'X' zone Broadcast Network - Jen Stein on Travis Walton

 

This week’s guest was Jennifer Stein, who is responsible for the documentary, Travis, about, what else, the Travis Walton abduction. This came about because of things that Mike Rogers had said, not only on this program, but what he said to others. In one case, Rogers had said that the whole thing was a hoax, only to retract that statement, in a matter of speaking not long after making it. I had reached out to various colleagues to solicit opinions on this, and ended up speaking with Stein. I thought she would make an interesting counter to some of what Rogers had said. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/46966498

One of the things we discussed was the Steven Pierce tale that Philip Klass had offered him, that is Pierce, ten thousand dollars to admit to the hoax. You’ll remember just a couple of weeks ago I talked to Robert Sheaffer about that. Sheaffer

had said that he’d read a transcript of the conversations between Klass and Pierce and it seemed that no such offer had been made. It was just some sort of a misunderstanding because of a rumor allegedly started by Rogers. I hadn’t seen the transcripts at that time but Sheaffer was sure that his interpretation was the correct one. Stein wasn’t so sure. I have added the transcripts at the end of this post for those who wish to read them can do so. I’ll be interested in what each of you thinks, having listened to the show and seen the transcripts.

But I also have to mention that there may have been communication from Klass to Pierce through the local police department. So, when Klass mentions they had never met or talked with one another, that was the truth. Once again, we have a conflict about what happened, when it happened and how it happened. It really comes down do who you wish to believe about all this.

I also mentioned that I had no trust in James Harder, having worked with him in 1976 on an abduction investigation. I saw Harder manipulating the situation between the recorded hypnotic regression sessions. He provided the script in the guise of attempting to provide comfort to the witness. He mentioned to me that his job was to validate the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case by finding another, credible case. I would have thought that his job was to find the truth.

He provided information between the sessions that appeared in the next session. He mentioned to the witness that Betty Hill thought she had been physically examined and in the very next session with the witness, the witness said that she knew she had been examined. Stein pointed out that Harder had but one session with Walton and there really had been no opportunity for him to influence Walton’s memories of the event. Stein thought the session was more of a relaxation exercise because, for Walton, the abduction was quite stressful. In other words, Harder’s part of the story was small and probably unimportant.

For those interested, you can visit Jen Stein’s website about Travis, the documentary she produced here:

TravisWaltonTheMovie.com

And for those interested in the Virtual Conference that will be held on November 6, you can find information about it here:

TheObservation.com

Next week, I’ll talking with Nick Redfern about his latest book, Time Travel. And the following week, for those of you who don’t think I was fair when I interviewed Bob Young, I’ll be chatting with Stan Gordon. We’ll get his take on all this, meaning the Kecksburg UFO crash. Stan had been investigating the case for decades.

Click on the document to expand... Klass' transcript of his telephone conversation with Steve Pierce.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Kathleen Marden

 

This week I chatted with Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill. Kathleen has taken the lead in abduction and experiencer research in recent years. We, of course, talked about the Hill abduction before moving off into the larger field with other, more plentiful players. You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/45236351

Kathleen mentioned that there was new evidence in the Hill abduction. Betty Hill’s dress, the one she had been wearing that night, was reexamined. Small blood stains, found on the back, belonged to spiders. I’m just not sure how that would have happened and certainly has no relevance to the abduction.

Kathleen Marden

Stains on the front, in the area that would have covered the abdomen, had DNA on it, but not blood. I’m still not certain how this is evidence of the abduction because I would expect Betty Hill’s DNA to be in all sorts of locations on the dress. Kathleen seemed to believe that the discovery was significant.

One of the things that has interested me for a long time was the star map that Betty Hill had drawn. Marjorie Fish had done an analysis many years ago identifying Zeta I and Zeta II Reticuli as the source of, at least, some of the alien ships. Given the changes in our knowledge, I wondered if some of the information used by Fish hadn’t been updated. Kathleen mentioned that an Astro-physicist had done an update and found that Fish was close to right. However, that Astro-physicist also suggested two other stars as the possible source… but I don’t have the names. I will also mention that it is clear that the scientist was a woman because Kathleen kept saying, “Her,” but wouldn’t supply a name.

We moved onto the larger issue of alien abduction. Kathleen talked about a major study with several hundred participants. We discussed the test results. I was looking for a commonality of traits. Were there too many left-handed people involved? Was there a prevalence of one blood type over another? Characteristics that were not readily visible to the unaided eye. Seems that there are some. Kathleen mentioned migraine headaches, for example. I wondered if the headaches were the cause of the belief in abduction if they were the result of an abduction.

