SUBJECT: MUFON SYMPOSIUM ! FILE: UFO2555
The following is a report from the 1992 Mutual UFO Network
(MUFON) Symposium held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July
10-12, 1992.
This report is intended primarily for the use of members of
the NEWAGE, ISSUES and SPACE Forums of the CompuServe
Information Service, and is copyright (c) 1992 Joseph T.
Walters. This report may be distributed freely and without
restriction as long as this header is retained intact.
Thanks!
Joe Walters, CompuServe 76702,1007
Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 12, 1992
----------------------------------------------------
FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1992
Greetings from the MUFON Symposium!
It was raining here in the desert as the Symposium began.
This was the first night of the get-together, and there
weren't any real scheduled events (except for the $5.00
reception), but we got to see who all was around. Looked
like around 1000 or so people were gathered in the
Doubletree for the pre-symposium festivities, and the
promised ISSUES Forum table was set up in the lower part of
the lobby (by the waterfall, near the guitar player).
There were 10 or so members of ISSUES and NEWAGE around
there, and after some intros and conversation, five of us
adjourned to Baca's Restaurant for some New Mexican cuisine
and paranormal tabletalk.
A good time was had by all, and we returned to the hotel.
Joe Balsamo, David Brune and I retreated to David's room...
ah, SUITE... and had fun trying to tie in Joe's PowerBook to
the phone system. Finally got online, proving it can be
done, and that pretty much did it for the evening.
Expect some more detailed reports from us tomorrow, probably
late evening. The symposium has events scheduled from 9:00am
to around 10:00pm, with meal breaks.
Looks like this is going to be a real fun time! There are
numerous dignitaries here (Joe and David thought they might
have recognized Bob Lazar), and we'll have detailed info on
that as stories develop.
----------------------------------------------------
SATURDAY, JULY 11, 1992
Hello again from the MUFON Symposium in Albuquerque!
Much much much happened today, and I took notes. We'll see
how much of it I can cram into this Forum before it bursts.
I first went into the Dealers' Room and checked out the
goodies; this was just a cursory overview, and I'll go into
more detail later.
I again ran into Joe Balsamo and David Brune, who were
standing around Stanton Friedman's table awaiting
autographs. Lost sight of them shortly thereafter, and
didn't see them again until after lunch.
There were 14 sessions scheduled for today, ranging in
(scheduled) length from 30 minutes to 1 hour (I thought it
interesting that the session titled "Fifty-six Aircraft
Sightings Involving Electromagnetic Effects" was allocated
55 minutes).
They got off to a late start, due to long lines at the
registration tables. The 9:00am "Welcome" speech didn't
start until almost 9:30, and everyone ran long anyway...
After the welcome and intro, the first session started. This
was one of the best of the day, titled "The UFO Jigsaw," and
given by Linda Moulton Howe. Linda started with a quick
overview of UFO history, from the 1947 Roswell crash to more
recent sightings, various alien types, animal mutilations,
and crop circles. She had an entertaining and enlightening
slide show with some video mixed in. Many of the slides
consisted of drawings by witnesses, and illustrated the
surprising correlation between totally separate reports.
Other slides covered animal mutilation shots (including some
very recent ones) and other related material. She also
showed a short video of Bob Lazar, a video about crop
circles, and a real interesting video taken at the site of a
crop circle, at which a small white object was observed
apparently floating a few inches above the ground and moving
about slowly, approaching the camera and moving about.
Eerie!
This was a particularly interesting session to me, as I had
"heard" about much of this stuff on CompuServe, but had
never seen the videos presented.
The next session was the "Fifty-Six Aircraft Pilot
Sightings..." session, given by Dr. Richard F. Haines.
Though this contained some interesting data assembly, it was
DRY. I faded out a few times during this one. Lots of
reading of statistics and numbers. A few interesting graphs.
Basically, Dr. Haines had correlated and analyzed data from
several inflight UFO incidents, and found some interesting
characteristics. For instance, most of the incidents
occurred between 9:00 and 11:00pm (local) and shortly after
midnight. However, there was no pattern of aircraft type or
nationalities involved. Most such reports came from U.S.
