The Art Bell Show, officially Coast to Coast AM, began roughly thirteen years ago and is America’s most syndicated late-night talk radio program. Carried five days a week on AM stations throughout the country (with a sixth show called Dreamland on Sundays), it regularly features a parade of paranormal oddities.

Theories about a strange object near Hale-Bopp were first made public in November of last year when Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer from Houston, called Art Bell’s program to report that a photograph of his appeared to show a large object behind the comet, an object he speculated to be up to four times the size of Earth. The following night, Courtney Brown, a tenured professor of political science at Emory University and director of the Farsight Institute in Atlanta, was a guest on Bell’s show and claimed that three “remote viewers” associated with his institute had confirmed Shramek’s findings and, incredibly, had determined it to be a metallic object full of aliens. As further proof, Brown sent Bell a photograph of the Hale-Bopp “companion” (allegedly taken by someone Brown identified only as a “top-ten university astronomer”) on the condition that Bell hold off displaying the image on his Web page until the astronomer in question held a news conference. (Meanwhile, astronomers analyzing Shramek’s mystery object concluded it was a misidentified star, though Shramek continues to dispute this.) After two months of waiting for the secret astronomer to come forward (time also spent feeding the Hale-Bopp UFO hype), Bell decided to post the secret photograph. One day later Bell was contacted by Oliver Hainut and David Tholen, both professors from the University of Hawaii, who said that Brown’s image was merely a doctored copy of one of their recent comet photos, and they provided a comparison to prove it. The image was a fake.

As one might expect, Bell took a number of steps to distance himself from the very controversy he had spent so much time promoting. Brown, who had enjoyed frequent publicity on Bell’s program, was no longer welcome (to this day Brown refuses to reveal the mystery astronomer’s identity). Links previously advancing the UFO story — including audio files of the November shows containing the early Hale-Bopp “companion” discussions — disappeared from Bell’s Web pages. (Bell says that all of the audio files from those November shows were lost when a hard drive crashed.) Russel Sipe, an Internet expert who maintains a popular Internet site devoted to educating the public and combating the pseudoscience linked to the comet, also noted that when Alan Hale paid a visit to the radio program in early March, Bell “talked about the magnificence of the comet . . . and even seemed to suggest that there was no evidence for anomalous elements surrounding Hale-Bopp.”

Despite the blatant reversal of position, Bell says he doesn't regret having publicized the Hale-Bopp UFO story. “You have to remember I had several sources,” Bell explains. “In addition to Shramek’s photo, I had a university professor at Emory who supplied us with photographic evidence of what he said was true.” Keep in mind this is the same professor who, for a mere $3,000, will teach students enrolled at his “Institute” to communicate with extraterrestrials. Nevertheless, Bell maintains that Brown and Shramek’s evidence constituted “sufficient material,” and he seems unconcerned that his sources eventually proved to be totally unreliable.

What about the possibility that thirty-nine people ended their lives in part because of Bell’s promotion of false information? Bell doubts the cult members incorporated the “companion UFO” story into their mass suicide decision. He says that in the weeks following the Courtney Brown debacle, the “entire fraud was heavily exposed” and that the revelations all occurred two months before the Rancho Santa Fe suicides. And in a further attempt to paint himself as just another innocent reporter at the mercy of his sources, Bell asserted that “the media had it totally, utterly wrong” in their initial reports of the numbers and ages of suicide victims, as if to compare his show’s unsubstantiated and pretentious banter about a massive, comet-trailing alien craft to the act of gathering details during a breaking, tragic news story. Most important for Bell, though, is that the Heaven’s Gate members appeared to have been aware of the Hale-Bopp UFO debunking. The first line of their now infamous Web site reads:

“Whether Hale-Bopp has a ‘companion' or not is irrelevant from our perspective.”

However, the cult’s Internet link to the Art Bell homepage also indicates it’s likely they first heard about an approaching spaceship during Bell’s two-month-long UFO escapade.

But whatever the Heaven’s Gate cult members or anyone else may have done with the information presented on his radio show, Bell feels that is not his responsibility. “I'm not going to stop presenting my material because there are unstable people,” he insists. “That’s what the First Amendment is all about.” Constitutional rights aside, Bell’s wild Hale-Bopp tales have clearly extended beyond the confines of harmless late-night entertainment and have contributed yet another ominous paranormal myth to a public of both stable and “unstable” people regularly misinformed about science.

According to much widely held public opinion, the United States government successfully recovered the remains of a crashed UFO along with its extraterrestrial occupants near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. In what is now known as the “the Roswell incident,” the U.S. military is said to have quickly covered up the affair and continues to shroud it in extreme secrecy even today.

If these events surrounding Roswell in the summer of 1947 actually took place, as have been claimed in several books on the subject and by numerous UFO researchers, it would certainly constitute the story of the millennium and be the greatest government-sponsored coverup of all time. Indeed, should irrefutable evidence ever surface that any government on this earth possessed the physical remains of either an extraterrestrial spacecraft or its occupants, it is an understatement to say that such a revelation would fundamentally transform humanity as we know it.

What does one do with the numerous claims about Roswell that have surfaced over the years? How does one begin to determine the truth about what really happened in 1947 and sort the fact from the fiction?

The Roswell incident, and all that surrounds it, is a complex web of events, not easily understandable nor explainable until examined fully and in painstaking detail. In my new book, The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know (Prometheus Books 1997), I undertake such a dissection. The book presents the results of some sixteen years of research and, for all practical purposes, leaves no stone unturned. The Roswell “mystery” has been solved, and there is no credible evidence that the remains of an extraterrestrial spacecraft was involved.

