Kathleen Marden - No Longer a Ufologist?

 

Just yesterday, a colleague wrote that Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill and an abduction researcher, had announced that she was no longer a Ufologist. I didn’t know what that meant but I do know Kathleen, so I reached out to her asking for clarification. I made it clear that I wanted to publish the information but it could by a private communication between the two of us. I was seeking information and had no desire to make editorial comment about it. She responded and granted permission to publish the letter. She wrote:

Hello Kevin,

 I did not intend to write, "I am no longer a Ufologist." To be clear, I am no longer a Scientific Ufologist because I have moved beyond the type of UFO research that I was immersed in for thirty-two years. My research and investigation continues to grow and flourish but I have stepped onto a different path. My new focus is on assisting Contact Experiencers and humankind in general, to move beyond fear and the chains that bind us, to a deeper understanding of consciousness.

 I am on a spiritual journey in service to humanity. It is personal but can be shared with others through direct contact. It involves divine light and healing. It began when I was struck by a blinding light in May 2020, while in my home office. There was no thunderstorm activity in my area, nor was there a power surge. I can find no prosaic explanation for what occurred. I can only describe it as a powerfully loving energy that swept me off my feet and dropped me to my knees.

 If you have read of Rey Hernandez's miraculous event on March 4, 2012, and how it altered everything in his life, my story is similar. Prior to this date, he had a material science orientation but this experience transformed him and radically altered his worldview. His experiences have continued, as have mine.

I will share additional information in the future but I do not feel comfortable unveiling this knowledge at the present time. Nor do I wish to invite skepticism. I am not delusional, misinterpreting sensory information, engaging in wishful thinking, or undergoing an emotional crisis. My new path is personal but is not in service to self. I have lived my life in service to others and will continue on this journey. My greatest desire is to bring hope to the hopeless, love to the unloved, and to do my part, as each of us can, in transforming darkness into light. 

Very best wishes, 

Kathleen Marden

www.kathleen-marden.com 

I grant you permission to publish this letter.

 This, then, is a clarification of her statement, which is to suggest that she was no longer a Scientific Ufologist, which is a change in the direction of her research. I was going to say that we now understand more about this, but it would be more accurate to say that I understand more about it.

Kathleen Marden with the late Stan Friedman at a MUFON symposium in Denver.

About the only editorial comment I will make is that I understand the desire to avoid skepticism, which can take a nasty turn. I have never understood why we can’t debate a point without it becoming acrimonious. I am not required to accept your point of view nor are you required to accept mine. We can both look at the evidence and interpret it in different ways. When dealing with something like UFO research, sometimes there isn’t a clear answer and two interpretations, or three interpretations of that evidence can be supported by the available evidence. Something more is needed to arrive at the proper answer.

Anyway, this is the direction her research is taking her and I wish her well in that endeavor.

Revisiting the Hill Star Map

As those of you know, who visit here regularly, I have been suggesting for years that we revisit the Betty Hill star map. I have thought that Marjorie Fish, who identified the Zeta Reticuli star system as the base of the aliens, did a great job. The shear size of the accomplishment is impressive. The only trouble with it was that she did that decades ago and our knowledge of our section of the galaxy has grown exponentially. In other words, as good as her work was, it is now outdated.

I also thought that, in the world today, with home computers that had more power than those used to put the men on the moon, we should be able to refine the process. Surely someone, somewhere, would be interested enough in this puzzle to revisit the star map. I have received word that such is the case.

In an email from James Hood, I was given the web address of a report that looks at the Hill star map using the latest information. I could find no signature on it (though the name might be embedded in the address), but found it interesting enough to mention here. Maybe someone also interested in the Hill star map, and who has a good knowledge of astronomy, will take a look at it and provide some insight into it. You can see the report here:

http://wolfmagick.com/nebula/zetareticuli/papers/a%20case%20for%20zeta%20reticuli_2.pdf

I will note that the Zeta Reticuli is not the only system identified as the origin of the Hill abductors. Betty Hill herself suggested it was part of the Pegasus constellation with Homan as the center star. There is another interpretation in which Epsilon Eridani is the main star and Groombridge 34 replaces the sun. There is another interpretation that suggested the star map was actually a map of the solar system as it existed in 1961 when the Hills were abducted. I mention all this only because I thought I should note that there is not universal acceptance for the Fish interpretation.

Anyone who has studied the star map, and who has some constructive criticism (and please note the qualifier), let me know what you think. This is one of those puzzles that demands a little bit of our attention from time to time. Something of importance might be embedded in it.

My Latest Outrage - Bielek, Allende and Several Other Things

I’m outraged… outraged, I say. In the last couple of days, I have been bombarded with nonsense in books, on the Internet and on television. Just when I think we have heard the last of some of the nonsense out there, someone feels the obligation to resurrect it with another half-baked, ignorant theory.

