ’80s.

To Bill Birnes: Danny’s middle name is just B, not Benjamin. I tell people this all the time. For once, get it straight: B, not Benjamin. As for Marci McDowell, she met with Bill Hamilton before 2002. She first met him in 1999 at the Little Ale’Inn on a Memorial Day weekend. She may have set a meeting for Bill to meet in Danny in 2002, but it seems like it was before that.

Doreen CrainLas Vegas, NV


Focus Your Hidden Abilities! Be All That You Can Be!by Dr. Bob and Zohara Hieronimus

Looking for a scientific framework in which to understand your psychic or paranormal experiences? A new book co-authored by “one of the grand old men of parapsychology” will help you. Becoming Psychic: Spiritual Lessons Focusing Your Hidden Abilities (New Page Books) is a collaboration between clinical psychologist Stephen Kierulff, PhD and researcher Dr. Stanley Krippner, whom we interviewed on 21st Century Radio®.

This book will give you detailed instructions for how to become more psychic in five important areas: mind reading, remote viewing, moving matter with mind, distant healing of physical ills through mental intention, and seeing into the future. And besides all that, Becoming Psychic has a fantastic set of appendices! Listings of professional psychics, healers, organizations, training schools, research centers, workshops and programs … it’s an absolute Virgo’s delight.

The book is set up as a kind of dialogue between Drs. Kierulff and Krippner, as Dr. Kierulff recounts various personal psychic experiences he has had and Dr. Krippner provides the latest verifiable research for the most up-to-date understanding of these skills.

Dr. Stanley Krippner is a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco and the co-author of several books, including Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work With Them, and Varieties of Anomalous Experience published by the American Psychological Association. The winner of the Parapsychological Association’s Outstanding Career award, he also served as Dr. Bob’s doctoral committee chairman and advisor at Saybrook Institute when he obtained his PhD.

Apparently one of the biggest barriers to developing psychic abilities is not believing it to be possible. As

Krippner points out, “This goes for any talent. If somebody doesn’t believe that they can learn how to cook, learn how to play a musical instrument, or learn how to have fun in sports, that puts up a barrier that will inhibit them from using their genetic and innate abilities. I think that like all talents, psychic development has a basic develop-mental background. Some people are gifted with more of it than others. But whatever amount of psychic capacity they have, they’re not going to be able to develop it if they think poorly of it, if they think poorly of themselves, if they lack the con-fidence to play around with it and expand their horizons, expand their way of thinking. But like I say, the same thing goes for any talent, any gift, any human capacity that a person might want to extend and make the best of.”

Having fun and enjoying yourself also appears to help the learning process, and this seems to be

especially true in the area of psy-chic development. As for a precise definition of psychic development, it’s a term that covers many topics. Intuition is the ability to glimpse into the possible future, the abil-ity to sense what is happening at a distance. “Some of these abilities we know a great deal about,” says Krippner, but others are still “high-ly conjectural which only future re-search will teach us about.”

Watch your ESPs and Qs

One of the ways Stanley Krippner has become one of the grand old men of parapsychology is the preci-sion and care with which he choos-es his words. There are many terms in this field of inquiry that make

him uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care enough about it to make it a big issue. Yet his points are of great semantic interest and food for thought.

He avoids terms like extrasensory, for example, explain-ing that he is “not ready to claim that it is extrasensory,

UFO 11February • March 2005

beyond the senses. There’s so much about the senses that we don’t know. There’s so much about the range of senses that we don’t know. The human organism might have senses that we haven’t discovered yet. Who is to say that these capacities do not behave like the senses in some way or another?”

Krippner also tends to avoid words like reality, truth, and materialism, saying that “all of these terms have traps in them. They have hidden agendas in them, and they’re a little too abstract for me. I like to get down and use terms that describe in a more con-crete manner just what seems to be going on.”

The special part of this book is that it follows the journey of Dr. Kierulff, who used his psychic experi-ences to develop spiritually. As Dr. Krippner is clear to point out, however, “There are many paths to spiri-tual development, and somebody doesn’t have to be psychic to develop spiritually. By spiritually, I mean developing the capacity to love, to have compassion, to be sensitive to the needs of other people, to find a connection with transcendent sources in the universe. Many people get there through their appreciation of art. Many people get there through serving their fellow human beings. Many people get there through some type of social or political activism. There are many ways to grow spiritu-ally, and psychic development is just one of them.”

Becoming Psychic is full of thoughtful reflections like “the spiritual lesson of telepathy,” which is learning that the sense of separation or aloneness is an illusion. “One of the spiritual lessons that comes out of the book,” says Krippner, “and out of the entire scientific literature

on parapsychology, is that there does seem to be a con-nective link between people that has been overlooked by mainstream science. This link really should give some comfort to people, because they are not alone—wheth-er they know it or not. They are connected with other people around the globe.

There does seem to be a global consciousness that transcends such artificial dividing lines as race and ethnicity and nationality. This should also be kept in mind when people go to war against each other because of some of these belief systems

based on rather superficial understandings of the human species. The deep connections do exist.”

A Dark and Stormy NightIf you go to the kinds of movies we do, you have proba-

bly noticed that Hollywood movies very often incorporate well-researched and documented tidbits about psychic phenomena, and then repeat them so often they become clichéd. Take for example, the obvious one that haunted houses get scarier during thunderstorms. Turns out that’s true. As Krippner considers it, the demonstrated effects

Hosted by Stacy Keach


of sunspots, electri-cal storms, and geo-magnetic activity on psi is one of the most significant steps that researchers have taken toward trying to understand these phenomena.

He relates that years after the now-famous dream tel-epathy experiments at Maimonides Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Hos-pital in New York, they reexamined the data and discovered their best results had

been at times of low magnetic field activity. These dream telepathy experiments were designed with one person in the dream laboratory trying to dream about distant pic-tures that were being projected to them telepathically by somebody in a distant room or a different building.

“This worked best when there were no major sunspots, no major electrical activity,” said Krippner. “The geomag-netic field had to be calm in order for the telepathy really to be demonstrated. This reached the level of statistical significance, and this is something that’s been applied to other experiments.” This examination of the geomagnetic field has been applied to other experiments only in ret-rospect, he added, so one can’t claim that people were finding what they were expecting to find. “The examina-tion of the sunspots and the electrical storms was done years, if not decades, after the original experiments had been done. I think this is the beginning of a tantalizing explanation.”

On the other hand, Dr. William Roll and others who have investigated the so-called the poltergeist phenomenon have found that electrical storms actually seem to increase or en-hance what is called psychokinetic activity. These researchers have determined that the poltergeist phenomenon is actually a type of psychokinetic activity, or something that involves mind over matter, and have found that electrical storms seem to enhance this anomalous ability people have, usually un-consciously, to move objects about without touching them.

Krippner wants to know if this enhancement can be tapped for healing, which can also been considered a case of mind influencing matter. “Maybe healers should do their work during storms,” he said. “We haven’t done any research on that yet, but this would be a worthwhile research direction.”

Real-Life PsiAnother worthwhile research direction is one that most

of our readers have probably already heard of: remote view-ing. Several excellent books have been written detailing

the U.S. government’s exploration of this technique in an attempt to train spies to be psychic (Joseph McMoneagle’s works are particularly recommended). Although there is no real way of knowing what the government is currently using or studying, Krippner is skeptical of whether this is the best use of research funding.

“A couple of million dollars was actually poured into laboratories like the SRI, Science Research Institute Inter-national laboratory in California. But these were not really formal experiments; this was applied technology. It did not really have the controls so that you could rule out coincidence. Some very striking things happened in terms of being able to identify what the military was doing.

“But then there are also some failures in terms of trying to locate people who are kidnapped, in terms of trying to identify troop movements. I would recommend articles in the Journal for Scientific Exploration a few years ago. One by Jessica Utts, a statistician who went through all of this declassified military data on remote viewing. She felt that there was something to it, that more often than not the remote viewers hit the mark. But then there’s a companion piece by Ray Hyman, a psychologist from the University of Oregon, who went through the same material. He said it was not very impressive to him.

“So you see, here we have two very talented, very intelligent individuals going through the same data and reaching very, very different conclusions. I haven’t seen the raw data—I have just read the articles describing it—but I sort of come down some place in the middle. Yes, it’s interesting stuff, but for all the millions of dollars that were spent, I don’t know that the residue is there to keep employing psychics on the government payroll to do remote viewing. Maybe the government has some people on the payroll now, and maybe they’re using them. If so, I don’t think they’re using them to very good advantage given all the casualties that we’re seeing in Iraq. But who am I to question what the government is doing secretly?”

Well, we all want to question what the government is doing secretly, but most important to remember is that when you do, they will usually not tell you the whole

Hieronimus& Co.

Are on tHerAdio!

Future Talk with Zohara Hieronimus, nationwide Sat-urdays 11 pm to 1 am EST, on the Business Talk Radio Network. http://www.FutureTalk.org21st Century Radio in Baltimore, on WCBM 680 AM, Sundays from 8 pm to 10 pm ESThttp://www.21stCenturyRadio.comSubscribe to The Hieronimus & Co. Journal for $30; PO Box 648, Owings Mills, MD 21117. Call 410 356-4852. Or send SASE to the same address for a list of affiliated stations.

continued on page 77


Lost in Translationby Jeremy Vaeni

The weather is at war with us as we’re at war with each other because we’re at war with ourselves, within ourselves. There’s your tongue twister of the month. Meanwhile, what’s that sound going BOOMBOOMBOOM? What’s that flash of light? … a fiery object … something lands on our idscorched earth: a craft. Its occupants have been waiting for this time of reckoning. It’s not Judgment Day, it’s Consequence Day. We can only run from our true nature for so long. This is the moment when we choose: Transcendence? Or translation?

Translation has served us well outwardly with our inventions and our laws and—let’s face it—plumbing is good. But it’s time to move on now, not get anchored in the muck of the familiar, the past, the dead ideologies of another age. Yeah, it’s time for transcendence, which is the scariest thing of all because it means the death of self, the death of the illusion of our control, and an end to the lie that “To be or not to be?” is a valid question.

Most of us take a position on aliens; that they are good, bad, or indifferent. Taking any such position implies that we have a relationship with them and that in this relationship we are equals to or even more fully actualized than are they. You can only understand another in relationship to you, correct? So the first silent presumption is that we know what humans are because we’re human. We are confident that we know who and what we are because we’re living it.

But we don’t. We’re broken at a stage, calling that the pinnacle, and fighting to preserve the status quo of the self. We’re fetuses clinging to the womb, pretending that we’re already adults so … no need to be born, thank you very much! Meantime, we’re not even babies yet. We do scream like babies, though. We are narcissistic like babies and we are clueless like babies. This is the dark horror of translation.

It needn’t be this way, but it is. It is this way. And only you can change this. Not because there are shady aliens keeping vital information from you, but because it is only something that you can tackle as an individual, within yourself. Now is the time to do so, for we are running headfirst into a psychospiritual wall that cannot be climbed.

The wall is this: There is no better future that we can project for ourselves anymore. Try to. You can’t do it, not realistically. If you are progressive, the best you can envision is more of the same, with some slight modifications. If you are regressive, then you are working to bring us

back to “the good old days” that weren’t good even then. So stagnation or regression are all any of us can envision anymore, because we are at a place where we can see that the future was never real. The buildingup of societies toward global harmony is a total and complete fabrication. Harmony begins and ends with the individual. Running toward the ideal future is running away from this fact.

There is something huge coming down the pike, make no mistake. All of the warning signs are there, be they of interior or exterior domains. We are about to get shrugged off the face of the earth because we choose to remain clever, irrelevant animals, and we know this. Do we care?

Will we claim responsibility or continue to smile and call it God’s work? Will we claim responsibility or continue to bemoan a shadow government? Will we take respon

The Allies of HumanityBook Two:

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The Second Set of Briefings is here!

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by Marshall Summers



The UFO Encounter of Dame Rebecca Westby Nick Redfern

According to a batch of now-declassified files held at the National Archives, Kew, England, on January 7, 1966, the well-known British writer Dame Rebecca West, MBE, was inadvertently plunged into a truly bizarre puzzle. Incred-ibly, she asserted, some sort of unusual aerial object had landed on the grounds of her home, Ibstone House.

Born in 1892, Rebecca West (the adopted name of Cec-ily Isabel Fairfield) was the daughter of Charles Fairfield, renowned in London society for his spirited and witty de-fense of “extreme individualism” in debates with the likes of George Bernard Shaw. While West was still a child, Fairfield relocated his family to Edinburgh where he died, leaving his widow and four daughters in circumstances bordering on poverty.

West (who adopted the name Rebecca at the age of 19 after Ibsen’s heroine in Rosmersholm) remained in Edinburgh and continued her education there, and trained briefly for the stage in London before becoming a noted feminist and journalist. As her career blossomed, West wrote for The Freewoman, The Clarion and The New Freewoman; and many of her writings from that time were collated and re-printed as The Young Rebecca in 1932.

Her first novel, The Return of the Sol-dier, was published in 1918 and was followed by The Judge, The Strange Necessity, Harriet June, The Thinking Reed; and after an extended period, The Fountain Overflows and The Birds Fall Down. In the meantime, in 1930 West married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker, who was to accompany her on the journey that ultimately led to the 1941 publication of her two-volume study of the Yugoslav nation, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

West was also present at the Nurem-burg trials and her 1949 book, The Mean-ing of Treason, largely grew out of articles commissioned by the New Yorker. In 1965, only one year before her cu-rious UFO encounter occurred, The Meaning of Treason was updated with added accounts of what were then more recent scandals, including those of John Vassall, a spy in

the Admiralty sentenced to 18 years imprisonment, and Stephen Ward, a player in the Profumo case, a famous Brit-ish spy scandal of the 1960s.

For its part, the files reveal, the Ministry of Defense was intent on playing down West’s UFO-style encounter and suggested that West had simply misidentified a helicop-ter seen under poor conditions. Whatever the truth of the matter, West’s odd experience became the subject of a fifteen-page file that attracted the attention of the MoD’s Defense Intelligence Staff.

But how did Dame Rebecca West become embroiled in the UFO controversy? As the now-aged documentation at the National Archives reveals, it was 2:45 p.m. on January 7, 1966 and West was out walking on the grounds of her

home when …“As I was going

down the steep hill to the farm buildings I noticed a man walk-ing on my property at some distance to the right of the path I was following,” she wrote to the MoD. “Pres-ently, he reached a point when the wood stopped and there is a hedge which runs down to the valley along a sharp ridge. There is a gap in the hedge and the man stopped just past this and turned around, facing in the reverse direction, and stood still.”

Expressing concern about “what he was going to do,” West watched in amaze-ment as what she de-

scribed as “an aerial construction” appeared out of no-where. “One moment it was not there, the next it was,” Rebecca West explained. “It seemed to come down quite rapidly, on the other side of the hedge from the man, but very close to it.”

Dec. 8, 1947: Dame Rebecca, celebrated author


And what, precisely, was it that Dame Rebecca West saw? Her description was curious, to say the least.

Stressing to the MoD that the object was “strangely shaped,” she stated: “It consisted of something like a met-al band, gray-blue in color, flattened at one point so as to seem almost leaf-like, crossed with a sort of herringbone system of metal strips.” She elaborated further: “There was also somehow attached to these an odd object like a bag with an opening that had points, made of yellowish material. As I looked the whole thing collapsed toward the ground.

“I saw it crumpling downwards, but crumpling is not quite the word. The metal band seemed to cut backwards and disappear while the curious bag looked as if someone were squeezing the air out of the lower portion of it, so that all the points stood up, and then fell back. Compar-ing the height of the object with the height of the man, I should put it as something [between] fifteen and twenty.”

Also playing on West’s mind was the identity of the mys-tery man. Stressing that his behavior was “very odd,” she continued that, “he seemed to be watching the thing come down, and the minute it was down, he turned ’round and followed the hedge track down to the valley. Once or twice he looked to his left as if he were scrutinizing the valley, and he did not seem to see me. But at the bottom of the track he stopped again and looked all ’round the slope on which I was standing, and this time he seemed to see me. We stood and looked at each other for quite a long time, and I had an uncomfortable feeling and went home.”

The key question centered on the identity of the strange object. In her letter to the Ministry of Defense, West wrote that a farm laborer had informed her that he had seen a helicopter flying in the vicinity earlier on that same day. West, meanwhile, ventured the possibility that it was “some gadget sent out by the Meteorological Office.”

Rebecca West signed off, “I feel most apologetic for bur-dening you with such an improbable story. But I did not like to report it to the local police, as I think you will agree that an elderly woman who went to the local police with a story of having seen the equivalent of a flying saucer would be adding considerably to the difficulties of her life.”

On arrival at the MoD, West’s letter was forwarded to a particular office known to have been involved in the col-lection of UFO data in the 1960s and referred to as S4F (Air). As the records show, however, one L. W. Akhurst of that office then dispatched all of the relevant data to a Flight Lieutenant Mercer of the Defense Intelligence Staff.

For his part, Mercer was inclined to accept that “Dame Rebecca West saw a helicopter, possibly of the Bell 47 or similar type, which in conditions of poor visibility ap-peared to have some unusual characteristics.” Despite this assertion, it is interesting to note that Mercer duly stamped his evaluation “Restricted” and advised Akhurst to inform Rebecca West of his conclusions.

Needless to say, she was far from convinced by the MoD’s explanation and fired a letter back to Akhurst. “To have appeared where I saw it a helicopter would have had to fly twenty or thirty yards with its lower half deeply embedded in the earth.”

She also maintained that, “There was at this time com-plete silence” and “that visibility seemed to me not poor at all, for I spotted several birds at a considerable distance. I do not expect an answer to this letter.”

She concluded, “I reported the incident partly because I feared the object might be a parachute or some such construction which was being used to drop something or somebody for criminal purposes, and partly because the construction I saw or thought I saw puzzled me, as I could


UFO16 February • March 2005

The UFO ForumI Think Therefore I Visit

www.theufoforum.org


Those Pesky Myths, Misperceptions, andMisunderstandings

by Stephen BassettHello, 2005. It’s the 58th year of the extraterrestrial-re-

lated, phenomena-truth embargo. I was born in Decem-ber, 1946. By then, the cover-up, as some prefer to call it, was already underway. While July, 1947 serves nicely as a formal beginning of this policy, there had been sightings during and just after the war, Thus, the truth embargo completely encapsulates my life.

What a long, strange trip.Fortunately, the frustration and anticipation which ac-

companies this issue, like few others—somewhat in the fashion of Lieutenant Dunbar’s approach to life in Catch 22—makes the passage of time seem sooooooo much slow-er. How long can this go on? Should I take out a 401(k)? The prize—disclosure—hangs out there in the hazy fu-ture, both inevitable and unreachable at the same time.

It would help to move things along if all of the myths, misperceptions, and misunderstandings could be cleared up. Let’s start off the New Year by taking a look at three examples.

The Great Halloween Fiasco of ’38On the eve of Halloween, October 30, 1938, Orson

Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air performed a radio play version of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. It was postured as a real news broadcast and immediately entered the realm of myth and legend. While there were disclaimers provided, many of the listening public who were dial-hopping back and forth from another popular show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, thought the broad-cast was real and proceeded to panic in various and some-times creative ways.

The Welles fiasco would have remained just an inter-esting footnote in history if it hadn’t gotten caught up in exopolitical matters, namely the truth embargo. In time, the War of the Worlds panic became a touchstone for those who wish to make the case that the human race “can’t handle the truth.” If you are reading UFO Magazine, you know the issues and have heard this non sequitur repeat-ed many times. In fact, just last issue (Vol. 19. No. 6) we reported another facet of this interesting study in psycho-logical manipulation. In short: It’s baloney.

Here is the ironic but proper inference that should have been taken from the Panic of 1938: It is not that humans,

when confronted with the idea of an extraterrestrial pres-ence, hostile or otherwise, go to pieces. The panic that ensued was unpleasant but hardly rose to the level of the Coconut Grove fire. That was panic. Given how little ex-posure Americans had had to the extraterrestrial hypoth-esis by 1938, the reaction was not exceptional.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that people got upset, and that was bad. Here is the inference that should have been drawn: When an institution of public trust such as a major radio network completely fabricates a false and scary scenario, people get upset. The message of 1938 is not that people can’t handle the truth, but rather that people can be misled into inappropriate response by elaborate lies. October 30, 1938 does not support a cover-up; it supports disclosure.

The Brookings ReportAh, the “Proposed Studies of the Implications of Peace-

ful Space Activities for Human Affairs,” the Brookings Re-port—what would a truth embargo have done without this fine tome commissioned by NASA’s Committee on Long Range Studies from the Brookings Institution in 1960? Quite a few people in and out of government have used a few sections of this report to justify taking a passive ap-proach to the disclosure process. Such an interpretation is a profound misconception. Take a moment and read the report’s exact material that did not become generally known until the early 1990s.

Summary: Introduction: Goals and Methods

5. Certain potential products or consequences of space activities imply such a high degree of change in world conditions that it would be unprofitable within the purview of this report to propose research on them. Examples include a controlled thermonuclear fusion rocket power source and face-to-face meetings with extraterrestrials.

Attitudes and Values

4. Though intelligent or semi-intelligent life conceiv-ably exists elsewhere in our solar system, if intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered in the next twenty years, it will very probably be by radio telescope from other solar systems. Evidences of its existence might also be found in artifacts left on the moon or other


planets. The consequences for attitudes and values are unpredictable, but would vary profoundly in different cultures and between groups within complex societies; a crucial factor would be the nature of the communi-cation between us and the other beings. Whether or not earth would be inspired to an all-out space effort

by such a discovery is moot: societies sure of their own place in the universe have disin-tegrated when con-fronted by a superior society, and others have survived even though changed. Clearly, the better we can come to understand the factors involved in responding to such crises the better prepared we may be.

5. While the discovery of intelligent life in other parts of the universe is not likely in the immediate future, it could nevertheless happen at any time. Whenever it does occur its consequences for earth attitudes and values may be profound. Hence a long-term research effort, which would aid in preparing for this possibil-ity, could usefully begin with:

A continuing determination of emotional and intel-lectual understanding and attitudes regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Section 9: Attitudes and Values: Possible Implications for the General Public

Recent publicity given to efforts to detect extrater-restrial messages via radio telescope has popular-ized—and legitimized—speculations about the impact of such a discovery on human values. It is conceivable that there is semi-intelligent life in some part of our solar system or highly intelligent life which is not technologically oriented, and many cosmologists and astronomers think it very likely that there is intelligent life in many other solar systems. While face-to-face meetings with it will not occur within the next twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus. If there is any contact to be made dur-ing the next twenty years it would most likely be by radio—which would indicate that these beings had at least equaled our own technological level.

An individual’s reactions to such a radio contact would in part depend on his cultural, religious, and social background, as well as on the actions of those he considered authorities and leaders and their be-havior, in turn would in part depend on their cultural, social, and religious environment. The discovery

would certainly be front-page news everywhere; the degree of political or social repercussion would prob-ably depend on leadership’s interpretation of (1) its own role, (2) threats to that role, and (3) national and personal opportunities to take advantage of the disrup-tion or reinforcement of the attitudes and values of others. Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the public and other leadership groups.

The knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might lead to a greater unity of men on earth, based on the oneness of man or on the age-old assump-tion that any stranger is threatening. Much would depend on what, if anything, was communicated between man and the other beings: since after the dis-covery there will be years of silence (because even the closest stars are several light years away, an exchange of radio communication would take twice the number of light years separating our sun from theirs), the fact that such beings existed might become simply one of the facts of life but probably not one calling for action. Whether earthmen would be inspired to all-out space efforts by such a discovery is a moot question. An-thropological files contain many examples of societ-ies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior.

Since intelligent life might be discovered at any time via the radio telescope research presently under way, and since the consequences of such a discovery are presently unpre-dictable because of our limited knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic circumstances, two research areas can be recom-mended:

• Continuing studies to determine emotional and intellectual understanding and attitudes—and successive alterations of them if any—regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.• Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dra-matic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from


the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?

These are measured statements completely in accord with an academic analysis. They clearly could be used to support an intellectual argument in the privacy of gov-ernment meeting rooms as to why government person-nel should maintain strict secrecy controls regarding all things extraterrestrial and honor all appropriate non-dis-closure/secrecy agreements until such time as the govern-ment felt comfortable with a public disclosure. Perhaps they even tossed in 1938 for emphasis.

But to use these dry, academic projections to assert the Brookings Institution sagely made the case human beings (particularly those in the United States and First World nations) 10, 20, 40 years in the future would fall apart, society would collapse, and the sum of all benefits from global awareness of the truth would be drowned out by some anthropological comparisons, is, well, thin.

Read it again. Does it strike fear in your heart? On a scale of one to ten, how does it measure up to the con-stant drumbeat of government predictions of possible dirty bomb, nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks by persons unknown?

