Space Oddity

Don't you just hate it when things come in threes?  Sure, sometimes the pattern is OK.  Sometimes it's not so OK.  But mostly it's annoying.

It is especially annoying when it involves something that should be easily ignored.  Take for example the recent buzz on the net concerning the supposed alien ship orbiting the sun.  Oh sure, the photo is extremely suggestive though the dang thing seems to be the size of a planet and its possible function is hard to discern.  But just look at those articulated arms on that thing.

Of course, the official NASA explanation is also pretty reasonable. One of the problems with digital photography is a tendency to occasionally produce patterns out of random patterns (for example, stray cosmic rays coming in at an unusual angle - according to NASA).  It is a common enough phenomena to actually be occasionally true (though perhaps not as often as some skeptics would like to believe).

So  Nathan Rich's glitch explanation is pretty good.  At least it was the first time back in 2011 when the same type of object was spotted by SOHO (and my thanks to SunsFlare over on YouTube for looking this one up).  In fact Nathan Rich's recent statements about the April photo was a repackaging of his same explanation back in October.

OK, so once is an accident and twice is coincidence.  These things happen.  It is a bit odd that these stray cosmic rays would result in the same formation each time, but it isn't impossible.  Highly unlikely, sure, but not impossible.

So I guess Nathan Rich isn't too happy that it happened again.  Good grief!  You would think that those stray cosmic rays would learn a few new tricks.  So now SOHO is offline for some "needed repairs."  Not a moment too soon because this is getting a bit weird. 

When the news story broke last month, I wrote it all off as a simple glitch.  My assumption was that if anything was really going on then there would have to be previous corresponding photos and without such images, leave this type of report to our old "friend" The Weekly World News.  I felt pretty happy with that attitude.

Then I made the mistake of looking for information related to previous such images.  OK, there is one.  Now I'm not so happy.  Gee, at the very least you would think that NASA could use our tax dollars to build better equipment than this dang piece of junk.  But things happen and two such incidents don't necessarily mean anything.

But now we are up to three such images.  All remarkably the same.  As Groucho Marx once said: "That's an awful lot of accidents for such a quiet neighborhood."

And by the way, we have just gone past the coincidence stage and thrice is a problem.  Whether it is a major technical failure or a visitation, Houston's got a problem and they are not really being honest about it.  Most likely, they don't even know what really is going on (which might explain the quick move to take SOHO offline). 

I don't think we need to get out the tinfoil hats (just yet), but I can't wait to hear Nathan Rich explain this one.  Hey!  Maybe it is just the planet Venus.

Unreal Estate

The recent case in New Jersey involving a family that bolted after a week from their new rental certainly brought back some memories.  It also brought up a question that I can half answer: Do landlords and/or real estate agents have an obligation to tell prospective buyers (or tenants) that a property might be haunted.  Since the case in New Jersey is going to court, I am not going to make any statements about it one way or the other (like I need to be in a stranger's lawsuit).  But I have two minor stories to offer around this topic.

About fifteen years ago, my wife and I were looking to buy a house.  Since this was back when the housing market was hot (and we were looking for a location in a reasonably desirable neighborhood), the process took us the better part of a year.  Oh yes, these were the boom days of the market where you barely had time to look at a place before you discovered that while you were in the kitchen someone was at the front door making a deal for the house.  So it was turning into a long and miserable quest.

Which is why it was not at all unusual to find ourselves on a sunny afternoon bring dragged out for the thousandth time by our agent to look at a house.  We had a very good agent.  A really nice, pretty straight forward, honest kind of lady.  Which made what happened next a tad odd.

We got to the house (a large and slightly rambling structure on a nice and quiet street) and before I even got all the way up the front steps a thought flew into my head: "Craps!  The place is haunted."  I don't make a claim to having any sort of "gift."  But I have also discovered that when that little voice in the back of my head speaks, I am advised to listen.  It has saved my life on a few occasions.

Since I have spent more afternoons with my real estate agent then with anyone else, I decided to ask her upfront, "Hey, is this place spooked?"  She gave me one of her big friendly smiles and simply said, "What makes you say that?"

So we go into a front room that has the strange feel and mood of the Tomb of Ligeia.  Normally our real estate agent would put a positive spin on just about anything.  She once explained to us that a house with train tracks running by its side was a sure sign that we would get a regular breeze.  But the minute we entered the place, she became oddly silent.  Just stood around, sticking very close to us.

Except when we went upstairs.  For some reason, she didn't want to follow us.  Which is sort of OK, because then I would have been tempted to ask her about the odd spot midway up the steps where both my wife and I got a very profound feeling of dread.  Just plain old dread right around a section of three steps.  No idea what that was about but we both felt it coming and going.

Maybe it had something to do with the pentagram etched into the window in the front bedroom.  Maybe not.  I wasn't going to ask because I suspected I didn't want to know the answer.

However, the real estate lady was willing to go down into the basement with me, but only if I went first and didn't go far from her.  Since the basement had a low ceiling which added to the sense of claustrophobia, some of the bad vibes of the place could have been due to that alone.  The odd chill also didn't help.  The open entrance in one wall to an underground crawlspace that simply vanished into darkness was also a nice touch.  I soon decided that I didn't need to see the basement and practically had to race the agent back up the steps.

Once we were in the kitchen, I asked her if it was true that real estate agents kept a private record of houses that were known to have "problems."  She smiled and simply said, "What makes you say that?"

What I didn't tell her was that I already knew the answer.  Yes, they do.  Many years prior to this Vincent Price house tour, I use to know a couple who were old friends of a person I was involved with at the time.  The husband was a psychologist who was getting close to retirement and was dabbling on the side in real estate as a form of second income.

One night while they were visiting, he noticed that I was reading a book by D. Scott Rogo.  Turns out he had gone to college with Rogo and was curious to know what I thought of the paranormal.  According to him, Rogo was already interested in the subject back in school but that he kept his own distance from it because,  quite frankly, it scarred the willies out of him.  Oh, and by the way, did I happen to know anything about how to deal with a haunted house?

Turns out a friend of his in the real estate profession had a house that was an infamous "problem" within the business.  He refused to tell me exactly where the house was located and didn't want to discuss what the nature of the problem might be, but basically no one was willing to stay in the place for more than a week or two.  In fact, the last buyer had apparently bolted before they had even completely moved in.

I asked him how he knew so much about the place, especially since the owner didn't sound too interested in discussing it.  Turns out that the folks in real estate maintained an extremely informal line of communication about these type of places.  Nothing on record; nothing on paper.  Just a regular system of chit chat.

I should add that he was also very concerned that I did not get the mistaken idea that he might actually believe in anything pertaining to the supernatural.  But....He did like my suggestion of calling in a priest.

I think you will find that this is how the system works.  And by the way, they basically are under no obligation to discuss this issue publicly (though it varies some from state to state).

Four Stooges of the Apocalypse

Gosh gee whiz, 2012 fever is hot out there.  I know because I recently made a passing joke about 2012 and the end of the world in a film finance blog piece (sort of my day job) and got various responses from assorted religious types who were stocking the bunkers.  Guess they were not sure how solid they were with the Lord.

