Unfortunately, UFO reports seldom if ever come from anyone really knowledgeable in trained observation of the skies and unusual phenomena. Nor do they come from those who understand perceptual issues and how beliefs and expectations can influence the interpretation of unidentified phenomena. People often think pilots and police officers are trained observers in these regards, but experience has repeatedly shown that they are not. James McGaha, an astronomer who has spent thousands of hours observing the sky, is a retired Air Force C-130 pilot and a longtime analyst of UFO claims and reports. He is concerned with misunderstandings about what makes a good observer. In his view, a good observer has the skills, knowledge, experience, and ability to critically analyze what is observed in the sky (whether natural, rare, or unfamiliar). The observer has to a) observe without prejudice, b) accurately record what was observed, and c) evaluate the data. Listed below are examples of basic astronomical, psychological, and perceptual knowledge needed to identify a UFO—important factors no trained observer would lack. Also given are potential causes of lights in the sky and some perceptual and psychological aspects of interpreting reports. All are excerpted from McGaha’s presentation “The Trained Observer,” which he gives to skeptic and scientific groups.

—The Editor

Examples of Astronomical Knowledge Needed

• Position of:
  • Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn
  • Twenty-five Brightest Stars
• Coordinate System:
  • Horizontal
  • Equatorial
• Elongation, Conjunction, and Opposition
• Diurnal Motion
• Ecliptic Motion
• Scintillation
• Atmospheric Extinction
• Atmospheric Refraction
• Magnitude Scale
• Meteors, Fireballs, and Bolides
• Meteor Showers
• Zodiacal Light
• Zenith and Zenith Distant
• Sidereal time

Areas of Expertise Needed

• Astronomy
• Atmosphere
• Aeronautics
• Physics
• Physiology of Visual Illusions
• Human Beliefs:
  • Perception and Interpretation
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Emotions
• Visual Perception

Human Perception:

Studies for more than one hundred years have demonstrated how unreliable human perception actually is. People are not objective recording “instruments.”

Belief:

There is a strong human desire to believe the myth that alien spacecraft along with alien occupants are visiting the Earth. These beliefs are perpetuated by wildly incorrect reports, claims, and statements made by totally unqualified individuals. There is no empirical evidence that such visitations are occurring now or have occurred in the past

Perception, Belief, and Psychological and Sociological Understanding Needed

Psychology/Sociology:

• Memory Bias
• Confabulation
  • False Memory
• Interference Theory
• Stress
  • Impact on Accuracy
• Lying
• Hoaxes
• Eyewitness Memory
  • Forgetting Curve
  • Contamination
  • Systemic Error
  • Due to Data Collection
• Sensory Information Errors
  • Acquiring
  • Interpreting
  • Selecting
  • Organizing

Lights in the Sky—Causes

• Planets
• Stars
• Moon
• Fireballs — Bolides
• Aircraft
• Missile Launches
• Satellites
• Balloons
• Searchlights
• Test Clouds
• Flares
• Sprites
• Ball Light
• St. Elmo’s Fire
• Sun Dogs
• Halos
• Glories
• Mirages
• Scintillation
• Dazzling
• Clouds
  • Lenticular
  • Noctilucent

A local Stephenville newspaper reported the story on January 10, and a public affairs officer for the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base at Carswell Field, sixty nautical miles away, was quoted as saying, “There were no F-16s from this unit operating.” (That proved to be wrong.) The national media picked up the story about the lights, and it was featured on Larry King Live on January 18.

Astronomer (and retired Air Force pilot) James McGaha (see the accompanying “The Trained Observer” piece) investigated. On January 17, he contacted the Federal Aviation Admin­istration and asked if any aircraft that night had entered the Brownwood Military Operating Areas (MOAs). These MOAs begin ten miles southwest of Stephenville—a 3,200-square-mile area used for military aviation training. The FAA informed McGaha on January 18 that a group of four F-16s from the 457th Fighter Squadron entered the operating area at 6:17 pm local time. A second group of four F-16s entered the same area at 6:26 pm. They departed at 6:54 and 6:58, respectively. The time the aircraft were flying in the MOA accords with the time of the sightings.

On January 18 McGaha contacted the 301st Fighter Wing Public Affairs Office and asked if they made a mistake in saying their aircraft had not been in the MOA that night. They called him back and informed him of their error. On January 23, they issued a press release publicly acknowledging the error, stating that F-16s had indeed been flying in the MOA that evening.

What were the aircraft doing? McGaha says they were flying training maneuvers that involved dropping extraordinarily bright flares. The LUU/2B/B flare is nothing like the standard flares you might think of. These flares have an illumination of about two million candlepower. They are intended to light up a vast area of the ground for nighttime aerial attack. Once released, they are suspended by parachutes (which often hover and even rise due to the heat of the flares) and light up a circle on the ground greater than one kilometer for four minutes. The flare casing and parachute are eventually consumed by the heat. At a distance of 150 miles, a single flare can still be as bright as the planet Venus.

McGaha also describes the testimony of a medical helicopter pilot, a retired U.S. Army pilot, flying that night, who saw the lights. He said: “I saw multiple military aircraft, with some dropping flares, in the area of the Brownwood 1 MOA.”

Much mischief was caused by a Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) report on the incident issued on July 4, 2008. MUFON members tend to promote the idea that UFOs are real and in fact are extraterrestrial spacecraft. The seventy-six-page report is mostly an analysis of FAA “raw” radar returns for the period in question, plus eight eyewitness reports.

These raw data contain 2.5 million points of noise and scatter. MUFON’s report selected just 187 of these points to contend that radar had tracked a huge “object” at least 524 feet in size, traveling near the Western White House (the Bush ranch, which is fifty miles southeast of Stephenville). “MUFON’s radar analysis is nothing more than cherry picking the 187 targets out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter to make a track moving forty-nine mph for over one hour,” says McGaha. “This analysis is absurd!”

Some MUFON witnesses described “very bright lights similar to the intensity of burning magnesium” and said they saw flares dropped from aircraft. Others said such things as “these were not any known aircraft” and the objects were stationary at times but also “moved at a very high rate of speed.” But these witnesses were not trained observers, McGaha says. “How did they know the altitude, velocity, size, and distance of an unknown object?”

There were lights in the sky, McGaha concludes. “There were F-16s flying in the Brownwood MOAs, and they did drop flares. The F-16s did not react to any unknown targets, and radar did not detect any unknown targets.”

“The untrained witnesses/observers were seeing nothing more than F-16s and flares. Stephenville is nothing more than connecting ‘lights in the sky’ to form a very large mysterious object, an object that many that night thought was from another world. But nothing otherworldly happened around Stephenville on January 8, 2008,” says McGaha.

Belief in UFOs and visitors from other worlds remains high today despite decades of sensational claims unaccompanied by proof. A child born at the dawn of the UFO era becomes eligible to collect Social Security this year. The face of UFOlogy has changed much in these past sixty-two years, but it has not faded away as some rationalists naively assumed it would. Indeed, its mutability is indicative of the strength of the myth, not of its weakness. Here I examine how the UFO movement has changed over the years and what it has become today.

In The Beginning (1947—1973)

In the beginning there were sightings, and those sightings began with private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. As soon as news stories appeared reporting Arnold’s claim that he saw nine airborne objects that flew “like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” others began reporting seeing the “saucers” too (a curious development, since Arnold did not say that the objects looked like saucers—they looked like boomerangs, he said—but skipped like saucers, a subtlety lost in the public’s imagination). Soon sightings of “saucers” were pouring in from all around the country and from around the world. Sightings occurred in waves, which appeared to be fueled by media reports. A wave would typically start in one location, but as soon as news reports began to carry the story of the localized excitement, sightings activity would pick up nationally. Great waves of UFO sightings occurred in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1957, 1965—67, and 1973.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the last large-scale national wave of UFO sightings occurred in the fall of 1973. The reasons for this are not clear. One common-sense explanation is that after more than twenty-five years of sensational sighting reports ultimately leading to nothing tangible and no new evidence, the public’s fascination with saucer sightings was wearing out. One prominent UFOlogist, the late Karl Pflock, later suggested quite seriously that extraterrestrial visitors actually did arrive around 1947 but departed sometime after 1973, and all subsequent UFO sightings were bogus. My preferred explanation is that this was right around the time that the majority of U.S. homes acquired color television, resulting in fewer eyes directed skyward, in addition to the ennui factor. Whatever the reason, the “buzz” was gone for mass waves of saucer sightings. Individual and even localized clumps of sightings continued to occur and to be reported in the news, but somehow they were no longer contagious. “Lights in the sky” no longer were a “shiny new thing,” and the public required something else to generate excitement about UFOs.

Abductions Gradually Replace Sightings (1966—1995)

Something genuinely new under the UFO sun occurred in 1966: the publication of The Interrupted Journey by John G. Fuller, a book detailing the alleged UFO abduction in rural New Hampshire of Betty and Barney Hill. The book reads like a thriller, telling the tale of an interracial married couple driving rural roads late at night, seemingly pursued by a UFO. Upon returning home, Betty began having nightmares about being abducted by aliens. The Hills belatedly concluded that there was “missing time” and came to believe the abduction dreams may have reflected reality. Barney was under much stress prior to the “abduction” and got worse afterward, so the Hills sought therapy from a well-known psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. Under hypnosis, they each told a UFO abduction story that largely matched Betty’s nightmares (which Barney had heard her repeat many times).

The Hills’ story became a sensation, serialized in Look magazine, and was made into a TV movie, The UFO Incident. Soon others began making similar abduction claims. The famous Travis Walton abduction story, depicted in the movie Fire in the Sky, aired a few weeks after The UFO Incident aired. Typically, these abduction stories followed a general pattern: You are driving in a rural area at night. You see a light in the sky that seems to be coming closer. You become frightened, and you are unable to recall exactly what happened next. A UFO researcher helpfully puts you under hypnosis, and you suddenly recover repressed memories of an alien abduction. The paradigm of the Hills’ abduction prevailed during the 1970s. Persons out on lonely roads late at night risked, in addition to usual earthly perils, abduction by extraterrestrials.

The face of UFO abductology changed dramatically with the 1981 publication of Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time. No longer was it necessary to venture out on lonely roads late at night; UFO aliens might come right into your own bedroom to snatch you, and you were helpless to resist. More books, articles, and TV shows followed, and soon a new paradigm for abductions was established. Aliens became a presence akin to ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. You don’t go out and stumble upon them—they find you. Moreover, the theme of repeated abductions, typically beginning in childhood, establishes a personal relationship between abductee and abductor. No longer is abduction simply the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as was supposedly the case for Hill-style abductees. Instead, the abductee (overwhelmingly female) became a special kind of person with a mystical, cosmic-lifelong bond connecting her to unknown cosmic forces and beings. Most current abduction stories contain claims that rudely violate common sense even beyond the dubious idea of alien visitations. Often the creatures and the abductee are said to levitate or fly, to pass through solid objects, or to simply teleport themselves from one location to another. Hopkins has actually suggested, in all seriousness, that the aliens have the ability to make themselves and their victims invisible to better preserve the stealth of their operations. Given such claims, plus the frequently sexual nature of the abduction experience, the correlation with dream states and sleep disorders is obvious.

By the early 1990s, abduction mania had become a significant social phenomenon. It resonated well with other concurrent manias, including “recovered memories” of alleged Satanic Cult molestations, large-scale daycare molestations, etc. In 1992, CBS-TV ran an entire miniseries based on the claims in Hopkins’s book Intruders, fueling widespread fears of sinister alien forces. Hopkins and his colleagues were so confident about the “scientific” status of their findings that in 1992 they arranged an Abduction Study Conference at MIT, hosted by physicist David Pritchard, in which I participated. While the participants were heavily slanted toward the pro-abduction view, there was a significant presence of skeptical professionals, and instead of solidifying the abductionists’ claims, the conference highlighted their glaring weaknesses. Hopkins and his colleagues used the conference to first reveal details of a spectacular alleged multiple-witness abduction case that occurred late one night in Manhattan. This case became the subject of Hopkins’s 1996 book Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abduction. However, independent pro-UFO researchers were unable to confirm the ever-shifting claims of multiple witnesses to the alleged abduction, and the abductees’ ever-spiraling and ever-changing tales of encounters and intrigue became increasingly difficult to believe. The case that Hopkins and his colleagues had “bet the house” on, expecting it to finally establish their claims, ended up as a humiliation.