The Original Roswell Event

For non—UFO buffs, the Roswell incident effectively began after the Fourth of July holiday weekend in 1947 when a rancher named William “Mac” Brazel reported to the local sheriff, George Wilcox, that he might have recovered the remains of “one of them flying saucers.” Wilcox, according to various accounts, then contacted military authorities at nearby Roswell Army Air Field, where Major Jesse Marcel was assigned to investigate.

Marcel and two Counter Intelligence Corps agents, Sheridan Cavitt and Lewis Rickett, drove out to the ranch where Brazel worked to examine and collect the wreckage. On July 8, 1947, the public information office at Roswell AAF made the startling announcement that they had recovered the remains of a “flying disc.”

However, by the next day the excitement was over. Brigadier General Roger Ramey, who had ordered the wreckage sent to him for examination at Carswell Air Force Base (also known as Fort Worth), held a press conference, with Major Marcel present, and announced that all the hoopla had been over a mistaken weather balloon, and nothing more.

With Ramey’s deflating announcement, the Roswell “flying saucer” story was effectively dead and would remain so for decades. Then, in 1978, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman happened to meet Marcel. Because Marcel dredged up his recovered-saucer story, and Friedman thought he had at last found a “star” witness who could blow open the U.S. government’s alleged coverup of crashed saucers and pickled aliens, the Roswell myth began anew, with Friedman as its most vocal (and visible) champion.

“Hundreds of Witnesses”

In the pro-UFO community, much fanfare has been made over the years about the “dozens” or even “hundreds of eyewitnesses” to the alleged UFO crash near Roswell.

If the near-holy reverence for the number of alleged witnesses surrounding the Roswell affair were limited to just the UFO buffs who have conducted no direct research of their own, this situation might be understandable. However, this is not the case, for the authors of numerous Roswell books play the numbers game as well.

In the pro-UFO book The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt note the fact that Bill Moore, coauthor of The Roswell Incident (1980), interviewed “more then seventy witnesses who had some knowledge of the [Roswell UFO crash] event.” Indeed, both Friedman and Moore, around the time of the initial publication of The Roswell Incident, boasted that they had interviewed more than “ninety witnesses.”

While these double-digit figures are certainly accurate, the presentation of such a seemingly impressive number of witnesses by themselves, without qualification, is misleading. The relevant issue is not how many witnesses were interviewed, but rather what type of witnesses (i.e., firsthand, secondhand), and how truthful and accurate their statements were.

Unfortunately, a careful reading of Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz’s Roswell Incident reveals that, despite the impressive claim of having “interviewed more than seventy witnesses,” the testimonies of just twenty-five people are presented. Out of these twenty-five, only seven of them are firsthand sources who claim to have seen the alleged saucer debris, and one of these accounts is suspect. Of these seven people, however, only five claim to have actually handled the material personally, and one of them is adamant that it was not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The remainder of the professed “witnesses” cited in The Roswell Incident are either secondhand sources (whose testimonies constitute hearsay) or people who saw no wreckage at all or were never present at the “debris field” during the critical time. In other words, they are not actually witnesses in the true sense of the word.

Father Time and Flawed Memories

While the pro-UFO community and the Roswell authors stress the number of witnesses, another factor in their firm belief that an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed at Roswell is the apparent consistency of the eyewitness testimonies.

However, a careful reading of the statements presented in The Roswell Incident and elsewhere reveals that there are serious discrepancies among the various accounts which, when analyzed in detail and taken collectively, severely weaken the case.

One undeniable truth that many UFO advocates seem to easily forget is that when Moore and Friedman first started interviewing some of the original witnesses regarding Roswell, the recollections of these people had undoubtedly changed. If nothing else, their memories reflected the passage of nearly thirty-one years, if not more. Even the very first person interviewed, Marcel, was not questioned by Friedman until 1978, again almost thirty-one years after the event.

It is an irrefutable fact that the passage of time erodes the accuracy of one’s recollections of an event. Despite this, the Roswell authors continue to stress just how “clear and sharp” their witnesses’ memories are, even though nearly fifty years have now elapsed. Certainly these memories could not have improved.

Perhaps the most absurd attempt to paint the Roswell eyewitnesses and their testimonies as beyond dispute can be found in Randle and Schmitt’s The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, which was later adapted for television by Showtime, under the name Roswell.

In drawing a parallel between the alleged UFO events at Roswell and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Randle and Schmitt state, “The Roswell memories are vivid and detailed, despite the passage of so many years” and constitute a “snapshot memory.”

If this is the case, to use Randle and Schmitt’s analogy, then these people forgot to load film in their camera, for even the most important “star” witness to Roswell, Major Marcel, when first interviewed, could not even remember the year of the alleged UFO crash, let alone the month. Indeed, Marcel’s own answer as to when this supposed “snapshot memory” event took place was simply “in the late forties"!

In my book on Roswell, I examine systematically the accounts of all major “witnesses” presented in the Roswell Incident and all others. For the first time, these testimonies are exposed for what they are: a mishmash of erroneous accounts, embellishments and outright confabulations. In fact, as I show, some of the people who have been touted as witnesses by the pro-UFO Roswell authors are not really witnesses at all. Here are some examples:

Lydia Sleppy: Claims she was operating a teletype machine announcing the recovery of the flying disk when her teletype suddenly went dead and broadcast an ominous message from the FBI back to her ordering her to stop broadcasting the story in the interests of national security.

Truth: A check by this author with all relevant FBI field offices and their headquarters turned up no evidence that the FBI sent any such message, nor did they have the monitoring equipment in place to do so. Furthermore, the type of teletype machine in use by Sleppy at the time would have required her to throw a “receiver” switch in order for her to receive an incoming transmission. There was no way that the FBI could have “interrupted” her as she claims.

