Aircraft-Carrier Sized UFO Filmed by Two Cameras in Melbourne, Australia

At 05:23 on Sept. 2, 2013, YouTube user Lou20764 of UFO Australia was photographing the International Space Station (ISS) pass in the pre-dawn sky over Melbourne. Then about twenty minutes later, at 5:47, he noticed part of the sky light up, and then saw and recorded a huge, glowing object high in the sky. It seemed to be pulsating and changing its shape. He had two separate cameras running, and both recorded the same thing, which makes the possibility of a hoax much less likely.




Lou posted the video to YouTube, where in a few days it was viewed over 100,000 times. A thread was started on the conspiracy-oriented website Above Top Secret, which attracted the usual mix of intelligent comment and wild speculation.

Noting the similarity of this event to previous rocket fuel dumps, space author and skeptic James Oberg suggested that a Chinese rocket launched just 30 minutes earlier was a likely candidate. Satellite expert Ted Molczan, who confirmed the identity of the "Top Ten" 1996 Mothership UFO sighting in the Yukon, confirmed that it was indeed the Yaogan 17 rocket, whose launch can be seen in the video below. The Chinese rocket was passing over Melbourne exactly where the object was recorded.


Molczan writes, "The fuel dump by the CZ-4C upper stage that launched China's third NOSS-like triad was seen over Australia, and a long video was made by Lou20764, from Melbourne. The event occurred on 2013 Sep 01 about 19:49 UTC (Sep 02 05:49 local time)." In other words, this is a reconnaissance satellite for the Chinese military, similar to ones that the U.S. Navy has been using for decades.


Oberg and others posted this information to Lou's YouTube page containing the video, but he promptly removed them. Lou wrote, "Not putting up with a organized attack by trolls anymore - I just took out the garbage and I feel good about it." To Lou, anyone who threatened his prized UFO video by providing a rational explanation is simply a "troll." Of course, he left up adulatory comments even if their statements are inaccurate or false. Molczan wrote, "Lou20764 seems to believe he saw some sort of ET craft, and so far has been refractory to other ideas. When Jim Oberg posted a congratulatory note on his having captured the fuel dump and requested some technical details, Lou20764 deleted his messages and blocked him from making further comments. Unfortunate behavior, but it should not prevent us from enjoying the latest fuel dump imagery."

Oberg provides these links for more information on previous sightings of fuel dumps resulting from space activities:

 1983 – FATE magazine: Giant UFO Over Two Continents [Europe and South America]
http://www.debunker.com/texts/giant_ufo.html

Worldwide UFO reports sparked by human space activity
http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo_worldwide.html

 ‘Mystery Cloud’ Appears Over Eastern U.S. And Canada
http://www.space.com/299-mystery-cloud-appears-eastern-canada.html

 The Great East Coast UFO of August 1986
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/great_east_coast_ufo_of_august_1986/

 “Smoke Rings” over Africa and Europe
http://transientsky.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/smoke-rings-over-africa-and-europe/

 Satellite fuel Dump
http://epvoxpopuli.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=thomas&action=display&thread=540

Just Published: never-seen Philip J. Klass papers on MJ-12 and the Condon Report.

Philip J. Klass (photo by author)

I have just placed on my Historical documents page on Debunker.com some newly-scanned "white papers" and correspondence by the influential skeptic Philip J. Klass (1919-2005) concerning the supposed MJ-12 papers, and a pre-publication critique of the Condon report.

In November, 1968, Klass wrote an advance critique of the not-yet-published Condon Report (University of Colorado study of UFOs), and circulated it to only a very few persons (fortunately, I was one). He notes that the persons involved in the study were supposed to be uncommitted on the the question of UFOs, but several were already UFO believers.

 

Supposed Harry Truman MJ-12 document, with a photocopied signature

Here are Klass' "White Papers" and other correspondence on the supposed MJ-12 papers (first series only. Even Stanton Friedman is reluctant to defend the MJ-12 papers of the second series!). He explains why they are hoaxes.  The discussion involves William L. Moore, Stanton Friedman, Peter A. Gersten. (57 pages)

Here is Klass' explanation of the $1,000 wager that he lost to Stanton Friedman.

Listening to The Great Debate

In my last Blog entry, I wrote about the Great Debate coming up between myself and "flying saucer physicist" Stanton T. Friedman. An audience of 100,000 people were reported to have listened to it live on August 8 (although some suggest, based on past audience claims, that that number is inflated). A thread was created about it on AboveTopSecret, a conspiracy-oriented website (which often has useful content, nonetheless.) The debate is now available on the YouTube channel of Third Phase of the Moon, embedded below.