Toward the end, I asked about physical evidence. Apparently, there is a tape of an encounter, which Kathleen describes in detail. She will be showing the tape and stills from it at an upcoming conference in Michigan. I confess that I would like to see it, because, from the description, there is very little that suggests a hoax or misidentification, but without seeing it, I just can’t be sure… and no, I’m not going to mention the Roswell slides here (oops, I just did).

Next week is Nick Redfern. We’ll be talking about his latest book and I’ll sneak a few plugs in for my latest.

Coast to Coast - Calvin Parker

 

Those of you who visit here regularly know that I’m not a big fan of tales of alien abduction. I believe that the solution for most cases is based here on Earth and that some of the investigation has been less than stellar. I do think that if there are alien abductions, I believe they would be targets of opportunity rather than some sort of longitudinal study conducted over years or decades. As I have said to Kathleen Marden, I’m more inclined to accept the tales told by Barney and Betty Hill, Travis Walton, and Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker.

For those interested, I have interviewed Calvin Parker of Pascagoula fame, a couple of times on the radio version of A Different Perspective. You can listen to those interviews here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/03/x-zone-broadcast-network-calvin-parker.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/07/x-zone-broadcast-network-calvin-parker.html

Like many others, I have always been somewhat skeptical of single witness reports, or in the case of Hickson-Parker, two guys telling the same story from the same point of view. That means they were together and there didn’t seem to be any corroborating witnesses. In the case of the latest investigation by Philip Mantle, it seems that additional witnesses have

Calvin Parker

been uncovered, and Calvin and I talked about that in the second link listed above.

But now, however, their seems to be some additional corroboration. Rather than witnesses who appeared nearly fifty years after the fact, there is a document found by Mantle that was written literally hours after the abduction took place. Mantle wrote:

After the book was published [Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story by Calvin Parker] … I continued my search for any formal documentation related to the incident as any that had been in the possession of Calvin Parker had been washed away by hurricane Katrina. I contacted all of the major UFO groups one of which included the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in the USA. They were very obliging and sent me a PDF file of what they had on the case. Most of what they sent was newspaper cuttings but buried in the middle of this file was a very curious and possible ‘smoking gun’ type-written document.

Although this document, dated 13^th of October 1973, just two days after the alien encounter, is unsigned it was written by Dr. James Harder. We know it was written by Dr. Harder as he was the only person to examine the witnesses which has been confirmed by Calvin Parker. Dr. James Harder’s academic credentials are as follows: BS (Caltech), MS, Ph.D., (U.C. Berkeley). He is a Fellow, AAAS; Life Member, ASCE; and Founding Member, Society for Scientific Exploration. Professor Emeritus, U.C. Berkeley. He was also a director of the UFO research group APRO.

Dr. Harder along with Dr J. Allen Hynek were on site in Pascagoula within 36 hours of the event happening. They interviewed Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson and at a press conference confirmed that they believed what the witnesses were saying.

It is important, in attempting to understand, the relevance of the document, to read first, what Calvin had to say about it:

At the time of my abduction on October 11^th, 1973   when the alien reached out to take me on board the ship. From the first time I saw them it was the fear I felt that is hard to describe. I just knew I would not live through this fear. As the alien made contact to my left arm, I heard a whisk of what I thought was air then all at once I got became really relaxed then all the fear was gone. Later on, after being examined by Dr. James Harder I heard him telling Dr Hynek that I had a puncture marks on my arm and later at the hospital I found out that I was given not one shot but two shots the second was while I was on board the craft. This document simply confirms what I have always known and that is both Charlie and I were given injections by these creatures and we had the puncture wounds to prove it.

Rather than me type in what is found on the document, the best course is to provide the document itself so that you can read it here.

Document found by Philip Mantle.

 Although the provenance of the document is not rock solid, the fact that it came from CUFOS and was among Hynek’s papers is relevant. It’s not as if the document appeared from an unknown location in the mail box of a UFO researcher. It does have a certainly level of credibility attached to it.