Military aircraft and foreign commercial planes. U.S.
commercial planes, foreign military aircraft, and private
aircraft accounted for relatively few sightings. All but one
of the engine failure incidents were propeller/reciprocating
engine craft; only one jet aircraft reported such.
The next session started up, "The Role of the Mutual UFO
Network in UFO Research," given by MUFON International
Director Walter H. Andrus. This was almost entirely a slide
show depicting buildings and personnel of MUFON and a few
other UFO research groups. Mr. Andrus had some difficulty
with the slide projector controller, and almost every time
he tried to change to the next slide, he jumped ahead two
slides and had to back up one. This was mildly amusing at
first, but after a half hour and no improvement, it began to
resemble the Chinese Water Torture.
Mr. Andrus broke off halfway thru his presentation to allow
the lunch break on schedule.
I went foraging with ISSUES Forum members Jan Murdoch and
Terry Rodemerk; we found that most of the food
establishments around the Convention Center (which is in
Albuquerque's downtown area) were closed on weekends, but we
found a little sandwich & burger place that wasn't too bad.
After lunch, I went in to scope out the Dealer Room in more
detail. First impression: BOOKS. Lots of books. Literally
hundreds of titles, mostly UFO-based (natch). These and
other titles ranged from the serious to the absurd; topics
covered included Mu, Abominable Snowmen, Future Sex, Flying
Serpents and Dragons, Kohoutek (Really! Kohoutek!),
Nostradamus (but not Nostra-Dennis), Uri Geller and more and
more.
Besides the books were some other items, including cute
little stuffed Greys, bumper stickers ("MJ-12 Staff Car",
"This car stalls for UFOs", etc.), T-shirts (serious and
humorous; my favorites were the ones with the "cattle
crossing" sign, with UFOs or Greys depicted--another touted
"The University of Pleiades"), some jewelry (both Native
American silver-and-turquoise Albuquerque tourist stuff and
UFO-related; my fave here was a bolo tie with the head of a
Grey as the clasp), little UFO spinning tops, and several
MUFON items (mugs, license plate covers, bumper stickers,
etc.).
Back to the seminar room!
First, Mr. Andrus finished off his "faces & names" slide
show.
Next up was Mr. Montague Keen of Suffolk, England, to
enlighten us on what's up with crop circles. He was a
fascinating fellow, and gave an excellent presentation
filled with that famous dry British humor (or humour, I
guess I should say!). He described several theories floating
around trying to explain these things, but it was clear that
there is still no definitive explanation for them. He did
mention that they've started up again this year, and that
there have been more than 70 of these things that have
cropped up (sorry) in England alone since April. He brought
up the two guys who confessed to being the cause of all the
circles last year, and pointed out that the paper that
reported them in the first place basically retracted the
story the next day, but the international press somehow
missed that aspect of the story.
The next session was "Photo Analysis: A Pictorial Primer,"
given by Jeffrey W. Sainio, a photo analyst from Wisconsin
who has done much analysis of UFO pics. This was a most
interesting presentation, pretty much all slides, with
discussion of how hoax pictures are often identified. He
didn't seem to want to commit himself as far as any given
pictures being outright fake or genuine, but (interestingly)
spent a lot of time on some of the Ed Walters photos (no
relation, though my father's name WAS Ed), and apparently
was unable to find any indication of fakery within. He
showed a couple of the Meier photos, and showed some
questionable discrepancies there. Good demo of simple visual
cues as well as some more sophisticated photo computer
enhancement and analysis.
Next was "Ufology in the Commonwealth of Independent
States," given by Vladimir Ajaja, President of the Soviet
UFO Center in Moscow. Dr. Ajaja spoke in Russian, and his
translator was heavily accented and hard to understand.
I had again run into NEWAGE's Joe Balsamo and David Brune,
and we left at the beginning of this session for a dinner
and... a little field trip.
----------------------------------------------------
FIELD TRIP: MONZANO BASE
Joe & Joe & Dave left the Convention Center, only to
discover that for the second day in a row it was raining in
the desert land. We headed across Albuquerque to the eastern
edge of town, south of Interstate 40, to the area nearest to
that part of Kirtland AFB called Monzano Base.
The mountain range north of I40 is called the Sandias; the
Monzanos start on the south side of the highway. In recent
years, the city has developed right up to the fence marking
the boundary at Monzano, so we were able to drive right up
to the edge of the base.