As might be expected, UFO abduction mania gradually faded as a force within UFOlogy. When abduction fever was rising, excited UFOlogists believed that it would finally deliver what UFOlogy has always wanted: validation of their personal belief in extraterrestrial visitors. But with the clear recognition that in the early 1990s the abductionists had taken their best shot and missed, UFOlogists gradually became disillusioned with abduction claims, realizing that they would ultimately fail to deliver. Thus, subsequent abduction claims failed to generate the same level of excitement. UFO abductions continue to be reported, alleged abductees continue to be hypnotized, and abductee-related support and research groups continue to operate. But abductees are seen today by many UFOlogists as something marginal and/or passé and are no longer looked to as the most promising area of UFO research.

“New Age” vs. “Science Fiction” UFOlogy

The major fault line in UFOlogy today is the division between what can be called “New Age” UFOlogy and what its proponents call “scientific” UFOlogy but is in reality “science fiction.” Both are junk science and consistently ignore Occam’s Razor (all other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best). Proponents fail to reconcile whatever hypotheses they invent with the rest of the body of established scientific fact. While the dividing line between the two groups is not hard and fast, and some UFO claims will contain elements of both, most major UFOlogists and UFO groups will fit clearly into one group or the other. “New Age” UFOlogy is dominated by women and “Science Fiction” UFOlogy by men, although you will find members of both genders in either group. We can think of members of the first group as fans of Oprah, the second as fans of the SciFi Channel. “New Age” UFOlogists often seem oblivious to the very idea that anyone should have to prove their claims, as if people are expected to simply accept unsupported accounts of extraterrestrial interactions (as is routinely done in such circles). If you expect to see any kind of proof, you need to hang out in different UFO circles.

The Late Betty Hill poses with a bust of the alien creature she says abducted her.

“New Age” UFOlogy grew out of the “contactee” tradition of the 1950s, which is not based primarily on claimed “evidence” but instead on personal revelations. Contactees reportedly talk to extraterrestrials and receive cosmic wisdom from them, never offering convincing “proof” of such communications. Today’s “New Age” UFOlogists largely claim to receive extraterrestrial messages via telepathy, channeling, dreams, or other subjective experiences, continuing the contactee tradition of having a personal relationship with the UFOs and their occupants. “New Age” UFOlogy often uses religious terms and themes, typically promoting the idea of an immanent cosmic, metaphysical change in the Earth and in peoples’ lives: the “age of Aquarius,” the “end of the Mayan Calendar,” or some other ill-defined term that largely parallels the concept of the millennium in conventional Christian eschatology.

One well-known group falling squarely in the “New Age” UFO tradition is the Unarius Educational Foundation in El Cajon, California. Founded in 1954, the group’s members believe that vaguely defined “energies” permeate the universe and claim they receive messages channeled from beings on other planets. They teach that “a new golden age for humanity” will begin as soon as we accept the wisdom and love of our space brethren.

“Science Fiction” UFOlogists claim the reality of visitations from extraterrestrials, or perhaps from “another dimension” or some other nebulous realm, based upon the weight of UFO sightings, photos and videos, alleged “trace cases,” abductions, UFO crashes, etc. They eagerly offer “proof” when questioned, but it falls short by orders of magnitudes of the evidence required to support such extraordinary claims. They also typically fail to see how their claims contradict accepted science in very significant ways. When they do acknowledge the conflict, they insist it is time to invent a “new” science based upon the “evidence” of UFO incidents, not realizing the impropriety of having weighty, well-supported, time-tested scientific principles overturned by anecdotes, as if hummingbird feathers outweigh elephants. At the present time, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is the largest and best-known organization of its kind in the U.S., primarily made up of “Science Fiction” UFOlogists.

UFO Crashes and Retrievals (1980—present)

A large part of contemporary “Science Fiction” UFOlogy consists of promoting one or more alleged UFO crashes. The first alleged UFO crash to gain widespread attention was in the 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers by Hollywood writer Frank Scully. Based upon the tales told by Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer (said to be an inventor and a government scientist, respectively), it told of a saucer allegedly crashing near Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, which contained the bodies of several dead aliens. But a thorough investigation by San Francisco newspaperman J.P. Cahn revealed that Newton and GeBauer were actually con men, fleecing investors and getting in trouble with the law, and that Newton’s alleged sample of strange extraterrestrial metal was in fact plain aluminum.

Cahn’s thorough debunking of the Scully book created a stigma against crashed saucer tales, and for decades such claims all but disappeared. But after twenty years or so, the stench of the hoax in Scully’s book had faded somewhat, and crashed saucer tales began to reappear. Veteran UFOlogist Leonard Stringfield began collecting such stories, and by the late 1970s was writing papers about Retrievals of the Third Kind. However, Stringfield never offered any proof for his claims, and his crashed saucer stories were little-known to the general public.

The earliest crashed saucer claim to make it big in popular culture was the alleged crash near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. However, the event was all but forgotten until it was resurrected by the 1980 book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz (of Bermuda Triangle fame) and William L. Moore. You will look in vain for the word “Roswell” in any UFO book or article published before 1980, even if the subject is UFO crashes. A long series of sensationalist movies, TV shows, books, and so on have made Roswell a household name synonymous with UFO aliens. By the late 1990s, it was clear to anyone who cared about facts that the supposed Roswell crash involved a once-secret balloon-borne intelligence-gathering initiative called Project Mogul. But once such an event, fictionalized or not, becomes embedded in popular culture, it doesn’t matter at all if the “evidence” is proven to be exaggerated, distorted, and/or fabricated. The Roswell legend will live on as long as there are claims of UFOs.

Today, the list of alleged UFO crashes has expanded far beyond the few familiar names like Roswell, Kecksburg, and Aztec. Claims about UFO crashes and their cover-ups make up a major part of contemporary UFOlogy. Since 2003 a “Crash Retrieval Conference” has been held each November in Las Vegas. It is organized by Ryan S. Wood, who claims that there have been at least seventy-four UFO crashes worldwide. All of these incidents have, of course, been successfully covered up by the country in which the unfortunate extraterrestrials fell.

UFO Photos and Videos

Photos of alleged UFOs have played a significant role since the early years of UFOlogy. In the 1950s, the famous contactee George Adamski produced a number of photos of what he said were the space ships of his friends from Venus, some of which were supposedly taken at close range and others using his telescope. However, Adamski’s photos never looked convincing, and few outside his circle of followers doubted that they had been fabricated using quite ordinary objects.

Certain “classic” UFO photos continue to have a wide following today among “Science Fiction” UFOlogists who defend them energetically. The Trent photos from Oregon in 1950 tentatively passed muster with the famously skeptical Condon Report, whose analysis suggested that the object was distant. However, that analysis depends on certain assumptions, and if the photos were fabricated using a truck mirror with a reflective surface (as now seems likely), the assumptions are incorrect. The Brazilian Trindade Island UFO photos of 1958 have been widely touted even though the man who took them was a specialist in trick photography. The Lucci brothers’ photos from Pennsylvania in 1965, famous for being used in many UFO books and magazines, have recently been confessed by one of the brothers to be hoaxes. In recent years, the most famous photos and video are those of the Phoenix Lights of 1997. Widely observed and photographed around the entire region, they undoubtedly represent real objects. And they were indeed real objects—flares dropped by an Air National Guard unit training nearby. (UFO photos typically are taken by—and the object only seen by—one individual or small group, even though the object is allegedly flying near a major city.) However, there now exists a small cottage industry of individuals who write and lecture that they saw the Phoenix Lights doing impossible things, and hence the lights could not possibly have been flares.

While there is considerable interest in UFO photos and videos today, few if any recent images are considered definitive. Nearly all of the recent “unidentified” objects in them appear as simply dots, blips, or lights. The famous Mexican infrared UFO video of 2004 turned out to be simply airborne images of distant oil well flares. Given the near-ubiquitous availability today of cell-phone and digital cameras, many of which are capable of producing videos, it is most curious that we do not have clear, close-up photos and videos of the many reported close encounters and abductions. We do get, however, plenty of photos of blips and dots that could be practically anything. Also, with the proliferation of software such as Photoshop for altering and even creating photos and videos, a photo or video cannot simply “stand by itself” as evidence of anything. For a photo or video to be convincing, we must know a great deal about its origins, the photographer, the location, etc. A number of really clever digital photo and video UFO hoaxes have been created in recent years, but typically they are submitted anonymously via the Internet because the story of their origin would not withstand scrutiny.

Conspiracies Abound

Given the near-universal belief among “Science Fiction” UFOlogists that UFO crashes, secret programs, and even alien captures have taken place, it follows that there must exist conspiracies of gigantic scale with vast resources successfully concealing UFO secrets from the world at large.

There is a widespread belief in an alleged secret U.S. government group known as MJ-12 (or Majestic-12), whose job is to investigate UFO crashes and also arrange their cover-up. UFOlogists William L. Moore and Jaime Shandera announced in 1987 that they had anonymously received copies of government documents purporting to show the activities of a secret UFO crash/retrieval organization. Fearing a possible compromise of government documents, the FBI investigated and quickly concluded that the documents were “completely bogus.” Other problems in the documents were soon noted. For example, one document was typed on a typewriter model that was not manufactured until fifteen years after the date on the document. Many UFO proponents strongly defend the authenticity of these “leaked” documents, but no proof of their authenticity has ever surfaced. Additional MJ-12 documents supposedly continue to be leaked to UFOlogist Timothy S. Cooper, far more than Moore or Shandera claim to have received. These newer MJ-12 papers are even less credible than the original ones. Dr. Robert M. Wood and his son Ryan S. Wood are the principal promoters of the “Majestic Documents” today via their Web site majesticdocuments.com, documentaries, conferences, etc.

The late Philip J. Klass, one of the leading UFO skeptics.

Others hypothesize that NASA is involved in a giant conspiracy to hide UFO data uncovered during its various space flights. Rumors of astronaut UFO sightings abound, supported by misquotations and even outright fabrications. Comments from astronauts concerning sightings of not-then-identified space debris were taken out of context to make it sound as if they saw alien spacecraft. While a few astronauts have been believers in UFO claims (most notably Edgar Mitchell and the late Gordon Cooper), not one astronaut claims to have seen any non-earthly technology while on any spaceflight. During shuttle missions while the astronauts are sleeping, NASA often makes real-time video available of Earth from the orbiter’s cameras, which is shown by some cable-TV services. Some UFOlogists, convinced that there are secret goings-on concerning UFOs and NASA, will record many hours of this uneventful video. Later, they scrutinize the recordings, looking for little dots or blips that to them represent alien spacecraft. Tiny pieces of ice or other orbital debris, sometimes kicked around by exhaust from the shuttle’s attitude control thrusters, are trumpeted as proof of aliens cavorting about while watching our space missions, a secret said to be kept hidden by NASA.

Author Richard C. Hoagland has become famous by promoting claims of many varied space-related conspiracies, mostly involving NASA. Over the years he has claimed that NASA has been covering up knowledge of a face on mars, large alien artifacts on the Moon, anti-gravity forces, and civilizations on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. His Web site, enterprisemission.com, is filled with notions about space conspiracies and “hyperdimensional physics,” which apparently go far beyond anything known to ordinary physicists.

Another major purported conspiracy centers around the claims of reverse engineering of alien technology made in The Day after Roswell (1997) by the late Col. Philip J. Corso. According to Corso, a great deal of today’s familiar technology, including integrated circuits, fiber optics, and lasers, were not actually invented by earthlings but were reverse-engineered from technology found in the alleged Roswell saucer crash. Corso also claims that he alone was able to understand this alien technology, after some of the nation’s top scientists had tried and failed. Corso’s claims have been extensively investigated and debunked by UFOlogist Brad Sparks and others but continue nonetheless to enjoy widespread acceptance, in spite of being entirely without foundation.

