• Now That We've Trashed the Roswell Incident, We Take On a Much Easier Target - The Alleged Landing at Aztec, N.M.
• Miscellaneous Ravings
• Books to Keep Your Bonfire Burning Brightly
• Tidbits of Trash
• Letters From Those Few Who Sometimes Still Use "Snail Mail"

The excuse for the festival is quite blatantly the success of the Roswell 50th anniversary bash last summer, which your "Smear" editor attended. The trouble is that everyone admits that there is much less evidence for the Aztec crash; in fact, there are few if any old-timers there who remember anything happening at all! Folks, it's a pure money deal! When asked why they chose the May 25th date over the more probable March 25th date, a local promoter replied, "We're saying May 25th because it works for us." Tourists are more likely to come in May.

The alleged Aztec landing was first mentioned by Hollywood humorist Frank Scully in his column in "Variety" in 1949, and later in his 1950 best-selling book "Behind the Flying Saucers". This and other similar tales in the book were later exposed in True Magazine. Interestingly, the town of Roswell is not even mentioned in the Scully book.

In the early 1950s, your editor met and had long interviews with Scully and with Silas Newton, one of two men who fed Scully his false information. These meetings will be detailed in our forthcoming book, "Shockingly Close to the Truth:", co-authored with Karl Pflock.

The Aztec story was pretty much morgotten thereafter until it was revived In 1974 by a semi-retired professor named Robert Spencer Carr, who discussed this alleged landing in numerous public lectures and interviews. He claimed to have received his original information from having seen an advance copy of Scully's book manuscript in 1950. Yet, he told many of the details of the story quite differently than Scully did!

Much of the information for this present article comes from an interesting paper written in 1975 by a researcher named Mike McClellan, who interviewed Carr and many others. McClellan was not favorably impressed with the over-all evidence for an Aztec UFO crash.

In 1984 your "Smear" editor, together with two friends, interviewed Carr at his luxurious retirement house in Clearwater, Florida. By that time Carr had quieted down about Aztec, but was claiming that spaceships frequently landed on the water right in front of his oceanfront home, and that the occupants came inside the house to chat with him. Few people knew about this story, as he only told it privately. He asked us to promise not to print it until after his death, and we kept our promise.

In 1986 the Aztec story was again revived, this time in a 600 page privately-published book called "UFO Crash at Aztec". The co-authors were William Steinman and Wendelle Stevens, both of whom we know and thoroughly mistrust in regard to their objectivity.

A nurse who accompanied us at our 1984 Carr interview, felt that he was hallucinating because of a specific physical disability. However, the more likely answer came from Carr's son, who contacted us by mail shortly after his father's death, about 1996. In essence the son said that his father had a lifetime habit of making up stories in order to get attention and to be more interesting. This indeed seems to have been the case.

Our thanks to Karl Pflock, Mike Mcclellan and Matt Graeber for the information herein. (See also "Smear" Vol. 44, No. 8)

• Here's an update on our item in the last "Smear" about the revival of APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), a group which was founded way back in 1952 by Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who spent their later years in Tucson, Arizona. Someone named William Heft, who calls himself "Bill of APRO", now claims to have recently revived the original group. Nonsense!

  Says Bill, "After the passing of Jim and Coral Lorenzen, two things happened: The Tucson group closed shop, and the Phoenix group did not. We just moved back to Jim and Coral's home area, near Chicago, just after Coral passed away."

  What on earth does that have to do with it? The fact is that Heft does not have the APRO files! Thus there is no continuity whatever. In addition, the new APRO intends to wear dark uniforms (like Men in Black?) and carry badges. It sounds to us like some childish ufological game! (Our thanks to Bill Jones of Mid Ohio Research Associates for this item.)

• Here's something that ties in nicely with our review of the book "The Great UFO Hoax", further along in this issue: The item is an article from the April 9th Albuquerque Tribune, and it has a headline that reads: "Funeral Director Says Area 51 is Proving Ground for Weapons to be Used against U.S. Citizens". The funeral director, named Norio Hayakawa, is quoted as saying "I believe the UFO phenomenon is a brilliantly concocted scheme by the government to conceal certain types of military weapons in development at `Area 51'". Hayakawa is calling for a mass gathering along Groom Lake Road, at the boundary of the base, at 6 a.m. on June 6th. This is the sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month - 666, the sign of the Beast! We really don't understand what 666 has to do with it, but the purpose of the demonstration is to show public distrust of this big government cover-up.