We took some pictures (and will scan & upload before long)
and saw some interesting things. The area in question
consists of a joined series of four hills, arranged
north-south. Inevitably, this area has become known as the
"four hills" area.
The northernmost hill (the largest, several hundred feet
high) was the closest, and apparently the most interesting.
There was some sort of structure on the top of this hill
(might be a couple of trailers or small white buildings; two
antennas are visible as well); it was the only man-made
thing visible on any of the four hills themselves. Around
the base of the hills are several smaller structures; a few
house-sized buildings, some groups of buildings among some
trees, and several trapezoidal-shaped concrete walls with
doors (identical to the entrances to bunkers you see at
nuclear weapons storage facilities) leading into the hills.
It is well known that these hills are riddled with caves and
tunnels (man-made), and that nuclear warheads have been
stored here. Every year or so, a local camera crew gets to
go inside and shoot some footage. This usually consists of
long empty hallways with a few people walking about. We
never get to see what, if anything, is stored in there.
However, a TV news report here just last week showed that a
new nuke storage facility underground on the southern part
of Kirtland had been opened, all the nukes from Monzano had
been moved to this new facility, and that the Air Force had
given over the Monzano facility to the Department of Energy.
They had no idea what was in there.
This is the place often rumored as the final storage site
for the 1947 Roswell saucer, among other related relics. I
don't know; could be anything.
Circling (I use the word "circling" here loosely) the entire
facility is a wide strip (about 100 meters wide) of
clean-scraped earth, on which rest 4 concentric rings of
fence. Within the fence is a circular set of power lines,
with power poles alternating with light fixtures (the area
is not visibly lighted at night; they may be UV or some
such). Not an easy area to sneak into! We could see that
there were signs at intervals along the internal fences, but
we could not get close enough to see them. We speculated
that they might be "Deadly Force" warning signs, but could
not tell. Perhaps another time...
The fence we were actually up against was a couple of
hundred yards away from the high-security fence, and was
topped with barbed wire. Signs warned us that entry was
forbidden without the Base Commander's permission; this was
the true boundary of Kirtland Air Force Base. I expected it
would be safe enough to cross that fence, and that we could
probably make it up to near the security fence, but would
probably make some new acquaintances at that point. Local
housing developments literally reach right up to this fence.
In the four years I've lived here, I've never seen a sign of
life in or near the Monzano base. As far as I could tell by
sight, the thing could have been abandoned. Imagine our
surprise when a tan Suburban truck suddenly appeared,
driving slowly around the perimeter on obvious patrol. This
was inside the high-security fence, too far away for us to
read any markings on the truck.
Whatever is in there, whatever, it is clearly considered
important enough to someone to warrant nuclear-level
security and constant patrols (in vehicles, not just on
foot!).
During my own time in Strategic Air Command in the Air
Force, as a KC-135 pilot, I saw many of the typical nuclear
weapons storage facilities at SAC bases with bomber wings;
this looked far more secure.
Rumors abound locally of dog patrols, ground-based motion
sensors, mines between some rows of the fences, electrified
fences and more. Just rumors. Who knows?
----------------------------------------------------
DINNER & BACK TO THE SHOW
Following the Field Trip, the three of us adjourned to
Garduno's (put a squiggle over that "n") for the best
available meal experience in Albuquerque. Amidst the live
mariachi music, we stuffed ourselves full of chips & salsa,
some terrific New Mexican entrees, sopapillas, and a couple
of large margueritas (except for the designated driver), and
we conversed over the events of the day.
All this took a little longer than planned, so we missed the
next scheduled session, "Forbidden Science: The UFO
Phenomenon and the Research Community" by Dr. Jacques
Vallee. We arrived just as that had ended, and there was a
small crowd around Dr. Vallee, including a TV crew with the
attendant bright lights.
The last session of the night was the eagerly-awaited
"Abduction Observed by Independent Witnesses" by Bud
Hopkins.
Just before this started, I realized I had left my name tag
in my car, so I had to go back and get it so the Men In
Badges would let me back in to the conference room. I made
it back just in time, and as I reentered the Convention
Center, I had to hold the elevator door for three folks
hurrying to get on board. I didn't realize until they were
up on the stage that these three folks were Hopkins, "Linda"
(more about whom later), and another woman with them. Dang!