One group working to uncover the supposed Grand Conspiracy is called The Disclosure Project (disclosureproject.org), founded by Steven M. Greer, a physician. They claim to have assembled over 400 military and government witnesses to UFO events and projects who are willing to give testimony about them. “The weight of this first-hand testimony, along with supporting government documentation and other evidence, will establish without any doubt the reality of these phenomena” according to Greer. This evidence was presented to the media in a much-hyped press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on May 9, 2001. It should come as no surprise, given the media’s love of reporting sensational claims, that the cover-up allegations of Greer and his colleagues were repeated widely on all the news outlets for at least a few news cycles. After that they simply disappeared, failing to convince even the most sensation-hungry reporter that there was pay dirt under the dust and chaff. Not one of the “disclosure witnesses” could produce a single shred of evidence beyond their own unsupported words, and many of them carry such baggage that believing what they say becomes a Herculean task. Greer’s claims of secret technology involving “zero-point energy,” “anti-gravity,” and even “superluminal” devices serve as red flags to knowledgeable persons that what follows is pure fantasy.

Another interesting contemporary exercise in UFO fantasy involves what is called exopolitics, “political implications of the extraterrestrial presence.” It is the brainchild of Michael Salla, who, with a doctorate in government, travels worldwide to participate in conferences and retreats, campaigning for peaceful relations between humans and extraterrestrials and for an end to the alleged UFO cover-up. Since there is no actual evidence of any alleged “extraterrestrial presence,” this discipline has much in common with medieval disputes concerning angels and pinheads. Nonetheless, it has become a significant player on the UFO scene, and Salla’s Web site, exopolitics.org, receives several million visitors yearly. Exopolitics claims that “hidden agreements concerning extraterrestrial life have been secretly entered into by a range of government-authorized agencies, departments, and corporations. In some cases, these pacts involve representatives of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations whose existence has not been disclosed to the general public.” They insist that such agreements should be made openly.

Promotion of UFO Belief Today

Initially, UFO excitement and belief was spread by news reports over mass sightings—a phenomenon that no longer occurs. Major magazines and books made sensational claims about sightings, which would generate much follow-on publicity. Pro-UFO books by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others became bestsellers and generated much interest and discussion of their claims. UFO groups such as NICAP and APRO appeared often in news stories about UFOs and were depicted as authoritative (rather than as groups devoted to promoting the idea of UFOs as interplanetary visitors).

It has now been over twenty years since a UFO book has become a bestseller and generated nationwide interest and controversy; the last two were Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987) and Transformation (1988). Today, first and foremost, the entertainment media play a major role in keeping UFOs alive, as well as radio and TV talk shows. News programs play only a very minor role. In the 1990s, cable-TV stations began producing entertainment programs based on popular UFO claims and themes, such as Roswell, the Alien Autopsy, and UFO abductions. In 2002, the Science Fiction (Sci-Fi) channel presented Steven Spielberg’s Taken, a twenty-hour miniseries based on alleged UFO abductions. Soon there were many other entertainment programs featuring UFO themes, which even though presented as fiction many take to be “based on fact.” Entertainment shows were soon bolstered by pro-UFO documentaries in which the skeptical view is given little or no voice and then by UFO “reality shows,” such as The History Channel’s UFO Hunters (2008; see the review in this issue). In that show, several “UFO experts” (all of whom are favorable to the pro-UFO position) investigate UFO claims and invariably find tantalizing evidence yet never any real proof.

Talk shows on radio and TV also reach millions of people with their sensational claims and uncritical analyses. Since the 1980s, the syndicated late-night, call-in radio show Coast To Coast AM has reached millions—now on over 500 stations as well as on XM satellite radio. Originally hosted by Art Bell, and now by George Noory, the show offers a dazzling array of wild tales about not only UFOs but cryptozoology, parapsychology, and conspiracies of every sort. Callers often relate their own allegedly paranormal experiences, and it seems that no claim is too bizarre to be given a respectful hearing.

Even some of the biggest names in the broadcast industry have uncritically promoted UFO claims in an attempt to boost ratings. During the summer of 2008, Larry King Live on CNN ran a series of poorly balanced programs about UFOs that displayed shockingly low standards of critical thinking for a major journalist. In February 2005, ABC-TV ran in prime time a two-hour show, “Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs—Seeing Is Believing.” The late journalist, a former news anchorman for ABC News, said, “I began this project with a healthy dose of skepticism and as open a mind as possible. After almost 150 interviews with scientists, investigators, and with many of those who claim to have witnessed unidentified flying objects, there are important questions that have not been completely answered—and a great deal not fully explained.” In spite of all the reporting and investigative resources that must have been available to Jennings, the program contained nothing significant that had not already been reported before, and was just a re-hash on primetime network TV of existing UFO claims and interviews with mostly pro-UFOlogists.

The Future

If the social phenomenon of UFOs tells us anything, it is that the future of the movement turned out differently than its proponents expected. For at least twenty years after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, believers expected that sometime soon, any day now really, a UFO would land openly—or would crash and be recovered—or otherwise be indisputably revealed. At the very least, believers hoped, the Air Force would end its alleged cover-up of the data it held about UFOs and disclose that information to the public. By the late 1960s, this expectation changed. With mass sightings having gone on for twenty years with no tangible result, UFOlogists’ hopes transferred to UFO abductions providing the desperately sought Holy Grail of proof. When abductions had gone on for thirty years without producing anything tangible, excitement shifted to claims of crashed saucers. The idea of a major “disclosure” coming soon has long been a major hope and expectation in UFOlogy, paralleling the Christian fundamentalists’ expectation of the Second Coming. The respected U.S. News and World Report published in its Washington Whispers column on April 18, 1977, “Before the year is out, the Government—perhaps the President—is expected to make what are described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs.” Perhaps the editors had forgotten that same magazine’s cover story of April 7, 1950, “revealing” that flying saucers were in fact a secret Navy project. Every few years, UFO disclosure mania rises to a fever pitch but always subsides.

In the March 1991 issue of Fate magazine, UFOlogist Jerome Clark reviewed two new books on Roswell and excitedly predicted: “Major media—not just the usual tabloid papers—will pick up the story and recount their own investigations, which will confirm the UFOlogists’ findings.” Of course, this never happened. We’re now coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Roswell Incident, and the case has sustained heavy blows by the disclosures about Project Mogul. Subsequent alleged saucer crashes never achieved anything near the level of belief or publicity that Roswell did (at least something did crash near Roswell, even if it wasn’t a UFO). So it’s likely that UFOlogy is ready for the “next big thing.” What that will be is difficult to say. Skeptical researcher Martin Kottmeyer has famously described the UFO movement as “an evolving system of paranoia,” and as such it’s difficult to predict where its paranoia will evolve next. Whatever it may be, we can expect it to offer an element of personal relationship or involvement (like contactees and abductees), to sound exciting and at least a little dangerous, and above all to promise such stunning evidence as to blow the alleged cover-up sky-high. It will have to excite and to entertain simultaneously—a tall order, but one that UFOlogy has been able to fill thus far.

Author’s Note:

Most of the UFO cases and individuals mentioned in this paper have been featured in my “Psychic Vibrations” column in the Skeptical Inquirer, appearing regularly over the past thirty years, where more details are available. Some of these columns are available online. A Google search on any person, book, or UFO case mentioned here will return a great deal of information and background, not all of it reliable. Consider the source in judging the credibility of any UFO claims you encounter.

Some recommended sources of information on contemporary UFO claims are:

• UFO Sightings by Robert Sheaffer (Prometheus, 1998).
• The UFO Skeptic’s Page by Robert Sheaffer, available online at http://www.debunker.com/ufo.html
• “Psychic Vibrations” column by Robert Sheaffer, in Skeptical Inquirer magazine (1977—present), “Give Me Disclosure, or Give Me Death!,” March 2002, “Where the UFO conspiracy theories roam,” July, 2005, “Where have you gone, Commander Quasgaa?” Sept. 2002.
• “The Campeche, Mexico ‘Infrared UFO’ Video” by Robert Sheaffer. Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2004 (available online at csicop.org).
• Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe by Karl Pflock (Prometheus Books, 2001).
• Book review, “The Day after Roswell” by Brad Sparks. Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 1998 (available online at http://tinyurl.com/4dtl42).
• NASA Conspiracies and “Astronaut UFOs": See James E. Oberg’s Web site, available online at jamesoberg.com.
• The Klass Files, some collected UFO writings of the late Philip J. Klass (available online at csicop.org).
• The UFO Invasion (Prometheus 1997), a collection of Skeptical Inquirer articles critically examining claims of UFOs, crashed saucers (nine articles on the Roswell claims), alien autopsies, alien abductions, and other UFO cases, plus crop circles.

According to tradition, the Ark, as a physical manifestation of God, possessed extraordinary power able to evoke disasters and defeat enemies. It is thanks to the Ark, for example, that Joshua is able to part the River Jordan. It’s the Ark that destroys the walls of Jericho and allows the Hebrew people to conquer the city.

The Bible implies that the Ark was figuratively last seen in the sky. “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the Ark of his Covenant.” Some believe that the Ark really existed and are convinced that it is hidden on Earth.

The Lost Ark

According to common interpretation by biblical scholars, the Ark was destroyed in 587 bc, when Babylonian troops led by King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Some researchers, however, do not accept this interpretation.

“There is no report that the Ark was carried away or destroyed or hidden,” says Richard Elliot Friedman, professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. “There is not even any comment such as ‘And then the Ark disappeared and we do not know what happened to it’ or ‘And no one knows where it is to this day.’ The most important object in the world, in the biblical view, simply ceases to be in the story.” Actually, there is a quite detailed description in the Old Testament about the Philistines (enemies of the Israelites) carrying the Ark away: “Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the temple of Dagon and set it by Dagon” (1 Samuel 5: 1-5).

Among various hypotheses, there are those who think that the Ark was taken from the Temple before the arrival of the Babylonians. In the First Book of Kings, we read: “And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak [Shoshenq I, founder of the twenty-second dynasty] king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: And he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king’s house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made” (1 Kings 14:25-26, King James Bible).

And if Shoshenq I took away the treasures, perhaps he took the Ark as well. That premise inspired George Lucas and Steven Spielberg when they wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, which popularized Indiana Jones as the adventurous archeologist engaged in finding lost relics. When Shoshenq was king, the capital of Egypt was in Bubasti on the Nile delta, which was near Tanis. In the Spielberg film, Indiana Jones finds the Ark in Tanis.

Others have imagined epic adventures in which Templar Knights found the Ark, hid it in a secret underground chamber below Solomon’s Temple, and then took it, along with many other treasures and relics, to some mysterious locale like Chartres Cathedral in France or Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.

Perhaps more realistic is the discovery made by James Bruce, one of the earliest explorers of Africa, around 1760. Bruce found a document from which it was possible to infer a possible link between Ethiopia and the Hebrews. According to this text, the Ethiopian Queen of Saba (or Sheba) had a child by King Solomon named Menelik. According to legend, Menelik stole the Ark from the temple and took it to Ethiopia around 950 bc.

This piece of information remained relatively unknown until English journalist Graham Hancock decided to investigate it. “The idea that the Ark of the Covenant could be hidden in Ethiopia stimulated my imagination and my curiosity,” says Hancock.

In Axum, Ethiopia, there is a temple that allegedly houses the Ark. “There were many facts that needed explaining. The fact that there existed a population of Hebrews in Ethiopia practicing the Old Testament, the fact that a Christian country worshiped a pre-Christian relic, the fact that there was no other country that claimed to own the real Ark. . . . [These are] mysteries for which I wanted to find the answers,” says Hancock.