• Around May 5th there was a heated debate on the Internet between researchers Jerry Clark and Robert Todd - neither of whom is noted for cool restraint. The topic, of course, was the Roswell Incident - an event the memory of which will never die - see poem below, left. This time it was Clark who, relatively, kept his cool, and Todd who made totally excessive remarks, for which he later offered a partial apology. He also withdrew permanently from this particular web ring, or whatever.

  In spite of his frequent use of excessive rhetoric, it was Todd who managed to obtain Jesse Marcel's service records and show this man up as an unreliable witness to a UFO crash or anything else. If only for this, the UFO field owes Todd a huge debt of gratitude. This was the closing remark made by Karl Pflock, who also took part in the debate, and we agree with Pflock completely. ...

• From Bea Starr we have received a card stating that on March 27th, 1998, her husband Hal Starr "was called to report to the Great Producer". (See middle item, below.)

  Hal Starr was a news reporter, writer & announcer who was not as well known in the UFO field as he should have been. For many years he had a five-minute syndicated UFO radio show that went out to thirty or so stations. He also served for several years as Arizona State Director for MUFON, and in that capacity he once used his influence with Walt Andrus to open the door to full MUFON membership for your humble "Smear" editor. (In those days, the lowly category of "Journal Subscriber" apparently had not yet been invented.)

  Hal lived in Phoenix, Arizona for a long time, and on our visits there we often got together with him and his wife for pleasant evenings of drinks and conversation. More recently Hal moved to Sonora, Mexico, and apparently died there, of cancer. He was in his late 70s. He will be missed. ...

• As we've mentioned before, the best UFO magazine around (even better than "smear"!) is England's "Fortean Times", which was kind enough to invite us to lecture at their London convention last year. This zine is expensive, however - about $60 for twelve monthly issues.

  The April 1998 issue attracted us because of its several long & short articles about outstanding hoaxes. The editors consider the current series of Mexican UFO videos (which began with the July 1991 solar eclipse) to be in the probable-hoax category; but their best comments are about the Moonpeople American newspaper articles of the 1830s. The "Fortean Times" account of this is entitled "When Beavers Roamed the Moon".

  Also mentioned are a number of other mostly-American hoaxes in the UFO & psychic realms; but we are mildly offended that the 1957 "Straith Letter" hoax on contactee George Adamski, perpetrated by then-unknown perpetrators, is not mentioned at all!

  At the bottom right, below, is a Fortean gem, lifted from the May, 1998 issue of "Fortean Times".

• In a rather bizarre situation, famed UFO author Whitley Streiber has accused former psychologist Richard Boylan of being a "possible disinformation agent", because of statements Boylan made on the Internet about a Catholic theologian named Msgr. Corrado Balducci. It seems that Balducci made pro-UFO statements in an interview that Streiber included in his new book "Confirmation", these statements being merely Balducci's personal opinions. Boylan then jazzed things up by claiming that there is actually a Vatican Commission on UFOs, and that Papal Nuncios in various countries are transmitting UFO information to the Vatican.

  Richard Boylan will be remembered as having recently loss his license to practice psychology in the state of California, because of a "hot tub" incident with a female patient, and other irregularities....

• The latest issue of CSICOP's "Skeptical Enquirer" (pun intended) includes an article by one John C. Sherwood called "Gray Barker: My Friend, the Myth-Maker". In it Sherwood, a journalist, confesses that he wrote two made-up articles for "Saucer News" in 1969 and 1970, which was during the period that Barker was editor of our former zine. (Barker bought the title from us in 1968 and let the zine die in 1970. "Saucer Smear" was begun in 1976 under a different title.)

  One of Sherwood's articles for Barker was a complex "Men in Black" story, which Barker encouraged him to make up. The only real mystery here is why CSICOP, which usually publishes articles by academics, bothered with Sherwood's offering. A lesser mystery is why, if Barker and Sherwood were such close friends, Sherwood has him dying in 1983 of a heart attack. Actually, Barker died in late 1984, probably from AIDS.