Loretta Proctor: Neighbor of Mac Brazel, the rancher who originally discovered the “saucer” debris. She claims she tried to bend, burn, and break a piece of the material Brazel showed her but was unable to. Proctor’s testimony is used by crashed-saucer buffs to buttress the argument that a spaceship made of unknown, exotic material crashed near Roswell.

Truth: Loretta Proctor has changed her story several times. She has transformed herself from a “witness” who never saw any debris, to one who now tried to bend, break, and burn the “mysterious” material. She began changing her account after her husband, Floyd, who made it very clear in earlier interviews that they had never seen any material, passed away.

Sergeant Melvin E. Brown: Brown is touted as a “witness” who saw alien bodies by Roswell authors Friedman, Randle and Schmitt, and Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle (Beyond Roswell).

Truth: Melvin Brown cannot be considered a witness since he died in 1986 and was never interviewed by UFO researchers. Indeed, the only “proof” one has that Brown was a “witness” comes from his daughter, Beverly Bean, who first made the claim years after his death. No other member of Brown’s family supports her claim. Furthermore, a check by this author of Brown’s military file revealed that he was a cook who held no security clearance and never pulled guard duty. Also noted in the book are the blatant contradictions and changes in Beverly Bean’s various accounts.

Major Jesse Marcel: The Hidden Truth

In my book I publish for the first time excerpts from the military file of Jesse Marcel, excerpts which prove that although Marcel served his country honorably, he was not a credible witness and should not be considered as such. (Despite this fact, Stanton Friedman and other pro-UFO Roswell authors consider his every word to be gospel truth.) The file is extremely incriminating, for it it clearly demonstrates that Marcel had a penchant for exaggerating things while repeatedly trying to “write himself” into the history books. Ironically, Marcel’s tendency to exaggerate was specifically noted in his military file by none other than the commander of the base at Roswell at that time, in a review of his performance that was signed just after the incident occurred.

Marcel claimed that he personally flew the UFO wreckage to Carswell AFB. He could not have done so, for he was never a pilot. Despite this, Marcel claimed in numerous interviews with Friedman and former National Enquirer reporter Bob Pratt that he was not only a pilot but had managed to shoot down five enemy aircraft! If so, this would have made Marcel an “ace,” a distinction that certainly would have been noted in his military file. Instead, there’s no record of this or even anything close, and in fact it was General Ramey who specifically noted in Marcel’s file that because he was not a pilot, he would be severely limited in his career opportunities in the Air Force. It’s no wonder, then, that Marcel would later “blame” Ramey for the “UFO coverup” at Roswell.

Marcel claimed he had a bachelor’s degree in physics and even named the universities he attended. However, when I checked with those institutions, I discovered that one of them he never attended, and he never finished his education at the other. Curiously, while Marcel blatantly lied to UFO researchers such as Friedman about his mythical educational background, he never dared make such false claims to the military. Indeed, in signed statements contained in Marcel’s military file, he replies “none” when asked under oath if he had a college degree.

Does this tell us that Marcel knew his gullible UFO peers would never check on him anyway? Or did he even care? We don't know.

The book also notes that Friedman, even as of this writing, has failed to refute these devastating new revelations about his “star” Roswell witness. Indeed, in what can only be politely called lame rationalization, Friedman counters that military records are notoriously inaccurate. While this is sometimes true, the comment is irrelevant, since throughout Marcel’s file his signature repeatedly appears indicating that he signed off on its contents, certifying them to be true. Until Friedman and other pro-UFO Roswell researchers bother obtaining Marcel’s entire military file, they are in no position to make comments on it, let alone dismiss it.

In addition to disproving Marcel’s testimony, I also systematically dismantle and refute other Roswell “eyewitness” testimonies such as those of British Major Hughie Green, Roswell mortician Glen Dennis, Rueben Anaya, Frankie Rowe, Frank Kaufmann, Jim Ragsdale, and others. In short, no credible evidence from any witness has turned out to present a compelling case that the object was extraterrestrial in origin.

Having discovered the sad truth behind many of the testimonies concerning the recovery of alleged “flying saucer” debris near Roswell, where does this leave us? With no known scientifically verifiable physical remnants to study, is there any way that we can determine the true nature and origin of the actual wreckage that was collected? Fortunately, the answer is yes, but we must first examine additional evidence.

The Air Force Coverup Begins

The beginning of the Air Force coverup of the true nature of the object recovered by Major Marcel started with Marcel’s arrival at Carswell AFB and General Ramey’s subsequent announcement that the debris was simply a misidentified weather balloon. As noted, Marcel maintains that the Roswell debris was from a flying saucer and that the weather balloon “explanation” provided by Ramey was a convenient cover story. Although Marcel’s credibility as a truthful witness in the Roswell saga has been impeached, there is no disputing the fact that he accompanied the wreckage to Carswell AFB and was present in Ramey’s office with him when the weather balloon explanation was given. But was there a coverup as Marcel claims, and was the weather balloon story part of that coverup?

According to Colonel Thomas J. DuBose, who was General Ramey’s assistant, the weather balloon story was indeed part of the coverup, designed to get the press “taken off [Ramey’s] back in a hurry.”

If the Roswell incident did not involve the retrieval of wreckage from a genuine flying saucer, then why was the weather balloon story given as an “explanation,” and what was the reason for the coverup? What was there to possibly hide, since the debris Marcel himself had helped recover was on display in Ramey’s office?

Flying Saucer or Weather Balloon?

According to the pro-UFO Roswell authors, specifically Friedman, Randle, and Schmitt, the debris photographed inside Ramey’s office is not the material Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt recovered from the ranch. Instead, it is the remnants of a weather balloon that were brought in as a cover story to hide the true nature of the Roswell incident.

