'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Dr. Don Donderi

This week, I reached out to Dr. Don Donderi, who has just published a new book on UFOs. He said that it was a sort of primer for those who have become interested in UFOs but have no real knowledge of the subject. It is an introduction to the field and we talked about that for a while. You can, of course, listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/49669598

And for those who are not easily frightened, or who would rather be watching our discussion than listening to it, you can see it here:

https://rumble.com/v13kind-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-don-donderi.html?mref=yqkns&mc=7zk0c

Frankly, I hadn’t realized that Don had been around the field for so long. We did begin with a short discussion of the Roswell case. I, of course, thought it was a topic we should ignore because I’ve covered it on the program more than once. I think Don wanted to engage me in a discussion of the case, but I deflected to points that I thought were more important and would be more interesting to the audience.

I wanted to know when he thought UFOs appeared… meaning when did people begin to notice many things in the sky. That, of course, led to the Great Airship of 1897. I wondered if he had noticed that the airship sightings mirrored the modern era, meaning all the types of UFO sightings we have today were reported at that time. That meant the wave was somewhat predictive of the situation today. I don’t think he understood that the majority of the sightings in 1897 were faked. There were people who approached the crews of the airship and were told all sorts of things. One crew found in Texas said they were on their way to bomb the Spaniards in Cuba. This predictive nature, that came from the hoaxes, is somewhat worrisome to my way of thought, but Don didn’t seem to know much about these sightings other than he seemed to think the majority were legitimate.

The airship that landed in Waterloo, Iowa in 1897, eventually proven to be a hoax.

We did touch of the nature of evidence, or what would be sufficient for most people to accept the idea of alien spacecraft. He believed that there is more than enough including radar sightings which seem to impress him greatly, photographs such as that from McMinnville, Oregon, and, of course, the testimony of so many witnesses. He seemed to be much more receptive of these things that I am. I would like something that leads us to the alien rather than the interpretation of eyewitness testimony that might suggest the alien.

He did mention the cockpit videos that the Navy released (more or less). He thought their pronouncement that they are real meant they were alien. I believe the Navy was just telling us that the recording had been made by the Naval aviators and other sightings were made by Naval personnel. They weren’t saying they were of alien craft, just that the information, the reports, had been made by Naval personnel. Too many have jumped to that conclusion that the Navy confirmed the alien nature of the reports.

We talked about alien abduction and I pointed out that the logistics of the situation were prohibitive. I suggested that by some estimates, more than three million Americans have been abducted and we hadn’t even mentioned people from other countries who claim they were abducted. The numbers are just impossible, especially when you begin to talk about longitudinal studies covering, basically, decades.

He wondered where I had gotten that number, I suppose figuring I had pulled it out of my hip pocket. I mentioned the Roper Poll conducted in the end of the last century. He was quite dismissive of it because he has no idea what the numbers are, but does believe, as David Jacobs does, that the aliens are creating a race of hybrids to take over the planet.

Anyway, as I say, you can listen to all that and decide for yourselves what you think. Next week, I’m going to try something a little different as I fly solo. I’ll be discussing an aspect of the UFO field with visual cut-ins. I’m not sure how well this will work. And in the next weeks I’ll be talking with Philip Mantle and to Michael Shermer. 

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Disclosure First, then Dr. Bruce Maccabee

Dr. Bruce Maccabee was the guest for this week’s show. But before we started, I mentioned that I had just heard the statements made by Christopher Mellon, one-time Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. The statements seemed to suggest, once again, that we are moving closer to Disclosure. He said, “We know UFOs exist. This is no longer an issue. The issue is why are they here? Where are they coming from and what is the technology behind these devices that we are observing?”

This might be the most positive statement made by a former high-ranking

Dr. Bruce Maccabee. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

government official. He would have been in a position to know what was going on. And, as he said, “There is a vital national security issue which I that our sovereignty is being violated by vehicles of unknown origin.”

This was a point that I have made over the years. No matter what they were saying, if people were reporting seeing these unidentified craft, there was a military obligation to investigate them. Didn’t really matter the point of origin. If there were craft out there penetrating our airspace without the proper authorization, then that is a matter of national security. The government could attempt to brush it off as something unimportant, but until they had identified the intruder, they must intercept it. Anything else was a failure to complete the government’s, and in the case the Air Force and Navy’s, responsibility.

Mellon, in fact, said that intercepts, or as he characterized it, “interacting,” was happening on a nearly daily basis.

Dr. Maccabee and I discussed this for a moment, but we didn’t have much more information than that. I had just found the story in the hour or so before the beginning of the program. It was, in the new parlance of the mainstream media, “Developing.”

From there Dr. Maccabee and I talked about the Arnold sighting and the ramifications of it in the world of the UFO. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18118538

We also discussed some of the best of the photographic evidence including the McMinnville photographs from 1950. As Dr. Maccabee mentioned, this really doesn’t take us to the extraterrestrial, meaning simply that while there might not be a solid, terrestrial explanation for the photographs, that doesn’t mean it proves alien visitation. More evidence is required to establish that.

Dr. Maccabee also brought up the 1973 Skylab III sightings by three astronauts. Again, there doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory answer for the sighting. Dr. Maccabee has written a paper about the case at his website that can be found here:

http://burmac.mysite.com/

Next up is Dan Wright who will be filling us in on his book CIA & UFOs. If you have questions, let me know in the comments section and I’ll do my best to get them. We did touch on most of the questions from readings here in this show but given the interview with Mellon, time was a little shorter than usual.

More Thoughts on McMinnville

I find that sometimes, if I pose a question here, someone out there has an answer. I have said for a very long time that there are only two conclusions to be drawn about the pictures taken in McMinnville, Oregon. They either show a craft from another world, or they are a hoax. I do not see a third possibility given the clarity of the photographs, the features of the object, and the state of our research and development of aircraft in 1950.