The Roswell crash is here to stay It will never die It was meant to be that way Though I don't know why I don't care what the people say The Roswell crash is here to stay (Apologies to Danny & the Juniors)		WHOA NELLIE! Kim Lee Chong, a 61-year-old chef, was jailed for 15 years for trying to have sex with an elephant. He was caught naked from the waist down, standing on a box behind the animal. The father of five claimed the elephant was the reincarnation of his wife Wey. She had died 28 years ago shortly before her 29th birthday. Chong told the court in Phuket, Thailand: "I recognized her immediately...by the naughty glint in her eyes." Sun, 28 Jan, 1998

• We have on hand the "uncorrected proof" of Robert Anton Wilson's latest bock (with Miriam Joan Hill) entitled "Everything is Under Control - Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups" (HarperPerennial, $15.00). This tome runs over 400 pages, and consists of hundreds of entries of roughly one page each, outlining current and classical conspiracies from Europe and America.

  We found the classical conspiracies (Illuminati, Freemasonry, etc.) to be less interesting than some of the others, but there's enough variety here for everybody's taste. Some conspiracies are definitely tongue-in-cheek, such as the Church of the Sub-Genius, whose deceased hero, "Bob" Dobbs is often compared to "Bob" Wilson himself. Other conspiracies are much more serious, such as the (alleged!) link between the CIA and drug-running; the Kennedy assassination; government drug and chemical warfare experiments against our own people; AIDS, and several others.

  Of course the UFO-related items were of great interest to us, and "Saucer Smear" gets credit in the footnotes for some of these. There are several versions of the recent craze in regard to fake alien photos, there is "Area 51", Albert K. Bender (the classic "hush-up" victim), Bill Cooper, Lt. Col. Philip Corso, CSETI (Dr. Steven Greer), the Deros, Charles Fort, Candy Jones (widow of Long John Nebel), John Lear, Mothman, James Oberg of NASA, Ray Palmer, Roswell, Richard Shaver, and the dreaded UMMO affair.

  Then there are subjects which, though not necessarily conspiracies are nevertheless sick - such as the well-known fact that baby formulas sent to Third World countries probably kill more babies than they help - because these formulas need to be mixed with unsanitary local water. Human greed knows no bounds. Wilson doesn't mention it, but the American cigarette companies now under attack for doing what we've known for fifty years they are doing, are not likely to go out of business - because no one is denying them their right to "hook" hundreds of millions of new victims in the vast, largely unexploited markets overseas. (Incidentally, your "Smear" editor smokes like a chimney and thoroughly enjoys doing so.)

  You see, your "Smear" editor is interested in many other things besides UFOs. Out of everything in Wilson's book, perhaps the best is this very short item:

  "During the Senate hearings on Iran-Contra, three members of the audience stood up and shouted, `Ask about the cocaine.' They were arrested, charged with Contempt of Congress, convicted, and sentenced to one year in prison each. The Senators never did ask about the cocaine."

  Robert Anton Wilson is a satirist, philosopher, Futurist, a loyal "Smear" non-subscriber, and the author of about thirty books. Whatever else one may say about him, it is highly unlikely that he ever votes Republican!

• Next we turn to another brand new book, written by a psychotherapist named Gregory Kanon, published by Galde Press, and selling for $15. It is called "The Great UFO Hoax: The Final Solution to the UFO Mystery". This is an absurdly pretentious title, and a very disappointing book. Wilson has a short but inadequate review of it in his book reviewed above.

  "Hoax" begins by claiming, in effect, that intelligent life probably does not exist anywhere in the universe except on our planet. He takes this view in order to logically claim that UFOs are not interplanetary. Our view, which hopefully science will soon confirm, is that life oozes out of the primeval slime in countless locations throughout the universe, and thus it is very common indeed. However, that does not mean that we are presently being visited by interplanetary craft. Why not? Perhaps it is because our civilization is just too primitive, commonplace, and boring!

  Thus Kanon and your "Smear" editor agree that UFOs are probably not spaceships, but we have very different reasonings. Kanon rejects 4-D theorizing by Jacques Vallee, though he endorses some of Vallee's other views that happen to please him. He even rejects the Mogul balloon explanation for the Roswell incident. Kanon's main thesis is that UFOs consist entirely of military aircraft, secret experiments, mind-control games by the military, etc. Thus, our government secretly encourages belief in ET saucers in order to divert our attention, or perhaps even to eventually enslave us with martial law, following a fake alien invasion.

  We agree with this view up to a point, but like everyone else with an ax to grind, Kanon vastly overstates his case. We don't doubt that the U.S.A.can be currently considered the most evil nation on earth, if for no other reason than because it is the most powerful. But Kanon can't prove this simply by listing vast numbers of highly classified projects, having no reliable details about any of them. One of his main sources is Martin Cannon, a fine fellow who is, however, a conspiracy writer. If there were no conspiracies, Cannon would have nothing to write about! (Wilson, on the other hand, writes on many different topics.)

