A Skeptic does the MUFON Symposium - Part 2

I'd say that the most interesting talk was the first one on Saturday afternoon, retired Army Colonel Dr. John Alexander. He is among the most skeptical of UFO believers, and because of this he excited (or more properly, inflamed) the audience more than anyone else. His heresy was not that there are not real ET UFOs, but merely that there is no government coverup, or secret UFO-related program. Alexander stated that "disclosure has already happened," pointing to a few mostly-ambiguous statements by world leaders (such as Jimmy Carter, or Prince Philip) that suggest a belief in UFOs. Alexander claims that the government already knows that UFOs are real and interplanetary, but they simply don't care. They have so many more pressing problems - the economy, wars and terrorism, health care, etc. - that they simply have no time or inclination to deal with UFOs.

Mostly, Alexander's talk was a recital of what he does not believe in: Alien Reproduction Vehicles, MJ-12 papers, antigravity drives, underground UFO bases, and (worst of all) no Grand Coverup, no 'secrecy police' (Men in Black). Even the Holy Roswell Crash was doubted. To those who claim to have been harassed or silenced because of UFO sightings, Alexander said, "come to me, I will protect you and defend your case." According to Alexander, "the UFO community" has become its own worst enemy, and it is necessary to make the study of UFOs intellectually respectable.

In case they come across a crashed UFO, MUFON investigators are totally prepared with this "Evidence Collection Kit."

The next talk was by Dr. Paul LaViolette, on "Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion" and "Superluminal Space Travel" (faster-than-light). He has invented a Unified Field Theory called "Subquantum Kinetics." This is a better theory than Einstein's, because it explains more things. It embraces Anti-gravity and Free Energy. It's based in part on the theories of T. Townsend Brown, a strange 20th century physicist who claimed to be able to prove that electric fields can overcome gravity (and who later founded the influential UFO group NICAP). Brown, like Tesla, is a favorite icon in the woo-physics of today. Using Brown's electro-gravitics, one could travel to Mars for just $25 worth of energy. LaViolette acknowledges that electrogravitics violates Newton's Third Law, but does not seem too concerned about that. His most interesting theory is that Pulsars are artificial beacons, set up by ETs for use during their superluminal travel.

During dinner break, the options for food weren't terribly good, so I ended up in the bar munching appetizers and nachos and chatting up some New Age types. In situations like this, one must always remember (as Phil Plait would say) "DBAD". I tell folks "I'm skeptical, but I've come here to see if there might be anything to it." Mostly they're OK with that. Strictly speaking that is a true statement, but after 40 years as a skeptical UFO researcher (I started young), I have virtually no expectation of finding any "good" ET-UFO evidence, and especially not in a place where the likes of Richard Dolan or Linda Moulton Howe are taken seriously. Still, keep reminding myself that I could be wrong.

UFO Abductionist Barbara Lamb (left) with New Age astrologer Linda Berry of San Diego MUFON

The first evening talk was by the UFO Abduction researcher Barbara Lamb. She has been a regular speaker at the International UFO Congress for many years. With the recent setbacks for the traditional leaders of UFO Abductology (see my earlier Blog posting, Abductology Implodes) and with Budd Hopkins now reported to be seriously ill, Ms. Lamb is sort of the Last Woman Standing among "serious" UFO abductologists.

Lamb has hypnotically regressed almost 800 supposed UFO abductees. She has found that ETs enjoy having sex with earthlings, and not necessarily just in a saucer. Indeed, we heard much about some peoples' fantasy sex lives involving these latter-day incubi and succubi.  She has been researching the matter of ET-human "hybrids," many of whom according to Lamb are already living amongst us. Indeed, she has interviewed some of them (many do not realize they are hybrids, and still think themselves human). Others embrace their ET heritage as a sort of badge of distinction.

Why are the aliens doing this? There is some suggestion that they are a dying race, possibly polluted by nuclear energy, and they need our genes to survive. The early-stage hybrids look very much like ETs, and cannot live on earth, although they may pop through the wall for a brief visit. Medium-stage hybrids possess a greater mixture of human DNA, and might more readily pass as human, but they still cannot live on earth for long periods of time. However, late-stage hybrids can live on earth and pass for being fully human, except for their odd, somewhat angular appearance. She showed many pictures of glamorous fashion models, mostly female, whose odd expressionless face and angular features suggest to Lamb not anorexia, but extraterrestrial ancestry.