Philip Klass believed the photographs to be a hoax and research and analysis on the photographs suggested to Robert Sheaffer that the pictures were taken in the morning rather than the evening as claimed and they were taken in a different order than claimed. They believe that if the Trents lied about the time of day when the pictures were taken, then they probably lied about other aspects of the case, and that suggests hoax. If they are correct in their analysis, I would have to agree with them… if they are correct.

In today’s world, is there a way to resolve this?

Yes, but it depends on a couple of things. First, we have to locate the original negatives which I understand are now in the possession of MUFON. If true, all we need is for someone to look at them, which I hope this will inspire them to do.

Second, we have to hope that the negatives were numbered at the time they were developed. As we all know, 35 mm film, for example, is numbered, which would allow us to establish the sequence in which the pictures were taken. This was not a 35 mm camera but one that took a roll of film that was loaded into the camera by hand in a dark room. But if that film had numbers on it, or if the negatives are numbered, then we can determine the sequence in which the pictures were taken.

If we can do that, if there are numbers on the film, we can answer the question but I find nothing on the Internet to suggest that this has been done. I believe it is because most of those who studied the photographs were working from prints or copy negatives and the numbering sequence wasn’t important information during those earlier investigations… or it might just mean they weren’t numbered in which case we’re back to square one.

If they are numbered, however, that will either confirm or refute part of Sheaffer’s analysis by telling us in what order the pictures were taken. If they were taken in the sequence given by the Trents, then it is one more bit of evidence of authenticity. If they were taken in the order that Sheaffer suggested, then it is evidence that the Trents faked the whole thing. Either way, we learn something new about the photographs and that advances our understanding of the situation. I just can’t believe that someone has yet to do this.

(Update: Robert Sheaffer tells me that his original calculations came from prints that Philip Klass had supplied but in 1976 he, and Bruce Maccabee, made a study from the original negatives that Maccabee had retrieved. Sheaffer wrote that he didn’t remember seeing numbers on the negatives and that scans of those prints were available at http://debunker.com/trent.html. This doesn’t completely resolve the issue but suggests that there may be no numbers on the negatives. I have yet to hear from Bruce Maccabee.)

(Update No. 2: I have received information that the film manufactured in the 1960s did not have numbers on it. I will assume from this, that this type of film from 1950 would not have numbers either. It was suggested that if the negatives are matched, meaning that they were usually hand trimmed so that the cuts wouldn't be perfect, it might be possible to deduce the order in which the photographs were taken.)

The Air Force and the McMinnville UFO Photographs

For the last several weeks I have been researching my new book and I stumbled across a bit of information that suggests the Air Force was less than enthusiastic in their investigations of UFOs. I wondered what their conclusion of the McMinnville photographs was. These are the two pictures taken by Paul Trent on May 11, 1950 of a disk-shaped object near his farm in Oregon. I’m not going to debate the merits of the pictures here, merely look at the Air Force response.

According to the Project Blue Book files, they came to no conclusion. In fact, they didn’t bother to investigate the case. Here was a sighting with physical evidence in the form of photographs. Even a cursory look at the pictures tells you that they are either an alien spacecraft or a hoax. There really doesn’t seem to be a third explanation because the pictures are too sharp and crisp to suggest some type of indistinct natural phenomenon or an advanced aircraft of Earthly design. But again, that really is an argument for another day.

These pictures, because of the clarity and because of the foreground detail that allowed analysis, should be of interest to an official investigation attempting to learn all it could about flying saucers. You would think that an organization that was charged with that investigation, would want to, at the very least, look at the pictures. Apparently the Air Force couldn’t be bothered with that because, according to the Blue Book files, this case was “info” only. No investigation, no analysis and no conclusion. If you don’t label the case, then you don’t need to account for it in your statistics and most importantly you can pretend it didn’t happen. There are many UFO sightings that are included in the files that are labeled as “info only.”

But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer a solution if asked about it. In 1965, W. Case wrote to the Air Force:

I have recently acquired some information concerning the sighting and taking of two, (2), photographs of one, (1), unidentified object by Mr. and Mrs. [name redacted but obviously Paul Trent] of McMinnville, Oregon.

The Photographs were taken on May 11, 1950 at the [Trent] farm just outside McMinnville, Oregon.

I would appreciat [sic]  it very much if you would obtain and send to the address listed below information and photographs of other and then such incident [sic].

Overlooking the fact that this guy claims to have information, which should have induced a query about what that information might be, the Air Force was uninterested. Yes, I know that it might have been nothing more than rumor or speculation that added nothing to our knowledge, but what if this guy had found another witness, one independent of the Trents? Wouldn’t that be of interest to the Air Force in their search for the truth?

Apparently, the answer would be, “No.” The response was written by Lieutenant Colonel John P. Spaulding, who was the Chief, Civil Branch, Community Relations Division, Office of Information. He explained:

The Air Force has no information on photographs of an unidentified flying object taken by Mr. & Mrs. [redacted but again quite obviously Paul Trent] of McMinnville, Oregon.

In this regard, it should be noted that all photographs submitted in conjunction with UFO reports have been a misinterpretation of natural or conventional objects. The object in these photographs have a positive identification.

Overlooking the fact that he said they had no information on the photographs; he offered a solution for them anyway. If they had no information, how would he know that the object, singular, in the McMinnville photographs had been identified? And why wouldn’t he have offered that explanation in his letter? Wouldn’t that have carried more weight than his blanket statement that was in error? The Lubbock Lights photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr., have not been positively identified, as but a single example of his misstatement.

The point here is that he said he had no information and then offered information. You either don’t know or you do, but you don’t say you don’t know anything and then refute that in your next paragraph. Yes, he could make the blanket statement about all the photographs are misinterpretations but he then specified these particular photographs. He should have left that last sentence off his reply.

