Sightings of alleged UFOs occur pretty often, but it's rare indeed for one to affect scheduled air traffic. We should not be surprised, then, to find that such an event has made the news. What was the mysterious object that allegedly hovered over Hangzhou's Xiaoshan Airport, China's ninth-busiest, on the evening of July 7, 2010? At about 8:40 pm local time, a UFO was reported by a flight crew that was preparing to land. As a precaution, flight controllers delayed or redirected eighteen flights.

As is often the case, conflicting and confusing accounts of the UFO incident make it difficult to determine exactly what happened. Reporters want an exciting story, and UFOlogists want to win converts. They will typically grab onto any photo or video that is supposed to represent the object and report as fact practically any claim that is made regardless of its source or veracity. Many images of the alleged airport UFO--images that were supposed to show the UFO over Hangzhou but obviously showed a different object--soon began circulating in news stories and on the Internet. Most frequently seen is an impressive-looking rectangular object, from which a beam of light shines out underneath (see the accompanying news report at http://tinyurl.com/273h68h). At first I thought the image was the reflection of an interior fluorescent light fixture, as may be seen when looking out a window. After studying the other photos in this series and reading some of the online discussions, I agree that it's probably an exposure of a few seconds showing a helicopter with flashing lights, shining a searchlight on the ground. In any case, because these photos were posted to the Internet a year before the sighting, they obviously have nothing to do with the July 7 incident. Other photos accompanying news accounts of this incident show a rocket launch, probably that of the Russian Progress M-06M supply ship launched to the International Space Station on June 30.

However, it is significant that the brilliant Venus in the evening sky at that time, was nearing its maximum brightness before setting about two-and-a-half hours after the sun. One would think it impossible for a group of educated and seemingly rational people to mistake the brilliant planet Venus for a UFO, but experience shows otherwise. "No single object has been misinterpreted as a 'flying saucer' more often than the planet Venus. The study of these mistakes proves quite instructive, for it shows beyond all possible dispute the limitations of sensory perception and the weakness of accounts relating shapes and motions of point sources or objects with small apparent diameters," wrote the well-known pro-UFOlogist Jacques Vallee in his 1966 book Challenge to Science.

A brief video snippet of the "UFO" about twenty seconds into a Chinese-language news report on the incident shows a tiny, bright dot against a dark sky (see http://tinyurl.com/2c9ft7o). It might be a camcorder image of Venus, although the slight fuzziness on the left side may possibly result from an off-axis image. Alternatively, it might instead show the plumes of a distant rocket launch. Without more information, we cannot say for sure. Officials said that the object did not turn up on radar. Ruan Zhouchang, spokesperson for the Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, said through an interpreter, "There was an unknown object seen in the skies over the airport. So according to our regulations we had to close the airspace. Aircraft movements were suspended from 8:45 pm to 9:41 pm." However, the photo accompanying that news report, supposedly showing the object, appeared to be that of a high-altitude contrail (see http://tinyurl.com/2vd2zuz).

A 2001 incident occurring at the Barnaul Airport in southern Siberia sounds very much like the incident at the Xiaoshan Airport. The Agence-France Presse reported from Moscow on January 27, 2001:

An airport in southern Siberia was shut down for an hour and a half on Friday when an unidentified flying object (UFO) was detected hovering above its runway, the Interfax news agency reported. The crew of an Il-76 cargo aircraft of the company "Altaï" refused to take off, claiming they saw a luminescent object hovering above the runway of the [sic] Siberia's Barnaul airport, local aviation company director Ivan Komarov was quoted as saying.

As in Hangzhou, nothing appeared on the radar. UFO investigator Eric Maillot--from the Cercle Zetetique, a French rationalist organization--looked into this case. He discovered that the time and direction of the UFO matched the position of Venus. And because the crew reported seeing just one bright object, not two, Maillot concluded that the "UFO" reported by the crew was Venus and not some separate object (www.ufologie.net/htm/afp270100.htm).

An official investigation by Chinese aviation experts was launched into the incident at Xiaoshan Airport. They concluded that the object probably was "an airplane on descent reflecting light" (see http://tinyurl.com/2bw272q), one which apparently kept descending for an hour or more. They said it might also have been an "unexpected flying vehicle," whatever that is. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to conclude, "Air Traffic Controllers at one of our major Chinese airports mistook Venus for an unknown hovering aircraft."

Whatever may or may not have hovered above Hangzhou, a feverish UFO excitement seemed to grip the region. On July 14, from about 8-9 pm, a UFO was reported in Shaping Park in Chongqing. This sighting also sounds very much like Venus. But according to the Chinese newspaper Southeast Express, at about 11:30 pm on July 9, two men in Xiamen reported seeing "dozens of vertical luminous beams" in the sky. According to one witness, identified only as Mr. Wang, "At first, there were only five of them, hanging very low in the sky, but after a short while, the number increased to about fifty, and they were higher and higher, just like a stave hanging in the sky." The story was accompanied by an impressive-looking photo showing hovering yellow lights in a mostly-cloudy and not-yet-dark sky (see www.whatsonxiamen.com/news13305.html), but it's not clear if the illustration is supposed to be an actual photo of the incident or a reconstruction using photo editing software (even if claimed otherwise, it's probably the latter).

Several explanations for this sighting come to mind. Witnesses may have seen a display involving searchlights or lasers from a distance. I witnessed once--and only once, in my many years of sky-gazing--a rare phenomenon of a mock-Jupiter, essentially the same thing as a mock-Sun or "sun dog," which looks like a vertical ribbon hanging in the sky. I glimpsed it only briefly before an approaching front of cirrus clouds covered it. Possibly the witnesses may have seen a very rare phenomenon of that sort, although I suspect that the clouds containing the ice crystals that were creating the phenomenon would have obliterated the sky before the object count got to fifty. Or, since this account contains very few details and does not contain the full name of any witness, the whole story may be made up. Such are the circumstances one often encounters when one starts to critically investigate UFO claims.

*...*

In the July/August issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, I reported on the stinging comments made by James Carrion when he resigned as head of MUFON, the largest UFO group in the United States. He described the UFO phenomenon as being based in "humans deceiving humans," which is no less than rank heresy to the mostly hardcore UFOlogists in MUFON, to whom UFOs must be extraterrestrial spacecraft. Now Carrion has announced the formation of the Center for UFO Truth (CUT), which according to him is "not a UFO organization nor is it affiliated in any way with Ufology. Instead CUT is a historical research organization focused on examining the question long ignored by historians: was the UFO subject purposely created by the United States and its allies as part of a cold war operation and perpetuated to this day for national security reasons?" (see http://tinyurl.com/UFOtruth).

Almost as soon as this announcement hit the Internet, some of UFOlogy's wolves started howling at Carrion, as he described in his next blog posting, "Blasphemy Will Get You Stoned." He also relates what happened when he presented his theory of psi-war UFO deception at the UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas in 2009. "I realized that presenting a human theory for the origin of UFOs at a UFO conference is tantamount to blasphemy."

I don't think that Carrion is going down the right path here. I don't see how the CIA could have manipulated Kenneth Arnold, Ray Palmer, and the other founding fathers of UFOlogy, or why they would want to. I think that the UFO subject owes its existence not to spy wars but primarily to processes that Charles Mackay described in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. However, it is entirely possible that some governments (including our own) may have exploited the public's existing belief in UFOs for their own ends. I commend Carrion for having the courage to go his own way, and I wish him well. Even if his journey doesn't lead to "UFO truth," I'm sure he'll turn up some interesting stuff along the way.

By a very interesting coincidence--if it is a coincidence (cue sardonic laughter)--a book just published in the United Kingdom makes the same kind of argument as Carrion: that the U.S. government has been secretly promoting belief in UFOs. This goes against the conventional UFOlogy belief that the government is trying to cover up the existence of UFOs. Mark Pilkington, a writer and filmmaker living in London, is author of Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia, and UFOs. According to the publisher's blurb, "Mirage Men explores the strange and symbiotic relationship between the U.S. military and intelligence agencies and the community who believes strongly that UFOs have visited earth." The review in the U.K.'s Daily Mail says, "According to Pilkington, the campaign to promote the idea of UFOs was masterminded in the Fifties by the head of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles. More recently, many of the leaked fake documents and bogus stories seem to have come from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)" (see http://tinyurl.com/28oknqb). Of course, by the 1950s, flying saucers had already promoted themselves quite effectively to the public without any help from the government, and Pilkington's claim that the famous UFO contactee George Adamski was a victim of CIA deception--complete with alien impersonators in fake saucers--is implausible in the extreme.

Still, it is undeniable that one of the early directors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the most influential UFO group of the 1950s and '60s, was Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who was also the first director of the CIA. Another early NICAP director was former CIA "psychological warfare" chief Colonel Joseph Bryan III, and there were at least two other NICAP directors in the CIA (see http://tinyurl.com/NICAP-CIA). Were UFOs just a personal interest of theirs, or were UFOs related to their CIA work? Enough persons with a CIA or other intelligence background have turned up in UFO circles over the years to make the question an interesting one. Even the well-known skeptical believer, the late Karl Pflock, was a former CIA man.

These men should not be confused with what seems like a small army of deceivers and impostors who claim to have intelligence and/or a military background that turns out to be simply made up. For example, a man originally known only as "Source A," who claimed to be a high-ranking Navy officer, gave "confirmation" of tales of U.S. military officials meeting with extraterrestrials. He was recently identified as Richard Theilmann, an impostor who apparently never served in the Navy; he wore a chest full of medals that he never earned (see http://tinyurl.com/SourceA).

More puzzling is the confession of UFOlogist William Moore, co-author of The Roswell Incident and The Philadelphia Experiment, who famously told the audience at a MUFON conference in 1989 that he had been recruited by intelligence agencies to spy on the somewhat unhinged UFOlogist, the late Paul Bennewitz. If Moore is telling the truth, this supposed spy mission makes no sense. If he's not, why would he make up a story that has caused everyone in UFOlogy to revile him? Of course, that assumes that Moore was acting rationally, and in UFOlogy rationality is often in short supply.

Boylan explains:

The Cabal within NASA know that there is a colony of Star Visitors living within Cabeus A Crater. The Cabal’s secret objective is to use the LCROSS and attached rocket stage to obliterate the Star Visitor settlement residing within that crater.... I note that the Cabal is indeed engaged in unlawful war crimes and attempting to position the United States, and by extension, all Earth nations, in an act of war against star civilizations. Since this is not a true act of the United States Government but a rogue act by Cabal infiltrators within NASA, then the official government of the United States, and by extension the United Nations, would repudiate this action as unlawful once its true intent becomes known.