Unfortunately for the pro-UFO Roswell advocates, the source of the claim that the wreckage in Ramey’s office was replaced by that of a weather balloon is none other than, once again, Major Jesse Marcel.

The key to understanding (and unraveling) the truth behind Marcel’s “bait and switch” claim is a clear understanding of the items shown in the photographs that were taken in General Ramey’s office by reporter J. Bond Johnson of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and others. Either the photos show the real debris that Marcel collected and claims was part of a flying saucer, or they do not. And if the photos do not show genuine flying saucer wreckage, and General Ramey’s weather balloon story was true, then they depict a weather balloon. On the other hand, if the photos show neither item, then there was indeed a coverup and Ramey lied.

Clearly, both Marcel and Ramey cannot be right, since the same material appears in all the known photos taken in Ramey’s office that day.

In order to determine definitively the truthfulness of Marcel’s substituted wreckage claim, I have analyzed in detail both the photos and the testimonies of the only other people who were in Ramey’s office when the debris was photographed — Colonel DuBose and Irving Newton. It appears that Marcel was once again confabulating.

Testimony of Brigadier General Thomas J. DuBose

As mentioned earlier, Colonel Thomas J. DuBose, who later retired as a brigadier general, was present when the wreckage was brought into Ramey’s office. There’s no disputing this fact, because DuBose met the B-29 personally when it arrived at Carswell AFB (Fort Worth) from Roswell carrying the debris that Marcel had collected.

DuBose not only greeted the incoming plane, but hand carried the wreckage remnants in a sealed canvas mail pouch, immediately escorting it to Ramey’s office.

In a revealing interview, DuBose puts to rest the “mystery” of the so-called substituted wreckage and exposes it for what it is — another Major Marcel myth. DuBose’s comments have never appeared before in any book on Roswell.

Q: There are two researchers (Schmitt and Randle) who are presently saying that the debris in General Ramey’s office had been switched and that you men had a weather balloon there in its place.

A: Oh Bull! That material was never switched!

Q: So what you're saying is that the material in General Ramey’s office was the actual debris brought in from Roswell?

A: That’s absolutely right.

In a second and a third, final interview, DuBose repeated his assertions that no wreckage substitution had taken place. More important, by the time of the third interview, DuBose had looked at the photos of the recovered debris taken at that time by J. Bond Johnson. DuBose recognized the material in the photos.

Q: Did you get a chance to read the material and look at the pictures?

A: Yes, and I studied the pictures very carefully.

Q: Do you recognize that material?

A: Oh yes. That’s the material that Marcel brought into Fort Worth from Roswell.

DuBose’s comments are significant, because they establish that there was no substituted wreckage and that the material Marcel recovered near Roswell was later photographed and put on display for public view in Ramey’s office by Ramey himself.

I also present the testimonies of Irving Newton, who was also present that day in Ramey’s office, and Sheridan Cavitt, who helped Marcel collect the wreckage from the ranch. After looking at the same debris photos, they confirmed that they depict the material they recalled seeing and that no UFO debris was ever there. In fact, both Newton and Cavitt make it very clear in their interviews that they have been misquoted by various UFO researchers, and they resent it.

Although DuBose’s testimony and all available evidence easily refute Marcel’s substituted wreckage claim, DuBose was adamant that there was indeed a coverup. He never knew what the Roswell object was, but he did know that it was not an ordinary weather balloon, contrary to what was claimed at that time. The question now becomes, what was the object?

Project Mogul: The Real Answer

Project Mogul was a super-secret operation in 1947 that involved the use of constant-level balloon trains that were equipped with various instruments for intelligence gathering purposes. Constant level balloon trains are clusters of balloons that are balanced so that they can float at a fairly consistent altitude and not continually rise up into the atmosphere. Project Mogul was a classified operation begun by the U.S. government after the end of World War II to spy on the former Soviet Union in order to determine the status of Russian attempts to build nuclear weapons. Project Mogul was so secret and sensitive that it had a national security rating of “Top Secret A-1,” equal to that of the original Manhattan Project (the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb).

While a Project Mogul balloon array has been mentioned before as a candidate for the Roswell object, unfortunately the case for it remained unproven — until now. In my book, I present previously unpublished, formerly classified photos and drawings of various components of Mogul that can be visually compared by the reader to photos of the actual wreckage that was recovered. From these photos and drawings, it is clear that it is the same material.

I also present statements from the surviving members of the secret Project Mogul team. In particular is an interview with Professor Charles Moore, the main scientist behind Mogul’s New York University balloon experiments and the man who actually launched the very balloon train that was recovered by Marcel. In addition to discussing Project Mogul and its history, Professor Moore also speaks for the first time about specific pro-UFO Roswell authors that have contacted him.

When I asked Professor Moore if UFO researcher Stanton Friedman had ever contacted or interviewed him about Roswell, he told me that in the early 1990s Friedman had placed a newspaper ad in the local paper soliciting witnesses to Roswell, and that he wrote to Friedman and later met him and his coauthor, Don Berliner, at a hotel in Socorro.

When I inquired as to how their discussion went, Professor Moore told me bluntly that Friedman and Berliner did not want to hear his side of the story and then accused him and his group of being part of the coverup.

It is curious that nowhere in Friedman and Berliner’s Crash at Corona is this meeting ever mentioned, nor has Friedman ever noted it in his published writings, nor has he ever refuted the overwhelming and convincing evidence that the whole Roswell UFO hysteria was caused by people who didn't know the identity of the recovered material, the discovery of which just happened to take place during that unique period of time in mid-1947 when the flying saucer craze was first sweeping America.

