A simple glance through the vendors room of any UFO convention would seemingly confirm that we are on a slippery ride to an irrational hell. Palm readers dressed in Star Trek uniforms sit demurely in a booth right next to a middle-aged housewife with a pyramid on her head. A professional Bigfoot hunter lectures on how he spends his weekend afternoons combing the woods for animal droppings while another speaker expounds upon her telepathic communications with extra-terrestrials. Through out the convention hall there are the inevitable tables filled with books and tapes devoted to the wilder ravings of the right-wing militia movement. Fliers advertise a meeting focused on the war against the New World Order, with a special treat being a video presentation of the new TV show Millennium.
The scene plays like a suburban version of Bedlam as the room fills with rumors about three black helicopters parked at a nearby airfield. Ironically, the rumors turn out to be true since the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration uses these vehicles in an effort to locate marijuana farms in the surrounding countryside.
The current state of American reality is stocked with enough weirdness to keep the X-Files department in business well into the next century. That may be one of the reasons why many people are seeking an answer for the unexplained from the world of the inexplicable. Like a religion, much of the belief in UFOs is based on faith. One either believes or disbelieves and there are few agnostics to be found.
"We have come a long way from the Sixties where God was dead and there is a lot of spiritual seeking right now," is how Paul Barrosse explains so much fascination with the topic.
Barrosse is the executive producer of Strange Universe, an internationally syndicated daily TV program on everything from UFOs to merely odd occurrences. He calls the show's venue the Millennium beat and proudly wears his press pass to any crop circle in sight.
"We think that it is probably in some way people looking at the Millennium and having to take an accounting of themselves and finding a better definition of their universe."
For Barrosse, the glass is half full and the dividing line between spiritual faith and scientific evidence is primarily an Old Age assumption quickly falling to a New Age sense of heightened enlightenment. Barrosse doesn't necessarily believe in every subject that his show covers, but he likes to keep an open mind.
"I don't know if you would call it Sixties fallout or what," he continues. "But we got introduced to a lot of alternative philosophies and a lot of barriers broke down and a lot of groovy subjects entered the mainstream."
But for others, the glass is half empty and layered with rot.
"The paranormal makes grandiose promises," asserts Nickell. "For example, if ghosts exists then obviously we live on after we die. It makes a promise of immortality...And extra-terrestrials would promise that we are not alone in the universe."
Unfortunately, there are no extra-terrestrials. Right?
Unless you happen to believe in Roswell. It has become the common touchstone of the modern debate as well as the recurring reference point for everything from The X-Files to The Rock. Whatever happened in 1947 in New Mexico (and something major did actually happen), it has snowballed into the greatest article of faith since transfiguration.
"We know that something did crash at Roswell," concedes Nickell. But he is a firm believer in the Project Mogul theory, which was a top secret military project attempting to detect possible atomic tests in the Soviet Union. According to this theory, the object that landed near Roswell was essentially a balloon and a radar reflector.
Oddly enough, there is no real evidence to support the Project Moguel theory, we only have the Air Force's word on it. Likewise, extensive first-hand eyewitness testimony present a different picture, including tape transcripts and signed affidavits from many key military personnels who were based at the Strategic Air Command post stationed at Roswell Air Base. Or at least that is the surprisngly impressive case made by Kevin Randle in his books on the incident.
This account supports the notion that a shuttle-type vehicle of presumed extra-terrestrial origin crashed for unknown reasons. Contrary to popular folklore, the ship was not a flying saucer but rather a long fuselage with bat-like wings. Likewise, the dead occupants were not the so-called greys. Instead, they were small built humanoids with slightly enlarged eyes and an unusual skin texture. Several of the eyewitnesses repeatedly described the skin as being like that of a reptile rather than a mammal.
Wait a minute. What was that about an impending invasion by man-eating nasties? You would think that somebody would want to spill the beans on an event of such magnitude.
"If I were in the government, I wouldn't fess up," says Timmerman. "I wouldn't make a public statement that there were UFOs. The world today is too preoccupied with its mutual annihilation and we are not prepared to handle such a development."