(to be continued)

A Skeptic does the MUFON Symposium - Part 1

MUFON's 2011 International Symposium was held in Irvine, California, not so far from where I live in San Diego County, after several years of being held in Colorado.  I hadn't been to a UFO conference in about eight years, and had never been to a MUFON Symposium, so I decided to go up there to see it. Phil Klass used to attend the MUFON Symposium regularly, so I figured that somebody has got to do it.

I didn't hear the Keynote Speaker on Friday night, veteran astronaut Story Musgrave. Last year he had been quoted in some news stories making wild UFO claims, but he had been badly misquoted. Musgrave's message was, I was told, that "the universe is very, very big," and so extraterrestrials must exist somewhere. However, he does not believe that there is any evidence that they have arrived on earth. Or as Musgrave earlier told reporter Billy Cox, “Life is everywhere in this universe, there is no evidence that it has visited earth.”

One of the first things I saw upon entering the hall Saturday morning was a vendor table peddling a lot of amazingly dubious stuff. Glenn Steckling is the coordinator of the George Adamski Foundation. I expressed surprise that anybody was still interested in the fables of Adamski, who claimed to be good friends with the people from Venus, and took lots of cheesy, fake-looking UFO photos. Steckling said that there was a lot of interest in Adamski, and that he had known Adamski personally. Knowing that Adamski had been dead for 46 years, I told him, "you must have been just a kid when you knew him." "I was," he replied, "I have been doing this all my life. My mother and father also knew Adamski." It's good to keep it in the family, I suppose. At the same table, Maurice Osborn (below, wearing glasses) was providing lots of useful information, like "Alien Abduction resistance" and "Beware of the Grays and Human Slavery."

Glenn Steckling promoting the books and fables of George Adamski

The first speaker of Saturday was Richard Dolan, author and TV producer who has been keeping a pretty high profile lately. His talk was titled, "A Secret Space Program : From Rumor to reality After Disclosure." (Read my earlier Blog posting on "World Disclosure Day", the UFOlogical equivalent of the Second Coming, fervently rumored and eagerly anticipated but never occurring.) Dolan gave the audience what it wanted to hear: lots and lots of wild, unsubstantiated claims, mostly about UFOs in outer space. Like UFOs supposedly following the space shuttle missions STS-96, STS-106, and STS-111 - little blurry blips of light that might have been anything. There is lots of alien activity going on on the Moon, says Dolan,  but NASA airbrushes its photos to keep them hidden.  Those objects that astronomers call "shepherd moons" that keep Saturn's rings sharply-defined are actually UFOs, too. Frankly, I felt that Dolan was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of the credibility of his claims, but later on Linda Moulton Howe and George Filer gave him some very serious competition in that regard.

The next speaker, Dr. Ted Peters,  asked "Will ET Contact End World Religions?" He and a colleague did a survey of many different religious groups concerning a possible ET religious crisis. The short answer is, practically nobody said that an official announcement of the existence of ETI would cause them a serious crisis of faith. MUFONers consider this very good news, because one common argument against "Disclosure," possible social upheaval from the breakdown of religion, appears to be a non-problem. Interestingly, Peters found that religious non-believers, however, seemed convinced that ET disclosure would cause religious believers to lose their faith!

(To Be Continued)

This fellow was bored by all those long-winded speakers.

"Classic" UFO Photo from Belgian Wave - the Hoaxer Confesses

For more than twenty years, UFO believers have been citing the 1989-1990 wave of UFO sightings in Belgium as an unexplained mystery. For a period of several months, people in Belgium were reporting sightings of a triangular-shaped craft. It was one of the major chapters in Leslie Kean's recent best-selling book, "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record" (see my review of it in the March/April 2011 Skeptical Inquirer). Even Michael Shermer's review of Kean's book suggests that the Belgian sightings represent a "residue of anomalies" (Scientific American, March 28, 2011).

