For instance, the true popularity here of UFOs may be hard to gauge, but when the China Post (1995) ran an editorial encouraging the study of UFOs in the schools, skeptical hackles were raised.² In a letter to the editor, Tim Holmes (1995) of the Taiwan Skeptics delivered a telling riposte.

Whereas the paper printed his letter, public lectures by UFO buffs don’t usually admit any questioning. I attended one such free presentation during an island-wide blitz by believers in 1995. As a door prize they offered Streiber-alien look-alike dolls. The slide show was a “Best of National Enquirer” tour de force, at which I thought everyone would double over laughing. Seeing as how the audience seemed to be taking everything in and being taken in, I ventured to question the plausibility of a slide which allegedly showed a U.S. bomber that had been transported by aliens to the dark side of the moon. My comment was greeted with stony silence, and my escort scolded me for breaching Chinese etiquette, which does not permit the raising of “problems” for a speaker. (Wen-ti, the Chinese word for question, is also the word for problem). In short, no public questions allowed — unless requested by the speaker at the end. Catch-22, in Chinese.

Another cult practice here apparently has its fountainhead in India. The supposed medicinal benefits of drinking one’s own urine made quite a splash in the media (Graves 1996; China Post 1996a,b). A television station aired an “investigative report” in which a credulous and somewhat flushed reporter watched mainly older men and women wash, gargle, and even swallow what they said was their own urine. The practice seems to be limited to small handfuls of devotees throughout the country, though the media gave “estimates” of tens of thousands of believers — based on reports from the adherents themselves. Tim Holmes (1996) tells me he has neighbors who assure him they practice urine therapy, which is said to cure disease and lead to a longer life.

Taiwan is part of that exotic Orient which has embraced Western technology and even adopted democratic electoral procedures. Behind all the hustle and bustle of daily life is the world of commonly shared cultural beliefs, some of which extol the paranormal or perpetuate pseudoscience. While many of these strike Westerners as quite odd, others at root are similar to widely held beliefs in the Occident and elsewhere. Certainly this sketch, and the one previous, in no way exhaust the world of the weird in Taiwan.

Notes

1. Two sixth-graders who attended that same camp joined my English class in the fall; they said they had not been harangued in any way.
2. The same newspaper subsequently reported that a woman had “sat in a bathtub for three years” (China Post 1996c). To the paper’s credit, they decided in the end that the family making the report “might have exaggerated.”

References

• China Post. 1995. Study of UFOs can be helpful. April 17, p. 4.
• —. 1996a. Urine can cure mad cows, says doctor. April 14, p. 8.
• —. 1996b. Urine drinking attracts more faithful followers. May 6, p. 20.
• —. 1996c. Woman sat in bathtub for 3 years, family says. August 11, p. 16.
• —. 1996d. Temple said to be forcing campers into monasticism. September 4, p. 15.
• —. 1996e. Angry relatives try to find college students-turned-monks. September 5, p. 1.
• —. 1996f. Temple melee prompts debate on religion law. September 6, p. 1.
• —. 1996g. Buddhists pledge parental approval. September 12, p. 16.
• Graves, N. 1996. Urine advocates say drug firms should listen. China Post. March 21, p. 7.
• Holmes, T. 1995. Using jackpot lure in science is risky. China Post. May 7.
• —. 1996. Personal communications.

Looking at ETs historically, Huyghe notes that they are well over one hundred years old. In 1896 one Colonel Shaw and a Miss Camille Spooner reported a near abduction by alien creatures with large black eyes who stood three feet tall. Similar reports came out of England in 1901, Baltimore in 1919, Australia in 1925, and Spain in 1944. All of these cases preceded Betty and Barney Hill’s "abduction,” George Adamski’s Venusian flights, Antonio Villas Boas’s alien party in Brazil, and police officer Lonnie Zamora’s encounter with little folk in white coveralls. Following the UFO-sighting classification work of J. Allen Hynek of Project Blue Book, we received in 1987 the alien cover on Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which made the “little grays” very popular. People began to see these fellows everywhere, and there were also many variants. Some grays turned out to be five, six, and even seven feet tall instead of the usual three or four feet. Moreover, people began to report many other aliens of every shape, form, and variety, as the abductions and human/alien encounters began to proliferate and prosper publicity-wise.

