Thursday, September 29, 2011

UFOs: The Science Fiction Effect


Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While perusing The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Illustrated) edited by Peter Nicholls [Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1979] I was struck by how many SciFi images matched or were similar to what some notorious UFO sightings proclaimed.

More importantly, the images all antedate the sightings that have become folkloric in the UFO canon.

Witnesses of the airship phenomenon of the late 1890s and early 1900s might have been influenced by illustrations for various publications such as these:

airship1.jpg

airship-2.jpg

Maybe George Adamski got the idea for his allegedly concocted flying saucer and photographs of same from something like this:

ad29.jpg

Betty Hill was remembering her contact from magazines and images like this:

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gray-2.jpg
Detail from clipping (above)

And Barney Hill’s recollection of what he saw came from this magazine, spotted on a newsstand perhaps:

sciships29.jpg

Or maybe it was one (or both) of these clips:

glassship.jpg

pod29.jpg

(One might even posit that Reverend Gill’s sighting in New Guinea was predicated on a remembered picture he once saw, particularly like the first of the three above.)

And have those who’ve seen little men next to or inside craft gotten their "sighting" from a classic Superman segment airing on TV in 1951?

superman29.jpg

Those who’ve described flying saucers and UFOs must surely have been influenced by clips such as these or movies of the 1950s which emulated the “saucer” seen here:

fs29.jpg

And persons halted by entities shooting them with a ray gun could assuredly been interposing, by culling from their memory, such images as this:

raygun29.jpg

And abductees got some of their ideas from portrayals such as this one:

sleep29.jpg

Recently, UFO spotters have been indicating they’ve seen triangular craft in the skies above them, such as this:

triangles29.jpg

Now either UFO witnesses are regurgitating images purloined from their memory, or UFOs and flying saucers have adopted the constructs imagined by SciFi writers and editors.

Which is it I ask?

RR

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Howard Hughes: Socorro (and Roswell?)


Howard Hughes’ Tool Company and Hughes Aircraft were employed by the U.S. military to devise various space craft and satellite equipment, including lunar landing modules in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.

Both Hughes’ constructs were CIA connected and some Hughes’ operations were CIA fronts: Maheu & Associates were a CIA front in the Hughes empire. (See Age of Secrets: The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett, 1995.)

Hughes and Raven Industries (a CIA front) worked on LEMs and tested them in the southwestern deserts of The United States in the 1960s (footnoted at the RRRGroup blog)

Howard Hughes also worked with Soviet agencies and engineering counterparts, with CIA approval, to acquire technical information about the Russian advances in space materials, especially lunar landers.

Here are three prototypical drawings of what Hughes Aircraft/Toolco derived from those internecine contacts with the Soviets.

lem1.jpg

lem2.jpg

lem3.jpg

(Note the similarity to the Socorro craft – image 1 and 2 -- spotted by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, 1964, and the propulsive thrusters in image 3; Zamora’s rocket blast!)

Howard Hughes was for atomic disarmament, and struggled with the AEC to thwart atomic explosions in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. He was generally rebuffed. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

Hughes also was enamored of pychics and connected with Peter Hurkos on various occasions, ostensibly about the insinuations of George Adamski, who imparted dire warnings that supposedly came from Venusian visitors about atomic testings. (Ibid, Age of Secrets et al.)

(We have also stumbled across indications of a secret Hughes Aircraft test for the Navy in 1947 that might account for the Roswell incident and debris. More on this upcoming.)

Hughes’ operations were also employed by the United States Navy. Late 1969: the CIA wanted to use the Hughes Tool Company as a front to build a high-tech "The Hughes Glomar Explorer" vessel to salvage sunken submarines. "The Jennifer Project" was to retrieve a sunken Soviet sub 750 miles northwest of Hawaii…but Hughes pulled out of the plan. (Ibid, Age of Secrets)

That UFO buffs and investigators have overlooked the Hughes connection to U.S. military testings of prototypical space vehicles, one of which we contend is what Lonnie Zamora saw in Socorro in April 1964, goes to the heart of the lacunae in “ufological” research, especially when such research tends to reference prosaic explanations for some esoteric UFO incidents, Roswell, Socorro, Shag Harbor among them.

RRR/JS/RR

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Adamski's Flying Saucer and Heflin's UFO

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The November/December 1976 Beyond Reality (Special UFO Report) magazine had a Guest Editorial by Brad Steiger (on Page 4), in which another “identification” for George Adamski’s iconic flying saucer is provided:

ad1a.jpg

To read the Editorial clearly, which says Adamski’s flying saucer photo was of a bottle cooler lid, click HERE.

