SUBJECT: True Believers Pursue Search for UFOs, Aliens FILE: UFO2861
By Billy Cox,
FLORIDA TODAY
Sunday, January 1, 1995
Moments after shuttle Columbia's solid rocket boosters disengaged on the
clear blue morning of Oct. 18, 1993, video cameras caught a bright, white
image that appeared to wheel diagonally, in the opposite direction from the
orbiter's path.
Replaying the brief sequence on their evening news, WFTV-Channel 9 anchors
in Orlando said some people thought it was a UFO, but NASA wrote it off as a
reflection of Earth. "How the Earth got in the camera shot, I don't know,"
joked Bob Opsahl.
Joe Jordan of Merritt Island studies that taped broadcast from a meeting
room in the Cocoa library. He jabs the VCR pause button.
"Now, I've gotta be careful about this next part," Jordan says. "I've got
a buddy out there -- who shall remain anonymous -- who works with the camera
crew at Lockheed. When this blip went across the screen over NASA Select,
he said that calls started coming in from officials wanting to know about
this intruder in restricted air space.
"He knew they had something I'd be interested in, so he made a copy and
got it to me within hours."
The next segment -- same sequence, slightly enlarged, slowed down then
reversed--shows an elliptical object, perhaps even domed, racing from the
southeast to the northwest portion of the monitor.
Jordan, a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the
nation's largest UFO research group, sent the tape to headquarters in
Seguin, Texas, for analysis. Results were inconclusive, but they indicated
the image was three-dimensional, as opposed to a lens flare.
"I've talked to three eyewitnesses who recall seeing the thing before SRB
separation," Jordan says. "They told me it appeared metallic, that it was
reflecting the sunlight.
"So I think we've got a problem. It's one thing to have saucers flying
hover a cow pasture. But over Kennedy Space Center? Now I've got a security
situation. And who wants to talk about that?"
Greg Katnik, KSC's lead film analyst, doesn't recall the event. In 11 years
of analyzing launch and landing footage, Katnik insists he never has seen any
shuttle-related images that couldn't be explained. Nor has he ever been told
to suppress information.
"We've seen things, over the years, that were unusual from an optical
standpoint, but nothing we couldn't figure out," Katnik says. "In this
instance, it sounds like it could've been a seagull that got caught In the
frame. When your camera is trying hard to focus on a shuttle that's on the
brink of hyper-infinity, near-foreground objects can get easily distorted."
Still, distrusting Americans -- such as the grass-roots gathering that
meets the third Sunday of each month at the Central Brevard Library in
Cocoa--are mobilizing behind growing suspicions that the UFO phenomenon is
the government's best kept secret.
And interest is accelerating.
Beginning of a revolution
Sixty-two-year-old Jenna Bartlett of Edgewater founded UFO Forum of Florida
in March 1993. Today, she says, anywhere from 40 to 90 curiosity-seekers
attend admission-free public meetings across central Florida for lectures
and videos.
Bartlett no longer fears ridicule. The bumper sticker on her camper
van ("UFOs Are Real -- Ask NASA") is an open provocation.
The whole purpose of these meetings is to get the word out, to 'open people
up to the possibility that extra terrestrials aren't out there anymore --
they're here. And they're not going away," she says.
They were supposed to have gone away in December 1969. That's when the U.S.
Air Force terminated Project Blue Book, its 22-year official study of UFOs.
After logging 12,618 reports, the Air Force listed 701 as legitimate "un-
explaineds."
Even so, whatever they were 'Blue Book concluded their mystery did not
represent advanced or unconventional technology, nor did they pose a national
security threat.
But 1994 -- exactly a quarter century later--was a watershed season. UFOs
were everywhere.
They were on CBS, NBC, CNN, Omni magazine, Popular Mechanics. They lit up
the entire electronic spectrum, from global Internet chatter to FAA radar
screens in Michigan. They hovered and streaked and darted like phantoms
across home videos aired by the likes of "Encounters," "Unsolved Mysteries,"
and "Sightings." They excited activists to picket the Pentagon and the
offices of political leaders.
And from the media overload cluttered with half-truths and shadows emerged
television's cult hit of the season, "The X-Files," whose laconic messages
-- The Truth Is Out There, Trust No One, Deny Everything -- merely echoed
the erosion of public faith in the status quo.
"What we're talking about is a revolution," says Michael Corbin, owner and
director of Paranet, the nation's oldest and largest UFO related computer
bulletin network "We're in the beginning of a revolution."
The Official Word
The first bomb went off in January 1994. It was a delayed-fuse device, 47
years long, coiling backward into the ghost winds of a New Mexico desert,
where the flying saucer era began.