Further Topics and Conclusion

The other parts of The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know expose the two cases where alleged physical metallic fragments were recovered and scientifically analyzed. In both instances, thorough analyses revealed that none of the fragments were extraterrestrial in origin.

I also address the issue of the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents. For those not familiar with the MJ-12 documents, these allegedly authentic top-secret documents were brought to the public’s attention in 1987 by Bill Moore, Stanton Friedman, and another associate. They refer to a top-secret “Operation Majestic-12,” supposedly created by President Truman to analyze the Roswell crashed saucer and aliens. Skeptic Phil Klass and others have shown this to be a hoax. I recount an interview with the widow and daughter of the late UFO skeptic and Harvard astronomer, Donald Menzel, an alleged MJ-12 member. Supporters of the MJ-12 papers, including Friedman, would have us believe that Menzel was a secret government “disinformation” agent who knew all about Roswell and the aliens recovered. Suffice it to say, the Menzel family are not amused by these ridiculous claims and were kind enough to share their thoughts with me, as well as provide additional evidence that their father could not have been a secret member of the non-existent MJ-12.

After maintaining my personal silence on the subject for nearly fifteen years, I finally come forth with some detailed insight into Roswell UFO researcher Bill Moore’s claim that he is a UFO disinformation expert for the U.S. government. I was one of the first people Moore told this to back in 1982, some seven years before he announced it in July 1989. At the time, Moore approached me and tried to recruit me on his “mission.” Naturally, I declined, and began to distance myself from him.

One of the last chapters in my book examines the infamous alien autopsy film and presents a myriad of reasons why it is a hoax. Also described are some behind-the-scenes details about the production and many of the games that were played on Fox TV by the film’s promoter, Ray Santilli.

The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know is the first book to thoroughly wade through the massive quagmire of Roswell evidence and finally separate the fact from the fiction. Paranoid UFO conspiracy buffs and X-Files fans will find that the book confirms their basic premise: Yes, Virginia, there was a “coverup,” but it did not involve the remains of an extraterrestrial flying saucer.

On the other hand, pro-UFO Roswell aficionados will find the massive evidence refuting the Roswell myth in my book disturbing, and not just because their favorite UFO case has now been explained. Indeed, the message in the final chapter makes it very clear that the UFO field has suffered in credibility because of Roswell and especially because of the unprofessional and shoddy “standards” of evidence the Roswell authors have practiced.

Although I didn't relish wording the last paragraph in my book the way I did, I had to call things as I see them. This paragraph reads: “The time has come for the UFO community to take an honest look at itself in the mirror concerning Roswell. If and when they ever decide to do this, they will see for the first time that they have two black eyes and a huge hole in their head. All of which have been self-inflicted.”

©1997 by Kal Korff — ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

In September of 1996, I saw a full-page newspaper ad promising a demonstration of amazing technologies, including one that will make free electricity from the air. On the night of September 23, I and a few other members of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT) went to see this “amazing” technology for ourselves. The city hockey stadium had been rented out for the grand finale of a thirty-four-city tour. There was a feeling of excitement (dare I say electricity?) in the air. After a brief prayer huddle with assistants, Dennis Lee took the stage amidst thunderous applause.

Thus began a five-hour, nonstop demonstration of a whole array of curious machines in the middle of the arena. The charismatic Lee said he has been victimized by a massive international, multigenerational conspiracy to keep such amazing technologies out of the marketplace. The audience gladly signed “declarations of energy independence” that boldly declared they would no longer accept governmental suppression. His presentation focused more on his unique blend of patriot politics and religion than on proof of his claims. He claimed he couldn't make good on his advertised promise to demonstrate a wonderful radiation-neutralizing invention by Yull Brown. Apparently, he had inside knowledge that government agents had infiltrated the presentation, ready to make arrests. Lee claims to have invented the world’s most efficient heat pump, but conspirators sabotaged his efforts, stole his company, and incarcerated him.

For about ten years, Lee has claimed that he can produce free energy from ambient heat by connecting his heat pump to a Fischer low-temperature phase-change machine. Not surprisingly, the audience warmed to the assertion that God had given Lee the final technical help to make this possible. (In Lee’s literature, he quotes many of God’s exciting revelations to him.) Unfortunately, Lee’s only proof of this device was to have an audience member confirm that one part of the machine was hot. Each new bold pronouncement was interrupted by ecstatic applause. Lee promised that people paying $10,000 to become dealers would be installing smaller versions of this machine in private homes across America before the end of the year. Since then, he has claimed that two thousand dealers signed up but that there will be a few delays. He seems not to have told his latest two thousand dealers that all but six of two thousand dealers of a similar effort years ago gave up on him.

Lee’s elementary scientific dissertations were laced with errors: He claimed his special electricity-generating bricks would each put out one volt of energy. Volts are not units of energy. A brick exposed to acidic soil will generate voltage but at thousands of times less energy than required to light a respectable light bulb. He had a modified car engine powered by compressed gas which awed the audience by warping a fixed torque wrench. However, Lee mixed apples and oranges by referring to this torque with units of power (rather than mere force) and thus claimed his stalled engine to be more powerful than a truck engine (without explaining that the truck engine torque was rated at a high rpm level). We were also shown a perpetual-motion machine-which operated briefly and then stopped in perpetuity-and an undemonstrated small air turbine that supposedly puts out kilowatts of power in a three-mile-per-hour wind. Other technologies shown were just as underwhelming. The only truly amazing thing demonstrated to me was mass gullibility.

He collected applications from many audience members (myself included) to have their cars converted to run on little heated cylinders and for free-energy machines to be installed in homes with the excess power sold back to the nervous electric companies. Although my skeptical colleagues and I brought electrical measurement equipment and a geiger counter, we weren't allowed to use them. Nonetheless, I heard someone in the audience remark to a friend, “At least one of those inventions has got to make it big!” Finally, well past midnight, Lee got around to the inevitable-asking the remaining groggy spectators to pay $10,000 to become dealers before the price shot up to $25,000. In becoming a dealer, one waives the right to legal recourse.