Said predictions are made in the open, not carefully couched in private reports. If the Brookings Report had been made public in the early 1960s, it would have been debated by intellectuals around the world until its more cautionary assertions were as inert as neon gas.

Attack of the 50-foot Insane Christian Fundamentalists

Here is a misperception (misinformation?) I am quite tired of hearing. While most people will be able to handle a disclosure event, those crazy disciples of Jerry Falwell will become so upset they will literally bring down society all by themselves. They will commit terrible unspecified acts so heinous the disclosure event will be catastrophic. Pleeeeeeese!

The vast majority of evangelical, fundamentalist Chris-tians are as reasonable in their actions and as demure in their behavior as any run-of-the-mill secularist. The few that are extreme are just that—a few. Nothing new here, and global policy can’t be held hostage to the discomfort of a few.

If there is a government policy basis for concern regard-ing evangelical Christians, it would more appropriately be their end times, Rapture beliefs when in close prox-imity to the executive branch of government. This issue has been raised by numerous journalists, including Bill Moyers. Why worry about the environment or a prophecy fulfilling war in the Middle East when the Second Coming and the end is near?

Whatever the outcome of that debate, the obvious point to make is that such an end-times belief structure would only serve to insulate that worldview from a disclosure event, not incite mayhem. There are other beings in the universe. So what? Just one more irrelevant piece of in-formation at the end of days. It is long past time to stop using fundamentalist Christians as scapegoats to justify continuing the truth embargo.

X-Conference 2005As of this writing, the April 22–24, 2005 X-Conference

has commitments from Paul Davids, Richard Dolan, John Greenewald, Paola Harris, Michael Heiser Phd, Lynne D. Kitei MD, Jaime Maussan, Richard Sauder PhD, David Sereda, and Alfred L. Webre JD. The balance of eight lec-turers and six additional panelists should be posted to the conference website by the end of January. UFO

Stephen Bassett is a political activist, founder of the Paradigm Research Group, executive director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Commit-tee (X-PPAC), author of the Paradigm Clock website, and a political columnist and commentator. You can reach him at: [email protected]

Brookings Report: www.anomalies.net/brookings/re-port.pdfWar of the Worlds Broadcast: http://history1900s.about.com/od/1930s/a/warofworlds.htm


by Guy MaloneMilitary involvement with UFOs continues to become

higher profile worldwide, although the sources of some stories remain questionable. India Daily (see additional article below) published the story of a reporter’s chance nightclub encounter with an unnamed but “very senior Indian military official ...” whom the reporter claims said: “Extraterrestrials have been visiting India and the rest of the world for thousands of years. In recent days most of the superpowers have been formally contacted.”

The article continued to tell of a retired Indian Air Force flight commodore who spoke to schoolchildren about an underground UFO landing base in Ladakh, located be-tween India’s incomprehensible mountain ranges. Quot-ing Tsering Spalzang, another senior official, “All para-normal activities are happening with the knowledge of the

Indian Army,” but the Indian Army and Air Force block the sensitive zones to curious Indians and Chinese.

Russia, Iran Join Forces

At least two other nations have recently joined the group of governments forced to address the UFO problem. Fol-lowing a rash of sightings, World Net Daily reports that “Russia and Iran have agreed to jointly study the UFO phenomenon” and to work together in space research and in the construction of satellites. WND stated in April that Iran had been struck with UFO fever after Reuters like-wise reported that the state-run television “broadcast a sparkling white disc flying over the capital of Tehran,” and that people from eight towns ran outside to witness “bright extraterrestrial lights.”

The Jerusalem Post more recently stated that “Flying ob-ject fever has gripped Iran,” and reports that shoot-down orders have been issued for any “unknown or mysterious objects” in Iran’s airspace, since so many of the reported hundreds (according to Whitley Strieber’s www.unknown country.com) of UFO sightings are occurring over Iran’s nuclear installations.

Related articles on the sightings and Iran’s aggressive stance have appeared in www.mosnews.com (i.e., Mos-cow News), Resalat, and from the Islamic Republic News Agency, as well as the Associated Press. However, only Unknown Country mentions that Iran’s fly-overs parallel UFO flaps associated with American nuclear installations in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s, making U.S. spy satel-lites slightly less obvious suspects. Perhaps unaware of Strieber or America’s past “nuclear UFO flaps,” the Per-sian Journal and India Daily nonetheless argue that the “United States has excellent satellite imagery and hence does not need low-altitude spy planes to monitor the ac-tivities” of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Exploding Object Over China

Dozens of newspapers and online sources reported on an exploding UFO seen over China by hundreds of peo-ple, but it seems most likely that the word UFO was used repeatedly only for the sake of grabbing eyeballs with sen-sational headlines.

The UFO was described as a streaking fireball accom-panied by one or more explosions and is believed to have crashed in the suburbs of Lanzhou. Local authorities re-ceived over 700 calls, and earthquake-like tremors were reported 100 km from the apparent crash site. Most specu-

UFO Secrets: India’s Military; Joint Russian/Iranian Study


lation argued that it was really a meteor, although no frag-ments or evidence of any kind has been found to support either the meteor or the UFO hypothesis.

Ausie Sightings

Australian news sources were kept busy with UFO ac-tivity in December—first with a sighting in Darwin that lasted close to 2 hours, consisting of flashing red, blue, and green lights which “neither the RAAF nor the airport” could account for. Several readers phoned the story in, ac-cording to The Australian. And in Mildura, a barbequing family reported a daylight sighting initially of a single, “shiny white object” that eventually remained stationary in the sky, only to be joined by two other similar objects in a mid-air rendezvous. ABC Victoria’s site (www.abc.net.au/victoria/) offers audio links to full interviews with the family members.

Videocams On Alert

Continuing around the globe, Alberta, Canada keeps breaking its own records for UFO reports—one former UFO nonbeliever has even begun recording his sightings on film and in a journal, claiming to see as many as four objects in the sky at once. The website www.rense.com

offers a photo from Chile with a bold UFO Confirmed head-line, while in the U.K., one area is seeing so much activity that the BBC has actually set up a UFO webcam at a high-way interchange on the Flintshire-Cheshire border. Web-surfers are invited to freeze photos and mail them for fur-ther investigation by local UFO researchers. Clicking any saucer on the online map will take you to either photos or a recent report. Check out the cam at www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northeast/guides/weird/ufos/pages/dobshill_ufo.shtml

Russian Biologist Hailed For UFO Sleuthing

Back in the USSR, Vladivostok News spotlights Russian biologist Valery Dvuzhilny, noted by the paper as one of Russia’s “most notable specialists in the investigation of unidentified flying objects.” The story begins by recount-ing a 1980 expedition, where he and others witnessed a flying disc land. According to the article, Dvuzhilny runs a lab in his apartment with over a thousand samples from ar-eas where other UFOs are thought to have touched down. He has been featured in American and Japanese UFO doc-umentaries and says that he dreams of opening Russia’s first UFO Museum.

U.S.-UFO Matters Marking More Media Time

While never free of them entirely, in America UFO sto-ries seem to be graduating from news-of-the-weird-type columns. Los Angeles-based talk show Let’s Talk Paranor-mal featured Dr. Roger Leir, who discussed implants and his ten surgeries related to removing them. Kudos to host Tracie Austin-Peters for giving the topic airtime in such a large market, and also to Las Vegas’ KLAS-TV for a two-night investigative report on black triangles, the text of which can still be read online at www.klas-tv.com. The news station polled their southern Nevada websurfers, and over 25 percent claim to have seen a black triangle.

Florida Today —never shy about publishing UFO-relat-ed stories—revisits an alleged U.S. military encounter, de-scribed as a “UFO air battle that began in Florida, shifted to the Eastern seaboard and ended in an Air Force white-wash.” Frank Feshino, author of a new book on the sub-ject (The Braxton County Monster, www.flatwoodsmon-ster.com) claims that over a dozen USAF jet fighters were destroyed in the 1952 incident.

Heading west, Deseret Morning News asks “Is Dugway The New Area 51?” Many believe that Groom Lake’s most sensitive projects have been moved, and the online article details a remote region of Utah which the U.S. military seeks to expand by as much as 145 square miles, due to too much scrutiny by alien-hunters—specifically www.abovetopsecret.com and “Alien Dave,” who regularly photographs the region and reports on what he sees.

Daytona Champ Reveals UFO Sighting

Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle included an interview with two-time Daytona 500 winner Sterling Marlin, who spoke of his UFO sighting. And www.earthfiles.com features an article by Linda Moulton Howe and Grant Cameron ar-

Original artwork: Shawn Kennedy. Contact: [email protected]


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guing that former presidential candidate General Wesley Clark was probably briefed on UFOs. When asked about this directly by noted researcher David Rudiak, General Clark looked down, mentioned that he was visiting Ros-well, and then finally answered, “There are things going on. But we will have to work out our own mathematics.”

Eminem Honored by Raelians

On a weird note, rap star Eminem was named an honor-ary priest by the Raelian religion, in honor of the antiwar lyrics featured on his video Mosh. According to www.hi-phopdx.com, the singer has not yet responded to the Rae-lians for bestowing him the honorary title. In other music news, hip-hop singer and “Pimp My Ride” host Xzibit somehow managed to get quoted in www.southflorida.com as saying that “only white people” see aliens or ghosts, because “Aliens don’t [expletive] with the hood.”

Roswell’s White Christmas

Roswell, New Mexico managed to avoid any UFO-relat-ed headlines the past couple of months, but was featured on www.cnn.com’s homepage for an 8-inch snowfall, resulting in a rare white Christmas. Your Breaking UFO News editor managed to miss that, however, while visit-ing the folks in Nashville, which was only cold. If any-thing crossed the night skies over the weekend, I didn’t notice, since a warm television and red wine kept me in-doors most of the time.

India’s UFO Conspiracy Charged

Special Correspondent Sudhir Chadda of the India Dai-ly picked up on unsubstantiated rumors that a conspiracy of silence prevented early warning of the devastating tsu-nami that is now blamed for the deaths of over 200,000 people in South Asia.

In the January 3 issue of the newspaper, Chadda noted that just prior to the disaster, numerous UFO sightings had been reported, especially in India. Moreover, talk on the street in Thailand, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka, along with India, pointed to a living culprit: “Some are conclud-ing that the Governments knew of some experiments by some country, agency, or entities,” Chadda wrote. “They were clearly told not to react because it was in a con-trolled environment. Or, they may have just asked to keep quiet.”

While the reporter failed to name sources for the most shocking statements, UFO observers were attributed as claiming that just before the earthquake, an unusually high number of sightings occurred in that part of the world, and that for some reason governments were told not to act.

On January 6, the paper published a story by an un-named reporter saying that a secret internal debate is go-ing on in India between factions that wish to tell the world about ET and UFO contacts and those who wish to abide by “invisible untold international protocols that prohibit


Statement of OwnershipUFO Magazine (ISSN#1043-1233; publication no. 007-068) is published bi-

monthly (six times a year) for $24.99 per year, domestic subscription, $39.99 foreign subscription. The complete mailing address of known office of publica-tion and the headquarters of general business offices of the publisher is 8055 W. Manchester Ave,. Suite 310, Playa del Rey, CA 90293.

The publisher is William J. Birnes, PO Box 1544, Venice, California, 90294-1544. The editor-in-chief is Vicki Ecker, PO Box 4252, Sunland, California, 91041-4252. The managing editor is Nancy Birnes, with offices at PO Box 1544, Venice, CA 90294-1544. The owners of the magazine are William J. and Nancy Birnes, with offices at PO Box 1544, Venice, CA 90294; and Don and Vicki Ecker, with offices at PO Box 4252, Sunland, California, 91041-4252.

There are no known mortgagees, bond holders, or other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities. UFO is not authorized as a non-profit organization. The average number of copies for issue during the preceding twelve months was 20,000 copies with 5,000 paid mail subscription or requested circulation and 15,000 copies through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales.

Copies distributed free by mail totalled 0, accounting for 20,000 total distribu-tion. Roughly 6,000 copies were returned and approximately 200 copies were kept in the office. The actual number of copies of this issue published nearest to the magazine’s filing date of PS 3526 (10/01/2004) was 22,608 copies, with 4,310 paid mail subscription or requested; 18,500 through dealers and carriers, street vendors, and counter sales. 300 copies were kept in the office.


by Peter RobbinsComing up through the ranks in American ufology, I

never heard or learned much about the status or popu-larity of UFO studies among Japanese investigators, but took it for granted that colleagues there were pursuing the subject as earnestly as we their counterparts were in the States.

By the late 1980s, while researching England’s Rendle-sham Forest UFO incident for Left At East Gate, I learned that many in Japan took this incident most seriously, so much so that eyewitness Larry Warren, the case’s whis-tleblower (and my co-author) had been invited to speak about his experience in Tokyo in October, 1984. This past October, 20 years to the month later, I had the opportunity to visit and learn about the current state of Japanese UFO research for myself.

My first-hand experience has convinced me that ufol-ogy is very much alive and well in the land of the rising sun, and nowhere more than at the office and meetings of the Organization for UFO Research Japan, a national UFO investigative group better known by its acronym OUR-J. This outstanding group and its dynamic Director Junichi Kato are at the forefront of mainstreaming the subject for an increasingly interested Japanese public.

Junichi—Jun to his friends—works for a respected ad-vertising firm by day and lives with his wife Yuko and children, Sumire and Ko, in a quiet district on the out-skirts of Tokyo. OUR-J’s office is in an old section of To-kyo, and though small, is often bustling and packed with printed, recorded, and photographic information.

Jun’s interest in UFOs goes back to his childhood in Aki-ta Prefecture. It was there at the age of 5 that he and his brother and some friends watched as a strange light came in above the field where they were playing baseball.

“It was a large elliptical orange thing, kind of like a bike wheel, although I’m not sure if it was rotating.” Unknown to Jun or the other children at the time, more than fifty people at nearby Akita Airport also reported seeing the phenomenon, which was also captured by a documentary film crew. I could relate to this event, since the effect of a similarly impacting childhood sighting ultimately led to my entering the field, as well.

Over the intervening years, Jun and OUR-J’s members have been responsible for numerous, uncontested, and anomalous photographs of aerial unknowns in the skies above Japan, including a jolting selection of photos of ob-jects captured directly above Tokyo.

One of my concerns in developing a working relationship

Mission to Tokyo (or, Peter Has More Fun Than Anybody Else in Ufology)

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Peter Robbins with OUR-J members at informal gathering following national conference in Tokyo.


with OUR-J was whether or not the group was governed more by mystical attitudes or by scientific thinking. Cult-like thinking perme-ates numerous UFO groups in the East just as it does in the West, keeping the sub-ject closeted in a manipula-tive system of pseudo-facts and beliefs. OUR-J’s man-date was anything but airy.

“In Japan, most UFO groups are cults or religious groups. We’re not anything like that,” noted Jun. “I make it clear to members that they shouldn’t hide their inter-est from their families—this isn’t something to hide.”

While lamenting the fact that Japanese investigators have yet to undertake the rigorous investigative work that their American and British counterparts have,

Jun Kato’s sighting reports, surveys, university lectures, television appearances, and regularly published commen-taries in leading newspapers and magazines have made him a uniquely important player in the field whose in-telligence, passion and personality keep OUR-J members and a growing segment of the public focused on the more scientific and pragmatic aspects of UFO research.

My relationship with the group began in 2000. While working as editor-in-chief of the website www.ufocity.com, I was contacted by Toshie Nakagawa, an OUR-J of-ficer and the organization’s leading translator who is fluent in English. She’d writ-ten to tell me that interest in England’s 1980 Bentwaters-Woodbridge UFO incident was still strong in Japan and that OUR-J wanted to know how Larry Warren and I felt about allowing them to translate and excerpt por-tions of our book for their quarterly, UFO Report Japan. We obliged gladly.

Toshie and I met when she attended the 2002 national MUFON conference, held that year in Rochester, NY, where I was a speaker. Then in late 2003, I was invited to speak at OUR-J’s annual conference for 2004. The re-

quested lecture topics were the Bentwaters-Woodbridge UFO incident, as well as the current state of UFO research in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe. Having never visited Japan, I was excited by the prospect and likewise flattered to be the first non-Japanese asked to lecture for this group. Over the next months I prepared my papers and submit-ted them for approval and translation. As I was to learn, Japanese UFO conferences were considerably more for-mal than their American counterparts.

I departed Newark International Airport on Wednes-day, October 20 and arrived at Narita Airport somewhat bleary-eyed after the 13-hour flight. There I was met by Toshie and Jun’s wife Yuko Kato. The two would remain my primary companions, guides, and translators for the duration, and what great hosts they and Jun were! It was genuinely moving to see Mount Fuji for the first time from the train into the city, where we arrived around dusk. I checked into my hotel, had a great dinner with my spon-sors, then returned to my hotel where I slept like a log until late Friday morning.

The next day, Yuko, Toshie, and I linked up with Jun and had lunch at a very Japanese-style Chinese restaurant in the Takashimaya Department Store, followed by coffee (yes, Starbucks) on the building’s roof garden. We spent that evening at Jun and Yuko’s home, where Toshie and I reviewed and timed our simultaneous English and Japa-nese versions of my talks. Later we ordered out for dinner: Italian food from Domino’s Pizza.

Like us, the Japanese share a real fondness for both Chinese and Italian cuisine, and it was great fun to tear into the pizza, pasta, and garlic bread at the traditional floor-height Japanese dining table. It was also that evening that I met Jun and Yuko’s children, Sumire, eight, and Ko, seven. We hit it off wonderfully, and the two of them re-mained my close companions for much of the remainder of my visit.

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Peter at Asakusa Kannon, the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo.

Peter with three OUR-J members at banquet following national conference in Tokyo. Note his flawless red tie and expert one-handed food maneuver.

Photo courtesy: Jun Kato


OUR-J’s Fifth National Conference was held on Satur-day, October 23. The venue was a building in downtown Tokyo designed specifically for conferences, receptions, and other events. Staff members were both professional and courteous, and the great majority of attendees dressed formally for the occasion. The group’s demographic inter-ested me, as well.

Unlike a similar event stateside—primarily male domi-nated and middle-aged, OUR-J members and friends seemed equally divided between men and women who ranged in age from their teens to well into their seven-ties. A good percentage were professionals, as well, with doctors, lawyers, business executives, and distinguished academics being more the norm than not.

The event’s proceedings were well designed and fea-tured a moving memorial tribute to Graham Birdsall, com-plete with photo. Graham had made a huge impression on the OUR-J members who’d met him the previous year at the Laughlin, NV conference, as had UFO Magazine. I was moved to see my friend remembered and honored so, even though he had been gone for more than a year. Sadly, both of my talks were dedicated to another friend and col-league, Dr. John Mack, who had been killed by a drunken driver only a month earlier.

Those of you who have attended UFO conferences in the States can attest to their general informality; it was

anything but that in Tokyo. Shortly after I arrived, I was sequestered in their green room with my translator, then brought out just before my first talk and seated at a small dais, memorable for a particularly Japanese touch: a sin-gle, beautiful flower arrangement.

Toshie was seated at a table to my right. Those in atten-dance were seated in rows but at tables where they were free to take notes and keep a water glass at hand. I would read several sentences from my paper, and then pause while Toshie translated. Upon completion I received a polite ovation to which I stood and bowed, and was then led from the hall.

After drawing a bit with the kids, I returned to the green room until it was time to present my second paper. Both PowerPoint presentations went off without a hitch and my efforts were again well received. After completing the second talk, Jun made his closing remarks, and then many photos were taken of all in attendance. This was followed by one more trip to the green room, this time for an inter-view for a national magazine. Simultaneous to this, the remaining fifty or sixty OUR-J members had regrouped on the building’s top floor to prepare for the banquet that was being held in my honor.

And what a banquet it was—replete with all kinds of Japanese food and drink and a complement of Chinese

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by George W. Earley Airplanes fly, and occasionally one crashes, whereupon

the government investigates and in due time publicly re-ports results and conclusions.

UFOs fly and, presumably, one will crash now and then, whereupon the government whisks the crashed disk to a secluded location, makes a thorough examination, clas-sifies results and conclusions, and also denies that there ever was a crash in the first place. So say those who make up ufology’s “retrievalist” faction. But nowhere in retrie-valist literature, or in skeptical writings, has the “how” of moving such large objects ever been examined.

In March, 1980, I returned to the aerospace industry, joining a team of engineers in creating the world’s most powerful wind turbine. When erected near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, this behemoth stood over 200 feet high and its 4-megawatt generator was powered by a huge propeller over 250 feet in diameter.

It was the problem of moving the turbine’s twin blades, each 125 feet long and 14 feet at their widest, from Con-necticut to Wyoming that caused me to take a hard look at crashed disk retrieval (CDR) claims.

The ease with which ufologists believed such huge fly-ing saucers (disks reportedly up to 100 feet in diameter) could be disguised and moved contrasted sharply with the problems our team had to overcome to move our big blades. Planning started a full year before the move. Once a route was chosen, it was necessary to coordinate with the state police and other agencies in each state through which the blades would be trucked.

Every overpass, where local roads crossed over interstate highways, had to be measured to ensure clearance was ad-equate for the blades to pass underneath, then those clear-

ances had to be re-measured just days before the carriers arrived to be sure they hadn’t changed. In some cases, usu-ally as a result of road resurfacing, the clearances weren’t enough, and preplanned detours had to be used.

The end result of my research into CDR claims was a two-part Fate Magazine article, “Crashed Saucers and Pickled Aliens” (March and April, 1981) and “Saucer Tales in Frontiers of Science” (January/February 1982).

Using data compiled by Len Stringfield, I identified sev-enteen cases of alleged saucer crashes during the period 1947 thru 1973. The data was sketchy at best. Disk di-ameter in eight of the seventeen cases was listed as “un-known.”

Of the nine remaining cases, one involved three 13 x 25-foot ovals; one disk was 15–20 feet in diameter; another was 25–30 feet in diameter, while the disks in the remain-ing six cases were claimed to range from 30 feet up to 100 feet in diameter—one-third the length of a football field! Picture that rolling down your town’s main street!

Which is where it would have had to go, since in those days there was no interstate highway system with its wide roads that went around—not through—every city, town, and hamlet lying between various crash sites and the guarded installations—Ohio’s Wright Patterson Air Force Base; Area 51; Langley, Virginia; Muroc in California, etc.—to which the crashed disks were allegedly taken.

And, not so incidentally, construction of the interstate highway system did not even begin until after fourteen crashes, involving more than fourteen disks, had hap-pened. The remaining crashes allegedly took place while the system was being built, but was yet unfinished.

What sort of a truck would you need for a disk “merely” 30 feet in diameter, let alone one 100-feet across? Accord-

The Myth of Crashed Disk Retrievals


ing to trucking industry representatives at the time I wrote my articles, there were no trucks in those CDR days capa-ble of carrying loads “having diameters or widths beyond 12 feet or so.” Really big stuff in those days, and even today, was built in reasonably transportable sections and assembled on site.

So, okay, no trucks. Let’s take a train. Sorry. Trains must bear even tighter restrictions on what they can carry. West of Kansas City, height limits on cargo (which have to in-clude the height of flatcars above the track) is 16 feet, 3 inches; east of Kansas City the height limit drops to 14 feet, 3 inches. A man cannot stand atop a boxcar when it goes through a tunnel, and the tunnels themselves are rarely much wider than the rail cars.

So, let’s fly it. Nope. No cargo plane in those days could take even the smallest crashed saucer. Can’t we take it apart? Just send pieces of it by train, plane, or truck? Well, if you believe (as do most retrievalists) the crashed saucer tales spun by Frank Scully in Behind the Flying Saucers, the saucer material was impenetrable. Hence, those 100-foot diameter saucers Scully wrote about would have had to be moved intact.

There have been a few notable exceptions to some of the above restrictions. In 1936, Corning Glass shipped “The 200-Inch Telescope Disc from Corning, New York to Pasa-dena, California. The almost 17-foot diameter disk rode up-right, in a special flatcar whose floor had been cut to lower the disc to just a few inches above the roadbed. The circu-itous trip took two weeks, with several detours required when some clearances turned out to be less than believed.

In 1945, “Jumbo” was a huge, steel “bottle” intended for use in the Trinity A-bomb test in New Mexico that preceded the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Jumbo was over 25 feet long, 12 feet, 8 inches in diameter and weighed 114 tons. To carry it required the Army to bor-row a special one-of-a-kind, 12-axle railcar, owned by the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, which had been built to transport “huge ladles of molten steel” in the factory.

It took several weeks in April, 1945 to move Jumbo from Barberton, Ohio to Pope, New Mexico; the circuitous route sent Jumbo as far south as New Orleans. Off-loaded at Pope, Jumbo traveled the remaining 30 miles on a specially built 30-wheel flatbed trailer pushed and pulled (at three mph) by four Caterpillar tractors. (My thanks to Stanton Friedman for tipping me to this incident.)

