UFOs: Extraterrestrial? Probably Not…

There’s the nature of the entities themselves: they practically overemphasize who, or what, they claim to be. Take, for example, all those “soil-sampling” aliens of the 1950s and 1960s. You know the ones: someone is working in their field, or driving down a stretch of road, when they encounter a couple of diminutive aliens collecting specimens of local plants, flowers, and vegetables. ET on a scientific mission, right? No, not in my view.

We only have to take a careful look at such cases (and there are more than a few on record – here’s a link to a number of classic cases) to see that these “incidents” are clearly stage-managed. It’s a game, a scenario that has nothing to do with real soil-sampling, but everything to do with trying to emphasize the ET meme. Are we to believe that, time and time again, aliens are so stupid that they can’t collect a few of those aforementioned samples without having their cover blown? Of course, they could easily avoid us! But, here’s the deal: they want to be seen. It’s not an accident. It’s carefully planned. And it’s designed to plant an image of “ET scientists” in the mind(s) of the witness(es).

It’s much the same with the way in which – in both Contactee and Abductee cases – the aliens aren’t just keen to tell us which planet, star-system, or galaxy, they’re from. They’re more than a bit too keen to do so. Once it was Venus and Mars. Then, it wasZeta Reticuli. Or is it the Pleiades? The problem is not so much where they claim to come from. Rather, it’s their eager insistence on letting us know where they’re from – and time and again. There’s another issue, too. Over the decades, we have allegedly been visited by long-haired Space Brothers, stacked Space-Babes, black-eyed and large-headed dwarfs, bipedal reptiles, praying mantis-type creatures, and…well…the list goes on and on. But, they all seem perfectly comfortable with the Earth’s gravity, temperature, oxygen levels, etc. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?

And there’s also the fact that many UFO encounters are far more visionary in nature than of a “nuts-and-bolts” type. Tales of Contactees heading out to isolated and desert-based locations, and meeting very human-like entities, abound. They’re not at all unlike multiple accounts that one can find in numerous religions. In fact, they’re near-identical. Lives are radically changed, and people find themselves on new paths. Gods, angels, demons, the “little people,” and – today – aliens: it’s all one and the same. A force that we presently don’t understand and which impacts upon us – and manifests before us – in a fashion that is relevant to the people of the particular era in question.

Of course, there’s nothing new about all (or any) of this: it mirrors the work of the likes of Terence McKenna, Jacques Vallee, and the aforementioned John Keel. I don’t fullydeny the ET angle of the UFO controversy. Maybe, they really are just inept plant collectors. But, I can say for sure that, every year, my views that we are dealing with something much stranger than ET grow stronger. Inter-dimensional? Time-Travelers? An ancient terrestrial race that exists alongside us? I don’t know. But, ET? Probably not. The main reason: the phenomenon works too hard to come across as alien. As McKenna said: “We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.”

 TAGS: John Keel, space-brothers, UFOs

Unidentified Flying Objects: The Great Deception

The subject of UFOs presents us with quite an enigma. It deals with ambiguities, in a world where certainties are not just the norm; they are requisite. Otherwise, there is little seriousness to be afforded something that, while seemingly tangible within the context of a body of data purporting to offer good evidence, remains so inescapably odd and downright unreal.

In the past, I have devoted a good bit of time to the assessment of “what a UFO is,” though honestly, there are times where I begin to question whether they can be easily defined at all. To illustrate this, the most common idea about UFOs present today addresses the subject through a lens of unreality, in which strange objects in the skies are taken to be alien spaceships. A host of conspiracy theories (yes, conspiracy theories) exist that offer “evidence” of this: crash landings in the American southwestern deserts, purported extraterrestrial assessment teams like the so-called “MJ-12”, and hosts of reports from proclaimed abductees who discuss their interactions with Star Guests that literally point to where in the universe they hail from.

Who knows. For all you or I may be able to discern, any (or all) of the above may be true. However, there appears to be so little hard evidence to substantiate such claims, despite years and years of collective research by the UFO community, that at times the silence begins to seem damning.

To be clear, my best assessment of the subject is that there is a phenomenon, though it remains ambiguous, and no conclusive data seems to exist that clearly, irrevocably indicates that the sole source is extraterrestrial visitation. My colleague Nick Redfern (who, as I write this, will soon be en route to the location where I’m staying here in Texas, for a coffee and a chat about all this), also wrote about this recently at MU, noting the way his ideas and attitudes have changed over the decades, carrying him along from a once-believer in ET or alien UFOs, to his present position as one who, like the late John Keel, thinks UFOs may be “something masquerading as aliens.”

Interestingly, the UFOs (or their occupants, if they have any) may not be the ones hiding behind the extraterrestrial meme at all. It very well could be that while some kind of phenomenon does exist, our perception of an “alien” origin is our very own creation, rather than something that is intentionally presented to for purpose of misdirection.