The other “identifications” include a chicken brooder, a humidor, and a Christmas ornament.

How or why, then, did some UFO spotters see UFOs that look like Adamski’s flying saucer:

ad2a.jpg
Drawing by Spanish witness, 1977 [Beyond Reality UFO Update, Fall 1978, Page 13]

ad3ajpg
Muhammed Ali’s drawing of what he saw in 1972 [Beyond Reality, March/April 1978, Page 34]

And the same thing happened with Rex Heflin’s alleged UFO:

heflin1a.jpg

Warren Martin drew a craft that he and four friends saw:

heflin2a.jpg
Beyond Reality UFO Update [Ibid, Page 34]

Both Adamski’s photos of flying saucers and Heflin’s photos of a UFO are said to be fakes, Heflin’s photos less so than Adamski’s arguably.

Nonetheless, if such photos are, indeed, fakes, why do some credible UFO sighters see or draw objects (or craft, if you will) “things” that smack of faked UFO photos?

RR

Thursday, September 22, 2011

The U.S. Air Force: Adamski/Heflin photos are fake!

Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine [February 1969, Issue 62] has some interesting copies of correspondence tied to Palmer’s “editorial” about William D. Clendenon’s attempt to interest the Air Force and Hughes Aircraft in his flying saucer prototype, which he, Clendenon, hoped to patent also.

Those thrusts by Clendenon led to missives from the Air Force to members of The United States Congress, in which Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer photograph is mentioned along with the photographs of Rex Heflin.

Click HERE to see the Adamski reference.

And click HERE to see the Adamski and Heflin references. (Another click HERE provides the signatory of this letter.)

Also, as I implicate Hughes Aircraft in the Zamora/Socorro sighting of 1964, I’m including two missives from Palmer’s publication [Ibid] that indicate Hughes Aircraft was not immune from the flying saucer phenomenon, in practical, constructive ways:

HUGHES-1

HUGHES-2

(Note that, in the Heflin letter to Congressman Meeds, the Air Force writes that it never had possession of Adamski’s photograph nor Rex Heflin’s, which may be disputative to some Heflin supporters.)

RR

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

How the Trent/McMinnville photos were created?

This photo from The NEW Report on Flying Saucers magazine [True/Fawcett, NY, 1967] appears on Page 27 in a Lloyd Mallan article entitled “There’s More (and less) to Saucers than Meets the Eye.”

The saucer depicted consists of two paper plates glued together by Gary Buboltz, hung on a clothesline with a thin thread and photographed from fifteen (15) feet.

The photo may be found in the Project Blue Book files.


Here is the uncropped photo:

fake20.jpg
Ibid: Back Cover

It shows, as Mr. Mallan points out, how easy it is or was to fake flying saucer photos.

J. Allen Hynek authenticated this photo from 1967:

jaroslav.jpg

The saucer shown was a balsa-wood model, created and filmed by the Jaroslaw brothers of Michigan who hung it, by a thread, from a tree at the edge of Lake St. Clair:

jaroslav20.jpg
Ibid: Page 31

The idea that the Trents may have strung a truck mirror from overhead wires rankles even me. The iconic photos have their supporters and defenders, such as Bruce Maccabee, and also their critics, such as Robert Sheaffer and deceased skeptic Phil Klass.

What allows me to accept the possibility [sic] of a Trent hoax is the time factors involved in the episode: the sighting by Mrs. Trent, the calling of her husband, his trip inside the house to get their camera, and the time to take two shots before the object departed.

Moreover, the object doesn’t move far enough in the sky if Bruce Maccabee’s estimate of the time between photo one and photo two taken by Mr. Trent is correct: 31 seconds.

(See a previous post here for copies of the Trent photos.)

Photos can offer proof or disproof of UFOs, as the Mallan article delineates, among other critiques of UFO photography; the advent of computer programs that can create or manipulate images exacerbates the problem of hoaxed UFO photos.

The Buboltz photo, above, emulates the Trent photos. Does it remove the “authentic” rubric given to the Trent pictures? You decide.

RR

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Egregious actions and blunders?

UFO Report magazine [August 1976] had an interview with J. Allen Hynek by Timothy Green Beckley [Page 18 ff]. This clip is from Page 20:

hynek1a.jpg

Hynek’s “marsh gas” or “swamp gas” explanation was for the Ann Arbor/Dexter/Hillsdale sightings in March of 1966, not April 1967.

This kind of inattention to detail is what has undermined Hynek by any serious UFO investigator or maven.