Huyghe’s classification effort is not the first — both Linda Moulton Howe and Thomas Bullard made earlier efforts to deal with this alien avalanche. Huyghe, however, believes his taxonomy is the best because all of his entities are closely associated with an alien craft and a good encounter story. Huyghe states his classification doesn't pretend to be scientific but is based solely on how the aliens looked to the human observer, i.e., their phenotype. Huyghe has been able to distinguish four separate classes with several types within each class. The largest class, as one might expect, is the humanoids with five sub-types: nordics, short grays, short non-grays, giants, and nonclassics. Under the animalian category are also five types: mammalian, reptilian, amphibian, insectoid, and avian. Under robotic we find two types: the metallic and the fleshy. And in the fourth category, the exotic, we have again two types: the physical and the apparitional (ghostlike creatures).

Short stories and drawings of all the reported aliens accompany each of the classes and types. As Huyghe notes, if you are a UFO buff, you need this book: "Don't get lost in space without it!” In closing, Huyghe quotes David Jacobs who believes that only the grays are genuine, while all the rest are confabulations of the witnesses. Eddie Bullard, the folklorist and neo-skeptic, also reports that in his opinion the alien humanoid is nothing but “a malicious fairy in technological trappings.” Other folklorists, however, are not so sure.

For example, Michael Craft, staff member of the Omega Institute and a student of Tibetan, Taoist, Native American, and other magical traditions, believes that not only are the aliens very real but, “Something deep inside us appears to love or require the existence of incomprehensible beings and forces, both hostile and friendly. Whether they are there because we need them or because they need us, they are there for us. Whether or not these things are ‘real’ is another question, perhaps one without a single answer.”

In his 1996 book Alien Impact: A Comprehensive Look at the Evidence of Human/Alien Contact (St. Martin’s Press, cloth, 302 pp., $23.95), Craft assures us: “The myth of the alien is as old as humanity. Angels, elves, dragons, talking trees, demons, and trolls are the ancestors of our modern Grays, Bigfoots, Poltergeists, and Channeled spirits.” Craft became interested in aliens, it seems, because of his own strange, UFO-type encounters. Hearing stories of others over a twenty-year period has convinced Craft that “belief is the enemy.” He says, “The UFO community, and its vast literature, is a creaky house built from many different materials” — disappearances, abductions, alien animals, celestial portents, false memories, time distortions, flashbacks, and so on. The fact that the number of people who report seeing UFOs and meeting alien beings is constantly increasing and that over fifty percent of the population believes in aliens has convinced Craft that such a “belief system” is not only real and powerful but mirrors the chaos of modern civilization.

Craft then proceeds to review the entire history of human/alien contact according to reporters such as George Adamski, Billy Meier, Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton, Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, participants in the Roper poll, David Jacobs, John Mack, as well as the infamous “men in black.” Every occult, paranormal, folkloric, or pseudoscientific phenomenon or concept — past and present — is trotted out by Craft in a maximum effort to make the reader take him seriously. These include cattle mutilations, crop circles, MJ-12, Area 51, Roswell, black helicopters, Erich von Däniken and Zacharia Sitchin and the Monuments on Mars, the Ashtar command, the Aetherius Society, Findhorn, Swedenborgism, Madame Blavatsky, channeling and science-fiction themes in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the Shaver mystery, and more.

Craft also treats us to modern experimentation in the field of parapsychology, including the work of Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne and some of those remote-viewers who report seeing alien-powered UFOs. Digressions into the belief systems of such sober scientists as John Keel and Terence McKenna are also provided. Keel believes that God is causing people to see UFOs, and McKenna says that an energy field — “the spinning vortex is the UFO . . . UFOs are intended to confound science and reason” — causes us to see and experience UFOs.