Then, in 1979, The Ar-gonne National Laboratory in Chicago declared its su-perconducting magnet sur-plus. Promptly acquired by the Stanford Linear Accel-erator Center, the 107-ton magnet, which measured

18 feet, 6 inches in diameter by 13 feet, 6 inches high, rode on a specially built 110-wheel flatbed truck trailer to its new home in Palo Alto, California. The trip took 21 days at an average speed of 25 mph and required the “complete cooperation of officials from the states through which the magnet passed.”

Note that these were all one-of-a-kind events; that in ev-ery case the transport vehicles came from the civilian sec-tor, and that months of advance planning were required before each trip was made.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of all this is that when my articles appeared, both the CSICOPian skeptics and the retrievalists flatly ignored them. While I think the skeptics preferred not to admit they had over-looked the transportation angle of CDR in their rush to simply pooh-pooh the entire topic, I was surprised that they failed to grasp the opportunity to needle the retrie-valists for also overlooking it. And I fear the retrievalists were simply exercising the old “Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up” reflex. Hardly a scientific at-titude by either group.

I did draw the attention of Dr. Robert Wood (who, with his son Ryan, is among the leading “MJ-12 is real” propo-nents) who spoke on Stringfield’s work in Las Vegas at the 2nd CDR conference last November. (See article, p. 43.) Though he read my articles and spent some phone time discussing them with me, his talk blithely kissed off the topic, claiming that:

• The military doesn’t need to get approval to move equipment.

• Plans for moving outsized equipment have been in place for years.

• Army Corps of Engineers know how to do this.• Etc. Documentation? None.I’ll give the late Leonard Stringfield the final word. When

he autographed my copy of his Status Report VI on Sep-tember 15, 1991, he wrote: “Still looking for proof!” UFO

George W. Earley, aka The Opinionated Oregonian™, lives in Mount Hood, Oregon where, when traveling on interstate highways, he has yet to see an unconven-tional outsized object.


March 6-12The 14th Annual International UFO Congress Conven-

tion and Film Festival will be held in Laughlin, Nevada, March 6-12. At press time, confirmed speakers included Dr. Thomas Van Flandern, Jaime Maussan, Barbara Lamb, Paola Harris, Wendelle Stevens, Nick Begich, Tom Valone, Donald Ware, A.J. Gaevard, Jim Marrs, and others. For a detailed schedule, registration form, prices, and transpor-tation information, call (303) 651-7136. Website: www.ufocongress.com

April 1-3UFO Symposium 2005. A fundraiser for the Aztec Pub-

lic Library, in Aztec, New Mexico, will host the follow-ing speakers on April 1, 2, and 3: Linda Moulton Howe, John Greenewald, Jr., Rob Swiatek, Susan Swiatek, Jim Hickman, Dr. David Rudiak, Moreen Scully, and Travis Walton. Vendors will be on site and guided tours to the crash site will be available. Call (505) 334-9890 or (505) 334-7657 or see the website www.aztecufo.com for infor-mation and registration.

April 16-17The Great UFO/ET Congress of 2005! The Days Inn,

Route 206 and New Jersey Turnpike exit #7 North, Bor-

dontown, N.J. Sponsored by Dr. Pat J. Marcattilio. For more information, call (609) 631-8955.

April 22-24The 2nd Annual Exopolitics Expo (X-Conference) is

scheduled for April 22-24, 2005 at the Hilton Washington, DC, North Gaithersburg, MD. Speakers listed at press time: Michael S. Heiser, PhD, Jaime Maussan, John Greenewald, Richard Dolan, Bob and Ryan Wood, Alfred Webre and Lynn Kitei, Paul Davids, Paola Harris, Michael S. Heiser, PhD, Jaime Maussan, Richard Dolan, David Sereda, and Richard Sauder. Registration available by contacting Paradigm Research Group, 4938 Hampden Lane, #161, Bethesda, MD 20814, or call (202) 215-8344. The confer-ence website is: www.x-conference.com. Topics in 2005 will include: impact of the film industry, MJ-12 Docu-ments, the Rockefeller Initiative, Area 51, underground bases, ET studies during the Carter administration, and much more.

May 29-30The Golden Anniversary of Area 51, the infamous secret

base within the sprawling Nellis Air Force complex in the Nevada desert, is planned for Memorial Day weekend, May 29 and 30. Festivities will be held adjacent to the

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stations to report the sightings and landings of UFOs in astounding numbers. One of these UFOs landed in Flatwoods, West Virginia, where a group of unsuspecting townspeople lived a night of terror when their paths crossed with that UFO’s 12-foot-tall occupant!

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CONFERENCES COMING UP



If You Finally Get Some Hard Proof, Call Me!by George Noory

One of the more exciting, but at the same time, frustrat-ing things about UFO studies is the uncertainty of the evidence. Even something that appears to be hard-rock solid as a piece of supporting evidence for the presence of extraterrestrials and their involvement with humans, such as a piece of a crashed saucer or a section of an ET’s cadaver, can turn out in the end to be only molten metal from a very terrestrial and mundane source or the remains of an animal petrified over time.

I’ve always believed that the evidence was out there, maybe still buried on the plains of San Agustin or, as re-tired Special Agent Joe Gutheinz will tell you in this issue, locked away at the Johnson Space Center in Houston or in a containment vault at Los Alamos. I’ve always wanted to find the documentary smoking gun as well, a memo or letter which was never meant to find its way into the public domain in which some unknown special advisor or science consultant engages in a slip of the tongue and refers to a UFO crash. But it would have to be a document that was irrefutable.

In the field of ufology, we’ve seen many documents in our time that purport to be the smok-ing guns. There was the Twining memo, there were the mysterious MJ-12 documents that turned up in Jaime Shandera’s mailbox, and there were other discoveries of docu-ments holding themselves out to be protocols for interactions between the military and ETs. At the crash retrieval conference recently, mo-tion picture producer Paul Davids interviewed Bob and Ryan Wood, pere et fils, about these papers and their ongoing meticulous work in looking for documentary proof that our government has had continuing interactions with ETs.

I interviewed author Jim Marrs on Coast, while he was at the crash re-trieval conference, about the Texas airship incident and about the mys-terious tiny creature folks say was buried in a lonely graveyard. Think of the rocking proof that would be if the body turned up somewhere just

like a piece of lost property catalogued on a long-forgot-ten manifest, yellowed with age, and just barely legible without electronic enhancement.

Or maybe the proof still exists in flight records of those dauntless Air Force pilots who, following almost suicide orders, engaged vastly technologically superior UFOs with their P51s or other World War II or Korean War vin-tage fighters, only to be shot out of the sky. Might there still turn up a witness to the mysterious crash of Captain Mantell’s plane, which, in a scene possibly out of the movie This Island Earth, was captured by a strange-col-ored beam when the pilot ventured too close to a UFO?

Ask yourselves, what did Joe Gutheinz see on floor of that camouflaged building at Los Alamos? Were they luck-less scientific investigators who were dissolved in a mo-ment by the radiological and highly toxic emanations of aliens being autopsied at one of our most secret research facilities in New Mexico? Not even Joe Gutheinz can tell us what those empty hazmat suits prove.

Were you one of those transfixed to your television set 10 years ago when Star Trek’s Jonathan Frakes introduced us to Ray Santilli’s alien autopsy footage? There were a

Bags of potential evidence from the Crash Retrieval Conference (see page 43) await investigation, analysis, and of course, debunking.

Photo courtesy Tim Cridland


goodly number of people, no doubt, who thought they were looking at the real thing. That inner black eye lens that was peeled away from the alien’s eye certainly looked convincing as though, even if it were a fake, somebody sure knew something. Yet, according to the show’s pro-ducer Bob Kiviat, interviewed by Don Ecker on his radio show and in this issue, it was a straight-out hoax and Kiv-iat even saw the proof of that. No more questions about that one, as you’ll see.

Maybe the irrefutable evidence won’t even come from the United States at all. Maybe it will come from Europe, in the form of a disclosure about flying triangles, or South-east Asia, where the Indian newspapers have been saying local governments are about to make some important an-nouncement about UFOs, or from South America, where UFO Brazil has been conducting some stunning research on visitations of aliens.

The Mexican Air Force was especially forthcoming about releasing those photos of—circle one of the follow-ing—St. Elmo’s fire, ball lightning, swamp gas, or UFOs. Skeptical types were quick to jump on it, but no one has really debunked them or explained away what’s in those infrared photos. Smoking gun? Even if that’s so, it wasn’t here in this country, and so it is quickly forgotten.

For me, one of the real smoking guns is the whole subject of remote viewing. I was enthralled by Ingo Swann’s story of his adventures with a secret government bureau in his book Penetration. I was riveted by the story that Paul H. Smith told me and which I reported in the pages of this very magazine about his experiences as a remote viewer in

the Army. And I’m simply awestruck at the way scientists like Bernard Haisch and Hal Puthoff, and Jim Deardorff and Bruce Maccabee, too, are able to put forth their theories on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in an important science journal. The revelation that the Air Force spent a large chunk of dough on Eric Davis’s teleportation report is perhaps another example of the truth seeking its way to the surface. These outcroppings of indicators of doors into other realms and alternate realities, while not a huge moth-ership landing on the White House lawn (an event I hope I never see) are even better. They are the leaks in whatever coverup still remains, the little knotholes in the old cen-terfield fence through which you used to be able to watch Triple-A minor league ball back in the 1950s.

Somewhere on that field of dreams there is a stunning piece of evidence that not even the most hardened and cynical debunker can deny, try though he or she will. I believe we will discover it sooner rather than later. I be-lieve that the surface tension between that reality and our everyday reality is so thin and so weakened in spots that the bubble will burst. I even believe at moments that it will be this year, perhaps on these pages, and perhaps in our studio at Coast to Coast. Whenever it breaks, I will be there. And if you know something, call me.

The phone lines are open. UFO

George Noory is America’s top nighttime radio talk-show personality, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM, heard on the Premiere Radio Network every night. George’s website is www.coasttocoastam.com.

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BUILDING 265

by Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr., J.D.

Editor’s note: A retired, highly decorated NASA investigator, the author of this astonishing tale is an irrefutablyimpeccable source. But whether the following story is truthful or the bad dream of its author is for you, the reader, to

decide through your own investigations of the author’s allegations.


From Roswell to White Sands to Area 51, the secret of UFOs and the extraterrestrials who crash land-

ed here has been tracked, documented, and—at least until a few years ago—held behind massive safe doors in an underground bunker complex known simply as Building 265 at the Johnson Space Center. I was never a UFO enthusiast; in fact, I was more of a skeptic. But all that changed 13 years ago when I stumbled across a secret no one outside of a select group was ever sup-posed to know.

Today I am a criminal defense attorney in Texas, but back then, just 5 years ago, I was a criminal fraud in-vestigator for the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) inside NASA. I was also a special deputy U.S. mar-shal, a modern-day Wyatt Earp assigned to protect our nation’s space agency from those who would steal from it, put our astronauts’ lives in danger, or try to rip off the hard-working American taxpayer.

I covered fraud investigations ranging from aerospace contractors involved in bid-rigging and inflating cost overruns, to an individual who impersonated an astro-naut, to outright theft of public property. In 1992, I was leading a nine-agency, 25-man (and woman) task-force fraud investigation known as Operation Tall Timber. Predicated on security concerns and size constraints, the task force was placed in half of Building 265 at Johnson Space Center. The portion of the complex I controlled was accessed through a safe door, but with-in the complex itself there were two other safe doors, each leading to the underground bunker for which we, the task force members, had not been granted access.

One of these internal safe doors was at one end of a large conference room whose other end opened into a hallway. During the daytime, with one million pieces of evidence contained therein, the task force side of the building was always a hive of activity. However, at night only I, as the task-force leader, remained. My office was at the far end of a cold, desolate and uninvit-ing hallway.

There were no windows in the heavily concreted and partially earth-covered building, which provided ex-cellent soundproofing but denied the occupants an un-derstanding of the outside conditions or an apprecia-tion for what time it was, except for a reliance on our government-issue clocks. NASA prohibited cameras in this building, and for some unknown reason our wrist-watches ran slower in this environment, making them unreliable.

NASA is populated by engineers, administrative man-agers, mid-level bureaucrats, and bean counters. I was different. I was a special agent, a “space cop,” if you like. I had always been a maverick within NASA, re-lentlessly investigating fraud, waste, and abuse without concern about repercussions from the NASA managers.

Because I worked for the inspector general, I was in-dependent, and one time the results of one of my in-vestigations actually stopped NASA operations dead in their tracks. In 1991, I investigated defective temper-ature transducers, a problem which led to the ground-ing of the entire space shuttle fleet. The following year I led a task force that ultimately would put seven com-panies out of business and result in the highest count indictment and conviction in NASA history. The task force members dubbed this case Operation Tall Tim-ber, which was housed in Building 265.

NASA was always curious about what I was doing with my task force, but I shut off information going to them, and I routinely denied or limited the access of NASA personnel to Building 265. On occasion NASA would send security personnel to ring the doorbell of the complex late at night, to try to get a look-see. But as a law enforcement officer I could—and almost always did—deny them access.


Compounding NASA’s suspicions about my work during this time was the existence of a second ma-jor operation taking place at Johnson Space Center. Known as Operation Lightning Strike, this project was led by the FBI and included a few NASA OIG Agents. Like Operation Tall Timber, Operation Lightning Strike was a multi-agency task force investigation, but, un-like Operation Tall Timber, it was wholly undercover. The two task force investigations ran independently of each other, and for the most part had no overlapping personnel.

One night, about midnight, an inexplicable hum rang out through my office and the whole complex of offices

for which I had cogni-zance. At first, it was but a nuisance, and within the usually soundless void I worked, it was also a curiosity. So, I worked through it. As I worked, the hum in-creased to an intolerable level, and, stumbling to my feet with my hands clasped over my ears, I was finally forced to lunge for the exit, bump-ing into the walls as I went down the hallway. I reached the safe-door exit, pressed the quick release, and left the building.

I was standing at the back of the building where our entrance was located, looking out at a dirt track as the hum completely dissipated. This track had only been used sporadically since the Apollo days when our astronauts ran on it. The area seemed de-serted. Very few people worked at NASA this late at night, and for me to see anyone but securi-ty personnel at this time was unusual.

But there in the dark I could see an old, white-bearded man with a cane, standing no more than a 100 feet in front

of me, stealthily casting sidelong glances at me. I sus-pected initially that it was some NASA bureaucrat told to watch the building, a thought that made me very angry. I walked across the thin strip of grass separating the parking lot from the track and approached the old man.

I said, in a kind of a completely flat, but menacingly polite, tone you’d expect from a highway patrol officer sticking his head inside the driver’s side window after catching someone on radar doing a hundred in a 55 mile-an-hour zone, “Sir, can I help you? My name is Special Agent Gutheinz, and the building behind me is used by law enforcement, so we have to check out any-

Author and award winner: Joseph E. Gutheinz, with his shield andcredentials. He is the recipient of the NASA exceptional service medal.


one we see who seems out of place. And at this hour, that would be you.”

Actually, I found myself saying far more than I need-ed to or usually would.

The old man answered, “You only have access to part of the building, not the bunker.” I was surprised by his knowledge and then noticed that the man was not wearing a NASA badge—but then again neither was I. I never did. When I asked him where his badge was, he reached into his pocket and pulled out something that was not a NASA badge. It was a security badge all right, but a badge that identified him as retired from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Labo-ratory.

“This gets you to the gate,” I told him, “not inside. How did you get into Johnson Space Center?”

“First things first,” the old man replied. “Do you know what the hum is?”

I was curious. “No,” I said. ““What is it?”“Have you ever heard of what happened in Roswell

in 1947?”I laughed as I threw up my right hand as if to say

“halt,” and told him, “I don’t believe in little green men.” At that point I could again hear the faint hum-ming sound coming from my building.

“Believe it or not, the story about a UFO crashing near Roswell is true,” he said calmly. “Three alien creatures were taken to a desert location only 5 miles from the present NASA office complex at White Sands, where they were initially examined and kept in a perfectly

camouflaged earth-toned building. One of the creatures had survived for a few hours and then died. Sometime later, autopsies were performed on the aliens. The or-gans were removed from each creature and placed in a preservative solution. The bodies were subsequently reassembled, absent the organs, and transported to Johnson Space Center, to your building behind you.”

The old man did not provide me any dates, other than 1947, but I have since surmised that the transport of the bodies to Johnson Space Center must have oc-curred in the 1960s.

The old man continued. “The bodies were the first to be shipped, with plans for the organs to follow, but shortly after the bodies were sent off, a low-grade, nuclear-biological release of some sort occurred at the White Sands facility which devoured the employees—flesh and bone—in a matter of hours. The facility has been locked down ever since.”

The man then told me how to get to this top secret facility at White Sands, at which point the humming increased ten-fold, and I could feel my legs give way beneath me as I collapsed into unconsciousness.

Suddenly I was aware that I was on a gurney being taken into my building by several men and women in surgical garb. Only the emergency lighting was on in the building and these apparent medical personnel each appeared to have red pupils. I saw the great safe door in my hallway being opened to the underground bunker, which, though covered by dirt, was on the same level as my office complex. Moments later, I was

Official press release: Joe Gutheinz and the past members of one of his task force investigations at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.


wheeled through another safe door which I had never seen before, and then down into a lower level of that bunker. I heard someone talking about inserting a transmitter/receiver, and again I passed out.

The next morning, I woke up on the ground outside my building with a couple of NASA employees attend-ing me. One told me that I had been unconscious and they offered to call an ambulance, but I refused help and drove myself to Saint John’s emergency room. I have always been a rational person, so I assumed that I had suffered a concussion and experienced a very vivid dream. The doctor treated me for a broken ankle, and I waived getting a 72-hour “get out of work” note. A few hours later I was back at work, ankle cast and all.

I recalled laughing to myself and thinking, “it was so real.” I had taken complaints from people who believed the gov-ernment had placed transmit-ter/receivers in their brains be-fore, and I had always assumed they were schizophrenics. Even today I know that many people who believe this has happened to them are probably are schizophrenics. But now I know for certain that some of them are telling the truth.

A few days later, people wearing bio-protective suits arrived and went through our building looking for as-bestos, which they claimed they found in the bunker. For days, behind plastic sheets, men covered in protec-tive clothes totally cleaned out the bunker, and months later we were told that the Russians had taken over that side of the building, using an entry door at the oppo-site side from our entrance. Subsequently, others also began securing access to the bunker side, including students attending space camp.

For years, I did not pay much attention to the goings-on in the bunker, although I remained curious, only because it seemed like such an incredible waste of money to give the Russians, and then kids, access to a maximum-security facility. Later, I realized that this was done specifically to make the facilities’ prior use seem harmless.

Then two things happened in the late 1990s. First the OIG was given the other half of the building, and I was able to see the second internal safe door—the door I was taken through in my dreams—and although much of the rest of the structure had changed, the door was the same. “How bizarre,” I thought. “The internal

safe door was just as I dreamed it!” Then also in the late 1990s, I was assigned a case in White Sands, New Mexico, correctly known as the NASA White Sands (JSC) Test Facility. This is where NASA, often with the Department of Defense, tests flight components, rocket technology—and yes—“hazardous materials.”

As a NASA OIG senior special agent I had the broad-est possible access to NASA, its facilities and its con-tractors. Upon finishing the case I was working on, I decided to drive around the small complex, and came

upon a blocked road reminiscent of what the old man had told me in my dream.

I drove around the blockade with the intention of driving the 5 miles and disproving my dream once and for all. At about the 5-mile mark, I found myself with-in a small depression, and I stopped my car and got out. Nothing was there, and I caught myself laughing at myself for my own foolishness. Then, like a mirage appearing only few feet in front of me, I saw the most perfectly camouflaged building I had ever seen, even in my days as an Army intelligence officer and aviator.

I went up to the building and saw that a camouflaged lock secured it. I had never seen such detail— even the lock was camouflaged! I turned around and ran back to my vehicle without the slightest hesitation. I excitedly opened my trunk and removed a large wrench, then ran back, breaking the lock and then prying open the door. Ten feet in front of me were two medical uni-forms fully laid out on the ground, and just as the old man had claimed, they were filled with dust as though human beings had been devoured within them.

At that point, an alarm rang out and I panicked and ran from the building. I jumped in my car and started

Operation Lunar Eclipse: (l-r) Honduran ambassador to the U.S., Dan Goldin, NASA administrator, Joe Gutheinz, unidentified man.


it up, immediately turning around to make a quick get-away. Three camouflaged Humvees rose from over the incline behind me. One of the three vehicles stopped at the building and the other two remained in hot pursuit of me. All I could see of the vehicles’ occupants were the nuclear/biological/chemical suits they were wear-

ing. One of the Humvees tried to force me off the road, but my car was faster and I eagerly sped in front of him. Just then, a humming sound and vibration began buzzing between my ears, intensifying to the point that I lost consciousness.

When I awoke, I was back in my office in Johnson Space Center. Two days had passed. On my desk, under where my head had rested, were the completed reports from the investigation I had conducted at White Sands. But I had no recollection of writing those reports or of traveling the hundreds of miles back to Johnson Space Center! As I tried to stand, my body went limp. The muscles in my legs and hands had all but wasted away.

As someone who investigates people who have bi-zarre delusions, I decided to keep to myself what had transpired. I assumed that the government had a worst-case solution, should I be perceived as a risk, an option I probably would not like. I was set to retire in a few months, and as it turned out I did not miss an oppor-tunity during that interval to make fun of delusional complaints I received. I wanted the government, who-ever was listening in, to know that I was going to play the game and remain silent.

Shortly after I retired, NASA said that Building 265 had been contaminated by black mold, and they re-moved the earth covering from the building and the

lower level. The last time I returned to the site, the Op-eration Tall Timber part of Building 265 was still intact, as was the upper level of what had been the bunker.

As I walked to the south side of the building where the underground bunker had been located, I was star-ing at another bunker only 100 yards away—a bunker

that had always been there. I asked myself if NASA had ever linked the two bunkers through the underground tunnel complex it operated at Johnson Space Center. If so, were the alien ca-davers still there?

I have waited 5 years to tell this sto-ry after retiring from NASA. At night when I try to sleep I can hear and feel a low hum resonate in my brain, a re-minder of what has been done to me. Like that old man who opened my eyes so many years ago, I have now passed on this story of aliens and a govern-ment cover-up to you, the reader. UFO

Joe Gutheinz is retired from NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG), a Senior Special Agent and a former Special Deputy U.S. Marshal. He is the most decorated special agent in NASA OIG history, having earned the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency Career Achievement Award, and numerous other awards.

He teaches for both the University of Phoenix and Alvin Community College and holds six degrees and eight teaching credentials. Joe is a certified fraud ex-aminer and criminal defense attorney licensed by ten courts, including the federal circuits and the United States Supreme Court. For more information, see: www.csmweb2.emcweb.com/2004/0617/p14s02-stss.htmwww.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-03-01-moon-rock-returned_x.htmwww.space.com/missionlaunches/nasa_safety_030829.htmlwww.texnews.com/1998/2003/texas/texas_NASA_prop828.htmlwww.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/06/23/national1710EDT0670.DTL&type=sciencewww.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2749

www.space.tbo.com/space/MGBBGZR8UVD.html

www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3912829.stmwww.cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Space/2004/05/21/468174-ap.htmlwww.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1184490_2,00.html

www.geotimes.org/nov04/trends.htmlwww.collectspace.com/resources/flown_shuttletiles.htmlwww.collectspace.com/resources/moonrocks_moon-con.html

All photos, except page 37, courtesy Joseph Gutheinz

Aerial shot of the grounds: Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.

By Vicki EckerRanking officials from the Russian military and Acad-

emy of Sciences are now contradicting statements they formerly made on videotape regarding the astonishing UFO incidents in the former Soviet Union, according to NASA consultant and UFO debunker James Oberg in an article recently published at www.space.com.Oberg, considered an expert on the Russian space pro-gram, is also known for his impressive efforts at belit-tling other anomalous UFO occurences.

In 1992, James Oberg and UFO Magazine’s Don Ecker squared off in visibly macho style on the sensitive mat-ter of UFOs in space. Their venue was none other than CNN’s “Larry King Live,” where both men understand-ably took advantage of some brief mass exposure on na-tional TV to push their viewpoints on the controversial matter of STS 48, the 1992 Space Shuttle mission that inadvertently taped a UFO cruising over the horizon when another unidentifiable object “shoots” at it, just missing the first object as it made an abrupt 180-degree turn and darted away. NASA coyly called the sequence a “urine dump.” More discreetly, Oberg suggested to the viewing audience that the shuttle’s camera prob-ably recorded simple ice crystals, always visible when sloughing off a spacecraft’s hull as it moves through space.

Virtually anyone watching the shuttle footage has to laugh at the above explanations. Oberg now seems to have his sights set on some fractionally wider histori-cal revisionism: the reversal of documented claims by retired Colonel Boris Sokolov regarding an important UFO incident in 1982. Colonel Sokolov is a highly regarded former Ministry of Defense official who di-

rected a secret 10-year study of UFO incidents in the then-Soviet Union, beginning in 1980.