Let’s start with the book. I had ordered, through Kindle, a book on conspiracies, not that I’m enamored with them, but because the book was free and it touched on a couple of topics I find interesting. So, I plowed through the Kennedy assassination stuff, some of it, in fact, informative, but then I came to two things that I know something about and that I knew were wrong.

First, I was treated to the idea the William Cooper had been assassinated by Arizona deputies because he knew too much about UFOs and the secret studies. Cooper, who claimed that he knew all about MJ-12 because of his position in the Navy, was considered dangerous, according to the theory. He had some sort of gig as a briefing officer on highly classified material, or something like that. MJ-12 was part of it, or was something that he had seen. However, if MJ-12 is a hoax, and the smart money is on that, not to mention that the best evidence shows that, then Cooper’s claims were also a hoax.

There would be no reason for government assassins, in the guise of Arizona deputies, to gun him down. Of course, had he not fired at them first, the outcome might have been different. The point, however, is that the information about Cooper was badly flawed.

Second, in that same book, there was a short mention of the McMartin Preschool scandal of the 1980s. The McMartins were accused of dozens of crimes including child abuse, engaging in Satanic rituals, child porn (I think), and a host of other crimes involving dozens of children. In the end, the vast majority of the charges were dismissed and the case ended in a colossal boondoggle.

Children, for example, had claimed they were flown out of state for the rituals, taken to locations in which Satanists abused them, sexual abuse in a super market, blood sacrifices and other crimes. But investigation showed that most of the crimes and abuse could not have been committed as described because of timing or in the locations mentioned. In fact, most claims of the Satanic abuse faded at the end of the 1980s for the lack of any concrete evidence that there was a national, Satanic cabal that was protected at the highest levels of the government.

To prove the case, however, the book suggested that the children told of underground tunnels below the school. Once it was demolished, there was some sort of old dumping ground found. This was proof of the tunnels, or so it was claimed. The children had been right. The problem was that so many of the tales told by the children were impossible and no evidence in the form of pictures, which the children claimed had been taken, were ever found. That was the sort of thing that the author relied on… a short reference with a suggestion of proof that had been debunked long ago.

In keeping with my chasing footnotes hobby, I chased a number of footnotes in the book and they lead to a right-wing publication and no further. I didn’t find the source material particularly persuasive, and if the source is flawed, then the information is flawed. In these cases, I knew the source was flawed. Given that, I didn’t find much else in the book that was of use.

AOL, once again, treated us to the story of Al Bielek. I don’t know how many times they have recycled this story. It’s always the same one, provides no real analysis, and suggests that Bielek is a real time traveler who knows, or knew, what the future holds. I’m astonished that Bielek didn’t make himself rich with this future knowledge like Marty McFly attempted when he traveled from 1985 to

A young Brad Steiger

2015. A simple check of sports outcomes or trends in the stock market or commodities, should yield millions. Bielek didn’t have any of that information. Hell, a wager on the outcome of the 2016 election, information about the president surely available in the future, would have done the trick, but no, Bielek missed that bet.

I don’t suppose I have to mention that Bielek’s tale is based on the Philadelphia Experiment, the Navy’s alleged attempt to teleport a ship. Of course, that tale is untrue and first surfaced as part of the Allende Letters, another hoax, revealed as such by Robert Goerman. All this has been explored on this blog in the past. I think the best of those articles can be read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/08/chasing-sources-philadelphia-experiment.html

One other thing about all this. My late friend, Brad Steiger had befriended Bielek in the past. Bielek stayed at his house on a

The late Carlos Allende aka
Carl Allen.

number of occasions and Brad told me that he found Bielek to be a likable chap. Brad said that he was deeply saddened when he realized that Bielek was not telling the truth. Bielek’s story is a hoax… but AOL keeps alerting us to it without telling us that it is a hoax.

Finally, I saw another of the seemingly endless documentaries on alien abduction, telling us the same tired stories with almost no evidence of anything extraordinary happening. I was going to pussyfoot around this topic somewhat, but really, why?

We were told that many of the abductees “remember” some of the event without the use of hypnosis. We learn that Betty and Barney Hill had conscious memories of the event before they were hypnotized by Dr. Benjamin Simon. But what we weren’t told was that there had been no memories until they surfaced in Betty Hill’s dreams. These she shared with researchers such as Walter Webb and, of course, her

The late Budd Hopkins, a leader
in abduction research.

husband. That the memories first surfaced in dreams is, I think, an important part of the case.

And, when we begin to talk of memories prior to hypnosis, we find that many of them are from hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations. These are sometimes terrifyingly real dreams upon waking or going to sleep. These accompany sleep paralysis and are often associated with a belief that some sort of entity is in the room. It is often only after hypnosis that the details begin to mimic those of alien abduction. Rather than go into this at length here, I’ll just point those of you who are interested to the following:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Budd+Hopkins

The real problem here, or at least part of the problem, is that those offering some opinion in passing, or creating a documentary, have some sort of agenda. The producers might wish to advance the idea that aliens are abducting people so they stay away from information that might challenge that idea. People writing about Bielek, are convinced that there was a Philadelphia Experiment, and he is confirming their belief. Doesn’t make it true, but they believe because they want to rather than because the evidence supports the belief. And those believe Bill Cooper about MJ-12 for the same reasons.