According to Craft, what all of the UFO alien lore really means is that reality itself is changing. In Craft’s words, “[H]umanity is headed toward a drastic reordering and restructuring of what we call reality. Paradigm-shaping scientific discoveries appear almost daily just as UFO encounters seem to. Those crazy ‘confoundings’ are on the rise. Perhaps we are headed toward a casual collapse, or a reshaping of reality that ignores all the old rules, except those found in old fairy tales . . . whether we go to the stars or oblivion, UFOs — our oldest friends — are along for the ride.”

If while reading this you have been hearing a buzzing noise, don’t be alarmed. Its just my baloney detector acting up. It goes crazy now every time it hears the words alien impact or the name Michael Craft. It is truly a shame that so very many intelligent and semi-educated people have failed to receive any basic training whatsoever in the sciences. Any general familiarity with one or more of the scientific disciplines would end once and for all the writing, publication, and dissemination of such unmitigated nonsense as Craft’s Alien Impact and the dozens of other books about visitors from beyond. Illusions, delusions, hallucinations and the need to feel important and to be heard and sympathized with, as well as the human proclivity to perpetuate "terminological inexactitudes” can easily and sufficiently account for all reports of contact between humans and aliens, not to mention contact between humans and dragons, elves, demons, fairies, or Elvis. Pompous, pretentious, and contrived accounts of the “social impact” of nonexistent entities are unacceptable. Can one even conceive of writing a book titled The Social Impact of Fairies?

Despite Craft’s labors and the hysterical maunderings of Hopkins, Mack, Strieber, Jacobs, and the credulous media, valid and scientifically acceptable evidence of the existence of either aliens or alien spaceships remains unavailable and will, in all likelihood, remain so for centuries to come. Independence Day is science fiction, not science fact. True believers will, of course, think me a pawn of sinister governmental forces or part of the reactionary establishment’s plot to keep the Truth from the masses. As Chris Carter knows, the Truth is, indeed, “out there.” Like Carter, Craft has discovered that paranormal and paranoid fiction is both more entertaining and financially profitable than dull and mundane fact.

This latest publicized controversy is sure to have a catalyzing effect on the planned fiftieth-anniversary hoopla, July 1-6, at Roswell, New Mexico, the site of ufology’s Holy Grail. From near Roswell, according to a burgeoning legend, in late June or early July of 1947, a crashed alien spacecraft and its humanoid occupants were retrieved and hidden away at a secret government installation.

The “Roswell incident” as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a “flying disc” had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed. (For a detailed account of the Roswell incident, see Kal K. Korff, ”What Really Happened at Roswell,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 1997.)

This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sighting, the famous string of “flying saucers” witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947.

Just such sightings had long been anticipated by pulp science-fiction magazines, like Amazing Stories, and by the earlier writings of a crank named Charles Fort. Called “the world’s first ufologist,” Fort reported on unidentified objects in the sky that he believed indicated visits from space aliens; his reports were based on old newspaper and magazine accounts.

Soon after the press release made headlines around the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was released: The unidentified flying object had really been a weather balloon, said officials, and photographs of the “wreckage” — some flexible, silvery-looking material — were distributed to the press.

In 1949 came the first of the crashed-saucer hoaxes. It involved a science-fiction movie, The Flying Saucer, produced by Mikel Conrad, which allegedly contained actual footage of a captured spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad posed as an FBI agent and swore the retrieval claim was true. The following year writer Frank Scully reported in his book Behind the Flying Saucers that the U.S. government had in its possession no fewer than three alien spaceships, together with the bodies of their humanoid occupants. Scully was fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum-locating device allegedly based on alien technology.

Other crash-retrieval stories followed, as did photographs of space aliens, living and dead: One gruesome photo merely portrayed the charred body of the pilot of a small plane, his aviator’s glasses still visible in the picture.