Of course, the ancient Mayans did not predict the end of the world in 2012.  They only predicted the end of this current age.  Maybe, depending upon your interpretation, the end of this period of civilization.  But that is about it (except for a little detail we shall get to later).  But that hasn't stopped the true believers from bracing for everything from Rapture to alien invasion (and lots of stuff in between).

For example, take the recent buzz on various UFO and end of the world sites concerning the report of Strange Metal Boxes on the Coast of Oregon (I put it in caps so you can quickly run it through Google).  The story started around Feb 8 as the boxes began appearing up and down the Pacific shoreline.  Continued on Feb. 14 as Dr. Bill Hanshumaker of the Hatfield Marine Science Center arrived to examine the boxes and announce that he had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE!  Then, the boxes began to glow and buzz and you would think that they would all be running for the hills.

OK, maybe there are some problems with the story.   Little details like the fact that Dr. Hanshumaker has never seen the so-called boxes (I know, because I asked him via email).  Sure, he sent some young volunteers over to Bray's Point to look at the boxes but there were no boxes.  In fact, nobody could be found who had a clue what they were talking about.

OK, maybe this story has some really big problems.  Considering the fact that the tale is just a single source story, completely lacking in any basic form of confirmation and the one and only expert witness quoted in the piece is telling everybody that he hasn't seen anything, we might just have to suspect a hoax.  A really, really big hoax.

Though the stupid tale doesn't hold up under the slightest scrutiny, it has traveled across the internet like lightening.  At some sites, UFOs have been added to the story with dark hints of an impending invasion.  At others, these boxes are clear signs of the 2012 Apocalypse (though I can't recall anything in the Book of Revelations that referred to the Holy Gift Boxes of God).  Increasingly, as the bogus reports pump up the tale with a buzzing sound, a few bold folks have linked it to the strange sky sounds that are a major hit on YouTube.

At any moment, someone will decide that these boxes must contain President Obama's real birth certificate.  The assumptions mount.  And yes, assumptions can also make an ass out of you and me.

But notice the quick linkage between this completely bogus story and the sky sound reports.  These many reports are a trickier lot.  Some, such as the incident in Costa Rica are confirmable.  A few odd incidents even received national broadcast, such as the "noise" during several baseball games at Tropicana Field.   So there really is something going on, but it is hard to truly evaluate as numerous hoaxes have been uploaded onto YouTube.  It becomes a bit hard to see the forest due to all of the plastic Christmas trees.

I have a bad feeling that the many hoaxes are doing a major disservice to the general public.  Especially if I am half-correct in my hunch that some of these noises may be related to unique freak upper atmospheric winds caused by radical climatic change.  Who needs the Four Horsemen when you have that going on.  Unfortunately, the hoaxes simply make it easier for many folks to doubt the whole thing and that may not be a good idea.

Many of the YouTube videos are single source presentations and are lacking in any form of confirmation.  A few have voice overs that attempts to misdirect the viewer.  For example, in one tape that I've seen, a woman claims to have been awaken in the middle of the night by the mysterious noise and has gone out to her backyard to tape it.  At one point, she describes how her neighbors are also waking up to this scary noise and their lights are coming on.  In reality, the lights were already on at the start of the tape.  She is just claiming otherwise.  Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be any sign of anybody stepping out to even see what is going on.  In fact, it looks like a pretty quiet neighborhood (except for the so-called racket from above).

I have noticed that many of the most suspect videos often share something in common.  They all have the same noise, the so-called Trumpet of the Apocalypse.  Many of these videos have virtually the same (or even the exact same) sound.  Most are presumably duped from the same master tape.  Ironically, they all resemble the climax from Kevin Smith's movie Red State (starting at the 32 second mark).  It is not the exact same sound (though extremely close), but it is the exact same idea (minus the explanation in the movie's wrap up).

Coincidence?  Yea, sure.  To be honest, I don't think God gets His ideas from Kevin Smith movies.  But if He does, then He must be a more fun fella than we have given Him credit (and I bet He loves comic books).

And by the way, what the ancient Mayans predicted for 2012 was the return of the heavy duty super god Bolon Yokte.  On Dec. 21, he is scheduled to descend from the sky and kick start the world into a new age.  Almost sounds like a job for The Ghostbusters.

Update: Email just received from Dr. Bill Hanshumaker:

The "boxes on the beach" are merely floats that were originally built to support docks. After a recent flooding event, some docks were destroyed and their floats drifted downriver and subsequently deposited on the beach. A colleague from a local state agency had the opportunity to examine one and confirmed this explanation.

William Hanshumaker, Ph.D.
Public Marine Education Specialist
Oregon Sea Grant Faculty

In a World of Speculation

Hallelujah!    Roswell has finally been solved!  Again.  Well that seems to be the main hot item getting splashed across the news services with the release of Annie Jacobsen's book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base.

Before I say anything else, let me put all my cards on the table.  The book has just come out.  I have not had a chance to read the book (though I will be looking at it as soon as I find a copy - most of the material should be extremely interesting).  Everything I have to say about this one part of the book is based solely upon the numerous news stories that have poured out during this past weekend.  Further, I have no doubt that Annie Jacobsen is a solid reporter, superb investigator, and extremely reliable and insightful writer, irregardless of what either Homeland Security or the U.S. Marshals might think (follow this link to Snopes.com for a pretty concise analysis of her Terror in the Skies story).

In a nutshell, Jacobsen argues that what really happened at Roswell was a psychological warfare attempt by Stalin and the Soviet Union to create mass panic in the U.S. by "invading" the country with deformed children disguised as outer space aliens who were piloted out of South America into New Mexico on a captured Nazi made Horten Ho 229.  The children were made to look unearthly by Josef Mengele who did it in exchange for laboratory space from the Soviets.  Stalin was inspired to try this stunt by the panic in 1938 caused by the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.  For all I know, Orson Welles was Joseph Stalin.


Surprisingly enough, this completely harebrained theory has flown through the media without anyone catching the "minor" problems in Jacobsen's thinking.

A.  Nobody really knows if the Soviets ever got their hands on a Horten Flying Wing jet because we were too busy grabbing them for ourselves.  I know a little bit about this because my late father-in-law was a member of the mechanical team whose job it was to dismantle the darn thing for shipment back to the States.

B.  Since it is a safe bet that the Russians knew that we had one of these suckers, you can also be sure that they wanted one for their own research.  If they had one, they would be too busy trying to test and develop the flying wing for their own use.  They would not be wasting the device in pursuit of a half-baked practical joke on Truman.  Stalin can be accused of many things, but stupidity wasn't one of them.

C.  It is extremely unlikely that the Soviets would stage such a stunt in New Mexico.  We had a ton of top secret work going on down there.  The Russians had agents working very hard at basing themselves in the area.  Why would they want to create a wild security scare that would threaten every other operation they had going in the area.  Again, Stalin was not stupid.

D.  Josef Mengele was not available in 1947.  He was busy laying low as a farm-hand in Germany while avoiding arrest by Allied authorities.  He didn't make it to South America until 1949. 

Otherwise, Jacobsen's theory is swell. 

Basically, her thinking sounds like an elaborate reworking of Nick Redfern's book Body Snatchers in the Desert, minus the plausibility.  Redfern's book is a must read.  I don't really buy his theory either, but he works harder at it.  Privately, I suspect that Redfern was being led into a weird dog-and-pony show by several people working together (his inside sources seem to tell the exact same story, which is normally a tip off to most investigative reporters that there is something funny going on).  Likewise, the timeline of events is not at all smooth.  But at least it sounds almost half possible.