I nonetheless think Keel was fairly close with his assessment. It may be that Nick and I would agree on many points, or that we may not, as far as any “final conclusions” go. But I think that it is telling that so many researchers who have looked seriously at this phenomenon over the years begin to move further from the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH), which at one time had seemed the most likely conclusion.

Back in the mid to late 1980s, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee had begun to express serious doubts about an extraterrestrial component underlying the UFO phenomenon. His five primary arguments against the ETH were as follows:

1. Unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth
2. the humanoid body structure of the alleged “aliens” is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel
3. the reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race
4. the extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded human history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon
5. the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives

One may, for sake of argument, dispute Vallee’s assessments, just as I have (despite essentially sharing his views). One reason for this is because, if we are to make a scientific argument, we must be careful to check for whether it is falsifiable. While UFO incidents seem to exceed the amount required for an alien survey of our planet, who knows what kinds of scientific motivations, and hence what other requirements, an “alien survey” might call for? Also, with no comparison as far as life on other planets, can we be sure that extraterrestrials would not possess features very similar to humans? We could go on, but the fundamental point remains that virtually any argument presented about UFOs could be debated… while I could continue the exercise of deconstructing Vallee’s analysis here, seemingly lending support to the ETH, I will nonetheless point out again that the ETH can be deconstructed just as simply; we are left with nothing that is truly conclusive about the phenomenon at the end of the day.

For the modern skeptic, this lack of clarity on the subject is roughly equivalent to no subject at all, rather than an apparent phenomenon that remains ambiguous. In likelihood, if there is anything more to UFOs than a cultural belief system and/or a social movement built around the idea, the first step toward understanding what they may be is to start thinking outside the box.

Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence, as is so often said; but maybe it’s time that a bit of ordinary thinking should be applied to the subject, rather than going to such lengths to “prove” something extraordinary, when it may be very different in the end.

 TAGS: extraterrestrial, John Keel, nick redfern, ufo

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UFOs: How Do We Study An Ever-Changing Phenomenon?

Are UFOs real, and do they represent any form of tangible phenomenon? Or are UFOs merely an idea, representative of some vestige within our collective memories of a social movement, built around paranoia and international concerns following the Second World War?

To the UFO advocate, the notion that unidentified flying objects could be anything but physical, tangible aircraft would seem laughable. And yet, among the many questions we face in our study of the phenomenon, one is particularly troubling: if the UFO subject represents a single, consistent “alien” phenomenon, then why has it changed so frequently over the decades?

This question was paraphrased to me recently during a correspondence with Jason Bradley, a skeptically-minded colleague of mine. “You have discussed the idea that maybe abduction stories share some similarities between some of the other rash of paranormal claims, like the cult terror in the 70’s and 80’s,” Jason said. “I have always maintained that something glaring about the UFO phenomena is that it’s always followed patterns. Saucers to cigars, cigars to triangles, triangles to lights and so on. I’ve always found this concept interesting, and can’t think of a moment when it’s been addressed. To me this is one of those situations that belies a possible cultural and meme like experience. Ultimately tracking those patterns may help us understand where the psychological component plays into this.”

Mirroring Jason’s ideas presented above, in the past I have similarly discussed the notion that certain trends do appear to emerge, especially within memes presented in UFO literature. However, it is difficult to argue that any definite or distinct lineage emerges from these; in other words, the idea of “saucers to cigars, cigars to triangles,” and the like may not be the most accurate representation of the UFO phenomenon as it has progressed over the years. Nonetheless, there are periods of change that begin appear when looking a bit further back, which thus help to place the “modern” UFO phenomenon of the last few decades into a broader cultural context.

For instance, beginning in the 1890s we can note the prevalence of reports that involve “mystery airships”, which began to appear in many American newspapers (there are, however, similar stories that appeared elsewhere, including parts of South America, as well as Australia, around this same time). Modern UFO historians view the airship craze as a sort of “cultural predecessor” to the modern UFO phenomenon, and it is indeed interesting to note the way that such “UFOs” didn’t appear to resemble saucers, cigars, or triangles of any sort; they represented aircraft that were remarkably similar to those appearing in fiction at that time, namely the work of authors like Jules Verne. Similar to such books and stories, the prevailing theories about the origins of the mystery airships had involved some intrepid inventor who, according to many rumors, was believed to be based somewhere in California, and had managed to construct an impressive new flying machine, which he kept secret from the public. 