To try to head off this disaster, Boylan attempted to send a message through unspecified special channels to warn President Obama and Vice President Biden, “who normally oversees the government’s Star Visitors programs.” Unfortunately, the message did not get through because it was intercepted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is a “Cabal asset.” So Boylan sent a telepathic message to Star Nations High Council, asking if they would like him to organize a “Joint Psychic Exercise [JPE] to redirect LCROSS and Centaur rocket away from the Moon.” Receiving a reply in the affirmative, Boylan announced the following: “Twenty days from now we will engage (along with Star Nations) in a Joint Psychic Exercise to divert the LCROSS space probe and accompanying Centaur rocket away from crashing into the Star Visitors lunar colony within Cabeus A Crater. That Joint Psychic Exercise will take place simultaneously globally on October 8 (the day before supposed impact).”

Boylan called this the “Joint Psychic Exercise to deflect and disintegrate LCROSS space probe and its Centaur booster rocket” and gave the hour in each time zone for his followers to perform their feats of psychic action-at-a-distance.

However, a week before the launch, NASA changed its mind about which crater to impact. NASA scientists decided that the main crater, Cabeas, was more likely to contain significant amounts of water, and they directed LCROSS and its Centaur rocket to the new target. So the energy from the future Joint Psychic Exercise probably went back in time, causing NASA to direct its impact away from the Star Nations visitors. Or else Boylan’s urgent message finally got through to Star-Visitor-Overseer Joe Biden, who averted an interplanetary war by moving the LCROSS target. But Boylan himself seems unaware of the re-targeting or at least did not mention it on his Web site.

Precisely at the predicted time, the Centaur rocket, followed quickly by LCROSS itself, both undeflected and undisintegrated, slammed into the lunar crater Cabeas at a speed of about 40 km/s. Nonetheless, Boylan proclaimed the exercise a success, claiming that the probe and rocket were “deflected” from the Moon and “disintegrated in space.” Boylan explained how he projected himself astrally through time and space and (still apparently unaware of the probes’ retargeting) “went out psychically to LCROSS and Centaur booster as they were streaming towards the Moon. Next I enwrapped LCROSS in a telekinetic force and redirected it onto a course to the left so it was aiming towards one Moon-diameter’s width left of the Moon’s left side. Then the same was done with the Centaur booster rocket.” But merely to deflect the objects was not enough:

I engaged first one, then the other, with strong dissolution energy to unbind the Strong Force bonds holding their atoms together as molecules. [That, however, is an electromagnetic bond, not a nuclear one.] Moving from top to bottom, I un-did the Strong Force bonds, causing the component materials of these space vehicles to come apart at the molecular level. This process also safely dismantled the advanced munitions which were secretly aboard these space vehicles... . This was confirmed this morning by Star Nations, whose members were also at work on these two space vehicles during our JPE, to assure thorough deflection and disintegration. Thus the star folks lunar colony within Cabeus A Crater is safe from overhead bombardment.

Perhaps this explains why no ground-based telescopes observed any dust ejected from the collision.

Attack of the Drones? Starting in 2007, pictures of weird, spindly shaped UFOs started to turn up in UFO Web sites and magazines, usually submitted anonymously. Looking like a cross between a wire basket and a ceiling fan, “drone UFOs” started popping up all over the place.

The first such photos supposedly came from a fellow in Bakersfield, California, known only as “Chad.” In May of 2007, he submitted a total of six drone UFO photos to the Coast-to-Coast AM Web site, which posted them. He wrote, “My wife and I were on a walk when we noticed a very large, very strange ‘craft’ in the sky.... The craft is almost completely silent and moves very quickly.... I see this thing very often.... It is almost totally silent but not quite. It makes kind of ‘crackling’ noises.... It moves almost like an insect.” The object in the photo had five protruding arms, one much longer than the others.

Before long, a second set of drone UFO photos was allegedly taken at Lake Tahoe near the Nevada-California line, submitted anonymously to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and posted on their Web site. This craft had four arms, two significantly longer than the others. Soon six more anonymous drone photos from Capitola, California, were posted on the Internet by a person calling himself “Rajman.” This one had some sort of “alien writing” on it. A few days later, somebody known only as “Stephen” produced three drone photographs supposedly taken at Big Basin Park, not far from Capitola. The object is somewhat distant, and details are hard to see. About ten days later, a guy named “Ty” submitted twelve drone photos, supposedly taken at Big Basin Park the same day as Stephen’s and seen by his cycling group. Ty’s photos are amazingly close-up, allowing one to see every gear, sprocket, and spike in clear detail. After that, a few more pictures trickled in from here and there, but the fad for photographing drone UFOs seemed to have run its course. Somebody calling himself “Isaac” wrote a letter explaining how he used to work on a classified project called “Caret” that utilized captured alien technology to produce antigravity. He also produced what he purports is a technical manual, portions of it heavily redacted, showing parts that seem to have come from a drone UFO.

In 2008, a woman in London who said she was with the “Open Minds Forum” contacted California private investigator T.K. Davis. She wanted to hire him to find out who photographed the drones, as thus far every photographer has only given a first name. She didn’t want to be identified, either. She had emailed Rajman with some questions, but he closed his e-mail account after only a brief reply. So Davis and his colleague Frankie Dixon headed to Capitola to identify the specific telephone pole seen in the photo. The whole affair is starting to sound like a Humphrey Bogart movie.

On September 10, 2009, the Telegraph of London published a strange photo with a story titled “UFO or Pterodactyl over Argentinian Lake? A Strange Object Photographed over a Lake in Argentina Has Been Described as Either a Flying Saucer or a Flying Dinosaur.” The somewhat blurry photo, taken with a cell phone, shows a round object with five arms or spikes protruding from it, causing anyone who has been watching the carnival described above to immediately exclaim, “It’s a drone!” The photo was taken by Rafael Pino (at least this man has a first and last name!) who says he was driving his truck when he spotted the object and stopped to snap three photos. However, one alert reader in Argentina wrote, “It does look like a windshield cracked by a rock.” An analysis of these photos on the blog Forgetomori (http://forgetomori.com) suggests that “indeed, the ‘UFO’ is apparently in the same perspective in all photos, as if it didn’t really move. Note that in the second photo, the line of horizon is tilted ... but the UFO’s rightmost ‘spike,’ which is actually a crack, is still parallel to it. So, a cracked windshield looks like a good and obvious explanation.” By the way, there’s a lot of interesting investigative material on Forgetomori, whose motto is “Extraordinary Claims, Ordinary Investigations.” But many of the investigations seem well beyond the “ordinary,” so I suggest you have a look.

Yet another photo of a spiky drone from the Netherlands was quickly identified by several readers as a “Waldorf box kite,” which indeed does have the same spiky shape. Of course, the clear and detailed, but anonymous, drone photos from California are not the result of cracked windshields or kites but probably are courtesy of Photoshop or similar software. In fact, some computer graphics whizzes have already produced impressive animated videos of drone UFOs. For one fine example, see the admittedly hoaxed video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBEYc5OUUtw. Seeing is no longer believing, if indeed it ever was.

Richard H. Hall, a UFOlogist of long standing, passed from the scene after succumbing to cancer on July 17 at the age of seventy-eight. Hall served in the U.S. Air Force and attended Tulane University before taking a job with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, DC, in 1958. At that time, NICAP was the largest and most influential UFO group in the U.S. Hall eventually became NICAP’s assistant director, working under NICAP Director Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe (1897–1988), one of the founding fathers of contemporary UFOlogy, whose sensationalist magazine articles and books, such as Flying Saucers from Outer Space, helped create the public’s belief in alien visitors.

Hall is best known as the author of The UFO Evidence (1964), a compendium of carefully selected best cases in the NICAP files. Upon publication, the book was sent to every member of Congress in hopes of attracting interest in the UFO mystery. When Keyhoe was ousted from NICAP in 1969, Hall followed, leaving full-time UFOlogy to take jobs as a technical writer and editor. He remained active with other UFO groups such as MUFON and the Fund for UFO Research. He also wrote numerous published articles on other subjects, especially Civil War history.

Dick, as he was always known, was a strong supporter of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs and had a reputation for contentiousness. He was often feuding not only with skeptics but with many UFO believers. The few times I met him, Dick was polite but clearly had a very low tolerance for UFO skepticism. Like so many in the UFO field, he believed that the evidence was “out there” for anyone to see if only they would open their eyes. That his UFO Evidence falls far short of the requirements of science was something Dick Hall was unable to understand.

But there is one space-related issue troubling Mr. Bigelow, one on which he feels the need to obtain, even at potentially great cost, the best counsel available: UFOs. It is not clear whether he fears that UFOs will interfere with his future orbiting hotel chain or if he believes that UFOs harbor some secrets of propulsion or anti-gravity that his engineers might someday be able to put to good use. Whichever it is, Bigelow has contracted MUFON, the largest UFO group in the U.S., with potentially very large sums of money for the pursuit of first-hand UFO information. Indeed, longtime UFO activist Ed Komarek is suggesting that Bigelow’s goal is nothing less than an “alien reengineering project.”

Bigelow has a long history in the matter of UFOs and “paranormal” subjects. He was the principal sponsor of the Las Vegas-based National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS) from its founding in 1995 until it was placed on “inactive status” in 2004. The NIDS Web site is still up (http://www.nidsci.org) but apparently has not been updated since 2004. It reports on a number of UFO investigations, alleged cattle mutilations, and other far-out stuff. The best-known and most controversial project undertaken by NIDS was its purchase of a supposedly “haunted” ranch in Utah (reported in this column back in May/June 1998), which some describe as a “Hyperdimensional Portal Area” or “Stargate.” The ranch is said to be infested by an alien or paranormal shape-shifting creature known as “Skinwalker,” taking its name from Native American legends similar to European legends about werewolves. NIDS researchers investigated the ranch starting in 1996. They compiled an impressive collection of what might be termed “ghost stories” but, in spite of having access to sophisticated electronic equipment, failed to obtain any actual proof that anything unexplainable was going on. For a collection of wild claims and stories about this ranch, check out http://www.aliendave.com/UUFOH_TheRanch.html. Rumor has it that MUFON will now take over the investigation of this “haunted” place.

