| EDITOR AND STILL SUPREME COMMANDER: James W. Moseley
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR:
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NON-SCHEDULED NEWSLETTER Volume 52, No. 3 March 25th, 2005 (Whole Number 379) |
MAILING ADDRESS: P. 0. Box 1709 Key West, FL 33041 |
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Michael Shermer of "Skeptics" Magazine made the interesting point that for most scientists, seeing is not believing, because it involves no physical evidence. This statement has some merit, but doesn't tell the whole story. The late Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a leading astronomer of his day, and he found the visual UFO evidence so convincing that, after about twenty years as a debunker working for the Air Force, he switched sides and became the founder of CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies), which still exists today. We were glad to see Dr. Hynek receive the recognition that is surely due him.
The program reviewed a few multi-witness cases in which credible people are still alive and available to be interviewed. For abductions, they bowed to Budd Hopkins (#1 on our "Hall of Shame" List), and as an over-all conclusion they opined that "only contact will solve the mystery". The trouble is, many people think that contact has already been established, and they therefore see the SETI project as a waste of time.
The only segment of the program that we really enjoyed was the one on (gasp!) Roswell, in which our colleague Karl Pflock is finally given the prominence he richly deserves in regard to solving this persistent enigma. Pflock is quoted extensively, and the Mogul Balloon solution is given credence. Stanton Friedman comes across as a money-grubber and an opportunist, which certainly did not displease us. William Moore and Charles Berlitz, who started the modern Roswell craze with a 1978 book, are barely mentioned at all.
Your "Smear" editor was consulted at length by phone regarding this show, and might have been invited to fly somewhere and participate in it. However, we declined because we felt it would be too much trouble for too little. Most "experts" shown on the program were quoted fleetingly, as is usually the case.
Needless to say, the Jennings special did not go over well with the ufological "hard core". Whitley Strieber has written a 3 1/2 page diatribe about this, which states in part:
"...Here is my response to Mr. Jennings and the dirty little men who lurk in his shadow, whispering their lies to him. First, Roswell really happened, and it is the key to everything, because the Air Force made a world-historical mistake there that has led to our being in the state we are in now: isolated on this earth, swimming in ignorance, and denied what is the birthright of every intelligent species, which is access to the great cosmos. Second, the most important aspect of the whole UFO phenomenon is abduction. As ugly as it is, it is also our only point of contact with the outside. And there is a message being sent from them to us. It has nothing to do with radio telescopes and the adolescent tomfoolery of SETI, and everything to do with the hearts, minds and bodies - and the souls - of the abductees."
The title of Strieber's statement is "The Scum Rises: Peter Jennings on UFOs."
Strieber, in his own unique way, is sincere but nevertheless fanatical. Others of the "hard core" were less emotional in their responses, but still not at all happy. Skeptic Martin Kottmeyer was moderately pleased by the presentation. Strangely, none of the critiques that we have seen actually mention Pflock by name, though obviously he is now, more than ever, the anti-Roswell villain!
Well, you can't please everybody! Hopefully the general public found this to be a relatively well-balanced show, which it was....
The problem seems to be that there is a great deal of UFO & paranormal activity in the area, but it all centers around Mary's shop. Mysterious photos have been taken near there, but the police have received no reports. Says Hoppel "The reason people don't take UFO research seriously is because of people like Mary. There have been legitimate cases in the world that defy logic. But what responsible, respectable professional is going to research this, when people like Mary are blathering this hokey-pokey crap as the truth?"
But Mary Sutherland says, "I welcome anyone to come down here and take pictures. Come here at 3 a.m. and see what is lighting up the sky". There is also a legitimate reason why people have not been calling the police about UFO sightings or paranormal activityshe claims. "I have a UFO center. Doesn't it make sense that if you see a UFO, you come to me? If you see paranormal activity, you don't go to the police, you would go to a paranormal center. It only makes sense."
All this reminds us of the case of famed UFO author Ed Walters of Gulf Breeze, Florida, who, one night in 1987, was molested by a low-flying UFO over his house, which shot out a "blue beam" and lifted him off the ground briefly. Later investigation showed that a man living right across the Street, who had been outdoors all that evening, watering his lawn & such, had not seen anything unusual at all!
The Space People are obviously very selective about whom they reveal themselves to. Budd Hopkins seems to know a lot about this peculiar behavior on the part of our (alleged) Visitors...
A separate part of this item from Pflock is Randi's tearful remembrances of Carson, who was a fellow magician. Randi claims that Carson kept in touch with him frequently after his retirement as host of the Tonight Show. It is a fact that Randi was on that show several times, the most notable of which was the time he exposed a psychic healer named Peter Popoff as operating with a concealed radio receiver in his ear. Carson and Randi had some things in common. Whether Randi was really as close with Carson as he claims, we do not know. Randi has been known in the past to sometimes deal rather loosely with the truth.