However, it would have been more powerful had it been signed by Dr. James Harder, and given what is known, it is reasonable to believe that Harder was the author. Given what is known, given the date of the document, it does provide us with some corroboration for the event told by Calvin Parker. It is up to each of us to decide what weight to give to it.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - David Halperin

I had the opportunity to talk with David Halperin about his new book, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO. It is a somewhat skeptical treatise on the subject of UFOs, bringing it, you might

David Halperin

say, down to Earth. It is a new way of looking at UFOs, suggesting the subject is deserving of serious research, but that the emphasis has been all wrong. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/23845786

The discussion was somewhat wide ranging. I had been going to ask him about the Socorro UFO landing which he mentions in his book, but he brought it up first. Contrary to what we all might have expected, he has no explanation for what Police Officer Lonnie Zamora witnessed in April 1964. Given that the case doesn’t boil down to just Zamora’s observations but has physical evidence in the form of landing traces, there is no good explanation other than Zamora hoaxed the whole thing. The problem is, of course, that others reported the UFO in the sky prior to Zamora seeing the landing, and there is no evidence that Zamora hoaxed anything. I explored the case in depth in Encounter in the Desert.

We talked, briefly, about UFO abductions and the Barney and Betty Hill case. As most know, I’m a bit skeptical about these alleged longitudinal studies which require a huge logistical supply line that would span interstellar space. On the other hand, if there are alien abductions, then it would seem that the Hill abduction, which was more of a target of opportunity than a planned abduction, is a more likely scenario.

David also mentioned a sighting that I had investigated in which I found a solution but noticed the discrepancy between the statements of the two witnesses. This was the sighting from Mount Vernon, Iowa, that took place decades ago. You can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/04/sighting-report-november-17-1975.html

Finally, we got around to Project Mogul, which David brought up in his book. I had thought he was going to defend the idea but actually is bothered by some of the evidence suggesting that Mogul is not the answer. He liked the symmetry of the answer, but feared that it simply didn’t work. For those interested in an analysis of Mogul and some of the counter arguments, you can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/04/truth-about-mogul.html

In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking with Curt Collins about the Cash-Landrum sighting and Jan Harzan, the executive director of MUFON. If you have questions for either guest, post it in the comments section and I’ll get it asked during the interview.   

Betty Hill and Alien Books

I am in something of a quandary. For those who had read Reflections of a UFO investigator, you know that I interviewed Carroll Wayne Watts about his encounters with, shall I say it? Men from Mars. It was clear that Watts had a limited imagination. He suggested that the space traveling aliens used paper maps, when an electronic survey would have been much better… Just look at what we can do with our satellites, spy planes and aerial photography. His descriptions seemed to be drawn from 1950s science fiction movies rather than a tour of an advanced, alien spacecraft.

Where am I going with this?

For an upcoming interview, I have been reviewing the Hill abduction. As those of you who follow this blog, you know I’m more than a little skeptical of the Star Map that Betty Hill drew. There are four different interpretations of it, with the Fish model suggesting the Zeta Reticuli double star system as the leading contender. You can read about that elsewhere on this blog.

Alien from "Hocus Pocus and
Frisby."

You might also remember that I have suggested that the illustration of the aliens that Barney provided is reminiscent of the aliens shown on the Twilight Zone episode, “Hocus Pocus and Frisby.” Betty had asked Barney at one point if he had been watching the Twilight Zone, though she said that she had never seen the program herself.

And, let’s not forget that in The Interrupted Journey, she described the aliens, saying, “Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante’s. (page 298 in the hardback edition).” Her later descriptions are somewhat different.  

Just so that I can again be accused of being an “abduction propagandist,” I noticed something else in one of the sessions that Betty had with Dr. Benjamin Simon. She was describing her talk (telepathic communication?) with one of the aliens. She wanted something for a souvenir, to help validate her

Jimmy Durante

story. He seemed agreeable and she looked around for something. She said, “…there wasn’t much around – but on a cabinet there was a book, a fairly big book. So I put my hand on the book and I said, ‘Could I have this?’ And he told me to look in the book and I did. It had pages, it had writing, but nothing like I had ever seen before. It looked almost like a – I don’t know – it wasn’t a dictionary – maybe a – it had the – the writing didn’t go across, it went up and down (page 172).”

I’m thinking now, “A book? With pages? A book made of paper and writing that she would later suggest looked like Japanese.” And while I understand that it looked Japanese but certainly wasn’t, I’m wondering now why they would have a book at all. I can’t tell you the last time I actually bought a book that was printed on paper. I now get them digitally, on my iPad. I have dozens of them that I can haul around easily and they take up no real space… and that would be something important on a spacecraft. Saving space and weight. A data retrieval system that is virtually weightless and doesn’t take up space would be ideal. I certainly wouldn’t want to carry around any books.