It might be most accurate to describe MUFON as “the largest remaining UFO group in the U.S.” since there used to be others of at least its size. Founded in Illinois in 1969 by Walt Andrus, it was originally known as the Midwest UFO Network. Geographically, it was positioned between its better-known rivals the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), headquartered in Washington, D.C., and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in Tucson, Arizona. However, each of these UFO groups maintained its own far-flung roster of investigators and “scientific consultants” so that any group might have a presence more or less anywhere. Andrus had originally been affiliated with APRO but got into a feud with its directors, the late Coral and Jim Lorenzen, and struck off on his own. With the demise of its rivals, MUFON found itself the last man standing. It reformulated itself as the Mutual UFO Network and picked up many of the fading groups’ most active and valuable members.

Walt Andrus remained at the helm of MUFON until his retirement in 2000. I met Andrus at the National UFO Conference in Phoenix in 1984. He was an irascible man who appeared untroubled by doubts about UFOs and who was barely able to tolerate skepticism in any form. He described my 1981 skeptical book The UFO Verdict as “an insult to the intelligence” of the reader. During the Andrus years, MUFON publicly booted out a number of its most prominent investigators for the sin of being too skeptical about one UFO case or another that Andrus was determined to defend, most notably Ed Walters’s absurdly unconvincing hoax UFO photos from Gulf Breeze, Florida. Probably Andrus found that the publicity over the Gulf Breeze photos was helping MUFON gain members, and thus criticism of the case was unwelcome within MUFON no matter how solid and factual.

John Schuessler took over MUFON until his own retirement in 2006, succeeded by the much younger James Carrion. I heard Carrion speak to Mensa last year in Denver and chatted with him afterward. Clearly more cautious than Andrus and not so hostile to skeptical questions, Carrion admitted to a great deal of uncertainty concerning UFOs and would not even make a defense of the Roswell crash claims. His position is essentially the same as that of the late J. Allen Hynek, former scientific advisor for the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook: he is sure that UFOs represent something unknown and significant but does not claim to know what.

Since it became a national organization (now headquartered in Colorado), MUFON has appointed state directors, subdirectors, and investigators, as well as establishing local groups that sponsor lectures and meetings. Throw a dart at a map of the U.S., and wherever it may land, MUFON will have some person whose responsibility it is to investigate a UFO report at that location. While MUFON may seem large, it is very thin. With 2,500 members spread nationwide, this means that an average-sized state will have about fifty members, most of whom do nothing except receive the publication. In reality, 80 to 90 percent of the members of a volunteer organization typically contribute little if any useful work, which shows how thinly spread organized UFOlogy is.

It is exactly this matter of “a volunteer organization” that Bigelow is seeking to change. Bigelow’s proposal is to generously fund the efforts of MUFON investigators to enable them to respond quickly to alleged UFO incidents. The agreement between Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) and MUFON sets up a “Star Team Impact Project” (SIP), with an initial funding period from five months to a year, with the option to renew for a second year. Investigations will be limited to cases where physical effects of a UFO are reported or where “living beings” are allegedly sighted or where “reality transformation” is said to occur. “Lights seen in the sky” do not qualify for paid investigation, a decision with which Hynek would have surely agreed. Anyone who is already a MUFON investigator can apply for a position with SIP, although new or inexperienced investigators are expected to demonstrate their skills by performing investigations of routine UFO sightings before moving up to SIP. Additionally, Bigelow is in the process of contracting up to fifty scientists, who are expected to be on the scene within twenty-four hours after significant UFO incidents, to perform state-of-the-art investigations of whatever artifacts or data the SIP investigators may obtain. All of the investigators’ travel expenses will be covered, as well as a paid stipend of $100 per day of investigation. Incentive payments and bonuses are also available for those whose contributions excel. The results of SIP’s first few months of investigations are scheduled to be presented at MUFON’s annual convention in Denver this August.

While Bigelow and MUFON are no doubt expecting great results, perhaps even dramatic breakthroughs, from investigations of UFOs in near-real time, this “Star Team” is not, however, the first attempt within organized UFOlogy to create a “rapid response team” to quickly investigate reports. In an article in Playboy (December 1967), Hynek proposed (and later implemented) a national toll-free UFO Hotline to be “manned 24 hours a day by competent interrogators capable of recognizing a true UFO report from a prankster’s report.... If the report passes preliminary and immediate screening, headquarters notifies the local police and they rush to the scene.” He explained how he expected solid and irrefutable UFO data “within a year of the initiation of such a no-nonsense program.” But in a moment of perhaps unguarded optimism, Hynek added, “if the UFO-1000 program is sincerely and intensively carried out for a full year and yields nothing, this, in itself, would be of great negative significance. Then we could go back to the ‘real, common-sense world’ of pre-UFO days—shrugging it all off with ‘There must have been a virus going around.’”

In an interview in Saga UFO Report (August 1976), Hynek explained how his national hotline was working out: “In an unprecedented move, the FBI printed an article of mine in their monthly bulletin [February 1975]. We furnished them with a special toll-free number which they can call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every night we get at least one call ... we contact one of our 300 regional representatives, and they go and interview the witnesses. Geiger counters, soil samples, physiological effects, etc., are all involved in the investigation.” Hynek gave no explanation of why he had not given up on UFOs as he earlier said he would if a year-long study yielded no solid evidence.

Other “rapid response” efforts to catch UFOs have likewise been attempted. Peter Davenport’s National UFO Reporting Center has been collecting UFO reports on its telephone hotline since 1974, many from law enforcement and emergency service agencies, yet UFO proof continues to elude them. In 1977 France’s CNES, their equivalent of NASA, created the agency GEPAN to officially sponsor investigations of UFO reports. It, too, failed to come up with anything really convincing, and CNES terminated all UFO investigations in 2004. In the late 1990s, when according to news reports Mexico City was being inundated by a Saucer Blitz, Mexican UFOlogist and TV personality Jaime Mausson organized Los Vigilantes, who were supposed to be ready to respond to saucer reports with cameras and such at very short notice. They never obtained anything of significance, so far as I am aware. Obviously Bigelow and MUFON must expect that their “rapid response” efforts will bear more fruit than these others did, although I cannot see any reason to expect them to have any greater success than others who valiantly chased the UFO will-of-the-wisp.

Howe submitted soil and barley samples to W.C. Levengood, a biophysicist and PhD-Eq at the Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory in Grass Lake, Michigan, who specializes in the investigation of crop circles. Levengood measured the “charge density plasma pulses” of the samples (whatever they may be). He found that the greatest “energy change” was about 200 feet south of the cow, and zero “energy” in the bounce mark in the ground. He concluded, “Right at the cow, the energy in the plants were also anomalously low. That would fit in because when the cow hit, the initial impact and second landing, the plant energies were neutralized.” Who says that UFOlogy is not scientific? Howe suggests that these “energy changes” might be due to “advanced beam technology,” a kind of tractor beam that aliens allegedly use to pick up and return cows, although it would seem that in this case the batteries or whatever powers the tractor beam must have been a bit weak, setting the animal down with a big thud. (For more on Levengood’s research see “Italian Skeptics Debunk Crop Cir-cle Electromagnetic Radiation Claim,” SI, September/October 2005.)

As if this were not sufficiently amazing, the famous animal that started it all, Snippy the Horse, is back in the news after almost forty years. Snippy, a three-year-old mare in Appaloosa, Colorado, became famous in 1967 when her owner, Nellie Lewis, claimed that she had been mutilated by space aliens. Lewis claimed that the dead horse gave off a sweet scent like incense, that its mane burned her fingers, and that the boots she was wearing were later found to be “radioactive.” No mention was made as to whether poor Snippy bounced when the aliens dropped her off. The Case of Snippy was investigated and included in the famous Condon Report (Case 32), which concluded in true closed-minded debunker style that “There was no evidence to support the assertion that the horse’s death was associated in any way with abnormal causes” (see www.ncas.org/condon/text/case32.htm). Another spoilsport was local veterinarian Wallace Leary, who determined that poor Snippy had been shot twice in the legs with a .22 caliber rifle. This probably would not have killed her, but may well have caused the infection that appears to have left her disabled.

Snippy was the first widely publicized claim of alien mutilation of livestock, and it seems to have started a big trend. Snippy now even has her own Web site (www.snippy.com), which includes a Snippy store selling Snippy merchandise. Recently Snippy’s skeleton was offered for sale on eBay, with a minimum bid of $50,000. However, bidding was suspended when ownership of the bones was disputed (see http://tinyurl.com/y3qutv). No mention was made of whether any bids for Snippy’s bones were actually received.

As scary as all this animal mutilation talk may be, it’s nothing compared to the hunt for the Skinwalker. A new book by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, Hunt for the Skinwalker, tells the chilling tale. Kelleher is a physicist who formerly worked for the now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS), funded by Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow. Knapp is a Las Vegas TV personality who has made a name for himself reporting sensational stories about Area 51 and such. When stories about an allegedly haunted ranch in northeastern Utah reached NIDS, Bigelow decided to buy the ranch to further his paranormal research. (The “Skinwalker Ranch” now has its own Wikipedia entry.

According to Knapp, “For as long as anyone can remember, this part of northeastern Utah has been the site of simply unbelievable paranormal activity. UFOs, Sasquatch, cattle mutilations, psychic manifestations, creatures that aren’t found in any zoos or textbooks, poltergeist events.” He suggests that it may be “the strangest place on Earth.” Some observers trace this weirdness back to an old Indian curse that the Navajo supposedly placed on the Utes. As you know, lots of paranormal problems can be traced back to old Indian graveyards or curses; one Indian graveyard in South Park, Colorado, has been particularly troublesome. One anthropologist quoted in the book describes Skinwalker beliefs as follows: “Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I’m no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things—they make people sick, they commit murders. They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into were animals and can travel in supernatural ways.”

The previous owner of the ranch had reportedly encountered numerous unexplained phenomena, such as a bulletproof wolf that could not be killed, and apparently walked off into thin air. Later, three dogs were zapped by something while chasing blue orbs of light in a pasture. All that was left of each of the dogs was a greasy, butter-like glob.

One of the incidents described in the book occurred in August 1997. Two unnamed researchers were perched on a bluff of the ranch late at night, monitoring a pasture. One of them descended into the pasture to meditate, as he believed that this sometimes “activated the phenomenon.” After about two hours, they allegedly spotted a small yellow light a few feet off the ground. They watched as it began to expand. One of them grabbed a pair of Generation III ITT night vision binoculars, while the other reached for a 35mm camera loaded with infrared film. As seen in the binoculars, the light seemed to expand, and take on a tunnel like appearance. At the far end of the tunnel, what started out as an indistinct motion gradually became the head and shoulders of a humanoid creature. It stepped out of the tunnel and walked off into the night. All that remained was the smell of sulphur. Unfortunately, the observer with the camera saw only the circle of light, and doesn’t seem to have taken any pictures anyway. Researchers installed cameras atop telephone poles, but they were attacked and disabled by some invisible force. Another golden opportunity for scientific research, lost forever. . . .

