Are Some Tales Just too Wild to Believe: Corey Goode and Andrew Basiago

When I interviewed Jan Harzan recently, I expressed my concern about the direction of MUFON and some of those invited to make presentations at the Symposium. I thought that some of the speakers were less than credible, thinking specifically about one man who seemed to claim to some sort of time travel before I realized there were two. Harzan’s response was that he wanted to give the membership a chance to hear the tales and decide for themselves if they believed them or not. The thinking here, I believe, was present an interesting program that provided data on the alleged secret space program, even if the evidence of such a thing didn’t exist, other than some testimony from some rather dubious sources. Besides, it would draw in more paying attendees but really has little to do with UFO research.

One of those speaking is Corey Goode, whose bio seemed to be more like that of Ender Wiggin. For those of you who don’t read science fiction, Ender Wiggin was a six-year-old boy who was recruited into the International [Space] Fleet in the fight against the Buggers, an alien race that had invaded the Solar System, twice. The fight would be taken to them, on other planets in other star systems. Ender was a genus at strategy and tactics and something of an empath, though that it never actually spelled out in the book. Instead, at the moment he comes to love his enemy, that is the moment that he destroys them… though by the end of the book, he is the one who saves that alien race from extermination. I mention this because of some of the parallels that I see among the speakers at the Symposium.

According to the bio of Goode, found at the MUFON website, under Symposium and Speakers, we learn:

Identified as an intuitive empath (IE), Corey Goode was recruited into Military Special Access Programs (SAP) at the age of 6. This program groomed Corey to be drafted into a Secret Space Program called “Solar Warden” in 1986. For the next 20 years Corey was assigned to a research vessel as well as being pulled into multiple other related assignments. This was designated as a “20 & Back” assignment which involved age regression (via Pharmaceutical means) as well as time regressed to the point of beginning service.

In 2015 Corey Goode was featured on a ground breaking new series on Gaia TV called “Cosmic Disclosure”. Corey has been sharing his experiences in these SAP’s in what has now become 7 seasons of Cosmic Disclosure.

I’m sorry but I don’t believe any of this except maybe that his name is Corey Goode. He has no evidence, or maybe I should say no reputable evidence, that any of this is true. I can’t file FOIA, I can’t see the headquarters or the office. Nor do I believe that the Navy had built “space carriers,” which if true would have required a crew of hundreds. Why are there no others talking about this? Obviously there has been no repercussions for Goode violating his oath. He hasn’t been prosecuted for it which show have inspired other “whistleblowers,” though none have come forward.

Andrew Basiago : Time traveler.

Even worse, if possible, is the tale told by Andrew Basiago, an attorney who claims that he, too, as a child was involved in some strange things including time travel, “jumping” to Mars through some sort of apparatus that might have been controlled by the CIA. According to him:

His talk will include the origins of Project Mars of the 1980s in Project Pegasus of the1970s; the program's goals; the training seminar; the identity of the young Americans who were the speaker's fellow trainees; NASA's involvement in selecting the jumpers; the desired traits of those to go off-planet; the origin, structure, function, and location of the jump rooms; what the CIA's threat assessment about the Martian civilization revealed about the true history of US probes to Mars; the dangers faced by jumpers; the speaker's acclimation jumps, exploratory jumps, and ultimate mission; the characteristics of three Martian humanoids; the identity and testimony of seven jump room whistle blowers; and the involvement of Buzz Aldrin, Barack Obama; Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, Stansfield Turner and Ross Perot. Attention will be given to President Obama's disinformation ploys concealing his participation in the program; whether the jumps were made to Mars or a “synthetic quantum evironment” (sic) in time-space; and the politics in exopolitics that have prevented the Mars jump room story from being given the standing in Ufology that it deserves and that the speaker's work has earned.

And no, I don’t believe this tale either. There is no credible evidence for this. But like Goode, he attracts a crowd with his preposterous tales of Martian humanoids and predators that are so fierce that his superiors gave him a cyanide capsule to commit suicide if trapped rather than a large caliber firearm to protect himself.