The Trent Photographs Reexamined

Through the years, I have often thought that the Trent photographs have only one of two possible conclusions. They are either of a craft that matched nothing in the inventories of various world air forces, or it was a hoax. It was something from another world or it was faked.

For those who need a little background, the Trents, Paul and Evelyn, photographed a UFO that hovered over their farm near McMinnville, Oregon, on May 11, 1950. According to the story, Evelyn Trent was outside feeding the rabbits when she saw a large, slow moving, disk-shaped object traveling toward the northeast. She yelled for her husband who came out, saw the object and ran back in the house for their camera.

Trent took two pictures of the object. According to witness statements offered years later, he took a picture and then had to manually wind the film to take a second. The UFO began to accelerate at that point.

Evelyn Trent ran back into the house to call her in-laws, who lived a few hundred yards away. Her mother-in-law entered the house to answer the phone but her father-in-law would say that he did see the object but only caught a glimpse of it.

Although they had what might have been the first authentic pictures of a flying saucer, Paul Trent said they waited to finish the roll before having the film developed. If they were excited enough to burn up two frames of film, it would seem that they would want to develop the film quickly given what they had on that film.

Then, once the roll was finished and they had the pictures, they didn’t take them to the newspaper but instead allowed the local banker to put them in the window of the bank. That led, of course, to a reporter seeing them and getting them published in the local newspaper. Once the pictures were published, the Trents found themselves in the national spotlight. Life borrowed the negatives and printed them in the June 26, 1950 issue.

The Condon Committee investigated them in the late 1960s, and found no reason to reject them. The investigator for Condon, William Hartman, wrote, “Two inferences appear to be justified: 1)It is difficult to see any prior motivation for a fabrication of such a story, although after the fact, the witnesses did profit to the extent of a trip to New York; 2) it is unexpected that in this distinctly rural atmosphere, in 1950, one would encounter a fabrication involving sophisticated trick photography (e.g. a carefully retouched print).  The witnesses seemed unaffected by the incident, receiving only occasional inquires.”

So Hartmann, with the Condon Committee thought the pictures were authentic, meaning of some sort of unidentified physical object meaning an alien craft. This annoyed Philip Klass and he launched his own investigation. Klass consulted with Robert Sheaffer, who made his own analysis of the pictures. According to Klass, Sheaffer found a shadow under the eaves of the garage and that suggested that the pictures were taken, not in the evening, but early in the morning. If true, then that would suggest the pictures were faked. There would be no logical reason to lie about the timing unless there were some shenanigans going on.

I was never thrilled with that analysis. It seemed a little esoteric and seemed to be the kind of thing just thrown in by the skeptics to discredit the pictures. Just a little crack in the case, but one that many skeptics found persuasive. I was not in that camp. Others, who studied the pictures, argued that the shadows were not significant.

Sheaffer’s findings, however, when sent on to Hartmann, seemed to be enough for him to reevaluate his stand on the pictures. Klass wrote that Hartmann wrote, “I think Sheaffer’s work removes the McMinnville case from consideration as evidence of disklike [sic] artificial craft.”

In 1965, Lieutenant Colonel John P. Spaulding, responding to an inquiry from a civilian, W. C. Case, wrote, “The Air Force has no information on photographs of an unidentified flying object taken by Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon. In this regard, it should be noted that all photographs submitted in conjunction with UFO reports have been a misrepresentation of natural or conventional objects. The objects in these photographs have a positive identification.”

Which is their way of saying that there is no such thing as UFOs, meaning alien spacecraft. We can interpret the last sentence to say that we know nothing about the Trent photos but they have been positively identified. Or he might have meant that all UFOs in the photos submitted to the Air Force have been positively identified, which is not strictly true. But I digress…

Getting to the real point here, in a posting on his blog, Tony Bragalia (see http://bragalia.blogspot.com/) has provided some evidence for a hoax that is more significant and more persuasive. Tony wrote, “Found clues point to a prank behind the most cherished UFO photographs in history. For over six decades the two images taken by Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon have continued to generate great debate about their authenticity. But investigation now indicates that the two Trent images were likely ones of invention.”

So what did Tony find that convinces him that the Trent photographs are faked? One of the things is “forced perspective,” which allows a photograph to present different objects in the same frame as if they are radically larger or smaller than they really are. Movies use it all the time to fool us into believing a human is giant-sized, or something else is tiny. To make his photograph work, meaning making it seem to show a large object in the distance, Trent was kneeling, rather than standing upright to produce the suggestion that the UFO is large and in the distance.

In a better bit of evidence, a friend of Trent’s wrote, on a copy of the photograph, “Paul I wish I could have been there shooting with you on this day in 1950. If it’s real, then whoa! But if you faked it, that’s even cooler. We can’t really fake stuff anymore. Years later if it’s all fake… or maybe it’s all real. Same difference. Thanks for this though. CM.” CM is not identified.

Tony also wrote, “This placement of photos in the window of a business reminds me of confessed UFO hoaxer and barber Ralph Ditter of Zanesville, OH. Ditter placed his UFO photos up in the window of his barbershop. Ditter too involved his child [See below and how Trent’s son was photographed on a ladder]. His little girl wanted to see a UFO. So Ditter “made one” using a toy wheel and captured it on camera for her.

 “And some say of the Trents that no money was ever sought for the photos. But in reality, in 1970, twenty years later and realizing their accrued value, the Trents insisted on having their negatives back from the McMinnville Register, which held them. According to Register Editor Philip Bladine, the Trents were not shy to note to him that ‘they had never been paid for the negatives and thus wanted them back.’”

It could be argued that the Trents realizing they hadn’t been paid for the negatives some twenty years later is irrelevant. Money, as a motive, didn’t seem to cross their minds until long after the fact and therefore is not a motive to create the hoax if that was the reason for it.