As scary as all this Skinwalker stuff is, it’s nothing compared to the story now being told by Robert Duncan O’Finioan, who claims to have been “brainwashed, conditioned and controlled as part of a highly classified MKULTRA program called Project Talent,” and whose story is now being featured on Jerry Pippin’s mystery-mongering Internet broadcasts (www.jerrypippin.com). Of a thousand others allegedly trained as “child warriors” in 1966, he says he is one of only twenty left alive. He was selected, he says, because of his mixed Native American and Celtic heritage; both of those groups supposedly have unique spiritual and mental abilities, so the combination is unbeatable for making a powerful psychic warrior. His top-secret training, which was very abusive and brutal, supposedly gave him “enhanced physical and psychic abilities . . . including the abilities to hurl someone across the room with his mind, and walk through a solid wall.” His right arm was “hardwired” with an “enhancer” implant, supposedly giving it “astonishing speed and strength.”

Supposedly O’Finioan and eleven other child warriors were flown to Cambodia in 1972 to deliver a “death blow” to Khmer Rouge troops, “using only the combined power of their minds.” A helicopter lands, coming to the aid of a platoon of Marines pinned down by hostile fire. Twelve children disembark, form a semicircle, and hold hands. When their hands are raised, the combined psychic force kills every enemy soldier within twenty miles.

Now O’Finioan says he is beginning to recover conscious memories of all these alarming events from his past, which had long been repressed by the mind controllers. When he underwent a recent MRI scan, not only did it detect an implant deep inside his brain, but the implant caused the MRI machine to catch fire, sending doctors and nurses scurrying with fire extinguishers. This also seems to have burned out the implant, effectively freeing him from MKULTRA’s control. Unfortunately, none of his remarkable physical abilities are demonstrated on the video Ultimate Warrior on Pippin’s site, in which O’Finioan simply talks to the camera and doesn’t walk through any walls. By way of explanation, he says that most of his paranormal abilities belong to his “alternate personalities,” which cannot be brought out on demand. What do his enhanced mental abilities foresee for the future? A giant supervolcano in a western state will rip the U.S. apart, and “very soon.” So if this happens, as you’re being buried in ashes and debris, remember that you read it here first.

One of the first survivors of the disaster to return to Britain, nurse Debbie Bates, told the Daily Record (December 28, 2004), “'I saw a palmist the day before [in Sri Lanka]. He said, 'Stay out of the sea, big wave coming.' At the time, I thought it was a joke-now I just think it is freaky.” Unfortunately, we don't know how many thousands of people may have received that same warning for days on which nothing unusual happened. Indeed, given the popular custom of visiting fortune-tellers in Thailand and other Asian countries, it seems remarkable that there was anyone left unwarned, unless the prognosticators themselves were equally in the dark. Meanwhile, a prominent Thai fortune teller blamed the tsunami on the “bad luck” of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Pinyo Pongcharoen, president of the International Astrology Association, said that Thailand’s astrological sign was already under the adverse influence of four ill-omened stars and, worse yet, one of the stars was further aggravated by malicious influence from Thaksin’s astrological sign (The Nation, Bangkok, December 28).

People from a nearby camp for the displaced bathe in a river January 26, 2005, in the tsunami-ravaged town of Meulaboh, Indonesia. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Once the tizzy over the mostly clueless fortune-tellers died down, media outlets were rushing to report how animals seemed to have a “sixth sense” causing most of them to avoid the coming tsunami. H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife Department, told Reuters, “No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit. I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.” Even the National Geographic News was reporting (January 4) anecdotes of how “elephants screamed and ran for higher ground” and “Dogs refused to go outdoors.” What is usually not mentioned is that the tsunami was preceded by an extremely powerful earthquake, capable of alarming both man and beast. Furthermore, it does not appear to be the case that wild animals cluster along the ocean’s open shore in the same manner that humans do-they usually prefer to remain hidden in the relative safety of the forest.

Lynette Hart, an animal researcher at the University of California-Davis, explained to the Sacramento Bee (January 14) that many animals are exquisitely sensitive to sounds and to vibrations in the ground. “It may only take one antelope becoming frightened by sensory changes to communicate, 'Let’s get out of here,' and they all go.” Andy Michael, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told National Geographic, “What we're faced with is a lot of anecdotes. Animals react to so many things-being hungry, defending their territories, mating, predators-so it’s hard to have a controlled study to get that advanced warning signal.”

Next, just as predictably, the conspiracy theories began to emerge (these usually don't surface immediately, as it takes a while to cook them up). The Egyptian Nationalist weekly Al-Usbu published an investigative report by Mahmoud Bakri on January 1. In it he suggests that the earthquake and tsunami were a consequence of secret nuclear testing by the U.S., Israel, and India: “The three most recent tests appeared to be genuine American and Israeli preparations to act together with India to test a way to liquidate humanity. In the[ir] most recent test, they began destroying entire cities over extensive areas. Although the nuclear explosions were carried out in desert lands, tens of thousands of kilometers away from populated areas, they had a direct effect on these areas.” These alleged nuclear tests “destabilized the tectonic plates,” leading to disaster. A (possibly fictitious) American scientist was quoted saying “the center of an earthquake that took place some forty kilometers under the ocean floor could not have caused such destruction unless nuclear testing had been conducted close to the tectonic plates in these countries, or unless several days previously there had been [nuclear] activity that caused these plates to shift and collide.” A Saudi professor attributed the tragedy to divine retribution for homosexuality and fornication, while various religious leaders warned that it was caused by corruption, the presence of infidels, and other sins (see here).

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Center said in an interview on Al-Majd TV on January 16 that NASA had discovered that Earth is emitting short-wave radiation. “When they discovered this radiation, they started to zoom in, and they found that it emanates from Mecca-and, to be precise, from the Ka'ba” (see here). What’s more, they found that the radiation was “infinite.” NASA found that the radiation extends well past Mars, apparently extending to “the celestial Ka'ba,” effectively connecting heaven and earth. NASA, says Al-Sayyed, had this information on their Web site for twenty-one days, but then took it down, apparently as part of yet another cover-up of amazing findings in outer space.

Speaking of NASA, the recent, highly successful Cassini mission to Saturn has returned a wealth of scientific data, especially the Huygens probe that landed on Saturn’s moon Titan, the first such landing on a planetary satellite other than our own Moon. However, NASA conspiracy theorist Richard Hoagland, the chief promoter of the “Face on Mars,” claims he has made dramatic discoveries from its photos, not of Titan, but instead of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, an unusual body having one relatively dark hemisphere and one lighter:

In our opinion, Cassini’s discovery of “the Great Wall of Iapetus” now forces serious reconsideration of a range of staggering possibilities . . . that some will most certainly find upsetting: it could really be a “wall” . . . a vast, planet spanning, artificial construct!! . . . There is no viable geological model to explain a sixty thousand-foot-high, sixty thousand-foot-wide, four million-foot-long “wall” . . . spanning an entire planetary hemisphere-let alone, located in the precise plane of its equator! (See here.)

Hoagland has further discovered that some of Iapetus’s craters appear to be somewhat “square,” and are allegedly lined up along north-south, east-west lines: “Clearly these are not random, 'square craters'-but remarkable, highly ordered evidence of sophisticated, aligned, repeating architectural relief! . . . The impression of a vast set of extremely ancient ruins-most now without roofs, but with ample surviving walls-covered both by 'snow' . . . and whatever the 'brown stuff' is . . . is unavoidable.”

Stressing the near-impossibility of these structures being built by living creatures on the surface of a cold, airless, waterless world, Hoagland leaps to a conclusion that presupposes an even greater engineering impossibility: “what if Iapetus is not a natural satellite at all . . . but a 900-mile wide spacecraft-an artificial 'moon?!'.” He suggests that Iapetus was assembled millions of years ago by some alien intelligence using the principles of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and that many of the craters are in fact “deformed hexagons,” where the moon’s surface is collapsing from eons of meteoritic erosion, revealing the underlying hexagonal supports. My brief summary cannot possibly do justice to the zaniness of Hoagland’s “hollow Iapetus” theory-you need to read the original on his Web site.

It is telling that Hoagland does not discuss the problem that his “hollow Iapetus” theory poses in accounting for that moon’s measured mean density of about 1.21 grams per cubic centimeter, less than our own moon’s but greater than that of Saturn. This is perplexing, since he begins the piece arguing that Iapetus’s relatively low density and slow rotation means that the centrifugal force at the equator would be extremely small. It’s too bad that Hoagland didn't follow through and give us any calculations designed to show how it would be possible for an essentially hollow sphere to have a mean density greater than that of water. He must have realized the fatal flaw this calculation would pose for his wild assertion, which is why he avoids the subject.

A NASA Web site notes: “Cassini’s next close encounter with Iapetus will occur in September 2007. The resolution of images from that flyby should be 100 times better than the ones currently being analyzed. The hope is that the increased detail may shed light on Iapetus’s amazing features and the question of whether it has been volcanically active in the past” (see here). Until then, we can only wonder what Hoagland’s amazing “artificial structures"-which, like all allegedly anomalous objects photographed, are near the limit of resolution of the cameras-will look like with one hundred times finer detail revealed.

Last December 8 The Telegraph of London carried an item written by Uri Geller, the noted Israeli-born spoon bender, about an “alien egg” allegedly given to him by the late John Lennon. According to Geller, he, Lennon, and Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono were having dinner in a New York restaurant one evening when Lennon surprised him with the following account:

About six months ago, I was asleep in my bed, with Yoko, at home, in the Dakota Building. And suddenly, I wasn't asleep. Because there was this blazing light round the door. It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with searchlights, or the apartment was on fire. . . . There were these four people out there. . . . They were, like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths and they were scuttling at me like roaches . . . I tried to throw them out, but, when I took a step towards them, they kind of pushed me back. I mean, they didn't touch me. It was like they just willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy. (See here.)

Today, “insectoid” aliens play a significant role in many stories of UFO abductions, which was not the case when Lennon allegedly related this account. So either John Lennon was a pioneering “experiencer” of a now-common alien encounter, or else Geller made up this story long after Lennon’s death.