George Knapp’s JourneyThe keeper of Colonel Sokolov’s original claims is

award-winning broadcast journalist George Knapp of KLAS-TV, who in 1993 made a special trip to Russia where he spent long hours with Sokolov and other offi-cials discussing their country’s UFO policies and inci-dents. Colonel Sokolov and his comrades were video-taped making statements that directly contradict what they’re allegedly saying now.

Oberg’s refutations of Colonel Sokolov’s testimony to Knapp made a particularly big splash when he post-ed an article on the Internet’s popular space.com site. Broadly countering purported claims from Western me-dia of “secret KGB files” and “captured aliens,” Oberg’s article highlights a summary of the Soviet Union’s 13-year study of UFO reports. The authors of the summary are none other than Colonel Sokolov himself—and Yuli Platov, often described as the Phil Klass of Russia. Phil Klass, for those new to the UFO field, is the acknowl-edged top UFO debunker in the U.S.

While this current report reasonably concludes that “practically all the mass observations of UFOs were unambiguously identified as the effects accompanying

Ranking Russians

February • March 2005 UFO38

George Knapp

Academy Sciences

the launch of rockets or tests of aerospace equipment,” Knapp finds the distinguished Russians’ debunking of one major UFO incident in Russia particularly annoy-ing, and a direct contradiction to their former claims. It concerns a 900-foot-wide object that hovered over a missile base near Khmelitskiy, Ukraine.

The “Ukrainian trigger” incident that occurred on Oct. 5, 1982 was no mere sighting; during the UFO’s in-trusion at the base, Soviet military personnel watched in shock as their command consoles switched them-selves to “prepare to launch” status for 15 seconds be-fore returning to normal.

Witnesses in the area said their car engines suddenly died and mysterious holes appeared in nearby build-ing windows. The distinguished Russians now assert, “that the fault of the operation of the command post equipment had nothing to do with the observed phe-nomena, it just completely accidentally coincided in time.” The disturbing accident, they now say, was due to a faulty indicator light, nothing more. And as to the huge UFO, the Sokolov-Platov report just passes it over in favor of a far tamer explanation: The fifty eyewitness reports gathered after the event amounted to mistaken observations of parachute flares or a balloon. Shades of Yankee UFO denials!

Official versionsAccording to Knapp, every single one of the fifty or

more witnesses who filed reports with the Soviet Min-istry of Defense were military personnel, and most of the key statements from officers. “The inference that not one of these officers could identify a flare or a bal-loon is beyond belief,” Knapp states.

“The written reports that I obtained, all stamped as official documents, spell out in great detail the char-acteristics of the UFOs, as seen over a 4-hour period. Some of the craft were huge. Some seemed to split apart, some seem to merged together. Many of them changed in color and intensity. Some were triangular, some elliptical. They performed maneuvers that the military men considered impossible for any known aircraft. “What’s more,” Knapp adds, “the UFOs gener-ated demonstrable and distinct effects on machinery and personnel. Military vehicles shook and engines died as these craft zipped around in the skies over the base. The last time I checked, flares don’t do these sorts of things.”

Knapp made two trips to Russia, in 1993 and 1996. In his article for UFO Magazine in 1999 (see sidebar), Knapp broke the UFO aspect of the silence once im-posed on citizens by the Soviet regime, publicizing unprecedented information gleaned from Colonel

Sokolov, Colonel Valery Burdakov of the Moscow Institute of Aviation, and General Igor Maltsev, once chief of staff for Soviet Air Defenses. This apparent rush of glasnost-inspired volubility was short-lived, and the closing door began to shut off the information-al flow even during Knapp’s 1996 visit.

“We noticed a disturbing difference in attitude among my UFO sources,” Knapp wrote of the latter trip. “We wanted to re-interview Colonel Sokolov, obviously, but he refused.”

Even Knapp’s friendly liaison for the trip, Russian physicist Nikolai Kapranov, declined to be inter-viewed, although he first agreed to help the American team. Kapranov was then working as an advisor to Bo-ris Yeltsin, who had brokered a deal with Mikhail Gor-bachev in 1991 to succeed the Communist leader as the days of Soviet control ended.

Stereotyping RussiansFor his part, Oberg in the early ’90s fought off the

UFO admissions of glasnostic officials with what Knapp suspected was a pre-emptive strike: “Oberg ar-gued that the Russians are an historically gullible and superstitious people whose ability to separate fact from fiction could not be trusted.”

39February • March 2005UFO

Deny UFO Incidents

Valery Burdakov

In the recent article, he not only trusts the words of the two Russians who have changed their story, he frames them as tight associates who have worked to-gether on these matters for some time. Knapp says that when he interviewed them, “even Platov had never heard of Sokolov. More importantly, he had no idea of what Sokolov’s 10-year program was doing.”

The colonel’s program was a special study he di-rected in the wake of an incident near Petrozavodsk in September, 1978, which Oberg said was identified as the missile launch of a spy satellite from a secret base nearby. Most accept that view. “But the reality within the Russian MOD suggests something else,” Knapp says. “The top brass was only too happy to perpetu-ate the missile-test explanation, but behind the scenes they decided to figure out what really happened.”

“(The UFO) was observed for 6 hours that night,” So-kolov told Knapp. “Military men, police, emergency crews, pilots, astronomers—all observed the phenom-ena. A letter was prepared for the Military/Industrial Commission. The contents were this—‘Surely we can’t ignore what happened, but we can’t find the proof or explanation, either. Joint efforts of all our scientists are needed to solve this mystery.’ ” So, while the world was told this incident was just a missile launch, the MOD had actually gone into emergency mode, absolutely unable to identify the object. “There may have been a missile launch,” Knapp notes, “but that isn’t what the witnesses saw. Most of the best accounts came from military personnel who were stationed at the base and knew very well what a missile test looked like.”

Technological SecretsOnce the special study was in place, “We were get-

ting more and more information on the subject of anomalous phenomena,” said Colonel Sokolov in the 1993 interview. “When the attention of the military was attracted by the problem, they came to the con-clusion that a person from the military was needed to

coordinate the subject. I became the head because of my military position … I could talk to anyone. No one rejected the invitation.”

The unearthly capabilities of typical UFOs naturally attracted Russian interest. “First, the unpredictability of the movement of UFOs, the quick changes in course angles,” Colonel Sokolov reported as motivating as-pects. “Second, the velocity of the movements. Third, we knew that UFOs observed visually could not be seen on radar screens all the time, and those seen on radar could not always be seen visually. … The mil-itary thought that if the secrets of the UFO could be discovered, we would be able to win the competition between our prospective enemies in terms of velocity, materials, and visibility. Stealth.”

“It is not surprising that most sightings are connected with technological activity,” Platov said. But in 1993 he admitted that a certain number of sightings simply couldn’t be explained, even stating, “The phenomena are real. Some say jokes and hallucinations—these statements are wrong. The observers are mostly hon-est, with few exceptions.”

Blithely underscoring Platov’s and Sokolov’s extreme change of tune, the ironic end of Oberg’s article fails to factor in their earlier claims: “… their evident lack of any motivation aside from telling the truth as they found it, will make their report a significant contri-bution to our understanding of what really has been happening regarding this mysterious and fascinating subject.”

Russia under PutinWhy would these two men suddenly reverse course

on what they obviously see as important—though once secret—information? The political changes in Rus-


Boris Sokolov

vladivostok crew

sia may explain their new attitude. Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown what some political com-mentators view as a harsh retreat from the democratic reforms that rose after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hints of Putin’s authoritarian policies solidified into a clear pattern after the terrorist strike on a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan, and now the for-merly amicable relationship between himself and Pres-ident Bush has become increasingly strained.

“I do not begrudge Colonel Sokolov for his change of heart,” Knapp comments. “After I returned from Russia in 1993 and publicized some of my findings, Sokolov was attacked relentlessly by some far-right Rus-sian newspapers. My associate, Dr. Nikolai Kapranov … stated flatly that if Sokolov had spoken to us just five years before, he would have been imprisoned. And if it had happened ten years before, he would have been shot.”

In a way, the specter of the KGB still looms over the Russian landscape. Putin is a former agent of that once-dreaded Soviet security force, which Sokolov and Platov now flatly deny ever had any other secret

UFO files. “They forget that some KGB documents have already been released. Sokolov’s study produced thousands of pages of classified documents about UFO incidents and we were successful in obtaining a sub-stantial number of them, including those documents that covered the most interesting cases. I’ve got them—so do several other researchers,” Knapp said. Sokolov further informed Knapp that every military unit in the nation had a KGB attaché; that the more sensitive UFO cases were taken over by the KGB, and that the files never crossed his desk.

On his Russian trip, Knapp also gained access to an even more impressive official, General Igor Malt-sev, who spent 7 years as chief of staff for Soviet Air Defenses. Maltsev confirmed for Knapp that their Air Force had standing orders that UFOs were not to be fired upon because “ ‘they may have tremendous ca-pacities for retaliation,’ ” Knapp quotes. “He talked about a mass sighting over Moscow in 1990 in which more than a hundred sightings were reported in a single night, confirmed on military radar, and that he knew of no terrestrial technology that could do what the UFOs did.”

Knapp has the final, logical word: “Oberg convenient-ly omits this incident because he simply doesn’t have a way to explain it away. The Russian military didn’t issue this amazing order because it regarded UFOs as hallucinations or misidentifications.” UFO

February • March 2005 41UFO

George Knapp

igor maltsev


Through the Soviet Looking GlassThrough the Soviet Looking Glass

George KnappGeorge Knapp

My attempts to obtain UFO information from the Russians began in 1992. The sweeping and historic changes that were transforming the former Soviet Union had opened what seemed to be a window of opportunity. American journalists and social scientists had achieved success in acquiring files on such previously inaccessible topics as the JFK assassination and the Cuban missile crisis, so why not UFOs? The premise was to find persons who were in a position to know about UFOs, but who had never spoken publicly on the subject, let alone peddled UFO tales to West-ern journalists.

A chance meeting with a Russian physicist made it all possible. Dr. Nikolai Kapranov was in the U.S. as part of a congressionally sponsored lecture tour. While here, Kapranov spoke to national labs, think tanks and universi-ties about disarmament issues. In Russia, he had taught cosmonauts how to detect American nuclear submarines from space, and had served as a national security advisor to both the Russian parliament and Academy of Sciences, and he retained numerous high-level contacts within Rus-sian military and intelligence circles.

Dr. Kapranov said he had no previous experience, or even any interest, in UFO investigations, but agreed to help find those who might know more. He spent eight months track-ing down the type of highly placed persons we had asked for, checking and double-checking, weeding out the irrel-evant or specious. The deeper he dug, the more amazed he became. In the spring of 1993, my colleagues and I traveled to Moscow to see what, if anything, we had, and we were not disappointed. Among those we interviewed:

Colonel Boris Sokolov, who told us that he had been or-dered by the Ministry of Defense (MoD) to head up an un-precedented, nationwide study of UFOs. The study lasted a full 10 years. Every unit in the vast Russian military had standing orders to fully investigate and report on any UFO incidents.

Thousands of reports involving millions of witnesses were funneled to Sokolov, including 40 or more incidents in which Russian warplanes engaged UFOs. Three of those planes crashed and two pilots were killed. In one disturb-ing case, UFOs maneuvered over a Russian nuclear missile base and somehow manipulated launch codes. Sokolov said the purpose of the MOD study was to figure out how UFOs perform as they do, so that Russia could gain an advantage in developing stealth technology.

Dr. Rimili Avramenko, a senior engineer in the Russian SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) program who has spent

most of his life working on classified projects, told us that UFOs have been detected entering this planet’s atmosphere since the late ’50s; they are objects whose technical char-acteristics cannot be duplicated even today. He said that since Russian sensors had documented such intrusions, there is no question that U.S. sensors had done the same. Avramenko contended that information from the ongoing study of UFOs had been incorporated into his country’s SDI program. He referred to one program as “the weapon of the aliens.”

Dr. Valery Burdakov, of the prestigious Moscow Institute of Aviation, birthplace of Sputnik, said that Russian interest in UFOs dated back as far as Josef Stalin.

Burdakov’s mentor was Sergei Koroylov, father of the Russian space program. Korolyov told Burdakov that Stalin had requested a study of the UFO evidence in general, and the Roswell incident in particular. Korolyov and other sci-entists told Stalin that UFOs were from “somewhere else” and that he had personal knowledge of an ongoing UFO study by the U.S. military but that information from the study remained secret. A ranking Russian Air Force offi-cer told us the Force continues to study UFOs in a classified program code-named “Thread 3.” The officer, who was the coordinator of the study, said the Russian military had long ago concluded that UFOs represented technology from an advanced civilization, possibly extraterrestrial.

An assortment of leading scientists, including Dr. Yuli Pla-tov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, (a self-described “friendly skeptic”) have said that while the vast majority of UFO cases could be explained in prosaic terms, there remains a core of mysterious incidents which might be of extraterrestrial origin.

Along with these interviews, we succeeded in obtaining a few thousand pages of UFO documents, including some which are still classified. Most of the documents were from the Ministry of Defense study conducted under Col. Soko-lov; some were from the ongoing UFO study by Russia’s Academy of Sciences, and a few dozen were culled from the still-secret “Thread 3” program. Every expert who has examined the documents has said they appear to be the genuine article. To me and to others, this collection of au-thentic documents and expert testimony represents “smok-ing gun” evidence. The world’s only other superpower con-cluded long ago that UFOs are real, are from “somewhere else,” and are worthy of study at the highest levels.

The best evidence for the UFO presence is hard evi-dence: physical objects in the form of crashed extrater-restrial vehicles and the government documents and cover-ups pertaining to them. The 2nd Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference, recently held in Las Vegas, Nevada, is the only event of its kind emphasizing both.

According to organizers Dr. Bob Wood and his son Ryan, the goal of the conference is to “clarify the UFO phenomenon, its agenda and history, and to implement the most effective way to educate the public and world governments to its reality and implications.” Their website, www.majesticdocuments.com, emphasizes the importance of the famed Majestic-12 documents, but the speakers assembled for this conference offered global evidence for the phenomenon and its cover-up.

MJ-12, the cabal of American military personnel, sci-entists, and intelligence agents allegedly assembled by President Harry Truman to deal with the extraterres-trial issue, is at the heart of the hard-evidence debate. Possibly the most captivating and complex aspect of American ufology, the group’s reality is supported by three sets of anonymously released documents and the additional supporting evidence found by those like uber-researcher Stanton Friedman.

MJ-12 first materialized in 1984, via the anonymous arrival of documents that became known as the Eisen-hower Briefing and the Truman Memorandum in the mailbox of Jaime Shandera. He and UFO researcher William Moore uncovered the so-called Cutler-Twin-

ing Memo in the National Archives, and along with a number of other documents and their analysis, pub-lished “The MJ-12 Documents: An Analytical Report.”

Tim Cooper received more anonymous documents in 1992, reportedly sent by an intelligence agent calling himself Thomas Cantwheel. Like the first two transmis-sions, a plain manila envelope with no return address was received by Don Berliner in 1994. It contained a document entitled SOM 1-01, or the MJ-12 Operations Manual and outlined procedures to secure and ship artifacts and EBEs (extraterrestrial biological entities) from recovered alien vehicles.

In his 1996 book, Top Secret/MAJIC, Friedman said, “There’s been a great deal of confusion within the ufo-logical community with regard to the Operation Majes-tic-12 documents. A major reason for this has been the confused, unconventional, and often incomplete way in which information has been released.” Suffice it to say, as much time has been spent attempting to authen-ticate details like date formats and paper stock to ward off skeptics as on a synthesis of the material itself.

Just as MJ-12 is likely to first come to mind in terms of a UFO paper trail, the history of crash retrievals in the U.S. is popularly tied to Roswell, New Mexico. At the Crash Retrieval conference, it was thoroughly dis-sected by Paul Davids, producer of the Showtime TV movie Roswell. Davids sponsored and headed the Ro-swell Debris Press Conference during the 50th Roswell crash anniversary festivities in 1997.

SECOND ANNUAL UFO CRASH RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE

by Skylaire Alfvegren

Paul Kimball


National Security PoliciesLong-time researcher Linda Moulton Howe also

devoted her time to New Mexico, using a number of events and locations there to illustrate the U.S. policy of denial in the interest of national security. Beginning with the test of a V2 rocket that went fantastically awry due to “peculiar phenomena” in May, 1947, she quoted former New Mexico representative Andrew Kissner’s investigation into the event.

“The ‘peculiar phenomenon’ [object] was defined as hostile in that it appeared to have affected the V2’s trajectory ... it became an immediate priority … to the Joint Research and Development Board of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chaired by Vannevar Bush. (Vannevar Bush is widely speculated to have headed MJ-12.) High priority was assigned to collecting a specimen of the technology … retrieval units operated under Projects Moondust and Pounce. One of their classified missions was to aggressively bring down advanced disks for study.” Howe further relates that “at least two, possibly four extraterrestrial flying disks” were brought down by military fire on May 15, 1947.

In an interview with Leonard Stringfield (now de-ceased), Howe was told “We lost so many of our own planes that the [shoot down] order was rescinded in the early 1950s.” Retaliation could be a contributing factor

in the deaths of over six hundred military personnel and civilians in a 2-month period in 1947, Howe sug-gested. Pulling together numerous sources, she went on to explain that during the Truman administration, a protective trio of radar bases was built around Los Alamos and the Sandia base.

Howe continued her New Mexico report by detailing a meeting with the ever-present specter of Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Richard Doty, who showed her an alleged presidential briefing paper in 1983. This episode 21 years ago is now widely known as a disinformation operation perpetrated on Howe by the AFOSI.

“One of the pages contained a list of locations where American military and intelligence units had retrieved aerial vehicles described as extraterrestrial, along with humanoid bodies, both dead and alive,” she said. The document also contained a crash-retrieval site list. “In addition to Roswell, other sites included Magdalena near the plains of San Agustin; Kingman, Arizona; northern Mexico south of Laredo, Texas; and Aztec, New Mexico.”

At the heart of Howe’s investigation is the worldwide animal-mutilation phenomenon. One Kissner source, purportedly a high-ranking officer at White Sands Proving Grounds, told him that “government insiders concluded at least one non-human agenda is to harvest genetic material from animals and people.” Howe rhe-torically asked: “Is this the horrible secret which has provoked a policy of misinformation and denial since at least 1947?”

International Perspectives“If you wanted to know just how far governments

will go to keep UFOs under wraps, this is it,” said Peter Robbins about England’s Rendlesham Forest incident. Robbins, along with witness Larry Warren, wrote Left at Eastgate (1997), an account of the December, 1980 siege at Suffolk’s Bentwaters-Woodbridge air bases and the surrounding Wood.

At that time, the U.S. military maintained a nuclear stockpile of 350,000 kilotons at the Twin Base complex, in full violation of a then-existing treaty with the U.K. An uprising that began in Gdansk, Poland, led by Lech Walesa, the man who would become that country’s first president, had Russia ready to roll with nukes on full red alert; there was a chance Soviet paratroopers might land that night in Suffolk to quash the Polish uprising.

Instead, the forest near the base was visited by a black equilateral triangle. The next night, UFOs moving in a grid pattern left triangular landing spots. The activ-ity was capped on the fourth night, when “troops sur-rounded a 40-foot round, self-illuminated ground fog,” Robbins said. “Their flashlights wouldn’t even work. A large machine materialized within the fog, and three Linda Moultin Howe

44 February • March 2005 UFO

stocky, translucent beings hovered off the ground. There was a stand-off with the wing commander.”

Warren, stationed at the most remote post, listened to other troops “describe the UFOs they were seeing with nervous joking.” Witnesses were told, “We’ve known about them before you were born,” and were reminded, “bullets are cheap.” According to Warren, they were chemically subdued and taken below Twin Base for a day and a half, where memories were im-planted through chemical means.

Warren said his ears popped going down, indicating the great depth of the shady facility. To add further in-trigue, a local Suffolk UFO investigator told Robbins that the tunnels between RAF Woodbridge and Bentwa-ters could accommodate five thousand people for up to a year. Warren took an honorable discharge 4 months later and wrote Left at Eastgate, which prompted the U.K. government to release hundreds of pages of docu-ments on the incident.

Robbins recounted letters by people there that night, including some still on active duty, corroborating the events. “In the food court across from the Pentagon,” he said, “I was told by Colonel Charles Halt, the deputy base commander of Bentwaters at the time, that lights which adversely affected the nuclear ordnances pen-etrated the bunkers.” Robbins also showed a video of Budd Hopkins regressing Warren, whom he said had a history of abduction events. “If congressional com-mittees convene again on the subject of UFOs,” Rob-bins said, “the Bentwaters case would be the one to investigate.”

Declassified DocumentsNick Redfern, author of three best-selling books on

UFOs, presented a laundry list of documents and in-formation. “For the most part, documents are either leaked by inside sources or by those with established links to retired military personnel,” he said. “There is an assumption that there is nothing in the public do-main, but a number of intriguing documents have been declassified, in North America, Russia, England, the Middle East, and Europe.”

Redfern spoke of the psychological aspects of UFO phenomena studied by the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s with Project Grudge and Project Moondust, the latter an operation that was established to “locate, recover, and deliver descended foreign space vehicles.” Al-though ostensibly created to study crashed Soviet sat-ellites, Moondust extended to UFO reports and was still receiving reports of crashed, non-Soviet objects in the mid-’60s.

The White Saucer, so named by the Air Force, was seen by a fighter squadron on October 18, 1960. It dis-appeared in a downward arc, and the information on it was sent to Moondust personnel, which indicates

interaction with non-crashed aerial objects, according to Redfern. He mentioned a 1965 document on a metal fragment recovered from an unidentified object found in the Congo.

The first paragraph promises “revelations of extreme significance,” Redfern quoted, and noted that the rest of the report is classified. The document is from the CIA, but was found in the archives of the National Security Agency. Redfern says there is a direct link from UFO landings and crashes to Moondust. “They claimed to be actively scanning the world’s papers, but it goes far beyond that,” he said.

Soviet IntelDr. David Pace, a Soviet-born scientist now based in

Southern California, provided a dizzying and highly entertaining crash course in politics, rocketry history, and UFO activity behind the Iron Curtain. Pace dis-cussed the Soviets’ history of tyranny, black ops, UFO studies, and experiments in reverse engineering and remote viewing, commenting, “Parapsychology as an academic discipline was quite accepted in the former Soviet Union, and in some places ufology was consid-ered a legitimate discipline, as well.”

Describing Laurenti Beria, Stalin’s choice to oversee nuclear development as “J. Edgar Hoover meets Jeffrey Dahmer,” Pace explained how, “in an act of interstel-lar, interplanetary diplomacy,” Soviet cosmologist Ya-kov Borisovich Zel’dovich “halted the Kremlin’s desire to detonate a nuclear warhead on the moon.”

He described Kapustin Yar as the USSR’s Area 51 counterpart. It’s been used as a space center, testing ground for Soviet missiles, and a radar tracking station during the space race. Pace said, “Many, many crash-es happen here. It was an absolute thorn in Reagan’s side.” He briefly touched on actual UFO activity, in-cluding the “Tsarist flap” of 1892, and a crashed craft discovered in Kiev during post-World War II recon-

David Pace


struction. He summed up the results of one sighting by saying, “All witnesses were removed, sedated with Haldol, and deemed ‘politically unreliable.’ ” Pace also described the Soviet program analogous to MJ-12.

Canada’s CasesMaking good use of multimedia, Grant Cameron

spoke about Project Magnet, Canada’s official sau-cer study headed from 1950–54 by Wilbert B. Smith. Smith made arrangements that his files would survive after his death—and they did, in startling contrast to the treatment of UFO documentation in the U.S. With the federal government’s approval, “Smith built a fly-ing saucer observatory. They were trying to record a flying saucer coming over,” said Cameron.

Cameron briefly mentioned Suffield in the province of Alberta, saying: “It’s basically our Area 51.” At the time, the government admitted it had this top-secret base, and they actually opened it up for UFOs to land, he said. He also touched on the alleged craft debris that Smith was said to have studied during Project Magnet.

But all good things must come to an end. “Basically it got into the news, and they shut down the program,” Cameron said. Astoundingly, because Smith’s files are still available, Cameron has been able to document the Canadian government’s active cover-up of their own UFO involvement. According to Smith: “The only reason that those in authority have said nothing about [UFOs] is that they simply don’t know what to do about it.”

Cameron mentioned a report on the Project Magnet that sat on the Canadian prime minister’s desk for 3 months. In exasperation, Smith wrote, “For your infor-mation, every nation of this planet has been officially informed of the existence of the space craft and their occupants from elsewhere, and as nations, they must

take responsibility for any lack of action, or for any official position they may take. There is nothing more to be done along these lines and effort in this direction is wasted.”