But Harzan said that he wanted to give the MUFON membership the opportunity to listen and decide what they wanted to believe. Fair enough… then why is the same courtesy not extended to Michael Horn, who believes that Billy Meier has been in contact with space aliens? Shouldn’t he be allowed to present his tale to the membership so that they can decide for themselves?

The real point, I suppose, is that if we expect to earn the respect of various other groups (journalists and scientists just to name two), we have to be careful in what we accept as reality. We can’t believe something because we want to believe it, especially when it is so outrageous. The driving force should not be a potential to make money off the claim. While it might be nice to give a platform for some of those with extreme views, we ought to be sure that their views are based in our shared reality and not in science fiction. Unfortunately, that is where we now find ourselves because it really is all about the money.

The Levelland UFO Sightings

At the most recent MUFON Symposium, I talked several people about creating multiple chains of evidence for our UFO cases. I based this on the study done in France in 1803 that proved rocks could fall from the sky... rocks we now call meteorites. The French Academy of Sciences had rejected the idea until a French researcher, Jean-Baptiste Biot, put together a study, with multiple chains of evidence, that proved in at least one instance, rocks had fallen from the sky. (As we say in ufology, it only takes one).

Which leads to another point. I had been discussing UFOs with a skeptic (Hey! I talk to them... most are reasonable people) and I mentioned, as one series of good sightings, the Levelland events of November 2, 1957. There were many reports of the close approach of the UFO interacting with the environment, meaning that it stalled car engines, dimmed headlights, and filled radios with static.

My skeptical friend said something like, "Oh yeah. The Condon Committee investigated that but even with the most powerful magnets available could not duplicate the alleged effects."

To him that meant the case had no merit because the electromagnetic effects (EM) claimed by the witnesses could not be replicated in the laboratory. But as I thought about this, I realized it could be taken another way. If the witness statements were accurate, then the UFO was displaying a technological capability that was beyond our science and could therefore be seen as proof that some UFOs were superior technological craft and were of alien manufacture.

In other words, we had a second chain of evidence, the first being the eyewitness testimony. See, in the French case, the eyewitnesses, who described the rocks falling from the sky and the resulting sound effects and smoke trail were counted as reliable. No one then thought to reject the eyewitnesses simply because they had only seen the rocks in the sky. Their testimony was collected, regardless of social station. None was rejected because he was merely an uneducated farmer, or because she was only a farm wife, or they were only children or because they might have talked to one another about the fall. All testimonies were carefully recorded so that a complete record could be made.

In Levelland, and contrary to what the Project Blue Book files allege, there were witnesses in at least thirteen separate locations who reported the EM effects without the time necessary for the news media or the local grapevines to pass that nugget. Although you could argue that one or two of the witnesses who surfaced the next day might have heard or read something about the sighting prior to making a statement, the majority of them told their tales without knowing there were other witnesses in other areas who had seen, heard, and experienced the same things they had.

Now, today, it is impossible for us to make any sort of meaningful measurements to corroborate, or disprove, this bit of observation. That so many made it, in such a restricted time frame, it seems reasonable to conclude that most, if not all, such reports were made without contamination. These EM effects are not reported in most of the UFO sightings, so we have something here that might provide a clue about the nature of some of the UFO reports.

The third chain of evidence is one reported by Don Burleson, based on his reinvestigation some forty years after the fact. Burleson said that he had talked to the daughter of the sheriff, Weir Clem, and Clem had been called out to a ranch north of Levelland where there were markings on the ground. In other words, a "footprint" of the UFO.

Had this bit of evidence surfaced in 1957, meaningful measurements might have been made. Coupled with the work of Ted Philips, who has cataloged some 4000 landing trace cases, we might have had the UFO sighting that would have moved UFOs from myth to accepted fact, just as the French study moved thunderbolts (rocks from the sky) into the realm of science.

But here is the problem... The French were interested in the truth, and in 1957, the Air Force was interested in explaining all UFO sightings in the mundane. It mattered not what the facts were. If they could generate an answer that stopped the interest in the case, they were happy. They had fulfilled their mission.

Yes, the Project Blue Book files prove this. On a Joint Messageform prepared by Captain G. T. Gregory and dated November 3, 1957, in PART III, paragraph a., it says, "Contrary to Keyhoe’s and Washington Press reports only three, not nine persons witnessed the incident."