Not to be entirely dismissive of the purported “airships” of the 1800s, my article “Airships in the 1800s: An Odd History of Aerial Phenomena” discusses a number of crude airships that were, as a matter of historical fact, actually built in California throughout the later 1800s. The most compelling of them all was (or rather, would have been) that built by a Dr. Charles Abbot Smith of San Francisco, an inventor who had garnered a large amount of publicity for his airship operation beginning in early 1896. It remains unclear whether Smith’s airship was ever able to fly, although historians Timothy Parrot and Michael Busby have been among those who have argued for the existence, and successful flight, of such a craft.

Interestingly, if one weighs the actual historical basis of the “airship craze” of the 1890s against the modern UFO era beginning in 1947, there is little similarity to be found. The most credible among the classic airship stories, ranging from inventors who actually did succeed in building crude airships, to the more far-out tales of aircraft actually observed in the sky, still seem to deal with a very earthly technology. Yes, there were some fanciful newspaper accounts that tell of the operators aboard these craft being “visitors from space”, but these were the likely concoctions of area “liars clubs”, or the occasional journalist writing on a day when legitimate news was lacking (such hoaxes were especially common during this period, and among the most famous were two penned by none other than Mark Twain).

These tales of “airships”, however, when compared with the flying saucers that would emerge after the Second World War, indeed seemed to be the stuff of very different worlds. And despite this, the early reports of “saucers” often bore little or no resemblance to any kind of disc-shaped craft at all, as I noted here of Kenneth Arnold’s famous encounter from the summer of 1947. In truth, reports of “cigar-shaped” objects preceded the era of saucers by at least a year, with the numerous reports of cigars and torpedo-like objects referred to as “ghost rockets” which purportedly swarmed the skies above Scandinavia in the summer of 1946. Similar American reports, such as that described by Captain Jack Puckett of Strategic Air Command in the summer of 1946, also predated Arnold’s sighting by several months.

Throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, UFOs would appear to take every shape imaginable: some were discs, while others were rounded spheres or eggs; some were cylinders, some shaped like footballs, and some were literally described as resembling “floating houses”. By the late 80s or early 90s, reports began to emerge of odd triangle-shaped aircraft that behaved, if anything, more like blimps; like their predecessors in the 1890s, these objects first appeared mostly over California, with subsequent reports occurring in numerous other locales. In particular a “wave” of triangle-shaped UFOs were reportedly seen over Belgium during the early 1990s.

Many have opined that these modern “triangles”, rather than being some exotic alien craft, are likely to be a variety of stealth aircraft employed by the U.S. military. The benefit of a large aircraft of this sort might include the large amount of material stock or rations it could transport over a long distance in a single stop; however, the size might also be attributable, more simply, to the amount of lift required to get an object like that off the ground, again presuming that they are something akin to blimps or dirigibles.

Coming back to the notion of “trends” that emerge in UFO literature, while it may be debatable whether there are indeed “patterns” that can be attributed with any conclusiveness, it would indeed be appropriate to note the apparent changes the phenomenon seems to have undergone in decades past. Close encounters with UFO occupants were, throughout the 1950s, largely comprised of credulous-sounding occurrences espoused by individuals who, along with retelling their encounters, were equally interested in promoting their involvement in the burgeoning UFO field, and capitalizing on it if possible. Hence, stories like that of George Adamski and his meetings with “Orthon” described, rather mundanely, encounters with an “alien” that was indistinguishable from any other man… apart from his telepathic powers, and unique mode of transportation through space. However, by the early 1970s, stories of UFO contact experiences were beginning to take on a much darker tone: the abductees now told of encounters with diminutive, emotionless humanoids, replete with bug-like eyes and other insect-like features, who were focused almost solely on brief examinations of their captives.

By the 1990s, the bulk of UFO related books focused on the apparent occupants of these presumed spacecraft, as featured in the written work of authors like Budd Hopkins and others. However, today those operating within the field of UFO studies have seemed to shift focus back toward the objects themselves, rather than having such preoccupation with “beings” seen in relation to UFO encounters. And yet, even the reports of objects seen in the skies have seemingly diminished; this decline in noteworthy UFO reports is, as I have observed elsewhere, interesting for a number of reasons. It has also led a number of commentators (including those found here, here,here, and here) to believe the field of UFO research may “changing” to such an extent that it is literally dying altogether.

Looking back, an interesting trend that does emerge, rather than being related to memes present elsewhere within the field of UFOlogy, is the apparent similarity between UFO abduction cases and other, unrelated phenomena. Namely, the descriptions of hallucinatory environments described by psychedelic “experiencers”, such as those featured in the written work of researchers like Rick Strassman, M.D., come to mind. In equal measure, we find such similarities in the Satanic ritual abuse panics of the 1980s, in which horrific torture and memories of abuse are recovered through hypnosis; again, the similarities emerge in more recent claims of “super-soldiers” who argue that their memories, recovered through hypnosis, seem to indicate their secret work as a government operative, memories of which were suppressed by utilizing advanced mind control technologies.