As intriguing as Smith’s story is, Cameron’s two-part presentation focused mainly on the knowledge and in-volvement of U.S. presidents in the UFO issue. “The President, as far as I’m concerned, is a key factor in the UFO mystery. He’s the only one in the U.S. govern-ment who is actually given the true information about what’s going on. He’s constitutionally responsible; he’s the head of the military.”

The question of President Truman’s knowledge of Roswell has always been debated and underscores the importance of a paper trail. “If you go into the Truman archive, you won’t find actual documentation,” Camer-on stated. Cameron provided evidence that both Edwin Easley, in charge of Roswell base security at the time, and General Roger Ramey, responsible for the weather balloon cover story, briefed the President, even quot-ing Ramey’s wife that “they were quite friendly” with Truman, although there are no documents available to support this.

Robert B. Landry, air advisor to Truman, gave an in-dication why this may have been so. “He briefed the president on UFOs every 3 months from February, 1948 until the president left office in January, 1953. There were nineteen, twenty briefings, and they were all done orally. There was no paper trail at all,” Cam-eron said.

He elaborates on his website, www.presidentialufos.com: “This one disclosure may explain why so little in the way of documentation is found in any of the presi-dential libraries related to direct involvement by the various presidents who have been forced to deal with UFO phenomena. Nothing was ever written down. The oral nature of the briefings in the early days indicates that the authorities realized a high level of security was necessary.”

Media Materials Cameron offered audio and visual material on vari-

ous cases, including a sighting at the Capitol and the Holloman Air Force Base. He provided a fascinating and credible overview of UFO films contracted by the government to acclimate the public, beginning with Walt Disney in 1956, each of which was pulled before release. Describing a project contracted under Presi-dent Nixon which included the Holloman footage, Cameron said, “After Blue Book shut down, there was a definite program that started with Richard Nixon to release materials, but surrounded by disinformation. They put the material out, and then they pull back what you need to prove it.”

Cameron covered the Ford and Reagan eras, but be-Grant Cameron


lieves Jimmy Carter worked hard on the UFO situation, saying that “the one thing they stalled him on was na-tional security.” Many UFO documents were declas-sified during his administration. The evidence that Cameron presented, including an interview with the in-triguing figure Daniel Sheehan, who worked for Carter as an advisor on two UFO studies, leads one to believe that Carter intended to be the disclosure president.

Cameron wrapped up with a mention of General Wes-ley Clark, who, when asked if he’d ever been briefed on UFOs, stated, “There are things going on, but we need to work out our own mathematics.”

The Death TollThe Wood themselves chose to examine individuals

within the crash-retrieval world. Dr. Bob Wood gave a presentation on the late Leonard Stringfield, former Air Force intelligence officer and the grand poobah of UFO crash information who coined the term UFO re-trieval. Stringfield, who died in 1994, published two books and seven Status Reports on his findings.

Co-organizer Ryan Wood presented an almost surre-ally scientific “death probability index” of deceased UFO researchers, complete with an Excel spreadsheet and the assistance of remote viewer Joe McMoneagle. Former CIA director Bill Colby, said to be sympathetic to UFO issues, was asked to resign, then disappeared while boating. His body was found a week later.

Wood sarcastically noted the official cause of death: “I think he got up in the middle of the night, went into the canoe in his pajamas, had a heart attack, and fell in the water and drowned.” John Philip Murphy, the first reporter on the scene of the Keckburg, Pennsylvania crash, “was supposedly crossing a four-lane highway in Ventura when he was hit by a Volkswagen bus going 55 miles an hour.”

Wood’s use of McMoneagle resulted in some interest-ing insights. Researcher James McDonald, a friend of Dr. Wood’s, told him a week before his first suicide attempt: “I found out what’s behind it.” He “succeeded” a few months later. The remote-viewing interpretation? “He was pushed methodically to the brink of self-obliteration by systemati-cally manipulating his social infrastructure.”

Another interesting case Wood asked McMoneagle to investigate was that of U.K. defense contractor John Ferry, an Army brigadier general who managed to electrocute himself. The remote viewer’s answer was that he was working on an “instantaneous, transverse-complex, cross-universe communications transmission system.” For Joe to come up with this answer is really weird, Wood said. It’s fantastic; it’s never been in the literature.”

The odds on each of the eleven deaths he inves-tigated, Wood said, “are greater than one in five thousand.” Though everyone presented thorough evidence of UFO crashes, only one speaker actual-

ly brought part of a crash retrieval with him. Chuck Wade, whose father owned a bar in Corona at the time of the Roswell/Corona crash, said he was “on a quest to find out what his father didn’t see on the Foster ranch.”

A retired general contractor, Wade built A-frames for the test site at San Agustin. After reading The Day After Roswell by the late Colonel Philip J. Corso, he assembled a team and went to retrieve crash debris, finding alu-minum-like samples which he had analyzed by a local university. After sharing the university’s findings with the audience, Wade hosted the only show-and-tell por-tion of the conference, having brought the samples with him in plastic baggies. As Stanton Friedman re-marked: “You’ve got to dig; you just can’t research by proclamation.” UFO

The 251-page 2nd Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Confer-

ence Proceedings (2004) includes articles and presenta-tion materials by Jim Marrs, Paul Davids, Don Ledger, Paul Kimball, Dr. Bob Wood, Ryan Wood, Linda Moulton Howe, Nick Redfern, Ron Regehr, Grant Cameron, Peter Robbins, and others. It can be ordered from www.majesticdocu-ments.com for $35, plus shipping.

Linda Moulton Howe’s complete presentation is available on her website www.earthfiles.com ($26 subscription).

Dr. David Pace’s lecture is available at www.lostartsmedia.com for $19.95.

Grant Cameron’s website is www.presidentialufos.com

Chuck Wade

Crash Debris!


Ryan Wood and his father, Dr. Robert Wood, are at the forefront of research into the history of UFO crash re-trievals. As two of the most credible individuals in the UFO field, Ryan and Bob Wood offer a disciplined ap-proach to the effort of unearthing any and all available evidence that sheds light on the question of whether advanced alien technology has been secretly recovered and studied by the United States government.

Just how Ryan views the evidence—and how he sup-ports those views—is a question of importance to the UFO field, given the effort at precision, discipline, and scientific procedure to which he and his father, a noted aerospace engineer and physicist, have commit-ted themselves.

A popular website (www.majes-ticdocuments.com) managed by the Wood presents a massive number of documents that have surfaced in the last two decades which tell a story of secret programs, includ-ing MAJIC and MJ-12, which may have been established to manage and advance top-secret UFO re-search as well as public opinion on the subject of alien life.

Some of these are original docu-ments that may date back many decades. Since the documents sur-faced without any obvious chain of title or provenance, the Wood have devoted themselves to trying to answer the difficult questions about which of the documents, and which of the reported UFO crash retrieval cases, may be authentic.

Ryan had just completed sponsoring the Second An-nual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference at the Sunset Station Hotel in Henderson, Nevada, near Las Vegas. At the close of the conference I sat down with him over breakfast before our departures, and he agreed to answer questions about his background, motivations, and accomplishments in the UFO research field. My marching orders from UFO Magazine were to ask the tough questions, and I tried my best to do so. I there-fore present the unabridged interview in this article.

Davids: Of all the different types of conferences you could have chosen to sponsor, why UFO crash retrievals?

Wood: The reason I chose the crash retrieval genre, so to speak, is that I was personally frustrated in going to

conferences and not seeing the types of things I wanted to see. And so I figured I’m just going to go do this, and I wanted to focus in on parts, and bodies, and military involvement and witnesses—a more investigative jour-nalist approach to it with hard checkable facts and de-tails, whereas other efforts in the UFO field are difficult to advance or investigate, and that’s why I really chose crash retrievals. There’s a tremendously large wealth of data to investigate.

Davids: What is it about your background that made you interested in UFO parts and hardware?

Wood: My interest stems from growing up as the son of a physicist, so it was very much real-world based—

how does the world work? I would rebuild car engines in high school, I liked mechanical engineering; my father was an aerospace engi-neer [and there were] the rockets and the space program, and the ex-citement of his friends and where we lived. At the time I lived in Pacific Palisades, south of Malibu. Southern California is the center of aerospace research. Later on we moved further south, to Newport Beach.

Davids: Your educational back-ground?

Wood: I have a degree in mathe-matics and computer science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I gradu-ated in 1978 and went into work-ing at Intel Corporation at the very

young time when the 8080 microprocessor had just started off and the 8086 microprocessor had just come on. [It was] the early history, to be with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove and the very young embryonic world of Silicon Valley at that time and watch it grow. And then I moved to Massachusetts and worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in computer systems and did a lot of work there, and then back to California where I was a sales executive for digital equipment, and then went to a couple of silicon valley startups. I worked in supercomputers and document imaging before starting my current career which is in commercial energy con-servation equipment.

Davids: A lot of people would say it seems like a really improbable interest for an aerospace physicist and his son, a computer expert, to grasp onto UFOs, a

INTERVIEW WITH RYAN WOOD, SPONSOR OF by Paul Davids

Ryan Wood addresses the conference ...


field that has been belittled and besmirched and ridi-culed by the scientific community since even before the Condon Committee Report of the 1960s. Why? Why risk it?

Wood: At times I ask myself that same question: Why risk it? And I really don’t have a firm answer except that I’ve always been very self-confident, with an at-titude of “I don’t care; I like the debate.” It’s something that I grew up around and was comfortable with and familiar with, with Stanton Friedman coming over for dinner when I was fifteen. And I’m now nearly fifty.

Davids: So your dad and Stan Friedman have a long-standing personal relationship, professional relationship?

Wood: It started as a professional relationship be-cause Stanton worked for my father for 3 or 4 months before the money that was set aside for his research project was canceled, and he couldn’t do any more ad-vanced research in the area and Stan and most other people were let go.

Davids: Did Stanton Friedman play a role in getting your dad interested in UFOs, or was your dad inter-ested before Stanton came along?

Wood: Oh, my dad was interested before Stanton came along, and Stan was hired because he was ahead of the curve in looking at this and studying it from a physics point of view. The reports were “light in the sky disap-pears over the horizon in 2 seconds, how many Gs is that? What are the curves that describe what’s happen-ing? Polarizing lenses people are wearing … they see interference fringes in the lenses … how many gauss is the UFO emitting at what range to understand the mag-netic field dimensions of the craft? Very much like the work Paul Hill did in his book, Unconventional Flying Objects … technical work.

Davids: What is it that led you and your dad to first have the concept that one or more extraterrestrial UFOs may have crashed, and that the government might have the debris and was refusing to tell us about it?

Wood: What really accelerated our working together and interest was the Special Operations Manual that came along in 1994.

Davids: It didn’t start with the original MJ-12 papers?Wood: No, I did read them, and I read Stanton’s fi-

nal report on MJ-12 and I did have some interest there. But it really got going when we got the undeveloped film and we started to blow it up to look at the Spe-cial Operations Manual in 1994. My father got it from Don Berliner who got it in the mail as undeveloped

film, postmarked Lacrosse, Wisconsin. And from that we began to blow it up and try to analyze and retype everything and begin to validate that manual.

And then about 4 years later, the Tim Cooper trove of documents came, beginning in 1998. The Majestic documents are a group of documents spread out over 20-plus years, from multiple different stories. And they’re of varying quality. Some are unexposed film. Some are photocopies. Some are actually original on-ionskin documents where you can test age and ink and watermark and other things. The original sources are all obscured, but not completely.

It’s really the content of the documents and the story they tell that excites me the most. But you have to look at the original documents, and there are two strong ones. There’s the Bowen manuscript, which is an ency-clopedia of flying saucers written by Vernon Bowen in the 1955–1957 time frame, and there’s a whole chapter stamped TOP SECRET MAJIC that’s all about the Air Force. They were embarrassed about what he was go-ing to say, and so they classified that chapter, and ev-erything else is confidential. You can do paper and ink testing and it all turns out to be authentic.

Davids: Is it fair to say that there would be nothing in his manuscript, though, that would be very far outside the public domain of what we know about flying sau-cers? As opposed to crash recovery?

Wood: That’s a fair statement. It’s an early history—1945 to 1955—of public reports, and some sleuthing around and connecting the dots. It’s not that embar-rassing today.

Davids: The Einstein-Oppenheimer document: Was

THE UFO CRASH RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE

Conference attendees examine crash debris ...


that a photo negative or a Xerox? How did you receive that?

Wood: The Einstein-Oppenheimer document is just a photocopy. But what’s interesting about it—it’s only a five-page document allegedly written by Einstein and Oppenheimer, but our study of it shows that it was re-ally written by Einstein, because it used unique words like “supernational” that were used in the period by Einstein in his own writings found at the Princeton ar-chives. And Latin and German words are in there, and even his sort of laconic style of punctuation and phras-es is a close fit to his original known authentic works.

Now to really vet that document fully, we use some-thing called forensic linguistics, and there are only a few experts on this. There’s only one journal in the world that deals with forensic linguistics, but you can fingerprint this document very well, down to subtle-ties of word usage, comma usage, phrase usage, and style and compare that with Einstein’s original writings.

Davids: I want to ask you some hard questions. My first book was called The Fires of Pele: Mark Twain’s Legendary Lost Journal. My wife and I wrote it deliber-ately in Mark Twain’s style. Our objective was to make it sound as though it was written by Mark Twain. When it was reviewed by a Midwestern literary journal, the editor thought it actually was a lost work by Mark Twain because we had copied his diction; we had found his favorite phrases. It was a deliberate effort. What makes you confident that this Einstein document isn’t a deliberate effort by someone else in the same manner as what we did in our Mark Twain book?

Wood: Well, it could be. But I think it’s remote be-cause it has flaws in it. If you’re going to fake some-thing, the faker wants to make it perfect and say, “I have a tremendous ego and I’m very skilled at this.” And then it goes into a grayer area of what is the mo-tivation for faking some of the Majestic documents or confusing them? It could be simply to discredit them after the fact.

However, when I interviewed some of the experts in psychological operations that work at the John F. Ken-nedy special warfare school in Fort Bragg in North Carolina, they looked at many of the documents and

said “This is rotten psychological warfare work. You want to tell people the truth, and tell people the truth, and tell people the truth, and then slip in a lie. You tell them the truth and shift the dynamic a little bit in a strategic and important way for your objective—psy-chological warfare has to have a clear objective and you have to deliver it in a credible way.

Right now most people discount the Einstein-Oppen-heimer document because it’s not very interesting—it doesn’t talk about much in the way of exotic technolo-gy. It mentions an EBE in June of 1947. But most of the document is a lot of intellectual thinking about how does the world react to the presence of aliens, how do world governments react, is it the right of aliens to come here and settle, what would we do if they did choose to come and settle here? It’s a think-piece rath-

er than a white hot report which is, “Yeah, we found the wreckage in Roswell, we analyzed it, here’s the engine, here’s the political implications.” Much more of a military style.

Davids: There’s noth-ing in the Einstein-Op-penheimer document that talks about UFO crash recovery, is there?

Wood: Yes, there is, but it’s not in direct phrasing. It talks about extraterrestrial biological entities—EBEs; it’s the first known use of the term. This is June of 1947, not July. So it implies that there were crashes be-fore Roswell.

Davids: Was this before the Kenneth Arnold sight-ing, the date of that paper?

Wood: It just says June. It doesn’t have a specific date. I don’t know when Kenneth Arnold’s sighting was.

Davids: It was June 24th, 1947, and it’s unlikely Ein-stein would have written this paper in one week.

Wood: Yeah, exactly.

Davids: So why would someone have gone to Ein-stein to do an analysis like this before we even had the Kenneth Arnold sighting at that time of 1947?

Wood: There must have been some activity before then that triggered this sort of analysis.

Davids: Linda Moulton Howe has speculated what that activity might have been, hasn’t she, in her pre-sentation at this conference? That it might have gone

Army personnel meet with Albert Einstein ...


back to May of 1947 and the V2 rocket test which was reported in the papers to have been brought down by some sort of anomalous phenomenon.

Wood: I would go back even further. There are four or five documents we have now that are all pre-Roswell. We have one that mentions the Cape Girardeau crash event. We have mentions that at the time of the Los Angeles air raid of 1942, two craft came down, one in the San Bernardino mountains, and one that crashed in water that the Navy recovered.

Davids: There may have been previous UFO activity and even previous UFO crashes, but still it’s a coinci-dence that the Einstein-Oppenheimer paper is dated the same month as the Kenneth Arnold sighting, when he couldn’t have possibly written it during that last week of June 1947, right?

Wood: Well, who knows what Einstein’s schedule was like around the time of the Kenneth Arnold sight-ing, and whether or not he even paid attention to that sighting. My impres-sion is—and I haven’t studied all his papers at the Princeton Library—but the paper itself seems to be broken up into five parts, in which he’s an-swering specific ques-tions such as: What do we do if they come here and try to settle? How will the international community react to their presence? He goes through some of the issues of disclosure today, but back in 1947.

Davids: Let me ask you another hard question. When the first MJ-12 document came out, critic/skep-tic Philip Klass, when he saw the name of Donald Menzel on the list of MJ-12 members, said “This is ob-viously an act of revenge by a ufologist who is trying to pay us back for dismissing ufology—he had the gall to put the name of one of the major critics of UFOs on a list of names of people who supposedly knew UFOs were real who were keeping the secret.” What’s to say, as we look for a motive, that all of these documents aren’t a sort of act of revenge by a well-educated ufologist who is having his digs, as opposed to being psychological warfare work? Can you rule that out?

Wood: The idea that a lone, well-educated nut would do this … it’s possible for one or two documents … but the breadth of the documents and the interweav-ing nature of them, and the obscure checkable facts in many of them … you’d need to be a genius and have a credible breadth of knowledge in military history

and government, and to some extent technology. You’d have to be extremely talented at doing this. And how are you going to recreate original documents? If these were faked, I think it would have to be the CIA or KGB. I wouldn’t put it past them.

Davids: A faker would have had to have access to some of the original documents, such as the textbook manuscript on UFOs you mentioned, right? And he presumably would have put a TOP SECRET MAJIC stamp on the actual original?

Wood: Yes, as well as the original manuscript which is a sort of ten pages of directives from Alan Dulles to the other MJ-12 members as to how to deal with the MJ-12 program. The original manuscript was burned as though it had been pulled out of a fire. That’s the odd part. The source that leaked it to us wrote a cover letter stating: “I snatched these out of a fire. I was responsible for clearing out the safe of James Jesus Angleton, and

there won’t be any more originals like this.” There are burn holes in some of the pages.

Davids: But the lone nut could have done that as part of his sce-nario too.

Wood: Yeah, but when you see and study the documents themselves and start to check things at the National Archives … when you get an original manuscript and there’s a reference to

someone named Tucker and it has his phone number and address and it’s in the right format—and you go to the aero-medical library and find the other papers he’s written and it’s in exactly the same format, exactly the same material. It’s different content but … the bar is very high for a lone faker. I would say the chance is well under one percent.

Davids: When you look at some of the other hoaxes of history and you say, okay, there were the Hitler diaries, there was the biography of Howard Hughes. These fell apart pretty quickly, didn’t they? The Hitler diaries fooled a major German magazine for a week or two and they put down a lot of money for them, but then it all fell apart rather fast. Just like in the recent presi-dential election, the supposed National Guard papers relating to George Bush that gave Dan Rather egg on his face: It fell apart rather quickly. But your argument is that you’ve been dealing with these UFO documents a long time, and they have not fallen apart. No one has done a satisfactory job of tearing them apart, correct?

Paul Davids displaysHollywood debris ...


Wood: We get anachronisms in some of the docu-ments that are still unresolved. What we did is to cre-ate a sort of authenticity meter for each document. You ultimately can look at the authenticity issues of every sentence from a content point of view. And just because you might have an anachronism such as “This font isn’t correct at the time—”

Davids: Why isn’t that enough to discredit it? Or an anachronistic word that’s out of its time in history—why isn’t that enough to discredit it?

Wood: An anachronistic word may not be out of its time, and that’s what you have to check. You have to do a reasonable job of exploring whether what you think is an anachronistic word or term might have been used at that time in history. Most of the debunkers haven’t really checked it thoroughly. After I’ve been to the Na-tional Archives several times and have looked up simi-lar documents and feel comfortable that I’ve looked hard and well to try to find something that could explain this problem, and I can’t do it—but we’ve never had that yet. If that hap-pened, I’d be the first person to say, “Yeah, I can’t explain that.”

There are still some anachronisms we’re trying to deal with. Stanton Friedman has brought up the theory that some of the docu-ments are emulations. He’s talking about six or seven one-page documents where it seems that there could be problems with handwriting, perhaps lifted signatures from other sources. But you don’t really know.

Davids: What percentage of the Tim Cooper docu-ments have these problems or may be tainted by emulation? Are we talking about 50 percent of the documents or fewer?

Wood: Oh no, much less. On a number of documents count, probably 2 percent. On a page count, .01 per-cent. We have about four to five thousand pages of doc-uments with varying classifications, from unclassified to highly classified.

Davids: Did this all come from Tim Cooper?Wood: Oh, no. Not all of them. We have the Don

Berliner material, the Special Operations Manual. We have the Bill Moore/Jaime Shandera MJ-12 documents that came as negative film.

Davids: But the new ones, these five thousand pages. That’s a lot of pages.

Wood: That came from Tim Cooper. Now, Tim says it was mailed from Fort Meade and he supplied the envelope that it came in with the postmark. And you say, “Why would Tim lie about it?” So let’s take it at face value that it really did come from Fort Meade in that particular envelope. In one particular mailing from a CIA post meter, it turned out that the meter had expired, but the post office people were able to trace it and establish that the meter was at the CIA and is now no longer used. And it had just been turned off 3 months before or something like that.

Davids: Tim Cooper said that his father had a back-ground in UFO research for the government and that’s why he was selected to release these. Is that correct?

Wood: His father, Harry B. Cooper, clearly worked in the National Photographic Interpretation Center and in New Mexico in photo-graphic printing. He had to print these documents. He traveled in a circle of friends where they were also involved in this and involved socially. Tim was young at the time. People in this group may have remembered him or liked him. And it may have been triggered by Tim writing FOIA requests in the right types of areas. My personal opinion is that it was the retired declassifiers who knew Harry Cooper who

may have remembered Tim, who decided we should leak this and put it out, and they used Tim Cooper to do it. That’s my belief.

Davids: Of all the information that’s out there, what do you think is the closest we have to a smoking gun of an ET saucer being in government hands?

Wood: The only thing that approximates a smoking gun is the breadth, the complete details of all these var-ious documents, and the stories and witnesses around Roswell, the stories and witnesses I’ve researched around Cape Girardeau, which is an obscure thing, something you’ve got to dig to find. And the stories around the Kecksburg and Bentwaters UFO landing and the other major events. It’s the totality that con-vinces me. Now there are little points, things you can point to and try to say, “Oh, that’s it.” But you get into trouble if you try to latch onto one thing. It could be dashed, and then your paradigm fails.

Wilbert Smith’s UFO observatory ...


Davids: You’ve had two UFO Crash Retrieval confer-ences so far, and they’ve both had published proceed-ings. Do you feel that one of the best ways for some-one to get the breadth of the whole issue is to get hold of and read both of those proceedings papers, or are there other things you’d suggest?

Wood: I would certainly read the two crash retrieval proceedings already published, but there’s other books. There’s the Majestic documents themselves, most of which are published at www.majesticdocuments.com. The website has 95 percent of them.

There’s a few I haven’t posted yet, usually ones that are less interesting, but we’re working on those. In some cases it’s as though someone cleaned out their file cabi-net and gave you both very interesting stuff and some junky stuff, and some of the more so-called junky stuff hasn’t been posted yet. That stuff is not nec-essarily directly on point.

I fully intend to do the third UFO Crash Re-trieval Conference in Las Vegas this year with more of a focus on hard-ware points and looking at more crash retrievals, more understanding of the Majestic documents, analysis of metal frag-ments, which we also did in 2003.

I want to do a review of several alleged UFO met-al fragments and have the metallurgists give us a better understanding of whether this constitutes proof.

Davids: If you were to hazard a guess—you say you’re almost fifty—how old do you think you’ll be when the government “comes clean?”

Wood: Well, I’ve asked that question before. Actually Joe McMoneagle, a psychic widely known for his work in remote viewing, was asked that question and his an-swer as to when they tell the truth is the year 2075. So I’m personally pessimistic.

Davids: We won’t be there.Wood: We won’t be there. My children might be there.

But that does not mean we can’t change the future and agitate towards that end. My passionate interest is re-

ally in the crash sites, the hardware, the technology. The great crime of the government is that they think that a hundred cloistered scientists, brilliant as they may be, can adequately understand and advance this incredible enigma. That’s just scientific hubris.

They need to apply in a controlled manner the full weight of a million to ten million scientists and engi-neers around the world on the alien biology, the mate-rials. Imagine how the world would be different if in 1960 they had hauled out an alien cadaver and put it on a table and said, “This came from outer space.”