According to Randi's present tribute to Carson, he received "several six-figure checks" from the Tonight Show host, over the years. (Carson left an estate of about $450 million dollars!) Your "Smear" editor clashed with Randi a number of years ago, regarding the latter's alleged misconduct with underage young men, and his allegedly libelous & slanderous statements about psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller. Randi was sued several times by Geller, and was eased out of CSICOP (Center for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) as an indirect result. But that's all water under the dam, as they say, (or over the bridge??).
Randi would surely head Smear's Hall of Shame List were it not for the fact that he has never made a public statement about UFOs specifically, as far as we are aware. Thus he is not in the flying saucer field at all, as far as we are concerned. He is merely a fanatical anti-psychic...
To make matters more intriguing, a few days after the above news report, NASA came out with a statement basically denying it. We really don' t know what this means!...
"Angel hair" is a term infrequently heard these days, as most of the cases date from several years ago, or even further back than that. Many observations are associated with sightings of UFOs, though many others are not. The substance in question has a strong superficial resemblance to spider webs, but chemically it is quite different, and definitely unexplained. We praise Boldman for his perseverance in pursuing this little-known aspect of the flying saucer mystery...
It is truly amazing that Honey, though strongly turned off by the Saturn trip, continues to accept Adamski's earlier material, and he continues to endorse the well-known photographs that were taken of "scout ships", "mother ships", etc. Readers of "Shockingly Close to the Truth!" are treated to the full text of the Adamski expose your "Smear" editor published in 1957, but Honey now dismisses all this detailed information with just a few words. Honey continues to believe in some sort of Cosmic Philosophy, which he expounds in a large number of tracts he has published in recent years. One can obtain a list of these by writing to him c/o Science (sic) Publications, 2456 South Woodlark Drive, Ontario, Ca. 91761.
Involved in all this is the notorious Straith Letter, which was a hoax perpetrated on Adamski in 1957 by the late Gray Barker and yours truly. It was on a State Department letterhead, and implied official endorsement of Adamski's preposterous claims. The text of this letter is also available in Shockingly. In spite of our well-known published confession after Gray Barker's death, in 1981, Honey persisted in believing the letter authentic until some telephone conversations with your "Smear" editor as recently as 2002. The Will to Believe is not easily killed!
Meanwhile, some forty years after Ceorge Adamski' s death, Honey is engaged in a complex feud with an organization called the Ceorge Adamski Foundation (GAF), headed by one Clenn Steckling (P.O. Box 1722, Vista, Ca. 92085). The crux of the matter in question is who has the rmght to continue distributin Adamski's material, and there is also the question of whether Honey resigned as a disciple of the Master, or was dismissed for misconduct. How on Earth (or even Saturn!) can grown men continue arguing about such matters after so long a time? Honey seems like a sincere, fair-minded fellow, but his view of the Universe differs dramatically from that offered by real Science!...
Here is a black and white rendition of another ufologicaI painting by New Jersey artist David Huggins, who has appeared
on our pages several times before. He calls this one "Hypocricy", and it shows a floating rendition of George Bush
surrounded by a halo, and he is looking over a killing field of dead bodies, presumably from the war in Iraq. Four
grey-type aliens are watching in astonishment. This painting represents a strong anti-war statement on the part of the
artist...
Yes, there are flying saucers downthere, and "friendly people" descended from ancient earthly tribes, and these highly advanced souls may actually speak English, we are told. Just when we started thinking there might be a core of truth in all this, we ran into a longwinded quagmire of Biblical prophecy, conspiracy theory, etc.
The expedition is planned to last from June 26th to July 19th, 2006. We are told that the danger ahead isn't in going along on it but in not going, due to all the terrible things that are soon to happen here on the surface. For more details, go for Dennis's zine, at www.thehollowearthtnsider.com...
Bigelow eventually claimed that phenomena worthy of investigation were no longer being reported to NIDS (though this is unlikely), so he turned his attention elsewhere, and NIDS died out. Bigelow had made his money as a large-scale slumlord in Las Vegas, Nevada, but apparently his real interests have always been more exotic.
Now he is pouring up to $500 million dollars into what is to be the world's first hotel in orbit around planet earth. Though the hotel ($1 million per night!) is still years away from completion, it is far more than a fantasy. Bigelow has hired veteran space-travel engineers to perfect the technology, he has produced nearly launch-ready hardware for testing, and he is floating a $50-million prize to entice other companies to create a safe, reliable space vehicle to transport guests to the front door - or rather, the airlock!