Tony points out that there is a picture of the Trent’s son up on a ladder, in the backyard where the UFO was photographed, and it seems as if he could have been involved in a scheme to create the pictures. Overhead wires seen in other pictures suggest that something could have been hung from them and forced perspective give them the appearance of something large and far away.

Trent told reporters that he did nothing with the pictures until encouraged to do so by friends. He said that he was a little afraid of the photographs because he thought he would get into trouble with the government. This answers one of the questions that has bothered skeptics.

Now, over at UFO Iconoclasts (see http://ufocon.blogspot.com/), there has been some discussion of Tony’s theories, and not everyone is on board. There is an argument that the pictures of the boy on the ladder was not on the film used by Trent, but was taken by a Life photographer sent to take some pictures of the area for the article they would publish.

Tony also wrote, “Kim Trent Spencer, the Trent’s granddaughter, told journalist Kelly Kennedy of the Oregonian something of missed importance- the Trents were repeaters. That is, they had multiple UFO “experiences.”

But this wasn’t something that has been ignored as Tony thought. In my book, Scientific Ufology (Hey, as I read various documents and comments around, I see people promoting their books… Why shouldn’t I?) I noted that the Trents were repeaters. I’m not sure of the significance… True, seeing a UFO would be a rare event but then so would be winning the lottery or being struck by lightning, yet there are people who had won several lottery jackpots and one unlucky man was struck by lightning five times.

So Tony provided some interesting evidence to suggest that the Trend photographs were faked. Debunkers, of course, know they were faked because there is no alien visitation and anything that suggests otherwise is faked. For the youngsters who wish to open new investigations into older cases, this is a good place to start. There are some legitimate questions about the photographs’ authenticity and in a case like this, there is always something new to be learned.

Extraordinary Claims...

Not all that long ago I took on the propaganda phrase “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” I pointed out that it was used when there was no evidence for a particular theory and it is the last defense as a point began to collapse.

Proponents of the extraterrestrial theory for UFOs are not the only ones who had a pet and somewhat meaningless phrase. Debunkers ofter claim that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” They trot this out when it begins to look as if some of the evidence does support the idea of alien visitation. That the evidence isn’t overwhelming isn’t really the point here but this phrase is often used to belittle any solid evidence or ignore it completely.

It can be argued that a claim of alien visitation is extraordinary and to prove it there must be some very persuasive evidence. Two or three, or a dozen people standing around and seeing a light in the sky that seems to move with great speed, maneuver in a way that defies physics as we understand it, and then disappears “like a light being extinguished,” certainly isn’t extraordinary evidence. There are too many other explanations for that sighting including illusion.

In fact, sighting reports in and of themselves will probably never be sufficient to prove alien visitation. Even if those making the observations are classified as “trained observers” meaning scientists, or police officers or military and civilian pilots, or a combination of all three, it is still just a sighting. When everything is examined, the report is still just the observations of those men and women and certainly open to interpretation.

What is needed are observations that are accompanied by other types of evidence. What is needed are chains of evidence independent of one another. A photographic case that is witnessed by several, with radar or other instrumentality involved, and maybe landing traces, or bits of debris that seem to defy an earthly origin would be perfect. What is needed is a scientific study of a case that mirrors that done in the early nineteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Biot. He was the French scientist who put together a study of a fireball that had fallen in France about three weeks before he initiated his investigation and changed the science of the time.

He did interview witnesses about what they had seen. He didn’t reject them simply because they were poor, uneducated, or rural. He didn’t reject them because they were not scientifically trained observers. He took down all the eyewitness accounts that he could.

But he also gathered physical evidence in the form of the rocks that were alleged to have fallen from the sky. Under analysis, he was able to establish that they were unlike the other geological samples from the region and that they had been introduced at some point after a recent survey of the minerals had been completed. They must have arrived as the witnesses claimed. They must have fallen from the sky.

He was able to reverse the scientific thought of the time and convince his colleagues that rocks did fall from the sky. His evidence was not extraordinary. It was eyewitness testimony and an analysis of the rocks that had fallen based on that witness testimony.

In the world of UFO, we begin the fight with the vast distances encountered among the stars. Everyone, it seems, agrees with the idea that there is life out there in the universe somewhere and some of it is intelligent. But then there are those who tell us that even with that, these alien races have not solved the problem of interstellar flight because, if they had, well, they would be here by now.

When we suggest that Earth has been visited, we are told that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and then dismiss everything that has been gathered as if it were not evidence, or, at least does not rise to the level of extraordinary evidence.

Okay, I can stipulate that much of the evidence has been poorly gathered. I can stipulate that the personal belief structures and the biases of those gathering the data come into play. I can even stipulate that many of those who have gathered the data were unfamiliar with the rules of evidence and scientific observation. But I will also note that some of those who complain about those of us who believe aliens have visited have done much to inhibit the gathering of proper data.

What do I mean?

Philip Klass routinely called the employers of witnesses, or investigators, of lecturers and researchers, and told them that their employees believed in alien visitation. He sometimes compared them to communists. He told half-truths about them. He attempted to silence them for reasons I do not now, and have not, understood. He wasn’t arguing evidence but attempting to silence these people through intimidation.

Klass would call venues hosting UFO conferences and suggest these same things, sometimes forcing the venue to be changed at the last minute. Klass, in fact, attempted to inhibit UFO investigation and once accused James McDonald of using government money to chase UFOs. The allegation was untrue but it caused McDonald a great deal of personal anguish and to what end? It didn’t stop the investigations and it might lead to an even more sinister consequence.

Klass wasn’t the only villain in this. The Air Force had a hand in it, though their role was never so outrageous. The official spokesmen, or those at Project Blue Book spokesman, believed the Air Force was wasting resources to investigate UFOs. They paid lip service to the idea of investigation and worked to avoid having to study the question. Documentation has been found that underscores that bit of reality.