Later, in his book, The World of Flying Saucers (and found in the Levelland papers and reports in the Project Blue Book files), Donald Menzel would write, "Three persons, not ‘dozens,’ had seen the phenomenon near the ground. Some ten or fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky."

Neither the Air Force statement nor Menzel’s words reflect the reality of the situation. There were people at thirteen, widely separated locations who were close enough to the craft to report EM effects. And, there were more than fifteen people who saw the object at a distance but none of them described the UFO as a flash of light in the sky.

The other evidence of this is that the Air Force explained the sighting as "ball lightning." In 1957, you could get any number of scientists to argue that there was no such thing as ball lightning. In other words, the Air Force was attempting to explain one phenomenon with another that had yet to be proved. And they forgot to mention that ball lightning was short–lived and rarely larger than eight inches in diameter.

The real point here, however, is that this case, the Levelland sightings, had they been treated with any sort of scientific curiosity at the time, would have yielded a report with multiple chains of evidence. We would have been able to develop some very interesting evidence, if the government in the form of the Air Force and the scientific community in the guise of Donald Menzel hadn’t been more interested in proving themselves right than they were in gathering the information. In other words, we would have had those multiple chains of evidence that would independently lead us toward the extraterrestrial. Instead, we have another controversial case that has been compromised by those who know that there can be no aliens visiting Earth.

The 2010 MUFON Symposium

So, as many of you know, I was at the MUFON UFO Symposium in Denver recently and have to admit I had a good time. Most of those attending were serious researchers, investigators, writers, and interested parties who wished solid answers based on evidence rather than wild speculations based on imagination. I was disappointed when one retired military officer seemed to be an exception to this rule. He seemed to embrace everything without worrying about evidence, but he was in a very small minority.

The programing was exquisite. The first was Richard Dolan who talked about what would happen after the government disclosed UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. He preached gloom and doom and I tend to be more optimistic about it. Dolan, however, made a good case for the changes faced by society, especially if the disclosure came at a time when the alien craft were landing. I know that no technologically inferior society has ever survived contact with a superior technology. Even the introduction of the horse to the plains radically alter the Indian way of life.

I looked forward to the presentation by Linda Moulton Howe because it dealt with the Bentwaters UFO landing and she had brought John Burroughs (seen here) with her. I had met him years ago while I was in Phoenix at a UFO conference. We traveled together to do a early morning radio talk show and I gained some insight into the case. Howe has spent a great deal of time investigating this case and she presented some very interesting points, including one that seemed to remove a skeptical explanation from the mix... though I suspect few believed that the airman and officers were fooled by the spinning of a lighthouse beam that had always been there.

I also enjoyed the talk by Marc D’Antonio but only because he lets his personality loose while on the stage. His presentation was interesting as well as informative.

Stan Friedman was, well, Stan Friedman. Say what you will about him, he’s very good on the stage and he presents his information in a very entertaining way. He’s been at it for decades and the polish shows. John Greenewald had the hosting duties again and was as brilliant as ever. He takes the job seriously and tries to provide each speaker with a build up that will impress the audience. He’s a fine and entertaining speaker in his own right.

I had a chance, brief though it was, to talk with Nick Redfern (seen here), who is going to review my latest book. I couldn’t help but ask what he thought and was pleased to learn that he had enjoyed it... which, of course, doesn’t mean that he won’t have some criticism about it (and provides me an opportunity to another plug of Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky).

And I sat next to Frank Salisbury (seen here) in the vendor area, who was there with a couple of his books, including an interesting update on his The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist’s Report. I had first run into him many years ago at a UFO convention sponsored by APRO. He had this book with him then. I didn’t know that in the new, updated version, I would actually find my own name, but there it was, in a short discussion on the Roswell UFO case in the introduction.

I didn’t know what a funny guy he was either. We had a couple of nice chats about UFOs, computers, and stealing customers from one another... He would often point them toward me, and if I couldn’t sell something to someone, I’d point them back to Frank.