In our world today, there is so much misinformation available it is a full-time job to keep just a tiny segment of it straight. There is spin to underscore a belief, but spin doesn’t really advance knowledge. In our world we have to fight to keep everything straight. That is why, after several years, we read on various news sites that those who created the alien autopsy have “finally” copped to the truth, as another example from a recent story.

Really?

I have known this for years and published information about it in books that are now several years old and Philip Mantel had devoted an entire book to it… but the “news” is provided for us today. Let’s just keep the debate alive rather than acknowledge the truth and move on.

Anyway, we must remain vigilant to the heavily biased information presented as if it is the absolute truth. We must attempt to correct this false and faked information with facts, figures and other information rather than just ignore it. Having ranted long enough, I now return to the football game.

Aliens and Rhinoplasty

The other day as I was working on something else, I came across a note that triggered (or in today’s world, with triggered having degenerated into a political term, maybe I should say inspired… or inclined, but I digress…) a random thought or two. The discussion centered on the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and the comment suggested that the tale was based in reality because it had remained so consistent throughout the years. This wasn’t quite accurate and I thought I would comment on it.

In The Interrupted Journey, Betty Hill, in the Appendix, in which her dreams about the abduction are recalled in detail tells us about the alien creatures she saw. These are notes from her dreams, as written down by her and, “…are printed here for those readers who would like to compare in detail the content of her dreams with her recall of the amnesic period as it came out under hypnosis.”

Jimmy Durante and his
nose.

On page 298 of the hardback edition of the book, she wrote (or said) of the aliens, “Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) [parentheses in the original] than the average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante’s.”

But now, it seems that the description is more in line with the grays from the Zeta Reticuli star system. Little noses that are more like slits rather than noses. So, what happened here?

A Zeta Reticulan?

Well, it seems that the look of the alien creatures has evolved over time. We can blame Whitley Strieber for some of it. The cover of Transformation seems to have cemented the large-eyed, big-headed, nearly noseless aliens into our consciousness so that here, in the US, that is the dominant alien… but not so much in other parts of the world. I draw no conclusion here, merely point out something that I have noticed.

Hill Star Map - Badly Out of Date

Given some recent astronomical discoveries, I thought it time to revisit the Hill abduction and the connection to Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. These stars were identified by Marjorie Fish as the home of the aliens who abducted Betty and Barney Hill decades ago and have become so embedded in UFO lore that it is accepted with no proof whatsoever. But the information and criterion used to

Hill Star Map 

create the three-dimensional models Fish used to identify the home world of the aliens is now badly out of date.

In creating those models, Fish made ten assumptions. I had always worried about some of those, especially the one that arbitrarily eliminated the red dwarf stars. I worried about including only main sequence stars that were near matches for our sun but rejected those younger, larger main sequence stars. I didn’t like the assumption that a spacefaring race that visited one type of star would visit those stars of a similar type but ignored those that were too different.

Now, I understood her reason for rejecting those red dwarves. There were just too many of them and if they were included, then the model would be so cluttered that the pattern in Betty Hill’s star map would be found repeatedly. Since it was considered unlikely that red dwarves would have anything of interest to a spacefaring race, such as planets that could support life, they were rejected. Fish wrote, “For example, they would not be likely to bypass five red dwarf stars to stop at the sixth, if all six were approximately equal in size, spectra, singleness or multiplicity, etc.”

Marjorie Fish interpretation of the Hill Star Map

Well, if you can actually understand the motivations of an alien race, that might have some relevance… or, if all those things were basically equal, but the sixth happened to have a planet with some rare mineral or was a planet that was orbiting in the so-called “Goldilocks” zone, then that might draw their attention.

According to Fish, that if these aliens were visiting double stars as suggested by another interpretation of the Hill map they would be expected to visit others. Fish wrote, “Since Atterberg’s pattern [one of those who proposed an alternative to Fish’s model] include a number of relatively close doubles (61 Cygni, Struve 2398, Groombridge 34 and Kruger 60), there should also be a line to Alpha Centauri – but there is not.”

As many learned in school, other than the sun, Alpha Centauri is the closest star to the Earth, except that it isn’t actually the closest. That honor goes to Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that might be gravitationally linked to Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which is a double star. The point here, is that we have a red dwarf that might be seen as part of the Alpha Centauri “system.”

Why bring all this up now? It was just announced by astronomers that they had found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri that was in the “Goldilocks Zone.” According to an article in the New York Times, “One astronomer likened it to a flashing neon sign. ‘I’m the nearest star, and I have a potentially habitable planet!’”

