A Skeptical Look at the 25th Annual International UFO Congress (Part 1)

Once again this year, I attended the International UFO Congress at the We-Ko-Pa Resort, Conference Center, and Casino, near Phoenix, Arizona. It looks much the same as last year, except for the really ugly bright orange bags we were all given. There are not as many plastic alien statues as last year, but there still are a few scattered about.

Samuel Maranto

The very first speaker was Samuel Maranto, MUFON's Illinois State Director, to speak about "Mass Sightings" in his state. Unfortunately, most of his photos and videos only showed featureless 'lights in the sky,' which could have been a lot of things, like lighted balloons (which suggestion he rejected as "complete and utter nonsense"). I did not realize that when the celebrated early morning sightings occurred in southern Illinois on January 5, 2000, the state was already having a decent-sized flap of UFO sightings, and sightings occurred in that same area the previous evening. So people were well-primed to see unidentified objects. He also spoke about the now-famous 2006 UFO sighting at O'Hare Field Gate C17 (and apparently nowhere else).  There are no photos of it, and it did not show up on radar. However, he showed a photo that depicted a round, fuzzy cloud, and said this was what the observers said it looked like. I spoke with Sam quite a bit afterward. He is a very friendly guy, and is not dogmatic.

Paul Davids

Paul Davids is a writer and producer of movies and TV shows. He was the producer and co-writer of the Showtime film Roswell in 1993. He spoke on "Marilyn Monroe, the CIA, and UFOs." He made much of the FBI Hottel Memo that talks about an alleged UFO crash, not bothering to explain how it has been shown to be just a re-hash of the well-known (and bogus) claim of Silas Newton.As for MM, she was killed by the same people who killed JFK the following year. During the evening film festival, Davids presented his 96 minute documentary movie, Marilyn Monroe Declassified. I saw part of the movie, and found it entertaining, just like his talk, but based on gossip and conjecture. I also had some interesting conversations later with Paul. He says his interest in UFOs began when he and his family had a Daylight Disc sighting near Los Angeles in 1987.

Nick Redfern

Nick Redfern, who has written three books about the MIB in the past few years, spoke on "Men In Black: History and Mystery." He went into the well-known history of the Men in Black: Albert K. Bender, Gray Barker, John Keel, Tim Beckley. Brad Steiger, said Redfern, reported an MIB encounter. Since Steiger confessed to me when we met, decades ago, that nothing he wrote should be taken seriously, he knows it's nonsense, I doubt that Steiger's "MIB encounter" actually happened. 

Redfern suggested that the MIB could be (in addition to government agents) ETs, Time Travelers, Demons, or perhaps related to Vampires. He also suggested that in "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers," Gray Barker tried to understand Bender's MIB as best he could. When I had a chance to speak with him later, I explained that I knew Barker, who always treated this book as a joke, as did James Moseley, who according to the book was one of the victims of the MIBs' "silencing." (Moseley lived for 55 years after being "silenced," and was one of the least-silent people in all of UFOdumb.) Perhaps Redfern, having found a comfortable niche in UFOlogy as the MIB-man, has become protective of his prime assets. He certainly knows his MIB lore, even the obscure stuff.

David Jacobs

Longtime UFOlogist and abduction-finder David Jacobs gave one of the most interesting talks, "Understanding the Abduction Phenomenon," which pretty closely followed his latest book, Walking Among Us. That means aliens, or specifically human-alien hybrids, which he calls hubrids. And they are literally taking over our planet, slowly and methodically. This alien enterprise, he says, probably began either in the last quarter of the 19th century, or the first quarter of the 20th.  These abductions are a thing that her never happened on earth before that. Alien abductions are global, clandestine, and intergenerational - they run in families. There is no evidence that aliens have ever made contact with governments. The goal is apparently "planetary acquisition," which they are doing for their own benefit, not ours.

Hubrids aged in their late teens through early 20s are moving into apartments in groups or 2, 3, or 4, although a few of them live alone. (I have seen them, too, but thought they were college students.) The aliens and their hubrids are all telepathic - if someone claims to be an alien hybrid but can't read your mind, then they're not. Since Jacobs says that this alien incursion is the "greatest existential threat" to humanity, it is extremely strange that he and his followers have made no effort at all to identify these invaders, and expose them.

Jacobs says that when he begins hypnosis sessions with a new "abductee," the subject says all kinds of things that just are not true, especially in the first few sessions.  Subjects often "confabulate." But after a few more hypnosis sessions, Jacobs' subjects apparently learn which details are 'correct' and which are not, and tell stories that are much more 'correct.' This conformity among accounts is then cited to "prove" that the abduction stories are real.