The show inspired me to both study and challenge these claims. By the next morning, I had set up and started promoting a set of Internet Web pages dedicated to collecting and disseminating information concerning Lee’s claims.

One of the first comments I received from believers was, “There must be a conspiracy to cover up Lee’s claims because the mainstream media won't cover it.” Ironically, that allegation has some truth to it. The media don't promote Lee’s claims-but they don't debunk them either! Unfortunately, when the press ignores a conspiracy theory, it’s just more evidence to believers that the conspiracy exists.

News of my nascent Web pages quickly traveled among the cyberspace free-energy and conspiracy communities. To the Lee investors concerned that I may be part of a government/big-oil/new-world-order conspiracy to defrock Lee, I responded with the same approach skeptic Philip J. Klass uses when accused of being a government agent: I created a Web page titled “Is Eric Krieg a Secret Agent of a Government Conspiracy?” I filled it up with references that anyone could follow to verify my independence and made an open offer for anyone to examine my unbroken record of pay stubs from high school to present. Roots as a born-again Christian seemed to buy me some credibility with Lee’s followers. Throughout debates, I tried to keep shepherding people back to the the primary issue: Does the free-energy machine work?

Lee and his people rebuffed my appeals to examine his machine. I then made an open offer to spend tens of thousands of dollars promoting his device among people with the experience and equipment to validate his machines if he would just let me verify it first. Lee simply told his army that they should pay no attention to me because I was the “enemy.” He certainly didn't respond to inquiries such as, “How much does your company pay the power company and gas stations?” One of my more popular Web pages documents three hundred years of free-energy and perpetual-motion frauds. Lee’s marketing approach seems to follow historical patterns, like focusing on theory and politics, targeting born-again-Christian farmers, avoiding demonstrations with engineers, and endlessly prevailing upon investors to be patient through delays caused by-you guessed it-the Big Conspiracy. The only conspiracy thwarting proof of Lee’s machine seemed to be Lee’s own refusal to allow open testing.

Apparently, pills that turn gas into water and 100-mpg carburetors have a Phoenix-like quality: After an “inventor” goes to jail or disappears prior to open demonstration, the next energy messiah refers to it as more proof of the conspiracy. I've identified a syndrome I call “buy-in mind lock.” People who have invested only some investigation time see my Web pages and easily decide not to sign over a check. However, dealers who have invested money and started soliciting friends as customers are much less likely to change. Most won't answer my follow-up mail. For them, it must be very difficult to admit to circles of friends and family that they may have lost big. I expect it will be psychologically easier for Lee’s dealers to borrow even more money to buy machines for installation than to cut their losses.

Apparently, I had intruded on a well-established free-energy society with its own lengthy periodicals, seminars, dutifully patient investors, and new claimants du jour. I received torrents of e-mail along the lines of, “OK, I'm convinced that Lee is full of it . . . but what about the new 'ACME' Energy Machine?” My full-time engineering job developing real products leaves insufficient time to investigate the many printed pounds of theory and rumor. So I openly offer a $2,000 prize, a promise of mainstream publicity, and a $1,000 finder’s fee for demonstrated proof of a free-energy device. I borrowed many of my conditions from James Randi’s analogous challenge. So far, there have been many inquiries but no scheduled tests. I've cultivated a network of people who feed me information, including copies of Lee’s newsletter to his investors. I discovered Lee offers commissions to bring in new dealers. Also, Lee has made a considerable effort to aid and recruit from the patriot movement. Dealers are greatly discouraged from communicating with one another. Many of his original, longer-suffering investors who've lost faith are bought out with newer investors’ money. A lot of that investment money went to a large nationwide advertising effort to lure new contributors.

Although, as of this writing, Lee has yet to install free-energy machines in homes across America as promised earlier this year, he recently claimed he would openly demonstrate a machine by mid-year. He refers to his dealers as “millionaires” and claims that dealerships have sold for as high as $100,000.

The Utah Deseret News (January 22 and February 16, 1993) reports that Lee was indicted for fraud in New Jersey in 1975, charged with fraud in the state of Washington in 1985, and pled guilty to two felony counts of consumer fraud in California in 1990 in connection with the sale of his energy-saving heat pump kit. Well, what the hell . . . they say Jim Bakker is planning a comeback, too.

Anyone still interested in becoming a dealer can contact Lee’s company at P.O. Box 1406, McAfee NJ 07428.

It was a celestial omen, Comet Hale-Bopp, that provoked their departure. For they thought that it carried with it a UFO spacecraft — an event already proclaimed on the nationally syndicated Art Bell radio show when Whitley Strieber and Courtney Brown maintained that a spaceship “extraterrestrial in origin” and under “intelligent control” was tracking the comet. According to astronomer Alan Hale, co-discoverer of the comet, what they probably saw was a star behind the comet. Interestingly, the twenty-one women and eighteen men, ranging in ages from twenty-one to seventy-two, seemed like a cross section of American citizens — though they demonstrated some degree of technical and engineering skills, and some even described themselves as “computer nerds.” They sought to convey their bizarre UFO theology on the Internet. Were these people crazy, a fringe group, overcome by paranoia? Or were there other, deeper causes at work in their behavior?