There might be problems with this planet. It orbits its sun in something like eleven days, according to one source, but if it is in the Goldilocks Zone, it would have liquid water on it and that might be a very good reason for a spacefaring race to visit it while bypassing a half dozen other red dwarf stars.

This might be the best reason yet for rejecting the Fish interpretation of the Hill map. Some of her basic assumptions are in error. She couldn’t know why aliens might visit one star and bypass another. Maybe the one system was filled with dead planets and no water… or important minerals. Maybe the next is filled with things that interest that alien race.

And while I’m on this kick, how about this? I have always been worried about the assumption that the sun was on the map, connected by the lines. Why? Maybe this is their first time here and they were surprised to find a technological civilization. Or maybe the alien leader just grabbed the first map he had, figuring that this terran civilian would have no idea what she was seeing, so it didn’t matter. Or maybe her memory of the map was off so that we now have a distorted view. Or, for the skeptics out there, maybe she just “dreamed” this up because she first “remembered” the map during a dream.

For those interested, I believe it is time to reevaluate the Fish interpretation of the Hill star map, which I have actually been saying for years. There are now too many problems with it for us to continue to consider it reliable. (This also means that I must now reject one of the elements of Alien. They found themselves at the Zeta Reticuli system where the alien waits in ambush.) That little note is irrelevant but what is not is that the Fish Model and interpretation of the Hill star map is now badly out of date, is wholly unreliable because of that and must be rethought. The bottom line is the map does not provide us with any information about the aliens or their home world… we are now back to where we were before Marjorie Fish (which, of course, is not her fault).

The Roswell Slides and Premature Disclosure

There are times when premature disclosure can ruin an investigation and close avenues of research. Back in the last century (which is a line that cracks me up for some reason) Gerald Anderson burst on the scene with his tale of seeing the crashed saucer over on the Plains of San Agustin. Contrary to popular belief, I was the first to talk to him and found his tale interesting but in conflict with the information that Don Schmitt and I were developing. We didn’t understand how the Barney Barnett tale fit into the whole Roswell picture, especially if Anderson’s date and location were accurate. Anderson seemed to be corroboration of the Barnett story and it was from an alleged first-hand source.

Anderson told me that he could identify the archaeologists that Barnett had mentioned, said they were from the University of Pennsylvania, and the leader was a guy named Adrian Buskirk. Tom Carey, who had studied anthropology as both an undergraduate and graduate student, took on the search for Buskirk and found a guy named Winfred Buskirk, and given the identikit sketch of Buskirk provided by Anderson, looked like it was the right guy. But Buskirk denied that he had been involved and during the summer of 1947 was in Arizona working with the western Apache and on his dissertation.

The question became if Buskirk wasn’t on the Plains of San Agustin to have seen the crashed saucer, then how would Anderson know about him. Buskirk, who had taught high school anthropology in Albuquerque was as confused as the rest of us. He solved the problem by calling friends at the Albuquerque High School who looked at the records there. According to what they told Buskirk, Anderson had taken his anthropology class. Buskirk told me this and provided the names of three contacts at the school if I wanted to verify the information. This I did, and in fact, the man on the phone told me that he was looking at the transcript as we spoke. Anderson had taken Burkirk’s anthropology class. We had put the two of them together in the same class room at the same time.

I called Fred Whiting at the Fund for UFO Research and told him what I had discovered. Whiting, in turn, called Stan Friedman, who called Anderson. Anderson then called the school and threatened them with a lawsuit if they disclosed anything about his academic record. Anderson then sent me a letter with the same threats, but in the course of that, verified some of the information I had received. Anderson insisted he had not taken Buskirk’s class but had taken sociology instead.

The upshot of this was no one else would be able to verify the information. Had I not told Whiting and set that chain in motion, better evidence could have been obtained and Anderson’s tale would have been rejected much sooner than it was. I can now mention all this because those who helped me are not in danger of losing their jobs. Yes, I have documentation to back this up, including letters from Buskirk confirming this.

That was premature disclosure.

So, how does this relate to the Roswell slides?

In much the same way.

I first learned of the slides, not from my research partners, but through Rich Reynolds’ UFO Iconoclasts blog. He mentioned the information came from Nick Redfern. While I didn’t believe most of what Rich had published about the slides, especially about some sort of nondisclosure agreement, I emailed Nick about it. Nick suggested that I call him, so I did.

At that point he confirmed what Rich had published. Or, at least, it was what he had been told, including the names of some of those involved. I next checked with my research partners and learned that the information Rich had published was accurate. I just hadn’t been in the loop.

At that point, I suspended work on the slides because others were involved and that nondisclosure agreement bothered me. As much as I wanted to publish here what I knew, I also suspected that the man who owned the slides would think that they had told me. If the man with the slides wanted nondisclosure agreements, it meant that he was serious about this, and if I entered into the investigation uninvited, then he could invoke the agreements. The investigation would end there.