Somehow the debate was titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?", a position that I have never maintained. I explained that, given the vastness of the known universe, I consider it a virtual certainty that there are other intelligent beings 'out there' somewhere. But there is not, I maintained, any credible evidence that extraterrestrials have ever visited earth.

What was the result, from my perspective? First, that they allowed Friedman to talk far too much. My time to speak was much shorter.  Also, Friedman kept interrupting me while I was talking, and seldom let me finish making a point. Here are a few of my observations:

• I brought up the Yukon "close encounter" UFO sighting in 1996. Friedman has spoken about this case as one of the all-time best. Ted Molczan and other satellite experts have unambiguously identified this as the fiery re-entry of a Russian rocket booster launched less than 24 hours earlier. Friedman refused to accept this: "No way, Jose!" I asked him if he believed that the fiery rocket booster, and an alien spacecraft, were both in the same place at the same time. Perhaps the spacecraft was obscuring the rocket reentry? I used this to illustrate the argument that "reliable witnesses aren't."

Was this the result of the debate?

• I said that when people see something in the sky that they can't identify, they should not jump to the least-likely hypothesis - that it is an alien space craft. Friedman insisted that this was the most likely hypothesis!!
•  He argued that the Bluebook Special Report 14 shows that the "unknown" cases are of a higher quality than those that could be explained. I read some of Alan Hendry's critique of BBSR14 from his book The UFO Handbook, accusing them of invalid statistical procedures.
• Concerning the so-called "Truman Forrestal memo" of MJ-12, I noted that it is fake because the supposed presidential signature is a photocopy of one on a genuine document. Stanton claimed President Truman signed so many documents that it's inevitable that two signatures could be found that are identical!
• When I brought up the lack of an Archive Registration Number on the supposed "Cutler-Twining memo" of MJ-12, allegedly discovered in the U.S. National Archives, Stanton tried to bait-and-switch, insisting that it had a proper document number on it. But the two are not the same: the copy number of a controlled document is not the same as the number that would be assigned to it when it was registered into the archives. I could not get him back on the subject. And no archive registration number implies that it was planeted in the archives for somebody to supposedly "find." Freidman claimed that all of the

  

  Or was it this? (cartoons by "torsion" on AboveTopSecret)

  arguments against the original MJ-12 "documents" are answered in his book MAJIC.
• I brought up the famous "Fish Map," the supposed 'extraterrestrial star map' of Betty Hill that has been a major part of Friedman's UFO lectures for about forty years. Recent astronomical data shows that the star catalog on which the map was originally based contained some major errors concerning the stars involved, and that the special sun-like properties that all its stars supposedly had is not correct. Friedman was of course not willing to say "Sorry folks, I've been steering you wrong for the past forty years. I'm afraid that the Fish map is not valid." So he again danced around the obvious, claiming that the map's Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli are "very special," without explaining what that is supposed to mean. I countered that it doesn't mean a thing. Of course, now that the map's foundation has been knocked out from under it, the two Zetas are irrelevant to any ETI argument. I asked Stanton if he was still promoting  the Fish map; he replied that he is still "promoting her work," for which he expressed great admiration. "She built more than twenty models," which, of course, has nothing to do with whether the map is correct. Should we give her an award, I asked? Freidman kept bringing up irrelevant points and dancing around the fundamental fact that the Fish Map is now, as I said, "dead."
• He praised the "skill" and experience of the Hills hypnotist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. But Dr. Simon did not believe the "abduction" story, and considered it a fantasy.
• Because Friedman has frequently promoted nuclear fusion as a technique for interstellar travel, I pointed out physics Nobel Laureate Edward Purcell's calculation that, to accelerate one unit of matter to 99% of the speed of light ( Friedman proposes to travel even faster than this in his essay on UFO Propulsion Systems) would require 1.6 * 10**9 units of fusionable hydrogen (1.6 billion), even if it could be done with perfect efficiency, which of course is never possible. Friedman insisted that this was in error, that Purcell made certain assumptions about technological limitations that were not correct. I replied that he is wrong: Purcell calculated nothing more than the amount of hydrogen fusion required to release enough energy for the acceleration, without worrying about how it could possibly be performed or controlled. Friedman insisted that we could use gravitational assist to fling ourselves to the stars. But this works only in our solar system, I replied; the orbital velocity of the fastest planet, Mercury, is only about 30 miles/second, utterly negligible when you're trying to speed up to almost 186,282 miles/second.
• The last 8 minutes were supposed to be "closing statements" from both of us. However, Friedman talked on and on for six minutes, leaving me very little. I was not timing him, I assumed that the host would. I wanted to close with Philip J. Klass' UFO Curse, but I was cut off before I could. Here is Klass' UFO Curse:
  

  "No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your death-bed, you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse."