He researched the legend of the Ark for two years and wrote a 600-page book, The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. His conclusions, however, are less than impressive. At the end of his investigation he found himself chatting with the guardian of the temple in Axum, who forbade him to enter. No one, except for the guardian, could see the Ark. And so the only proof of the existence of the Ark rested on the testimony of the guardian.

Mystery fosters curiosity, and owing to the fact that no one can see the Ark in Axum, Hancock made a fortune thanks to mere speculation. Perhaps in the temple there is a replica of the Ark built according to biblical descriptions, but not even this is certain.

An Electricity Storage Device?

Apart from the possible resting place of the Ark (assuming it really existed), another question that many have tried to answer is what this mysterious object could be. Some believe the Ark has supernatural powers; some see the Ark, the Ten Commandments, and the frequent conversations that Moses had with God as proof of ancient contact with more evolved beings, probably extraterrestrials. Erik Von Däniken, for example, was convinced that the Ark was some kind of radio receiver through which aliens passing in spaceships communicated their will to the prophet. “I seem to remember,” says Von Däniken, “that the Ark was often surrounded by flashing sparks and that Moses made use of this ‘transmitter’ whenever he needed help and advice. Moses could hear the voice of his Lord but could not see his face.”

There is no mention of flashing sparks in Exodus, and Von Däniken eventually changed his mind. He later claimed that maybe the Ark was a miniature nuclear reactor. He suggested that the machine stored water from the night dew, then green algae (chlorella) was added, and manna came out of the machine. The reaction needed to form manna was radiation.

The thought that the Ark was some kind of anachronistic technological artifact is quite appealing to some. Two British enthusiasts, Michael Blackburn and Mark Bennett, researched the topic (Fortean Times, 2006). The Bible says that those who carried the Ark had to be dressed in a specific way and that no one could touch it. In one instance, it appears that the Ark was in danger of falling from the cart, and a man named Uzzah jumped forward in order to stabilize it—he died instantly.

What if the Ark, wondered Blackburn and Bennet, was no less than a primitive electrical condenser? The description in the Bible (a wooden box covered in gold with two golden cherubs facing each other on the lid with wings outstretched and almost touching) reminds one of the Leyden Jar, a very simple device that accumulated and stored a large amount of static electricity that when discharged could deliver a very powerful jolt. “The cherubim would act as the positive and negative terminals,” say the two authors. “Using the example of the 500 gram, coffee-jar-sized Leyden Jar, and assuming that this could store a charge of approximately 200 volts, the Ark would have held the equivalent of 125 such jars, giving it a comparable, if not greater, potential voltage, as well as, more importantly, allowing for a much longer discharge time,” Blackburn and Bennet explained.

All of this is interesting speculation, even though such a hypothesis raises more questions than it answers. How did the ancient Hebrews discover the properties of static electricity? How could they electrically charge the Ark before taking it into procession? And what could be the use of a similar object, apart from producing a strong electrical discharge?

An Invention of the Ancient Egyptians?

The Ark, in fact, should be seen not as a real object but as a symbol, say modern historians of the Old Testament. “I see an enormous disparity between the historical fact and the narration of it,” says Gianantonio Borgonovo, teacher of Exegesis of the Old Testament at Catholic University in Milano, Italy. “Every narration must have a link to some historical fact, but here there is none. What I mean is that when there was the Ark nobody talked about it, now that there is no Ark everybody talks about it.”

It is a fact that no biblical-era figure writes about the Ark except for the prophet Jeremiah, “But his text had been rewritten and corrected a century later, when the Temple had already been destroyed. Another contemporary, Ezekiel, could have talked about the Ark but didn’t,” explains Borgonovo.

Borgonovo continues, “probably, there never was in Solomon’s Temple an object called ‘The Ark of the Covenant.’ It is just a highly symbolic image that, not accidentally, becomes an object of reverence for Christians, which contains the Ten Commandments, some manna, and Aaron’s staff. So, the question now becomes: Why choose the Ark as a symbol? This is a likely consequence of the Egyptian origins of the Hebrew tradition. It was Tutankhamun, in XIV century bc, who gave the most beautiful description of the Ark.”

It was the forgotten pharaohs who depicted the possible origin of the Ark’s tale on the decorated walls of the East-facing pillars of the palace of Ramses II in Luxor. There one can still see a symbolic representation of the feast of Apet, an Egyptian holiday that announced the culmination of the flooding of the Nile, on which the New Year’s harvest depended. On the wall there is a drawing that appears to show an ark carried on long poles supported by the shoulders of a group of priests. This, however, is not a box but a miniature boat carried by sedan-bearers, as in the Biblical tradition.

The link between Apet’s feast and the Ark of the Covenant is clear if one believes that ancient Egyptians used to carry their gods in procession inside the miniature boats. During Apet’s feast, then, “arks” contained small stone representations of the pantheon of Egyptian gods, just like the Ark of the Hebrews contained the stones of the Ten Commandments, symbol of the God of Israel. l

Reference

• Blackburn, Michael and Mark Bennet. Re-Engineering the Ark. Fortean Times 207, March 2006, pp. 48-55.

The highly publicized releases of “UFO files” from France and Britain provide more puzzling tales about the “appearance” over the years of anomalous aerial objects. But the real stories behind some of the most spectacular sightings in UFO history will come to light only when the Russian Ministry of Defense opens up its files.

Consider one of the most sensational UFO stories in Soviet history—a story that has been enshrined in the most high-quality data files of world UFOlogy as a classic that cannot be explained in any prosaic terms. It really is an important case study, because the tale of the Minsk UFO sighting can teach a lesson about the irremediable vigor of unidentified flying objects as a cultural phenomenon.

A passenger jet is flying north on September 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 am, the flight crew notices a glowing object outside their forward right window. In the ten minutes that follow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays searchlights on the ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft in the area, alerted by air traffic control operators who are watching the UFO on radar, also see it.

Respected British UFOlogist Jenny Randles, in The UFO Conspiracy (115) described it this way:

A radar visual case from the USSR began on an evening in 1985 [sic] at 4:10 AM when Aeroflot flight 8352 observed a strange yellow light while cruising at 30,000 feet in clear conditions. A “blob” shot out and downward from the light, and projected a cone of brilliant (greenish?) light at the ground below. Two additional beams appeared, and features on the ground could be seen to be illuminated.

One beam then swung around and illuminated the aircraft cabin. The light appeared to approach and resolved into a greenish luminosity as much as several degrees in extent, which then paralleled their course. There were multiple lights of different colors and fiery zigzags that crossed the vapor.

At this point, the aircraft was coming within range of the ground controller, who could then also see the object. The object seemed to change shape, [and according to a quoted report] “it developed an ‘appendage’ and then ‘became’ a wingless cloud-aircraft with a pointed tail (the spike?). The yellow and green glow, like phosphorescence, was eerily intertwined.” A second aircraft was vectored nearby and also could see the object near the first aircraft. Talinn approach radar detected the aircraft and the object, and also experienced unusual radar interference.

The incident also figures prominently in UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union (Ballantine, 1992, pp. 128-9), a 1992 book by Jacques Vallee, who was the real-life inspiration for the fictional UFOlogist in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Valle reports in the book that “Two military pilots saw an object that hit them with a beam of light. One of the pilots died; the other managed to land the plane, although he had also suffered psychological effects from the light.” Vallee said that he learned the story from Yevgeniy Kolessov in January 1990 during a visit to the “Kosmos” pavilion at the “VDNKh” exhibits park in northern Moscow.

On page 201 he categorizes the case as an “encounter” in which “witnesses suffer significant injury or death—one of only three in Russian UFO history.” The story is based on a “firsthand personal interview with the witness by a source of proven reliability,” with the “site visited by a skilled analyst,” and the conclusion was that “no natural explanation [was] possible, given the evidence.”

A leading Russian UFO expert, Vladimir Azhazha, reported in “UFOs: Space Aliens?” in Soviet Soldier magazine, December 1991:

Any meeting with or even sighting a UFO is fraught with danger. Let us consider the following case. On December [sic] 7, 1984, a liner flying from Leningrad to Tbilisi came across an unidentified flying object.

For some time the plane accompanied the alien craft, illuminating it with a searchlight. The outcome of the contact was tragic. Half a year later, V. Gorridze, the crew commander, died of cancer; Yu. Kabachnikov, the second pilot, had a serious mental derangement. The encephalogram of his brain was not of an “earthly” character, as he lost memory for long periods of time. Now he is a “first group” invalid; naturally, he cannot fly. The hostess, who was in the control room [i.e., cockpit] at the moment of the UFO “attack,” fell ill too. She developed a heavy skin disease of unknown character. Perhaps somebody [sic] of the passengers was also affected. Regrettably we have no information to this effect.

Ukrainian-born author Paul Stonehill has written many books on Soviet UFOlogy. In his version,

The greenish cloud suddenly dropped below the altitude of the aircraft, ascended vertically, moved to the left and right, and then stopped right across from Tu-134A [flight 7084]. The cloud was chasing it.... Lazurin shouted the object was teasing them.

Then another Tu-134A entered the control tower area. The distance between the two aircraft was [100 km]; one could not miss the giant cloud from such a distance, yet the commander of the other airplane did not see anything. Only at [15 km] did he see the UFO....

The captain of flight 7084, V. Goridze, died in 1985 as a result of electromagnetic radiation. Kabachnikov, the pilot, was fired because he developed heart disease.... The Tallinn crew suffered one casualty, a steward, who developed similar ailments as the pilots of Flight 7084.

This is certainly a story that “has everything.” It’s no wonder it achieved such elevated status—and absolute credibility—in UFOlogy. And as we shall see, it fully deserves such elevated status but for absolutely opposite reasons.

This combination of perceptions from multiple witnesses and sensors, together with the serious physiological effects, makes for a dramatic event that on the face of it defies any earthly explanation. It was just as amazing that the official Soviet news media, long averse to discussing UFO subjects, disclosed the story in the first place. So it was no mystery that over the years that followed, the story was never actually checked out. It was only retold again and again.

Weighing the Pilots’ Evidence

However much we are comfortable with entrusting our lives to airline pilots, a blind trust in their abilities as trained observers of aerial phenomena is sometimes a stretch. For a number of excellent and honorable reasons, pilots have often been known to overinterpret unusual visual phenomena, often underestimating their distance from what appear to be other aircraft.

Think of it this way: you want the person at the front of the plane to have hair-trigger alertness for visual cues to potential collisions so that avoidance maneuvers can be performed in time. A worst-case interpretation of perceptions is actually a plus.

So it’s no surprise that pilots have sent their planes into a dive to avoid a fireball meteor that was really fifty miles away or to dodge a flaming, falling satellite passing sixty miles overhead. Even celestial objects are misperceived by pilots more frequently than by any other category of witnesses, concluded UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek over thirty years ago. Since the outcome of a false-negative assessment (that is, being closer than assumed) could be death and the cost of a false positive (being much farther away) is mere embarrassment, the bias of these reactions makes perfect sense.

What Could Have Caused It?

Was there anything else in the sky that morning that the Soviet pilots might have seen? This isn’t an easy question, since the Moscow press reports neglected to give the exact date of the event, but I could figure it out by checking Aeroflot airline schedules.

It turned out that early risers in Sweden and Finland had also seen an astonishing apparition in the sky that morning. These are the report summaries Claus Svahn, an experienced researcher and writer for UFO-Sweden, published in his group’s magazine:

• Truck driver Jan Åke Jansson, heading ENE between Örebro and Arboga, observed a “very strong globe of light” just over treetops in the north, which vanished in twenty seconds.
• Policeman Mikael Smitt in Örebro received a radio call from a patrolman of a very strong light in the sky with “a skirt” under it, which slowly moved east. Smitt called Swedish Air Force in Uppsala and Arlanda airport; both sites confirmed observing the light in the ENE direction.
• Train engineer Ingvar Finér reported to UFO-Sweden that while driving a train south of Stockholm he observed a very bright light moving in the NNE “at a very high altitude.” He wrote that the light hit the ground in front of him, making it possible to see features he had not seen before.
• Olof Baard was driving a newspaper van near Sävsjö when he saw a strong light in the north. He stopped his van and got out for a better look. The object was soundless and looked “like a diamond in fog.”
• “UFO Research of Finland,” Annual Report 1984, stated: “Fifteen different locations all over Finland—phenomenon started as a bright rising object. Later there was a flash of light which created red, green, yellow and purple colors around the object. The skies were clear and therefore the phenomenon could be seen all over the country.”