I had learned the name of the man, not from either Don or Tom. I had just enough information about him that it took me about three minutes to find an active telephone number for him. I’m not sure why I bothered with that because I had no intention of calling him. If I did that, he could take his slides and go home. The investigation would have been ended. To me, the end result, that is verifying the provenance of the slides and securing as much data about them as possible was the most important aspect of it. I could stand aside and let the investigation go.

Sure, I had ideas. When I was told that the coding on the edge of the slide film proved that it had been manufactured in 1947, I asked if they knew that the codes were recycled every twenty years, which meant the film could have been manufactured in 1927 or 1967 rather than 1947. I believed that the chemical composition of the film and a proper analysis of the chemicals used in developing the film might be important in dating the film. I wasn’t told if this was being done but have since learned, as has everyone else, that a Kodak official has verified the date… and no, I don’t know how that verification was done. If it is based solely on the dating code, then that doesn’t do much for us.

I didn’t want to wreck the investigation of what could be some of the most important evidence of the Roswell case just so that I could know everything that was going on immediately. I put my trust in Tom who had put his trust in Don. Or, in other words, I believed that when the time came, I would eventually have the information necessary.

The problem for me was that others were being brought in. Tom and Don got permission to ask questions of others but I was left out of the loop. In conversations and emails with various people, I learned a little more, but never anything that wasn’t already out in the UFO community… I suppose a more accurate way was to point out that I was getting corroboration of what I knew as opposed as getting anything from them. I wasn’t actively looking for the information but was getting it as a by-product of other work.

The real point is that there wasn’t much for me to do in the investigation. I made suggestions about what should be done, I harped on the provenance, and on chemical analysis as a way of dating the slides, but I wasn’t being told anything specific… Oh, I wanted to publish but knew that could destroy the working relationship between the source and Tom and Don.

Just over a year ago, this whole thing had a minor detonation. Information got out and people asked me about it. I felt the information was proprietary. Some of the things I knew, I didn’t think should be shared widely because I believed that could damage the work being done. I answered questions by saying that I was not part of the investigation, which was true. I used that to dodge the question so that I didn’t have to lie about it. I wasn’t involved in the investigation and had done no real work beyond the preliminaries when the information first surfaced but that was what everyone else already knew. It wasn’t the exact truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it wasn’t false either. Some took offense at that, the very thing I had attempted to avoid. My statements were misinterpreted and twisted and not what I had said, but that happens quite a bit in the world of the Internet and all too often in the world of the UFO.

The leaks in this weren’t coming from Tom and Don. Nick had learned of all this from a source in Midland, Texas, but it was never clear to me how that source learned about this. Nick had told me, so long ago, that the slides were discovered in a box of slides as a woman was cleaning out a house after the owner had died. The slides were taped to the underside of the top of a box and didn’t seem to be part of the slides filed in the rest of the box. The other slides were of the same era, meaning 1947, which suggested a date, but certainly wasn’t evidence of it.

The name of the woman who had cleaned the house and the name of the now deceased owner were known, but that still didn’t tell anyone who had taken the slides or how they had gotten into that box. There was speculation about who had taken them, but, at that time, no one knew for certain. And there was no way to connect them to Roswell, other than there just couldn’t be that many UFO crashes. It was deduced that they were from Roswell.

As we know from what Tom has said lately the slides were dated as 1947 and that a historian at Kodak verified that. Tom’s specific words were, “It’s 1947 stock. From the emulsions on the image, it’s not something that’s been photo-shopped like today. It’s original 1947 images and it shows an alien who’s been partially dissected lying in a case.”

I can dissect that statement but I wasn’t in the room to ask the specific questions which means that someone probably didn’t ask them. I would have asked had there been a chemical analysis done, which might have provided an accurate date. It is a question that will come up. Yes, the image on the slides is a real image, but that doesn’t mean it was a real alien. I know that the slide holder was from the proper time frame and I know the code could be from 1947 but the code is not definitive.

Tom also said that the creature is “three and a half to four feet tall, the head is almost insect-like. The head has been severed and there’s a partial autopsy. The innards have been removed, and we believe the cadaver has been embalmed, at least at the time this picture was taken."

A question that comes to my mind is how does this affect the Glenn Dennis story. The illustrations that he supplied of what the alien supposed looked like is not insectoid. They more closely resembled the heads described by Betty Hill at one point and the arms and hands look like the Martians from the 1953 War of the Worlds. Does this mean that they now reject the Glenn Dennis testimony? Oh, it wasn’t that strong in the first place because the descriptions he offered were second hand at best.

There is an indication that they have a witness who is over 90 years old who said that the creature on the slides looks like the creatures he saw. Given what I know about Tom, I’m sure that he has verified that this unnamed source was assigned to the base at Roswell in 1947 (or to one of the other commands in the proper time frame) so that he could have seen the creatures recovered there. That would tend to tie the slides to Roswell but that still doesn’t tell us who took them and how they ended up in Midland, Texas.