Had them all alone and didn't know it!
Hopkins wasted no time getting into the details of an
interesting case, one that has been discussed online to some
extent recently. This event occurred in New York City in
November of 1989.
He had received a letter from this "Linda" (we didn't yet
know she was present) detailing an abduction event; he had
interviewed her and basically filed the info away with other
reports. Some time later, he got a letter from two policemen
who had witnessed an abduction and wanted to come forward;
turns out they had seen Linda's abduction. Drawings made
independently by the cops and another witness who later came
forward matched astoundingly well, and corroborated Linda's
story.
As time went on, the story began to take strange turns. The
cops had a hard time dealing with what they had seen, and
took on some strange behavioral patterns (including watching
Linda in her apartment without her knowledge, sleeping with
weapons ready against the possibility of the aliens coming
after them, and more). Then it turned out they weren't cops,
but were intelligence agents for an unnamed organization;
they had been escorting an unnamed government VIP, who had
also witnessed the event, and were trying to determine the
correct actions to take.
Hopkins made it clear that he had determined what agency
these two worked for, and who the "third man" was, but
wouldn't reveal these sources, a condition of their coming
forward. He indicated that he felt that they would reveal
themselves before long.
Well, it wasn't over yet. Linda had long complained to her
doctor about a sensitive spot in her nose; he finally
convinced her to allow him to X-ray her. Hopkins showed a
slide of the X-ray, which showed a spiral-shaped implant
clearly visible within the nose. He said that the night
after the X-ray was taken, Linda awoke suddenly with blood
on her lower face and hand and no idea of what had happened.
She hadn't received the developed X-rays yet, but after they
arrived and she saw the implant, she had another X-ray taken
and the implant was gone. Hopkins speculated that bombarding
the thing with X-rays may have set off some alarm somewhere,
and they may have come back to retrieve it.
In a later conversation with her young son, Linda was
horrified to learn that he had been abducted some months
before her event; he asked why she didn't wake up and help
him while he was screaming and crying at being taken by
these little grey characters. She took her son to see
Hopkins, who had him draw a picture, which he showed us on
the slide screen. A typical child's drawing, it nonetheless
clearly depicts exactly the same type of scene witnessed at
her abduction.
But wait, there's more! The two cops/intel guys showed up at
her place unannounced one day and demanded to talk to her
alone; she offered to have them come in, call Bud Hopkins
over, and they could talk. They didn't like that, and after
further refusal, bodily carried her out to their car and
drove off with her. They interrogated her for some time,
asking if she was trying to trick or hoax them, if she was
trying to mess with their lives. They had her take her shoes
off so they could examine her feet--they said that they
thought she might be one of "them," and that they knew what
their feet looked like: they had no toes.
They discussed National Security with her and took her home.
Some time later, she awakened at night choking on something;
turns out she had a nosebleed on the right side. Her husband
awoke too, also with a nosebleed on the right side. Her son
and a friend sleeping over also awoke with nosebleeds on the
right side. This was apparently very recent, as they haven't
followed up on it yet; Hopkins said they would be X-raying
them all, but hadn't yet.
He said there was still more to this story, but as time was
running out, he brought Linda up on stage, and she answered
a few questions from the audience.
Well, this was a pretty spooky session, and the last item on
the agenda was a Q&A session with all the day's speakers on
the panel. Not much new came up here, and this was cut short
by the fire alarm going off. False alarm, but it did clear
the building. There was much joking speculation as to who
set it off...
That's it for today (and that's ENOUGH!). Tomorrow is the
last day of the Symposium, and features five sessions and a
few other events.
----------------------------------------------------
SUNDAY, JULY 12, 1992
The 1992 MUFON Symposium is over, and, though I can't speak
for the others, I'm about UFO-ed out! And it was the third
consecutive day of rain here in the desert.
Well, apparently I was up too late last night typing
something (can't imagine what), as I overslept about an hour
today. I made it to the Convention Center today during the
last part of the first session. Sorry! Sue me. Hopefully,
someone else will give a comprehensive report of that
session.