There would be hundreds or thousands of PhDs in exobiology who could have potentially solved cancer and developed and advanced vastly our understanding of our own biology and intelligent life in another way,

given almost 50 years to have worked at it.

That’s the crime. If they expose the materi-als—the proof—you can advance the world and make progress in society much faster.

Davids: What do you think the chances are that they really don’t have the proof of ETs and never have had the proof, but that they have created a grandiose myth that they do and have denied their own myth just to arouse more interest in the idea?

Wood: The chances that this is all a hoax or manipulation or that the government really doesn’t have anything—I can’t fathom it. It’s a very, very low probability.

One chance in a mil-lion. UFO

Paul Davids is the executive producer and co-writer of the film Roswell, starring Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen. He has produced numerous UFO documentaries and has written many articles for UFO Magazine.

In 2004, Paul Davids was a speaker at the MUFON International UFO Symposium, the National UFO Conference, and the UFO Crash Retrieval Conference. His website is www.pauldavids.com

Photo page 51 courtesy Paul David; remaining photos courtesy Tim Cridland.

Wilbert Smith makes acalculated decision ...


August 28, 1995. Fox Television airs a ratings-grab-bing phenomena special, and it can be argued that with that program, the feisty network launched the new breed of reality TV. The premise? Back in 1947, a UFO crashed—probably near Roswell, New Mexico—and the military recovered and ultimately dissected an alien body. And we have the film, ladies and gentle-men, as shot by a military cameraman!

Now, after 10 years, Robert Kiviat, the producer who brought “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?” to the Fox Network, is releasing the whole story. What he learned answers the final question—is this story fact or fiction? At this moment in time, Kiviat argues, it is fiction … and he can prove it.

BackstoryVicki Ecker and I were invited to speak at the First

World UFO Congress in Vienna, Austria, in November 1993. While there, we met and became friends with John and Anne Spencer, Philip and Sue Mantle, and Jenny Randles. Near the end of the conference I was having coffee with Phil Mantle one morning when he relayed to me a fantastic story concerning the Roswell crash and a film of an actual autopsy of an alien being.

There were many rumors and famous names associ-ated with this mysterious film, including director Ste-ven Spielberg. As the story was then circulating, Spiel-berg was alleged to have some actual footage shot by a military cameraman during the recovery and autopsy of an alien being, and Spielberg would be including it in a new film called Project X.

Several weeks after returning from Europe, I received a telephone call from a researcher in the U.K. who told

“Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?”

10 Years AfterPART 1: Fox-TV’S FIRST TASTE OF REALITY

By Don Ecker

me that Fox Television had expressed interest in this alleged military footage and that they might be working on a special. I told this researcher that I had a working relationship with several producers at Fox and would check on this information. I called Robert Kiviat, with whom I had worked on several UFO episodes on Fox’s program Encounters, and he said he would check on it.

Kiviat talked with others, saw the value of the footage, and the rest, as they say, is history. Initially Fox, through its “Alien Autopsy” host Jonathan Frakes, promised that if any further information were to be found to ei-ther prove or disprove the film, the network would air that information and keep the public informed. Fox stretched the alien autopsy story into three specials, each time doling out a little more footage and insisting that viewers make up their own minds.

Producer Bob Kiviat says that he can definitively an-swer the question of whether the film is fact or fiction, but Fox, through its special projects executive Mike Dar-nell, has declined to discuss the pro-gram. According to


“Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?”

10 Years AfterPART 1: Fox-TV’S FIRST TASTE OF REALITY

By Don Ecker

Kiviat, both CARAT Media Conglomerate and Darnell have credited the “Alien Autopsy—Fact or Fiction” program as the starting gate for Fox’s reality-show pro-gramming. According to Kiviat, Darnell has stated that the alien autopsy franchise was responsible for launch-ing his career.

The Fox BrushoffWhen I attempted to contact Darnell, my call was

passed to Scott Grogin, vice president of corporate communications at Fox. Calls to Darnell, and later his associate Tom Sheets, were repeatedly diverted to Gro-gin, whose apparent irritation increased with each call. When asked about the alien autopsy shows, he said they were “reasonably successful,” but that Fox had no plans “at this time” to do another show.

I reminded Grogin that Fox promised they would release any new information they discovered. The three specials garnered huge ratings. I further reminded Grogin that the special was more than reasonably suc-cessful, and he denied he ever said that they were “reasonably successful.” Later, Darnell green-lighted other Fox specials, including “When Animals Attack,” and of course the unforgettable special episode of “Guinness World Records: Primetime” showing the re-moval of a 300-pound tumor.

In sum, Grogin said that if UFO Magazine wanted a quote from the network, it was simply that “Fox has no plans to air another show on the alien au-topsy.” He declined to discuss the matter further.

In the following interview, producer Bob Kiviat gives us the inside look at this highly touted and controver-sial film and the TV programs it spawned.

Ecker: Bob, So here we are 10 years after the first airing of “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction.” What is your bottom line?

Kiviat: If you speak to Mike Darnell during the course of this investigation, you have to ask him why, with his crediting the “Alien Autopsy,” and CARAT Media, both in many ways state that Fox reality [programming] owes its presence today to the airing of “Alien Autop-sy.” Then the question becomes, “Why wouldn’t Fox want to bring this story to a conclusion?” If I’ve finally solved the case, then why wouldn’t Fox want to bring this to the country and the world? The alien autopsy is in the category of the Hitler diaries, the Howard Hughes biography hoax, and the Piltdown Man hoax.

Ecker: What was the main reason you produced the alien autopsy show?

Kiviat: I realized that if this was a fraud, it was on the level of the Hughes biography hoax or the Hitler

diaries hoax. The question evolved to: Where would I bring this story if it were a hoax? The most logical place would have been the Murdoch News Group or the Fox Network. Murdoch has a history of being involved in these amazing stories. He helped to first bring those hoaxed documents to the public, and, after finding out they were frauds, brought that to the public.

Ecker: Whom did you take this to?Kiviat: My manager called Bob Bain [Head of Fox

Special Projects] early in 1994 because we had tried to get Fox interested in an idea I had for a show called Supernatural Eye. Bain asked me if I would be willing

to join a series of specials they had called Encounters; he asked me if I could bring in all my information to Fox for Encounters and make the show credible.

The big premiere episode would be called “Alien Au-topsy.” I told him the material in general would be just like the 60 Minutes of supernatural phenomena. If we discovered fraud, we would skewer it and this would be a ratings pleaser. Fox sent me to the company that was doing Encounters, where I became coordinating producer.

So, by Episode 12 or maybe 13, Fox is talking about canceling Encounters. About December of 1994 I kept pushing my idea of the Supernatural Eye. This is the same time that I heard the rumor that Steven Spiel-berg was working on a film called Project X, and that he is supposed to have footage of aliens recovered at Roswell. I tried to find out if this was real, and called everyone I knew but couldn’t verify it.

The only thing that looked like it might be tantalizing was the story I heard that Reg Presley, a former musi-cian with the British rock band The Troggs, who also was a UFO researcher, had told some people that he saw this film that was rumored to be going into a Ste-ven Spielberg production … and that it was real. I got a telephone call telling me that Reg Presley had gone


on a morning television show in England and told the stunned interviewers that “You’re going to be hearing about a film and it’s going to show this [aliens]. Presley also mentioned the name Ray Santilli in connection with the film. Then I got a call from Omni telling me to check out their new issue— that Spielberg’s people were denying this rumor completely, that there’s noth-ing to the rumor.

Now I know that there is a name connected with the alleged footage—Ray Santilli. Presley had also men-tioned that there were reels of film containing images of three alien creatures, along with footage showing a crashed saucer plus a debris field. Presley also said the alien he saw “looked longer” than the aliens described by Roswell witnesses.

I went and told Encounters Executive Producer Paul Hall what was going on, and he told me, “Bob, it’s all yours! It sounds fascinating.” A number of articles [about the alien autopsy] began coming out of England. It was implied that Fox had shown interest in this story, but neither Bob Bain nor I knew anything about this.

No one at Fox in the U.S. knew anything about it. I called up Ray Santilli and told him that Fox knew nothing about this material, and he agreed. Santilli said he had no idea how the press got that wrong. I said, “Ray, how did the press get it wrong about Steven Spielberg being involved?” Santilli shrugged it off. He went on to say that he did not have all the reels of film processed yet.

As to the cameraman, according to Santilli he was an 80-year-old guy living in Florida. I asked why the film wasn’t processed fully and he told me that some of the film was brittle, cracked, and so forth. I asked what could be seen and he described this dark scene [later identified as the “tent footage”] with a flickering lantern and someone who looks like he’s pulling some-thing off a body. I asked him what else he “thought” was in the film—the film not yet processed. He said that the cameraman told us that [President Harry] Tru-man was walking around, clearly visible, and also the debris field of the metal from the crashed flying saucer. [This was approximately March, 1995.]

Ecker: Okay, so now that Santilli has whetted your appetite, what did you do?

Kiviat: I told him that I would set up meetings at all the networks, and asked, “When do you want to come?” Santilli had said he would have to accompany the footage, since he would never send it alone. So we settled on a date in April.

A few days before the meeting date with Fox, I find out that Bob Bain has someone working with him, maybe a junior executive under Bob. His name was Mike Darnell. I had met Mike Darnell once very briefly during the host wrap party for Encounters. This was the only time I had met him. Darnell became my con-tact with Fox for the alien autopsy.

At the last minute, Santilli contacted me and canceled


the meetings because “something came up.” According to Santilli, there was a problem with the film process-ing. He then informed me that he was going to set a ma-jor London screening in “a few weeks.” He went on to say he was inviting all the press from around the world for the screening at the Museum of London. I told him that it sounded as if he were setting up an auction, which he denied.

He promised me that I would have “ev-ery opportunity” to make a deal with him for North America. I asked if he planned on making the footage available to more than North America, and he said he had hired a sales agent to handle all this. I told him to have his agent call me so we could work out arrangements. I got a call from this nice-sounding guy who tells me I will get first crack at securing rights for North America, but that they already had a deal worked out with TF-1 in France. I informed him I was somewhat leery about this, considering no one had yet seen the film, but he told me to come to England on May 5 and all my ques-tions would be answered!

May 5 comes and I go to a hotel in Lon-don where I’m supposed to wait for Ray Santilli. I go down to the bar and have a drink, and Santilli and a couple of his as-sociates come in. They start questioning me about my background. They had seen some of my work, knew that I wrote for Omni Magazine, and that I knew people at NASA. They knew I came to London on my own nickel, that I paid my own way, and they said they were impressed.

We go back to Ray’s office and I am ex-pecting to see this dark scene, and lo and behold, the alien autopsy we now all know about starts running on the screen. This ran for about 10 minutes, and Ray stopped it. He asked if I wanted him to run it again and I said yes. He told me the cameraman claimed to have filmed this in Fort Worth, Texas.

I asked about the other footage we had discussed be-fore [the tent footage], and did he have it? He said yes and then ran it. After it was over, I told him it didn’t look like it even came from the same time. It was dark, in black and white, but like a muddy black and white. Santilli said the cameraman told him that the dark scene that we call the “tent footage” was shot inside a tent erected at the crash scene with President Truman’s scientific team.

I asked him where was the footage of Truman, and he told me, “Bob, we are having a problem with the Tru-man footage.” I asked what kind of problem. He then

said that they were not sure they would have footage with Truman. There were problems with the process-ing. I asked if there was any other footage and he said yes, the debris footage. Okay, lets see that.

The first thing I see is a guy’s legs up to the waist; it looks like he is wearing military khakis. He is han-

dling what looks like fat, thick I-beams with some kind of hieroglyphics embossed on them. However, this did not look anything like what Jesse Marcel, Jr. described [from the Roswell debris].

The camera panned over to a table with metallic de-bris on it, including these weird metallic rectangles with six-finger hand impressions. I asked Ray what they were, and he said the cameraman said these were some type of controls the creatures used on the ship. I checked, and the body had six fingers. This thing had impressions for six fingers,

Okay. So now what? Santilli told me I might never meet the cameraman. As a condition for Santilli to get the film, he says he had to promise that the man’s name would never be released. He was an old guy, over 80,


and sold the film, according to Santilli, because he needed the money because his daughter was getting married. He claimed, again according to Santilli, that the government knew he had the film, but they never bothered to get it.

So the next day, the screening, the room fills up, and Ray introduces the film. There were probably a couple of hundred people there. He was peppered with ques-tions that he ignored and walked out with his entou-rage. I had noticed a man, fiftyish, dressed in a suit standing about 10 yards behind Santilli. I asked Ray who he was, and he informed me that the man was his “German investor.”

Later, I was talking to Ray’s accountant outside a pub by Ray’s office when I see the guy introduced as Ray’s German investor walking down the street with a girl on his arm, now in very casual clothes with an open shirt. He walks up to me and says, “Bob Kiviat! Nice to meet you. Volker Spielberg. How are you?” Now, I didn’t even know he spoke English. Then he asked me “Bob, are you Jewish?”

I was taken aback, and said, “Well, yes, and also part Italian and Russian. Why do you ask?” He said, “Bob, there are people who might think this film is fake. But you know what might be more fake? The Holocaust might be more fake!” I didn’t know how to respond to this. In the 30 seconds that I am speaking to him, he asks me if I’m Jewish, tells me the Holocaust might be fake, and etcetera. All from this German investor!

On the plane ride home, I thought about how to broach the Spielberg connection. Here was this Ger-

man with the same last name as Steven Spielberg and the rumors of Project X.

Ecker: Well, surely you must have suspected some media manipulation by Santilli now that you knew about Volker Spielberg.

Kiviat: I asked Santilli if he had mounted any type of a publicity campaign. I mean, first the rumors about Steven Spielberg—untrue. Then the rumors that Fox was interested, also untrue. Santilli claimed this was all just an innocent circumstance. As the first meetings were set up here in the U.S., Ray sent one of his people with all the footage on videocassette on PAL [British format], not even converted to NTSC [format] that we watch in America.

I set up the meetings, and Fox was the second meet-ing. I had a PAL VCR brought in and Ray’s guy brought in the film. Bob Bain and Mike Darnell were there. I popped in the tape, and I can tell Mike Darnell is ex-cited by it. Bob Bain said he would be in and out, but he informed me that if this project was bought, Mike Darnell would be in charge since he, Bain, would be leaving Fox. I was surprised, but here is the first thing Mike would do once he talked to the president, John Matioan.

John Matioan had just come over to Fox from CBS. So I told them that if John Matioan wanted to see it, we could set up another meeting. All the networks that saw this expressed interest. NBC was interested; CBS expressed interest. It had some very compelling im-ages.


Fox came back and said they were interested but had some concerns. Darnell said that John Matioan would have to see the footage so we would have to set another meeting. Darnell said they would have to have insur-ance that they could check the material. I told him that Santilli told us we could not meet the cameraman. So if that would be a deal-breaker, we will have to know now. He told me he didn’t think that would break the deal.

Then I hear that Kodak is testing the footage. Santilli claimed that European Kodak technicians were testing the film. They came up with three potential dates for the film: 1927, 1947, or 1967. So I mention this briefly to Darnell, and we agree to set a date.

The date is set for John Matioan to see the footage, still in Bob Bain’s office, since he hadn’t left yet. He was sitting on Bob Bain’s couch with me and ev-erybody else was there. Ray Santilli’s sales man-ager flew in. We play the film. As the dissection is going on, there is John Matioan hiding his face in his hands, covering up his eyes!

I nudged him and said “John, what do you think about this?” He said, “Bob, I have never been one for science class. I just can’t watch this. Whether it’s real or not.” Santilli’s sales manager then explained where the scenes were supposedly shot, the time frame and the fact that they had another autopsy segment but it was not part of this deal, and as a mat-ter of fact would never see

the light of day. Everybody said okay and the meeting broke up.

The goal was to broadcast this film around the world toward the end of summer. I told Darnell that time was of the essence here. He said he was still waiting for a decision from John Matio-an. He wanted to know if there was any more word on authentication. I said that we knew that a Holly-wood office of Kodak saw the film. Ray brought in

reels of film, according to Kodak; they looked at the beginning of the reel and did see an edge code that was either 1927, 1947, or 1967. So, though we knew we couldn’t get the cameraman, couldn’t interview him, Kodak could verify that the reel they saw was manu-factured in either 1927, ’47, or ’67.

I asked if this would be the first part for my idea for the Supernatural Eye series, and Darnell told me, “No, we need a really big special.” He told me he just needed a couple more days to get everyone on board. So Mike Darnell and John Matioan and Bob Bain said that it is fine, even without the cameraman. We had only a “maybe” from Kodak, but that was enough to get me started. My lawyers had to work out a deal with


Santilli’s company that I think he called Roswell Foot-age, Ltd. The agreement was to use the footage for a documentary on Fox.

Both John Matioan and Mike Darnell liked the idea of calling it “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?” The ques-tion mark at the end of “Fact or Fiction” implied that we would tell the truth if it wasn’t real. I asked Mike, “What happens in my investigation if I discover it’s fake?”

“Well, Bob,” he said, “we have to have a contingency plan.” If we discover it’s a fake, we release the story in a heartbeat, even if it’s the middle of the week here in LA on Channel 11. He said we could have anchors John Beard and Christine Devine do a one-hour spe-cial. This is just around the 4th of July, with an airdate of around August 28 to match the airing in Europe. We were going to produce it in the entertainment division as a documentary special. If we found out it was a fake or even real, we would go national in a heartbeat.

I looked at the calendar; we only had 6 weeks to make the show, and we started working on the show July 11. My own company took on the pre-production

issues, hired a staff, and got a really good news guy I knew from New York. We hired a private investigator to go to Florida to try to track down the cameraman, if he existed.

Ecker: So, all in all, you seem to have had a promis-ing show.

Kiviat: I must tell your readers right now that we did the best we could possibly do. We were asked by Mike Darnell himself to not include the tent footage or debris footage in the first show. They thought that the brighter footage was compelling, and the debris and tent foot-age more confusing.

So we ran the show on August 28, 1995, and the rest, as they say, is history. We got huge ratings, and the next day I thought it could still be a fraud, but right then nobody could say for sure … and the guy at the East-man House at Kodak was enthralled with it! Then Fox called me up and said they wanted to do an encore air-ing the following week and add some more footage to it. Not the tent footage, nor the debris stuff, but more of the gory footage of the autopsy. UFO


UFO Magazine Contributing Editor Sean Casteel re-cently sat down, accompanied by Ventura, California newspaper copy editor John Weigle, Casteel’s faith-ful companion at many a UFO conference, to speak to researcher and author Richard Dolan. Dolan is the au-thor of UFOs and the National Security State (2002), and though a relative newcomer to the UFO field, has made a significant mark by compiling a huge amount of historical data on how the phenomenon has affected our culture.

The interview was conducted at the National UFO Conference, held at the Renaissance Hotel in Holly-wood, California. Dolan was one of the featured speak-ers. His book was the starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of UFOs, politics, and conspiracy theory. Along with his dark ruminations on the emergence of a totalitarian form of government, born after World War II and nursed along by nearly 60 years of UFO secrecy, Dolan offers moments of hope, even humor, with his stand in opposition to what he views as the withering of America’s freedoms on a vine of warfare and deception.

Casteel: Please explain the title of your book, UFOs and the National Security State. Is it your intention to say what our current form of government is evolving into?

Dolan: I chose National Security State as the subtitle of my book because it’s my own opinion that the UFO phenomenon has interacted with the American mili-tary and intelligence community for a long time now. And the community has itself helped the government to undergo a major change. I guess the best way to put it is that this interaction, over 50-plus years, has resulted in so much secrecy and so much unaccounted-for activ-ity that we have essentially a government that’s a state within a state. And I call it a national security state.

Casteel: Are you talking about something like right-wing fascism? Is that one label you’d put on the national security state?

Dolan: I suppose. I look at our government as a form of authoritarianism. And how you can distinguish—is

it fascist or is it something else? It’s hard for me to say. But I think that we’ve developed a new form of govern-ment over an extended period of time. America started out as this wonderful republic, and I think through a series of wars, most importantly World War II, that republic went through various transformations which involved the creation of an increasingly autonomous military complex—again, something that I like to call the national security state.

There’s a quote that I’m fond of by Machiavelli. Es-sentially, he says: If you want to have a revolution from above, then what you really need to do is make sure you retain a semblance to the old forms of government, because that’s all people notice. You can have tremen-dous changes going on underneath, but if you keep the outer clothing as it is, then you’ll be fine. I would add, though, that at a certain point those changes become so profound that it’s probably impossible to hide the new form of government. It is my belief that, especially since 9/11/2001, we’re witnessing the unveiling of this new state.

Casteel: So this national security state you’re talking about—is it a response to UFOs, or is it evolving along with a response to UFOs?

Dolan: I think it evolves along with the UFO phenom-enon. I think it would be overstating the case that the reality of UFOs and of that secrecy is solely responsible for creating a kind of runaway military government. But I do think that it’s certainly contributed to it.

Let’s say Roswell happened, as many think it did, which was the retrieval of a nonhuman type of technol-ogy that was very advanced. So what would happen? You would theoretically give it to a group of ultra-reli-able scientists with top-level security clearances and you’d say, “Well, figure this out.” And after a certain period of time, maybe some scientist came up with a bright idea and said, “Oh, here’s what we can invent on the basis of this.” And you have this culture, then, of unaccountable secrecy that develops after years and generations. The secrecy is so pronounced now that it seems to be very hard to get away from that.

NATIONAL SECURITY STATE UNVEILED:

Q&A With Richard Dolan By Sean Casteel and John Weigle


I think the UFO phenomenon has contributed tremen-dously to this, but it’s hard to know exactly, because in figuring this problem out, I feel like we’re this little kid pressing our nose against the darkened window with the curtains almost totally drawn, and all you can see is a little bit of activity going on and surmise what you can. So how big is the UFO phenomenon within the classified world? Well, I suspect it’s quite big.

Casteel: But it’s not the sole motivation?Dolan: I don’t think it is, no.

Casteel: What other motivations are there? What would lead our supposedly straight politicians to begin this sort of downward spiral?

Dolan: I think power and money. Power, power, power. It’s no different from Rome. You have the development of an empire—and an inability for the traditional form of government to run that empire—because it’s not de-signed to run an empire. And America has succeeded so greatly because of its wealth and power that now it’s at a point where, when you have to manage an international empire, there is no way that you can maintain an adher-ence to your traditional republican heritage.

Casteel: So it’s a matter of expediency, to better manage our empire? The more politically corrupt and totalitarian we become?

Dolan: Yes, absolutely. If you want to manage an in-ternational empire, you can only do it by coercion. And that’s a corrupting process. So, back to the UFO connection. I think that the UFO secrecy is a contribu-tor to the political problems we have today. I wouldn’t say that it’s the only contributor, though.

Casteel: What about the people who say that our government and other world governments are conspir-ing directly with the alien UFO occupants?

Dolan: That’s hard for me to say. I always try to dis-tinguish between what I know and what I don’t know. I know that there is unexplained technology travers-ing our skies and oceans—I know that. I know that ele-ments of our military are extremely interested in that.

I don’t know about the allegations of collusion on an international scale. I believe, though, that—let’s call it at a transnational level—I think even beyond govern-ment, frankly, that there are very powerful individuals or interest groups who probably coordinate this. Look, I don’t believe, and I don’t think most people believe, that the U.S. president is the actual person who makes all the decisions regarding American national security.

I think most people understand that any president or any high elected official works for others who are prob-ably even more powerful and influential—the people who put him into power. So I think that happens inter-nationally. Highly monied interests are most likely those people who have access to this knowledge, as well.

Weigle: Is it a conscious agenda for the president, or is it just the influence of these people because they’re the ones who see the president for various reasons? They have the money, so they have the access. Who-ever the president is at the time—does he consciously know he’s working for this group?

Dolan: I don’t know. I would think that a president would be able figure it out. He would understand that there are forces more powerful than himself who are behind certain things. There’s been no president who has written down in any memoirs, who has said, “There’s this working group, see, and I have to answer to them.” So all one can do is speculate.

Casteel: Colin Bennett of England has a similar theory about how all this is starting to fuse together. He doesn’t call it the national security state; he calls it the entertainment state, like being fascistically op-pressed by the television, the music, the media.

Dolan: I agree with that. The “entertainment state” is a phrase I kind of like. But of course they’re not unre-lated concepts, clearly. You turn on your TV and that’s the most mind-numbing, brain-sucking entity that’s out there. I tell people: Don’t watch TV. Don’t watch TV news, especially. The TV shows are absolutely a cancer to your brain.

Casteel: Do you think there are subliminal messages being transmitted? Or even overt messages?