One thing I did notice was a preponderance of geezers, which, for a moment troubled me but then I had an epiphany. The problem wasn’t that the youngsters weren’t interested in UFOs, or that they didn’t care what we geezers had to say, but that they probably couldn’t afford the time or money to attend the symposium. In this shaky economy, the youngsters, just starting out, might not have had the disposable income for a rather expensive weekend in Denver, not to mention children at home and a work schedule that might intrude.

Which is not to say that there weren’t many younger people there. There certainly were and they were just as excited about the symposium as were we geezers.

If I had a complaint, it was only that the WiFi connections in the common areas, the lobby, the vendor area (seen here), the restaurants, was not as reliable as it could have been. Of course, it seemed that every time I managed to logon, someone would appear to ask a question or two. Before I could get back to the computer, the connection was lost.

Next year they have decided that the symposium will be held in Orange County, California. I’m sure it will be a fine venue and I’m sure they’ll have no trouble transferring the expertise from Denver to Orange County. It might be good to move the symposium around, as they have done in the past, but frankly, I’ll miss Denver. I grew up there and I like the chance to get back into the old stomping grounds again.

Paul Kimball, Lance Moody, UFOs and Me

Not too long ago, I posted an article about the "Old Geezers" in Ufology. A critic had suggested it was time for the old guys to get out of the way because we had failed to solve the riddle of the UFO. Once before he had suggested it was time for us all to die because we were inhibiting the younger, smarter, more rational researchers.

I suggested that we had, in fact, solved the riddle of the UFO proving that some UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin, meaning here that they were under intelligent control. Paul Kimball and Lance Moody suggested I might have overstated the case and that we hadn’t proved it.

First, permit me a short digression. I wonder why things must always take a nasty turn. Why suggest that someone will be happy when we all die? Why take what I would term a civil discussion and turn it nasty? Why can’t we all agree that we’ll not accept some things the other side says without suggesting something about parents and thought processes? Why not realize that I have sometimes read the various arguments and reject them... not that I’m unaware of them, but because they do not persuade me.

And I direct none of this at either Paul or Lance, two gentlemen who have argued with me about some of the things I have said or published in the past. I have had some very interesting and satisfying personal discussions with Paul, both online and in person. I do not know Lance personally, but his postings here have always struck me as well reasoned and well intentioned. Certainly not the nasty ones that have appeared elsewhere.

As I say, they disagreed with my statement that some UFOs are intelligently controlled alien spacecraft. To them, if I understood their arguments, the evidence was not persuasive. They wanted more. Lance, I believe, suggested that my understanding of the scientific method and scientific thought left something to be desired. I believe he objected to my suggestion that there is a level of repeatability in UFO landing trace cases.

Let’s take a look at some of this. I know that I have one piece of information that is not universally accepted as legitimate and that is really my fault. When I got involved in the Roswell case with the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and Don Schmitt, I was spending a great deal of money each month on telephone calls to witnesses and in research. Sometimes the bill was over three hundred dollars. It’s something of a tribute to my wife for never complaining about the costs of the investigation. Well, not much.

Anyway, I was at the Center’s Chicago office and while they held a board meeting, they suggested that I use the telephone if I had some witnesses to call. An opportunity, for toll free calls (or rather calls that would be billed to someone else) was not to be missed. I wanted to follow up with several people, one of those being Edwin Easley.

Easley was the Provost Marshal at Roswell, sort of the top law enforcement officer on the base. When I had talked with him earlier, he had told me, repeatedly, that he had been sworn to secrecy and couldn’t talk about the events. Much to CDA’s annoyance, he told me that Mack Brazel had been held on base, in the guest house... CDA simply doesn’t believe this, and that certainly is his right.

So I called Easley, without benefit of my tape recorder. I was making notes about the various things we had talked about earlier. Then I asked him a question that would, for me, become critical. I asked, "Are we following the right path?"

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "We think it was extraterrestrial."

And then he said, "Well, let me put it this way. It’s not the wrong path."

I was so excited by this admission that when we finished our conversation, I interrupted the meeting to tell them what I had heard. Easley, one of the top officers at Roswell in July 1947 had confirmed that the craft was extraterrestrial, although in a somewhat round about fashion.