(To be continued)
 

It's here! My New UFO book "Bad UFOs"

At long last, the book everyone has been waiting for (ha ha)! My New UFO book, "Bad UFOs."

A 6x9" quality trade paperback with 277 pages, it is the first skeptical book examining the UFO phenomenon published in the United States since, well, my previous UFO book, UFO Sightings in 1998. That's eighteen years. This book is not just a compilation of Blog entries, although some of the material has appeared on this Blog. It  covers the broad outline of contemporary UFOlogy: sightings, photos and videos, saucer crashes, UFO abductions, conspiracies, disclosure, etc., with everything brought up-to-date as of the date of publication (January, 2016). Among the UFO cases and UFO claims discussed are those of:

• Betty and Barney Hill
• the Phoenix Lights
• "mystery missiles" off the coast near Los Angeles
• Richard Hoagland
• Steven Greer's "Disclosure Project" and ET Contact Protocols.
• Trent UFO photos
• Heflin UFO photos
• Travis Walton
• Exopolitics
• Rendlesham forest
• Roswell 'crash' and Roswell slides
• 'Fly UFO' video from Chile, and Leslie Kean
• Whitley Strieber
• "Planet X" / Nibiru 
• Electric Asteroids
• and many more.....

Here is the Table of Contents of the book Bad UFOs.

How can you get it? You can order it right here, using this link: book.badufos.com

The list price is $18.95 (plus shipping). And if you order it from this link, you can enter the discount code Y8ZHYK6Y and get 10% off the retail price.

You can also order the book from Amazon.com. But in that case, there will be no discount.

For those who prefer the Ebook format, Bad UFOs is also available from Amazon on Kindle. The E-book is only $8.95 (no discounts available).

Enjoy!!

Fraudulent "Psychologist" Pops Up to Defend Marden's Absurdities

In my previous posting dated January 2, we saw Kathleen Marden's absurd charges that the letter I posted from Dr. Simon dated March 1, 1976 is "fraudulent," because its contents are most inconvenient for her and contradict the story that she is trying to promote.

Somebody claiming to be "Paul Westfall," a Master's degree student in psychology at UC Berkeley, posted a comment to that Blog entry which exactly parallels Marden's argument that Dr. Simon's letter is a "forgery." Putting on the airs of a psychology professional, he basically says that what Dr. Simon wrote in that letter is full of crap, and accuses Klass of forging it.

Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden selling stuff at last year's International UFO Congress.

But I smelled a rat as I started to look into this. At that same time, I unexpectedly received an email from the very wise Ted Molczan, telling me that he smelled a rat, too. 

Here is the reply I posted to "Paul Westfall" (who cannot even spell "Berkeley" correctly!):

Mr. Westfall,

Your letter above is rather peculiar, especially inasmuch as you say that 'your group' has been monitoring 'my group'. Sir, I don't HAVE a group here. It's just me writing.

"We have also been monitoring carefully how groups such as yours interact with such individuals. Within that context we found the content within this blob perplexing and quite frankly somewhat irresponsible and represented."

I seriously think that this is quite bogus, as psychology researchers at a prestigious university have better things to do than to read Blogs such as mine, and complain about them.

Here is the current directory of psychology graduate students at UC Berkeley. It is nicely in alphabetical order. There is nobody on that list named "Westfall."
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/graduate-students

Also, Cal Berkeley DOES NOT HAVE a Master's program in Psychology. It is a PhD program only.

You, sir, are a fraud. Who put you up to this?????

Is this "Paul Westfall" a real person? Or is he a sock puppett created by Marden or one of her staunch defenders?

It's a "Forgery," Marden Charges!!

I frankly didn't expect to get a lot of response to my posting of December 23, Dr. Simon Reveals his Real Thoughts on the Hill "UFO Abduction" Case. I scanned and posted a 48-page PDF of old letters and documents related to the case, most of them about 40 years old. In a sense, it did not reveal anything new, but merely added more detail to what we already knew: Dr. Benjamin Simon, the Hills' psychiatrist, did not believe their story of having been abducted on board a flying saucer. I wrote about this as far back as 1981. It was also in my book UFO Sightings, published in 1998. Indeed, if you go all the way back to The Interrupted Journey (1966), the book that started it all, we find Dr. Simon saying [chapter 12] that he found the most tenable explanation for the abduction story to be that the dreams of Mrs. Hill had "assumed the quality of a fantasised experience." In very diplomatic terms, he is saying, "I don't buy it." So the fact that Dr. Simon did not accept the abduction story is not exactly news, or at least it should not be to anyone carefully following both sides of this controversy. (We all know how few people that is.)