The immediate disconnect that I found was that the Scandinavian witnesses were not looking southeast toward Minsk (where the airliner was flying with its terrified crew). Nor were they looking eastward, toward the top-secret Russian space base at Plesetsk, where launchings sparked UFO reports starting in the mid-1960s. They were looking to the northeast, across Karelia and perhaps farther.

The direction of the apparition being seen simultaneously near Minsk provided another “look angle.” If the vectors of the eyewitnesses are plotted on a map, they tend to converge over the Barents Sea, far from land. This made the triggering mechanism for the sightings—if they were all of the same phenomenon—even more extraordinary.

Still, some implications were attractive. If the two groups of witnesses were observing the same apparition (as subsequent evidence will support), then all interpretations of the UFO’s close proximity to the Minsk witnesses can be dismissed as misinterpretations, and all interpretations that the UFO was local to witnesses there and responding specifically to them can be dismissed as baseless.

Preludes and Precedents

Whatever the stimulus behind the 1984 Minsk airliner story turned out to be, I already knew that many famous Soviet UFO reports were connected with secret military aerospace activities that were misperceived by ordinary citizens. I’ve posted several decades of such research results on my Web site.

In 1967, waves of UFO reports from southern Russia and a temporary period of official permission for public discussion created a “perfect storm” of Soviet UFO enthusiasm. But it was short-lived—the topic was soon forbidden again, possibly because the government realized that what was being seen and publicized was actually a series of top-secret, space-to-ground nuclear warhead tests, a weapon Moscow had just signed an international space treaty to outlaw.

Once the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (south of Arkhangelsk) began launching satellites in 1966, skywatchers throughout the northwestern Soviet Union began seeing vast glowing clouds and lights moving through the skies. These were officially nonexistent rocket launchings. “Not ours!” the officials seemed to be saying. “Must be Martians.”

Other space events that sparked UFO reports included orbital rocket firings timed to occur while in direct radio contact with the main Soviet tracking site in the Crimea. Such firings and the subsequent expanding clouds of jettisoned surplus fuel weren’t confined to Soviet airspace. One particular category of Soviet communications satellites performed the maneuver over the Andes Mountains, subjecting the southern tip of South America to UFO panics every year or two for decades.

As the Soviet Union lurched toward collapse in the 1980s, its rigid control over the press decayed. This allowed local newspapers, especially in the area of the Plesetsk space base, to begin publishing eyewitness accounts of correctly identified rocket launchings. The newspapers sometimes printed detailed drawings of the shifting shapes in the light show caused by the sequence of rocket stage firings and equipment ejections.

The Evidence Comes Together

Still, I wasn’t willing to wave off the elaborate extra dimensions of the Minsk UFO case as mere misperception and exaggerated coincidences. Even though none of the most exciting stories, such as one pilot’s death half a year later from cancer, could ever be traced to any original firsthand sources, they made for a compelling narrative.

Fortunately, the Soviet Union’s collapse provided the opening for the collapse of the UFO story. The May/June 1991 issue of the magazine Science in the USSR contained an article that reprised the story with one stunning addendum from the co-pilot’s [Gennadiy Lazurin] flight log. As it was happening, he sketched the apparition, minute by minute, as it changed shape outside his cockpit window. Now, fourteen of the drawings have been published for the first (and as far as I can tell, only) time.

Nyonoska missile test site observed by U.S. Corona spy satellite, 1971.

The graphic sequence of bright light, rays, expanding halos, misty cloudiness, tadpole tail, and sudden linear streamers may have looked bizarre to the magazine’s readers, but they looked very familiar to me.

I dug out the clippings from Arkhangelsk newspapers mailed to me by an associate there. I looked up the other articles from recent Moscow science magazines that showed how beautiful these rocket launches looked. I also found the set of sketches made by a witness in Sweden of what was immediately recognized as a rocket launch. I laid the separate sketches out on a table.

They all clearly showed the same sequence of shape-shifting visions, as viewed from different angles to the rear and off to the side of the object’s flight. The more recent accounts were of nighttime missile launches—and the impression was overwhelming that the Minsk UFO, as drawn in real time by one of the primary witnesses, looked and visually evolved just like the Swedish sketches.

So what happened? Here is a prosaic hypothesis:

• The flight crew was unexpectedly treated to a spectacular naval missile test launch from the Murmansk area
• Interpreting the apparition as a structured craft that was a threat to their own aircraft (the proper instinct), they grossly misperceived its range and imagined its “intentions”
• Alerted by radio, other people in the area looked for weird apparitions in the sky or on radar—and a few found them
• Unusual in such cases, one witness took the opportunity to make real-time sketches of the developing phenomenon, and the record became public
• Amazed by the unprecedented experience, primary witnesses and their interviewees wove every coincidental occurrence into a single coherent narrative
• Media coverage was filtered to remove specific identifying details (e.g., exact date and possible simultaneous sightings in northern Russia) that could connect the UFO to a real event

1. Witnesses did NOT report UFO in direction of witnesses on airliners near Minsk (Southeast)
2. Narrative features (bright light cloud, timing and motion, even ground illumination) establish same identity of stimulus.
3. All interpretations of UFO close proximity to minsk witnesses can be shown as misinterpretations.
4. All interpretations that the UFO was local to witnesses and responding specifically to them can be shown as baseless
5. Plesetsj cosmodrome NOT likely as stimulus point of origin.

Case Closed—Or Minds Closed?

Without Lazurin’s detailed, minute-by-minute drawings, any claim for solving the case would have been tentative and circumstantial at best. Even now, the case isn’t quite closed. Until the Russians release the records for the test launch of a submarine-based missile—as we now know often happened from that region of the ocean without official acknowledgement—the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven.

But the answer is compelling enough to remind us of wider principles of investigating—and evaluating—similar stories from around the world: there are more potential prosaic stimuli out there than we usually expect. Precise times and locations and viewing directions are critical to an investigation. The temptation to fall into excitable overinterpretation is almost irresistible. Myriads of weird but meaningless coincidences can be combined to embellish a good story.

What have we learned from this experience? What do “pseudo-UFO reports” (such as this one) sparked by military space and missile events teach us about world UFOlogy?

• “Control experiments” (albeit unintentional ones) underscore how extraneous details and exaggerations intrude on and pollute raw perceptions
• Almost without exception, the more “research” done to currently accepted UFOlogical standards, the greater the introduction of obscuring and mis leading, garbled information
• The world’s “best UFO experts” usually failed to identify and learn from the prosaic stimuli behind most top “Russia UFO” stories and aren’t likely to do so
• It is fair to generalize that this failure is endemic to the attitudes and capabilities of UFOlogy and that “arguments from incompetence” (“We can’t explain it—hence it cannot have an explanation”) are unworthy of general belief
• Contemporary UFOlogy has gotten the legitimate notion of “government UFO secrets” completely backwards (governments sometimes opportunistically exploit the public’s misinterpretations of their secret aerial activities in order to camouflage the truth about such activities, and UFOlogists are the unwitting tools of this deception)
• Reports of this type are not evidence for “alien visitations”

The most important factors for cutting through the misperceptions are having the good fortune to come across enough original evidence and having enough time to make sense of that evidence. The degree to which pure luck is critical to arriving at a persuasive prosaic explanation is humbling. That’s one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the Minsk UFO case: as long as those factors are in short supply, it’s no mystery why there are so many amazing UFO stories—and so many enthusiasts willing to endorse them.

Background

On July 8, 1947, an unauthorized press release from an eager but relatively inexperienced public information officer at New Mexico’s Roswell Army Air Field propelled the “Roswell Incident” into history. He reported that a “flying disc” had been recovered from an area ranch where it had crashed (Berlitz and Moore 1980; Korff 1997). The crash came in the wake of the first modern UFO sighting, witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24. Arnold’s string of “flying saucers” may well have been nothing more than mirage effects caused by a temperature inversion (McGaha 2006), but it initiated the modern wave of UFO sightings (Nickell 2007).

Soon after the Roswell press release made worldwide newspaper headlines, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was announced: the unidentified flying object had really been a weather balloon, said officials. Photographs of the wreckage matched descriptions of the debris given by the rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel, who discovered it on his rented property, the Foster ranch. In the Roswell Daily Record (July 9, 1947), Brazel described (in a reporter’s words) “a large area of bright wreckage” consisting of tinfoil, rubber strips, tough paper, sticks, and tape with flower designs. “There was no sign of any metal in the area,” noted the newspaper story, “which might have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind.”

Although officials announced that the UFO had simply been a weather balloon, the best evidence now indicates that the crashed device was really a United States government spy balloon—actually a balloon-array with dangling radar reflectors. Part of Project Mogul, it was used in an attempt to monitor sonic emissions from anticipated nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. I spoke about this with former Project Mogul scientist Charles B. Moore who identified the Roswell wreckage in photographs as likely coming from a lost Flight 4 Mogul array. (See, importantly, Dave Thomas’s special report in the July/August 1995 Skeptical Inquirer. See also The Roswell Report: Case Closed published by the United States Air Force [U.S. 1997].)

Continuing Saga

The news story died almost immediately, but the event continued as the subject of folklore and fakelore. In addition to the dubious “memories” of aging Roswellians, there emerged amateurishly forged government conspiracy documents and a hoaxed “alien autopsy” film showing the purported dissection of one of the extraterrestrials allegedly recovered from the crash site (Nickell 2001, 118—121). Many have given free rein to their imaginations (see figure 1).

Enter Robert Galganski. A crash-safety research engineer and a Roswell buff, he offered a paper, “The Roswell Debris Field: An Engineer’s Perspective” (published by Fund for UFO Research). In it, Galganski (2005, vii) used “existing documentation” in order “to calculate a very liberal quantity—that is, significantly more than one would expect—of debris that [Mogul] Flight 4 could have deposited on the ranch pasture.”

Essentially, Galganski examined the Roswell controversy quantitatively, focusing on the amount of the debris. As he summed up, “These quantitative and visual findings provide compelling support for the conclusion, based on logic and common sense, which many other researchers have reached: Project Mogul Flight 4 did not cause the Roswell debris field” (Galganski 2005, vii).

Figure 2. A replica of one-half of a Project Mogul spy balloon array was created for the Discovery Channel. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

The Test

Galganski based his findings on two main sources. One was Major Jesse Marcel, who in 1947 was the Roswell Army Air Field staff intelligence officer. The other was Mac Brazel, the rancher who discovered the crash site. As Galganski concedes, however, the two descriptions were “markedly different” (2005, vii).

Indeed, Marcel—recalling more than thirty-two years later—stated that the field was “. . . three-quarters of a mile long and two hundred to three hundred feet wide,” whereas Mac Brazel described the debris as only (in the reporter’s words) “scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter” (“Harassed rancher” 1947). After making numerous assumptions and performing myriad calculations, Galganski determined that the field would have been covered by the wreckage so sparsely that it could not “honestly be called a ‘debris field’” (2005, 28).

To test his conclusions, the production company for the Discovery Channel documentary recreated a Mogul-type array, crashed it, and assessed the resulting amount of debris. They chose a site in California at the edge of the Mojave Airport, and I was asked to monitor the experiment. (The experiment took place the next day, December 20, 2006, and the documentary aired February 22, 2007.)