There are a couple of other points. In the pictures, the alien’s midsection is obscured by a hand lettered sign that could provide some information. Unfortunately it is turned at a sharp angle to the camera so that it can’t be read. Yes, there have been attempts to read it, but it is more obscured than the Ramey Memo.

At the moment, from what I know, there doesn’t seem to be an answer to the question of who took the slides. There is speculation, and even if that speculation is accurate, the man can’t be interviewed because he is long dead. That, I think is going to be a stumbling block.

I will say, however, that this isn’t really an investigation in the scientific arena. Areas of science can be used such as the chemical analysis of the slide stock and the chemicals used to develop the film, but this is actually an historical investigation. Given what is in the hands of Tom and Don, history is a more appropriate arena. The case needs to be put together as historical research with a dash of documentary evidence thrown in and a little bit of scientific analysis.

But the real point here is that premature disclosure could have wrecked the investigation and there wouldn’t be any controversy if some of the information hadn’t leaked too early. That information didn’t come from Tom or Don and I don’t believe they had any reason to disclose what they knew in the very beginning. They had made no public claims about the slides and while there were those who wished to know more, neither Tom nor Don had an obligation to supply that information. In fact there could be legal ramifications if they did.

That situation has changed with the information released at the press conference. Tom announced officially that they had the slides and that some research had been done. Once he did that, then questions that have been asked for the last two years should have been answered. No evidence was offered… it was sort of a presumption of evidence to come. It was “Here is what we have and we will let you know about it soon.”

Tom said that everything would be revealed after the first of the year, but the trouble with that is that he was sitting at the table telling the story now. If he was not prepared to share the evidence, then he shouldn’t have been talking about this in the way he was at the forum where he was. The issue of premature disclosure was over… he had ended it with the announcement.

Oh, I’m willing to wait a few more weeks for the detailed information but if he, and Don, were not prepared to provide it, they should have waited. After all the turmoil over the last eighteen to twenty months, that was what should have been done… But, of course, that wasn’t my call, I had no hand in making the decision, and have no inside information contrary to what some believe.

Alien, Marjorie Fish and Zeta II Reticuli

Here’s an interesting thing. I was watching Alien and in the beginning, after they have been awakened by the computer, they assume they have arrived back home, more or less. Veronica Cartwright, as Lambert, is sitting in front of a computer screen that was probably high tech in the late 1970s but is no longer, and says, “That’s not our system.”

They attempt to contact Antarctica control (which, given this situation, is probably hours away by radio, given the speed of light) and receives no answer. Sigourney Weaver, as Ripley, then says, “That’s not our system.”

Lambert says, “I know that.”

But, and this is the part relevant to us here, she says, “It’s Zeta II Reticuli.”

Of all the systems out there, why pick this one. And, which came first, Marjorie Fish’s discovery about the Betty Hill Star Map, or Alien.

That question is simple to answer. Marjorie Fish. The information was published in 1976 or about three years before Alien was released. Rather than the movie contaminating the search for the stars in Betty Hill’s map, it seems that Fish’s work came first.

And I would venture to say that someone with the production company at some level knew this. They needed the name of a star system and this one was available and easy to pronounce. It was just another one of those little inside jokes that are spread through most movies.

It also shows how deep some of the information about UFOs can penetrate into pop culture. I suspect that most people would pick up on the reference, but some of us did. The fact that it was used at all is the interesting part of this, but proves nothing about the really of Fish’s interpretation of the Star Map…

Oh, and I think it warns us not to go near that star system. Zeta I Reticuli might be safe but certainly not Zeta II.

Geezers vs Youngsters

Back when I was in graduate school and preparing to write my dissertation, I learned that the first thing you did to prepare was make a search of the literature… well, the second thing, after you have figured out what you wanted to research. You looked to see what others had done before you, if someone had already accomplished what you wanted to, and how you might improve on both your idea and what had gone before.

 

 Apparently in UFO research, this is not the case.

I don’t know how many times we must revisit cases that seem to have been solved, that seem to have nothing to do with UFOs, or that are hoaxes. Every five years or so another crop of interested people show up and we begin all over again… and somehow the blame is pushed on the “Geezers.” We just haven’t made the case, whatever the case might be.

 

Take the Allende Letters, that group of correspondence between Carlos Allende or Carl Allen and Morris K. Jessup. Allende/Allen wrote about Jessup’s UFO books. Allende/Allen suggested a knowledge that was based on inside information and personal observation. Part of it was the so-called Philadelphia Experiment in which it is claimed that the US Navy teleported a ship in 1943. Ignore the fact that no documentation has ever surfaced to prove it. Ignore the fact that the allegedly teleported ship’s logs place it elsewhere at the time. Ignore the fact that there is nothing to support this claim except Allende’s allegation.