Timmerman's organization was originally created by Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Hynek was the dean of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University, the scientific advisor for the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book and the technical advisor for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (whose title is taken from Hynek's own classification system for UFO reports). Though Hynek was employed by Project Blue Book in order to explain away UFO sightings, he became a strong believer in the phenomena.
Both Timmerman and his wife were close friends of Hynek. As the public information officer for the center, Timmerman has made a strong effort to solve the mystery that left his late colleague baffled.
"I have 800 to 1,000 recorded interviews from people all over who have had these experiences that are so similar in character that I am so convinced that this is real. If it isn't, we need to do serious studies on the human brain and the minds of people, because they are all thinking the same thing."
Which means that many people are asking the same questions in a desperate hope that the truth is out there...somewhere.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
The Aliens Are Coming Part One
(Back in 1996, I wrote the following for a British magazine. However, my editor thought I was nuts for doing the article and was busy getting rid of all of the American writers from the staff. So the piece never saw the light of day. Though some of the information is outdated, I feel the need to present it. Call me stubborn.
-WK)
Man-eating reptiles from another planet are preparing to invade the earth. Or at least that is the hot buzz on one of the numerous computer bulletin boards devoted to UFOs. But the rude diners from the Draco star system have better get in line. By some accounts, our world is one of the busiest stops on the intergalactic superhighway. Simply everyone who is anyone is landing here these days.
"We have visitors on this planet," insists Peter B. Davenport, the executive director of the National Center for UFO Reporting in Seattle, Washington. "There is very little remaining doubt."
The center maintains a 24-hour telephone hot line for UFO reports from all corners of North America and has accumulated thousands of eye witnessed statements.
"I think we are observing," adds John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies, "something we cannot explain or understand coming from a place we cannot imagine for reasons that are beyond our imagination."
Which is to say: It's a mystery. But long before such movies and TV shows as Independence Day, The X-Files and Dark Skies renewed public interest in low flying things that go bump in the night, the UFO mystery was deeply entrenching itself into the global sub-conscious.
Since the end of World War II, strange lights and bizarre flying crafts have been spotted on every continent. Though often dismissed as misobservations of such natural phenomena as St. Elmo's Fire and nocturnal geese, UFOs have also resulted in a variety of well documented reports from surprisingly reliable sources. Consider:
The North American Air Defense Command have actually tracked fast-moving objects that were whizzing in and out of the upper atmosphere and that were not behaving in a manner resembling either a satellite or a meteor.
Both a pilot and his Cessna plane vanished off the coast of Australia when he encountered an object that was tracked, and then lost, on radar. The pilot's last radio message was that he was being followed by something that was not an aircraft.
In a recent interview, ex-astronaut Gordon Cooper revealed that he and several other jet pilots once encountered a mysterious saucer-shaped ship in the desert near Edwards Air Force base.
But such provable (or at least plausible) allegations pale next to the nebulous twilight realm of myth and folklore that has evolved around the UFO mystery. Legends abound, from tales about massive underground alien bases to terrifying accounts of abductions. In some stories, the government is secretly in league with the critters as they willingly surrender the planet in a fool-hardy pursuit of advance technology.
Either way, everyone agrees that the U.S. government is keeping something secret. Even the government goes along with this since they have repeatedly denied access to a large volume of material on the subject. The Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have all spent years actively gathering information on UFOs. But the small sampling of documents which have been released are more laundered than the expletives deleted from the Watergate tapes of Richard Nixon.
"The government didn't tell the full truth," admits Joe Nickell while discussing a few of the more infamous cases in UFO mythology. Nickell is a research fellow for The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He is an expert on the subject of forgery and his work has been crucial in the debunking of the original Majestic-12 documents.
"We pretty well know," he continues, "that whenever there is secrecy, what happens is that it is a breeding ground just as damp, moist places may be a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible creatures. This type of breeding ground produces rumors, speculations, fantasies. People come out of the woodwork: pathological liars and raconteurs, the kind of people who like to sit back and spin some tall tales."