When the time was up, the host asked Friedman and I if we might want to do this again sometime. I said that I'd be willing, after some time had passed. But not Stanton - he proclaimed himself too occupied to ever debate again. I think he realized that his evasions did not  go over well, and the stuff he has been defending is too flimsy to be defended in a debate. And I was told that Third Phase had considerable difficulty finding any pro-UFOlogist who was willing to debate me; several turned them down before Friedman agreed. If I ever do debate Friedman again, I will insist on strictly-monitored time segments: he talks for five minutes and I stay silent, then it's my turn. Otherwise Friedman just jumps in and tries to steer the discussion his way, using irrelevant arguments and "red herrings."

On Above Top Secret, "carddown" said "Friedman brought very little new to the debate, mostly just a performance in part of his Cosmic Watergate lecture. Sheaffer brought up many good points, and I thought he really scored with the Canadian UFO/booster reentry and the Fish map flop. (Did you notice how Friedman had to retreat on the map by saying eyewitnesses are unreliable?) "

If you have any comments on the debate, please share them with us below. Please keep them polite and civil, however tempting it might be to do otherwise. Thanks.

Before the Great Debate: My Review of "The Aztec Incident"

The time of the Great Debate Approaches! On Thursday, August 8, 2013 I will debate the self-styled "Flying Saucer Physicist" Stanton T. Friedman, who has been a major UFO proponent for almost 50 years. The debate is sponsored by Third Phase of the Moon (a well-known UFO advocacy site, the leading UFO channel on YouTube), and carried by the Revolution Radio Network. The time is 5:00 PM Pacific Time (8:00 PM Eastern Time). To listen, go to http://www.freedomslips.com/ and click directly on the unlabeled "play" icon for Studio A on the left. At some point the host will open up phone lines for questions. When that happens, the call in number is 818-923-1713.

Stanton Friedman

One of the subjects sure to come up in the debate is the supposed "Aztec, New Mexico UFO Crash" of March 25, 1948, "eight months after Roswell." Long considered a hoax by the great majority of UFOlogists, a new book The Aztec Incident by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey now has Friedman being very impressed by the so-called "evidence." He wrote a Foreward to the book, in which he apologized for his earlier skepticism about the case. Friedman said:

This is a very important book setting new standards for investigation, persistence, and the casting of a very wide net to locate witnesses. There will certainly be shrieks of distress from both noisy negativists and pro-UFO types who have been unwilling to maintain the Aztec story in their "gray basket." It is not gray anymore. It proves there were more than a few crashes.

 In the November/December 2012 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, I wrote a very detailed critique of the Ramseys' new book. I want listeners to the debate to be able to read that review, so they can see for themselves what a loopy tale it is that Friedman now endorses:

from The Skeptical Inquirer, November/December, 2012. Revised August 5, 2013

  Aztec Saucer Crash Story Rises from the Dead?

The Aztec Incident by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey
Dr. Frank Thayer and Frank Warren, researchers.
Foreword by Stanton Friedman
(Mooresville, NC: Aztec.48 Productions, 2012. 221 pp, $24.95)

    The famous Roswell Saucer Crash claim was born, and died, in the span of about a twenty-four hour newspaper cycle in July of 1947. The story was dead and forgotten for about thirty years, even among those few who believed in saucer crashes, until brought back to life by the book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Since then, the Roswell story has reached Critical Mass, and thus will never again be forgotten or ignored, no matter what the facts about the case have been shown to be.

    A second saucer crash is supposed to have occurred in New Mexico, at Aztec, in 1948. The source of that story was the 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers by Variety columnist Frank Scully. That claim had a somewhat longer run, until 1952. That was when San Francisco journalist J.P. Cahn convinced the editor of True magazine that the Scully saucer crash story was either the greatest event of modern times, or the greatest hoax. The editor agreed, and the result was a long investigation culminating in two lengthy and devastating articles in True. Cahn proved that Scully’s sources, Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer, were con men who made a living swindling people by claiming to have devices for finding oil and minerals in the ground.

    In fact, so successful was Cahn’s demolition of the Newton/Gebauer story, that claims of  “saucer crashes” were ignored until at least the mid 1970s. In 1987, UFO researcher William Steinman published UFO Crash at Aztec, trying to legitimize that claim. It got very little “respect” - even Stanton Friedman didn’t buy it (for which Friedman here apologizes, blaming his earlier rejection of it on absurd statements made by Steinman’s co-author, the late Wendelle Stevens). In 1998, the first annual UFO Conference was held to benefit the Aztec Public Library. The last one was held in 2011; there wasn’t enough interest to continue. The Aztec crash seemed to be a hoax, and that was the end of the story.