The next thing that Lennon could reportedly remember, he was back in bed with Yoko, left holding a smooth, metallic egg-like object he subsequently gave to Geller in the hopes that Uri could figure it out. Says Geller, “I have a strong sensation that John knew more about this object than he told me. Maybe it didn't come with an instruction manual, but I think John knew what it was for. And whatever that purpose was-communication? Healing? A first-class intergalactic ticket?-it scared him.” Yet despite all the hype, Geller seems to have made no attempt to initiate any serious scientific analysis of his potentially miraculous “egg.”

But Meier is in contact with the space people from the Pleiades (he calls them “Plejarans”; I suppose that “Pleiadeans” sounds too unwieldy). And according to Michael Horn, who says he is the officially authorized media representative of Meier in the United States (which so far as I know Meier has never disputed), the Plejarans have warned that when Toutatis is closest to Earth, it will suddenly veer off course and head straight toward us. Horn says that it will require a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” to keep this multi-kilometer-sized asteroid from slamming straight into Earth. Before you dismiss this prophecy as the ravings of a demented man, be forewarned that Meier claims a long list of successful predictions (no doubt selectively culled from a much longer list of unsuccessful ones—Meier reportedly has written thousands of pages of predictions). Horn says that Meier predicted back in 1987 that Islamic fanatics would destroy the World Trade Center in New York. If true, this information will be of great interest to the current Congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks: What did Meier know, and when did he know it?

Others are also starting to sound alarm bells. The Web site of the conspiracy-oriented radio host Jeff Rense carries similar warnings (see www.rense.com/general50/sep29th2004.htm). There is even a claim of a secret government missile program to save us from disaster on September 29. And the biblical prophecy expert Arnie Stanton suggests that the encounter with Toutatis indicates that the Second Coming will be just a few months away. Stanton also warns that a larger, as-yet undiscovered asteroid will definitely smack into Earth sometime in 2006.

This is the first time to my knowledge that the world is ending in 2004. The world most recently ended in May of 2003, when a mysterious Planet X, inhabited by Zetans, was reported to be on its way to a disastrous close encounter with Earth, moving the poles and flooding entire countries. The Web site www.zetatalk.com is still there. It talks a lot about the disasters expected in 2003 but says nothing about there being a year 2004; as near as I can tell, their claim is that a disastrous planetary encounter did occur in 2003, but was covered up by NASA. Before that, the “planetary alignment” of May 5, 2000, was threatened as a trigger for all manner of earthly havoc. And of course, society as we know it ended on January 1, 2000, when every major computer system in the world not only failed, but became contagious, infecting even computers that did not suffer from the Y2K bug. The next scheduled major world-ending is in 2012, when, according to a number of reliable experts, the Mayan Calendar simply “runs out,” apparently making it impossible for time to continue.

During April a major conference on UFOs and “Exopolitics,” called “the X-Conference,” was held near Washington, D.C. (see www.paradigmclock.com/X-Conference/X-Conference.htm). It featured the usual suspects sounding alarm bells over supposed “government cover-ups” of UFO and alien hijinks. However, the speakers at this conference delved even farther into the vast conspiracy than anyone has dared to delve before. Phil Corso Jr., whose late father wrote in The Day After Roswell how much of our high-technology (such as transistors) was reverse-engineered from the crashed Roswell saucer, explained that the Roswell aliens were in fact simply “us” from the future, returning as time travelers. This he has learned from notes and manuscripts left by his father, explaining that “we” went back in time to warn “ourselves” about the nuclear threat.

There was much controversy over the claims of Dan Burisch, supposedly a Ph.D. microbiologist who has worked on designer diseases for the military at Area 51 in the Nevada desert—and who also studied the extraterrestrial beings in residence there. Burisch warns of a sinister conspiracy between E.T.s and the military to develop deadly diseases to wipe out humans that the conspirators want to be rid of. Burisch is now reportedly in “lock-down” at Area 51, and is requesting immunity from Congress in return for his testimony about this nefarious program. Some of the UFOlogists at the conference cautiously supported Burisch’s tales, others supported the stories even more strongly while accusing the first group of distorting them, and yet a third faction angrily charged that the Burisch supporters were disinformation agents charged with “spinning” wild tales to sow confusion within UFOlogy. (UFOlogists seldom believe that other UFOlogists with whom they disagree are simply mistaken—they are usually either pathological liars or government agents.)

Steven Greer was at the conference to talk about his Project Disclosure, which three years after its much-ballyhooed launch at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., featuring twenty supposedly credentialed military/intelligence/defense-industry witnesses (reported in this column, March/April 2002) has yet to present any of its supposedly solid evidence of UFO cover-ups to any official government investigations. Greer reportedly acknowledged his disappointment that more progress has not yet been made, but he kept the faith. However, the defrocked psychologist Richard Boylan charged that Greer and others are in fact disinformation agents funded by powerful moneyed interests. Apparently the purpose of the disinformation must be to keep UFOlogists from finding out what Boylan considers the real stuff, like alien-hybrid children and “Walk-in” Star Visitors (a contemporary analog of demonic possession).

For another example of the truly stellar quality of contemporary “scientific” UFO research (pun intended), see The Lawton Triangle UFO Hoax at http://ufohoax.tripod.com. In March 2002, hoaxer Carl Wilson submitted a dubious-looking, indistinct photo of red and white lights against a black background to Jim Hickman, a “research specialist” with MUFON, the largest UFO group in the U.S. He wrote of seeing these lights in the night sky over Lawton, Oklahoma. Hickman sent a copy of the photo to Bruce Maccabee, the best-known “scientific” UFO photo analyst, who has “authenticated” many classic UFO photos such as those from McMinnville, Oregon, and Gulf Breeze, Florida. It didn’t take long for Maccabee to conclude “unless someone has a better idea, I would have to classify this as a True UFO (TRUFO), which might be some sort of Alien Flying Craft (AFC) (or two such craft)?”

Not content with fooling the “experts” once, a few months later Wilson submitted to Hickman a similar photo, purportedly of a UFO seen hovering over Fort Sill, Oklahoma, near Lawton. Hickman again sent a copy to Maccabee, who could barely contain his excitement: “Wow! Got to pull out all the stops on this one! A rare event, two photos of the same (apparently) thing!”

Were these two photos of some alien craft? No, says Wilson: “In reality, these pictures were nothing more than a picture of Microsoft Optical Mouse taken with the room lights and camera flash turned off!” When he revealed his hijinks on the Internet newsgroup alt.alien.research, many asked him whether he was a paid government debunker. He replies, “I did it to demonstrate how easy it is to fool the so-called ‘UFO experts’ and how willing they are to take any claim at face value. But rather than learn from this example, their reaction was one of hostility.” And he reports being harassed in many ways. Wilson concludes, “Clearly many of those involved with or supporting ‘UFO research’ are less interested in ‘Finding the Truth’ as they claim, as they are in silencing their critics.”

While NASA continues to glean astonishing amounts of information about Mars from the Mars Rovers, others are finding plenty of things in the photos that NASA seems to have missed. UFOlogist George Filer, MUFON’s Eastern Director, writes that “Our examination of thousands of images has led us to theorize that we might be observing an ancient civilization. . . . Strangely, the symbols and writing are very similar to English” (see www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2004/mar/m10-029.shtml). He notes that “The symbols or letters A, E, G, H, P, V, and Y have been found. The Y symbol is the most numerous and often has deep round holes drilled at the three corners.” (The letter B, Filer reminds us, had previously been spotted by the Viking lander carved into a rock way back in 1976.) Filer is far from the only person making such remarkable discoveries. According to a Knight-Ridder news story of March 6, NASA is being deluged by supposed “Mars discoveries” from civilians, including stone tools and dinosaur fossils (see www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/nation/8124461.htm).

The most dramatic Mars finding would appear to be from the above-mentioned Boylan: based upon news reports that Mars’s ice caps appear to be melting, he suggests that Mars is being “terraformed” by alien intelligences to make it more habitable (see www.drboylan.com/trfmars2.html). Boylan informs us that “the U.S. has a tiny forward station on Mars, staffed by astronauts from a secret space program operated by a military black project agency . . . the Star Visitors [also] have a long-term presence on Mars.” The Mars Society proposes the eventual “terraforming” of Mars to turn it into another habitat for humans, but if Boylan is correct, we may arrive there someday to find the work already finished.

In the May/June 2003 issue I reported about the giant scorpions allegedly being bred in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, to be used as secret weapons. While no giant scorpion bioweapons have yet been found, the Web site of the Coast to Coast AM radio show carries a photo of what is alleged to be a “camel spider” supposedly facing our troops in Iraq. According to one caller to that show, “They run 10 mph, jump three feet, are a nocturnal spider. . . . When they bite you, you are injected with Novocain [sic] so you go numb instantly. You don’t even know you are bitten when you are sleeping, so you wake up with part of your leg or arm missing because it has been gnawing on it all night long” (see the purported photo of this critter at www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page440.html).

As if to make up for the dearth of giant scorpions, the region is currently in the grips of UFO fever, with sightings running at a high pace, especially in Iran. Sa’dollah Nasiri-Qeydari, head of the Astronomical Society of Iran, told Reuters that people were probably seeing Venus, which was near its greatest brilliance in the evening sky. But Michael Salla, author of Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence, begs to disagree. Salla, who was educated in Australia and has degrees in government and in philosophy, is currently a Researcher in Residence in the Center for Global Peace, American University, in Washington, D.C. He suggests that the UFOs being seen across the Middle East are “very likely related to Stargate/energy portal activity in Iraq/Iran and the region generally. It is very likely that the whole region comprising Iraq/Iran/ Afghanistan is a vast energy portal that was strategically chosen for this reason as the home base for extraterrestrials known as the Anunnaki during the Sumerian era” (see www.exopolitics.org/Exo-Comment-15.htm). The anger of Moslems over the U.S. occupation is so intense that, according to Salla, “What they might manifest by all this rage/anger is an opening of the portals and literally the gates of hell opening with the return of the Gods—the Anunnaki—who take the rage around the region as permission to intervene and punish U.S. forces and their allies.” But apparently Bush and his fellow conspirators, who head up a secret “shadow government” in collusion with extraterrestrials, knew about this all along, and this was the real reason for the war in Iraq: “it wasn’t Oil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, or the ‘War against Terror,’ just a desire to be in Iraq if and when the energy portals/Stargates became active.” He warns, “The ultimate result of extraterrestrial intervention responding to regional rage against the U.S. is a military confrontation that could lead to a domineering extraterrestrial race having a major strategic toehold in human affairs.” And wouldn’t that be terrible!