  In our opinion Kanon correctly identifies as probable military hoaxes such events as the "Battle of Los Angeles" (1942), the Washington, D.C. radar sightings (1952), the RendleSHAM Forest case in England (1980) and the famous flying triangles in Belgium & elsewhere. But then he claims that the famous Siberian meteor (?) of 1908 was actually a secret experiment by famed mad scientist Nikola Tesla! Absurd speculation, to say the least!

  Most ludicrously, Kanon devotes almost two pages to Mel Noel, alias Guy Kirkwood, a "former Air Force pilot", who allegedly had various ufological adventures while in the service. As most UFO researchers now know, Mel Noel was never a military pilot - period. Some say, however, that in recent years he has acquired a private pilot's license. (He's a nice guy, though; we like him!)

  Kanon's main thesis was summarized in a much better way by former NASA engineer Jim Oberg, writing in the June 20th, 1997 issue of "Saucer Smear" - and elsewhere. Oberg is in a position to know. Kanon isn't!

• While Aztec, N.M. is in the spotlight this summer, Roswell, N.M. has by no means given up its lust for lucre. There will be a festival on July lst-6th, celebrating the 51st anniversary of the Mogul Balloon crash (or whatever); and the Roswell Museum ( = The International UFO Museum & Research Center), which only recently moved into larger headquarters, may soon be moving again - this time to a 25-acre site west of town. Yes, with eyes as big as saucers, the Museum curator, Deon Crosby, is planning a $15 million expansion in three phases. Attendance at the Museum is expected to top 300,000 this year, and the present site on Main Street just isn't big enough any more. Egads!

  Getting back to the 1998 Roswell Festival - there is even a Roswell Musical! Also speeches by top researchers (?) such as Stanton Friedman, Philip Corso, Robert Dean, Peter Gersten, and Clifford Stone. Wish we could be there to indulge in the Scientific Enlightenment!...

• Unfortunately, we still have no final word regarding the date and location of this year's National UFO Conference (NUFOC) - a tradition of annual conventions that goes back to 1964. We hope to pin this down before our next issue of "Smear" comes out....

• Similarly, Karl Pflock and your "Smear" editor are still waiting to find a suitable publisher for our book "Shockingly Close to the Truth!" - Stay tuned!

• STANTON FRIEDMAN, commenting on our comments about the notorious MJ-12 documents, has this to say:

  I must say Saucer Smear is always good for a laugh. Re Menzel and NJ-12: It might have been more informative if you had noted that neither Mrs. Menzel nor Dr. Taves had security clearances. Neither had a need to know for Menzel's secrets. The notion that Menzel, who in 1960 was writing Jack Kennedy that he had a 30 year connection with the NSA and its Navy predecessor and that he had a TS Ultra Clearance with the CIA, would have told them highly classified matters is absurd. I, too, when first hearing of his being on the MJ-12 list, thought it was ajoke. But then I got the 3 permissions needed and checked his records at Harvard and discovered his previously unknown close connections with Dr. Vannevar Bush and with very high security intelligence matters. The whole story is in TOP SECRET/MAJIC. (Special for your readers Paper back $14. HC $22, postage paid from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958-autographed)

  If one compares the MJ-12 documents marked BOGUS as they appear in the FBI MJ-12 internet package with those sent to UK researcher Nicholas Redfern back several years ago by USAF OSI Colonel Richard Weaver (disinformation specialist), one finds the hand done heavy black BOGUS markings are identical. One notes that the FBI stopped its investigation once the OSI had made its claim of BOGUS. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the OSI for all supporting documentation for this totally unsubstantiated claim. The response was "we have nothing in response to your request". I appealed. The appeal was given to Weaver (Fox guarding the chicken coop) who again claimed there was nothing in response to my request. So we have a clear case of Colonel Weaver lying both to Redfern and to the FBI. Weaver letters and other indications of USAF lies about Roswell are in my 27 page paper "The Roswell Incident, The USAF, and the NY Times." ($4. PP from UFORI) or FREE to anybody ordering one of the books noted above or my 1996 CD-ROM "UFOs: The Real Story"at a special price of only $20. Postpaid..