    Not so fast! say Scott and Suzanne Ramsey. Having spent over $500,000 of their own money over a period of 25 years, traveled to 27 states and collected over 55,000 documents, the Ramseys claim that there are first and (mostly) second-hand witnesses to the crash retrieval operation, and that the honest and successful oilman Silas Newton was pretty much framed by J.P. Cahn, to discredit the crash story, and especially to discredit Frank Scully.

    “Eight months after Roswell,” on March 25 1948, some oil workers went out to battle a supposed brush fire near a company site, and supposedly discovered instead that “a very large metallic lens-shaped craft sat silently atop the mesa.” They found that there were at least two dead bodies inside it, beings that were small but otherwise entirely human. Soon there was a military helicopter hovering overhead, and soldiers arriving. Eventually there were up to 200 persons involved in the recovery effort that lasted two weeks, a few miles outside this town of a few thousand people. However, no word leaked out to the local press or community leaders, probably because, as one man explained, “we were threatened with our lives if we ever spoke out about this.”  

    One of the government scientists who supposedly studied the crashed saucer was a mysterious “Doctor Gee” (obviously Gebauer despite his and others’ denial), who let his friend, oilman Silas Newton, in on the secret as they were driving around trying out a magnetic device for detecting “microwaves” supposedly emitted by oil in the ground. Dr. Gee claimed to be a “master of magnetic energy,” and to have worked on a device called a magnetron that “knocked out as many as 17 Japanese submarines in one day.” The saucers, according to Newton, probably originate on Venus, and use “magnetic” propulsion, traveling along “Magnetic Lines of Force which originate in the sun and revolve around their planets and their moons, keeping the universe in magnetic balance.” The Ramseys don’t seem to realize that these statements are pseudoscientific gibberish.

    For some reason, the magnetic prospectors drove directly to Frank Scully’s house in Hollywood (Newton also lived in Hollywood, and had been in contact with Scully), where they regaled him with tales about saucers, including the one that crashed in Aztec.

The book that started the Aztec Crash story

Newton, according to the Ramseys, has gotten a bum rap from Cahn. His supposedly “questionable” business deals were “nothing new, as the oil business always has a high level of risk… Newton’s investors were, in the main, all quite happy, as court records show.” (Of course, con men like Newton typically use money from new “investors” to pay off earlier “investors” who threaten to complain to the law.) When Scully refused Cahn’s fervent offer to buy the whole story for the San Francisco Chronicle, say the authors, Cahn set out to destroy the Aztec crash story, and also Newton, Gebauer, and Scully. The authors claim that Cahn’s accusations made to the FBI “resulted in the malicious prosecution of Newton and his friend Leo Gebauer – a prosecution based in envy and a relentless vendetta.”

The FBI, however, takes a different view. Official government records at http://vault.fbi.gov/silas-newton contain “the FBI’s investigations into Newton’s fraudulent activities between 1951 and 1970.” According to the FBI, “Silas Newton (1887-1972) was a wealthy oil producer and con-man who claimed that he had a gadget that could detect minerals and oil.” Newton’s first arrest was as far back as 1931, with many more arrests following. In 1970 Newton pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to illegal securities sales (but was allowed to withdraw that plea after making restitution to the investor), and was also under investigation for an alleged mining fraud in New Mexico, two years before his death at age 85. And the Ramseys state, “the FBI is still withholding over 211 pages concerning Silas Newton.” Would you buy a used saucer from that man? (By comparison, so far as I am aware J.P. Cahn has never been in trouble with the law.)

In Frank Scully’s Private and Confidential Memo on J.P. Cahn, dated June 15, 1952, and forwarded to the attorney for Newton, some inflammatory accusations were made. Scully claimed that Cahn was “trying out blackmail on me, for size… he even confessed that he had gone in for some larceny to strengthen his case…. He proved himself a louse in the blouse of journalism, a dangerous man.”

However, this Memo was almost certainly dictated by Scully under the direction of his attorney. Thus it must be read not as “here is what happened,” but instead “here is what we’ll say in court, if the matter lands there.” It cannot be taken as unbiased fact. The next time you are in a courtroom, note that while witnesses are placed under oath, the attorneys never are, and thus are under no real obligation to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

I knew Cahn during the 1980s and 90s. I can agree that he had a brash and self-promoting personality, and I can well imagine the verbal battles between the caged combatants Cahn and Frank and Alice Scully as they made the slow drive from Los Angeles to Palomar Mountain to see George Adamski. (The Scullys were Adamski supporters). Cahn wanted Scully to admit that he had been duped, and write an article admitting it. “The fact is, Frank, the information you accepted and passed on to your readers in good faith is not what you were led to believe it was. Gebauer is not one of the nation’s ‘top scientists’”.  Cahn was urging Scully to protect his reputation and admit he had been hoaxed. But in Behind the Flying Saucers we find Scully surprisingly unconcerned about his reputation: “It is generally believed that to be any party to a hoax spells ruin, once the hoax is exposed. Nothing is further from the facts.” Scully remarks that he formerly wrote for the sensationalist New York Sun, which expired with great “notoriety,” about which he seems rather proud. Read all of Behind the Flying Saucers (available as a free E-book from scribd.com) and you will realize the obvious: Scully was a “true believer” in flying saucers, as well as a dedicated follower of Charles Fort, and probably no evidence to the contrary would ever change his mind.