The first session was "UFOs and Ufology in Brazil," by
Phillippe Piet van Putten, listed as MUFON National Director
for Brazil. He spoke decent enough English that we could
understand him very well. As I arrived, he was just showing
a slide of some runners in a footrace, with an amorphous
blob visible in the sky in the background. Missed what that
was about.
He then showed a video that appeared to me to be taken from
a Brazilian TV show (or several shows and news reports). The
sound was off, as the soundtrack was in Portuguese anyway;
van Putten narrated. The video showed several Brazilian
military and air traffic control officials, talking about
live and on-radar sightings of UFOs; there were also shots
of some of the 150 passengers on a Brazilian jetliner that
witnessed a UFO flying near their plane. Officials included
the Minister of Aeronautics, who stated outright that "we
have secret UFO files in the Air Force." There was a
description of a sighting (on radar) of a group of 21
objects, and fighters (F-5s and Mirages) were scrambled. We
saw some of the pilots, and the video had an animated
recreation of what they were describing (similar look to the
animations we see on US network news shows). These UFOs
appeared to be spherical in shape, slightly smaller than the
planes, and changing colors rapidly. The planes and UFOs
were depicted as moving at the same speed, with the spheres
moving around the planes in flight.
There was a long shot of what appeared to be a sphere of
indeterminate size floating above Sao Paolo and changing
color and perhaps spinning (hard to tell). In addition,
there were many shots of blurry objects in the sky and
witnesses on-camera. He also showed some slides of toy
balloons, which he said are often launched into the air at
night in Brazil with fireworks attached; the resulting light
show (a) is entertaining, and (b) tends to generate lots of
UFO reports.
He described several incidents and eyewitness accounts,
including some with numerous witnesses. He concluded by
mentioning that these reports came from military officers,
government Ministers, air traffic controllers, professional
people and others. He said, "These people... are... not...
idiots." This clearly heartfelt line, delivered with much
emphasis and emotion, drew lengthy applause.
Either he started late or ran long (or both), as I was still
able to get so much from this presentation. van Putten was a
most entertaining speaker.
The second session was "Operation Blue Fly" by Clifford
Stone, UFO researcher from Roswell, New Mexico. He began
with the basic history of the Roswell crash of 1947 (I won't
duplicate it here, as there are at least three good books
out on the subject!), and mentioned two military programs,
called Project Moondust and Project Blue Fly; Moondust was
ostensibly designed for recovery of space debris from US
sources, but according to a mission document Stone showed,
its true purpose was the recovery of "Soviet and unknown
space debris." He had received a copy of the mission
document in (I think) 1952, which was at the time mostly
uncensored; he then showed a later copy of it he had
petitioned for via Freedom of Information (hoping to get the
few parts of the doc that had been blanked out on his
original), and what he got was a document composed entirely
out of blank pages. It had been classified after the fact,
and when he wrote back with some sample text from his copy,
he was accused of violating national security.
Stone then went into the Blue Fly project, which he said was
formed for the purpose of rapid deployment, quick response
for recovery of Soviet equipment. He learned of 38 documents
relating to this project, and sent for them; all were
unreleasable.
From there, he detailed attempts by New Mexico Senators Jeff
Bingaman and Pete Domenici to acquire information on the
Roswell incident, and went into long detail as to the
stonewalling they encountered.
Stone had some interesting info, but was highly
disorganized, often stopping in mid-sentence to page thru
his notes looking for something. Still, it was a decent
presentation. And if the two Senators are still interested
in trying to get some of this data out, perhaps something
will come of it eventually.
Next was "The Missing Embryo/Fetus Syndrome" by Richard M.
Neal, M.D., a gynecologist and MUFON consultant. This was
rather clinical, and a bit hard to follow for us non-medical
types; basically, he noted that many of the reported
abductions by women include mention of examinations and/or
interference of this type, some of these turn up apparently
pregnant sometime after the incidents, only to find that
there is no fetus present. If there were any conclusions
from this, they were probably summed up in a slide which
stated that there was no indication of missing pregnancy
(i.e. feti generated and removed) in abductees.
There were slides of examinations of some patients, mostly
ultrasound and a few internal fiber-optic camera fetus
shots.