 

Allende/Allen arrived in Tucson, Arizona in the 1970s, apparently on his way to Mexico for cancer treatment. While in Tucson he met with Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of APRO and signed a statement that the whole Philadelphia Experiment, the letters, and everything else associated with it was a hoax. Allende/Allen said he made it up because Jessup’s writing frightened him and he didn’t want Jessup to write anything more.

 

To me, that admission, by Allende/Allen ends the discussion. It is a hoax. It is an admitted hoax. They guy who started it said it was a hoax. What more do we need?

 

Remember, that was in the 1970s. I even did a magazine article about this in the 1970s. Robert Goerman, a UFO researcher interested in the Allende Letters found Allende’s family who told him, Goerman, that Allende was slightly unhinged… bright but unhinged. There was nothing to the story he told…

 

But then the youngsters enter the field, bringing their “fresh” perspective to it, and we begin again to hear about the value of the Allende Letters. We hear there might be something to them. We hear how they might be the key to solving the UFO mystery… and away we go again, covering the same ground because Allende/Allen’s admission of hoax was forced by the CIA and should therefore be ignored.

 

Or take the latest of the Aztec “re-investigations.” We have a new book that suggests that there might be something to the Aztec UFO crash. Once again, this is a case that should have been relegated to a footnote a long time ago. It is clear that Aztec is a hoax started by a con man, Silas Newton, who is probably laughing his ass off in his grave because there are still people who believe it.

 

Newton told the story to Frank Scully who made fun of it in his newspaper column in 1948, but a couple of years later Scully seemed to have changed his mind and suddenly began to believe the tale. He wrote a book about it that became a bestseller… and then J. P. Cahn wrote an expose about it that should have put the whole thing to rest… but didn’t.

 

In the 1970s Robert Spencer Carr said that he had found five witnesses to the Aztec crash and the case was revitalized… but even the reinvestigation failed to find much in the way of evidence. Carr relied on unidentified witnesses and rumor and we don’t know who his witnesses were or why he accepted what they said. There was nothing new… until the 1980s when William Steinman began his new investigation, “proving” there was something to the crash tale. Of course, Steinman offered little evidence of anything other than he is a fan of garage sales and that he had been to Aztec annoying the locals with his less than gracious manner.

 

But even with all these investigations and the failure to find anything substantial, Aztec is back. We’re told that the proof is now incontrovertible, but it is weak at best. Though we’re told to ignore Newton and his con man buddy Leo GeBauer, they are still tied to the case. We are treated to links between alleged witnesses and the event, but when we look deeper, we find the links broken. There is simply nothing there that hasn’t been discussed before, yet we’re supposed to roll over and accept this new data as if it is proof.

 

I could go on in this vein. We have arguments that maybe the contactees had something important to say, but in reality, they merely cluttered the UFO field with their nonsense making it easier to hide the truth, whatever that truth might be. We hear about great air wars between the aliens and our Air Force, but the evidence doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We have phenomenon, such as crop circles linked to UFOs, but that really should be another field of research…(get it? Field?).

 

True, there are some things that do need to be reexamined. The Majorie Fish Star Map that was based on Betty Hill’s memory needs new work now that we have better information. Some of the stars she used are not where we had thought them to be and she excluded red dwarves because she didn’t think there was anything interesting to be found near them, not to mention there are so many of them. Fish’s work was great when she did it, but it is now badly out of date. Maybe a youngster who plays with computers could do the work in minutes rather than the months it took Fish.

 

The point is that we geezers have something to add, if only it is to direct the youngsters into areas that should be explored. We don’t really need to study the Allende Letters again. We have all we need to know about Aztec, and if Scott Ramsey really spent a half a million dollars on his research, I can think of better areas that he could have explored with that kind of money.

 

So rather than dismiss us all as failures, maybe some should look to what we have learned. It just might save someone a half million dollar mistake; years of research that will go nowhere, or help focus the spotlight on areas that could provide a breakthrough or two.

 

And rather than pit the geezers against the youngsters as some are attempting, maybe we should all work together. Why does it have to be an either or propostion?

The Betty Hill Star Map - Revisited, Again

I was reading an article by John A. Johnson in the latest Sky & Telescope (which suggests something about my eclectic interests) and was struck by his opening comments. He suggested that an alien astronomer searching for Jupiter-like planets would not be inclined to look at our solar system. And, he mentioned that if you were searching for small, rocky planets, then you would be more likely to find those orbiting dwarf stars.

What has this to do with us, you might ask.

Glad you did. See, back in the 1970s Marjorie Fish, in attempting to find the star system from which the abductors of Barney and Betty Hill originated, made a model of our section of the galaxy. She assumed, and I’m not sure that it was a bad assumption at that time, that those aliens’ home world would be close to us, galactically speaking. They probably didn’t come from a world across the galaxy, though when we begin to speak of interstellar flight, we really have nothing on which to base our assumptions. Once you have solved the problems of interstellar travel, the distances, however great, might not mean all that much. We just don’t know.