Was Cahn motivated by “envy and a relentless vendetta?” I absolutely do not think so. I always felt the suspicion that old Jape was fond of Scully and went too easy on him.  Cahn always emphasized that Scully was not himself a hoaxer, but had been hoaxed. My web page http://debunker.com/Scully.html contains a lot of in-depth information on the Scully controversy, including what is probably the only recording of J. P. Cahn discussing his investigations. The Ramseys have misrepresented Cahn’s feelings about Scully. Cahn told the Bay Area Skeptics “Frank [Scully] turned out to be an absolutely super guy.” (part 1 about 8:15), “And he was outraged, absolutely outraged, that I would question this” crashed saucer story. An honest man telling a hard-to-believe tale expects to meet with incredulity, but a scoundrel is outraged at encountering reasonable doubt.

Whether or not you agree with the authors’ conclusions, you have to admire their zeal for investigation. This is one of the best-documented UFO books I have ever seen. There are documents from the FBI archives, Air Force archive documents, news clippings, and most important, the documents from the Frank Scully Collection at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming (that no researcher previously realized existed!). They even found a transcript of the interview of Denver radio ad salesman George Koehler, an associate of Newton, by two Air Force Office of Special Investigations men, a recording that Scully boasts of having erased to thwart those he calls the “Pentagonians.” In 1950, the Air Force was clearly still concerned that flying saucers might represent something real, and wanted to find out.

Regardless of what flaws might or might not have existed in the characters of Newton, Gebauer, Cahn, and Scully, many problems remain: there is no physical or documentary evidence of any extraordinary object landing near Aztec in 1948; the “scientific” theories expounded by Newton and Gebauer are pseudoscientific claptrap (no real scientists were the source of this information, thus Gebauer is lying about working as a top government scientist); and Newton’s claim to operate an electronic device he would carry around the desert to locate oil and minerals was likewise fraudulent, because such devices do not exist. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate the claims of a saucer crash at Aztec needs to explain why we should believe obvious liars like Newton and Gebauer before worrying about who squabbled with whom over publication rights.

It's interesting to note that I'm not the only one writing a critical review of this book  UFO proponents Kevin Randle and Jerome Clark have each written their own reviews of that book, and while the three of us might agree on little else, all three reviews agree that The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon is not credible or convincing. What's amazing is that there is virtually no overlap in the approaches taken in the three reviews. Three entirely separate lines of investigation lead three very different UFO theorists to the same conclusion. We should also note that Frank Warren, credited as a researcher on the book's cover, also expresses serious reservations about the authors' conclusions. Practically the only well-known UFOlogist who takes The Aztec Incident seriously is Stanton Friedman. (I'm sure that, in the debate, he will trot out one or two others.)

Monte Shriver grew up in Aztec, NM, moving there in 1947, and graduating from Aztec High School in 1952. His mother lived in Aztec until her death in 2006. He has written a long, three-part article on Kevin Randle's Blog demonstrating problems with the "saucer crash" claims in the Steinman and Ramsey books. Despite the claims of military retrievals, harassment, surveillance, roads closed, etc., not one of the local residents ever mentioned anything about a supposed "saucer crash" in Hart Canyon (where Shriver went camping as a Boy Scout). Had there been anything out of the ordinary going on in a town as small as that, it would have been the main topic of conversation for years! He cites local history references to demonstrate many errors concerning roads, rivers, mountains,  etc. in both saucer books.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

John G. Fuller Warns Betty Hill Not to "Jump to Conclusions"

Betty Hill (1919–2004), who with her husband Barney was allegedly "abducted' by a UFO back in 1961, is an extremely well-known figure in UFO circles. We know her from the book The Interrupted Journey by John G. Fuller, by countless media articles and appearances, and from her appearances at UFO conferences. The conventional wisdom is: she was a serious and credible person who reported an incredible experience, but in later years became somewhat fantasy-prone because of something akin to a post-abduction syndrome, worsened by ther husband's sudden death. A more realistic appraisal would be: Mrs. Hill was a fantasy-prone person, who nonetheless succeeded in convincing a lot of people she was credible before the weight of evidence made it obvious that she wasn't.