I have a one terabyte external hard drive. I mention this because, on it, I have the Project Blue Book files. I have the vast majority of the more than 12,000 cases (though I have found a few minor gaps) and thousands of pages of administrative files. On that same hard drive, I have most of The A.P.R.O Bulletins, CUFOS IUR, NICAP’s UFO Investigator and the MUFON Journal beginning with the issues known as SKYLOOK. It also holds several dozen UFO books, including the manuscript versions of many of my own.

The point is that the hard drive is only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes but not as thick. I can slip it into my pocket and carry to conferences, if the mood moves me. No matter where I am, I have access to a huge amount of data that not so long ago, would have been difficult to review.

To make this worse, and as I have said many times, my cell phone is more powerful than Star Trek’s communicator. I have access to all of human knowledge through the Internet. True, I have to ask for the right information, and sometimes there is a fee to access it, but it’s all there, in my cell phone which is even smaller than that external hard drive that I just mentioned.

Back in the 1960s, when Dr. Simon was treating the Hills and John Fuller was writing his book, no one thought in terms of digitally stored data. Having a book, and something that might have been a paper star chart (or some other flexible material that was rolled up) didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Astronauts, pilots and nearly everyone else thought of data retrieval in terms of something printed. But today, with my desk covered with electronic devices that give me access to so much information, I have to wonder why a spacefaring race would deal with books and paper. When Betty talked about a book in the 1960s, no one thought about that being unusual. Today, well, you have to wonder.

Is this a major problem with the Hill abduction? Nah. It’s just something that struck me as I was reading parts of Fuller’s book. Everything we need is available digitally with no need for ink and paper. There are schools that no longer teach cursive because that is now an obsolete form of communication.

And all that just makes me wonder about that book just laying around on that cabinet in an alien ship. Wouldn’t everything be available digitally? Wouldn’t they have advanced beyond pen and paper? Would they be carrying books? Did they even use it if they are telepathic… but that’s a question for another time.

Project Blue Book Episode 9 - The Hill Abduction (Almost)

I suppose the only thing to say about this latest episode is that it was really annoying. It was based, loosely, on the Hill abduction in 1961. Yes, we had the black man abducted, but his wife was also black and not abducted. Given the time frame of the episode, that is sometime in the late 1940s or the early 1950s, with laws still forbidding interracial marriages in some states, this might be a nod to keeping the time frame accurate… except they have violated that rule a number of times.

Anyway, the black man was abducted by alien creatures and the terms abducted and aliens were bandied about with no thought that such terminology was certainly not in use in the time frame of the story. He had called the Air Force to ask for help, but Quinn, it seems,

Captain Quinn

had blown him off. In the early 1950s this case would certainly have been ignored given the incredible nature of it.

The man finally bursts into the Blue Book office where Quinn and Hynek are having an argument about Hynek’s resignation. Hynek wants to take his research files while Quinn, in civilian clothes, tells him the files belong to the Air Force. Before they can resolve this dilemma, the man, armed with a .45, bursts in and demands they listen to him.

Meanwhile, the Soviet spies are attempting to compromise the Hynek’s wife so that Hynek will give them information about his investigations, though, given the time frame, I’m not sure what the agents expected. The female spy convinces Mimi to get drunk so that they can take compromising photographs of her.

We do get to learn a little about the abduction, as Hynek interviews the guy. He has a paper with dots all over it and in what can only be described as an impossible deduction, Hynek recognizes the star field, but says that it’s reversed, as if looking at it from a point in space on the opposite side from that we see on Earth… Ah, an oblique reference to the Betty Hill star map.

I won’t say anything about the military response to the locked office and the rifle shot through the window. Or the fist fight between Hynek and Quinn. Really, Hynek? In a fist fight? I don’t think so.

So, let’s talk about the Hill abduction case. The Hill abduction took place in 1961, but the Air Force really didn’t take notice of it then. Betty Hill, rather than contacting the Air Force, wrote to

Donald Keyhoe

Donald Keyhoe at NICAP, which, given the Air Force attitude at the time, and Keyhoe’s prominence in the UFO field, makes sense… Unfortunately, it also sort of contaminates the case.

The only case that I can find in the Blue Book files that references the Hill sighting is from Lincoln, New Hampshire on September 20, 1961. The Blue Book index shows the radar sighting as insufficient data and the accompanying visual sighting as insufficient data, meaning there is no solution, but that the evidence isn’t all that strong either. Neither of these have anything to do with the Hill abduction.