One big problem with the Belgian wave has always been the lack of photos or movies showing the object, despite hundreds of claimed sightings. Indeed, Kean seeks to dismiss the lack of evidence by noting that "twenty years ago, cell phones and relatively  inexpensive, consumer-level digital and video cameras were not yet in use"  (true, but film cameras were plentiful and widespread). Indeed, only one photo claiming to show this supposed 'triangular craft' has ever been seen (above). It was said to have been taken in  Petit Rechain, Belgium in April, 1990 by a twenty-year-old man known only as "Patrick," although it was not released until four months later. The Belgian UFO investigative group SOBEPS investigated the photo and found it to be authentic. So did many other "experts". Kean writes,

A team under the direction of Professor Marc Acheroy discovered that a triangular shape became visible when overexposing the slide. After that, the original color slide was further analyzed by Frangois Louange, specialist in satellite imagery with the French national space research center, CNES; Dr. Richard Haines, former senior scientist with NASA; and finally Professor Andre Marion, doctor in nuclear physics and professor at the University of Paris-Sud and also with CNES. (p. 30)

UFO skeptics have long supplied reasons why this photo is not credible. For one thing, it shows nothing in the background to allow its size or distance to be ascertained. It could as easily be a tiny model seen close-up as a giant hovering craft. In the 1990s the Belgian skeptic Wim van Utrecht showed that the photo could easily be reproduced using a small model. In a recent issue of Tim Printy's WebZine Sunlite, an article by Roger Pacquay notes several inconsistencies about the photo.

Now we have a confession. The Belgian news organization RTL is reporting that the hoaxer has given his "Mea culpa" and now "lifts the veil": The reporter interviewed "Patrick" in his home, where he showed them many slides and prints. "l’OVNI de Petit-Rechain n’est pas un vaisseau spatial venu d’une lointaine galaxie mais un panneau de frigolite peint et équipé de trois spots" ("The UFO of Petit-Rechain is not a spaceship from a distant galaxy but a panel of painted styrofoam with three spots affixed.")

http://www.rtl.be/info/belgique/faitsdivers/812149/le-mystere-du-celebre-ovni-des-annees-90-elucide-une-supercherie

"Patrick" explaining that once he showed his hoax photo to his colleagues, he could no longer hold back the photo's march all across the world

"On arrive à tromper tout le monde avec une bête maquette en frigolite".

("One has managed to fool the whole world with a silly model made of styrofoam.")

[The formerly anonymous hoaxer is now known to be Patrick Marechal. See http://tinyurl.com/KeanBe ]

Happy World UFO Disclosure Day!

As you may have heard, UFO activists have declared today, July 8, as the first-ever "World Disclosure Day". This date was chosen because it's the anniversary of what they see as the beginning of the  supposed Roswell crash cover-up. According to AOL Weird News, Stephen Bassett is "a registered lobbyist who runs the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, an organization that since the late 1990s has been demanding Congress release information about the presence of aliens as soon as possible." He says "There was an arms race, a space race, and now we have a disclosure race. There are a dozen or so countries that might well effect disclosure tomorrow. It is hoped the Obama administration will become aware of this and take action." However, the Big Oil companies are pressuring the government to keep secret the free energy that alien technology offers us. So here we are, sixty-four years later, and the U.S. government still has not "disclosed" the presence of aliens all around us.



In honor of Disclosure Day, let me quote a few of the optimistic "disclosure" predictions of the past:

• "Vatican UFO disclosure Soon", 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWt_JS-H3TY 

• " It is my analysis that the ending of the official government's UFO cover-up began August 7, 1996... we may expect further announcements related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life, after the November 5 election." UFOlogist Dr. Richard Boylan, http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/newsb/boylan.html 

• “Before the year is out, the Government perhaps the President—is expected to make what are described as 'unsettling disclosures' about UFOs” - U.S. News & World Report, April 18, 1977.

• “Aliens... will begin trans­mitting their secrets to us no later than August, 1977” - Jeane Dixon, 1976.

• “We predict that by 1975 the government will release definite proof that extraterrestrials are watching us.” - Ralph and Judy Blum, in Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (1974).

• “The time is getting near when the U.S. Air Force will have to end its longstanding tactic of concealment.” - Syndicated columnist Roscoe Drum­mond, 1974.