A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, after her death Mrs. Hill's papers were donated to her alma mater, and now are available to researchers at the Milne Special Collections, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH. Skeptic Kitty Mervine has been studying these papers, and has made some extremely interesting findings.

Kitty found that Betty originally described her alien abductors as looking like the natives of Patagonia, that she saw in a slide presentation:

We did see some slides of a group of Indians in Antarctic who resembled these humanoids very much- both of us were very shocked by this. They had fatty layers of tissues around their features to protect them from the extreme cold of their environment – a warm day is 40 below and they go swimming.

From this Betty concluded that the aliens must have originated on a very cold planet. Betty didn't explain how the natives find liquid water when it's 40 below.

Kitty also found Betty's margin notes concerning her regular visits to a supposed "UFO landing spot" near Exeter, NH, which she visited two or three times a week for at least six years, and saw six or eight UFOs each night. This is the spot where, according to the UFO proponent John Oswald, on the evening he went there with her, Mrs. Hill couldn't "distinguish between a landed UFO and a streetlight." In her notes, Betty scribbled details and descriptions of her UFOs in the margins. Concerning one friend who came to see this miraculous event, Betty wrote,

So now when he comes to visit, he brings his mother and we have great times together. When they were here in October, we went out to my area and counted 12 UFOs in thirty minutes.  His mother was amazed!

Betty Hill with "Junior" and UFO promoter 
Timothy Green Beckley, who took pictures at the "UFO landing spot."

However, one visitor to the "UFO landing spot" was not so easily impressed: John G. Fuller, the  author of the book The Interrupted Journey that made the Hills famous, who regularly wrote for major magazines such as the Saturday Review and Look. (Remember when people used to read magazines for news and current events?) Fuller was a firm believer in UFOs, ghosts, and other paranormal claims, but he could not stomach the UFO claims being made by Betty Hill after her supposed "abduction."

Fuller visited the UFO landing site with Betty. She was attempting to persuade Fuller, and the editors of Look magazine, to publish an article about the UFOs that she was seeing there. But Fuller, the author of numerous loopy books about ghosts and psychic surgery, wasn't buying it at all. In a letter to Betty dated January 8, 1974, Fuller wrote,

during the evening we went out with you, there was nothing that appeared that could not be identified as planes on a normal traffic pattern for either the Boston airport, the Pease Air Force Base, or the traffic route for overseas passenger jets. Yet you had a tendency to feel that some of these were UFOs....to misinterpret aviation traffic as the [unidentified] objects does not help your case.

Regardless of the intensity of your belief, it must still be backed up by cautious and competent witnesses or it works against you very seriously...

Because your first encounter was so well documented, it served as very good evidence of the existence of UFOs. Unless you can back up any current happenings with equal caution, you can seriously harm your position, and that of those who found your original evidence so interesting because of your reserve and caution. Hate to speak as a Dutch uncle like this, Betty, but it is very important to do so, if only for protecting your own reputation.

very best regards,   John

In another note (undated), Fuller admonishes Betty to, "never extrapolate, always re-check and look for natural explanation first." That is so un-Betty! "It's so easy to jump to conclusions, and when you do, you can weaken your position drastically.

In other words, Fuller warned Betty: 'don't be so crazy. You are damaging your own credibility, and mine, too.'

UFO Researcher of the Year Displays some Careless Research

Grant Cameron is a well-known in the UFO community as a researcher who specializes in documentation, especially about supposed "Presidential UFOs." I earlier wrote about Cameron's speech to the 2013 International UFO Congress near Phoenix, Arizona:

Grant Cameron

He spoke on "Consciousness and UFOs." He explained that he is convinced that no real progress in knowledge about UFOs will be made until we successfully contact the beings involved, which he is sure is possible. He noted that one person claiming mental contact was the former Democratic Congressman, Dennis Kucinich, who not only had a sighting that lasted several hours [how can you watch something like that for hours without getting cameras, binoculars, the neighbors, the news crew, the police, etc?], but also said that he "felt a connection" with the UFO that he and the others sighted. "You have to make contact, you can't watch from a distance," says Cameron. He feels that the idea of UFO contact has been made disreputable because of certain people whose famous claims of contact are not credible. He showed photos of three persons he was implying to be phonies: Billy Meier, George Adamski, and Steven Greer. (No argument there!)

 On July 19, 2013, Cameron wrote in his Blog, "Is there a UFO Government Control Group? – New Information ." In it he said

John [Alexander] was a Colonel in the US Army, and had been interested in the UFO mystery since a young boy in 1947. He also had done work on “esoteric projects, specifically in the intelligence community with psychokinesis.”

Alexander wrote a book on his UFO investigations called “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities.” In the book Alexander pointed out that although UFOs are real, they are of no interest to the American government, and therefore there is no cover-up of the facts by American officials.