The crew, including a Hollywood special effects technician, recreated one-half of a Mogul array. For this, they inflated a dozen four-foot balloons, attaching one after the other to a tethered line, then strung on three box-kite-like replica radar reflectors (consisting of sticks and foil-covered paper—figure 2), and finally attached a parachute carrying a simulated radiosonde (instrument package). Then a rifleman used an airgun to burst each balloon in turn until the wreckage lay scattered on the ground. Galganski thought the debris was insufficient to match that at Roswell in 1947, but since the array had been kept on a tether, the debris naturally came down and littered a very limited area, only about 793,138 feet (figure 3). Had it been more broken up and scattered by the wind, I concluded, the results would have been dramatically different.

Wrong Assumptions

Figure 4. The Author at the now-deserted old farmhouse on the Foster ranch where Mac Brazel lived when he discovered the infamous Roswell wreckage. (Author’s photo by Vaughn Rees)

We must recognize that Galganski is at pains to assume that a large wreckage area and a consequent amount of debris was needed to at least “lightly litter” the area. From this perspective, he believes that what crashed at Roswell was much, much larger than a Flight 4 Mogul balloon train. This seems a very poor way to make a determination. One wonders what Galganski would conclude from the size of the area strewn by debris from the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia disaster (on February 1, 2003). Officials said, according to The New York Times, that “The grim fallout scattered along a path at least 100 miles long and 10 miles wide,” (Halbfinger and Oppel 2003). Was a gigantic space shuttle involved?

In fact, it is Galganski (2005, 45) who assumes “a litter-filled region,” not Mac Brazel. Brazel provided not only an estimate of the size of the area involved but also indicated the amount of debris. Brazel, Major Marcel, and a couple of others took the pieces to Brazel’s home (a now-deserted house I visited with investigator Vaughn Rees in 2003—see figure 4). The Roswell Daily Record reported:

According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all. They tried to make a kite out of it, but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.

Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell, and that was the last he heard of it until the story broke that he had found a flying disc.

The newspaper article continued:

Brazel said that he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.

The article went on to add:

When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.

A small and lightweight “disc” indeed! Clearly, what Brazel described was not even an entire Mogul array. The article added that “No strings or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used” (“Harassed rancher” 1947).

Photographs made of the wreckage when it was displayed to the news media (U.S. 1997, 7) show that the wreckage was consistent with Brazel’s description and that it in turn matches Project Mogul’s Flight 4 balloon/radar-reflector array.

From the evidence, we see that not only did balloons burst near Roswell in 1947 but that conspiracy theorists have had their fanciful flying-saucer bubbles burst as well.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Vaughn Rees and Tim Binga for their assistance with this and earlier Roswell research, as well as the entire crew I worked with in the Mojave Desert, assembled by Creative Differences Productions, Toronto.

Notes

1. These “MJ-12 documents” fooled arch Roswell-conspiracy writer Stanton T. Friedman, who has continued to tout the bogus documents (Friedman 1996). See Nickell and Fischer 1990.
2. Among other sources were two that gave estimates ranging from only “about 20 feet square” (a Capt. Sheridan Cavitt, whose testimony Galganski finds dubious) to debris being “scattered over a square mile” (given in an Associated Press article). See Galganski 2005, 24—25.

References

• Best Evidence: The Roswell Incident. 2007. Television documentary on Discovery Channel, February 22.
• Friedman, Stanton T. 1996. Top Secret/Magic. New York: Marlowe & Company.
• Galganski, Robert. 2005. The Roswell Debris Field: An Engineer’s Perspective; third ed. Washington, D.C.: Fund for UFO Research.
• Halbfinger, David M., and Richard A. Oppel Jr. 2003. Loss of the shuttle: On the ground. The New York Times, February 2.
• Harassed rancher who located “saucer” sorry he told about it. 1947. The Roswell Daily Record, July 9; copy given in Galganski 2005, C-1.
• Korff, Kal K. 1997. What really happened at Roswell? Skeptical Inquirer 21(4) (July/August): 24—30.
• McGaha, James. 2006. Interview by Joe Nickell, September 28—29; in Nickell 2007, 14—16.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1990. The crashed-saucer forgeries. International UFO Reporter, (March/April).
• —. 2001. Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky.
• —. 2007. Mysterious entities of the Pacific Northwest, part II. Skeptical Inquirer 31(2) (March/April): 14—17.
• Thomas, Dave. 1995. The Roswell incident and Project Mogul: Scientist participant supports direct links. Skeptical Inquirer 19(4) (July/ Aug.): 15—18.
• U.S. Air Force. The Roswell Report: Case Closed. 1997. Authored by Captain James McAndrew for Headquarters USAF; Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Much of the public believes that UFOs are alien spacecraft. This represents a conceptual leap from unidentified lights in the sky or radar bogies that were the UFO stories when I was growing up. Today, “believers” are talking about actual alien contact, with alien bases on the Moon and Mars, and their concerns receive reinforcement from radio, TV, and Internet blogs.

On one level UFOs are real, of course; many people occasionally see objects in the sky that are not immediately identifiable as planes, balloons, planets, stars, or unusual atmospheric phenomena. But the questions I receive from the public (submitted to a NASA Web site) suggest a belief system linking UFOs with alien visitations and abductions spiced up by “conspiracy theories” to hide this information from the public.

If UFOs are alien spacecraft visiting Earth, then it seems reasonable that evidence of alien civilizations might be seen by astronomers or the radio signals from alien spacecraft might be picked up by the sensitive receivers we use to communicate with our own spacecraft. Perhaps astronauts who venture into space would be among the first to make reliable observations of alien spacecraft or artifacts. Perhaps we should look for alien bases on other worlds. Indeed, the Internet carries many stories of such encounters. I will examine some of the evidence cited for alien presence in the solar system.

Astronaut Encounters with Aliens

One allegedly well-documented report stems from an interview in which astronaut Buzz Aldrin describes seeing a UFO during the Apollo 11 mission. In an interview on the Science Channel (left, top), Aldrin stated that he, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins saw unidentified objects that appeared to follow their Apollo spacecraft.

To get the story straight, I called Buzz Aldrin, who was happy to explain what happened. He said that his remarks were taken out of context to reverse his meaning. It is true that the Apollo 11 crew spotted an unidentified object moving with the spacecraft as they approached the Moon. After they verified that this mystery object was not Apollo 11’s large rocket upper stage, which was about 6,000 miles away by then, they concluded that they were seeing one of the small panels that had linked the spacecraft to the upper stage (any part of the spacecraft’s rocket upper stage will continue to move alongside the spacecraft, as both are floating in free-fall). These panels were too small to track from Earth and were relatively close to the Apollo spacecraft. Aldrin told me that they chose not to discuss this on the open communications channel since they were concerned that their comments might be misinterpreted. His entire explanation about identifying the panels was cut from the broadcast interview, giving the impression that the Apollo 11 crew had seen a UFO. Aldrin told me that he was angry about the deceptive editing and asked the Science Channel to correct the intentional twisting of his remarks, but they refused. Later, Aldrin explained what happened on CNN’s Larry King Live (left, bottom) but was nearly cut off by the host before he could finish.

With the popularity of YouTube, this same question is addressed to me repeatedly, as in: “Check out this video on YouTube with Buzz Aldrin saying he saw a UFO on Apollo 11. Who is fibbing? NASA or the great American hero, Buzz Aldrin?” My answer was that the fibbing was being done by the producers of the video, who omitted the second half of the interview.

It is instructive to watch this interview to see the ways the story is embellished and ultimately manipulated. Most of the talking is done by the interviewer and not Aldrin, but their comments have been edited to create the illusion of a seamless narrative. Throughout the interview we see a montage of short scenes from Apollo and other missions, including a blurry image through the window taken during a later flight. Only a critical viewer will distinguish what Aldrin said from the narrative by the interviewer or realize that the video clips are unrelated. The end product is clever disinformation, strongly suggesting—without explicitly lying—that Aldrin and his crewmates saw an alien spacecraft.

Many Internet claims of encounters between NASA astronauts and alien spacecraft are based on quotes from “secret communications” between flight crews and Houston. It is true that there are such private conversations, concerning crew health for example. But the Internet stories of overheard conversations are never documented and often attributed to leaks from unnamed NASA workers whose jobs (or even lives) would allegedly be at risk if they were identified. Many of these stories involve the Apollo 11 flight, and they include claims that alien spaceships accompanied the NASA craft during its Moon landing and that a row of alien spacecraft along a crater rim monitored the astronauts’ spacewalk on the lunar surface. (Incidentally, Apollo 11 landed on a flat plain where there were no hills or crater rims to provide such a viewpoint.)

To my knowledge, no NASA astronaut has ever reported seeing a UFO in space, let alone having a confrontation with aliens. However, this is not to say that no astronaut believes that alien visitations to Earth might be happening. Recently there were news reports that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell believes in the reality of some reports of UFOs. He has attended a number of meetings of UFO believers, and he asserts that some of these reports are true, and that the U.S. government and military are aware of these alien visits. However, Mitchell does not claim to have seen aliens himself. His astronaut colleagues tell me that he has always had an interest in the occult, and he even tried to conduct a parapsychology experiment on the way to and from the Moon. It is easy for a journalist to ignore Mitchell’s caveats about most UFO reports being untrue, or about not encountering an alien himself, to give the impression that he and other astronauts have had frequent encounters with beings from other worlds.

One argument presented to me by several correspondents is that aliens must have warned humans to stay away from their bases on the Moon. Otherwise, why was the Apollo program suddenly terminated with three more missions scheduled and almost ready for launch? (The huge Apollo/Saturn-5 rockets that enthrall visitors to the NASA space parks at Canaveral, Houston, and Huntsville are not mock-ups; they are real hardware built for Apollo 18, 19, and 20.) The conspiracy story attributes our failure to follow up on the Apollo flights to this same interplanetary quarantine and suggests that NASA’s current program to return astronauts to the Moon will be cancelled for the same reason. I admit being baffled by the sudden termination of the Apollo program at the peak of its success, but I accept the official explanation that it was due to the changing political priorities of the Nixon administration, where many looked upon Apollo as a Kennedy-Johnson program.

Mars: The Viking Era

Mars plays a unique role in public consciousness. Just a century ago, this planet was widely thought to be inhabited by intelligent creatures, largely due to astronomical studies and the popular writing of Percival Lowell. The classic science-fiction novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells reinforced public curiosity about the possibility of aliens on Mars. But early space missions that showed decisively that Mars was not really very Earth-like—with no canals and an atmosphere only 1 percent the size of ours—damped much of the public’s fascination. Scientific interest has steadily increased, however, and Mars is the planet most visited by spacecraft. The first stage of scientific exploration climaxed in 1976 with two identical Mars landers and orbiters as part of the Viking program. All four Viking spacecraft were fabulously successful, providing a comprehensive survey of the planet together with detailed analysis at two landing sites, including clever experiments to search for evidence of microbial life.

After two decades of post-Viking neglect, NASA initiated a new series of Mars missions with the 1996 Mars Pathfinder, which included a rover about the size of a microwave oven. After two mission failures in 1998, several remarkably successful orbiters and the two famous Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, followed. In addition to high-resolution orbiting cameras, there is also a digital, global topographic map based on laser ranging between the orbiter and the surface. As a result, we have more detailed and quantitative data on martian topography than we do for much of the Earth’s surface.

Naturally, the tens of thousands of high-resolution photos from orbit and on the ground (all publicly available) have been studied for evidence of life and any potential artifacts of a possible ancient civilization. In this respect, the most famous discovery was made by Viking Orbiter 1 in 1977, in a low-resolution (about 40 meters) photo of the ancient Cydonia region of Mars. In the midst of a heavily eroded plain with irregular low mountains or mesas is the Face on Mars, one of the iconic images of the space program.

The Face on Mars, seen under oblique lighting, seems to be an oval humanoid face with eyes, nose, and a mouth. It is about one kilometer across and surrounded by a sort of halo that reminds some of the cloth headpiece worn by Egyptian pharaohs. It was spotted by Viking scientist Toby Owen and released to the press as a joke to show how even on Mars we (humans) could find features that looked vaguely like ourselves. Unfortunately, Viking project scientist Jerry Soffen made an offhand remark to the press that this “face” showed up only under this particular lighting and not in other photos of the same site. The problem was that Viking had not taken other photos of this spot at equal or higher resolution, and the mission ended before this area could be mapped again. Thus began another conspiracy theory: NASA was suppressing confirming photos of the face. When the next NASA mission to photograph Mars (Mars Observer) failed in 1992 shortly before its arrival at the Red Planet, the story began to circulate that this failure was faked and the spacecraft was really in orbit and sending back secret high-resolution images of the face.