At that time, Easley, as far as I knew, was in good health. I planned to visit him at his home, video tape a conversation if he would allow it, audio tape if not, and get the discussion on the record. A few months later, Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director at the Center said that he was going to be in Fort Worth and would I arrange a meeting with Easley. I thought this a wonderful idea because it would provide a... well, a different perspective.

When I called to arrange the meeting, I learned that Easley was extremely ill. He would die not long after this. An opportunity for corroboration through a disinterested third party had been lost. Now everything hinged on what I had heard, how I interpreted it, and what I had reported. I simply couldn’t prove what Easley had said to me during that conversation. If some wish to reject it, that is certainly their right. Without Easley on tape, his statement can be considered too good to be true and he’s not around to contradict me.

Oh, I can point out that other officers in Roswell such as Patrick Saunders, provided some interesting written evidence. There have been some interviews, conducted by other researchers that have tended to corroborate some of this. Joe Stefula’s interview of Chester Barton, one of the officers who worked for Easley for example, suggests that something extraordinary was recovered and that Easley knew about it. But that isn’t the same thing as Easley saying it was extraterrestrial on tape.

And to be fair, Barton believed, at least at first, that what had crashed was a B-29 carrying nuclear weapons and not an alien spacecraft. But Barton also said he never got all that close to the debris and the burned areas. He did say he thought the amount of debris field was smaller than would be accounted for in a B-29 crash.

Easley’s family, and one of Easley’s doctors, have suggested they heard about the extraterrestrial nature of the crash from Easley. Some researchers have dismissed this, confusing Easley with both Sheridan Cavitt and Curry Holden’s discussions of the crash, attributing to Easley things that were said by Cavitt or by Holden’s family.

I mention all this to provide a little bit of a context. These are all things that I know. It comes down to this. Easley told me, basically, that the crash was extraterrestrial and I can prove it to no one. For me, this is important information, but for others, it is not. If I had a tape, then we would be having a different discussion.

There are some who said that the very instant that Easley made that admission, they would have gone out, bought a tape recorder and called him back. While I thought about it, I believed, at the time, I would have an opportunity, several opportunities to discuss all this with him again. I did not anticipate his illness. If I had it to do over again, I would have called him the first chance I got and hade him repeat the information.

This interview with Easley was important to me... but is not important to anyone else. This is one of the reasons that I have accepted the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation.

Science is often about repeatability which means that what I observe you can also observe. It means that a phenomenon, whatever it might be or how rare it might be, has been observed by others. We can say that a meteor fall is something like a UFO sighting. We can’t repeat them at will but we can interview those who have seen them. In today’s world, we know what meteors are (and do I really need to point out they are of extraterrestrial origin?). But not all that long ago, at the beginning of the 19th century, science rejected the idea that there were rocks in the sky. Yes, there had been meteoric falls, and meteorites, known as thunderbolts, had been recovered, but the idea of a meteor was outside of the science of the day.

And it was into the 1950s that science failed to recognize that some craters were of meteoric origin. Many scientists believed them to be extinct volcanos. Although I’ve always though about the craters on the moon having their origin in impacts, that wasn’t always the scientific thought.

I bring this up merely to point out that some things in science are not readily reproducible. The observations must be taken where they can be found and often are not made by scientists but by the public. It is the job of those scientists to gather the observations in a detached and dispassionate fashion so that we all can understand what has happened.

There has been a level of reproducibility in the UFO field. Ted Philips has been studying UFO landing trace cases for decades. His catalog has some 4000 different cases in it. There have been all sorts of UFO landings in which traces have been found. This would be, of course, the UFO interacting with the environment.

Philips, at the MUFON Press Conference held in Denver in August pointed out that he knew the kind of landing trace he would find based on the witness description of the craft. That, to me, suggested that there was something more than a random nature to the landing traces. It meant there was a predictability here that science would demand. You give me a listing of the object’s characteristics and I will predict the type of landing traces that we will find.

There are hundreds of cases in which instrumentality was used as part of the UFO observation. This might be radar, might be cameras, might be other types of sensors but all of it leads to the conclusion that something physical and real had been observed. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was extraterrestrial, only that what was seen was neither hallucination nor illusion. It might be misidentification but it was real.