So maybe Jacobsen would like to rework the last part of her book.  Then again, maybe not.  She still seems to be convinced that the members of a Syrian rock band on their way to Vegas were really terrorists plotting a hard trip to paradise and still sounds miffed that every federal investigator who dealt with the case said otherwise.

 And you can skip what I said about Orson Welles.  He was much too tall to pose as Stalin.

Update:  Sometimes you need to quit when you are looking as if you are ahead.  Annie Jacobsen has given an interview to Popular Mechanics which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how good her source must be.

1.  Her anonymous single source (which from a journalist perspective is a really bad way to precede) claims he was out there to reverse engineer the Soviet Horten flying wing.  Really?  We already had them.  Why in the heck would we need to reverse engineer the thing?

2.  He learned part of the story from personal conversations with the surviving "child."  Really?  Since the little nipper would not have a thing to do with reverse engineering and since these type of secret projects work on a need to know basis, why was he having these lovely chat fests?  It just doesn't add up.

3.  The project started in 1951 which is why it is called Area 51?  WTF!!??  The origins of Area 51 predates World War One.  It started into extensive use by the US Navy as a secret gunnery range during World War One.  The number 51 was used on the map as they were sectioning off the area for use.

What does this tell us.  Well, it strongly suggests that Annie Jacobsen isn't exactly into research and fact checking and all of that hard stuff.  It also strongly suggests that her single source is either deranged or pulling her leg.  No matter what, this story is a crock. 

Folk Tale or Not

Both the high and the low of the paranormal field (if we can even call it a "field") is the strange degree to which it lives as a vast minefield of folkloric reports. There are numerous accounts that sound good, really really good, that are simply nothing more (nor less) than snippets from a campfire tale.

Take for example the so-called Mudhouse Mansion that was recently presented in the Forbes online magazine story about the nine scariest abandoned mansions in America. This place has several really scary stories that are widely repeated on various regional ghost hunter sites..  It looks really creepy and seems to be a spook house delight.  Too bad most of the tales are bogus and few people have even bothered to do the slightest check on the house's history.

According to the folklore, the mansion was once the home of some sort of government official (an oddly nameless chap who seems unclear about both his position and exactly what type of government he served - federal, county?).  It was right after the Civil War and he had slaves hidden away on his estate (which is a pretty bold move for someone living in an anti-slave state better known for its links to the Underground Railroad).  He was a cruel slave driver (no pun intended) whose slaves finally rose up and killed him (presumably on a dark and stormy night).  If you are familiar with the real case of the Hickory Hill Slave House in Equality, Illinois, you will sense a strong case of deja vu.  This story appears to be a displaced, revised version of that incident.

Then, some years later (maybe in the 1870s or 1880s), a family moved into the Mudhouse Mansion.  According to this tale, a husband, wife, and three children happily settled in and were never seen to come back out.  For days, neighbors saw the solitary image of a woman in white standing in a window on the second floor of the mansion.  After many days, the police were asked to check in on the family.  To their shock, they discovered all five family members hanging by their necks from the ceiling on the second floor.  The wife, wearing a white dress, was hanging in front of the window where the neighbors thought they saw her standing.

To this day, there are those who swear that they have seen the ghost of this woman, still staring out of this window.  Some have even drawn pictures of this haunting sight.

Too bad the place wasn't built until 1900 (according to the Fairfield County Ohio Auditor's site).  Likewise, the mansion was never known as the Mudhouse (except by recent ghost hunters).  The actual Mudhouse was a more primitive structure across the road (built around the 1840s) that had largely functioned as a stagecoach inn and tavern.  It would fit the dates for these tales but there seems to be no association in the stories to this structure.

What is being called the Mudhouse Mansion is actually better known by local historians as the Hartman House.  It was built and lived in by a couple named Byler until sometime around 1910 when they sold it to the Hartman family.  Years later, the Hartman's daughter inherited the mansion.  Though the folklore insists that the place has been abandoned since 1931,   the daughter simply became a somewhat reclusive old woman who lived there until her death in the late 1960s.  Then the house was inherited by her nephew who has not taken much interest in the property and has pretty much left it alone.  At the Grave Addiction web site, a comment has been left by a local that presents a pretty accurate account of the house:

"I have some information that you might find interesting. I became interested in the house a few months back due to a friend who drives by it everyday. So I started doing my research, and the best book that I found was my father. My father's name is Emmett Pinkstock, and he grew up in the Lancaster region his whole life. He actually lived in the white house next to the "Mudhouse" house, while he was a young boy (it burnt down in a fire a few years back.). His father and the last owner, Helena Hartman, were good friends. He gave me some really great info on the house and the stories. The house was still in order until the late 1960's when Helena passed away. She had inherited the house through her parents, who were farmers at the time they passed. Dad told me of the beauty that was in the house. There were 22 rooms with 10 bedrooms all upstairs...he told me that all the windows upstairs were all stained glass. The outhouses outside held different things. One building behind the back, he explained, was a generator room where they made their own electricity. Another building was divided into two sections for their carriages and a blacksmith shop. Helena was never married, and was a farmer who raised cows on the property. Dad remembers going up as a young boy and helping with the animals and farm. She was famous for her onion gravy that she fixed (Gross, I know!). She was a very simple woman and was a sweetheart by all means. She wore simple dresses and looked like she didn't have a toilet to pee in. He explained to me that when she died, the house was left the way it was. She was never married and had no kids. The house went over to her nephew who already had a fortune of his own. And also with the name of the house, he referred to it as theHartman-Mast House. Mudhousebreakins for the furniture that she kept inside. He explained she had silver everything and clocks throughout the house that were encrusted with rubies. And as far as the current owner, Jeanie Mast, she really isn't that mean old lady that everyone takes her to be. She's in her early 80's who lives right down from the house. I've been able to talk to her about the history, that house is AMAZING! But there is no Bloody Mary's or war general with slaves. Just rumors that came about. The house was one of the first brick ones in Lancaster and was one of the finest. So of course, like she said, you're going to have legends and stories about it."

No slaves, no hangings, no ghosts, no nothin'.  Just a basic set of facts and a remarkably straight forward history.  And it only took about ten minutes to locate the information online.  
 

The Neverending Story

Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record is now a best seller. Various retired military men have gone public with their reports of UFOs disabling nuclear missiles . A growing list of countries are releasing documents confirming that alien objects are real. All in all, it seems to be pretty earth shaking stuff.

So naturally the national press is more focused on Lindsay Lohan's most recent arrest. After all, everyone is bound to be shock that she might be doing drugs.

So basically, aliens could launch a full scale attack, blow up half the cities on Earth, and generally wreak the kind of havoc seen mostly in Michael Bay's films and nobody will report it. Well, maybe a small report at the end of the news hour (mostly using another pointless interview with some debunker who will balance the story with another round of "it was only the planet Venus" jibber jabber).

I mean heck, most of Kean's book is packed with material that has actually been available for a few years, is pretty well documented (mostly by the U.S. military itself) and is widely known within UFO circles. But to the public at large, it is new and mysterious.