How do I know?

The Levelland UFO case is illustrative. Here was a case that might have met this mythical idea of extraordinary evidence if it had been investigated properly at the time. It had multiple chains of evidence with many witnesses found at thirteen separate locations. In many of those locations there were multiple witnesses. There was evidence that the UFO interacted with the environment in a way that could be calibrated. There is even a hint of a landing trace which meant there would be physical evidence of the UFO’s presence. Or, at the very least, indirect evidence.

And what happened?

The Air Force almost called Major Donald Keyhoe, the director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena a liar for what he said about the Levelland UFO reports. Air Force spokesmen said that Keyhoe had claimed nine witnesses but their investigator had found only three. My point in today’s world is that I was able to identify many more showing both the Air Force and Keyhoe were wrong. Both underestimated the number of witnesses but both were too busy arguing this unimportant point to get to the heart of the matter.

Without going into detail about the case, we have sightings by law enforcement officers, travelers, ranchers, and a host of others. They reported that a close approach of the craft stalled their vehicles, dimmed their lights, and filled their radios with static. Not just one or two of these witnesses, but all of them at all the separate locations. All talked about this prior to news coverage and without consultation with witnesses at the widely scattered locations.

But no one was really investigating this case. The Air Force NCO sent in spent a day talking with three witnesses and if a witness did not talk to the Air Force, then that witness did not exist. Even with the suggestion that UFO could suppress the electrical fields around vehicles, the Air Force didn’t pursue the investigation. I would think that the weapon potential would have been obvious to anyone in a military arena and that should have interested them. Today we call that the electromagnetic pulse or EMP.

Don Burleson, a UFO researcher from Roswell, New Mexico, which is some three hours from Levelland, said that about a decade ago he talked to the daughter of the Levelland sheriff. According to that information, the sheriff was more deeply involved than he let on in 1957 and according to her, knew of a burned area on a ranch. Who knows what sort of evidence might, and I stress the might, have been found if properly investigated in 1957? Today this information, while interesting, is useless. We don’t have anything from the sheriff, there is nothing to see there, and we’re dealing with, at best second hand information. We’re only forty or forty-five years too late.

But here was a chance to learn something important. Here was a chance to pursue those multiple chains of evidence. Here was a chance to gather, within hours of the event, the observations of those involved. Here was a chance, a possible chance, to gather physical evidence. And in the end, it was lost because of a disbelief by those in charge of the Air Force investigation and a fight over how many witnesses there really were.

It is possible that the extraordinary evidence might have been gathered at this point. We don’t know because no one actually attempted to gather it at the time.

There are other cases that present these sorts of opportunities. The McMinnville pictures of 1950 show some sort of object that is not of obvious origin. There are the photographs that are available for analysis. There is the witness testimony. There are not a horde of witnesses, but there were two known and a possibility of a couple of others. This seems to be a case that is either of something not of terrestrial manufacture or it is a hoax. Maybe not extraordinary evidence but certainly interesting evidence suggestive of something that borders on the extraordinary.

There are the Washington National UFO sightings from July 1952. The Air Force eventually claimed that they were the result of temperature inversions over Washington, D.C. But there were sightings by civilian pilots, by military pilots, by witnesses on the ground, and importantly, radars. In one case, radars at three separate locations showed the objects. Multiple chains of evidence that suggested something extraordinary, but a case that was labeled quickly and forgotten.

My point here, however, is that each time we suggest a case has some interesting elements, we are reminded that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I suspect, however, that if we produced an alien ship, there would be those who would believe that we whipped it up in a lab just to prove our point. There are people who argue that no man has ever walked on the moon. There are those who deny everything and base their denials on personal belief rather than evidence review.

But trotting out the argument doesn’t really provide much of an answer. It is a fall back position that allows the user to take what he or she believes to be the scientific high ground, and reject everything that is offered. Nothing will ever meet this arbitrary standard of extraordinary evidence. No matter what is offered, it will not be extraordinary enough. Just as some say, “Absence of evidence,” we have those at the opposite end of the spectrum saying, “Extraordinary claims...”

I merely suggest that we not allow ourselves to be diverted by propaganda such as this. Yes, we must improve our methodology, yes we must improve our techniques, and no, we really don’t need more sighting reports. What we must do is gather the evidence in a professional manner and present it in a professional manner. Once we do that, we can get away from the propaganda machine and just maybe learn a thing or two.

Disclosure Poll

The results are in and not too surprising. More than half of the voters in this unscientific poll believed that Disclosure wouldn’t happen for years (that is 54 of the respondents or 56%).

The next large bloc of votes (24 and 25%) thought there would be Disclosure, but it wasn’t coming soon. That means that more than three-quarters of the respondents don’t believe in Disclosure anytime soon.

Fewer than ten voters (9 and 9%) thought that Disclosure was at hand. I don’t know why they’d believe this, given the history of this phenomenon. It’s been around, in the public consciousness for more than sixty years and at times it seems we are no closer to a resolution than we were at the very beginning.

And the smallest group ( 8 and 8%) think Disclosure is coming soon. That’s a fairly vague term and is, of course, my fault. I should have defined what I meant by soon... which is sometime in about a year or so.

All this means is that the majority of us have no faith in the government coming clean about UFOs. The majority of us realize that the status quo is going to remain, well, the same...

Unless some outside force acts. By this I mean that the aliens land to tell the world they are here. In the world of secrecy you do not say that which you know to be classified to those not cleared to hear it, even if the secret is out and everyone knows it. You are still required to keep it a secret. This explains why sometimes you hear a government employee denying something that we all know is true. We are not cleared and he is going to obey the law about the disclosure of classified information.