Yours Truly with Kathleen Marden and the "Flying Saucer Physicist," Stanton Friedman, at the MUFON Symposium, 2011, perhaps in happier days.

I realized that this ran counter to what Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill's niece and heir to her celebrated Saucer Story, was saying. What I didn't realize is how fiercely invested Marden is in preserving the illusion that Dr. Simon accepted all of the Hills' account as being factual, including the abduction story.

On December 26, Marden wrote on her Blog, "Debunkers at it Again." In it she says,

I received an email message from Andre Skondras on Christmas day informing me that debunker Robert Sheaffer, an associate of Philip Klass and longstanding member of CSI (formerly CSICOP) , had found a never before published letter allegedly written to Klass by Dr. Benjamin Simon. The letter dated March 1, 1976, was mailed by Klass to Betty in 1988. It spoke of Dr. Simon’s intent to “give the true story of the Betty and Barney Hill affair.” It is our opinion that Dr. Simon would not have stated that his untested, unproven conjectures were the truth. He was circumspect and professional in voicing his opinion. The intentions voiced in the letter would have been a violation of his contract with John Fuller and a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality.

Of course, that confidentiality had already been breached, with permission, by the entire commercial enterprise exploiting the Hills' account, including John Fuller's 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, and by 1976 the NBC-TV movie dramatizing their account, The UFO Incident. Once a story gets that far out into the public eye, and questions arise about its interpretation, you can't claim that further discussion constitutes a "violation." Once the Hills' sessions with Dr. Simon have become pillars of support for the pro-UFO abduction argument, you can't release that information selectively.

The late Karl Pflock gave Betty Hill this T-shirt (photo by author at the Indian Head conference, 2000)

But there was something in that letter even more upsetting (and ultimately threatening) to Marden's enterprise than Dr. Simon's skepticism about the abduction story. In his letter of March 1, 1976 to Philip J. Klass, Dr. Simon stated that "my interest in UFOs was almost entirely on the phenomenon of Barney Hill's developing racial paranoia which seemed to me to have been the best representation on the matter I have seen." But that was not Marden's biggest problem. In the letter Dr. Simon writes,

the Today show [Oct. 20, 1975] was the first time I did this openly to the public at large [state his skepticism about the abduction account]. A few days later I did the same thing on the NBC TV station here, WBZ, which resulted in  Betty telephoning and implying that I was lying when I said (what you have said in your book) that Betty's sister [Marden's mother] was much interested in UFOs and served as a stimulus, and that the idea of a true visitation had been suggested by her narration in the presence of her sister and her supervisor. She promptly telephoned WBZ and undoubtedly was looking for my appearances and affirmed that her sister was not interested in UFOs and that she had never told the story. Aside from the fact that this is a lie denying her own statements on the tapes we also received a letter from Betty's mother proclaiming that while I have the right of free speech, I was telling lies abasing her beloved daughter! I revealed the entire story on an hour an a half radio show with Larry Glick.

So that is the true dark heresy, which cannot be admitted: that Betty's sister was a UFO buff, and encouraged Betty's fantasies. Every time this was mentioned, Betty Hill (and now Kathleen Marden) would pop up to deny it. But here we have Dr. Simon saying that it's true.

Marden says that Klass sent a copy of the March 1 letter to him from Dr. Simon to Betty Hill in 1988. I do not know anything about that, but it does not surprise me. Klass and Mrs. Hill exchanged many letters, and he must have sent it along to prove a point he was trying to make. Marden continues,

I had thought about publishing the letter in my book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, with Stanton Friedman, but decided not to, due to uncertainty about the identity of the writer. Betty had marked "Forged Letter!” at the top of the letter. 

Now, it does not surprise me one bit that Betty Hill had said such an absurd thing. Mrs. Hill wrote and said many absurd things, and not just about her famous UFO incident. Even Marden admits in her book Captured (p. 275), "After Barney's death, she turned away from careful, objective evaluation, and with subjective enthusiasm began to identify any lights in the sky as UFOs." Although as I showed in my review of this book in The Skeptical Inquirer (November/December, 2007), after Barney's death was not the only time Betty Hill said absurd things about UFOs and aliens. There is much evidence of Betty making wild UFO claims with Barney sitting right beside her.