The attraction that UFOs have for nuclear missiles (both ours and the old Soviets) is also well known and documented (by both us and the Russians). Nothing exactly new. It is a topic that might be considered of some deep concern (at least if you are kind of concerned about global security and stuff), but it isn't actually new. Of course, a lot of the media isn't exactly paying attention because...well, just because.... Heck, this story is only going to get attention if you can someone factor in a drunk and drugged Lindsay Lohan (maybe doing wheelies around the silo while aliens shoot heat beams at her or something like that).

Heck, I just watched a news story on CNN about a farmer in Georgia trying to catch the mystery intruders who have killed and mutilated 20 of his cows over the past year. It is a classic "mute" case and it is also quite obvious that the reporters covering the story haven't a clue as to what they are chasing.

Despite ample evidence that these cases represent something extremely unusual (and there has been lots of evidence gathered over the years, mostly by honest-to-god police investigators - the FBI have even posted online the material), the cattle mutilations are still blown off as freak acts committed by elusive lone nutcases (I think they are second cousins to the equally odd lone gunmen types). Very little investigation has gone into these cases (and they don't even have to involve the UFO theory - in fact I have often leaned toward the "black op" notion). But the evidence strongly suggests something extremely serious is going on and it most likely involves something that just might be darn serious to public health and safety.

So obviously it is doomed to a small piece on the back page, surrounded by uninformed quotes from whatever dingbat the reporter can find on his speed dial.

After all, they have to save the front page for ol' Lindsay. She is about due for court again.

What If...

Let's say you are the president of the United States and you are having a pretty lazy afternoon, just hanging around the Oval Office catching up on your soaps or whatever. Suddenly, all the phones start ringing as everybody from the State Department to the Joint Chiefs and even the D.C. police are calling about a large saucer shaped craft that just landed on the National Mall. What are you going to do?

OK, after you have taken that stiff drink, what do you do next? It's a good question that doesn't seem to have an actual straight forward answer. Most likely, there is some form of protocol in place. Experience suggests that it will go something along the same lines as what happened in similar situations.

When NASA was about to present the possibility that they had found fossils in a Martian rock, the results were first taken to then President Bill Clinton in order to prepare him to prepare the nation for the shocking discovery of...well, of like maybe dead Martians (by the way, so far the world has pretty much been capable of dealing with this discovery - much more so than some geologists). Naturally, Pres. Clinton admittedly told the news to his main spin doctor, Dick Morris. In turn, Morris made a quick retreat to a hotel room and blabbed the whole story out to a call girl. OK, this isn't exactly much of a protocol. According to most reports, the call girl wasn't even all that impressed by the story. Guess she wasn't into geology.

In 2004, an asteroid appeared to have been heading toward the earth. President George W. Bush was immediately alerted and for the next nine hours the White House held phone briefings with various other foreign heads of state in order to prepare them for an impact. Oddly enough, while all of this chatting was going on, nothing was actually done that might have suggested any kind of attempt at the most basic level of public preparedness. The debate was kept secret and, I suspect, was mostly about who got to race for the bunker first. Screw the public.

So the known track record for certain types of events isn't exactly fantastic. One would hope that the current administration might do a better job. The current farce with the Gulf oil spill suggests otherwise. President Obama might be tempted to simply form a committee and then move on to something else.

Which is too bad. Alien contact is not such a strange possibility. It is even possible that it has already happen, the so-called Wow signal being just one of several distinct moments. Unfortunately, the known details of such events suggest that if it were left strictly to the scientific community, they would simply dick around with the issue for a few decades and then, maybe, publish a paper.

At the political level, the only known decision concerning aliens appears to be the infamous order by Harry S. Truman to shoot them down. Who knows, maybe the aliens need to be taught a lesson or two. But an itchy trigger finger doesn't exactly set the stage for a very productive greeting.

It also doesn't help that no real public effort has been made to prepare the world for this highly plausible moment. Sure, a long history of Hollywood movies and TV shows have sort of prepared the general public for alien contact. But the effort has been, at best, a little half baked and poorly defined. The main upside is that most of the general public is half-equipped to deal with the concept, contrary to the panic-inducing notions of the old Brookings Institute report.

Ironically, the general public may now be in better mental condition to deal with alien contact than most of the so-called intellectual class. For the past fifty years, the subject of aliens has been successfully treated with scorn and ridicule. A sizable amount of the intellectual class (academics, scientists, etc.) have largely treated the subject as a goofy idea and are extremely ignorant of the current situation. In turn, they are the people most invested in an intellectual understanding of reality that will be at best sorely tested (if not torn asunder) by the process of alien contact. They have the most to loose. In all likelihood, they will be the ones who will be least capable of grasping the issues if, and when, events unfold. In many respects, first contact will be the end of the world as they know it. Likewise, the higher the intellect, the greater the fall. Many of them will never recover from the blow and I suspect that an entire generation will go missing from the shock. The average person will most likely do OK, but the tenured faculty folks can simply cash it in the minute the first craft publicly lands.

Which is too bad. They are also the same people whose help in understanding the situation will be critically needed. But they are unprepared for this event. They have had a lifetime of denial and denial is a hard habit to easily break.

Take Me to Your Leaders

At the opening of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Stilll, the alien had the common decency to plop right down on the Capital Mall and make himself known. OK, he got shot for his effort, but it was a nice enough of a straight forward gesture.

But in reality, these critters from so far away just don't seem very interested in making such a grandstanding stunt. Not once have they popped up at noon in front of the White House demanding a photo op with any of our elected officials. Heck, the only world leader known to have even gotten close to an alien was Richard Nixon (or at least according to the Jackie Gleeson story)and that was only a dead one. Otherwise, our outlandish visitors seem quite disinterested in dealing with representatives of our ruling class.

Of course the history of many modern presidents has been laced with UFOs. Harry S. Truman ordered them to be shot down. Jimmy Carter spotted one. Ronald Reagan chased them. But only Tricky Dicky had hands-on experience.

Or at least until now. In a recent BBC news report, the president of Russia has been asked to personally investigate the claim by a regional president that he has been in contact with aliens. This claim by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, was made during a TV interview and has provoked concern about both his sanity and, just on the off chance that this is real, what exactly is the government protocol for dealing with it.

OK, by all account Ilyumzhinov is a tad eccentric. He appears to have an interest in being a Buddhist styled dictator who believes that he is able to influence people through ESP and has a couple of aides who were convicted of murdering one of his political opponents (not that he knew anything about it - guess the ESP was off that night). So his bio is just weird enough to suggest that alien contact is pretty normal for this guy.

But the totally weird thing is that he is not the only one. In some strange way, the world of alien encounter is creeping into the mainstream political culture and it is a global event. Not that long ago Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of the current prime minister of Japan confided to the press about her ride to Venus with her alien friends. Though her story sounds like a retread of George Adamski, she is quite serious and her husband seems to support her belief.

Then there is Fife Symington, the former governor of Arizona. During the Phoenix Lights sightings in 1997, Symington staged a press conference primarily to make fun of the numerous UFO sightings. Ten years later, he came public with his own sightings at the time and become quite upfront that there was something from another planet whizzing over Arizona that night. Of course, with Arizona's current laws, I doubt if they will ever want to try landing.