In July 1947, the Army Air Force base at Roswell, N.M., announced it had
recovered a "flying disc" that crashed in the desolate outback. Within hours,
the Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, revised that claim,
saying it was only a weather balloon.
But on-site investigators described weird debris that couldn't be burnt or
broken, foil-like material that tlattened itself out after being crumpled,
lightweight I-beams inscribed with heiroglyphics. There were whispers of
tiny extraterrestrial corpses.
Rural neighbors were alarmed by military security checkpoints in the middle
of nowhere. And years later, retired Air Force Gen. Thomas DuBose went on
record -- wreckage scraps were flown to Washington, D.C., and the weather
balloon story was a hoax he perpetrated to neutralize the media.
Following the popularization of the story in the 1980s and early '90s,
uneasy New Mexicans began pressing U.S. Rep. Steven Schiff, R-N.M, to resolve
the issue.
Schiffs inability to acquire relevant Air Force documents led him to appeal
to the General Accounting Office.
The GAO launched its investigation last January.
In September, the Air Force issued an unsolicited response "intended to
serve as the final report related to the Roswell matter." Known as the Weaver
Report, for its author, the 25 page paper said what really happened in '47
was the held retrieval of classified science called Project Mogul. Mogul was
a top-secret, balloon-launched train of sensors designed to sample high
altitudes for evidence of Soviet nuclear testing.
Although many major newspapers accepted the Weaver Report uncritically
("Saucer Debris Was of This Earth"-- The New York Times, "1947 UFO Finally
Identified"--USA Today, a careful read reveals egregious contradictions and
selective omissions.
The GAO was unconvinced. Its investigation continues, and the debate rages
on.
The Media Investigation
In its ongoing series on UFOs -- called Project Open Book -- Omni magazine
invited readers to sign the Roswell Declaration, a petition demanding an
executive order to declassify ET-related secrets.
Omni editor Keith Ferrell says signed petltions have arrived by the box
load into the magazine's Greensboro, N.C., offlce. He suspects the tally may
surpass l0,000 when the counting begins this year.
The magazine intends to formally present the petitions to the White House.
"Our initiative is simply to open the books," Ferrell says. "We're not
taking an editorial stance one way or the other, but we do want to get a
lot of the superstition and myth and foolishness out of the way. So we've
decided to put our journalistic credibility and prestige on the line,
and we're taking a rational look at what's there."
In the information vacuum of classified military operations -- called
"black projects"--rumors nourish like weeds. The most controversial
speculation contends tne military is attempting to engineer recovered UFO
technology into its arsenal at the hyper-secretive Groom Lake Test Facility
in southern Nevada.
The March issue of Popular Science profiled the paranoia blooming around
the complex -- variously known as Area 51 and Dreamland -- and its bid to
acquire an additional 4,000 acres on a distant mountain range during this
post-Cold War era of military down-sizing. The December edition of Popular
Mechanics addressed the military's flying saucer prototypes and other black
technologies emanating from Groom Lake.
"What struck us most," Popular Mechanics opined, "is how much Air Force
secrecy -- both at Area 51 and at Roswell -- has done to undercut its own
denials. 'They lied about the first balloon,' goes the word around Roswell.
'Why believe them this time?' "
In October, CNN sent talk show host Larry King for a two-hour live remote
broadcast from outside Dreamland. Among those King interviewed were former
Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater from Arizona, the patriarch of American
conservatism.
Goldwater told how the late Gen. Curtis LeMay, then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, tlew into a pique when Goldwater asked for access to a
chamber at Ohio's Wright-Patterson AFB's Foreign Technology Division, rumored
to have been a depot for the early Roswell debris. Goldwater never asked
again.
But if, in fact, a lid of high-level secrecy is nailed tight atop the UFO
mystery, videotaped sightings continue to press against the wall of denial.
Bob Kiviat, coordinating producer of "Encounters" on the Fox Network, calls
ratings of his fledgling, limited-run show "very good," despite its suicide
slot opposite "60 Minutes" on Sunday night. A majority of the format is
devoted to UFOs, and much of that is fueled by hand-held cam corders.
"With the proliferation of video cameras, more and more UFO footage is
starting to come out. And what we're documenting is a world-wide phenomenon,"
Kivat says. "We are a news magazine and we take this subject seriously. We
consult with photo experts who take this seriously as well, some of whom are
affiliated with NASA."
In fact, the most chilling UFO revelation of 1994 was featured on ABC's
"Prime Time Live" in November.
When ABC peered into UFO secrets inside the former Soviet Union, it
discovered, among other things, a narrowly avoided nuclear incident in the
Ukrainian town of Usovo in 1983.