• “FLYING SAUCERS—THE REAL STORY: U.S. BUILT FIRST ONE IN 1942. Jet-propelled disks can outfly other planes ... By choosing which [jet] noz­zles to turn on or off and the angle of tilt, the pilot could make the saucer rise or descend vertically, hover, or fly straight ahead, or make sharp turns… a big advance in the science of flying... No official announcements are being made yet, but about the only big secret left is "who makes them." Evidence points to Navy experiments... ” - News “scoop” in U.S. News & World Report, April 7, 1950.

Happy World Disclosure Day! (But don't hold your breath waiting for it.)

"UFO Mothership & Fleet over London"

Another implausible video showing UFOs has gone viral, spawning a  flurry of news stories in the major media.For example, the Daily Mail in London asks "Are aliens getting less camera shy? UFOs filmed above BBC building in London." The Huffington Post reports, "London UFOs: Multiple People Capture Odd Occurrence Over British City" (although not at the same place and time). Here is the video that started it all, posted by a photographer known only as alymc01:



One has to admit that this looks pretty cheesy.  The big "Mothership" looks a bit like a lens flare, but it does not act like a lens flare, its movement unrelated to that of the camera. At first I thought that the small UFOs were birds, but on closer examination they appear to be generated artifacts as well.

Actually, that is Alymc01's second UFO video. His earlier video doesn't look nearly as impressive, so it was largely ignored:



So far, "expert" commentary has not gone beyond comments like 'this looks like a computer-generated fake'. And strictly speaking, that's enough. After all, the burden of proof is not on the skeptic to show that a video is fake. The burden of proof is on someone who claims it shows unknown crafts, to rule out all prosaic explanations.. Using the terminology of Mythbusters, that is enough to call this video "busted."

But also in the spirit of Mythbusters, let's not stop there. Let's see if we can really blow this thing apart.


British UFOlogist Nick Pope isn't buying it. That's bad for this video, since Pope, currently on tour to promote the DVD release of the Hollywood space alien movie Battle: Los Angeles,  buys a lot of dicey things. But apparently this video looks unimpressive even to him. Interestingly, Pope adds "The slightly suspicious thing, though, is it's a part of London where it just so happens that a large number of film companies and visual effects companies are based. And some of the people do look a little bit self-satisfied. So I suspect this is a CGI hoax, and that someone is showcasing their skills." Good comment!

Surprisingly, the most useful commentary on this video was found on the UFO and conspiracy-oriented website, Above Top Secret. The forum participants, mostly anonymous, dug deeply and turned up facts that the 'experts' seem to have overlooked.

"C-Buzz" commented "100% CGI. 1:18 - 1:22 the object doesn't actually go behind the clouds, it fades out. Not only that it looks like he stuffed up creating this animation because if you have a look at the bottom left there is actually a lighting effect which probably isn't supposed to be there & a RED orb moving across the building." It's hard to see, but it's there. There's also a brief  "green flash" on the building, as well as a suspicious-looking red color on the "mothership." I'm not enough of an expert on digital processing to know what this means, but it reeks of digital tampering. Sharp eyes, C-Buzz!

"LiveEquation" posts "The video is a scam right and i have evidence. if you start watching the video at 1:21 you will see two artificial bubble glares and then delay of the UFO glare. The UFO vanishes into the clouds first. Then you see 2 fake bubble glares and the ufo glare moving in the same direction after the ufo has already vanished. delay of about 1 second. Its actually weird that the UFO cast a glare. That's a giveway. The person who made the video doesn't know jack about optics."


"GiftOfProphecy" adds "This video is clearly fake. You can prove it by watching the video starting at 1:00 and after, and stabilizing the video. You can see they did a horrible job motion tracking the camera movement... probably because they have a rolling shutter camera. If you watch the UFO you can see it is not shaking with the camera perfectly, it is shaking independently. However the "UFO" is shaking the same rate and nearly the same magnitude, it's direction and position are just not synchronized. That to me indicates several bad motion track points. In order to insert a fake UFO into the video they had to track certain pixels as they move and shake around, then apply that tracking to the UFO so it moves exactly the same as the camera (match moving). Sometimes the pixels will move say 10 pixels in one direction, yet the computer detected the pixels move 12 pixels, and that creates a bad tracking point. Normally you can fix bad tracking points by hand, but when there is about 30 tracking points per second, it becomes very time consuming. If you apply the motion tracks to the UFO when it has bad track points, it will wobble and shake around similar to what you see in the video."