The Face on Mars has been vigorously promoted by one energetic entrepreneur: Richard C. Hoagland. A young freelance journalist and one-time museum guide, Hoagland was a part of the large corps of journalists who encamped at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the Viking landings. Hoagland not only accepted the artificial origin of the face, he went on to develop a detailed “theory” that linked this feature with a number of others in Cydonia that he also interpreted as artificial. These included a set of intersecting low ridges that he called the “city” and several mountains of roughly pyramid shape. (Pyramid-shaped peaks with three or four sides are a rather common product of both ice and wind erosion on Earth.)

As improving technology allowed for higher photo resolution, the “face on Mars” looked less like a face and more like the natural landform it is.

Hoagland set out to study the geometry of this layout, finding coincidences in the angles between the features that further demonstrated (to him) their artificial origin. He published the results from his “research” in a 350-page book called The Monuments of Mars (now in its fifth edition). He also undertook a lecture circuit that climaxed when a naïve public affairs officer at NASA Glenn (then Lewis) Research Center in Cleveland invited him to present a director’s seminar and then offered to put a videotape of this talk on the NASA TV channel. Hoagland also began making regular appearances on Art Bell’s late-night talk show Coast to Coast AM, where he still happily holds forth on the conspiracies of NASA and the U.S. government to keep the truth from the public.

Hoagland’s elaborate interpretation of the “monuments” on Mars represents an amazing flight of imagination. Since the features are in a state of ruin, he concludes that the aliens who built them are no longer present and dates the construction of these huge projects to about half a million years ago. Since the face is (in his opinion) clearly human and directed upward (best seen from above), he concludes that it was built as a message for Homo sapiens, a species that was just emerging on Earth at the time. The story then bifurcates: either these aliens were also visiting Earth at the time and knew about the future rise of humans (analogous to the opening sequences in the book and film 2001, A Space Odyssey), or the monuments themselves were built by an earlier race of humans that had moved from Earth to Mars and left no traces of their tenure on our planet. Yet another option is that Homo sapiens had a martian origin, migrating to Earth when their own planet became uninhabitable (a conclusion that flies in the face of all modern genetic analysis of humans and their primate cousins).

Hoagland’s analysis of the geometric patterns of the alleged monuments convinced him that the entire layout in Cydonia was a technical message to humans, one that included the key to a limitless source of energy. Apparently he has deciphered the message but is not revealing it just yet, other than to say that this energy could be tapped only at latitude 19.5 degrees (north or south) on the Sun as well as Earth and Mars. More recently, Hoagland linked the monuments on Mars with the crop circles appearing on Earth, which also allegedly held the key to unlimited energy, implying that the creators of the city on Mars were also active today on Earth. The fact that Hoagland was able to peddle this bizarre fairy tale for two decades and make a living selling books and videotapes is a testament to his ability as a salesman, if not to his unscientific acumen.

The two-decade post-Viking hiatus from Mars provided plenty of time for Hoagland to market his fantasy. The 1992 failure of Mars Observer, far from ending this story, was twisted by Hoagland into an additional conspiracy theory. The day the failure was announced, a group of his followers demonstrated outside the JPL gates to protest the blanket of secrecy they claimed had been thrown over this mission whose real purpose was to allegedly study the face. In the late 1990s, one of the two most frequently asked questions in letters and emails received by NASA concerned the Face on Mars (the other topic was asteroid impacts).

New Results from Mars

In 1998, a much-improved camera arrived at Mars on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. A vocal segment of the public demanded that NASA give high priority to re-photographing the face. NASA wisely argued that this was not a high-priority target but quietly obtained a high-resolution image of the face as soon as the spacecraft orbit permitted it. On April 5, 1998, when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over Cydonia for the first time, Michael Malin and his Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team snapped a picture ten times sharper than the original Viking photos, revealing a natural landform. However, the new lighting was very different from that of the original Viking photo, and some face proponents refused to believe that this was really the same feature. On April 8, 2001, the MOC captured a photo using the camera’s maximum resolution, better than two meters, which was twenty times higher than the Viking original. This spacecraft also carried another instrument, a laser ranging device, which gradually built up an extremely detailed quantitative topographic map of Mars that did not depend on lighting angles. With these data, it was possible to reconstruct exactly how the mesa would look from any direction. Many details of this story are recounted in the article “Unmasking the Face on Mars”.

Additional images with even higher resolution were obtained in 2007 by the University of Arizona HiRISE camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. With a resolution of 25 cm, these photos showed features as small as a briefcase. Such data eventually convinced almost everyone that the face was simply a mesa surrounded by an apron of eroded debris. NASA’s chief Mars scientist, Jim Garvin, even jokingly plotted a hiking trail that ascended the rugged hill. However, as the true nature of this eroded mesa became undeniable, the suggestion was made that the face had been intentionally destroyed by NASA: the clandestine mission of Mars Observer had been to first photograph the feature in detail, then deface it with a well-aimed nuclear missile.

Meanwhile, Richard Hoagland was moving on and generating new claims, some even more bizarre than those associated with the face. The Wikipedia article on Hoagland mentions his assertions that “Rocks on Mars containing biological fossils were purposely destroyed by NASA’s rover Opportunity. Numerous objects surrounding the landing sites of the Mars Exploration Rovers are in fact pieces of martian machinery. There are large semitransparent structures constructed of glass on the lunar surface, visible in some Apollo photography. There is a clandestine space program, using antigravity technology reverse-engineered from lunar artifacts and communicated by secret societies. Federal agencies such as FEMA and NASA are linked to Freemasonry.”

Hoagland held a press conference at the National Press Club on October 30, 2007, to “review NASA’s 50 years of cover-ups and hidden solar system data.” His accusations against NASA appeared in more detail in his book with Mike Bara, Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. He was also by then in his crop circle phase, promoting new sources of energy revealed to him in the crop circles. And he is still a regular guest on Coast to Coast AM, where he has the title of science advisor.

Humans have a natural tendency to see anthropomorphic features in natural shapes such as clouds and mountains. As thousands of new photos of the martian surface were streaming back from the rovers, some of these tendencies were bound to pop up. One of the funniest is an image of a tiny eroded rock only a few centimeters long that looks rather like the famous “little mermaid” statue in Copenhagen Harbor. This too has been hailed as a real photo of a Martian. The continuing torrent of spacecraft images from current missions to Saturn and Mercury as well as Mars will probably generate new advocates for aliens in space. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are happy to accept these images as wonderful products of our space age exploration of the solar system and not as a new episode in the great alien cover-up.

An important advance in national test-range instrumentation was made in the fall of 1964 at the California Air Force Western Test Range (WTR).

An experimental, state-of-the-art, video-equipped telescope was transported from the Range Measurement Laboratory, located at the Eastern Test Range in Florida, to a California coastal mountain ridge near Big Sur. The objective was to evaluate the ability of this instrument to enhance the analysis of flight anomalies and failures during ICBM testing from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Unprecedented views of intercontinental ballistic missiles in flight were obtained, and one of the launches revealed a flaw in design that was deemed quite important at that time. Eleven launches were viewed over the month of September, and the telescope and its crew returned to Florida in October.

As the project initiator and engineer, I had worked for months to gain the required clearances, arrange the myriad support mechanics, and assemble a crew. The Range Measurements Laboratory was headed by Walter Manning, an unforgettable character with remarkable energy and enthusiasm. The Air Force assigned Lieutenant Bob Jacobs from the WTR 1369th Photo Squadron as the telescope site commander for logistical and security matters. A bright and eager officer, he was a key contributor to the ultimate success of the project. Decades later, he concocted a story that we had filmed an alien UFO that circled an ICBM in flight, altering the missile’s course with an energy beam. He asserted that the project became a cloaked intelligence effort to hide proof of scientifically advanced space aliens. This preposterous fabrication was founded on a lack of understanding mingled with distant recollections—and perhaps some tongue-in-cheekiness by Bob Jacobs—who left the Air Force for a college teaching career in, oddly enough, journalism and broadcasting.

Jacobs’s first pronouncement was in the National Enquirer in 1982, and a more comprehensive version was published later (Jacobs 1989). The incident he described became known as the Big Sur UFO. A friend gave me the article after finding my name mentioned in it. I later submitted an unsolicited rebuttal to the Skeptical Inquirer (George 1993).

The Jacobs article correctly states the basic facts of the deployment. The telescope, called the BU Scope for short, had been assembled by Boston University for the Eastern Test Range. A modified 90 mm military gun mount is the cradle for a twenty-four-inch primary telescope mirror and a 240-inch basic focal length. An image orthicon television camera was the sensor, and the thirty-frame-per-second 875-line interlaced output was displayed on a kinescope in an accompanying van for recording by a 35 mm motion-picture camera. The site was close to Anderson Peak in the Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur at an altitude of 3,400 feet, approximately 110 miles to the north-northwest of Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch that Bob Jacobs makes the centerpiece of his story was an Atlas missile nicknamed Buzzing Bee, released just before dawn on September 22. Conditions were ideal for the light-sensitive image orthicon to capture the best shots. My report in October 1964 (George 1964), the only contemporary written material on Buzzing Bee still in existence, indicates that it was tracked for about 400 seconds. At the end of the image-tracking the Atlas missile was roughly 3,000 miles away from our location.

Jacobs made six assertions near the end of his 1989 article. My 1993 rebuttal in SI concentrated on these items by countering with what we had actually captured on film that day. In a nutshell, the Atlas launch to the Kwajalein atoll included deployment of two decoy reentry vehicles (RVs) intended to confuse enemy defensive radars. Our photography showed that the decoys did not deploy properly after the main propulsion phase ended and were surrounded by pieces of Styrofoam packing from their launch tubes. Thus, the “real” warhead, released before the decoys and without the packing, stuck out like a sore thumb. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarter analysts subsequently recognized this as a shortcoming of a major weapons system and classified the film as top secret. Film footage seen up to the time of this new classification was the origin of Jacobs’s fantasy, as his security level was not high enough to handle the film or talk about it after re-classification. Nor was mine, at that time, but my clearance level was increased very soon thereafter.

The Air Force pressed on with projects to place a permanent telescope at Anderson Peak and equip it with our own image orthicon device. We also placed a telescope on Santa Ynez Peak to the east of Vandenberg AFB. Both sites were upgraded through the following decades. The image orthicon, difficult to adjust and “tune” in the field, was replaced with image-enhancement devices, auto tracking was developed, and many other improvements made. Use of the two sites allowed mapping of deployment events and reconstruction of three-dimensional depictions. The exercise of 1964, owing to Buzzing Bee, was a huge success that significantly enhanced the ICBM development programs.

The Resurrection of the Alien Myth

After my 1993 SI article, the more skeptical UFO aficionados took Big Sur off of their lists. But the Big Sur UFO story resurfaced on the Internet, implausible as Jacobs’s tale was. I received a complimentary copy recently of International UFO Reporter magazine (Hastings 2007) with a fourteen-page cover story by Robert Hastings on the same subject. Hastings apparently has no personal connection to the original project but has carefully reviewed what is known and Jacobs’s postulates and added some fantasies and idle thoughts of his own. His lengthy write-up is sprinkled with numerous snide comments about Skeptical Inquirer, its staff, and members of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and in passing calls my earlier effort in SI “. . . a dismissive but factually inaccurate summary of [the incident]. . . .” The Hastings rehash contains a host of minor issues that are not worthy of rebuke, but there are three major items that need to be addressed.