In 1974 Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one of the crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. According to the late claimant’s son, Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story. (See “Son of Originator of ‘Alien Autopsy’ Story Casts Doubt on Father’s Credibility,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 1997.)

In 1977 a pseudonymous “Fritz Werner” claimed to have “assisted in the investigation of a crashed unknown object” in Arizona. This included, he said, his actually seeing the body of one four-foot-tall humanoid occupant that had been placed in a tent. Unfortunately there were suspicious parallels between the Werner and Scully stories and other evidence of hoaxing, including various inconsistencies in Werner’s tale.

In 1987, the author of a book on Roswell released the notorious “MJ-12 documents” which seemed to prove that a saucer had indeed crashed near Roswell and that its humanoid occupants really were recovered. The documents purported to show that there was a secret “Operation Majestic Twelve” authorized by President Truman to handle clandestinely the crash/retrieval at Roswell. A “briefing document” for President-elect Eisenhower was also included. However, MJ-12 was another Roswellian hoax, the documents merely crude paste-up forgeries that utilized signatures cut from photocopies of actual letters and documents. The forger even slipped one document into the National Archives so it could be “discovered” there. (The Archives quickly cast doubt on its authenticity.) The NBC series Dark Skies is based on the MJ-12 pseudohistory.

In 1990 Gerald Anderson responded to an Unsolved Mysteries telecast about the alleged 1947 UFO crash (placing it in western New Mexico). He claimed that he and other family members, including his uncle Ted, were rock hunting in the desert when they came upon a crashed saucer with injured aliens among the still-burning wreckage. Anderson released a diary that his uncle had kept which recorded the event. Alas, examination by a forensic chemist showed that the ink used to write the entries did not exist in 1947 but had first been manufactured in 1974. (Anderson claimed that the tested pages were copies, but he never made the alleged originals available.)

The boldest of the Roswell hoaxes came in 1995 when an “alien autopsy” film surfaced, showing the purported dissection of a retrieved humanoid corpse. Attributed to an anonymous former government cameraman, the film was distributed by a British marketing agency that formerly handled Walt Disney products, and it was promoted during prime time on the Fox network. Although the film was supposedly authenticated by Kodak, only the leader tape and a single frame of film had been submitted, and Kodak refused to be taken in by the obvious ploy. In time, the film’s bogus, non-military codemark and various anachronisms led it to be declared a hoax — even by most ufologists, who let it be known there were limits to their credulity.

More recently, there was the Roswell “UFO fragment” of 1996, a piece of swirly-patterned metal that turned out to be nothing more than scraps discarded by a Utah jewelry artist. And so the hoaxes continue. Many ufologists have heralded the Roswell incident as providing the primary evidence for the UFO invasion of planet Earth. Supporting evidence, of course, purportedly comes from myriad UFO reports (most of which eventually become IFOs: identified flying objects) and “alien abductions” (experiences that skeptics have shown are fantasy-based).

Ironically, the government’s claim that a weather balloon instead of a “flying disc” landed at Roswell was honest but mistaken. It was not, of course, the grandiose coverup of extraterrestrial visitation that conspiracy theorists now imagine. The best current evidence indicates that the crashed device was in reality a U.S. government spy balloon — part of a 1940s secret operation called Project Mogul, an attempt to monitor sonic emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests.

As a consequence of these sordid events, the Roswell incident has left a half-century legacy of bizarre cult mythology, anti-government conspiracy theories, and unrelenting skywatching by self-styled ufologists who seem to fancy themselves on the brink of a momentous discovery. The latest book or television program to the contrary, what crashed at Roswell was the truth, plain and simple.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the “Roswell incident,” an event that helped kick off our culture’s undying fascination with UFOs. Although its passing will undoubtedly be marked with more sensationalistic “documentaries” and continued cries of conspiracy, two former proponents of the incident have had a change of heart.