"charlyv" noted "Fake, stop action in frames shows no motion blur, Impossible for such recorded speeds in any consumer digital camera, regardless of make or resolution."


Then "davespanners" opens up a whole new angle of investigation:

This is filmed outside coral bookmakers in clipstone / great portland street in London. If you google search that building You will eventually find this page, which is a tv production company that is in the very same building.From their web site

The Mill creates pioneering visual effects for the advertising, music, television and film industries. We craft commercials, music videos and generate compelling film and TV. We build installations, projections, applications and create multi-media content and experiences.

"EnigmaAgent" replies with a photo of Managing Director Mike Smallwood, taken from that company's website, who appears to be the same guy seen smiling in the video, apparently enjoying this incident 'way too much.

"Heliocentric" dug further, and found a link from the The Mill's website to a particular commercial for Sony. And that same Sony commercial is a "favorite" on the YouTube page of Alymc01, who photographed the "UFOs." The noose tightens!

Chillingly, "GiftOfProphecy" observes that video hoaxers are now using claims of "copyright infringement" to make YouTube remove videos showing that the original video was a hoax: " the hoaxer "50nFit" is claiming copyright infringement on the video that proves his Jerusalem video is a hoax... Now the videos that prove his London UFOs are a hoax were removed to avoid complete suspension [of his YouTube account]. The "HOAXKiller1" channel may be suspended anyway because YouTube doesn't understand Fair Use laws, and allows the deceptive scumbag hoaxers to retaliate and claim copyright on videos that are for research and analysis."  In other words, if you place a video on YouTube showing how a UFO video was faked, the hoaxer will contact YouTube to force you to remove your analysis, claiming "copyright infringement."

Of course, many of the comments in this very long thread are credulous and foolish, and I don't want to imply that all of the participants are credible researchers. But I am definitely impressed with a few of them!

That "Ghostly Mirage City" in China

Once again, the mass media is filled with breathless nonsense about a "Ghostly mirage City" allegedly seen from Huanshan City in the eastern part of China over the Xin'an River. The phenomenon went viral starting with this dreadful piece in the London Daily Mail, which proclaims, "Ghostly apparition of entire city appears over Chinese river... but is it just a mirage?" In fact, it's neither, as we will see. This story was accompanied by an equally dreadful video, which has (thankfully) been removed because the user's YouTube account was terminated. Here is a non-sensationalized news report from ITN News:

Now these are obviously actual buildings that are being seen. The details are quite sharp. Mirages are very different. Mirages are not something imaginary or dream-like. They are a perfectly real phenomenon of meteorological optics: the behavior of light in the atmosphere, where temperatures can often vary dramatically, resulting in different indices of refraction, and hence non-straight light paths. Think "fun house mirror." Mirage images are never as detailed as these Chinese images, because the different atmospheric layers are not stable enough to produce details like that, and also mirage images always bring into view something many miles distant, not close-up like this.

 My photo of an inferior mirage over Lake Michigan. The ship appears to be hovering above the water.

There are two different kinds of mirages, superior and inferior. The inferior mirage is caused by cooler air overlaying much warmer, creating images that appear lower than they actually are. It is by far the most common. Usually it results in a strip of the sky being bent downward below the horizon. It's often seen on highways on hot days, looking like distant water. The superior mirage is more interesting, and rarer, as objects appear higher than they actually are, resulting in things becoming visible that are normally beyond the curvature of the earth.  That Chinese "Ghost City" is neither. Typically with a superior mirage you will see a double horizon: a false horizon, often slanted, is on top, with the actual horizon below it. The region between them represents a mirage image of distant water. The Weather Doctor has a pretty good explanation of mirages. When I was a student at Northwestern University I had a dorm room facing Lake Michigan. The double horizon and the superior mirage was actually a fairly common sight in the springtime, when warmer air would blow in from the south over the still quite frigid Great Lake. At night, images of lights of cities in Indiana and Michigan would occasionally become visible, normally below the horizon.

My photo showing the jagged double-horizon of the superior mirage over Lake Michigan. Between the two horizons is the mirage region, where the outline of an inverted ship can be faintly seen.