Heaven’s Gate was led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles (who died in 1985), who taught their followers how to enter the Kingdom of God. They believed that some 2,000 years ago beings from an Evolutionary Level Above Human sent Jesus to teach people how to reach the true Kingdom of God. But these efforts failed. According to documents left on the Heaven’s Gate Web site, “In the early 1970s, two members of the Kingdom of Heaven (or what some might call two aliens from space) incarnated into two unsuspecting humans in Houston [Applewhite and Nettles]. . . .” Over the next twenty-five years Applewhite and Nettles transmitted their message to hundreds of followers. Those who killed themselves at Rancho Sante Fe (including Applewhite) — plus the two former members who subsequently attempted to take their lives on May 6, one of them succeeding — did so to achieve a higher level of existence.

Reading about the strange behavior of this cult of unreason, one is struck by the unquestioning obedience that Applewhite was able to elicit from his faithful flock. There was a rigid authoritarian code of behavior imposed upon everyone, a form of mind control. Strict rules and rituals governed all aspects of their monastic lives. They were to give up all their worldly possessions, their diets were regulated, and sex was strictly forbidden (seven members, including Applewhite, were castrated). The entire effort focused on squelching the personal self. Independent thinking was discouraged.

The followers of Heaven’s Gate lived under a siege morality; they were super-secretive, attempting to hide their personal identities. They were like nomads wandering in the wilderness, seeking the truths of a Higher Revelation from extraterrestrial semi-divine beings. What has puzzled so many commentators is the depth of their conviction that space aliens were sending envoys to Earth and abducting humans. They kept vigils at night, peering for streaks of light that might be UFOs, waiting for spacecraft to arrive.

We read on their Web page: “We suspect that many of us arrived in staged spacecraft (UFO) crashes, and many of our discarded bodies (genderless, not belonging to the human species), were retrieved by human authorities (government and military).”

This form of irrational behavior should be no surprise to the readers of the Skeptical Inquirer. I submit that the mass media deserve a large share of the blame for this UFO mythology. Book publishers and TV and movie producers have fed the public a steady diet of science fiction fantasy packaged and sold as real. Alarmed by the steady stream of irresponsible programming spewing forth claims that were patently false, last year CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), publisher of Skeptical Inquirer, established the Council for Media Integrity, calling for some balanced presentation of science. We said that, given massive media misinformation, it is difficult for large sectors of the public to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, particularly since there is a heavy dose of “quasi-documentary” films. Why worry about these programs? Because, I reply, the public, with few exceptions, does not have careful, critical knowledge of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. So far, the Council for Media Integrity’s warnings have gone largely unheeded. What drivel NBC, Fox, and other networks have produced! (A notable exception to this is ABC, which we are glad to say has called upon CSICOP skeptics to present alternative views on 20/20, Prime Time, and other shows.) TV is a powerful medium; and when it enters the home with high drama and the stamp of authenticity, it is difficult for ordinary persons to distinguish purely imaginative fantasies from reality. Many people blame the Internet. I think the media conglomerates, who sell their ideas as products, are to blame, not the Internet. We are surely not calling for censorship, only that some measure of responsibility be exercised by editors and producers. Interestingly, the Heaven’s Gaters were avid watchers of TV paranormal programs.

CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer have been dealing with UFO claims on a scientific basis for more than twenty years. We have attempted to provide, wherever we could, scientific evaluations of the claims. We have never denied that it is possible, indeed probable, that other forms of life, even intelligent life, exist in the universe. And we support any effort to verify such an exciting hypothesis. But this is different from the belief that we are now being visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft, that they are abducting people, and that there is a vast government coverup of these alien invasions — a “Luciferian” conspiracy, according to Heaven’s Gate.

In my view, what we are dealing with is “the transcendental temptation,” the tendency of many human beings to leap beyond this world to other dimensions, impervious to the tests of evidence and the standards of logical coherence, the temptation to engage in magical thinking. UFO mythology is similar to the message of the classical religions where God sends his Angels as emissaries who offer salvation to those who accept the faith and obey his Prophets. Today, the chariots of the gods are UFOs. What we are witnessing in the past half century is the spawning of a New Age religion. (This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of the first flying saucers over the State of Washington in 1947.)

There are many other signs that UFO mythology has become a space-age religion and that it is not based on scientific evidence so much as emotional commitment. Witness the revival of astrology today; or the growth of Scientology, which proposes space-age reincarnation to their Thetans and attracts famous movie stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta; or the Order of the Solar Temple, in which seventy-four people committed suicide in Switzerland, Quebec, and France, waiting to be transported to the star Sirius, nine light-years away. Perhaps one of the most graphic illustrations of this phenomenon is what occurred on April 21, 1997, when the cremated remains of twenty-four people, including Gene Roddenberry (father of Star Trek), Timothy Leary (former Harvard guru), and Gerard O'Neill (scientific promoter of space colonies), were catapulted into space from the Grand Canary island off of the Moroccan coast aboard an American Pegasus rocket. This celestial burial is symptomatic of the New Age religion, in which our sacred church is outer space. The religious temptation enters when romantic expectations outreach empirical capacities.

Science is based on factual observation and verification. It was perhaps best illustrated by the discovery of Comet Hale-Bopp. That the comet has been captured by the paranormal imagination and transformed into a religious symbol is unfortunate. Alan Hale deplored this extrapolation of his observations. Yet the transcendental temptation can at times be so powerful that it knows no bounds.

Incidentally, the paranormal — which means, literally, that which is alongside of or beside normal scientific explanation — was involved in other aspects of the Heaven’s Gate theology. The members expressed beliefs in astrology, tarot cards, psychic channeling, telepathy, resurrection, and reincarnation. That is why it is often difficult to ferret out and examine these claims dispassionately, for New Agers are dealing with faith, credulity, and a deep desire to believe, rather than with falsifiable facts; and they are resistant to any attempt to apply critical thinking to such spiritual questions.