Bigelow admits that his project is a huge gamble, but he is no wild-eyed visionary. Your editor might want to visit his hotel, if & when the rates come down quite a bit!
As I recounted a couple of columns back, I was hooked on saucers very early in life. During the summer of 1958 or '49, when I was five or six, I was reeled in by a story about the discovery of a crashed flying saucer and the bodies of its crew.
My father was interested too, in an open-minded but hardheaded way. Pop ordered saucer books for me through his bookstore, and we speculated about what UFOs were and, if they were real, where they were from and why they were here. We never missed the latest science fiction films, many featuring flying saucers and their usually malevolent operators. Then there was the 1956 docudrama "UFO", which I sat through three times one Saturday afternoon.
In the summer of 1951 or 1952, my dad and I and two of my friends and their father saw a UFO, or what I'm sure would have stacked up as one if our sighting had been investigated. Full Story, next column.
I devoured all the serious UFO books and diligently studied magazine articles about saucers, pro and con. One article, "Have We Visitors from Space?" in the April 7, 1952, Life, had me saying "Yes!" - as did a 1954 special issue of the thinking kid's comic book "Weird Science-Fantasy", in which the intrepid editors issued "A CHALLENGE TO THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE!" demanding it "TELL US THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FLYING SAUCERS".
I also read not-so-serious saucer tomes, whose authors told of their contacts and space travels with golden-haired Space Brothers and shapely Space Sisters. I even attended a lecture by a woman contactee whose name I no longer recall (Dana Howard?). Yawn... I found the contactees photos of Venusian scout ships and such interesting- and fantasized about the Space Sisters (whee!). But I simply couldn't take the yarns seriously, as much as I wanted to.
Along about 1957, a couple of friends and I determined to get the U.S. Air Force to TELL US THE TRUTH ABOUT FLYING SAUCERS. We figured we would do better if we didn't seem to be kids. So we founded the National Committee for Investigation of UFOs (NCIUFO). Much to our disappointment, but not really to our surprise, all we got were releases from the air force press desk, with saucer-report and case "solved" statistics and the usual rhetoric. We also cranked out a couple of newsletters, but lost interest when we were unable to generate enough paying subscribers to cover the cost.
A few years ago, Robert Todd discovered that the air force seems to have taken us seriously, at least as a nuisance. NCIUFO, "Director - K. T. Pflock", was among the pesky UFO organizations listed in two late-fifties classified air force intelligence staff studies. It would have been exciting to know this at the time, though it probably wouldn't have mattered much. Earth girls had by then pre-empted the Space Sisters in our youthful affections. But saucers were in my blood, like malaria...
OF MICE AND MEN - A WORD FROM OUR ESTEEMED CONTRIBUTING EDITOR:
My "mysterious, affliction is mysterious no longer. On February 11, I was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Cehrig's disease. There is no cure (yet) for this inevitably fatal condition. Most ALSers shuffle off this mortal coil three to six years after diagnosis, though a good proportion carry on for ten years or so, and a few much longer (physicist Stephen Hawking has been living with ALS since the 1960s). I'm in the care of Dr. John Chapin, an ALS expert at the University of New Mexico School of Medecine, in a program conducted in cooperation with the Muscular Distrophy Association's ALS Division. I will soon begin participating in a clinical trial of a drug that has been very effective against ALS in laboratory mice. Let's hope it works as well or better in humans. If not, my backup plan is to become the first recorded case of spontaneous remission. (MJ-12 and the Elders of Ufoology won't get rid of me this easily!) For those interested in learning more, etc., here are two websites, http://als.mdausa.org and http://alsa.org.
"On January 6, 2005, 'India Daily', an apparently serious newspaper, ran an apparently serious editorial claiming that there is a debate within the Indian government over how or when to reveal to its citizens the details of its (the government's) extensive contacts with extraterrestrials. Wondering whether this might in fact be the 'National Enquirer' of India or if there are clues in there that an Indian would catch that would reveal that this is a joke editorial, or whether, say, January 6th is the Indian equivalent of April Fool's Day, I had an Indologist colleague of mine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland run it by an e-mail discussion group he runs. No on all counts; it's simply a weird editorial, and I can't discern if it attracted much notice in general...
"One last note: A few months ago an ad of sorts was run in Dennis Crenshaw's e-mailed 'Unraveling the Secrets' (formerly 'Hollow Earth Insider') newsletter, reading as follows: 'My wife and I areplanning an expedition to the North Pole Opening in Feb., 2005. If you are interested in joining us, please e-mail us... We presently live on Orcas Island, Washington State, in a four bedroom house. If you would like to join us here first and then leave from here, let us know. We are spiritually open minded and we are also poly minded. We have a lot of Love to give! Love and Peace, Noah & Naomi.'