Alexander is the author of  UFOs Myths Conspiracies and Realities (NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011). He is not a popular figure in UFOlogy today, even though he is a UFO proponent. As I wrote about Alexander's speech to the 2011 MUFON Symposium:

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.

Paradoxically, while denying that the U.S. military is involved in any UFO coverups, Alexander is a strong proponent of the famous Rendlesham Forest alleged UFO landing, which took place in England in 1980 but involved U.S. Air Force personnel. The U.S. Air Force operated the base at Woodbridge, as part of the NATO defenses against possible Soviet agression. So apparently Alexander believes that the U.S. Air Force does not cover up domestic UFOs, but it does cover-up foreign ones. And he does not seem concerned that the principal witnesses have greatly "improved" their stories over the years.

John Alexander (left) chats with James McGaha at The Amazing Meeting 2012, South Point Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Cameron Continues:

In a June 15, 2013 interview with radio show host Nancy Du Tetre Alexander, Alexander suddenly announced that the MJ-12 group had existed.[ii] This sudden disclosure was strange. That is because the MJ-12 controversy is central to the whole government cover-up theory believed by most in the UFO community. Yet Alexander did not talk about the MJ-12 idea in his book which had as its basic premise that there is no government control group dealing with the UFO mystery.

Cameron is quite wrong about this. Chapter 7 in Alexander's UFO book is titled "Majestic 12," and it is ten pages long (hard cover edition).  Obviously Cameron has not read the book. He continues:

This is the transcript of the interaction;

Alexander: I think that there actually was a group and they were created something known as COG – continuity of government – and it was to prevent nuclear decapitation of the United States. It was really super super sensitive.

Nancy Du Tetre: Well let me ask you this. Does MJ-12 as far as you know exist today?

Alexander: I don’t think so. I had someone whisper to me that it had existed. I didn’t think it had existed at all, but when I looked into it and asked if the names were correct, and they said yes and that should tell me what I need to know to figure it out. That’s how we came up with this particular occupation because most of them were into nuclear warfare. That was one common thread of all the people on the list, and much more so certainly than with UFOs.[iii]

Cameron's story was written up by paranormal reporter Jack Brewer on The Examiner, headling "Grant Cameron reports John Alexander confirmed MJ-12,"   and has now become a big news story in UFO circles.

Before going ballistic on this, Grant Cameron should have actually read the chapter on the alleged MJ-12 "documents" in John Alexander's book. Alexander examines the claims, and is generally skeptical of them. On p. 130, he suggests "COG - An Alternative Solution." He cites a 'confidential source' he trusts who tells him that "the topics the group was involved in studying had nothing to do with the Roswell crash in particular or UFOs in general." In other words, a group existed called "MJ-12," but it had nothing to do with UFOs. He speculates that it may have been involved with "continuity of government" following a nuclear war, but he doesn't know for sure. In his book Alexander does not claim that the names of the alleged MJ-12 were "correct," but he does say "Those named as the MJ-12 constituency dovetails appropriately with a body created that might advise a POTUS." Possibly what Alexander meant in the radio interview that the names were "correct" for a COG panel. He has not yet replied to several requests for clarification, including mine.

So, John Alexander was being interviewed on a radio show, and said almost exactly the same thing he had said in his book two years earlier. Grant Cameron seized upon Alexander's statement as a "sudden disclosure" and it became a big UFO news story.

Lee Speigel notes in the Huffington Post that "At the recent 22nd annual International UFO Congress in Arizona [2013], Cameron -- co-author of "UFOs, Area 51, and Government Informants" -- was honored with the researcher of the year award for his outstanding achievement in the field of UFO studies."

Given that Cameron was chosen "UFO Researcher of the Year," this tells us a great deal about "UFO Research!"

R.I.P., Marjorie Fish and her Star Map

Most followers of the UFO scene are familiar with the supposed 'alien star map' that Betty Hill drew after her alleged UFO abduction, and of Marjorie Fish's purported identification of (some of) the stars on the map as nearby solar-type stars. Stanton Friedman, the self-styled "Flying Saucer Physicst," has been promoting that map as a supposed 'proof' of extraterrestrial visitations for more than forty years.

The famous Fish Map

On July 7, 2013, UFO and star map researcher Steve Pearse sent an email to a number of UFO researchers, informing them that Marjorie Fish had died in a nursing home in Oak Harbor, Ohio almost three months earlier, on April 8. She was 80, and had reportedly been suffering from Azlheimer's disease. Apparently none of those receiving the email, including Kathleen Marden and Stanton Friedman, knew that Fish had died. A link was provided to a memorial page for Ms. Fish created by a local newspaper. The obituary contains this rather startling statement:

Marjorie Fish

As one of her hobbies, Marjorie made an investigation into the Betty Hill map by constructing a 3-D star map in the late 1960's using several databases. She found a pattern that matched Mrs. Hill's drawing well, which generated international interest. Later, after newer data was compiled, she determined that the binary stars within the pattern were too close together to support life; so as a true skeptic, she issued a statement that she now felt that the correlation was unlikely.