But once the aliens land further confirmation of their presence will not be required. We’ll all know the truth. Until then, we will continue to argue alien visitation. We will cite proof which the debunkers will reject based not so much on evidence as on their belief that aliens couldn’t reach here from there. The distances in space are too vast... and they will reject the proof available because they know there is no alien visitation and if there is no alien visitation there can be no proof.

And yes, this is a little bit more supportive of the ETH than I wanted, but sometimes I just get tired of the arguments. Donald Menzel says that the Lubbock Lights photographs are a hoax because there is no other answer except ETH... Phil Klass rejected McMinnville because it was either alien or a hoax and since there are no aliens, it must be a hoax.

Disclosure is a different matter. There were those, in the 1950s, who believed the government was preparing us for Disclosure with the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Others believed, in 1977, Disclosure was at hand with the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the world today, there isn’t that sort of movie tradition, though science fiction films that deal with alien invasion, alien visitation and alien reality do very well at the box office (It’s amazing to me that the Oscars have not recognized how well science fiction does with everyone but the pretentious voters who claim they don’t watch science fiction, but I digress).

This survey says that most don’t believe Disclosure is near and that is my attitude as well. Back in the mid-1990s we came close, with the massing of evidence about the Roswell case and the general interest in UFOs, but the opportunity was lost. The big propaganda machine was able to divert attention and provide explanations for Roswell... It made no difference that those explanations didn’t fit the facts as long as there was an explanation and the news media, who are too sophisticated to believe in alien visitation was right there to promote the message (Don Schmitt and I, at one point in the mid-1990s were at a major Chicago newspaper (No, not the Sun-Times) for a scheduled interview. We were met by an intern who told us that she had the assignment because her editors didn’t believe in UFOs... let’s not check the facts, let’s just make sure that our belief structure is kept intact... but I digress again.)

So, barring some extraordinary event outside the capability of the government to control, there will be no Disclosure. Those on the outside think that throwing rocks at the glass house of UFO secrecy will eventually work. Unfortunately, the glass is bullet proof and the rocks bounce off.

UFOs and the Negative

The other day I was reading something and it told me that scientists ignore us because we attack the problem of UFOs from the negative. In other words, we say that there is alien visitation because five percent of the sightings remain unidentified. You simply can’t get to the extraterrestrial from that direction.

While I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with the underlying premise. I don’t believe I have ever suggested we must have alien visitors because X-number of sightings remain unexplained. I have always approached this from the positive. There are some sighting events that suggest alien visitation because of the evidence gathered.

As one example, let’s look, briefly, at the photographs taken by Paul Trent in May 1950. There are two possible explanations, given the clarity of the photographs and the story told by Trent and his wife. The pictures either show an unknown craft of a type not flown on Earth, or the pictures have been faked. There is no third possibility.

This case provides us with two chains of evidence. First is the witness testimony about what they saw. The second is what can be deduced from the photograph. They can be considered independently and they can either support or undermine one another. Is there something that can be observed in the pictures that suggest the witnesses are lying? Some skeptics will say yes. Some UFO investigators will say they are not.

As I have mentioned before I also think of the Levelland sightings of November 2, 1957as good, positive evidence. Here we have, at least, three chains of evidence. Of course there is eyewitness testimony from witnesses in thirteen separate locations who were not aware that anyone else had reported the UFO.

The second chain is one that his hotly disputed and this is the reports of the UFO affecting the electrical systems of the various vehicles. Somehow, the approach of the UFO, according to the witnesses, caused engines to fail, lights to dim and radios to fill with static. The UFO was interacting with the environment in what is now known as electromagnetic effects.

Skeptics will tell you that the Condon Committee attempted to suppress the electrical systems of cars using the most powerful magnets available and they failed... which tells us a number of things. The magnets weren’t powerful enough or those electromagnetic effects are something other than just powerful magnetic fields, and the witnesses, without consultation with one another invented this rather interesting detail in an amazing coincidence.

There was the possibility of a third chain of evidence and this is one that Don Burleson discovered some forty-three years after the event. Apparently, there was a landing that left markings on the ground. This was investigated by the sheriff at the time, but he was told not to mention it. Burleson learned about it by talking to the relatives of the sheriff. Of course, forty-three years after the fact is the same as no evidence at all in this specific case.

What all this means that an amazing series of sightings, if investigated properly when they happened, might have provided some clues about the nature of UFO sightings. The problem is the agendas of various organizations, the Air Force, NICAP, APRO, the news media, got in the way. Everyone was looking to prove his or her point and the evidence didn’t matter all that much.

I could go on. Take the Tremonton film from 1952. A Navy officer filmed some objects in the sky in Utah. There are no foreground details. Just the white lights in the sky (frame of the film seen here). The officer, Delbert Newhouse, said that he had seen the objects at closer range and they had a definite shape. The Air Force and others rejected that testimony, writing the case off as birds. But here is an intriguing case in which some of the evidence is ignored because it simply doesn’t fit with the offered solution.

And I could point out, as I have before, that Ted Philips has catalogued some 4000 landing trace cases. What would have been the result if the academic community had spent the time attempting to learn something from these landing traces? We would be having a different conversation.

Or take the Washington Nationals in which there were observers on the ground, observers in commercial airliners, fighter pilots (seen here with their aircraft), and the objects watched on radar sets... and at one time, three different sets at three different locations. Multiple witnesses with various levels of training and instrumentality involved in the corroboration. What is one of those on the ground had thought to take pictures, or what if one of those fighters had been equipped with gun cameras? What might we have learned? Another opportunity lost.

My point here, however, is that I haven’t argued the reality of UFOs from the negative, meaning that X-number of sightings are unidentified. I argue from the positive. Here is the evidence. Let’s look at it carefully and see where it leads us. The criticism, then, that we somehow, unfairly, reach our conclusions, based on a negative premise, is disproved. Now, let’s see where the positive evidence takes us... something to explore at another time.