Dolan: I think there’s a tremendous amount of propa-ganda going through mainstream media. We know that there has historically been close collaboration between top-level media people and government people and fi-nance people. They all live in the same world. And it’s a lot easier to control the media, by the way, if there are only five major media corporations as opposed to a hundred. And so the continued consolidation of media ownership only helps those who rule and makes it a lot easier to get your message out. So is there intent on the part of the media to kind of dumb people down and make them servants of the state? I think, at times, that there is, yes.

Casteel: Okay, suppose that nobody’s able to throw any kind of monkey wrench into this at all. Suppose they succeed in their aims. What would that be like for the average person out there?

Dolan: It’s a terrifying thought, because basically nor-mal citizens will be at the mercy of these elites. What does the future have planned for us? Embedded mi-crochips in the population where you’re constantly tracked?

Casteel: So you were about to elaborate more on the corrupt leadership.

Dolan: Some people are incredulous, thinking, why would this elite want any more than what they have?


How could Bill Gates want more than he’s already got? Let me answer that first, because it’s important. How could someone be that greedy? That’s really the basic question. And I just keep thinking back. Pretend that you’re an Egyptian farmer from 5,000 years ago, and you’ve got your nice little mud hut and you work the Nile and you’ve got a good family. And then there’s the Pharaoh, who’s got this palace, and he’s got literally rooms filled with gold, and all of these great things. And why would Pharaoh want more?

Well, one reason Pharaoh might want more is because Pharaoh entertains foreign dignitaries from Babylon and other places, and he’s got to impress them with his might. And I believe that the same principle applies to the elites of our society—that they want the money, they want the power. It’s an endless quest for power, because power is the drug that they’re addicted to. And the money is the means to achieving that power, so it’s an endless quest.

No amount is too much for these people. And so the continual plundering of people, the plundering of resources—I think that’s what these people are all about.

Casteel: So George W. Bush is only in it for the money?

Dolan: Why do people run for the presidency? I don’t know. It’s a big hassle of a job. Ego? I’m sure there’s always tremendous ego. But maybe it’s part of the fam-ily business. You know, the Kennedys always have a political branch in the government; the Bushes have their political people in there.

Think of the world as a room of a hundred people. And if the total amount of money in that world is $100, then if this were a perfect communist state, everyone would have a dollar and we’d all be holding hands. But of course in our world, one of those people probably owns close to 40 of those dollars, and then the next 19 wealthiest people own another 40, 45 of those dollars. And then the remaining 80 people share $15.

That’s our room, that’s our world today. And so that room has a political system. It’s got a legal system; it’s got all these things that make it go. Clearly, the guy with the $40, whom we can call the owner class of the society, is going to have people in the right positions in society running things his way. And any society, any system, whether it’s the United States today or the So-viet Union of 30 years ago, or Nazi Germany, they all exist as a stratified structure of power. And there are always going to be people who seek to manipulate that structure.

Casteel: Again hypothetically, assuming that they succeed in their aims and achieve exactly what they want in terms of totalitarianism, what’s going to hap-pen eventually to that system? Is it going to collapse

of its own weight? Surely it’s not going to endure forever?

Dolan: No. Rather than ask what happens if they suc-ceed—I think that they have succeeded. And I think that their program has been very successful, and I think it’s an ongoing kind of thing. It’s an ongoing tweaking. Is it fascism if no one recognizes it as such? I was at the park a couple of weeks ago with my kids, watching them play, and everyone was having a great time. They had no sense of oppression. There are adults like this, who have no sense of oppression. Does that mean that we’re not in an authoritarian society? I think we are, and people aren’t necessarily going to have that fact announced to them.

Some of us, like Americans in this society right now, are along for a pretty good ride even if we’re not in the elite, just because we’re in a country where we have all these things. What can bring it down? A lot of things. At least, a lot of things can bring much of our infra-structure down. I look at energy-supply interruptions as a real possibility; certainly war is a possibility.

Figuring all of this out and then working the UFO part into the equation is very tricky for me. But here’s what I can say: I believe that there are elites who have access to this very, very advanced technology. That doesn’t mean that they’re all flying off-planet in black triangles to the moon, but it might mean that when there is a secret breakthrough in understanding a new aspect of that technology, those people are the ground-floor investors. That’s just a theory. I mean, there’s a lot of incentive. If you’ve got this technology, what’s your motivation for sharing it with the rest of the world, as long as you can parcel it out while making the maxi-mum amount of money from it?

Weigle: If we have that technology, why aren’t we using it more obviously in wars, for instance?

Dolan: There are people who have argued that the U.S. has used black-matte triangular aircraft in the Gulf War—the TR3 Black Manta, which according to rumor is a reconnaissance platform that accompanied the F-117 Nighthawk, the Stealth Fighter. This is the argument.

I can’t confirm that, but I know this is what some aerospace people believe. So in fact, maybe we have been using it. But when you think about the abysmal quality of reportage in the Gulf War and how these re-porters were herded like cattle by the military—there was almost no independent reporting during that war. And what about now? What independent reporting in the Iraq War are Americans getting? Basically none.

So it could well be that weapons are being used that are much more sophisticated than we suspect. But we just don’t know. We can’t assume that our news media is able or willing to give us accurate information on


the status of our military. If they do have these hy-per-advanced ob-jects that can stop on a dime and instantly acceler-ate, if they can duplicate UFO technology, there doesn’t seem to be evidence that they’ve used it. That’s true. Why would they be holding it back? I don’t know. One argument that I’ve been given by an

alleged insider is that they do use it, but they use it to go off-world, to bases somewhere else.

I’m not presenting this as something that is factually true. Part of the problem with this topic is you have a huge jigsaw puzzle with five thousand pieces. Some jerk has taken out three thousand of those pieces, and then they put some fake pieces in. You’re trying to put this together and meanwhile someone is screaming over your shoulder, “You’re doing it all wrong!” That’s the situation we’re in. So you have to put the puzzle to-gether as best you can and ask, What does this picture look like? And fill in the blanks where you have to.

Casteel: So you were saying earlier that the machin-ery is already in place. It’s simply a matter of getting it more firmly entrenched.

Dolan: Yes, absolutely. Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in the 1930s said, “If fascism ever comes here, it will be wrapped in an American flag.” Okay, so I think the machinery is in place. I think the machinery is hard at work. We’re not at the end product, but we’re moving right along. If Patriot Act II gets passed, we’re going to be moving very far along.

Casteel: Do you have any ideas about a timetable for that?

Dolan: Well, no. I don’t have that gift. I think that real-ly bad things can happen certainly within 5 years. We’re at a position now where most people in this country are able, no matter how depressing things may seem, to go through their ordinary lives and raise their kids and do their thing. But I think it’s entirely possible that even in as little as 5 years, our social, political, and economic situation could be totally different. I hope not.

Weigle: I read the first edition of your book some time ago; have your views progressed and changed?

The book primarily seems to concentrate on UFOs and their effect on the national security state. You seem to have broadened out now into some other things.

Dolan: Well, you have to remember that I backed into UFOs through the study of history and politics to begin with, and I have a lifelong interest in philosophy and literature. So I’ve always had very broad historical in-terests. I feel that when I wrote my book I approached it in a fairly broad way, even then. I felt that there really weren’t too many other UFO writers who were trying to write about this as though it were part of mainstream history. So I felt that I had a very broad approach to begin with. In fact, that’s always an important aspect of my writing that I’ve tried to cultivate.

But I would say that my attitudes have evolved a little bit since I started that book. As depressing as the theme was to write when I was working on volume one, it’s worse now. Maybe the events of September 11, 2001 are really the things that have catalyzed it, and then watching all the destructive changes going on in American society.

Maybe that’s caused it, but a few people have re-marked to me that they’re getting a little concerned about the status of my emotional temperament. Some-times I get a little too distraught or angry over things. Bitter. I don’t really know if that’s true—I actually have a nice, happy family life, and I have a lot of fun in my life. But when I look at the state of the world, yeah, I just feel it’s crazier every year I look at it.

Casteel: You were talking about [Truman Defense Secretary] James V. Forrestal’s suicide during your lecture. You wonder what he knew that drove him to that, if he had some kind of vision of how the country was going to change.

Dolan: I believe Forrestal was murdered, and I didn’t really get into the details as to why in my lecture, but the book lays it out. There are a couple of things that are very odd. First of all, Forrestal really lost his grip on reality throughout a lot of 1948. There are conven-tional reasons you can ascribe to that. He had a real problem administratively managing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and trying to help Truman balance the budget, which was an impossible task.

So there was a lot of stress, unrelated to UFOs. On the other hand, the UFO problem was there. It was a big problem. Forrestal was involved in dealing with this problem. He had to be, as Secretary of Defense. And the man was losing his grip. There are many multiple connections to him and the MJ-12 group with Van-nevar Bush and President Truman. I think that that’s probably true, that such a group existed and that he was in it.

So then you have to wonder. Truman fires him, re-ally because of political disloyalty by Forrestal. And

Richard Dolan


then what? What happens is that during his farewell speech, in March of 1949, Stuart Symington [Secretary of the Air Force from 1947 to 1950], his most vehement political enemy, meets with him privately in the limo ride back to Forrestal’s office. When Forrestal emerged from this limo, he was absolutely shaken, and was not seen until someone came into his office. He was sitting at the desk in his office, ramrod straight, staring at a blank wall, repeating one sentence: “You are a loyal fellow.”

I mean, he had lost it. So then he was taken to Flor-ida. The national security crowd basically had him. And then within days, they took him to Bethesda in Maryland, the naval hospital, which is where he died six weeks later by falling out of a tall window.

I think he was murdered. The guard on shift when Forrestal died was a new guy, a new guard that For-restal had never seen. Some coincidence. An hour and a half into this guy’s shift, the first time, Forrestal goes out. We only have that guard’s testimony as to what happened. The guard said, “At 1:30, I checked in on the Secretary and he was up writing something and he didn’t want to take a sedative. … I left to go check with another doctor and when we returned, the Secretary was gone.” Well, Forrestal was in his fifties. His health wasn’t the greatest. He wasn’t a physically strong man. How’s he going to compete with a mid-20s Marine/Navy corpsman? Clearly, it’s suspicious. And yet, this is 14 years before the Kennedy assassination, and so no one was going to question it.

Casteel: I always get the feeling that something ut-terly humiliating, something devastatingly humiliat-ing, was said to him in the limo ride that could have been related to the way the aliens presented them-selves to the government. There could be some kind of knowledge there that simply drove some people over the edge.

Dolan: That could be. And perhaps Symington was issuing some kind of not-so-veiled threat like, “You talk and you’re done for, so be a loyal fellow.” Some-thing like that.

Weigle: When do you think your second book will be ready?

Dolan: I am working on volume two. I’m spending all the time that I’m able to spend working on it. Actually, I’m at the point right now where I have more research done for volume two than I did when I started writing volume one. So I have a lot, but I’m not done. Volume two probably won’t be done for about a year and a half, realistically.

Casteel: You were about to talk about Patriot Act II at some point. Give us your feelings on that.

Dolan: Patriot Act II is nothing short of an abomina-

tion of American rights. It has not been passed. It’s a bill. And you can read the bill at a variety of websites, including the dreaded ACLU, which has the complete Patriot Act II bill on their website. One of the provi-sions of Patriot Act II that has gotten a lot of people’s attention is the provision stating that if you are deemed to be supporting a terrorist organization—and what is support and what is terrorist? But if you have been deemed to support a terrorist organization, you are li-able to be stripped of your American citizenship, even if you’re a native-born American citizen.

And therefore, once you’re stripped of citizenship, anything can happen to you. You can be held in indefi-nite detention or deported. And, as others have pointed out, that could certainly include countries where they practice torture. So it’s a pretty bad thing. Patriot Act II is a step beyond even the draconian measures of Pa-triot Act I, which allows the government to spy on you without you knowing about it. They don’t need a court warrant to tap your phone or to enter your house and take things and to analyze things. They do not need court orders for that.

It’s very likely that they were doing this all along, but it was not technically legal. Now that it’s legal and above board, you can expect that they’ll employ it even more than they used to. But Patriot Act II is a thing that really scares a lot of people. It just seems to be so anti-American that it would effectively be the end of the Bill of Rights as we know it.

Casteel: Where does the UFO community fit in that overall picture?

Dolan: Well, the UFO community has political beliefs that span the entire conventional spectrum. There are UFO researchers who are very politically conservative, in the fact that they support the current policies, say, of George Bush. And you have UFO researchers who are very, very left wing in their outlook, who are internationalists or even socialists and so on. And you get a whole bunch of people in between. I myself am really neither.

I increasingly tell people I’m a libertarian. I don’t know if that’s ex-actly right either, but I’m not a so-cialist and I’m not a conservative. What’s a conser- Sean Casteel


vative? Bush is not a conservative. I grew up with a conservative father and household. The conservatism I grew up with told me that you should not trust big, centralized government. This is a president who is in love with the state. He is in love with a bloat-ed, obese state that gets in your face that picks

your pocket and gets in your bedroom. So that’s not conservatism. The UFO research community, in terms of their politics, is all over the map.

Casteel: Will the UFO community ever be judged, en masse, as a terrorist group? Are we a threat to this emerging totalitarian system?

Dolan: Well, the fact is we are a threat. Of course we’re a threat. We’re some of the only people who are really willing to peek under this rug and see all the dirt and stuff that is there. UFO researchers are some of the most astute political analysts that we have in this country. They actually understand the nature of the black world better than a number of Washington insiders do. So are we a threat in reality? The answer is yes. So should UFO researchers fear the implications of, say, Patriot Act II? Yeah.

Weigle: There’s no doubt that CSI [Civilian Saucer Intelligence of Los Angeles] and APRO [The Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization] were being watched carefully, and NICAP [National Investiga-tions Committee on Aerial Phenomena] perhaps was infiltrated, although that’s disputed still.

Dolan: Well, I think NICAP was infiltrated. Certainly it’s indisputable that APRO and CSI—and this is back in the 1950s—were being monitored by government agents. And this is clearly a direct result of the Robert-son Panel guidelines and recommendations. The fact is that NICAP, from its early inception, had high-level members of the CIA’s psychological warfare staff on board from the get-go.

The fact is that Keyhoe was ousted by such mem-bers, and after Keyhoe was ousted, they were run by one ex-CIA guy after another. If that’s not proof, then fine. Check your brain at the door and just say, “I don’t know.” But I think it looks pretty clear that NICAP was absolutely managed by the CIA. And they’re not the only organizations. There are all kinds of people who’ve said the same things about CUFOS [the J. Allen Hynek Center For UFO Studies], MUFON [the Mutual UFO Network] and the rest. Those are allegations. I

should be careful where I go here. But certainly I’m not the first to say it.

Casteel: Is there any way that opposing believers, such as you, people who understand what’s going on and are willing to stand against it, can affect this thing? Or is it an inevitable tightening of the vise?

Dolan: I have a faith in the value of truth. I really do. I know that sounds idealistic and silly, but often it’s the only thing that I have to hold on to that keeps me going and doing this. I believe in this thing called truth, and I believe that it has a value of its own, independent of anything else. So it is worthy of my efforts, and it’s worthy of everyone’s efforts. We have to realize that no matter how bad things look, we can’t predict the outcome of things.

Casteel: You allow for the possibility of positive change?Dolan: I do. I think that if you don’t work toward pos-

itive change, it will never happen. If you work toward positive change, you have a shot. So people have to become aware of the need to dedicate themselves to truth. You and I are sitting here in Hollywood, which is the entertainment capital, the fantasy capital, of the world, but illusion is one thing and truth and reality are another. And people have to learn to distinguish them from each other.

Casteel: But it’s possible that enough people could see into the situation and react against it?

Dolan: It could happen. If you have a big sledgeham-mer and you keep hammering away, something can happen, and there can always be a catalyst. When I was writing my book, I had this idealistic hope that maybe my book could be such a catalyst. I thought if I could simply lay out the argument for the reality of UFOs and the UFO cover-up, as clearly as I could, that that might be able to help crack this open.

Well, my book has generated a lot of positive feed-back, but it certainly hasn’t had that kind of effect yet. But you never know. You’ve got to keep trying. I’m do-ing what I can do, and other people are doing what they can do. As long as we keep communicating with each other, and keep working at this the best we can, we have a shot.

I think it’s important for the people reading this inter-view to come away from it with a renewed sense that they need to be committed to learning everything that they can about the state of this society that we’re in right now, because it’s necessary more now than ever to defend the cause of freedom. If this is something that you actually believe in, rather than just a convenient cliché to toss around every now and then, then it’s im-perative to realize that you need to step outside what’s called the mainstream and recognize it for what it is, which is an illusory structure of beliefs that are there to keep you in your place. UFO

John Weigle



Mission to Tokyo • continued from page 26

and Italian dishes to round it out. It was toward the end of this sumptuous meal that the earthquake hit. I hadn’t been drinking much but felt that maybe I had been when I looked up to see the large chandelier overhead swaying.

It was actually the building that was swaying, and the chandelier was just going along for the ride. Being an East Coaster, earthquakes and tremors are not a normal part

of my routine. With glasses and crockery now rattling away on the tables, I steadied myself and looked around to judge the ferocity of the quake by the expressions on my colleagues’ faces.

“No big deal” they seemed to say in unison. It was then that a new friend touched my right arm and said with a demure smile, and in perfect English, “Welcome to Ja-pan!” It was, however, a big deal at the epicenter 250 miles away, where the quake registered 6.8 on the Richter Scale, killing dozens and injuring thousands. The things we take for granted …

Following the banquet, fifteen or twenty of us visit-ed a Japanese beer hall, an institution they’d borrowed from the Germans—complete with pitchers and steins of beer, trays of sausages, and mounds of fresh sauerkraut. Really! There we talked and laughed into the night and conducted a more informal question-and-answer session than the conference’s formality had afforded.

The next day, Sunday, we visited the beautiful Meji Jingu Shrine in Tokyo’s equivalent of Central Park, then joined about thirty or so OUR-J members for an afternoon skywatch held in a huge meadow nearby. Over the years, most of the skywatches I’d attended in the U.S. and the U.K. were held at night, and while focused on observing the sky, also served a social function.

This one was pretty much all business. Every member seemed to possess either binoculars or camera with a tele-

photo lens, or both. And while snacks and cold bottles of green tea were in abundance, OUR-J’s members and friends carefully observed the skies above Tokyo with a single-mindedness I was unused to.

The gathering broke up late that afternoon. I should add here that for those who may scoff at the idea of a sky-watch being held in full daylight in the center of one of the world’s largest cities, you should know that members

have regularly observed and photo-graphed truly anomalous objects in the skies above, a good proportion of which have been disc-shaped. While none were seen that afternoon, I was impressed with both the group’s dis-cipline and attitude.

That evening Jun, Yuko, Toshie, Sumire, and Ko visited OUR-J’s of-fice in the quiet Yushima District of old Tokyo. Here we where joined by Yasuo Kuwabara, who is perhaps Japan’s leading scholar and transla-tor of classic U.S. UFO documents. A tall, quiet and modest man, Mr. Kuwabara is responsible for translat-ing into Japanese much of the Con-don Committee’s Scientific Study of UFOs and the Ninetieth Congress’s Symposium on UFO Hearings, among other Project Bluebook-era papers that are now available to the Japanese public in published edi-

tions. Yasuo Kuwabara’s efforts, like those of Jun Kato, should serve to remind us that dedicated individuals can indeed make a difference in our field.

My final day and a half in Tokyo was dedicated to unabashed tourism and spending as much time as pos-sible with my new friends. Highlights included a visit to Asakusa Kannon, an absolutely beautiful Sensojj Temple in the old part of Tokyo, and a final dinner with my trans-lator and the Kato family. Jun and Toshie saw me back to Narita Airport the next afternoon and it was not easy to say good bye to these esteemed colleagues. I look forward to building on these friendships and to another visit to this most fascinating country.

For any of you interested in making contact with OUR-J, you can do so by writing to them at: The Organization of UFO Research Japan; #201, 2-7-10, Yusima, Bunkyo-ku; Tokyo, 113-0034, Japan. Building links with our col-leagues in Japan as well as in other countries benefits us all and our search for the truth. Sayonara until next time, readers. UFO

Interview excerpts are from the article, “Close En-counters,” which appeared in the Japanese magazine Metropolis, issue No. 501, October, 2004.

Peter Robbins is the author of Left at East Gate, A First-Hand Account of the Bentwaters-Woodbridge UFO Incident, Its Cover-Up, and Investigation (1997).

Junichi Kato, director of the Organization for UFO Research, and Peter Robbins, author and lecturer.

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Conferences Coming Up • continued from page 29 •

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Connecting the Dots • continued from page 71

scribe target sites and activities. One even claims having viewed Mars, both in the past and in the future. The basis for these claims, apparently, is that the CIA funded it for a decade; therefore it must have some validity.

While there are paranormal aspects to UFOs, that doesn’t mean that all paranormal phenomena are within the scope of a UFO book. It is tough enough to get main-stream scientists to investigate UFO cases and to persuade the government to disclose what they know without com-plicating the issue with unrelated claims. In the 1950s, certain groups called this ability astral projection. I guess a name change and tying it to UFOs is a better market-ing ploy! UFO Magazine’s examination of remote viewing claims in the Vol. 11, No. 3, 1996 article “Room With An (Alien) View” came up with little merit. I’ve seen nothing to support it since then.

Unbiased investigators have looked at remote-viewing tests and found no control groups, no double-blind stud-ies, and ambiguous results. Still, remote viewers are push-ing their courses, books, and websites. Don’t expect any negative results from them. The CIA only funded remote viewing because the Soviet Union was doing paranormal work, but eventually stopped, they claim, because the re-sults were unreliable. Ms. Harris states that she tried to publish remote-viewing articles in Italy but the publishers told her it wasn’t science. Including remote viewing in a UFO book does not help connect the dots or contribute to the disclosure process.

While most reviews of Connecting The Dots have been favorable, one complaint on the Internet is that the book presents well-worn claims already known to UFO readers. Actually, there’s quite a bit of new information in the book that I haven’t seen elsewhere. To my knowledge, the inter-view with Colonel Corso has not been in print or on the Internet before. Also, low-profile astronaut Clark McClel-land comes forward to talk about NASA UFO incidents. Interviewed in 2003, crop-circle researcher Eltjo Hasel-hoff has a lot to add to recent dialogue about crop circles. I haven’t seen either McClelland or Haselhoff in any of the UFO or crop-circle documentaries, so their revelations were new to me.

To sum up—there is a lot to like about this book. Instead of in-depth interviews, it gives us a larger number of brief interviews across a wide cross-section of UFO and para-normal investigators. I would have preferred that other credible UFO investigators replace the remote-viewing interviews. Yet I will be returning to this book for second and third readings of selected interviews as well as rec-ommending it to friends. It has given me new books and websites to explore in my personal quest to connect the dots. Any book that inspires further reading and research has done its job. UFO

San Diego resident James Taylor has a BA in psychol-ogy, manages investments, and reports that he wants to stay alive long enough to witness official contact with our ET visitors.


The Alien FilesThe Secrets of Extraterrestrial Encounters and Abductions

by Gregory Van Dykby Scott J. Santa

There aren’t really any secrets divulged in this book for veteran UFO/abduction readers, although The Alien Files (Element Books, 1997) addresses the overall abduc-tion experience very well, and with a touch of spirituality lacking in most books of its kind. The author’s main scope seems to be an all-out disparagement of mainstream sci-ence and its inability to define or even recognize anything it can’t explain or control:

A scientific view of the world is bankrupt in appreciating or understanding the non-material, whether it is human emo-tions or communications from distant extraterrestrial intelligences. Phenomena which are beyond the purview of scien-tists’ ability to explain are dumped into a special category called paranormal. The very need to create such a category sug-gests that science holds center stage in determining what is normal and decid-ing what is abnormal. It is a form of in-tellectual trickery that makes a mockery of almost everything that is human. The term paranormal also indicates the fail-ure of science by indicating that which it cannot explain.

I found the book to be rather tired, in that the author covered the UFO/abduc-tion theme with old cases that are previously document-ed and fully reported in the literature. For example, he covers the well-worn Roswell scenario, Lonnie Zamora’s Socorro report, Betty and Barney Hill, Betty Andreasson, Travis Walton, and Billy Meier—all well-known subjects in the field—without really adding anything new or of ad-ditional value.

Where the book really turns off the road is in the latter sections dealing with channeling. With respect to gather-ing information from ET intelligences, Van Dyk seems to take for granted that channeling is real without any of the documentation that the science he disavows earlier in the book seems to necessitate.

Though I can agree with his attack on mainstream sci-ence’s inability and/or refusal to seriously consider the UFO abduction experience, the context of his message seems to imply implicit belief in channeled information as a valid alternative:

Channeling represents a source of information and con-tact with ETs not otherwise available to us. Ufologists who believe in scientifically determined physical reality as the predominant reality, as opposed to any kind of spirit-based reality, are concerned primarily with space-craft and metallic objects—chasing the getaway car, as Budd Hopkins so aptly puts it. Channelers by contrast provide a ready access to the occupants of the spacecraft insofar as they receive direct communications from ET sources—by spiritual mobile phone, as it were.