"I did an Internet search on the phrase 'poly minded', and, sure enough, it's an apparent abbreviation for polygamy. It seems we have a couple of Hollow Earth swingers! Their expedition should be leaving this month, and my guess is that if Noah & Naomi - and whoever signs on - don't find the polar opening, they'll find plenty of others!
"Keep your eye on the cavern entrances'"
Our understanding it that the real Hollow Earth expedition won't be until 2006, but it is refreshing to know that "swingers" may be involved! As for the Indian editorial, part of it is reproduced above. Editor
"...You have asked for my comments on the statement from Carol Honey that Philip Corso was very upset over statements in his book that he said he hadn't made or intended to promote. Moreover, as I understand it, you would also like me to comment concerning Col. Corso's having said that the bulk of the mistakes in 'The Day After Roswell' were attributable to me."First, let me be very clear that Corso reviewed his manuscript as it was being written and reviewed it when it was complete l was in close contact with his editor at Pocket Books for over a year, and promoted the book for the entire year before he died. When that book went to his publisher, it went with his full endorsement and his full enthusiasm, which is attested to by his appearance at Roswell in 1997, where he stood up for his assertions in the book. What he said at Roswell is on video tape and is now a matter of public record. I would suggest that Carol Honey review that video tape.
"Second, I am well aware that Phil Corso made statements attributing the mistakes in the manuscript to me. However, those statements were made in the context of litigation between Corso and the movie company what optioned his life-story rights for the book and a motion picture. They were painful for me to hear, knowing he was fully involved in the writing, but completely understandable in that he was seeking to find other outlets for his material while his rights were tied up.
"For the record, I would be the first to say there are plenty of mistakes in that book, mistakes that Col. Corso was certainly aware of at the time the book was published, and he believed he would have corrected them in subsequent editions; but for his rapidly deteriorating health, multiple heart attacks, and the litigation that took place after the book was published..."
"Last Fall, Jim Wales sent me the information that you have published a book. I ordered it immediately and I have read it from the first page to the last page during the Christmas holidays. 'Shockingly Close to the Truth!' is the only American UFO book that I have read with great interest!"My own history in the UFO field began in 1973 when I faked my first flying saucer movie and a lot of saucer photos, to examine the methods of the hoaxers. From the very beginning I was interested in 8 mm and 16 mm UFO-related movie material. Today I have one of the largest UFO film collections, including crashing saucers, landing saucers, landed saucers with the difference that I am not a Believer but a skeptical researcher who knows the true backgrounds!...
"If a fairy godmother were to ask me for a wish I would answer: Please bring me with my camera equipment to Jim Moseley! But such a fairy godmother has not appeared and therefore I don't have the money to travel to America. A few days ago I again bought very expensive movie archives material for my project, and I had several other bills to pay. Stanton Friedman has no problems, as he appears every night on a satellite TV program we receive, to tell people the yarn they want to hear - that everything is genuine and mysterious. The Ed Walters hoax is genuine, the Betty & Barney Hill encounter nonsense is genuine and true, the MJ-12 paper hoax is genuine, etc. Has anybody ever told Friedman that he is nothing more than a stupid charlatan???..."
Klaus Webner has kindly sent us a copy of his 1993 book "Wesen aus dem Weltraum?", which is a wonderful treatise on hoaxed UFO photos throughout the years, with beautiful reproductions of many of them. The infamous Canadian prone oriental-looking dead spaceman is on the cover, and can also be found (sadly!) on the back cover of Tim Beckley's edition of your "Smear" editor's book "UFO Crash Secrets at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (1991). Unfortunately, Klaus's book is written in German. He can be reached at: Zugspitzstrasse 56; 65199 Weisbaden, Germany. - Editor.
"Jim, that picture of Erik Beckjord (in the last 'Smear') was bizarre. The only face in it was that of Marilyn Monroe - on his tie! That's a 'Smear' classic!..."We knew Beckjord's face would come out too dark to see. (There was no way of preventing this.) But we didn't notice Marilyn Monroe on his tie! Beckjord has just sent us a long letter together with a better picture. We will run this in our next issue. - Editor.
"...Someone made the comment that it would be interesting to the rest of us to have you tell us why/how those l0 people made it into the 'Hall of Shame'. Only you know why you chose them, so some elucidation might be in order. Heck, because of the increased mail you would get, it might be fun to do that twice a year..."If there is enough reader interest, we will indeed give more details about our glorious "Hall of Shame" List. - Editor.
Saucer Smear Index
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