Bad Astronomy and Phil Plait, Part Two

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame strikes again. This time, rather than making a pronouncement that is not backed up by facts, he raises a couple points that are worth examining because I am nothing if not reasonable.

He wrote, "What do I count as evidence? Hard, physical data. Not eyewitness reports (because even the most highly-credentialed person in the world can misidentify something, or not understand what they are seeing, or may suffer from an episode, or decide to lie, or just be simply wrong)."

Fair enough. He wants "hard physical data" and not creepy eyewitness statements, so I will ignore the highly-qualified, technically-oriented people who have reported UFOs. I will ignore the statistic that tells us that the higher the educational level and the longer the object, thing, light was observed, the less likely it would be identified in the mundane, which is, of course, the opposite of what the skeptics would tell us. No eyewitness testimony... well, not much, anyway.

And yes, I’m aware of all the problems associated with eyewitness testimony. I would think, however, a multiple witness sighting, with those witnesses separated by miles and independently reporting the same thing would go a long way to providing some strong, if not hard, evidence.

Yes, you always want examples and here I’ll refer to the Levelland, Texas sightings of November 2, 1957 with witnesses in thirteen locations reporting an object close to the ground that interfered with the electrical systems of cars, stalling engines, causing radio stations to fade and lights to dim until the object moved away and disappeared.

The Air Force investigated but only found three witnesses and to the Air Force, if they didn’t talk to the witnesses, then they simply didn’t exist. The Air Force attributed the sightings to thunderstorms in the area, though the storms were over when the sightings began.

In the end, we are left only with the statements of the witnesses, even though the object interacted with the environment, we only have the testimony of the witnesses to that. We have the witnesses making their reports prior to any media suggestion, and the reports match, generally, but in the end, we have only eyewitness testimony and Phil Plait said he didn’t want to hear it.

He also said, "Not fuzzy photos."

Again, fair enough. I will point out here that while about 99% of the UFO pictures were taken by teenaged boys and 99% of those are faked, there are some very good pictures out there and they weren’t taken by teenaged boys.

Here I think of the pictures taken by Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon on May 11, 1950 (seen here). According to their story, Evelyn Trent had been out feeding the rabbits when she spotted a slow moving saucer-shaped object coming from the northeast. She alerted her husband, who came out, saw the object and rushed back inside to grab a camera.

Trent took a picture, advanced the film manually (in those pre-motor driven or digital days) and took a second. Before the object disappeared, Paul Trent’s father glimpsed it.

Now, in what Phil Klass, the late UFO skeptic found strange, the Trents did not immediately have the film developed but waited to finish the roll. Trent did, eventually mention the sighting to his banker, Frank Wortman, who got the pictures for a display in the bank window, which lead to a newspaper interview, and eventual national interest.

The Condon Committee examined the photographs as part of their alleged scientific study. Dr. William Hartmann did the analysis and in the report wrote, "...it is unlikely that a sophisticated ‘optical fabrication’ was performed. The negatives have not been tampered with."

Okay, so Hartmann is telling us that the object in the photograph is real in the sense that it is not some kind of optical trick and he is telling us that the negatives have not been altered. What you see on the film is what was in the sky. He sees nothing to suggest trickery at this point.

His conclusion is, "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot by said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such of the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication."

For a report that suggested there was nothing to these UFOs, this conclusion seems to strongly indicate otherwise. But, of course, that’s not the point here. We just needed to find a sharp photograph (seen here).

The debunkers, and here I’m thinking again of Phil Klass and Robert Sheaffer, know that there is no visitation and therefore any evidence offered to the contrary must be in error. Klass, in his UFOs Explained and Sheaffer in his The UFO Verdict Examining the Evidence claim to have found proof of fraud. Klass claims that the shadows, underneath the eaves of the garage are too dark and given the orientation of the garage proves that the photographs were taken, not in the evening, but in the morning, and if this is true, then they were taken in the reverse order. Case solved and evidence dismissed.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist who worked for the Navy, and is a believer in UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, disputed this claim. He said that the shadows were due to random light scattering and based this on the clouds in the photograph. He said the shadows were not strong enough for Klass’ claim.

Two problems for Klass. He never explained the motive for saying the pictures were taken in the evening, if they were morning shots and he couldn’t get around the unsophisticated nature of the Trents. Not a single person ever expressed any doubts about the Trent’s sincerity and no one ever suggested they would have been able to fake a photograph using a 1950 box camera.

Of course, I could say to Phil Plait, I don’t want to see fuzzy photos of extra solar planets and I don’t want to hear about some esoteric wobble in the star that tells me there is something orbiting it. I want some hard evidence that these things exist and not theoretical constructs, but that would be splitting hairs.

I could say the same thing to palaeontologists who give me pictures of what dinosaurs looked like based on some bones. I could say how do you end up with a hunting strategy used by predators based on bones... and by the way, explain fossilization so that it makes some sense in the real world rather than this idea that minerals in the soil replace the structure of the bone. Real evidence and not just theory. But I digress...

Phil Plait also said, "Not fuzzy video."

Okay, how about 16 mm color film? Here I move onto shaky ground but only because the film is of two bright white lights moving across Great Falls, Montana in the middle of the day in the summer of 1950.

Nick Mariana, the manager of a minor league baseball team had gone to the field to check it out when he saw two bright objects in the sky (seen here over Great Falls). He ran back to his car, retrieved his 16 mm movie camera and made a short, color film of them as they crossed the sky, flew behind a water tower and then disappeared.

The sighting was also witnessed by Virginia Raunig, Mariana’s secretary. She told investigators she had seen "two silvery balls." Mariana said they had a definite disk shape and he thought they were about fifty feet across and about three or four feet thick.