The list goes on. It is almost like a fad. It is also extremely interesting. It doesn't matter if the various stories are either real or phony, the concept of alien encounter is making a slow but steady creep into high office. It is almost as if we have gone beyond disclosure without any disclosing along the way. It is simply becoming a given.

So it may be fair to ask: When Obama talks about illegal aliens, which kind is he talking about?

Katie Bar the Door

Stephen Hawking has just done the world a great favor. With his comments published today in the London Times the so-called smartest man on earth has just made it so of official that aliens exist and are lurking somewhere nearby. OK, he claims this on the basis of math and probability, but this is his area and he seems quite confident in his statement.

Which means we can now get down to the real issue: Do we greet them as space brothers or Help! Murder! Police! and Katie bar the door and tell grandpa to get out the shotgun!!!!!

These have always been the two main schools of thought on the matter. Kind of limited and certainly very simplistic, but this is about the best anyone has ever come up with concerning the issue. Each view is driven by obvious human needs. The aliens must be feared school is obviously rooted in human fear of the unknown. Well that, and our own long history of treating other cultures in various nasty and brutal manners. Gee whiz, why wouldn't an alien race do to us what we did to the American Indians (and the Africans and the Asians and on and on).

Likewise, the Space Brothers school is a strong extension of the I-Love-You-And-You-Love-Me childlike need for "adult" approval. We want them to be space brothers because we need their acceptance in order to bolster our own sense of low self-esteem.

Either way, we are hopelessly focused upon our own nightmares and dreams and want to project that upon the alien "other." Too bad. Since they are aliens, they may not be all that incline toward either enslaving us or patting our heads. Most likely, they will be rooted in their own psychology and social values and we can only hope to figure out what any of that means. They will operate according to their own needs, social values, and cultural traditions. It may or may not be good from our viewpoint. It will be up to us, as humans, to try and figure that out as fast as possible.

We will have no reasons to believe that any alien visitors love us. Nor do we have any reasons to believe that they are here to enslave us. The truth will be somewhere in the murky middle. It will be up to us to establish the means of handling contact and analyzing the intent of any such visitors. Each case will be different and every instance must be approached in a manner that is neither friendly nor hostile.

Hawking seems to suggest that we should turn off the lights, bolt the door, and not answer the phone. Tempting thought. Too bad this is a completely pointless notion. They already know that we are here and if any body out there is interested, they will find us quite quickly. So we need to be dealing with the best ways to prepare for global contact. The hiding option is no good.

And by the way, so is the hostile option. It's a safe bet that any alien race that is capable of getting here (and undoubtedly, there are some) will also be advance enough to blow our butts off if they are so inclined. No matter how advance some of our weapons may be, we will still end up looking like a pack of cave dwelling nitwits waving some sticks in their face (if they have one).

So what we need is less hardware and more rational, clear-headed thinking. I suspect we need to do this now. Actually, we should have been doing this many years ago.

Strange Days Indeed

Once, when I was working on an article about UFOs, I sent a letter to Jacques Vallee regarding any comments he wished to make concerning his current thoughts on the subject. A few weeks later, I received a photocopy of a newspaper article entitled "Kooks, Nuts and Weirdos" with a handwritten note that this is what he thought.

Maybe I was missing something, but I kind of got the impression that he didn't feel like talking about it. I have long admired much of his writing (and still highly recommend most of his books as essential reading), but there was definitely an attitude. At the time, I figured he was looking to drop the whole subject.

Then again, maybe not. Over at the BoingBoing.net web site, Vallee has posted several interesting pieces on the subject of crop circles. They are both a quick read but very concise and sort of thought provoking. Kind of. Actually, the theory that crop circles might be the result of some super secret microwave weapon has been kicked around over the years. Not a bad theory. So far, impossible to prove in any way. Doesn't help that the only obvious use (thus far) of such a mysterious weapon is to spend every summer zapping the English countryside just to jack up the locals. By the way, the complex and extremely well developed artistic quality of many of these circles seem beyond the skills of the U.S. Army. So it must be a Navy project.

But what is most interesting about Vallee's work is the reactions he is getting in the comments posted at BoingBoing. Basically, many of the comments seem confused by most of the statements Vallee makes concerning the known qualities of non-man made crop circles. A lot of people have very strong opinions about the subject backed up by no information what so ever. So it would seem that many of the known facts listed in the piece by Vallee is a major surprise to a lot of readers.

So maybe Vallee has actually done a public service. He quickly lays out the main proven facts before moving into his theory. It has been known for quite a few years that at least some amount of crop circles are produced by some type of high energy process and, most likely, does not have a human origin. Sure, there are also a lot of them that are produced by people who have embraced the concept as an art form. Some of them even do some mighty pretty work. But some are simply not handmade, if you know what I mean.

Where I do split from Vallee is with the secret microwave weapon theory. OK, granted that the U.S. military has some really weird project going on and, most likely, got some weapons stashed away that are pretty far out (e.g. the laser cannon). But blasting at farm fields for no rational reason just doesn't seem to make any sense. Besides, we have lots of secret bases and test zones all over the globe just for that purpose.

I am also curious as to why Vallee seems to ignore the research that has been done in attempting to decode crop circles. No, I don't mean the New Age trace induced stuff. I'm talking about the work that was being pursued by Gerald Hawkins before his death a few years ago. Best known for his decoding of Stonehenge back in 1963, Hawkins became increasingly convinced that some of the crop circles were a form of code closely related to both math and music.

Maybe he was on to something, or maybe not. He died before he completed the work. But his theories were extremely interesting and his approach would seemingly be of interest to someone like Vallee. Then again, maybe not.

Seems that Vallee is more focused on a bunch of G.I. Joes whizzing around in their saucer-shaped jets blasting microwaves at the cows.

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

There are some extremely intelligent people to be found in the field of UFO and paranormal research. There are many very sincere and honest folks searching for aliens, bigfoot critters, and assorted other things that go bump in the night.

Then there are people like Sean David Morton. OK, I don't normally like to kick a guy while he is down, but the fraud charges brought against him by the Security Exchange Commission comes as no surprise to anyone who has been aware of his very curious career. For the past several decades, Morton has repeatedly made claims that were, at best, wild exaggerations and, in some cases, out right falsehoods. In the past, he has always operated within the context of UFOs and the paranormal and managed to stay within a weird zone in which facts were hard to find and cross referencing is often unheard of and rarely pursued.

For example, he used to claim that he had discovered a mountain peak near Area 51 from which you could see the world's most famous top secret base. OK, actually it was well known already to the locals and he simply heard about it from someone. Likewise, he insisted that the people living near the mountain had named it after him. Nobody had named anything after him and this story was just part of the come on for his guided tour of "Morton Peak." All you had to pay him was $99.99. The only mystery to this racket was the $99.99. Why not just charge a $100. Better still, just pack a lunch and go on your own.

As stupid and expensive as it was, Morton did get the occasional customer. It was about this time that he started calling himself the world's foremost UFO authority. That was how I first heard about him.

As previously related, I had been approached by the original PR person for a company that was looking to release a videotape of an alien under interrogation at Area 51 . Though the provider of the tape was a man who stayed nameless (for fear of presumed government killers - or maybe just the IRS), there was a strange ensemble of characters involved behind the scene in peddling this tape. Aside from Art Bell (who in those days popped up behind every stunt since the Piltdown Man), one of the characters was (to me) an unknown chap with a set of claims about his personal reputation that seemed odd. I had never heard of this "foremost authority" and I figured I better check him out.