It wasn't until this past June that I finally had a chance to visit that reputedly privileged place. The center of all things extraterrestrial in that valley is of course the UFO Watchtower (although “elevated platform” would be a better description). It contains a saucer-shaped gift shop and an unimproved campground (see www.ufowatchtower.com; also, this column, May/June, 2002).

Judy is a pleasant middle-aged woman who owns and operates the UFO Watchtower. She seems to genuinely enjoy receiving visitors in her gift shop, filled with alien tchotchke. If it’s alien, she has it: dolls, balloons, key chains, pens, etc. Outside, little alien figurines dot the property, pointing the way to the campground or the exit, or just carouse on old farm implements. These aliens are archaically painted green, as in the days when UFOs were objects to be sighted-the present-day aliens, whose primary occupation seems to be abducting humans, are generally acknowledged to be gray. “We discovered that there are two large vortexes in front of the dome,” writes Judy in her newsletter. "Two psychics marked the centers of them for me and suggested that a rock garden be built so visitors could rest, relax, and meditate in it.” The result is an extraterrestrial cactus and rock garden filled with hub caps, the remains of old satellite dishes, and miscellaneous post-industrial detritus splotched with green paint, intending no doubt to create an eerie atmosphere-with some degree of success.

Not surprisingly, the degree of paranormality in this Alien Valley seems to have been greatly exaggerated. Judy herself claims only that twenty-one sightings have occurred since the opening of her UFO Ponderosa in May 2001, an average of less than one sighting a month. Of these, she has seen fifteen herself. Most of the sightings sound like a description of lights in the sky, a characterization she agreed with. When you get out into dark skies away from city lights, there are plenty of lights in the sky that might be called UFOs by those who are so inclined. “There haven't been any landings here,” she added. One female camper, says Judy, claims to have stepped outside her tent to behold a UFO that looked like a roulette wheel spinning in the sky above her. Unfortunately, she did not awaken her husband, asleep in the tent, to confirm the sighting.

The lack of photos on display in the gift shop is surprising. One would expect that any place worthy of being called a UFO Hot Spot would boast of numerous clear, unambiguous photos taken of the phenomenon by those who come hoping to see it. The lack of such photos suggests a corresponding lack of a genuine phenomenon. I noticed the same thing during my 1996 visit to some of the hottest of the UFO Hot Spots in Mexico (see chapter 21 of my book UFO Sightings).

If UFOs really were hovering around those parts on practically a daily basis, as some claim, and given that there was no shortage of people with cameras, the fact that nobody in those areas could show you clear and convincing photos of anything unusual pretty well refutes the claims that Mexico is under siege by extraterrestrials. (Another UFO Hot Spot is reputed to be in Pine Bush, New York, near the Hudson Valley, which is also where Whitley Strieber claimed to have encountered his “visitors.” It, too, is reported to be rather “cool” at present.)

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate as I entered the Mysterious Valley. Colorado weather is notoriously unpredictable, and a storm started to brew just as I approached the area. Lightning could be seen striking the ground. Later it cleared, and a modest stream of visitors came to climb the tower. By sunset it had cleared beautifully, and the night was exceptionally clear. The valley floor is extremely flat, so lights from distant farms, towns, and vehicles ring the horizon, twinkling like stars. The landscape is very quiet. The effect was indeed impressive and eerie, but unfortunately I didn't see anything in the sky that didn't belong there. But you know how reluctant paranormal phenomena are to reveal themselves when skeptics are present.

We still have no clear explanation from the Zeta about the failure of their prediction that Earth would stop rotating and flip its poles this May (this column, May/June, 2003). An update to the Web site www.zetatalk.com dated May 15-the very doomsday itself-states, “This is the last update, no further ZetaTalk anticipated.” It boasted of a 68 percent success rate for seeing Planet X during April, but only for “those educated, who had done their homework and followed the imaging session, noted our words as to what to look for, and oriented themselves in the sky.” Apparently other people didn't see anything. Nancy Lieder, the Zeta representative here on Earth, further informs us that MJ12, the supposedly ultra-secret crashed UFO panel, has “committed suicide to prevent itself from being misused.”

But Nancy and her diehard believers still apparently cling to the belief that Planet X is nonetheless on its way. During June she posted numerous accounts of supposedly bizarre phenomena such as unexplained booms, sunspots, a ring around the Moon, and the Sun “rising and setting in the wrong place.” These are labeled as “signs of the times,” and are attributed to the proximity of the dangerous Planet X. Nancy insists that Earth’s rotational stopping and flipping is indeed still going to occur, but she refuses to specify the hour or date. Her followers are carefully noting the times of sunrise and sunset, and the position of the Sun going down, to see if Earth’s expected careening might have already begun.

We previously mentioned the low state of activity in the UFO field (this column, September/October 2002), which seems to have cooled off almost as much as Internet stocks. Indeed, things are so slow that MUFON has recently closed its headquarters in Colorado. However, the UFO field has not been totally without interesting new developments. The Web site UFO Casebook carries an account originally published by MUFON of how Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State under president Franklin Roosevelt, allegedly showed a visitor four dead aliens in glass jars in the sub-basement of the Capitol Building way back in 1939 (see www.ufocasebook.com/hull.html). A “wrecked round craft” was also said to be nearby. The source of this story is a letter from Lucile Andrew of Ashland, Ohio, who claims that her father, the Reverend Turner Hamilton Holt, a cousin of Hull, was shown these wonders, but was of course sworn to secrecy. The tendency in UFOlogy of late has been to push back the date of supposed saucer crashes well before the famous incident in Roswell in 1947.

The online news service www.ananova.com reported on May 14 that police were investigating “gnome reports in Ecuador.” Several residents of the town of Quininde saw what they described as a “gnome” near the center of town. “They all described the creature as being very small, green and ugly.” Marco Preciado told Diario Extra online: “It was less than three feet tall and I saw it three times. I tried to follow him but he disappeared.” Joseph Trainor’s Web site, www.UFO roundup.com, reported on May 14 that the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s speech of May 5 may have literally been “out of this world.” “According to UFO Roundup’s Middle East correspondent Ayesha al-Khatabi, some residents of Baghdad claim to have heard Saddam’s 15-minute broadcast over their household radio sets . . . there was some question as to whether the speech was made from the Moon or from a gigantic disk-shaped UFO orbiting Earth.” If so, the capture of all of the Most Wanted Iraqi Deck of Cards will never be completed. Also in that same issue, “The U.S. government said it will seek to block the airing of a video found by Navy rescuers in Antarctica that purportedly reveals that a massive archaeological dig is underway two miles (3,200 meters) beneath the ice. . . . The Atlantis TV production crew that shot the video is still missing.” The archaeologists are reportedly confirming the existence of a legendary city previously known only through the writings of the fantasy/science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft. The April 30 issue of UFO Roundup reveals how "The Russian Navy has reportedly recovered a large triangular UFO, which crashed in Kaliningrad harbor after overflying a naval base. The crash caused minor damage to a Russian destroyer.” None of these bizarre stories appear to be written tongue-in-cheek-apparently no matter what kind of implausible story gets told, somebody somewhere is eager to believe it.

Paranoia was the mantra, and the late-night radio talk show maven Art Bell the high priest. The world in which these people live is a truly frightening place. Mind control assaults us, and chemtrails poison us from above. Supposedly health-giving vaccines are deliberately poisoned, the energy crisis is a sinister fraud, and even microwave ovens are dangerous. Worst of all, some shadowy, sinister group is doing everything for its own selfish gain.

Mark Philips and Cathy O'Brien started the conference with a bang, giving their talks on MK-Ultra Mind Control (see trance-formation.com/). Philips told how this type of sinister mind control was first studied, then perfected, by the Third Reich under the direct orders of Hitler. The Nazis found that it was possible to create robotlike people with superhuman powers using a sinister program of early childhood sexual abuse. Not only would these people obey orders unquestioningly, they developed “forty-four times” visual acuity. After the war, ex-Nazi psychiatrists and psychologists came to the U.S. to work for the CIA, where the evil work continued. O'Brien explained that she was one of those unfortunate victims. Her father, who allegedly had abused her since infancy, cooperated with congressman (and future president) Gerald Ford and the governor of Michigan to deliver her up to the MK-Ultra Mind Control group. Her “owner” within this group was a still-prominent U.S. senator. She was controlled on a day-to-day basis by the “harmonics” in the music she was given to listen to, and by TV shows she was made to watch, such as Disney programs and the Wizard of Oz, which contained subliminal messages.

She explained that “my sexuality had been enhanced,” a statement that did not inspire disbelief. She had allegedly spent years as a robotic sex slave for the conspiracy. Nobody asked her if she had developed forty-four times visual acuity. Mark saved her in 1988, and just in the nick of time, because at age thirty the conspiracy was preparing her for “elimination.” Around that age, you see, mind controlees begin to spontaneously recover the “repressed” memories of their abuse, and so they are pre-programmed for self-destruction. Nothing so dramatic as a cyanide capsule is needed: MK-Ultra programs into its victims a capability to go into “respiratory failure” upon receiving the proper signal. Fortunately, Mark rescued her and whisked her off to safety in Alaska. Apparently Alaska is so far away that even MK-Ultra couldn't find her.

After those exciting talks, William Lyne was a big disappointment. He was supposed to talk about “Tesla’s Secret Technologies and Government Suppression,” but he rambled on about a lot of things, mostly about himself. He claims to have led an extremely exciting life, encountering government agents at every turn, who were responsible for things happening to him that might otherwise be interpreted as failures, such as losing a job, his wife leaving, or getting booted out of the armed forces. He says he discovered a Soviet spy ring running the career counseling office at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas. One would have expected that a Soviet spy ring would have concentrated on getting information on weapons and codes, but they apparently thought they could do more damage to U.S. interests by misdirecting Air Force enlistees into inappropriate training programs. However, Lyne’s brilliant discovery upset General Curtis LeMay, who feared that if word leaked out it could endanger Eisenhower’s re-election. This led to Lyne being booted out of the Air Force.

Lyne was the first to find out about the Soviet missiles in Cuba and he warned the CIA, but they didn't tell JFK about it until six months later. He “predicted” the assassination of JFK as soon as he saw the motorcade route in the newspaper the day before. He had met Oswald, who was working for the CIA and was “robotic.” Oswald was actually a right-winger and not a Marxist. One thing Lyne did not spell out was whether or not he believes that Oswald actually did kill Kennedy. If so, he must have been the only person there (besides me) who did. As for Tesla, all we learned was that some Nazi U-boats were powered by Tesla devices, a fact confirmed by a man who claimed to have been a Nazi U-boat commander. We also learned that the real reason that Rommel’s Afrika Korps went into the desert was not to fight the British, but actually to test a neutron bomb. Apparently to test such a thing requires entire armies and thousands of armored vehicles, rather than just a few key scientists and technicians.