Taking complete leave of her senses, Marden joins in her aunt's delusion:

 I have had it and other letters that Dr. Simon wrote to Betty examined by several individuals, including three who were close to Dr. Simon, and all believe it is probably a forgery. The style and phraseology were not characteristic of Dr. Simon's writing. An important piece of information is the fact that Dr. Simon signed a non-competition clause with John Fuller. He could not have legally written a book. It is doubtful that Klass would have known this. Dr. Simon was circumspect with regard to sharing his opinions about the Hill case, and it would have been highly uncharacteristic of him to opine or violate doctor-patient confidentiality. 

Between the two of us, Marden and I have recently posted four letters from Dr. Simon, three from me (one of which she claims is a "forgery"), and one from her. As I understand it, she has clarified her claim to mean that only the letter if March 1 is a "forgery," the others are genuine. If you're inclined to believe her absurd claim, I urge you to compare the four letters. They are all very similar. None of them are "forgeries."And in all of them, Dr. Simon maintains the same thing: he believed that the Hills had a "sighting" (as do I), but he believed that the abduction story was not real and came from Betty's dreams. How did Barney learn about Betty's dreams? Betty always maintained that she never told him about them. But as Dr. Simon explained on the Larry Glick show, Betty was telling the truth saying that she did not tell him directly. However "she did tell it in Barney's presence [to Betty's sister, and her supervisor], and that's where he got it."

And to settle the matter of Dr. Simon's skepticism about the abduction story once and for all: you can go to the wonderful audio archive CEIV An Audio History Of Alien Abduction And Animal Mutilation 1957 1976 compiled by the well-known UFOlogist Wendy Connors. Click on track #21,

Betty Hill and Dr. Benjamin Simon are interviewed on the Today Show to promote the NBC TV movie, the UFO Incident, on October 25, 1975.  08:30

You will hear Dr. Simon describe the abduction account as a "fantasy," and plainly state, "the abduction did not happen."

Perhaps Ms. Marden will say that this recording is a "forgery," too?

 If you click #5, you can hear Dr. Simon on Larry Glick's radio show, saying more "heretical" things.

Dr. Simon Reveals his Real Thoughts on the Hill "UFO Abduction" Case

Digging through some boxes in my garage, I came across a collection of papers I had earlier set aside concerning the famous "UFO abduction" case of Betty and Barney Hill, the subject of John Fuller's 1965 book The Interrupted Journey, as well as the 1975 NBC-TV movie The UFO Incident.

I have just finished scanning 48 pages of these documents, and placed them on my Historical UFO documents page on my website www.debunker.com. They will be of great interest to anyone interested in the Betty and Barney Hill case. These documents contain:

• Correspondence between Dr. Benjamin Simon and arch-skeptic Philip J. Klass.
• Correspondence between Betty Hill and Philip J. Klass, in which she  attempts to persuade Klass that her abduction story is factual.
• Correspondence between Dr. Benjamin Simon and yours truly (!!).
• Copies of the supposed "radar evidence" of the Hills' UFO.
• Betty Hill's drawing illustrating the relative positions of her "UFO" and what she is calling "Jupiter", and the moon, establishing that it was actually Jupiter she saw at the beginning of her sighting.
• My skeptical article about the Hill case, published in the August, 1976 issue of Official UFO magazine, and Betty Hill's letter to the editor about it.
• The complete record of weather observations for Sept. 19-20, 1961 from the Mt Washington  Observatory, the highest point in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

Betty Hill in 2000 posing with "Junior," a bust of her supposed alien  abductor (photo by author)

Some are now claiming that Dr. Simon accepted the Hills' abduction account. For example, "UFO Hunter" Bill Birnes (one of the most pompous asses I have ever encountered in UFOlogy - sometime I'll write about what happened when I was on Dr. J's internet radio show, and Birnes called in) writes on page 112 of UFO Hunters, Book One:

[Kathleen] Marden [Betty Hill's niece, and currently the biggest promoter of the Hill abduction story] suggested in a provate email to me, "Had Dr. Simon stated publicly that he believed that the Hills had experienced an abduction by non-human beings in a flying saucer, it would most assuredly have been professional suicide." However, Marden said that in his personal letters to Betty Hill, Dr. Simon was positive and fully supportive of Betty.

Dr. Simon's letters to Klass show that this is absolutely false. Dr. Simon said that he believed the Hills had a "sighting" (and says that he has had two sightings of his own, but gives no details!). However, he wrote:

 The abduction did not take place but was a reproduction of Betty's dream which occurred right after the sighting (p. 3).