That took longer than I had expected. His name was largely unknown in virtually every rational list I could find on UFOs. As I moved deeper into the New Age zone, he was still a pretty unknown figure. Finally, I arrived at the Nevada researchers backstabbing, infighting zone. There, I found his name. A lot of the folks who were involved in "work" near Area 51 (OK, a lot of it consisted of standing around in the dark waiting for lights to buzz overhead) had pretty bad things to say about Morton. In turn, he had bad things to say about them. There was no love being lost in the dry desert air.

But all this told me was that he had a strong ego, a high opinion about himself, and pretty poor skills at public relations. Then I heard back from the PR person. The "boys" (Bell, Morton etc.) were busy trying to sell release rights to the video to several companies at once without telling any of the bidding companies that another company was already involved. Likewise, they were undercutting the PR by selling the rights to a rival British magazine without telling anyone. By the way, they were selling all of these rights without establishing any sign of ownership. The whole thing quickly took a nose dive into business oblivion while the boys were mostly interested in getting lots of people to pay cash up front.

The video, by the way, was undoubtedly bogus. Which is OK. If it were real, then the high handed (and largely dubious) antics from the boys would be appalling. As it was, it merely rounded off the freak show feel to the whole scam.

At the time, I was largely interested in the strange questions concerning Art Bell and his possible connection with the Defense Intelligence Agency (well, his phone system and computer server were obviously hooked up to the DoD system). Morton just appeared to have been a minor grifter with an ego problem. He hadn't yet discovered his psychic skills in investment opportunities. But I am not really surprised by the charges now leveled against him by the S.E.C. These guys have a habit of over reaching.

But at least he made Inside Edition. Finally, he is world famous for something.

Freakin' in the Fun House Part 3

I figured that one of the best ways to "bone up" was by interviewing a variety of people who just might be considered knowledgeable in an area where knowledge was both thin and open to debate. So I compiled a list of folks, both pro and con, and began calling.

Most of the people I talked with made for pretty good, solid interviews. Peter Davenport of the National Center for UFO Reporting was kind of fun as a combination of cheer leader ("They are definitely here!") and easy conversationalist about the topic. John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies provided a surprisingly open ended philosophical discussion of the topic. In some kooky way, his wife also made the call endearing by her odd interruptions as she was preparing to leave on a trip. We may be getting visited by men from Mars, but the home front is never far away.

Then I finally had to make the obligatory phone call to Joe Nickell at The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Suddenly, the process got weird.

The first thing I couldn't help but notice was that The Committee used a computer switchboard and then a receptionist. Everybody else took their own calls, for crying out loud. In fact, nobody else had the money for this kind of set up. So I guess things must be pretty profitable on the nay saying venue.

Then, once I finally got to chat with Nickell, I found myself getting a little annoyed. Aside from the fact that his opening joke made no particular sense (he insisted that people confused his name with Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City Bombing - a connection that I didn't want to waste time thinking about), I also kept getting the odd impression that since I was a reporter, I must also be an idiot. OK, sure, the two often do seem to come in tandem, but enough already.

Then he had the odd habit of trying to shift the conversation into a debunking of all conspiracy theories concerning the Kennedy Assassination. Since I wasn't interviewing him about anything that had to do with that day in Dallas, his repeated sliding into this area never made any sense. Besides, like virtually every other God fearing American alive, I am quite aware that it was a conspiracy (a pretty oblivious one, I might add). So how dumb does he think I am?

Sure, I got a couple of freaky high points out of him. Nickell went on at great length about how most Americans are scientifically misinformed and blamed it all on too much emphasis on the Humanities and not enough on Science. I was already quite aware that Mr. Nickell's own Ph.D was in English, which last I checked was in the Humanities. Likewise, his own scientific background is quite limited (mostly pertaining to issues concerning document verification - his real area of expertise).

Then he got into unloading about Stanton Friedman. This started out in response to my questions about Roswell (though I was more versed in the investigative work of Kevin Randle rather than Friedman). But for Joe, it was suddenly personal. He began a long rant about how Friedman had the nerves to call himself a scientist, to pose as some one versed in scientific matter, to even dare call himself a "Nuclear physicist." Then there was a long pause. Presumably lawyers danced through Nickell's head. "...Well, he is a nuclear physicist but he only has a Master's degree."

Before this interview, I had my doubts about CSICoP. After this interview, all doubts were removed. I don't know who is actually paying the bills for these guys, but they are not getting their monies worth. These white boys are a pack of total nimrods.

Freakin' in the Fun House Part 2

The tape that Victor was peddling was the alleged interrogation of a supposed captured extraterritorial at Areas 51. Victor's claim was that he had smuggled it out of the facility and wanted to make it public because he was appalled at the government's treatment of the ET. Due to the top secret nature of the material, he had to maintain a high level of secrecy concerning himself and the background to the tape. He also was hoping to cut a deal for world wide release via a major video distributor with lots of moola for a tape that, if real, would actually be federal property and not legally usable for commercial purposes (a point that no body, including the distributor, ever raised).

Since a super-secret security organization working for a hyper-secret wing of the utterly secret invisible government was searching for both him and the tape, Victor was unwilling to give the press his name and could only be interviewed by a phone connected to an encryption system. Due to the alleged dangerous nature of his predicament, the encryption was the finest piece of technology that was available at Radio Shack (for approximately $20). He also had a fondness for using pay phones located in Nevada.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I kind of suspected that these security precautions would in no way misled the NSA. Nor the CIA. Maybe, just maybe, it would stall the FBI. I have heard that some G-Men still have trouble accessing e-mails.

I did suspect that the whole smoke-and-mirror show was designed to set the stage for the press. Unfortunately, I was the only press at this point and the magazine I worked for wasn't offering money for the story. For the publicist, this wasn't a problem. But we were not so sure about the boys on the other end of the arrangements.

A strange group of people had gathered around the tape even though they appeared to have no actual contractual connections to the material. One was the host of a national late night radio show. The other was a UFO investigator who kept insisting that they had named a mountain peak after him near Area 51. Behind the scene, they were increasingly dictating terms to the pr person though no one seemed too clear about what authority they actually had in the matter.

Negotiations for the video release was going on with an established movie company. As part of the deal, they were hoping to get a special effects artist lined up to swear that the production could not have been the result of make up or FX work. It was becoming obvious why they wanted the person I was dealing with to be the publicist She had began her career as an assistant to one of the most acclaimed special effect/make up artists in the business. They wanted him to be in the program. She was their contact to woe him.

There was, perhaps, one slight problem. Neither the publicist nor the make up master were sold on the tape's authenticity. Instead, they were privately guessing that it was a puppet (an opinion that I shared).

While the negotiations for the video wore on, I began researching both the material and the people. I figured I better find out a little more about what I had just gotten myself into.

TO BE CONTINUED

Freakin' in the Fun House - Part 1

Back in the mid-1990s, I was (briefly) the exclusive European correspondent for a news story about the capture of an extraterritorial alien. More precisely, I had (very briefly) the inside track for interviews with various people who claimed to have been directly and/or indirectly connected with a videotape purportedly smuggled out of the alleged Area 51.