But I digress...

When Fish put together her model, she ignored the red dwarf stars because there were so many of them in the vicinity of Earth and they probably didn’t have anything interesting going on around them anyway. Astronomic thinking at that time suggested that dwarf stars wouldn’t have planetary systems. We now know there are planets circling many of these stars.

What all this means, simply, is that the Fish model, and the conclusion that some of the aliens originate from Zeta I and Zeta II Reticuli has been superceded by better information. The evidence that suggested this is no longer accurate. Fish needed to include those dwarf stars in her models.

Again, this isn’t a criticism of the work done by Fish. At the time she constructed her models and did her research, she had the best information available. In today’s world we know that some of her basic assumptions were wrong.

And I haven’t even mentioned that the newest star catalogs have revised the distances to some of the stars that she did use and that earlier information has been found to be inaccurate. In other words, some of the stars that she included in her survey are now outside the parameters that Fish set.

This means that we can no longer say, with any degree of certainty, with any degree of confidence, that the Zeta Reticuli system is the home of any alien race. Until this research is redone, we can no longer say that we know where some of the aliens originate. The evidence just is no longer there.

Betty Hill's Star Map

I was reading the National Geographic not all that long ago and was struck by a paragraph in a story about life on other worlds. It suggested that the search for extra solar planets was targeting M class dwarf stars, which, of course, include those known as Red Dwarfs. It mentioned that seven of the ten closet stars to Earth were dwarfs.

Here’s what struck me. I remembered reading about Marjorie Fish, the school teacher and amateur astronomer who had located the area of the sky that Betty Hill seemed to have drawn after seeing a star map on a UFO. Fish built a model (actually a series of models) of our section of the galaxy and viewed them from various angles until she found a pattern that was representative of the star map.

Don’t get me wrong. This was an impressive feat and took years to accomplish. In fact, it wasn’t until some of the star catalogs were updated with new and better information that she was successful.

Here’s where the problem arises. She assumed that the map represented our section of the galaxy, that alien travelers would be interested in stars of the same type as our sun, the travel patterns should make some sense and travel patterns would avoid the largest stars and those that are not on the main sequence (that is, stars that are basically stable for long periods of time and like our sun). These assumptions would become important later.

But others were also searching for the pattern. Charles W. Atterberg found a pattern that had Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi as the base stars rather than Fish’s Zeta 1and Zeta 2 Reticuli. Atterberg’s map also fits with the Hill map, and two of the stars on it Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani were targets by Project Ozma, one of the first of the SETI searchs. In other words, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligences believed that two of the stars in the Atterberg interpretation were likely candidates for planetary systems and intelligent life. Tau Ceti was also one of the candidates on the Fish map.

Suddenly we have two published interpretations of the Betty Hill's star map, both of which make sense (and I haven’t even discussed Betty Hill’s interpretation which was another section of the sky). But Marjorie Fish disagreed with Atterberg. Of the Atterberg interpretation, she noted that he had included some red dwarfs as stars visited by the aliens. She said that she had ruled out red dwarfs because there are so many of them and if she used red dwarfs in a logical construction, then all the lines were used before she reached Earth. She had assumed that the sun would be one of the stars connected to the others on the map although the "leader" of the alien crew had provided no indication that this was true.

She also assumed that if they, the aliens, were interested in red dwarfs, that is, that they visited some, then there should have been lines connecting other red dwarfs but there were not. Her assumption was that one red dwarf would be as interesting to a space faring race as the next. But it could be that some red dwarfs were more interesting because of things we could not see. Because we could detect no difference between one red dwarf and another doesn't mean that there aren't differences.

Fish made those assumptions thirty or forty years ago and they are now invalid. The article in National Geographic suggested that these M Class stars have long periods of stability, longer than those postulated for stars like our sun. While the dwarf stars are smaller, dimmer and cooler than the sun, they do have zones in which the conditions ideal for life as we know it exist and given the discovery of planets around some of these stars, including planets known as "Super– Earths," it is possible that life, including intelligent life, would be found on those planets.

There was also a recent announcement of a Super Earth that has oceans. This planet, thought to be about two and a half times the size of Earth, with a mean temperature higher than that on Earth, suggests that some dwarf stars might hold a great deal of interest for any space faring race. And while all stars that have planets where life is possible might not have life, some of them might and that would certainly make them interesting to space travelers.

What this means, simply, is that the criterion used by Marjorie Fish in her groundbreaking work should be revisited. With computer models available, scanning for the Betty Hill pattern wouldn’t take the years that Fish devoted to her search. We could now look at more stars closer to Earth because we have much better astronomical records and catalogs available. We might find a pattern closer to Earth and that might suggest to some where the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should be concentrated.