However, nobody seems to know anything about any such statement made by Marjorie Fish. Marden sent email to that same list, saying she knew nothing about any repudiation by Fish of her map, and doubted that Fish ever did so.
[A statement from Fish's niece casts doubt on Fish's supposed repudiation.]

Separately, Steve Pearse has written an open letter to MUFON, titled "Should Stanton Friedman Renounce Marjorie Fish?" In it he says:

In the December, 2012 issue of the MUFON Journal (No. 536) Stanton Friedman wrote a two page rebuttal article in his regular monthly column ‘Perceptions’ aimed primarily at his arch rival Robert Sheaffer, a well known UFO debunker... This wasn’t a draw, split decision, or a knockout by either one of them, but it is time to settle this issue once and for all.

He objects to my descriptions of how Betty and Barney shared their accounts before the hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon, thereby compromising their independence. He also objects to me calling certain individuals "UFOlogists" when they were engineers and whatever. Well, what should we call people who spend a full twelve hours interviewing a supposed UFO witness - "UFO fanatics?"

However, Friedman must endure even worse from Pearse:

Robert Sheaffer is correct! .... When you remove the lines-it’s very obvious that there is no match. You have to ask the question: Why was this ignored?... I have to side with Robert Sheaffer on one major topic and that is the invalidation of Marjorie Fish’s controversial Zeta Reticuli Interpretation, it’s become even more controversial because Friedman is fully aware of the fact that the triangle in Fish’s star map doesn’t exist. Two of her stars are outside of the boundary of her working model that claimed that all the stars were with 55 light years of Sol/Earth looking in the direction of Zeta Reticuli. All that he’s willing to say is that there is better data now. 

Of course, Friedman, and MUFON, will ignore that letter. This will surely lead up to a fascinating exchange when I have a two-hour debate with Stanton Friedman on the Revolution Radio Network, currently scheduled for August 8 at 5PM Pacific Time (8PM Eastern Time). Then, Friedman will not be able to ignore the problems with his precious Fish Map.  I wonder how Friedman can possibly defend his continued promotion of the Fish Map, given that we now know how utterly implausible it is.

But wait, there's more: one reason that Pierce is so eager to discard the Fish map is that he thinks there is a better one! He has written a book titled Set Your Phaser to Stun, in which he describes another alleged indentification of Betty Hill's sketch. His email user name, HR3951 (an entry in the Yale Bright Star Catalog) gives us a clue. One of the giant globes representing the aliens' alleged home star is supposed to be HR3951 = 20 Leo Minoris = SAO  61808, a totally obscure star in an obscure constellation. At magnitude 5.4, it is barely visible to the naked eye under excellent dark sky conditions. (If there is any constellation more obscure than Reticulum, it is Leo Minor. Why can't the aliens choose more interesting places to come from? At least Billy Meier's aliens came from the Pleiades - that's a lot more interesting!)

I have not had time to study the details of the Hill-Wilson map. However, it is supposed to be an earth-based map, yet one of the giant globes is supposed to represent our Sun. How do you map the sun in a position among the stars if you are on earth?

In any case, the new map now takes its proud place as Star Map #6, the sixth proposed identification of what Betty Hill drew. (There may be others I'm not aware of.) The six are:

1. Betty Hill's Pegasus Map, in The Interrupted Journey
2. Fish Map
3. Atterberg Map (nearby stars, see my book UFO Sightings)
4. Koch-Kyborg Map (planets and asteroids)
5. Yari Danjo Map (nearby stars)
6. Hill-Wilson Star Map (stars seen from earth-based view).

Adding to the uncertainty over any star map are Betty Hill's own comments, in a letter to Marjorie Fish. Skeptical researcher Kitty Mervine has been studying Betty Hill's papers which are now housed in the Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham NH. In a letter dated only "October 12" (1969?), Betty Hill wrote

As for the 8 background stars - I really do not know if they exist and in that position, or if I added them to try to show that the other stars were seen on the sky map in the background. I know I added them to show that stars were in the background; however, as to their position on the original skymap, I am not sure.

So even Betty Hill herself was not so sure about the unconnected stars - one of which is sometimes claimed to represent a star that 'had not been discovered yet' at the time the map was made.  Kitty suggests, "We should be focused on Betty Hill's original drawing, not attempted matches.  If you are starting with bad information, you will never have a match." And if even Betty Hill says she was "not sure" about the stars she drew, I can't imagine why anyone else should be.