If some Ufologists are guilty of believing anything, then Nickell could be accused of disbelieving in everything. Aside from his work for CSICoP, Nickell is also a member of the Council for Media Integrity and is a vocal critic of such shows as The X-Files and Dark Skies. In the Council's viewpoint, fun is fun but the current crop of media induced paranoia may be steering people into a new Dark Age.
"We are becoming two nations," Nickell warns. "One that is scientifically literate...and another that is not educated or informed in that way."
For the Council, a program like The X-Files gives false credence to old hoaxes while using pseudo-scientific babble to confuse the viewer into accepting various conspiracy theories that flies in the face of any well-balanced, rational thinking.
-WK)
Man-eating reptiles from another planet are preparing to invade the earth. Or at least that is the hot buzz on one of the numerous computer bulletin boards devoted to UFOs. But the rude diners from the Draco star system have better get in line. By some accounts, our world is one of the busiest stops on the intergalactic superhighway. Simply everyone who is anyone is landing here these days.
"We have visitors on this planet," insists Peter B. Davenport, the executive director of the National Center for UFO Reporting in Seattle, Washington. "There is very little remaining doubt."
The center maintains a 24-hour telephone hot line for UFO reports from all corners of North America and has accumulated thousands of eye witnessed statements.
"I think we are observing," adds John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies, "something we cannot explain or understand coming from a place we cannot imagine for reasons that are beyond our imagination."
Which is to say: It's a mystery. But long before such movies and TV shows as Independence Day, The X-Files and Dark Skies renewed public interest in low flying things that go bump in the night, the UFO mystery was deeply entrenching itself into the global sub-conscious.
Since the end of World War II, strange lights and bizarre flying crafts have been spotted on every continent. Though often dismissed as misobservations of such natural phenomena as St. Elmo's Fire and nocturnal geese, UFOs have also resulted in a variety of well documented reports from surprisingly reliable sources. Consider:
The North American Air Defense Command have actually tracked fast-moving objects that were whizzing in and out of the upper atmosphere and that were not behaving in a manner resembling either a satellite or a meteor.
Both a pilot and his Cessna plane vanished off the coast of Australia when he encountered an object that was tracked, and then lost, on radar. The pilot's last radio message was that he was being followed by something that was not an aircraft.
In a recent interview, ex-astronaut Gordon Cooper revealed that he and several other jet pilots once encountered a mysterious saucer-shaped ship in the desert near Edwards Air Force base.
But such provable (or at least plausible) allegations pale next to the nebulous twilight realm of myth and folklore that has evolved around the UFO mystery. Legends abound, from tales about massive underground alien bases to terrifying accounts of abductions. In some stories, the government is secretly in league with the critters as they willingly surrender the planet in a fool-hardy pursuit of advance technology.
Either way, everyone agrees that the U.S. government is keeping something secret. Even the government goes along with this since they have repeatedly denied access to a large volume of material on the subject. The Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have all spent years actively gathering information on UFOs. But the small sampling of documents which have been released are more laundered than the expletives deleted from the Watergate tapes of Richard Nixon.
"The government didn't tell the full truth," admits Joe Nickell while discussing a few of the more infamous cases in UFO mythology. Nickell is a research fellow for The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He is an expert on the subject of forgery and his work has been crucial in the debunking of the original Majestic-12 documents.
"We pretty well know," he continues, "that whenever there is secrecy, what happens is that it is a breeding ground just as damp, moist places may be a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible creatures. This type of breeding ground produces rumors, speculations, fantasies. People come out of the woodwork: pathological liars and raconteurs, the kind of people who like to sit back and spin some tall tales."
If some Ufologists are guilty of believing anything, then Nickell could be accused of disbelieving in everything. Aside from his work for CSICoP, Nickell is also a member of the Council for Media Integrity and is a vocal critic of such shows as The X-Files and Dark Skies. In the Council's viewpoint, fun is fun but the current crop of media induced paranoia may be steering people into a new Dark Age.
"We are becoming two nations," Nickell warns. "One that is scientifically literate...and another that is not educated or informed in that way."
For the Council, a program like The X-Files gives false credence to old hoaxes while using pseudo-scientific babble to confuse the viewer into accepting various conspiracy theories that flies in the face of any well-balanced, rational thinking.
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