Adrian Vance provided an article for that same UFO Report magazine [August 1976, Page 36 ff]: Vanishing UFOs: A Dimensional Dilemma.

In Vance’s piece he related that Edward U Condon destroyed all the Colorado Projects UFO materials right before his death.

condon18.jpg

And in a following paragraph, Mr. Vance tells how Hynek mislaid some UFO photos and negatives that he (Hynek) took of a UFO himself.

hynek18.jpg

Click HERE to see that portion of Mr. Vance’s article.

Can anyone substantiate the Condon and/or Hynek actions?

If either actually happened, it represents behavior that is egregiously unscientific and sickening, as Mr. Vance indicates.

Condon was a security risk, who should not have had access to any materials from the Air Force or any other government agency. We went after Condon’s security status right before he was handed the Colorado Project and you can read about our efforts here in a very early posting – the second one in the archive:

Condon's Security Woes

Hynek was just scatter-brained.

Is this any way to do science?

Is this why the UFO phenomenon is a joke?

Are UFO hobbyists investing their productive lives in a topic that is so befouled by past and present stupidities that they (the hobbyists) can be maligned for wasting their lives?

I ask you…

RR

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Merlin, Arthur, UFOs, and Mac Tonnies

merlin15.jpg

A letter to the Editor of UFO Report magazine [Summer 1975, Messages, Page 6] from a David A. Krouse of Wallingford. Pennsylvania refers to the ancient British work, The Brut, an account of English history from antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Mr. Krouse wrote that the text contains a segment for the period 900 A.D. which tells that a small boat, piloted by two women, dressed in strange garments, rose out of the sea, to take Arthur, the King, to Avalon.

Here’s the actual Brut account:

brut15.jpg

Mr. Krouse didn’t remember the story exactly as it exists in The Brut.

But his note spurred me to look into the Arthurian legend, again.

That much of the legend is immersed in, near, or within water, Arthur’s story took me to Ivan Sanderson’s thesis that UFOs may derive from bases in and under the oceans of the world, which brings me to Mac Tonnies conjecture, in Cryptoterrestrials, that a concomitant civilization to our obvious civilization has thrived for millennia and may account for UFO sightings over the years.

mac15.jpg

Mac’s hypothesis leaves much to be desired, but along with Sanderson’s ideas and legends such as that of Arthur the King, and the fish-god Oannes who came from the sea to enhance early Babylonians, one has to consider the possibility that UFOs may come from underwater bases or a civilization evolved within the waters of the Earth.

fish-god15.jpg

What’s interesting to me, however, is that abduction tales never have anyone taken down into waters but, rather, up into the sky.

If UFOs do come from the seas – a big IF I grant you – one would think that the beings who are allegedly abducting people would take them downward, into the watery depths instead of upwards, into the heavens.

After all Jesus ascended into the sky; he didn’t sink into the Sea of Galilee when he departed this Earthly realm.

And Mohammed went up, not down.

Nonetheless, the fact that water makes up 70% of the surface of the Earth, as Anthony Bragalia reminded me recently, the idea of an underwater world of aliens is not out of the running to explain the source of UFOs.

Yet, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders of the Sky, which contains a raft of strange UFO or UFO-like sightings, isn’t entitled Wonders of the Sea.

wonders15.jpg

So, either scrutiny of the Tonnies’ crypto-world or Sanderson’s little-talked-about underwater UFO hypothesis has been remiss or there is no real cause to pursue the underwater explanation for UFOs.

But can we readily dismiss the legends that Gods and Kings came from beneath the seas so easily also?

(One aside: I know that most visitors here, maybe all, have not bought or read the Vallee/Aubeck book, or Nick Redfern’s Contactees book, and many other books referred to here, and elsewhere. That dearth of reading or effort is distressful, for it indicates a slovenly approach to the topic of UFOs and attendant ideas. To continue to ramble on and on here without a connected base of well-read individuals is a futile effort, as Paul Kimball has seen it and we, here, are starting to see also. While Wonders in the Sky is disappointing – it lacks evaluation of the sightings listed – it is an invaluable source for those who truly wish to know what UFOs are or may have been, just as legends such as that of Arthur allow hints to supplement conjecture, about UFOs and related matters.)

RR

Monday, September 12, 2011

The Carlos Alberto Diaz abduction, not unlike the Antonio Villas Boas episode


Joseph Brill wrote, in Official UFO magazine [February, 1976, Page 12 ff.] about an alleged “abduction” of an Argentine man, 28 year-old Carlos Alberto Diaz, in 1975.