Another factor weighing in here is how hard the Air Force, and other parts of the government, have worked to conceal information. A look at the Project Blue Book files shows us that these investigations were less than adequate and while they claim that only some 700 reports are labeled as unidentified, about 4000 cases, or one-third, are labeled as insufficient data for a scientific analysis. That means they are unidentified.

We can prove that the Condon Committee was designed, not to learn if there was a reason to study UFOs but to end the Air Force involvement in UFO investigations... or rather their public involvement. This documentation exists and suggests, at the very lease, a bit of duplicity.

All of this, and many other things, have lead me to the conclusion that some UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors. To me the evidence is overwhelming and convincing. To others it is not. It is a question of what evidence you see and what evidence you believe and what evidence is persuasive.

What is interesting here is that both Paul Kimball and Lance Moody can make their points without descending into the nastiness that others employ. Over the years I have been called all sorts of names just because my opinion is different from that of someone else. I have been accused of all sorts of things from being a government agent to being a liar and a coward, simply because I disagreed with someone’s analysis of a UFO case or bit of evidence. But that doesn’t make them right and me wrong. It only makes them nasty.

So, to Paul and Lance, I say, we disagree and I believe the evidence is overwhelming. I say, I am satisfied by the evidence I have seen and the witnesses I have interviewed. If you find the evidence to be insufficient and the witnesses less than believable, then that is your right. I am hoping that someday we all can find the evidence we need to prove our points... (And yes, I understand that we approach from opposite directions and if I am right, they must be wrong and if they are right, then I am wrong).

And for those out there who wonder about this, I have changed my mind when the evidence warrants it. I believed Frank Kaufmann until we had the evidence that he was not being candid. It is one thing to reject his testimony because you know that there has been no alien visitation and therefore he must be lying and another thing to reject it because the evidence suggests he was lying.

We will continue to march here, providing information as best we can (and that would be the editorial we which means, of course, me). As new information appears, it will be published, regardless of what it is. I hope that we can leave the nastiness aside and continue to discuss all these phenomena intelligently, rationally and civilly.

As a final thought... if those who wish that the old geezers would get out of the way, I say this. Buy my files, records, tapes, microfilms and photographs for one million dollars, meaning that after taxes are paid, I have one million dollars, and I’m gone. I won’t write anymore UFO books, I won’t appear at anymore conferences or symposiums as a speaker, and I will take down this blog. Then you youngsters can have the open field. Just let me know when you have the money.

Thanks.

UFOs and the Old Geezers

Many times when someone posts something somewhere that is ridiculous or meanspirited, I just ignore it. Ignorance is in great supply in the world of the Internet and all you need to do to see that is take a look at the comments appended to news articles. Ignorance of the UFO world is overwhelming.

Just recently the RRR Group posted a picture that my wife took at the MUFON Symposium in Denver and claimed that those of us on the Speakers panel were a bunch of geezers who had failed to solve the UFO question. It was time for us to get out of the way and let those younger, brighter and more enlightened take over. We had our chance and we failed.

Except we haven’t failed. We solved the problem. We have the proof that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and we can make that point over and over. The evidence for that is overwhelming, but not unlike Galileo, who failed to convince the church that there were moons orbiting Jupiter, we get a bunch of people who "refuse to look through the telescope."

Old geezer Ted Philips, being interviewed during th MUFON Press Conference made an important point. Talking about the four thousand or so landing trace cases that he had investigated, he mentioned that once he had a description of the craft, he could predict what the landing traces would be. In other, more scientific words, we had reproducibility, meaning the same things observed under similar circumstances and the predictability that comes from repeated observation. This was science at its best and it’s something that the debunkers, the skeptics, and apparently those in the RRR Group ignore.

Old geezer Chris Rutkowski (seen here) reviewed, at length, a longitudinal study of twenty years of UFO reports in Canada, looking for trends. Here again was a statistical study that provided information about what people saw and how it was identified, if it was identified and what it meant when the mundane, or what some would call the rational, did not explain the events. These were unidentified sightings that suggested alien visitation.