Quotations from the Heaven’s Gate videotape are instructive. Those who committed suicide affirmed that: “We are looking forward to this. We are happy and excited.” “I think everyone in this class wants something more than this human world has to offer.” “I just can't wait to get up there.” These testimonials sound like those of born-again fundamentalists who are waiting for the Rapture and whose beliefs are self-validating. These confirmations of faith are not necessarily true; they are accepted because they have a profound impact on the believers’ lives. Heaven’s Gate gave meaning and purpose to the lives of its followers. As such, it performed an existential, psychological function similar to that of other religious belief systems. Obedience to a charismatic leader offered a kind of sociological unity similar to that provided by traditional belief systems.

One might well ask, what is the difference between the myth of salvation of Heaven’s Gate and many orthodox religious belief systems that likewise promise salvation to the countless millions who suppress their sexual passions, submit to ritual and dogma, and abandon their personal autonomy, all in quest of immortality? Their behavior is similar to the more than nine hundred Jewish Zealots who committed suicide at Masada in 73 c.e., or the early Christians who willingly died for the faith, or the young Muslim Palestinians today who strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to kingdom come in the hope of attaining heaven. I recently visited Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, where a ship of the dead had been uncovered. The Pharaohs had equipped a vessel to take them to the underworld, hoping thereby to achieve immortality after death. This has been transformed into a UFO craft in modern-day lingo.

The bizarre apocalyptic theology of Heaven’s Gate is interpreted by its critics as absurd and ridiculous; yet it was taken deadly serious by its devotees, and a significant part of the UFO scenario is now accepted by large sectors of the public.

In one sense the New Age paranormal religions are no more fanciful than the old-time religions. Considered cults in their own day, they were passed down from generation to generation, but perhaps they are no less queer than the new paranormal cults. No doubt many in our culture will not agree with my application of skepticism to traditional religion — CSICOP itself has avoided criticizing the classical systems of religious belief, since its focus is on empirical scientific inquiry, not faith.

I am struck by the fact that the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Chassidic Jews were considered radical fringe groups when first proclaimed; today they are part of the conventional religious landscape, and growing by leaps and bounds. Perhaps the major difference between the established religions and the new cults of unreason is that the former religions have deeper roots in human history.

The Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan, which in 1995 released poison gas into a crowded subway station, killing twelve people, was made up of highly educated young people, many with advanced degrees. Unable to apply their critical thinking outside of their specialties, they accepted the concocted promises of their guru. Thus an unbridled cult of unreason can attract otherwise rational people.

The one thing I have discovered in more than two decades of studying paranormal claims is that a system of beliefs does not have to be true in order to be believed, and that the validation of such intensely held beliefs is in the eyes of the believer. There are profound psychological and sociological motives at work here. The desire to escape the trials and tribulations of this life and the desire to transcend death are common features of the salvation myths of many religious creeds. And they appear with special power and eloquence in the case of the misguided acolytes of Heaven’s Gate, who, fed by an irresponsible media that dramatizes UFO mythology as true, found solace in a New Age religion of salvation, a religion whose path led them to oblivion.

MIT physicist Philip Morrison, who is confined to an electronic wheelchair, related how at the age of six Sagan had been told that you can always add 1 to a number, and Carl had tested this by laboriously writing all the numbers from 1 to 1,000, stopping only because he had to sleep.

Sagan’s curiosity never diminished, for he went on to solve the mysteries of the high temperature of Venus (a massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (windblown dust), and the reddish haze of Titan (complex organic molecules).

Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould remarked that unlike Sagan, the Brooklyn garment worker’s son who turned his eyes upwards to the skies, he as a boy in Queens had turned his eyes downward to the ground. He added that the two New Yorkers had not known each other until much later. Ending an eloquent summary of how important Sagan had been to the entire scientific community, as well as the world’s other peoples, Gould paraphrased Longfellow, saying Sagan had turned the spheres and left no hell below.

Ronald Sagedeev, who had been Mikhail Gorbachev’s adviser and director of the USSR’s Space Research Institute, called Sagan a citizen of the world, one who was against the false promises of the Star Wars defense, and said “the Cold War was ended because of Carl Sagan and his friends.”

Other speakers included Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician-friend who called attention to Carl’s passion, humor, and forgiveness. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, told of Sagan’s consideration when, as a young black college student, he had first gone to Cornell for an interview (see his comments in the May/June 1997 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, p. 56). Frank H. T. Rhodes, who had been President of Cornell University during much of the time Sagan headed Cornell’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies, called Carl “a scientist but a humanist at heart,” one who was comfortable with philosophy.

One of Carl’s daughters, Sasha, described how her father had taught her logic, critical reasoning, and (to the large audience’s amusement) the importance of questioning authority. Carl’s son Jeremy said that his agnostic father was a warrior for the world, an avid antiracist, an evolutionist rather than a creationist, and one who disapproved of anyone who masked ignorance by using jargon.

Carl’s wife, Ann Druyan, secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, told of his and her exuberance at their having included an interstellar message along with the music of Bach, Beethoven, and others in two NASA Voyager spacecraft now beyond the outer solar system. At a speed of 40,000 miles per hour, the recordings are traveling in space and have a projected “shelf life” of a billion years.

Vice President Al Gore noted that he, the believer, and Carl, the nonbeliever, had no problems whatsoever working together on behalf of Earth’s environment. The two were instrumental in getting scientific and religious leaders to unite on issues of environmental protection. Carl had shown him that we are not central to the universe and that we must do something significant if “the blue dot” as seen from space is to flourish. Gore was both folksy and eloquent in relating his warm memories of Sagan.

The most eloquent of all, however, was Carl Sagan himself. A taped excerpt of his Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space resounded with an awesome timbre over the loudspeakers.