The picture above is a sketch, from the magazine, depicting what Senor Diaz experienced.

He was “absorbed” by a descending light [UFO?] in which he was succumbed by three entities of human form but stumps rather than arms, and faces without mouths, noses, or ears and greenish-tinted skin.

He was unceremoniously deposited in a vacant field about 200 miles from the spot where he first encountered the light. The time of his “capture” was 3:50 a.m., according to his stopped watch. When he was found, during mid-day following, he had a newspaper with him that he bought in his Naposta neighborhood of Bahia Blanca, which lies southwest of Buenos Aires by the 200 miles noted. That newspaper provided credibility for his story, Brill writes.

naposta.jpg

During his stint in a hospital, it was noticed that hair on his head and chest had been cut or taken (not by shears). He suffered no ill after-effects.

The Villas Boas case is one said to be instigated by a CIA/military psy-operation, according to DoD/CIA operative Bosco Nedelcovic, who told me the story in the late 1970s.

boas.jpg

Nick Redfern covers the account in his book Contactees [Chapter 20].

Nedelcovic presented a scenario that’s hard to accept by some but readily accepted by those who’ve studied the machinations of the CIA and military, the so-called psychological operations.

Villas Boas was, Nedelcovic said, collected by a special unit whose purpose was to create simulated alien contact. The unit operated in South America, with the help of A.I.D. and also in Great Britain, where Nedelcovic said they were part of the infamous Scoriton contact with a man named Bryant.

My point is that the Diaz event mimics the Boas incident, but almost twenty years later.

Was Nedelcovic privy to such simulated events. It seems so. (The UFO UpDates archives has more on Nedelcovic, involving the CIA and child-nappings with a perverse sexual element.)

However, Vallee’s and Aubeck’s Wonders in the Sky is replete – and I mean replete – with similar abduction-like events: Listings 48, 108, 116, 163, 171, 233, 337, and many more.

The CIA wasn’t around then to perform such “tricks” nor were there other groups able to create, so imaginatively, such bizarre stagings.

So, was Boas really part of a CIA experiment, and Diaz too? Did both men suffer similar psychotic-induced hallucinations? Or were both men taken by entities unknown, ETs or otherwise?

Can we ever know?

RR

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Why do most UFO buffs concentrate on the older sightings?

ezekiel10.jpg

The early flying saucer and UFO sightings were more exotic than those of today.

Today’s sightings are generally of amorphous lights, abstract triangles, and benign fly-overs.

The earlier sightings often involved landings, with entities, electromagnetic disruptions of car motors or house lights and electricity, and interactions of various kinds, including alleged abductions of sighters.

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Also, earlier sightings were free of modern accretions: cynical skepticism, fakery and embellishment for fame, or psychosomatic stress, and media waywardness.

Yes, some contactees, Adamski, the worst of the bunch when it came to fame-seeking, and a slew of teen-agers or wannabes and never-were corrupted the study of flying saucers and UFOs but they were meticulous, pretty much, in their follies.

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Today, the fakery and search for fame is cavalier, often slovenly, dismissive even, just a lark for a few minutes of attention.

And UFOs seem to perceive that human dismissiveness, appearing nonchalantly as a phenomenon nowadays, whereas back in the day(s), UFOs or flying saucers really put on some shows.

Where are the Roswell-like events today, or a Socorro, or a Rendlesham, or a Hill experience, a Travis Walton episode, or a Pascagoula?

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There are none.

Just lights in the sky, orbs, or triangular craft.

No Flatwoods monsters. No Villas Boas examinations. No Aztec concoctions. Nothing sensational or exotic at all.

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That’s why UFO mavens keep harking back to the old-tales, the old sightings. Those sightings and UFO events had something.

RR

Saturday, September 3, 2011

UFOcus


An article in UFO Report, September 1978, by Alex Evans, about two young fellows in Maine [1975] who saw a UFO, were allegedly abducted, then visited by some so-called “men-in-black” got me to thinking about how shattered the topic and study of UFOs is.

I found Mr. Evans’ piece to be very interesting, for several reasons, so I Googled the names and found a MUFON link to Bob Pratt’s web-site – Mr, Pratt died in 2005 – that has a rather thorough, bizarre, account of the Maine episode.

Click here to access the Pratt rendering

The young men, David Stephens and Glen Gray, should be contacted now to see what they can add to their totally intriguing experience.

They were inside a ship, saw alien beings, and had a total abduction experience, plus their initial UFO sighting, supplemented by a visit from strange people, that have received the sobriquet “men in black” by UFO investigators.