If we look further back in the last century, hypnotic regressions have similarly facilitated belief that some may have experienced encounters with highly advanced technologies and alien environments in other ways: namely through perceived “past lives”, during which the experiencers claim to remember lives in places like the lost city of Atlantis, asdescribed by Edgar Cayce, among others.

What can be made of all this, and how might our recognition of these apparent changes or “trends” help us to reevaluate some areas of the modern study of UFOs? Perhaps, at the heart of the matter, it is still a question of how the human mind perceives UFOs, and what beliefs — whether or not founded in reality — may be built around valid observations of strange aerial objects that are collected over time.

To conclude with a final anecdote, it was the late Fortean researcher John Keel who had often reminded us that “belief is the enemy”. Much as Keel suggested, perhaps it is our belief in UFOs that informs us the most about the subject… rather than what the phenomenon itself may actually represent.

 TAGS: Kenneth Arnold, mystery airship, ufo

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Was J. Allen Hynek Secretly Involved in U.S. Air Force Misinformation?

As far as the scientific study of unidentified flying objects in the 20th century goes, few names would stand out in the minds of UFO researchers, past and present, like that of J. Allen Hynek.

Hynek served as the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force and its UFO study program, Project Blue Book, throughout the 1950s and 60s. Later, with the formation of the Center for UFO Studies, Hynek would go on to become one of the leading proponents of the idea that the UFO mystery represents a real and valid phenomenon, capable of scientific study, and the possible rewards that might result from such studies.

With his salutary place in the history of UFO research, it was of little surprise that while reviewing a copy of Greg Bishop’s new book, It Defies Language: Essays on UFOs and Other Weirdness, Hynek’s name came up early in the book, in a section where the author was discussing the sad affair that involved Paul Bennewitz in the 1980s (this, of course, is a subject Greg Bishop knows all too well, having written a fine book on the subject called Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth). 

However, what Greg had to say was indeed rather disturbing, rather than presenting the usual kind of “sunny” perspectives on the life of one of the most visible UFOlogists of the last century.

Greg writes:

“In 1980, Paul Bennewitz was trying to figure out what he was hearing on his home–built radio receiver, with its antenna array pointed at the Kirkland Air Force Base and the NSA’s coded microburst tests. With his knowledge of electronics, he was just beginning to figure out what was zipping into his DIY master control maze, which it almost filled his den and was starting to spill into the bedroom. His home-built computers and software were reeling off a frightening array of alien transmissions. Because of his special relationship with the Air Force, he told them what he was picking up, and what he thought it was.”

The story Greg begins to outline here is a pretty familiar one in UFO circles, having been previously outlined in the aforementioned Project Beta. The short version of the story here is that the Air Force got antsy about what Bennewitz had managed to uncover, but rather than spilling the beans and warning him that this was classified information, a dodgy misinformation campaign began against Bennewitz, with the objective of scrambling the information so that, rather than hiding it altogether, Bennewitz would continue to obtain new data, and with the help of the Air Force, misinterpret it horribly.

Greg continues:

“To this and, an unnamed computer scientist was hired to write a program specifically for Bennewitz. Instead of words like “telemetry,” “range,” and “target,” others were substituted. The same signals would now spit out things like “aliens,” “Home planet,” and “death ray.” Now, the whole thing needed to be delivered to Bennewitz’s doorstep.”

This is where things get really strange, however. In 1982, UFO researcher Bill Moore would be in attendance at a MUFON annual symposium, the same year J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies had been there lecturing. According to Bishop, Moore told him that while talking with Hynek over drinks at the bar that year, Hynek admitted to having presented the “bogus” computer setup to Bennewitz, describing it as one of the last “official” actions he carried out during his tenure with the USAF.

This is unsettling data, to say the least, and it suggests a number of things about Hynek and his work. These range from Hynek apparently being complicit with one of the most infamous and well-known Air Force misinformation campaigns against the UFO community, as well as questions raised in relation to just how much official work he may have continued to carry out for the U.S. government after his tenure with the Air Force.

Greg Bishop at the grave of Paul Bennewitz (photo courtesy of Nick Redfern)

“If true,” Greg notes of the incident, “this throws new light on the sort of dealings that some major ufologists may go through in order to keep a line of communication (however tainted) open to authorities who can push the right buttons and make the right calls when they are needed.”

And in hindsight, maybe it bolsters some of the suspicions many in the UFO community have had over the years, especially as it pertains to the long-held concern that those in government — no matter how benign their individual intentions — may nonetheless serve as some part of a broader apparatus that does not want the public to know the full truth about UFOs.

 TAGS: Greg Bishop, It Defies Language, Paul Bennewitz, Project Beta

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