Any reporter worthy of the name would have followed through and determined exactly what was being seen: which buildings those were in the video, and their location. Certainly at least some people who live in that area would be able to identify those buildings, and show on a map exactly where each building is. If you are in Huanshan City, and you speak Chinese or have an interpreter, how difficult would it be to interview people and find out exactly which buildings are being seen in the video, where those buildings are located, and solve the "mystery?" Well, the Australian photographer and film producer Auki Henry did exactly that. He says

" the reality was bad Chinese translation combined with hyper-sensationalist reporting. All the buildings in the footage are real buildings, not visions, mirages or illusions, they actually physically stand exactly where they were filmed.  The only thing out of the ordinary here is they are surrounded by floodwater and mist."

Mr. Henry has nailed down every significant detail. He gives us a map showing the location of each of the "ghost" buildings. And so far as I can tell he did it without even going to China, or interviewing anyone there! The Xin'an River was at flood stage, and the waters generated fog that obscured the bottom parts of the building, making the tops of the buildings appear to float in air. Wooooo - big mystery!

Why is it that no reporter bothered to do his or her job and get to the bottom of this story? News reporters don't want to get facts, they want to get ratings. And why let mere facts get in the way of a great story?

More "Night Vision" UFOs : A Squadron of UFOs flying over Oakland?

"Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California?", asks the London Daily Mail, adhering strictly to the First Law of UFOlogy: any unidentified object spotted must be presumed to be an alien spacecraft until conclusively proven otherwise. And there were other stories in the press. What they had in common was: somebody photographs something in the sky that he doesn't understand, and thousands of people jump to conclusions about alien craft.

In brief, an anonymous photographer known only as "KevinMC360" took two videos of unidentified (to him) objects, using an image intensifier ("Night Vision") device,  one that (unlike the human eye) is sensitive to infra-red light. He posts them to YouTube with the suggestion that these are objects visible only in the infrared, and unknown to science. Then thousands of viewers, including "serious" journalists who should know better, think they are seeing something extraordinary, but all it means is they don't understand how these "night vision" devices work. In some cases, the anonymity of the photographer creates the strong suspicion of a hoax, but I don't think that is the case here. The video looks absolutely unmodified. This is what you see when you look into Night Vision devices. I wrote a recent "Psychic Vibrations" column about the uses (and misuses) of Night Vision devices by UFOlogists (Skeptical Inquirer, September/October, 2010), and here we see another instance of that.




In this video, the interesting objects are the three that fly in a triangular formation. These look very much like the triad of NOSS satellites operated by the U.S. Navy for reconnaissance (see http://www.satobs.org/noss.html ). However, most information about these satellites and their mission is classified for security reasons. According to that website, there are still two such configurations of three satellites in orbit, NOSS 1-7 and NOSS 2-1. I have seen these myself, using binoculars, and this looks very much like what I saw. Notice that the three objects keep the same position with respect to each other, except that the configuration flattens as the objects move further away. This is exactly what you would expect to see as the configuration recedes to the horizon. The single object that brightens is not too interesting, it is probably just a satellite moving into a position where its sun angle is more favorable toward the observer.





In the second video, the objects do not behave the same. There are four of them, and they do not stay in strict formation. Probably they are birds. The problem is, however, that in low-resolution devices such as this, practically any object is simply a white dot. The argument that these UFOs must be giving off infra-red, because his wife could not see them with her naked eye, doesn't wash. The night vision device amplifies available light, infra-red or otherwise, making faint objects become visible. Had she been using binoculars, she probably would have seen them better than he did. The video also shows the lights of a jet aircraft. Is the jet using infra-red lights? Of course not.

Night-Vision UFO watching is becoming a popular activity. The leader of this pack is Ed Grimsley, who claims to have videos of "Objects in Earth's space shooting it out," which he is happy to sell you. He even has a Meetup Group in San Diego, where for a mere $20 you will be taken out to dark skies to see these amazing night vision UFOs yourself. As I noted in my column, I was present when this group brought its night vision equipment to a star party of the San Diego Astronomy Association. What none of these intrepid explorers seemed to realize was that the "mysterious" objects they thought were visible only in their green goggles were also visible to anyone who has a pair of binoculars - and the binoculars show the objects in better detail.