The visual sighting was of a cigar-shaped object that was described as a band of light. The witnesses said that wings seemed to appear on the main body. They were “V” shaped with red lights on the ends. It would change directions abruptly and disappeared to the north.

On the project card, under “comments,” it was noted that the weather might be a factor in both the visual and radar sightings. It was reported that a strong inversion layer covered the area. They thought that an advertising search light playing off the clouds might be the cause of the visual sighting, but that seems unlikely. The Air Force concluded that there was no evidence that the objects were caused by anything other than natural phenomena, though they didn’t really identify any of those phenomena.

Other than weather records, the file contained a letter from Colonel Eric deJonckheere (who would appear in the Zamora case in 1964) which referenced the Hill abduction. He noted that Barney Hill had been investigated by officers from Pease Air Force Base and the case is carried as insufficient. This, I think, is a reference to the Lincoln, New Hampshire, case because deJonckheere’s letter is in that file.

Later in the file, there are parts of a magazine article, written by John Fuller, that chronicles some of the Hill abduction. The article is incomplete.

The points of interest here are the suggestion that the Hill abduction was investigated by officers from Pease, but I found nothing in the Blue Book file to confirm this other than deJonckheere’s letter.

As usual, he mentioned inconsistencies in the sighting report and that Jupiter seemed to be visible near the location of the sighting. He wrote that the sighting lasted about an hour and that Jupiter was in the approximate location of the craft and set about the time the object disappeared. He wrote the same thing that appeared on the project card which is that there was no evidence that the sighting was due to anything other than natural causes.

The one thing I do want to talk about is the star map that Betty Hill seemed to remember in a dream. It had a number of random points with lines connecting some of them. These have been called “trade routes,” which indicates alien interest in those specific points.

I have discussed this in past blogs which can be read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/09/hill-star-map-badly-out-of-date.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-hillfish-star-map-revisited.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/12/betty-hills-star-map.htm

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/11/alien-marjorie-fish-and-zeta-ii-reticuli.html

and finally, here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/04/betty-hill-star-map-revisited-again.html

If you don’t wish to wade through all that, then let me reduce it without all the supporting information. Marjorie Fish created a number of 3D models of our section of the galaxy so that she might search for a pattern in the stars that matched that on Hill’s star map. She used the best information available to her, which has been revised over the years so that the distances to some of the stars are farther away and others are closer. She did not use any red dwarf stars in her models because there were too many of then and there wouldn’t be anything of interest circling them. If the aliens traveled to one, they should travel to them all. Or so she concluded.

This is not to mention that there are four other interpretations of the star map out there, including one that suggests the map represented not stars but planets in our own solar system. The Zeta I, Zeta II Reticuli interpretation seems to have gained the greatest popularity, but given the flaws in the Fish models, I believe that this should be revisited using computers rather than 3D models.

The point here is that one of the best bits of evidence for the reality of the Hill abduction is somewhat flawed (and no, this isn’t the only point that argues against a real event), we should be careful in our acceptance of this particular abduction.

On a person note, when I was investigating the abduction of Pat Roach, I was working with Dr. James Harder. He was conducting the hypnotic regression sessions. But he told me that he wanted to find something that would validate the Hill abduction. He wanted another case that mirrored the Hills because as second report, from an unrelated abduction, would strengthen the Hill case. What I saw during those sessions, and what I have learned about hypnosis, suggested that Harder contaminated the Roach abduction by his techniques. I firmly believe, given the research that I have done personally including my interviews with the principals, is that Roach experienced an episode of sleep paralysis… Harder managed to introduce elements of the Hill abduction into those hypnotic regression sessions. I don’t believe he realized what he was doing at the time.

All this was laid out in the book, The Abduction Enigma, which was published more than twenty years ago.

I mention these things as a way of, well, discussing the abduction enigma and some of the problems with the research. I also mention it to suggest there are terrestrial explanations for some of the abduction reports.

I will note that the writers of the Project Blue Book show seem to have done their research. They interject elements from the real cases into the plots, even if those points are subtlety made. Little things that many wouldn’t notice, such as the racial identity of the man who said he was abducted. Or the star map reference which here was even more obscure.

However, they seem to be drifting more into the realm of science fiction (though I don’t really object to that) and away from the reality of what can be found in the Blue Book files. Next week they are going to be tackling the Washington Nationals and if the previews are any indication, they’re going to move from intercepts without real conflict into intercepts in which the fighters fire on the “lights.” It’ll be interesting to see where they go with that.