Old geezer Stan Friedman (seen here) diverted from his normal "Flying Saucers Are Real" talk and spoke about the possibilities of interstellar travel, something the youngsters, the debunkers, and the skeptics will always reject out of hand. The distances are too vast and we just can’t travel that far with our chemical rockets.

Well, of course, a chemical rocket would quickly run out of fuel, but other methods of propulsion have been discussed everywhere from science fiction to science conventions... and ways to generate the necessary energy have been discussed. Methods that aren’t beyond our current technology so that when the opposition says the Voyager spacecraft will take 70,000 years to get to the nearest star, they don’t mention that it is not accelerating. Any trip to another star will require constant acceleration until a point is reached that the craft will have to begin to slow down, but the round trip time drops considerably.

Old geezer Bruce Maccabee (seen here) examined the pictorial evidence for UFOs and there are some cases in which there are but two possible solutions. The object is either alien or the case is a hoax. Maccabee mentions the McMinnville, Oregon case which he had investigated for decades and he finds no evidence of hoax... which, coincidentally, is the solution offered by the Condon Committee, the University of Colorado scientific study of UFOs. The object in the photographs matches no known earthly-built craft and was, or is, therefore good evidence of alien visitation.

I, myself an old geezer, would point to the Lubbock Lights photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. in 1951. The four known pictures show the objects in V-shaped formations over the town and are either of some unknown craft (which could be of earthly manufacture though no one can point to it) or they are faked. Donald Menzel, that paragon of scientific thought and rationality, for no reason what-so-ever, declared the pictures to be fakes. Carl Hart, Jr., told me in an interview a number of years ago that they weren’t faked and he doesn’t know what they were.

I could point here that the Air Force has been less than candid in its investigation of UFOs, slapping on ridiculous solutions just to be able to label the case. For the 1957 sightings in Levelland, Texas, which involved multiple witnesses, the UFO interacting with the environment, sightings by law enforcement officers and even the suggestion of a landing trace, the Air Force decided the sightings were weather related and the culprit was ball lightning... at the time, even science denied the existence of ball lightning. No one then seemed to catch the irony of using something that didn’t exist to explain the sightings of something else that didn’t exist, at least according to those in the Air Force.

If you are interested in the duplicity of the Air Force, let me point out that according to their nearly day long investigation, their representative spoke to only three witnesses. Later, when Major Don Keyhoe suggested that there were nine witnesses, the Air Force all but called him a liar.

But the truth is that both Keyhoe and the Air Force were wrong. There were many witnesses in thirteen separate locations. Many of their stories, gathered before the publicity and within minutes of their sightings were strikingly similar, including the electromagnetic effects on their vehicles engines, radios and lights.

What all this means is that we geezers have solved the UFO question. We know what is going on and we use our experience to provide answers for those cases that we can and we suggest that some of these UFO sightings are the result of alien visitation. I believe that we know what is going on with the cattle mutilations, a subset of UFOs, I’m fairly certain we know what is happening with crop circles, another subset, and the jury seems to be out on alien abduction, though we have some very interesting terrestrial solutions.

And now we have people... scientists saying the evidence is anecdotal but, of course, that is a way to reject it without having to examine it. We have people claiming that after 60 or 70 years of investigation we have no answers, though we have many solid answers, and we have one group waiting impatiently for those they consider geezers to die off and get out of the way of the new breed who can bring a fresh approach to the problem.

I ask, just what will this new breed do differently? Use the Internet for their research? Rehash the cases that have been solved and involve us again in messes like the Allende Letters, which was explained thirty years ago? Or maybe the RRR Group will support more experiments like those two clowns in New Jersey who proved that witnesses report accurately what they see and that UFO investigators provide answers quickly...

Old geezer Marc D’Antonio told me that he knew the objects in the New Jersey case were either Chinese Lanterns or flares after examining the tape of the lights. The only people fooled were the news media who haven’t conducted much in the way of investigations in thirty years and the employees of a Ford dealership. The two "twenty-somethings" who conducted the "experiment" lied to the media, lied to the researchers, interjected themselves when the publicity began to slip, and then drew conclusions that were not based on the research but on their own personal bias. So much for the new life interjected into UFO investigations and research by the young, hip, enlightened youth.