Hundreds of residents reported seeing a 900-foot disc that spent two
hours or so gliding above the city. Lt. Col. Vladimir Katunoff described how
the object hovered over the ICBM missile silo he commanded. For 15 seconds,
Soviet technicians lost control of the post; the display panels lit up and
indicated the nuclear warheads were preparing to launch. The red-alert
status receded as soon as the UFO disappeared. A damage-control in-
vestigation detected no equipment failure.
"We're going to see more and more of these reports coming out of Russia,
because they're so broke they're actually selling formerly declassified UFO
military documents," says Don Ecker, research director for UFO -magazine in
Sunland, Calif.
"We've already got one of their top SDI scientists on record admitting
they've been observing objects entering and leaving Earth's atmosphere for
the past 30, 40 years. We haven't heard the end of it."
The Information Gap
Just as information technology -- fax machines, satellite dishes --
contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Denver's Michael Corbin
sees the same forces assaulting the domestic containment web surrounding the
UFO phenomenon.
In 1986, Corbin founded PARANet, the first computer bulletin board to
discuss UFOs. ln 1990, what began as a 6 personal computer link up plugged
into Internet, the global telecommunications giant.
"I think it's safe to say that we're now in every country in the world,"
Corbin says. "I'd say, conservatively, more than 100,000 PC users have
access to PARANet."
Corbin says PARANet gives ordinary citizens access to scientific and
academic discussions on UFOs, plus an information-exchange forum offering
investigators immediate data on incidents across the world.
"In 1947, the government acted quickly to contain the crash at Roswell,"
Corbin said. "But unlike '47, when the authorities were able to censor the
wire services, there's less of an ability to conceal data and information in
the event of another incident like that. They'd have to shut the whole thing
down. But we're too big, we have no geographical boundaries anymore."
If the surge in PC-UFO chatter reflects mass cynicism in government, it
also may suggest a loss of faith in the conventional media's ability to cover
this complex subject. Pete Theer, who runs MUFON's bulletin board, MUFONet,
says computer networking may render traditional news outlets obsolete.
"TV, radio, and newspaper coverage is critical, no doubt about it,"
Theer said. "But their coverage tends to be superficial, and there's
often a significant time-delay involved. The appeal of PCs is that the
information you can get is virtually instantaneous.
"Somebody in Scotland, for instance, uploads an article about a local
sighting wave there, and you can download it virtually the next day in the
States. That's information American wire services probably wouldn't carry,
anyway."
In 1991, Ed Komarek of Thomasville, Ga., co-founded Operation Right To
Know. Since then, he and several hundred activists have picketed the White
House in an effort to force the government to open its UFO files, and provoke
media scrutiny of the issue. In 1994 ORTK's pickets marched outside the
Pentagon, as well as the offices of Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Sen. Barbara
Boxer, D-Calif.
"It's going to lake the kind of media coverage we're seeing in the O.J.
Simpson case to do the job, where you follow every minute detail back to its
original source," Komarek said. "This is a political problem. But the
politicians are going to be the last ones on board. Only the mass media has
that power to break it open."
Science and UFOs
But 1994 indicated the phenomenon may involve another problem, as well.
Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard psychiatrist John Mack put his professional
neck on the line with Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens.
From the subjective and densely complicated depths of hypnotic regression,
Mack plumbed the minds of "experiencers," patients who claim to have been
pirated aboard UFOs and prodded like lab rats by aliens. He took their
stories at face value, and interpreted them as a constructive entree into
meta-physics.
Blasted by critics for a susceptibility to "false memory syndrome,"
Mack's work nevertheless does have a sympathetic audience.
In 1992, 150 mental health professionals from across the world attended a
closed-door symposium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to discuss the
emergence of the alien-abduction syndrome.
Findings from that conference are scheduled to be made public this
year, according to Richard Boylan.
Boylan, a clinical psychologist in Sacramento, Calif., recently rounded
the non-profit and non-funded Academy of Clinical Close Encounter Therapists.
The new network counts 60 members, and ACCET's first seminars are scheduled
for the western United States this year.
In May, Boylan says ACCET will participate in a three-day, international
conference in Washington D.C., titled "When Cosmic Cultures Meet." The idea,
Boylan says, is to discuss principles of conduct between Earthlings and
aliens when the UFO reality is acknowledged by the government.
"Lest you think this is some snake-oil event, we've invited people like the
Clintons, Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama," Boylan says. "And the whole thing is
put together by the Human Potential Foundation, which is financed by
Laurance Rockefeller."
Millionaire and conservationist Rockefeller, according to Boylan, has
attempted to get the Clinton administration to examine the UFO situation and
lift the security veil.
"If you thought 1994 was a busy year," Boylan says, "wait 'til '95.-
You ain't seen nothing yet."
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