Quite naturally the Air Force investigated the film and just as naturally, they thought the objects were two F-94 jets that might have been in the area at the time. Sunlight from the fuselage washed out the other details. Mariana and Raunig said they had seen the jets in another part of the sky.

Ed Ruppelt, the chief of the Air Force investigation in 1952, when the film was reexamined reported, "We drew a blank on the Montana Movie - it was an unknown."

Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, had looked at it in 1955, reported that if the objects had been the jets, given all the information he had, they would have been identifiable as jets on the film. He ran experiments using a similar camera and filmed objects at various distances to reach his conclusions. He reaffirmed them in 1972.

Quite naturally, the Condon Committee wanted to study the film (blow up of objects seen here), after it had been examined by other experts. Dr. Hartmann wrote, "Past investigations have left airplanes as the principal working hypothesis. The data at hand indicate that while it strains credibility to suppose these were airplanes, the possibility nonetheless cannot be entirely ruled out."

Depending on the exact date of the sighting, there might have been two airplanes in the area. Hartmann wrote, "Assuming the 15 August date was the correct date, Air Force investigators found that there were two F-94 jets in the vicinity and that they landed only minutes after the sighting, which could well have put them in circling path around Maelstrom AFB [Great Falls], only three miles ESE of the baseball park. However, Witness I [Mariana] reported seeing the two planes coming in for a landing behind him immediately following the filming... thereby accounting for those aircraft."

Yes, yes, these are points of light, but they are on film and clearly Mariana didn’t have the equipment or expertise to fake something like that, especially in 1950. He also said that the Air Force had removed the thirty-frames from the film and in those frames you could see the disk shape. The Air Force said that they had removed a single frame because the sprockets were broken and they just wanted to repair it.

I could mention the Trementon, Utah film made in 1952 by a Navy warrant officer, but again, it’s just bright lights in the daytime sky. The warrant officer said that he had seen the disk shape as the objects had passed over his car, but by the time he got his 16 mm camera out of the car the objects had moved off and only the bright glow showed against the bright blue sky.

Phil Plait said, "I want hard, physical data. I want an alien on the White House lawn. I want a piece of metal with clearly non-terrestrial isotope ratios of components, or be composed of some currently non-discovered element. I want some piece of predictive evidence — a map of an alien world that can eventually be verified, or an alien-given advance in physics that can later be verified with the LHC or some other cutting-edge technology. And nothing vague like ‘a unified field theory exists’; it has to be definite and precise, so that there is no controversy."

How about instrumentation with visual confirmation? In other words, radar sightings along with both commercial and military pilot observation?

In July 1952, radars at the Washington National Airport showed numerous blips. Air Traffic Controllers, when they asked pilots for visual confirmation received it. Radars at other locations confirmed the sightings as well, and jet interceptors, vectored into the area also saw the objects. In one case the fighter was surrounded by the objects before he was able to break away.

The Air Force said that the sightings on radar were the result of temperature inversions over Washington, D.C. at the time, but were unable to explain the visual sightings or why the radars in different locations, and different scopes had the same objects on them. Weather experts said that the inversion layers were not strong enough to create the blips and besides, the Air Traffic Controllers were familiar with blips created by the inversion layers (yes, I know that the inversion level bends the radar beam giving a false echo but that just didn’t fit the flow of my sentence).

The Air Force wrote off the sightings as weather related, but independent analysis by atmospheric experts suggest they overreached for the explanation. The Air Force abhorred an "unidentified" sighting which is why so many in their study were marked as "Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis." It wasn’t explained, but then, it wasn’t unidentified either. About 40% of their sightings were marked as "Insufficient." Condon, by the way, had about 30% as unidentified which doesn’t include the sighting identified "as a natural phenomenon that it has never been seen before or since," but which is never identified.

Phil Plait then asked, "Do you think this is too demanding? I have news for you: you’re asking me to believe in something that will revolutionize all of human existence. I think demanding some actual evidence for such a thing is not only not too much to ask, but is to be demanded."

As a note to Phil Plait, no, I don’t think this is too demanding. Yes, we’re asking you to accept the idea that we have been visited. No, not nearly as often as has been reported by some, but often enough to get noticed and certainly often enough to leave some of the evidence you require. The only question left is will you look at it all, believer and skeptic, or will you just assume that the skeptical information is somehow more accurate than that assembled by those on the other side of the fence? When the opening premise is that there has been no visitation and therefore anything that suggests visitation is in error, you are not going to learn much of anything.

This means that the skeptics have obscured the truth, provided ridiculous explanations and written off cases as hoaxes when they have absolutely no evidence of hoax.

You want an example?


Sure. The Lubbock Lights photographs (seen here). True, they show indistinct blobs of light, but they are flying in a "V" formation. Carl Hart, Jr., who took the pictures in 1951 said that he didn’t know what they were then and when I interviewed him in the 1990s, he said the same thing. He didn’t know what he had photographed.





Dr. Donald H. Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who attacked all things UFOlogical suggested, at first, the lights were mirages, but mirages don’t fly in "V" formations. He then said, without a shred of evidence to support it, that the photographs of the lights were a hoax. Not exactly the scientific method in action. Besides, if they weren’t a hoax, then Menzel had no scientific explanation for them, but since we all know that there is no visitation, it must be a hoax.

So, I suppose all we need to know now is if this brief survey of some of the evidence is of sufficient strength to create a desire to learn more by Phil Plait, or will we just hear more reasons to ignore it. True, I’m not talking about aliens on the White House lawn or pieces of debris with strange isotopic ratios, but I am providing cases where the UFO interacted with the environment, pictures that was not fuzzy objects and movie footage from the early 1950s that have been examined by some of the leading experts. The best they can do is suggest hoax, often without a shred of evidence to suggest hoax because the only other explanation can’t be right. If McMinnville, if Great Falls, if Levelland were not hoaxes, then just what were they.