Here’s the bottom line in this. We know the answers but we can’t get the scientists, the Air Force, the media and the debunkers to look through the damned telescope. They know there are no such things as alien visitors and any evidence that shows otherwise must be manufactured.

And now we have to put up with those enlightened individuals who believe that we have failed in our mission the last several decades. But no, that’s not where we failed. It was in the public relations war. The bad guys had access to the media who are too sophisticated to believe that creatures from another world were smart enough to get here from there. They’re too sophisticated to believe that an average person is smart enough to distinguish between the mundane and something extraordinary. They’re simply too sophisticated to look through the telescope.

So what is the answer here? Simply do a better job communicating the results of investigations to the press. Make sure that everyone knows when an explanation is the result of a desire for a specific truth rather than the culmination of an investigation. And to get those who refuse to finally look through the telescope.

Alien Abductions, Sleep Paralysis and MUFON

For those of you who might have missed it, I was just at the 40th MUFON Symposium in Denver (The Speakers Panel at the Symposium seen here). I had the opportunity to give a talk about using the scientific method to upgrade the evidence that we gather, but that’s not the point here.
During the question and answer period after my talk, someone, naturally, asked me about alien abductions. I pointed out that I believe that there is a terrestrial explanation for most abductions and like it or not, sleep paralysis is a viable answer to many cases. I attempted to make it clear that I don’t believe that all cases of abduction are actually episodes of sleep paralysis, but some are. I suggested that we needed to develop a protocol to separate sleep paralysis from alien abduction and was aware that some work along those lines was being done.

In fact, in a brief discussion with Kathleen Marden (seen below), the niece of Barney and Betty Hill, she told me that you could tell the difference because abduction descriptions were in black and white and sleep paralysis was in color. What she was saying was that because it was normally dark in the room when the abduction took place, the abductee described the events there in black and white. During sleep paralysis, which is often accompanied by the feeling that something is in the room, the descriptions are in color because this is, essentially, a hallucination.

That was an intriguing point and it suggests other ways to develop the protocol to separate sleep paralysis from abduction. But that’s not the point here either. Just a taste of something I learned at the Symposium, which proves the worth of such gatherings, but as I say, I digress...

I went out of my way to explain that while it was clear to me that some cases of sleep paralysis were offered as evidence of abduction, I didn’t believe that this was the end all solution. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that there will be many diverse answers to this problem and sleep paralysis is just one of them...

Or, I suppose I could say, "Get it?" Not all sleep paralysis ends with a belief that the person was abducted and not all abductions are explained by sleep paralysis.

I tried to make that distinction, but, of course, as there is in any large group, there were those who didn’t listen. They heard, "sleep paralysis" and then were so busy forming their response, they lost the rest of the message. They didn’t listen, and, of course, wouldn’t believe that sleep paralysis solved any case even if the witness came forward and said, "I experienced sleep paralysis and not abduction."

To make that point, all we have to do is look at the knee-jerk reaction to Susan Clancy’s book about abductions and sleep paralysis (called Abduction: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, if you must know). Of course, she was so busy trying to prove her theory that she didn’t bother to see the flaws in it, but then again, I digress.

The next day, one of those in the audience came by and handed me a short list of statements by John Mack that he thought refuted the whole idea of sleep paralysis. I told him that not only had I read Mack’s book, but I had a signed copy given to me by Mack. I didn’t even have to pay for it.

For those interested in such things, the inscription says, "To Kevin, with admiration for your pioneering work. All the best wishes. John Mack."

So, yes, I understand that sleep paralysis won’t explain everything. But I also know that its part in abduction can’t be dismissed with a couple of words of derision. To understand abduction we’re going to have to understand sleep paralysis.

And when we dismiss sleep paralysis with a smart-ass response, then we’re doing exactly what we accuse the debunkers of doing. Not looking at the evidence. Not willing to learn something new. And not bothering with research because our minds are made up. After so many years of this, shouldn’t we be a little more open to solutions and a little less closed minded about the work of others, even if we don’t like where it is going?