In the March issue of his Skeptics UFO Newsletter, Philip Klass reports that Kent Jefferey, an international pilot and organizer of the International Roswell Initiative (which collected more than 25,000 signatures aimed at obtaining a Presidential Executive Order to declassify UFO information), is expected to explain his new position — that there’s little evidence to support the Roswell case — in an upcoming issue of the MUFON UFO Journal.

Earlier this year, Klass reported that Roswell researcher Karl Pflock had publicly disclosed his revised view that “no flying saucer or saucers crashed in the vicinity of Roswell or on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947.”

Will the revelations of these converts dampen the anniversary hype? Probably not. But skeptics should be pleased to know that a book by Klass about Roswell is in the works, to be published by Prometheus Books later this year. (Skeptics UFO Newsletter, March 1997)

Faking the Final Frontier

According to one theory, the recent production of Apollo 13 — with its amazing special effects and camera tricks — had a great deal more in common with the famous NASA mission than just the story. As Jon Blanton reports in the North Texas Skeptic, some conspiracy buffs still believe that the moon landings and the many other Apollo missions were mere Hollywood fakery. Their proof?

First, they claim that the lighting in both the still and video records of the moon walks is totally inconsistent with what would be expected on the moon — and entirely consistent with staged studio lighting effects (e.g., “pools” of light around the central figure with rapid fall-off of lighting in the surrounding areas; “fill-in” lighting on central figures where shadows should have been virtually black; etc.).

Secondly, they claim the audio is suspicious. For instance, Armstrong’s quiet voice describing the landing has virtually no “background noise” — whereas he ought to have been yelling to make himself heard above the noise of the engine controlling the descent.

Thirdly, they believe there are glaring inconsistencies between the video and still records (of Aldrin’s descent onto the lunar surface, for example).

Is it possible that NASA didn’t have the resources to get a man on the moon and simply faked the whole thing? That’s a stretch. Besides, as Blanton likes to point out, he once stood in the control room at McDonald Observatory and watched while a laser beam was bounced off a reflector left by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Of course, maybe Blanton is part of the conspiracy. . . . (North Texas Skeptic, March 1997)

Decorating for Balanced Energy

If you've recently moved your sofa to make room for that new recliner, your relationship just might go down the tubes. And those shelves you just put in? They might lead to financial ruin. Or, as Robert Baker points out in a recent Kases File, if you don’t pay careful attention to the location of that litter box, you might find yourself in a heap of trouble.

Feng-shui (pronounced “fung-shway”) is an ancient Asian folk belief that the way objects are arranged and placed in one’s home will affect ch'i, or qi (pronounced “chee”). Ch'i, of course, is that invisible field of electromagnetic energy that determines our vitality, fortune, and love life. And for one reason or another, this folklore has caught on in America.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Thousands of people . . . are taking weekend courses and promising to change the fortunes and love lives of eager clients through consultations that can cost as much as $1,000 an hour.”

Feng-shui consultants and gurus are even showing up in Architectural Digest and other magazines, dispensing advice on how to rearrange the ch'i in your home. (KASES File, Volume 10, Number 1)

Awards for Credulous and Incredulous Reporters

As all skeptics know, getting fair, balanced reporting on paranormal topics is rare. The wild claims of astrologers, healers, and psychics of all kinds often go unchallenged and uninvestigated by reporters. But this is not always the case. Occasionally, thorough stories do appear, in which the investigator took the time to look at both sides of the issue. Keith Taylor, a member of the San Diego Association for Rational Inquiry, believes both types of reporters should be recognized, and his group is establishing new awards to do just that.

Though the names of the awards have not yet been decided, the hope is that local reporters will be singled out for their gullibility or honored for their responsible journalism. It might even generate some publicity for the local group. And perhaps other skeptics groups will be inspired to start similar programs.

Suggestions for award names can be sent to DipsyDmstr@aol.com, ehemming@adnc.com, or the San Diego Association for Rational Inquiry, 945 Fourth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101. (Rational Inquiry, January/March 1997)