Really? Channeled information should be taken with a huge dose of skeptical salt. Can channeling or channeled information be proven or disproven? I’ll leave that to the reader to figure out.

The author relates various channeled information on the nature of UFOs and alleged aliens such as the Lyrans and the Vegans, and how humanity carries the ge-netic material of the original humanoid race. And they are here trying to get some of it back! Then he adds a few chapters on spiritual dimensions and the nature of re-ality, which overall were related in simple terms, with food for thought from the final paragraph:

Given our conventional view of the world as a physical, tangible thing, many people are likely to find the concept of ET entities as part spirit-beings, with different energy vibrations to ourselves, as difficult to ac-cept. The problem, I suggest, lies not in the paradoxical nature of these ET phenomena, but the obdurate nature of the Western mind that only acknowledges one-dimen-sional reality.

For a reader new to the subject, I would recommend the first half of this book as good historical introductory material, but the second half can be bypassed. These lat-ter chapters are easily recognizable to veteran and expe-rienced readers of the subject, but would, I feel, confuse and possibly lose any reader looking for solid and factual information on either UFOs or abductions, or both.

Van Dyk cannot convincingly persuade readers that he has stumbled upon anything new or revelatory, unlocked any secrets, or added anything of real interest to the field of either UFOs or abductions. UFO


The Cash-Landrum UFO IncidentThree Texans Are Injured During an Encounter with a UFO and Military Helicopters

by John F. Schuesslerby Scott Holloway

Alien abduction has long been regarded as the most dis-turbing aspect of UFO encounters. John Schuessler’s The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident challenges that assumption, dramatically. In doing so, it throws light on a vital, but tragically underexposed case.

Schuessler, a founding member of MUFON and a vet-eran engineer of NASA’s manned space programs, relates the story of Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Colby Landrum, beginning on the night of December 29, 1980, near Dayton, Texas.

While driving home, the three were confronted by a massive, luminous, diamond-shaped craft, which hovered over the road, bat-tering them with relentless waves of heat and noise. When the craft finally departed, it was apparent-ly trailed by at least 20 twin-ro-tor helicopters. The three imme-diately developed symptoms of radiation exposure, from which only Colby, age 7 at the time, ever truly recovered. Schuessler is not given to flowery prose. His narra-tive is sparse and efficient, as he conveys the terror of the initial encounter, as well as its horrific consequences. There is no sense of wonder in the telling of The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident.

Schuessler concisely lays out the timeline, from Betty and Vickie’s attempts to ascer-tain the origin of the object and the helicopters, to their medical travails, to their eventual lawsuit against the gov-ernment. He also details his own involvement with Betty, Vickie, and Colby and provides transcripts of his inter-views with them, his consultations with their respective physicians, and his efforts on the trio’s behalf to uncover a possible military connection to the helicopters.

Beginning with Chapter 16, however, the layman read-er may get bogged down in all the medical terminology,

which is excruciatingly precise. Physicians’ reports are quoted verbatim, repeatedly. As a result, the book drags a bit before resuming its focus on the principal witnesses.

Schuessler was able to arrange a session with hypno-therapist Dr. Leo Sprinkle for Vickie and provides that tran-script as well. There is also an intriguing account from UFO

investigator Tom Adams’ publica-tion, Stigmata, which quotes an alleged firsthand witness to the incident, a helicopter pilot then stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas.

The author presses that theme with interviews of several ad-ditional witnesses to the flight of the helicopters. He talks to military pilots familiar with twin-rotor helicopters and combs through military flight records in his attempt to verify the events of that day. Ultimately, though, the book’s credibility rests on cor-roborative eyewitness accounts and the documented proof of the injuries of all three witnesses.

There is no smoking gun. The three lost their civil suit against the government when the presid-ing judge refused to hear the ma-jority of the evidence, and they were stonewalled at every turn in their quest for answers. In the end, Schuessler is left to lament the ab-sence of closure on the case and

the devastation of three innocent lives. Despite his frustration, it is hard to imagine a more

diligent effort, one aided by researcher Bob Pratt, among others. The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident may not provide all the answers, but it has opened the door. One can only hope that further disclosures will keep that door from closing again. UFO

The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident is available from the author at [email protected]


Connecting the DotsMaking Sense of the UFO Phenomenon

by Paola Leopizzi Harrisby James Taylor

Connecting The Dots (Wild Flower Press, 2003) is a col-lection of 25 interviews, letters, or commentaries with some well-known and some not-so-well-known figures in the fields of UFO and paranormal phenomena. Paola Harris gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the world of UFO conferences and per-sonalities, including J. Al-len Hynek, the late scientist who coined the phase “close encounters of the third kind” during his years with Project Blue Book.

Harris started with Ital-ian translations of Hynek’s sightings reports, became a member of Hynek’s Center For UFO Studies (CUFOS), and then went on to docu-ment UFO-related events as a photo journalist, rather than as an investigator.

Of special interest in Har-ris’ book is the interview with Linda Moulton Howe. Except for her few books, one seldom sees her in print. In the 1980s, Howe made video documen-taries investigating cattle mu-tilations but since then has broadened the scope of her investigations. Unfortunate-ly, this interview was done in 1999 and doesn’t include comment on her more recent crop-circle investigations. She does, however, delve into the high strangeness and paranormal aspects of UFO investigation, as well as the prospects for disclosure.

Another interviewee, Dr. Steven Greer was instrumental in the Disclosure Project in 2001 which brought a number of insider UFO and alien-contact witnesses to the Nation-al Press Club in Washington, D.C. The press conference was transmitted on the Internet to a worldwide audience. Prior to the Disclosure Project, Dr. Greer led groups from

the Center For The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) to UFO hotspots in attempts to initiate contact with UFOs.

He tells Harris of his involvement in preventing oil companies and covert intelli-gence groups from suppressing nascent zero-point-energy de-vices that might free us from oil dependence. As with the Howe interview, he was interviewed in 1999 and so does not touch on his current efforts. (Greer’s Disclosure Project is covered in UFO Magazine, Vol. 16 No. 6 and Vol. 17 No. 1)

An all-too-brief 1997 interview with the late Colonel Phillip J. Corso, who co-wrote The Day After Roswell, touches on his own encounter. Colonel Corso’s book documented his efforts as head of the U.S. Army’s For-eign Technology Division in the early 1960s to covertly transfer alien technology from the Ros-well crash to corporations. In this interview he discusses his purported alien encounter near the New Mexico atomic bomb site, which was not in his book. It had some paranormal aspects to it, so Harris said she waited to

reveal it, fearing it might have damaged Colonel Corso’s credibility.

In the book’s section titled “The Paranormal Factor,” Harris interviews at length a number of remote viewers. This is the second UFO book I’ve read that includes re-mote viewing, the first being Jim Marrs’ Alien Agenda.

For those who don’t listen to Art Bell or George Noory on Coast to Coast AM or haven’t read previous issues of this magazine, here’s the summary: Remote viewers claim they can “see” across vast distances and accurately de-



December 2005•50 SightingsRandomly selected from over 300 sightings

1) 12/1 5:00 A.M. Seattle, WA. 10 minutes. Strobing cyl-inder heading north to south. The UFO disappeared in clouds.

2) 12/1 8:05 A.M. Pincher Creek, AB, Canada. 2 min-utes. The UFO was shaped like a teardrop on fire and descended slowly until out of sight.

3) 12/1 9:00 A.M. Dublin, OH. 1.5 hours. Egg-shaped craft described as looking like something out of a movie. Reportedly landed 500 yards off in a field.

4) 12/1 11:00 P.M. Wylie, TX. 5 minutes. Pyramid-shaped, triangular craft with pulsating light seen emitting red flare.

5) 12/2 6:30 A.M. Pottsville, AR. 10 minutes. Triangular craft with lights, quiet and slow, drifting. It was just hanging in the night sky,dull in color, as if it wasn’t fully illuminated yet. About 1,500 feet up, it then slowly went north. It became fully illuminated then it banked west.

6) 12/2 4:30 P.M. Bowling Green, KY. 20 minutes. Dia-mond-shaped objects were quite distinct and quite bright. The two diamond objects did not seem to be moving at all, but the line object was moving very slowly to the right.

7) 12/2 5:30 P.M. West Greenwich, RI. 1 minute, 30 sec-onds. Light started to descend, and took a triangle shape. Witness counted about a dozen or more red lights. Another witness said he also saw blue lights.

8) 12/2 7:00 P.M. Lindsborg, KS. 32 minutes. West of Lindsborg is a military bombing range. These craft have been reported on many occasions, especially when bombing practice is taking place.

9) 12/2 7:05 P.M. Memphis, TN. 30 seconds. Machine-like triangle. Witness said if it were ours, it would be on Memphis approach radar or be given clear-ance to enter.

10) 12/3 1:00 A.M. Norquay, SK, Canada. 20 minutes. Reported sphere.

11) 12/3 3:00 P.M. Lexington, KY. 2 minutes. Twenty spherical white objects spotted hovering over University of Kentucky campus.

12) 12/3 5:50 P.M. Lakewood, OH. 2-3 seconds. Cigar-shaped UFO along with heavy military air traffic in the area.

13) 12/3 6:00 P.M. Sunol / Pleasanton, CA. 30 seconds. Seven lights, big to small, moving to the center of a triangle, appearing out of nowhere as if uncloak-ing.

14) 12/3 7:45 P.M. Los Angeles, CA. 60 seconds. Huge triangle with red lights.

15) 12/3 9:00 P.M. Jamestown, NY. 1 hour. Horizontal oval formation of white lights rippling through clouds.

16) 12/4 12:00 A.M. Leicester, UK. 25 seconds. Fiery light.

17) 12/4 8:30 P.M. South of Burlington, IN. 20 minutes. Orange flashes followed by appearance of objects. One object that flew over witness appeared to be triangular, with three red areas that looked like the tips of a triangle. The outer points were the bright-est, fading into black at the center. It resembled a piece of metal when a torch is held on one side until it gets red hot, fading into the opposite, cooler edge.

18) 12/4 11:00 P.M. Geelong, Australia. 5 minutes. Three lights in triangular formation moving across the sky.

19) 12/4 11:00 P.M. Kansas City, MO. 3 minutes. Convoy of objects crosses Kansas City sky.

20) 12/5 4:25 A.M. Terre Haute, IN. 5 seconds. Four lighted chevron- shaped objects silently glided southward.

21) 12/5 2:45 P.M. Tampa, FL. 15 minutes. Revolving cylindrical object, with one end glowing.

22) 12/5 8:30 P.M. Orlando, FL. 7-8 seconds. A bright green, fluorescent light that traveled at a very rapid speed leaving a trail. Changed direction rapidly before disappearing

23) 12/5 9:35 P.M. Bainbridge, NY. 2 minutes. A UFO in the shape of a disk/saucer hovering above a field, silver/gray with blinking orange/yellow lights evenly spaced all the way around it. Estimated about eight stories above the ground.

24) 12/5 10:00 P.M. Strathroy, ON, Canada. 10 minutes. Slow moving diamond/triangle-shaped, low-flying, soundless craft with bright white lights on tips and scrolling blue and red lights.


TO REPORT A UFOHotline: 206-722-3000 (use only if the sighting has occurred within the last week.)• On-Line UFO Report Form: http://www.ufocenter.com/

reportform.htmlNational UFO Reporting Center; P.O. Box 45623,

University Station,Seattle, WA 98145www.UFOcenter.com

25) 12/5 10:20 P.M. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. 2 hours. A bright shining object that emitted multicolored beams of light.

26) 12/6 4:00 A.M. Richmond, NSW, Australia. 10 min-utes. Bright lights and shaking.

27) 12/6 6:34 A.M. Harbor Beach, MI. 2 hours. Described as large and blinking, having a fierce glow around it. Something seemed to be dropping off of it.

28) 12/6 6:55 P.M. Brandford, FL. 5 minutes. Triangle with three lights followed witnesses a quarter of a mile.

29) 12/7 5:45 A.M. Fort Worth, TX. 2 seconds. Gold, cigar-shaped object seen moving away from Car-swell AFB. Object was moving very fast.

30) 12/7 5:18 P.M. Tucson, AZ. Cylinder. Few seconds. Phasing cigar-shaped UFO.

31) 12/7 7:05 P.M. Myrtle Beach, SC. 10 seconds. White lights, in unison, moving left to right. No change in velocity, direction, or speed, much too large for a normal aircraft.

32) 12/7 7:55 P.M. Alexandria, LA. 10-15 seconds. Random glowing lights appeared in the sky then formed a straight line and disappeared.

33) 12/8 12:00 A.M. Myrtle Beach, SC. 5 to 10 seconds. Orange-reddish glow, chevron-shaped, moving in a zigzag pattern.

34) 12/8 7:30 P.M. Surfside Beach, SC. 20 minutes. Three orange lights aligned horizontally with a fourth light directly beneath the middle light. Lights seemed spherical, and larger than Mars, which is visible. They appeared for 1-2 seconds, flashed two or three more times. Haze seen around them.

35) 12/8 11:00 P.M. Washington, DC. 4-5 seconds. Dark, hang-glider shaped object flying very low, 20 feet above tree line. No sound at all. Moving from north to south.

36) 12/8 11:33 P.M. Henderson, NE. 6 seconds. Three very large, gold-colored connected lights moving east to west.

37) 12/9 12:04 A.M. Chico, CA. 5 seconds. Flying triangle with five orange lights observed as it flew silently and slowly in an eastwardly direction over city.

38) 12/9 4:15 P.M. Yellowknife, NT, Canada. 8 minutes. Twilight sighting of bright, glowing, red, oval object moving in northern Canadian sky.

39) 12/9 7:45 P.M. Lindsborg to Lyons, KS. 1 hour, 15 minutes. Bright orbs appeared in the sky, bigger than stars or plane lights and much brighter.

40) 12/9 10:05 P.M. Lourinha, Portugal. 6 seconds. Tri-angle-shaped lights disappeared in the sky.

41) 12/9 10:10 P.M. Bristol, TN. Triangle. 25 seconds. Triangular object photographed.

42) 12/10 4:45 A.M. Los Angeles, CA. 5 seconds. Small light heading north got brighter then flashed and headed south.

43) 12/11 2:30 P.M. Monmouth Beach, NJ. 3 seconds. 12 brilliant silver orbs surge from the cloud cover.

44) 12/11 9:50 P.M. Fort Worth, TX. 1 minute. Three lights in form of a triangle in the sky west of Fort Worth. Two were brilliant white and one orange. After a minute, they disappeared completely.

45) 12/11 9:55 P.M. Van Alstyne, TX. 15 seconds. Trian-gular formation of lights briefly seen in the western sky, then faded away.

46) 12/11 10:00 P.M. Greenville, TX. 10-20 seconds. Triangle-shaped lights slowly faded out and disap-peared.

47) 12/12 2:00 A.M. Friendswood, TX. 45 minutes. Tri-angle-shaped craft.

48) 12/12 2:45 A.M. Puyallup, WA. 5 minutes. An object seen to the south dropped several small objects that glowed and seemed to “go out” as they neared the ground., like burning embers.

49) 12/12 10:00 A.M. Phoenix, AZ. 2 minutes. Glowing gold sphere seen in northwest Phoenix. Object hovered then moved from south to north across west valley

50) 12/12 10:15 P.M. College Station, TX. 5 minutes. 22 orange-yellow UFOs, flying low, fast and silently east to south over Texas A&M University. Four moving randomly were followed by 18 in a line.


View From A Brit • continued from page 15

not conceive how it could be got into the air, could stay in the air, or be brought down out of the air.” Akhurst’s response was short and to the point. “No further evidence has become available concerning this particular sighting, so there is nothing further I can add.” The case was closed.

The Ministry of Defense seemed satisfied with the explanation that the object was simply a helicop-ter. However, West’s letters clearly demonstrate that not only had she summarily dismissed the notion that the object was a helicopter (“I have seen many in my time, and I can’t imagine how I could have seen a helicopter from any angle which would have made it present such an appearance,” she stated), she had also given much consideration to the idea that the object was some form of man-made gadget.Yet, she was equally well aware of the fact that her report seemed to fall squarely into the flying saucer category, too. And there was also the glaring obser-vation on her part that the object had been flying in total silence.

Dame Rebecca West continued to write with vigor al-most until the time of her death at the age of 90 in 1983, and her contribution to British literature is more than well recognized. It seems that nearly 40 years later, however, this particularly curious aspect of her notable life will remain forever unresolved. UFO

National Archive files: AIR 2/17983. Public Record Of-fice file: AIR 2/17984. Crown copyright exists.

Nick Redfern lives in Dallas, TX. His most recent book is Three Men Seeking Monsters (Paraview-Pocket, NY, March 2004). He can be contacted at www.nickredfern.com

Newsguy • continued from page 23

doing anything that may cause worldwide fear and panic. It is well accepted between the UFO and ex-traterrestrial experts that all the five nuclear powers are in contact with the beings from other stars for quite some time.”

Complete stories are on the Internet at www.in-diadaily.com/editorial/01-03d_1-05.asp and www.indiadaily.com/editorial/01-06a-05.asp.

Ufologists Publish ET Ideas In Science Journal

For the first time in 25 years, a serious article on the strong potential for ET/UFO visitation has made the elite pages of a mainstream science journal. Break-ing outmoded tradition, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society published “Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation” in their January issue, Vol. 58.

Authors James Deardorff, Bernard Haisch, Bruce Maccabee, and Hal Puthoff synthesize some break-through theories in physics and astrophysics to ar-gue that evidence of ETs and their probes just may be found in certain high-quality UFO reports.

Of particular note is their re-examination of the Fermi Paradox, which in general asks that if there are feasibly many advanced civilizations in the uni-verse, where are they? The answer incorporates new multidimensional approaches to reality and the gen-erally held idea of an expanding universe. For more information on inflation theory, see www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/cosmo.htm

Guy Malone lives in Roswell New Mexico. Contact: [email protected] and www.breakingufonews.com.

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21st Century News • continued from page 12

truth. Joseph McMoneagle is not the only one who pointed out that only certain information at a certain level was divulged to Utts and Hyman.

And considering that Ray Hyman is a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Inves-tigation for Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), his skepticism is to be expected.

Unfortunately, this brand of skepticism keeps research dollars from subsidizing parapsychological research to further our knowledge. “In the 130 or so years of parapsychological research,” Krippner said, “we really have only a couple of hundred experiments that I think are substantial; ones that were well done and have stood the test of time.”

Yes, there have been successful experiments of moving matter with the mind, “but have they been replicated by skeptics? Very rarely. Have they been replicated by other parapsychologists? Yes, but not in a continual sequence.

“So I think that the jury is still out. From my point of view, I think there is something there. And one nice thing about psychokinesis is we’re not dealing now with thoughts or feelings or emotions, the types of things that we deal with in telepathy and clairvoyance experiments. We’re dealing with matter.

We’re dealing with living matter like bacteria, plants, blood cells. All of these have been the subjects of psychokinesis experiments. Or else we’re dealing with moving matter, like dice that were thrown up into the air by a machine, and trying to affect their outcome.

“If we could figure out how these things work, then they would no longer be as controversial as they are

now. I don’t get into arguments with people who are very doubtful about the existence of telepathy and remote viewing and psychokinesis, because these phenomena cannot be easily replicated, and because we do not have a good explanation as to how they work.

“Now, if we could figure out a mechanism, then we might be able to figure out how to improve the replication of these phenomena, and then we’d have something more substantial.

“Many people who are in the parapsychological community think that I’m being too skeptical and too conservative when I make statements like this But I have to say I think people should be skeptical about everything. ... When it comes to science, I don’t have a 100 percent certainty about anything, and I think that’s healthy. I think that skepticism keeps you open to weighing new evidence as it comes in, and throwing out ideas that absolutely fail the test of evidence completely.” UFO

For more information on Saybrook Graduate School: 415-433-9200. www.saybrook.edu

Becoming Psychic: Spiritual Lessons Focusing Your Hidden Abilities can be ordered from New Page Books: 1-800-227-3371

Mind Trek by Joseph McMoneagle (Hampton Roads, 1-800-766-8009).

Penetration, by Ingo Swann: for more information, see http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com

Unleashed, by Dr. William Roll, is available from Paraview Press.

Article prepared by Laura Cortner

Vaenian Abductions • continued from page 13

sibility or call it alien invasion? Will we take re-sponsibility or commit suicide because we’re so lost in translation that we mistake transcendence for apocalypse, trade inner death for outer war?

In essence, will we surrender to transformation or commit the ultimate act of substitute sacrifice? The aliens are here, that much is a fact. By the sounds of things lately, they may be making little homes for themselves in mountaintops around the world, preparing for the implications of either decision we make. Both involve them.

Them.Us.There is no versus betwixt the two, for they are not

alien, we are not human, and they cannot meet us as equals until we meet ourselves. If there’s time. Is there time? That’s up to you … and you … and you … and me, right now.

As we go to press, we’ve just witnessed the worst natural catastrophe in modern history, that of the earthquake/tsunami demolishing the shorelines of South Asia—right around where much of this UFO/mystery boom activity is located.

Is this a coincidence?One thing is not: as a result of the disasters, the

earth is now vibrating and its rate of rotation has increased, perhaps permanently. Chaos theory won-ders at the butterfly effect: that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas. If there’s even a grain of truth to that kind of synergy, imagine what the newly speeding, humming earth will cause. UFO

Jeremy Vaeni is a freelance writer/producer and the author of I Know Why the Aliens Don’t Land! (Kyne-gion House, 2003).

Make contact: www.valiens.com

December U F O Sightings

For Map Datasee pages

72-73

December U F O Sightings


To Not Go Where They’ve All Gone Before ...by Don Ecker

If you enjoy outer-space science fiction, then UFOs would naturally be an item in your interest category. Vice-versa if you like UFOs—science fiction should rate right up there. The truth of the matter is somewhat different. Having a friend who has appeared in so many science fic-tion programs, Dwight Schultz, I discovered that it is not the case.

Schultz had a long ongoing part in the Star Trek fran-chise, acted in Babylon 5, Stargate, the Outer Limits, etc. One could argue he is a science fiction icon. And he has never made secret that the UFO enigma is something that has intrigued him for years.

Yet when I’ve asked him about oth-er actors, producers, executives, and whether they have an interest in such topics beyond their value as audience pleasers, Schultz surprised me with his candid assessment of many in his field.

“Most of those people do not believe there is any-thing to the UFO subject,” he told me. And if the truth be told, most (like people in every walk of life) are glaringly unfamiliar with the hard data associated with the UFO subject. Having talked to lots of science fiction fans, I’m still very surprised that when UFOs are mentioned, they—at best—turn up their noses. Hmmm.

This topic is timely, since we at the magazine recently received a plea from a certain group fearful that the latest Star Trek incarna-tion, Enterprise, is on the skids and about to be canceled. Allow me to make an admission: I watch Enterprise faith-fully. I’ve watched all the incarnations of Star Trek since the mid ’70s, when the original Star Trek, with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was being rerun.

Back in the ’60s, when TOS (The Original Star Trek) was first aired, I never gave it a glance, and disdainfully sniffed at “any of that space-opera crap” after watching a couple episodes of Lost In Space.

That was dreadful, but Trek was different. Even today, my wife kids me mercilessly when my several science fic-tion programs come on the tube. I tell her truthfully that

watching these shows in some way gives me hope for the future.

You know the old adage: “If we can think it, maybe we can do it!” “Star Trek” has always taken a positive posi-tion on what humankind may some day accomplish.

Travel to the stars, meeting and interacting with other races in the cosmos, discovering age-old secrets of the universe. Answering similarly age-old questions like: Who are we? Where did we come from? What does it all mean?

Well, okay, it’s doubtful that Star Trek can answer those ques-tions … but what if? What if we really do get out there some day?

Just what might we discover when we do? Those are very worthwhile questions, and since there is a program like Star Trek: Enterprise” that causes me to think about such things—what in hell do you mean to cancel it? Are you nuts?

Of course, I then think back to my buddy Dwight Schultz, who told me a long time ago, when dis-cussing the entertainment media, it all comes down to the almighty buck! Read: good old American dollar bills. If you think any pro-gram survives because it is good, thoughtful, filled with informa-tion, etc., the final arbitrator is actually—does it sell?

’Cause if it doesn’t, say goodbye to it. Enterprise? Who knows, but as I said, I watch it. But then, my wife and I used to watch The Fearing Mind, a really enjoyable week-ly cable series about a horror writer, and it only lasted 6 weeks. We still have trouble understanding why the suits canceled such a unique, pleasantly highbrow, thoughtful show … hmmm?

But that’s ancient history! To save Enterprise, go to www.saveenterprise.com

At press time, UPN and Paramount Network Television jointly announced that this will be the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise on UPN. The series finale will air on Fri-day, May 13, 2005. UFO

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