There were also a few external exam photos explicit enough
to make me wonder if the patients in question knew their
more personal areas were being displayed openly on a big
screen to an audience of thousands...
These latter shots were shown primarily to show some scars
and incisions that apparently occurred during the abduction
events; they were horrifyingly mindful of some of the scenes
in cattle mutilation shots, but on a smaller scale.
What a great session to put just before lunch!
David Brune and I, along with Cherry Kilgore (a
telecommunications user from a GEneric non-CIS online
service), went exploring for lunch sites, and happened into
a what turned out to be a horrible greasy-spoon place called
Lindy's. Worst chicken fried steak I've ever eaten in 30+
years of CFS connoisseur-ship. At first, I thought they had
put brown gravy on the thing (Horrors! A sure sign of yankee
influence!), but it turned out not to be gravy--rather, it
was a brownish substance roughly the consistency of water,
which quickly made the Fries inedibly soggy. Well, sometimes
life gives you fish cookies.
We took our time on the lunch break, and returned during the
next session, "Global Ufology: Worldwide Cases, Official
Policies, and Ufological Attitudes" by J. Antonio Huneeus,
MUFON International Coordinator from New York City.
He covered a lot of international incidents, and was into
the Belgian flap when we came in. He showed slides, almost
all of which were "artists' conceptions," depicting the
incidents that have occurred recently in that part of the
world. He showed a video of a production shown in Russia,
with a few very blurry shots of glowing lights in the night
sky. Some indistinct photos appeared here. He also showed
some shots from various other European countries and Japan,
including some Japanese crop circles. He said there had been
over 100 crop circles in Hokkaido alone in 1991.
The pictures from Japan were a pleasant sight, after the
fuzzy blurry European shots. Huneeus mentioned this point,
and said that there were more good UFO pics coming out of
Japan than anywhere else. He didn't think that there were
more UFOs there, but that there were more cameras! He has a
point. He told us to compare with what's coming out of
Russia: lots of text reports, few pictures.
Walter Andrus (MUFON Director--see yesterday's report) came
up at this point to present an annual MUFON award (sorry I
missed its name!), and there was much applause.
The final session was Stanton T. Friedman's presentation on
"Crashed Saucers, Majestic-12, and the Debunkers." Much of
this was description of the Roswell incident, which is
covered in detail in several books; Friedman himself has a
new book on the subject, called "Crash at Corona." (Corona
is a little town northwest of Roswell, near the ranch where
the crash occurred.)
He spent some time discussing this and debunkers (I gather
he doesn't like debunkers; he gave this subject a lot of
time, and put them down throughout the talk).
Lastly he went into Majestic-12, describing the events
around the revelation of the documents describing this
organization. He talked of attempts to debunk the MJ12
papers, and went into some detail as to why he believed them
genuine.
Friedman was a very dynamic speaker, and gave a terrific
presentation, including some slides. Good conclusion to a
good show!
After this, David Brune and I went thru the Dealer Room for
one last time, just to see if there was anything left to
tempt us. David bought a T-shirt, and we both almost
collapsed on the floor laughing when we picked up a book and
looked thru it. The book was "Galactic Gourmet." That's
right, a gen-u-ine UFO cookbook. Recipes included the
ever-popular Alpha Centauri Meat Loaf, Andromeda Chicken and
Rice, Martian Tacos (they have tacos on Mars now? What do
they call it, Mars-Mex??), the dreaded Neptune Frankfurter
Lima Bean Bake, a frightening concoction called Asteroids
Zucchini Loaf, Flying Saucer Pancakes, UFO Apple Crunch
Residue, and, for dessert, Unidentified Frozen Object.
Jeez!!! We noted that most--if not all--of the recipes,
interestingly enough, consisted of only Terrestrial
ingredients.
David and I ran into Joe Balsamo, and we decided to skip the
final Q&A session. I left for home.
Great show! It's a real advantage to have a national show
come to your home town, but most of the crowd was
nonetheless from out of town. Pretty much everyone seemed to
enjoy themselves, and the presentations left much to think
about.
It was also fun to meet Joe Balsamo, David Brune, Terry
Eckert, Terry Rodemerk, Jan Murdoch, and a few others from
NEWAGE and ISSUES Forums.
Keep watching the skies!
-JTW
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