Jordan Maxwell (see jordanmaxwell.com/) is a jolly sort of fellow who uses simple, folksy arguments to reach startling conclusions. He informed us that we Americans are still living under a system of government and religion that is “Druidic” in origin, and we are still being ruled by England. All of our law is based on maritime admiralty law. Because you were born from the water breaking in your mother’s womb, under maritime admiralty law this makes you a maritime “product.” We think we are American citizens, but in reality all of us “belong” (literally) to the United States, which is a foreign-owned corporation set up in 1868. When your mother signed your birth certificate, this gave ownership of you to the U.S. corporation. Our birth certificates are traded on the stock exchange, where they serve as collateral for the U.S. corporation’s loans from international bankers. (It’s odd, I have looked at many stock quotes over the years, but have yet to see my birth certificate listed.) Originally sold for $630,000, our birth certificates are now worth more than $1 million each. If you look at your name as it appears on official documents, you will find that it is always in capital letters, just like the letters on a tombstone. This indicates that you are dead, under the law: you belong to them.

There is a way to remedy this, of course, and “repatriate” yourself to become a citizen of “America” instead of a product belonging to the “United States.” You can also get your true name back, using both uppercase and lowercase letters. Among the advantages will be that you do not have to pay income taxes, and are no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the courts. Maxwell and his pals can help you to do this, but (as did not come out until the second day) it’s going to cost you. His “repatriation” package sells for a mere $995. A “mortgage cancellation” package costs $1,200, a true bargain considering the size of mortgages here in California. But not all his services are so expensive. Monetary judgments can be set aside for a mere $125.

Dubious etymology is a specialty of Maxwell’s. For example, the Christian worship of God’s “son,” who is risen, is clearly derived from Roman worship of the “sun,” which rises each morning. Son-sun, he repeats, it’s obvious. (Can his audience truly be so simplistic to believe that these words would sound the same to speakers of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew?) “Christ” is really “cristo” or “crisco,” which means “oil,” not anointed. The “Lord,” originally spelled “Lard,” is simply congealed “crisco.” Passover is when the sun “passes over” the equator which marks the beginning of spring. (According to his resume, Maxwell was an “On-screen Expert and Research Consultant” for the CBS pseudodocumentary series “Ancient Secrets of the Bible.” With “expertise” like his, no wonder that program had the real scholars howling!)

The British conspiracist David Icke (pronounced “Ike”), perhaps the best-known of all the speakers, swaggered out onto the stage, then proceeded to tell a lot of jokes. Eventually moving onto the serious matters, he explained how all hunger and poverty in the world is caused by the conspirators who keep people miserable to promote dependency on them. Multinational corporations are, of course, the cause of poverty in Africa, and not political instability, lack of education, or poor infrastructure.

The Atlantean-Lemurian civilizations were very advanced. Today’s royal bloodlines trace back to them (and indeed much further). The Merovignians, an ancient dynasty, founded Paris, and dug many tunnels and caves under it. One of them was the Pont d'Alma tunnel, where Princess Diana died (although it looks to me suspiciously like an urban traffic underpass of much more recent vintage).

Icke’s most amazing claim is that the bloodlines of Europe’s royal families, which some claim to trace back to a secret union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are in fact derived from extraterrestrial lizards (see davidicke.com/icke/temp/reptconn.html). As proof of this, you need only look at the prevalence of gargoyles and dragons on all kinds of royal coats of arms. These people can be recognized by their ability to “shape shift” into reptilian form, then back again.

Cathy O'Brien claimed to have seen, during her days as a robotic White House sex slave, George Bush do a “lizard projection” using “harmonics.” Icke claims that the Illuminati lizards need to maintain a vast, global network of satanic cults to perform human sacrifice, sexual molestation, and cannibalism. He explains on his Web site that “to hold their human form, these entities need to drink human (mammalian) blood and access the energy it contains to maintain their DNA codes in their 'human' expression. If they don't, they manifest their reptilian codes and we would all see what they really look like. . . . From what I understand from former 'insiders,' the blood (energy) of babies and small children is the most effective for this, as are blond-haired, blue-eyed people.”

William Thomas, who spoke on “Responding to the Chemtrails Threat” (see island.net/~lbnews/), is the archetype of what a conspiracy theorist is expected to be like. Unlike many of the other speakers his mannerisms are paranoid and intense, his humor wry and unintended. (Maxwell’s delivery had been so light that I seriously wondered if his presentation was entirely farce, although the audience surely didn't think that. However, no one will ever question Thomas’ sincerity.) He lamented that his two-and-a-half-year pursuit of the chemtrails has “just about taken over my life, just about ruined my life.”

Thomas got repeated laughter from the audience when, showing slides of broad, flat jet contrails crossing the skies, he recounted the official explanations he had been given that these are just “normal airline operations.” For the benefit of those who cannot tell chemtrails from contrails, he offered the following explanation: contrails are pencil-thin lines that disappear quite soon, usually within one minute: anything else is a chemtrail, which is both sinister and bad for your health. The chemtrail assault upon us was first noted in November 1998, and has been causing sickness ever since. Thomas does not agree with those who say that it’s a deliberate attempt by the U.S. government to poison us. Instead, he suspects it is a massive, covert government operation to delay global warming by increasing the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into space. (According to a ten-year study by the French climatologist Olivier Boucher, not only do jet contrails sometimes seed the growth of cirrus clouds that can grow to enormous size, but they appear to increase global temperatures by trapping in reradiated heat. See “Air traffic may increase cirrus cloudiness,” Nature 397:30, 7 January 1999). Unfortunately, the aluminum oxide that is allegedly being sprayed has bad health consequences: the particles are causing huge colonies all kinds of bad bacteria, molds, fungi, etc. to precipitate down from the upper regions (where they presumably cavort happily unless disturbed, subsisting on nothing but plain air). Thus people are getting sick wherever chemtrails are seen. “Basically, Chicken Little was right.”

Dr. Leonard Horowitz is an anti-vaccination activist who spoke on “The Toxic Warfare Against Humanity” (see tetrahedron.org/aboutus.html). He explained how vaccines are deliberately contaminated by the Rockefeller-Windsor-Bush cabal, who not only make money selling the killer vaccines, but also off the medical treatments resulting from the diseases the vaccines create. The Rockefellers have invented the American medical monopoly, the cancer industry, and eugenics. The Rockefellers control the Alfred P. Sloan philanthropic foundation, which has created many viruses, including AIDS. The Rockefellers are trying to slowly poison us to reduce the population, making profits all the way. The recent West Nile Virus outbreak in the U.S. was a hoax, concocted to sell vaccines. Alzheimer’s patients are actually suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of Mad Cow disease. The bacteria E. coli is being genetically engineered by the CIA to create killer germs. Wherever WASP-directed capitalism goes, there also goes genocide.

Horowitz takes very seriously the “Report from Iron Mountain” with its claims of a secret government plot to perpetuate war. But this “document” is actually a hoax, as its author has confessed: see museumofhoaxes.com/iron.html. Unlike many of the other speakers, Horowitz, a “Jew for Jesus,” is very religious, his talk interspersed with prayer making him sound much like a revivalist. (Most of the other speakers were quite hostile toward organized religion, viewing it as part of the conspiracy.) Today, he warns, vaccine-induced diseases are fulfilling the dreadful prophecies from the Book of Revelations.

Surprisingly, it never was decided just who is to blame for the mess we are in. The favorite villains were the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Bilderberger network, the Illuminati, the CIA, and according to at least some of the literature being promoted, the Jews. There are also international bankers, the British royal family, Jesuits, multinational corporations, and all the speakers’ favorite villains, the Republicans, especially George Bush the elder, who is imagined to have secretly been running the country for decades. Of course, if he were really as powerful as all that, it seems he would have at least engineered his own re-election, let alone arrange a better than razor-thin electoral college victory for his son and heir.

"Alternative medicine” seems part and parcel of conspiracy claims, here and elsewhere. The speakers and the literature tables refer endlessly to conspiracies promulgated by organized medicine, and I heard a number of people complain about conditions not recognized by mainstream medicine. Conspiracy apparently cannot thrive without hypochondria-presumably those who feel healthy do not look around for someone to blame for their condition, and those who are genuinely sick realize that nobody conspired to create their illness.

As it happened, the conference facility was being shared with the Northern California Conference of Charismatic Catholics. During the breaks, I could hear some people talking about messages they received from the Lord, while others told of receiving threats from the CIA. The Charismatic conference, by the way, had a much greater attendance.

But Ron Ruiz of Oro Valley, Arizona, has gone one better, offering for sale at a Tucson gem show for $69,000 a potato-sized green rock that supposedly came from the crash of a liquid-hulled alien spaceship that crashed in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1947. “It seems like an awfully high amount, but there is very little of it," Ruiz told the Arizona Daily Star (February 5, 1999). Smaller pieces were available for $100 per gram, and at least four pieces were actually sold. However, skeptic James McGaha checked out the remarkable evidence, and suggests that it was probably a piece of slag, the refuse from metal smelting. You can decide for yourself what it is by looking at www.wehug.com/crashsitedebris.html. Actual pieces of supposed Roswell crash debris were on sale at the Bay Area UFO Expo held near San Francisco over the Labor Day holiday but seemed to generate little enthusiasm, probably because even the credulous UFO buffs in attendance found them unconvincing.

But you've got to give credit to Jose Escamilla of Roswell, New Mexico, who seems to have worked out a whole new angle in the crowded field of paranormal claims. They're called “Roswell Rods," and they allegedly zip through the air, never seeming to stop or slow down. Supposedly first discovered at Roswell, the Rods have now been seen almost everywhere that anyone has bothered to look for them. Seldom seen visually, the best way to spot them is to take a video or movie camera and point it at the sky. Sooner or later some little dark spot will be seen to zip across at high angular velocity, and when it does you will have a Rod sighting. "Rods have never been slow,” Escamilla explains. “These things travel at extremely high velocities and can barely be seen as they pass by. We have never seen a Rod hover or fly slowly as reports of cigar UFOs suggest. Most footage of Rods lasts from one to five frames in duration. What we consider to be the slowest Rods we have ever seen on video last a full ten frames before flying off screen. These ten frames equal one-third of a second.” I attended his lecture and video presentation. Some of his “rods” were obviously insects zipping across the field at a high angular rate. Others appear to have “appendages” in stop-frame video, apparently birds' wings blurred in zipping across the frame. Escamilla is convinced he's onto something really big here. His Web site, www.roswellrods.com, claims to have had more than 7 million visitors in the past three years, and he says he's now aggressively pursuing movie and television deals.