And if you think I just used a lot of qualifiers, just wait till you hear the rest of the story. All names have been dropped to protect both the guilty and the chumps.

At the time, I had been writing free lance film articles for a British science fiction magazine. Technicality, I was considered a foreign correspondent, even though my old trench coat was the only British item involved in the job. Everything else was an easy telecommunicate from Ohio (though keeping up with the time differential was often a bear).

At the time, the editor for the magazine's American office was routinely in contact with a woman who was the agent for an actor who had a major recurring role on a popular science fiction series (a lot of this story does indeed have a friend-of-a-friend quality). Their relationship was just chatty enough that the agent felt comfortable asking the editor for help with a problem. The agent had just agreed to help coordinate PR for the impending release of an odd videotape and did we know anyone who knew anything about UFOs?

I got nominated primarily because no one else wanted to deal with the issue. I had a passing interest in the subject but was way out of date with the information. However, the magazine was preparing for the premiere of the series Dark Skies and I was already having to do some basic research....So I accepted the nomination.

Besides, I figured that it would be good for laughs. Kind of like a carny show.

Admittedly, one of the first problems was the provenance of the video. The story was that the provider of the tape had worked at Area 51 (a claim never substantiated) who had smuggled the tape (by means never described) out of the Dreamland facility. For security reasons, the man was only known to the people preparing the tape's release by a code name and even the code name was not to be provided to me or any other member of the press.

When the agent told me all of this, I took a guess and asked her if the code name was Victor. There was a moment's silence on the phone.

"How did you know that?"

"Just an educated hunch."

Victor had been the name of a captured alien in the John Lear hoax a few years earlier. I was wondering if there might have been a connection.

At the time I only had a passing familiarity with the John Lear/Bill Cooper material, but everything was already feeling like some sort of half baked cross between that warped tale and the alien autopsy hoax a few years earlier on Fox.

Which was OK. I was definitely looking for a side show and I was pretty convinced that I just found the way to the freaks tent....

TO BE CONTINUED

Search For the Great Flying Whatsit

I saw my first flying triangle as a child. Actually, it has been my only flying triangle. I'm not even sure what I really saw. It was less a sighting and seemed more like a perceptual glitch.

This was back in the mid-1960s (probably 1964) and a wave of UFO sightings had been taking place around the country. This was back in the days when newspapers and TV stations actually reported such sightings and the news accounts were extremely inspiring to youthful imaginations. So a group of us kids in my neighborhood spent a perfectly lovely summer afternoon enjoying fresh air (we still had that back in those days too) and scanning the sky for anything that we thought was moving.

That is when I spotted a solid black triangle shape moving like a silent silhouette against the pristine blue of the day. Though it seemed to have been high up in the sky, I distinctly saw what appeared to have a single bright red light at its center. The vision lasted barely 5 seconds and then it vanished just as quickly as it had appeared. It was the first time I truly appreciated the phase “out of the blue.”

At the time, I thought maybe I had something in my eye because the whole experience certainly didn't seem exactly real. Likewise, I undoubtedly had my mind focused on seeing a UFO, and obviously my imagination did not want to be disappointed. But oddly enough, I was looking for those saucer-shaped thingies that I was use to seeing in the movies. I had never heard of flying triangles. Somehow it didn't make sense and I wouldn't know anything about this form until many years later (not until the early 1980s).

So what did I see? If I were a debunker, I could comfortably write the whole thing off as a combination of too much television and too little lemonade. What else do you expect from a bunch of dumb kids on a hot summer day who probably should be doing something more with their time than wasting it on a wild goose chase into phony land. Besides, we were kids, so our opinions don't count and it is just anecdotal data anyway, so go blow junior.

On the other hand, I know that I actually did see it. It wasn't that hot of a day. I like to think of myself as being reasonably intelligent. There really wasn't anything in my eye and I knew that at the time. Besides, I wasn't alone. Two of the other kids saw it as well.

But since it wasn't saucer shaped, we couldn't be sure what it was and were mainly left scratching our heads. It simply wasn't the shape we were seeking and it is often amazing the ease with which we forget something that doesn't fit our expectations.

EVP

What exactly is a EVP? The mystery of Electronic Voice Phenomena has long flown under the paranormal radar. Yet it does exist, which is something I can state from first hand experience.

I wish it didn't. For whatever reason, it is a phenomena that genuine spooks me. I think I was exposed to an episode of the old Twilight Zone at too impressible of an age (it was the one concerning phone calls from the dead). The thought gives me the willies and I often think twice before picking up the phone.

For those unfamiliar with EVP, they are voices (and other sounds of unknown origins) picked up on tape equipment or other forms of audio amplifiers. Sometimes they appear to be the voices of the dead and increasingly ghost hunters have used recorders as a mean of attempting to communicate with the great beyond. Other times they appear to be any number of other forms of disembodied voices, with one web site purporting to have recordings of angels singing (though one of the tapes sound more like Alvin and the Chipmunks played backwards).

Though not widely discussed, the phenomena is well known among recording engineers. Since all sort of radio waves create various forms of interference, it is usually a safe bet that the noise in the background of the tape has more to do with a local radio station rather than another dimension. But every so often, something strange occurs that is not easily explainable.

My own most impressive experience took place when I was once setting up the A/V system in an auditorium for a lecture one night. It was early and only I and the photographer were in the auditorium at the time. The event was a special presentation for a museum and it was a "high pressure" evening and everything was expected (actually, ordered was more the word) to go without a hitch.

The photographer was unloading his equipment at the back of the auditorium while I was just start to set up the PA system. Suddenly, a voice came full blast over the PA speakers, calling the photographer's name. The voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the director of the institution, who at the time was having dinner with selected guests at a restaurant on the other side of town. The director was infamous for his highly neurtic behavior patterns and extremely rough shod handling of employees. So I wasn't surprised to find that the photographer had broken out sweat.

I told the guy not to worry, that it was just a freak coincident caused by the PA system and radio interference. I didn't bother to tell him that the system wasn't on at the time and that there was no way this could have happened. I had a strange feeling that he didn't need to hear the truth at the moment.

Sometimes you just let sleeping dogs lie.

The Aliens Are Coming Part Two

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.

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.

First Time For Everybody

The world is a pretty straight forward place and material reality is all there is to it. Or so I tried to remind myself the first time I encountered a ghost. Unfortunately, the thought was neither convincing nor reassuring.

Instead, I knew that I was witnessing something that was not scientifically suppose to exist but which was there no matter what and it didn't appear at all interested in what science had to say one way or the other. It also didn't seem very interested in the profoundly stupid wide-eyed look on my face. I have since learned that this is a common facial expression when people are having their first "experience."

A long time ago (longer than I care to admit), I was a film student at Ohio University. Yes, the infamous Athens, the town with almost as many folk tales as bars. If half of the ghostly stories about Athens were true, you would expect to meet headless ghouls at every street corner.

In truth, many of the tales have to do with youthful imaginations and a common love for telling creepy tales. One year, I lived in a house rumored to be haunted. The proof, it was said, was the way doors mysteriously swung open by themselves. It was true that various doors did just that. However, this had more to do with the fact that there wasn't a right angle anywhere in the house and the only mystery was figuring out how to keep any of the doors shut due to the way they were all hung.