The problem is that there are several conjoined UFO events here, or several disparate UFO events, depending upon one’s perspective.

First there is the UFO, then there is an “abduction,” followed by a description of the inside of a UFO and the entities responsible for the UFO. Afterward, the young men and their families were ‘assaulted” by strange phenomena, as was a doctor who regressed the two fellows at the behest of UFO investigators, Shirley Fickett and Brent Raynes.

This UFO event encompasses almost everything that a UFO researcher might like to get his or her hands on: a seemingly credible account of a UFO sighting, an “abduction” (with a medical examination by alien beings using telepathic communications), and visits by men/people in black.

But what was done? Where’s the denouement?

The episode requires specialization. Someone versed in UFOs, someone versed in the abduction phenomenon, and someone versed in men-in-black accounts.

But there is more. Someone versed in psychiatric hallucinations and/or hysteria is a must, just in case the event is an hallucinosis.

Alex Evans records that Stephens, while inside the alien ship, describing a “mushroom man” (or alien), punched the “entity” (who had, large, slanted, unblinking eyes, no visible mouth, small, round nose, webbed fingers and was dressed in a flowing black robe), with no repercussion(s), accepted the futility of his situation, and laid down, letting the creatures remove his clothing (for a medical examination).

mushman.jpg

(This variegated incident is the possible psychiatric component.)

I know of no UFO researcher or investigator who has the credentials or cachet to delve into the various facets of such a UFO account as this one, which is not atypical of many UFO events.

MUFON is collecting data, the Examiner is reporting sightings (with no evaluations) and UFO buffs are arguing about minutiae that has nothing to do with UFOs, per se.

(See the current discussion about Phil Klass at Kevin Randle’s blog or the UFO UpDate brouhaha about Jeff Rense’s anti-semitism for examples of “ufology” gone astray.)

A sincere study of UFOs, as they appear today, needs focus, not abstracted, discursive dialogue about peripheral elements that besmudge or side-track the search for what UFOs are (or were) and what their relevance is for humanity, if there is any relevance.

Everything else is entertainment, and not good entertainment either….

RR

Friday, September 2, 2011

Freudian or Jungian UFOs?


Matthew J. Graeber’s “article” from Magonia 52, May 1995 about UFO mother-ships or airships posits the idea that the cylindrical ships spotted since early times right up into the modern era may have a sexual psychical component.

You can access Mr. Graeber’s thesis by clicking HERE

As readers here know, or should, we do not think UFOs are psychical projections or quantum creations, although we have conjectured that quantum mechanics seem to have a bearing on the ‘tangible” objects we designate as “flying saucers” and quantum theory may help explain UFOs, as they appear today.

(Triangular UFO craft, for us, are military prototypes, and don’t factor into our conjectural observations here and elsewhere.)

As for Mr. Graeber’s sexual symbolism for airships, the idea is not anathema to us, but it is a psychological stretch, just as Carl Jung’s hypothesis was in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978].

jungsaucers2.jpg

And even though the current thrust in many UFO circles is toward the concept that UFOs are projections of the human psyche or mental impressions coming into the minds of select individuals (from extraterrestrials supposedly), for purposes as yet unknown, we think that persons who imagine UFOs or see them mentally when they don’t exist in any tangible, real form are in need therapy of a serious psychological kind.

However Mr. Graeber would disagree:

Although we might expect to make little headway towards resolving today’s UFO enigma by comparing it to past mysteries, we may, nevertheless, examine both present and past UFO events as being comprised of optically perceived images or imagery that occasionally have an extraordinary effect upon the individual(s) who either observe or come into close proximity with them.

Mr. Graeber’s views are both Freudian and Jungian.

But if UFOs or mother-ships resonate as a sublimated sexual symbol with someone, as Mr. Graeber delinates in his piece, we think that that person should hie themselves off to a psychiatrist immediately. They have serious terrestrial problems.

Nonetheless, Mr. Graeber’s views should have a hearing or reading; they are pondered sensibly and unsensationally.

He closes with this:

Perhaps we have discovered enough about the mythical, sexual, and marked psychic background of the god-ships to determine that their origin is most likely the human unconscious, and not some alien planet situated at the edge of the cosmos. For it seems highly unlikely that a visiting alien intelligence would be so human-like as to possess similar intrapsychical processes regarding the development of their technology, their exploratory aspirations, and their myth-making tendencies.

Not a view we espouse necessarily, but a cogent suggestion by Mr. Graeber.

RR