The charismatic and controversial UFOlogist Steven Greer (see this column, September/October 1999) recently revealed on his Web site http://www.cseti.org the real reason for the death of Marilyn Monroe. Greer claims to have an "authenticated CIA wiretap document of Marilyn Monroe signed by legendary Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton the day before her death detailing that she knew about the crashed spacecraft and dead bodies from Jack Kennedy and was planning a Press Conference to tell all-and more!” Unfortunately, if you want to read the full story, you'll have to buy Greer's new book.

Another wild-and-wooly UFO group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (see this column, September/October 1998) has filed a lawsuit complaining that the U.S. Government and the State of Arizona jointly are failing to protect citizens against a foreign invasion, specifically, abduction by extraterrestrials (see http://www.caus.org/crindex.html). The state, not surprisingly, has filed a motion to dismiss the case. However, its response deals with the suit not by showing that it is unsubstantiated and ridiculous, but instead claiming the state has “Qualified Immunity” and that the suit would “interfere with public administration,” even if the state's citizens were actually being abducted. Another lawsuit was directed against the Department of Defense for allegedly withholding UFO secrets requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Still in the works are planned lawsuits against the FBI and the CIA.

Still another UFOlogist, Larry W. Bryant of MUFON, recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the medical center at the Andrews Air Force Base, as follows:

Word has come to me that your facility routinely administers medical care (including counseling services, on both an in-patient and an out-patient basis) to servicemembers (and their family members) exhibiting symptoms of having undergone abduction by “extraterrestrial biological entities” (a.k.a. UFO-borne aliens).

Accordingly, under terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request that you send me a copy of the following records:

1. The standard treatment plan pursued by your personnel in caring for these above-defined victims.
2. All statistical-survey reports produced to date on the demographics, etiology, treatment protocols, long-term prognosis, and forensic evidence relating to your care of these victims. . . .

There is, as yet, no word about any deep secrets he may have pried loose. James Moseley reports in Saucer Smear (http://www.martiansgohome.com/smear) that Bryant is considering a lawsuit similar to that filed by CAUS against the state of Virginia, where he resides, charging that it, like Arizona, has failed to protect its citizens against alien abduction. But MUFON is leaning on Bryant to nix the suit, as MUFON considers it abysmally bad public relations.

However, according to one very earnest group of SETI researchers, the most promising way to detect extraterrestrial intelligence is not using sophisticated radio equipment or even ordinary telescopes, but instead setting up a Web page and waiting patiently for ET to log on. The group, sixteen of whom are members of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Committee, calls itself “Welcome ETI.” It has set up a Web page (http://members.aol.com/WelcomeETI/) and seriously expects to receive an e-mail message from a highly advanced alien intelligence that has figured out a way to hack into a terrestrial Internet connection.

This, however, is more difficult than it sounds, assuming that the ETs must abide by the same laws of physics as us Earthlings. The Internet protocols require the assignment of unique network addresses-even to ETs-and are inherently bi-directional. This means that ETs cannot just passively surf the net, but must enter data into the Internet in order to receive data from it. As for tapping into communications channels, we know that this is something that terrestrial intelligence agencies routinely can do.

However, if the ETs have placed an intelligent probe somewhere in our solar system that wishes to somehow insert data into one of our terrestrial microwave data links that is not expecting to receive it, because of delays of seconds if not minutes in the information round-trip at the speed of light, the un-hacked data would have reached its destination long before any extraterrestrial hacking could be accomplished (unless the ETs are precognitive and know what data will be transmitted in the future).

After I exchanged several e-mails with the group's organizer, Allen Tough, he agreed that because of these and other difficulties a successful alien hacker would have to have a presence on Earth instead of in space, which as I explained sounds very much like the plot for an episode of The X-Files. This suggests that the proper equipment for a SETI researcher might not be expensive telescopes and radio spectrum analyzers, but a hand-held scanner and a four-wheel drive vehicle. The group says that it has already received thirty replies claiming to be from ETs, however “none have yet come close to persuading us of their authenticity.”

The National Enquirer reported in its September 14, 1999, edition that Jackie Stallone, Sly Stallone's mom, has given up astrology for an even more bizarre form of fortunetelling: “rumpology," reading the imprint of a person's posterior. Clients remove their pants, sit on an ink-coated paper, then creating an impression in which the prognosticator interprets the lines and wrinkles. “It's all written on your behind who you're going to marry, love affairs, health-and most important of all in Hollywood, whether you're going to have a successful career,” she told the Enquirer.

But far from admitting defeat, a defiant Benveniste recently challenged the skeptics in a large Internet mailing. In it he boasts, “In our lab, this research has now reached a point way beyond the ‘memory of water.’ We have, we believe, unveiled the hitherto neglected physical nature of the molecular signal, which consists of waves in the kilohertz range, which we have recorded on computers, and sent to any destination of our choice via the Internet network.” Yes, he is claiming that water not only has a “memory,” but that he can store this memory in his computer, and even send it out over the Internet. By way of proof, Benveniste provides the following:

Abstract to the Congress of the American Association of Immunologists (San Francisco, February 1997)

TRANSATLANTIC TRANSFER OF DIGITIZED ANTIGEN SIGNAL BY TELEPHONE LINK.

J. Aefssa, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Benveniste. Digital Biology Lab-oratory (DBL), 32 rue des Carnets, 92140 Clamart, France, and North-western University Medical School, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

Ligands so dilute that no molecule remained still retained biological activity which could be abolished by magnetic fields [1-3], suggesting the electromagnetic (EM) nature of the molecular signal. This was confirmed by the electronic transfer to water (W) of molecular activity, directly or after computer storage [4-7]. Here, we report its telephonic transfer. Ovalbumin (Ova), or W as control, was recorded (1 sec, 16 bits, 22 kHz) in Chicago using a transducer and computer with soundcard. Coded files were transferred to DBL’s computer as e-mail “attached documents.” Digitally amplified, they were replayed for 20 min to W (dOva, dW), which was then perfused to isolated hearts from Ova-immunized guinea-pigs. . . .

Benveniste claims that physiological effects of the diluted substance were manifested in those organisms receiving his homeopathy-at-a-distance. If he is correct, in the future your doctor, roused from bed, won't tell you to “take two aspirins and call me in the morning,” but will instead send you e-mail, with the appropriate antigen as an attached document, which gets played through your sound card to work its vibrational miracles. Benveniste complained in his mail missive, “Clearly, the shortsightedness of two high priests of Orthodox Science [John Maddox and Walter Stewart] and a prestidigitator [Randi] have delayed this advance in chemistry and biology by ten years.”

Another advance in science receiving belated recognition involves Professor John Bockris of Texas A&M University, who was recently awarded the celebrated Ig Nobel Prize for Physics by the Annals of Improbable Research at Harvard. Bockris is a leading researcher in the field of cold fusion whose accomplishments have been prominently featured in Infinite Energy magazine. However, the prize was actually awarded for his experiments demonstrating the chemical transmutation of base metals into silver and gold. Bockris did not travel to Cambridge to pick up his prize.

The money to fund Texas A&M University’s 1993 ventures into alchemical research was donated by William Telander. The Houston Chronicle reported last April 3 that Telander was recently released from prison after serving two years for securities fraud. The university still holds $45,000 of his original $200,000 donation, and Telander wants it back unless it is used for its intended purpose -- funding Bockris’s experiments. The university, however, has frozen the funds, apparently as nervous about funding more alchemy as it is about returning the money.

Almost immediately, amateur satellite watchers began reporting remarkable things. While the Iridium satellites are not particularly large and are normally visible only with the aid of binoculars, satellite watchers were astonished to see one or more of the Iridiums suddenly flare up to be as bright as the brightest stars, then fade back to invisibility. Additional skywatching revealed that the Iridium satellites would often flare so brightly as to actually outshine Jupiter, or even Venus. Indeed, experienced satellite watchers have occasionally reported flares from the Iridium satellites so bright as to rival the first-quarter moon, and some have even been observed during daylight.

Mathematical analysis by Rob Matson and Randy John, both authors of satellite-tracking software, quickly yielded an answer to the mystery. The four Main Mission Antennas of an Iridium satellite, developed by Raytheon, are oriented at 90 degrees to each other. While they are not especially large (188 by 86 cm), they consist of highly reflective aluminum flat plates, treated with silver-coated Teflon for thermal control. Each being maintained at an angle of 50 degrees from Earth toward the satellite’s zenith, one always facing in the direction of the satellite’s travel, they probably represent the best flat reflecting surfaces ever to orbit Earth. When the angle is just right between the satellite, the observer, and the sun, sunlight reflecting off the silvered panels results in the sudden appearance of a dazzlingly bright, slow-moving, unexpected object that disappears in about twenty seconds or less -- the perfect culprit to cause UFO sightings. The flare-up lasts just long enough for someone to shout “Look! Up there!", giving the crowd a few seconds of dazzling brilliance, then fading completely from view. (For more information on the Iridium flares and to download software to predict them, see plasma.mpe-garching.mpg.de.)

Flares from the thirty-four Iridium satellites now in orbit are visible sporadically in most locations around the globe, typically occurring during the time of evening or morning twilight. When the Iridium program is fully deployed, it will consist of sixty-six satellites. Hence, the flares can be expected to increase in frequency and continue indefinitely.

While we are on the subject of satellites that mimic UFOs, we should mention Superbird A, a dead Japanese communications satellite now adrift in the satellite graveyard just outside the Clarke belt of geosynchronous orbit, many times more distant than the Iridium satellites. It, too, sometimes reflects the sun from both the front and back side of its huge solar panels as it tumbles approximately once every twenty-three seconds. When the satellite is favorably placed in the sky, for a period of about six minutes per evening observers can see millisecond-duration pulses of light every 11.6 seconds, looking for all the world like a strobe flash hanging in the heavens.

While not nearly as bright as the Iridium reflections because of its great distance, Superbird A is the only object in or near geosynchronous orbit regularly visible to the naked eye. Because of its distance from Earth, Superbird A can be expected to remain in orbit for intervals measured in "eras,” not “millennia.” The night sky will continue to glitter with space junk long after we're all dead.