The Image Orthicon (IO) and Optical System

The first item in the Hastings article is a brief Physics 101 analysis of optics by Mark Rodeghier, one of the editors of the International UFO Reporter. Rodeghier concludes that his analysis “. . . thus generally supports the observations and testimony of Jacobs and Mansmann.” There are a number of serious objections to that conclusion.

The IO was a very significant invention, especially useful in the early days of television because of its high sensitivity. It was called an “Immy” in the TV industry, corrupted into the term “Emmy” for the TV awards. It has a series of electron-multiplier stages to boost the output signal and can detect very dim stars to twelve or thirteen stellar magnitude—the naked eye sees sixth magnitude readily, but it has trouble at higher numbers. Brightness decreases by a factor of two-and-a-half as the numbers progress.

A series of images from an Atlas Launch.

My 1964 report states that the BU Scope was set to 720 inches, indicating that a 33 Barlow magnifier was used to increase image size. The magnifier degrades the image intensity at the focal plane, so the sensitivity of the IO tube was “pushed” to compensate for this, with a consequent lowering of the dynamic range and resolution on the display kinescope.

The IO controls were set to a level just below the point of electron avalanche to prevent image or monitor screen “white-out.” A very bright object causes a dip in the sensitivity of the photon detection layer—called blooming—which lasts for several frames. A tadpole effect is seen as the image moves across the screen, leaving a slowly shrinking and vanishing tail. In daylight, with the IO sensitivity in a normal range, we would see a tiny image of the missile tankage prior to burnout, even for a vehicle three or four hundred miles away. However, the background of a brightly daylit sky after engine shutdown was always too much for the small spotting telescopes used by the manual trackers, and tracking would halt.

When explosive events occur, such as reentry vehicle shroud-cover removal and RV separation, a fast-expanding, gassy exhaust cloud is seen, lasting only a very few film frames in the vacuum of space. It can be identified by printing enlargements of individual frames. Stars whiz through the projected film with regularity, the brighter ones with arcing tadpole tails—the apparent star motion, of course, is present because the telescope was being trained manually on the fast-moving target, modified by slight jerky errors of the azimuth and elevation wheel operators.

The Atlas vehicle, with payload shroud, is about ten feet in diameter and one hundred feet in length. At engine shut down, the vehicle is between 500 and 1,000 miles in altitude. The distance to the telescope at shut-down would have been at least 500 slant miles, growing to 2,000 miles or more at film run-out. The tank image length on the face of the IO tube (seven or eight arc-seconds) would be roughly twenty-seven thousandths of an inch at first, or perhaps twenty-four scan lines, diminishing to around two thousandths, or a single scan line, by the end of the viewing. The IO bloom from the big Atlas tank caused the largest white spot on the film but no “shape.” Other much smaller objects provided smaller spots—less blooming effect—so we could eventually infer which spots belonged to known objects. The big main tank reflecting sunlight was all that could be detected through the spotting telescopes used by the azimuth/elevation trackers but was bright enough for them to maintain track until film run-out.

With a deep bow to the fabulous sequential-scanning color HDTV systems of today, our primitive IO set-up of 1964 would not have produced something with a distinct shape. The film was a collection of energetic blobs in black-and-white that only made sense when the launch exercise was understood in detail. It was a matter of weeks of analysis before we finally unscrambled the meaning of what we had filmed and confirmed the SAC analysis. The Rodeghier analysis in Hastings’s article is simply irrelevant given the low-grade optical capability of the 1964 BU system and its very poor resolution on film.

Energy Beams in Space

The second issue involves Star Trek devices. Perhaps readers are familiar with the roar of the Starship Enterprise passing through space and the brightly visible laser beams traded with Klingon cruisers. The vacuum of space does not permit sound travel or colorful side-visible rays of any kind. In his MUFON exposition, Jacobs suggests “energy beams” of some sort, but the type doesn’t matter. Dust particles, ionized particles, or sustained gas clouds are required to detect a focused laser or energy beam, such as when a mist is displayed to identify lasers in a jewelry heist movie. What one might see if a laser was used in space would be a hot spot or meltdown of the outer skin of a target. Could the white spot turn even whiter? No, the BU Scope would not permit that kind of detail to be observed.

Hastings mentioned the northern lights as a type of light caused in the upper atmosphere by sun-generated particle streams. A relatively rare phenomenon at our latitude, the aurora borealis involves a huge number of sparse particle streams spread over a vast space above the arctic sky.

What Launch Did Jacobs Describe?

Jacobs’s account indicates a launch “that may have occurred on September 2, 3, or the 15th with an Atlas type F or D.” Film was exposed on nine launches in total, missing two due to weather or mechanical problems. The Vandenberg AFB launch summary from the 30 Space Wing Office of History indicates eleven launches took place during the month of September in 1964. Two of these were space launches toward the south from Vandenberg on September 14 and 23 and were of marginal interest to us at the time. Seven were Minuteman ICBMs on September 1, 8, 10, 15, 21, 23, and 29. The other two occurred on September 15 and September 22, an Atlas D nicknamed Butterfly Net and an Atlas D nicknamed Buzzing Bee. Buzzing Bee carried a simulated reentry vehicle warhead and decoys, duplicating the packages on the active (on-alert) Atlas F weapon system, and Butterfly Net carried an advanced reentry vehicle for study via terminal area radars.

Butterfly Net was launched in the morning, long after sunrise, with a bright sky behind it. The image orthicon would have been adjusted for daylight. The manual trackers were handicapped after engine shut-down, when the vapor trail of engine fuel was depleted some 240 seconds after lift-off. Their inferior spotting telescopes would not permit direct viewing for more than a few seconds. It was disappointing, as we were half-way through the project and had not yet scored as I had hoped. Could the crew have filmed something and kept it hidden from my knowledge? Not possible—I was totally “on top” of every inch of film exposed that whole month, and I was likely on site for the launch, although I was not on site for every one of them.

Buzzing Bee was launched more than a half hour before sunrise at Anderson Peak. The ICBM broke into sunlight well after lift-off, while the background sky was still dark and many stars were still visible. The site was in complete darkness. Our “score” had come at last. Without a shadow of doubt, what we had captured, and what had excited Jacobs as well as many others, was Buzzing Bee. The launch dates, nicknames, and times are all easily verified by simple Internet searches.

One More Quandary: What about Mansmann?

Both Jacobs and Hastings mention SAC Major Florenz Mansmann Jr., who was the photographic support coordinator for the First Strategic Aerospace Division at Vandenberg AFB. I have reviewed post-retirement letters purported to be from Mansmann, and they indicate that he agrees, in general, with Jacobs’s conjectures. He passed away, according to Hastings, in 2003.

Mansmann would have determined the photo requirements for every launch and issued directives to the 1369th Photo Squadron. The launch personnel were busy in those days, as more than one hundred test launches were taking place yearly in the early 1960s. I made more runs to the Squadron lab over the next decade than I could count, so my memory does not let me pick out particulars during that September. Owing to his substantial workload, Mansmann was only marginally interested in the Big Sur site and the purpose of the project. He visited the Anderson site only once that I can recall, in early September.

On September 22, about twenty films would have been processed, including those from the pad cameras and all the local tracking cameras. Within a few days, reduced 16 mm copies would be made and sent to a variety of analyst offices, including the SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. It was weeks before we heard anything about the sensitivity of our IO film. The preliminary report I wrote does not go into any detail of the launch, but the fact that I published it on or about October 13 (the date stamped on the title page) indicates that at least two weeks had passed without any clamp-down from SAC headquarters. Otherwise, I could never have mentioned it or even hinted at some sort of anomaly. Jacobs is totally wrong to suggest that the “men in black” appeared the day after the launch at a special showing.

Why would Major Mansmann agree with Jacobs? It is doubtful that in 1964 he had more than a small inkling of what the Buzzing Bee films showed—and even less interest many years later. Would he have supported his former “comrade in arms” after he was long retired and short on memory of those busy times? And might it have even been amusing to him? I remember Mansmann for his great sense of humor and friendly nature.

Conclusion

The only reason the film became top secret is because it revealed a weakness in the Atlas weapon system, which was our only on-alert ICBM at the time. All the original films of all launches would have been destroyed or recycled decades ago, or else today we would need a Pentagon-sized warehouse just to hold all of them. A couple of years after the master copy had been stored in a vault used exclusively for top-secret storage, I was asked if it could be destroyed to conserve space, and of course I approved.

The Western Test Range was very pleased by the hugely successful project. A 16 mm, forty-five-minute publicity film of the project was assembled in Hollywood by the Lookout Mountain Photographic Squadron shortly after the project. I wrote the script for the film, which included footage of operations, including some of Buzzing Bee. There was a copy of this film in my office for several years, but in shifting jobs and office assignments, it eventually vanished. Portions of it were used in the Air Force Quarterly Film Report, likely the Winter or Spring issue of 1965.

The Western Test Range gained an extraordinary new capability from the Big Sur project. Jacobs’s conjectures may mystify and amuse many and even seem persuasive to those without an appropriate background. That, plus the fact that the physical evidence is long since gone, is likely why myths continue to surround and degrade the historical significance of the Big Sur adventure.

Note

1. Except for the 1964 report, several references can be readily found on the Internet by a Web search for “Big Sur UFO.” I have an original of the 1964 report and could provide an email copy on request.

References

• George, Kingston A. 1964. Preliminary report on image orthicon photography from Big Sur. Headquarters 1st Strategic Aerospace Division Operations Analysis Staff Study, October 13.
• —. 1993. The Big Sur ‘UFO’: An identified flying object. Skeptical Inquirer 17(2) (Winter).
• Hastings, Robert. 2007. Atlas rocket shot down by UFO in 1964? International UFO Reporter, 31(1) (January).
• Jacobs, Bob. 1989. Deliberate deception: The Big Sur UFO filming. MUFON UFO Journal 249 (January).

Indeed, upon more careful investigation, many so-called UFOs turn out to be perfectly natural objects or processes in the Earth’s atmosphere or beyond. As the late Carl Sagan emphasized, “Extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary proof.” Surely, the notion that some mysterious phenomenon you briefly observed in the sky must be an interstellar spacecraft (and not a human craft, meteor, or a bright planet) qualifies as such an “extra-ordinary” hypothesis! Yet, amazingly, given the number of UFO incidents believers report, not one UFO has left behind any proof—a piece of spacecraft material or machinery (or even a sandwich wrapper) that laboratory analysis has shown to be of clearly extraterrestrial origin.

It’s also remarkable how unlucky the UFO occupants are in their choice of people to kidnap. Never do “aliens” seem to snatch a person with a good knowledge of astronomy or physics or someone with high-level government clearance. Time after time, their “victims” turn out to be homemakers, agricultural workers, or others whose relevant knowledge base seems to be limited to reading UFO enthusiast literature.

Even UFO sightings turn out to be reserved (for the most part) for those who have not studied the sky in any serious way. Although the world’s supply of professional astronomers is not much larger than the population of Wasilla, Alaska, the world has many tens of thousands of active amateur astronomerss who spend a great deal of time observing the sky. You would think that if UFOs really are alien spacecraft, a large majority of reported sightings would come from this group. Yet, unsurprising to astronomers, you almost never get UFO reports from experienced amateurs whose understanding of what they see in the sky is much more sophisticated than that of the average person.

All of which does not mean that astronomers in general are pessimistic about the presence of intelligent life on planets around other stars. Indeed, many observations over the last few decades have increased the level of optimism in the astronomical community about the potential for life to exist out there. Primary among these is the discovery of more than 300 planets around relatively nearby stars, which certainly shows that planetary systems like our own may be far more common than we dared to hope. We just don’t think that intelligent aliens are necessarily visiting Earth.

The problem is that the stars are fantastically far away. If our Sun was the size of a basketball (instead of 864,000 miles across), Earth would be a small apple seed about thirty yards away from the ball. On that scale, the nearest star would be some 4,200 miles (7,000 km) away, and all the other stars would be even farther! This is why astronomers are skeptical that aliens are coming here, briefly picking up a random individual or two, and then going back home. It seems like an awfully small reward for such an enormous travel investment.