Many tales about Athens has less to do with spirits and more to do with a unique combination of high ground water, shoddy construction, bad wiring and a complete lack of housing inspectors.

Which may be why I had ignored the rumors about the haunting in the hallways of the film department. Live and learn is all I can say.

Some people claimed to have heard the sounds of footsteps and weeping in the hallway outside of the editing room. A few reported odd noises late at night on the office side of the building. A couple of braver souls had actually attempted to trace the sounds only to find nothing. Several debunkers insisted that it was simply the sound of the stream pipes in the building. I had sided with the stream pipe theory. I should state right now that I have been known to be wrong.

How wrong became apparent when I was staying late one night watching a film in the screening room. It was after midnight and no one else was on the floor except me. I had finished the movie, placed the 16mm reels back into the container and had stepped across the hall to put the print away in an office when it happened.

At the end of the hallway was a fire escape door. Like most fire escape doors, it was locked and could only be opened by pushing the crash bar. Further, it was connected to a heavy spring that actually made the door difficult to open. Once, when we had to open it, it had taken several of us to do so. This is why I was slightly surprised when the door opened and closed all by itself.

I could have sworn that I heard the sound of someone moving a few feet down the hall and then stopping. Since I knew what I had just seen couldn't have happened, I told myself that there was no need to panic. So I calmly opened the office door, calmly threw the film box onto the nearest chair in the room, then very calmly closed the door and with extreme calmness fumbled with the keys until I locked it. I was so calm that you could barely see the flop sweat rolling down my brow.

Since I was determined not to show fear, I left the building in a steady and orderly manner and immediately made my way to the nearest bar for a couple of stiff ones. However, as I went to leave, I did turn around and uttered a respectable good night. For some odd reason, that only seemed like the decent thing to do.

Over the next several months, I discovered that the other rumors were, by in large, pretty accurate. The "racket", as we came to call it, would usually start up round midnight and continue until 3 am. Footsteps and soft weeping noises would move up and down the hallway for several hours. At first, the sounds would be disturbing. But you had to choice to either get your work done in the editing room or else, and many of us developed various techniques for dealing with the situation. One student would play heavy metal music and sip from a bottle of even stronger spirits through the night to steady his nerves. Or at least that was his excuse. Most of us simply learned to ignore it. Fortunately, it never crossed the doors into the editing room.

I had already learned to ignore it when a colleague of mine had decided to put in a long night on a project that was on a tight deadline. He had never stayed this late in the editing room and since his original background was psychology, he had largely dismissed the rumors as misperceptions. We were working at editing tables positioned side by side and he had already made it clear that he was planning to be wrapped with his project by 1am.

So we were quietly working away when the magic hour came and the "racket" kicked in. By this time, I am playing no particular attention until it was nearly 1am and I just realized that my partner at the next table hadn't moved for the last 45 minutes. I turned and noticed that he had a profoundly stupid wide eyed look on his face.

In a quiet voice, he asked "Is that what I think it is?"

I nodded yes. "By the way, I thought you were planning on leaving about now?"

"That's OK," he replied. "I don't have to rush."

We spent the rest of the night getting a lot of work done. Strangely enough, neither one of us had to go to the bathroom anytime during the night. I am sure that the fact that the bathroom was out in the hallway had nothing to do with this.

"Phony perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

-Bela Lugosi (from the movie The Black Cat)

Leave it to ol' Bela is perfectly sum up my own attitude toward the paranormal. Sometimes I really don't know which way I feel or think about the subject. There are many claims made which sound silly and, upon closer examination, turn out to be extremely silly. Then there are the reports that are quite preposterous and, the more one looks into it, very hard to either explain or forget.

I once had some neighbors who were convinced that they had a ghost stalking their attic. They described every spooky sounding stomp, scratch and squeal of some strange entity that routinely scrambled across the attic floor. In fact, they described these ghostly hauntings so well, that I realized that they had squirrels in their attic.

Many hauntings do have such equally banal explanations. Some do not.

I once talked to a woman who had been stationed by the U.S. Army in England. She lived off base in a quaint little house that had been recently built on what had use to be a parkway in the village. The parkway had been very popular with people walking their dogs. So popular that an elderly gentleman who had been deceased for a few years still took his dog for a daily walk and routinely came in through one kitchen wall and out the other. The first couple of visitations she found disturbing, but after awhile got use to it.

Some tales are just out right ridiculous. Some are not. And quite a few are in between. It is my fondest hope that over the years I have at least learned how to tell some of the differences.

There are certainly some basic rules that I have learned and that I strongly adhere to. These are my general guidelines for studying any claim of the paranormal.

A. Most eyewitnesses are seriously trying to tell you what they believe to have seen, heard and felt. Often, the core description is reasonably reliable. It is their interruption of what they witnessed that becomes tricky. They can report the basic perceived "facts." It is mostly their attempt to explain what they have observed that gets all balled up into their own predetermined notions. This is sometimes called analytic overlay.

B. The vast majority of people involved in paranormal events are extremely sane, quite normal and rarely have been indulging in any legal or illegal substances. The kook, crackpot and weirdo theory just doesn't hold.

C. Extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary proof. This favorite chant of the debunkers (which was not coined by Carl Sagan) is simply anti-scientific rubbish. The whole point of science is that it is a great leveling force. All claims, no matter what they may be, must pass the same standards of proof. There are no exceptions to this anywhere in the history of scientific theory and methodology.

D. You can indeed fool some of the people some of the time. Charlatans, con artists and those who tell tale tales depend upon this and have an amazing ability to wheedle their way with bogus claims and stories. We call them bullshit artists and you always have to be on the watch for them.

E. Likewise, you can fool all of the people some of the time. These people are called "debunkers." Many debunkers have a scientific attitude but a complete lack of scientific training. A good example was the late Philip J. Klass. He had a perfectly respectable career as a technical writer and editor, but he routinely made a pretense to levels of scientific knowledge that he simply did not possess and often invented bogus scientific claims that were even more bizrre than the UFO sightings he kept trying to disprove. Klass had a near religious belief in ball plasma and its capabilities for chasing farmers across fields in the middle of the night.

Debunkers often exhibit a blind faith in 19th century Newtonian physics and seem to be waging a long lost crusade against the post-Einstein age. In some ways, I have a slight sense of sympathy with them. I have only recently allowed myself to accept that we live in a so-called "multiverse." Personally, I don't like the idea. It strikes me as kind of messy and complicated and the whole idea gives me a headache. Unfortunately, the multiverse doesn't care if it gives me a headache.

F. Never try to explain a mystery by invoking an enigma. This is a bad habit of folks from the "New Age" persuasion. I once was part of a panel on crop circles that was largely dominated by someone explaining how the circles were formed by aliens using their superior vibrational planes to open new channels of consciousness yada yada yada. The guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about and none of it made any sense and it was all based upon papering over one unexplained event by referring to a boatload of inexplicable notions versed in the language of pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo. Much like the multiverse, this too gives me a headache.

Finally, there is the one rule that is the most important. Don't worry about finding the right answer. Sometimes, it just isn't about finding the answer. Often, it is really about discovering the right questions. I seem to recall that the ancient Greek philosophers said the same thing, only in a much fancier form.