  I will be speaking at the October 9-11 Cocoa Beach Conference.. See you there. Topic "The Cosmic Coverup: 52 years of Government Misrepresentation about UFOs"... Watergate is now best known as where Monica Lewinsky lives.

• ROBERT ANTON WILSON, author of "Everything is Under Control", writes:

  "...My whole book is linked like the World Wide Web on that other medium you dread, the `cursed' Internet. Most of my books were organized in that fashion but the Web made it easier for me to find a metaphor for what I was doing all along...

  "Professor Timothy F.X. Finnegan of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Astro-Anomalistic Society still sees the face on Mars and still claims it is Moe Howard. He uses computer enhancement to see the face better. Under `UFO/Satanic Conspiracies' you will find another bloke who sez it's two astrological signs conflated, and under `Fortean Times' you'll find a gent who sez it's Elvis Presley!

  "Prof. Finnegan is the founder and CEO of CSICON - the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal. They deny that the normal exists, saying it is only a mathematical fiction. Some people think I invented Prof. Finnegan but he appears also in Tony Shield's `Mysterium'. He (Finnegan) was the witness when Tony took his famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster. The fact that he has the same name as the hero of a famous Irish novel (that's a kind of book with more lies than usual) is purely coincidental...

  "You're right about losing letters due to Internet. You're one of only two friends with whom I regularly correspond by snail mail. Everybody else I care enough to answer is on email. The net now has 100 million users and is growing faster than any technology in history, 10 times faster than the industrial revolution and 100 times faster than the transition from hunting bands to agricultural (stationary) communities...

  "Keep the ravioli in orbit over Roswell!"

• Former Bigfoot hunter ERIK BECKJORD, who now pushes the Mars Face and runs a small museum somewhere in San Francisco, writes as follows:

  "Dear Passed-Over One:

  "What you do not realize is that all the major UFO investigators are on the Internet, and do not bother writing typed letters any more. They get all the UFO news from Lindemann and ten other major Internet UFO mags, mostly free. Nobody gives a damn any more for you or `Smear'. If they do, they download it free from the website. Your mag is Over. Dead. No interest. A MONTH BEHIND THE NEWS. Now, reputations are destroyed in ten seconds, not ten days. `Smear' is Finito. Dead. DON'T YOU GET IT? IT IS OVER! Technology has killed `Smear'. You are finished!"

• And, kindly old PHIL KIASS writes:

  Please cancel my NON -subscription to Smear. You have become too damned skeptical. Looks to me like you're trying to replace me as "the world's handsomest. smartest- -AND MOST MODEST- -skeptical UFOlogist.

• Researcher ART WAND writes as follows:

  "Wow, Commander, quite an issue! Are your adventures more intrepid, your perceptual sketohes a little wider, your insights into others more pithy, your prose more sterling than ever, or should I attribute it to this industrial-strength ganja I just imbibed?..."

• KARL PFLOCK of ufological fame writes:

  "Well, Vol. 45, numero 4 was yet another bang-up ish... My compliments to both Robert Anton `Bob' Wilson and George Earley. ..Their observations are right on target, seems to me. Moreover, RAW's comments confirm our wisdom in selecting him to grace our book `Shockingly Close to the Truth' with a trenchant foreword. ...

  "Now then, the inevitable nit - well, more than a nit this time. Your MCP persona seems to have been in charge when you/he knocked out the paragraph about the death of Congressman Steve Schiff. Characterizing Mary's position as Chief of Staff of the Schiff office as ` = Office Manager' is rather like equating the position of `Smear' Supreme Commander with that of copy boy. The fact is, the office manager (supplies, vouchers, etc.) works for Mary, whose job directing a 16-member staff in two offices (D.C. and Albuquerque), managing an annual budget of $1 million, and serving as the congressman's right hand and personal representative most closely approximates that of a corporate chief operating officer who doubles as vice president of government and public affairs."

• NORMAN A. HOWARD charms us with:

  "Regarding the `J.S..' after your name on `Saucer Smear' page one every issue: Why on good old Earth do you want your readers to know that you are a MUFON Journal subscriber?... The MUFON Journal is a fourth-rate publication, poorly edited and printed. `Saucer Smear' ranks higher in my book! So does the Tampa Bay Skeptics' publication, and Phil Klass' SUN. Keep up the good work!"

  The "J.S." is to remind us that we were once a MUFON State Section Director, and then were (gasp!) demoted to the lowly rank of Journal Subscriber. - Ed

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