Dr. Benjamin Simon

Dr. Simon's skepticism concerning the abduction story could not have been more directly stated. He told Klass that "my interest in UFOs was almost entirely on the phenomena of Barney's developing racial paranoia which seemed to me to have been the best representation on the matter I had seen" (p. 8).


Dr. Simon stated his skepticism quite directly for the first time on the NBC-TV Today show on the morning of the premiere of the NBC-TV movie, The UFO Incident (October 20, 1975). Klass apparently had chided Dr. Simon for not speaking out on this sooner. Dr. Simon defends his reluctance to speak out on the grounds of not being given sufficient opportunity to explain it fully. Dr. Simon says that it was James Oberg's review of Klass' book published in Technology Review, chiding him for not speaking out about his skepticism on the Hill story, that finally convinced Dr. Simon to do so! Oberg wrote,

why was it left to Mr. Klass to reveal that the psychiatrist who treated Betty and Barney Hill (The Interrupted Journey) never for a moment believed that they had been inside a flying saucer, while Look magazine used his misquoted words as an endorsement?  (p. 10).

Dr. Simon wrote to Klass, "THE ZEITGEIST HAD COME!, and I determined that this could be a magnificent opening for the book I am going to write on this whole matter." Unfortunately, no such book was ever written. Is it possible that Dr. Simon left behing a partially-completed manuscript at the time of his death?

The Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn (bottom) as seen at midnight in the White Mountains (size of planets exaggerated)

Betty Hill's sketch of the positions of the objects she said she saw. What she is calling "Jupiter" is obviously Saturn, and what she calls a "craft" is obviously Jupiter. (Size of moon is exaggerated.) If some other object were present, she would have seen three objects near the moon, not two.

Everyone interested in the Hill case will want to see these newly-published documents.

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November - the Greatest UFO Mass Sighting in French History, 1990

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November - it's now been 25 years since the greatest mass UFO sighting in French history, in 1990.

Drawing of the French mass UFO sighting, Nov. 5, 1990. This one was observed by seven people

From James Oberg: http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/Oberg/901105-French_wave.pdf

• Thousands of witness reports, artwork 

• Mass media saturated 

• Fireball reports common, but accompanied by more artificial structured objects 

•  Some reports of EM effects on computers, car radios 

http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0507/children.html

Some witnesses described it as 'giant triangles' crossing the sky. Except that it was the re-entry of a Russian Proton rocket (designation 1990-094C), used to launch a Gorizont satellite. Satellite orbit guru Ted Molczan has prepared this map, showing the trajectory of the object as it traveled (west to east) across France. This matches up extremely well with the time and trajectory of the reported "UFO."

 From the UFO Working Group Netherlands: Analysis of the 1990 UFO reports by British jet fighter pilots.

Case Studies In Pilot Misperceptions Of "UFOs" by James Oberg.

"Credible people reporting incredible things." But quite inaccurately.

Dr. ThepPhanom's Aliens

On October 29, I did about a 40-minute interview on Skype with a team of producers from Malaysian TV in Kuala Lumpur. They produce a show called Strange Encounters, and they wanted to talk to me about aliens.

They had recently traveled to Thailand, where they met with Dr. ThepPhanom Muangman, a U.S.-trained medical doctor who says he regularly communicates with aliens. (He says that his first UFO sighting occurred in New Hampshire when he was a medical student back in the 1950s - beating out even Betty Hill!) He has a considerable following, called the Kao Kala Group, named for the hill that they claim is a UFO hotspot or interdimensional portal or something. There was an article about him in the Wall Street Journal back in 2011. You might say that Dr. ThepPhanom is the Steven Greer of Thailand.

They sent me links to two videos. The first one just seems to show a satellite going over, very likely the ISS. I told them that there was nothing unusual about that one. The second video, below, purports to show an "extraterrestrial" walking around farmers' fields in Thailand. Notice how dramatic music has been added.

I pointed out to the producers that just because this guy is walking around in a white suit, that doesn't make him an alien. This looks like the kind of suit someone might wear when working with hazardous materials, perhaps putting pesticides on the fields. The second part of the video shows a bright light in the sky. It looks like it's possibly an airborne flare, on a parachute, but not knowing how it was recorded, it could be just about anything. In their imagination, they claim to see ETs jumping down from it. 

The Strange Encounters producers interviewed Dr. ThepPhanom at his home in Thailand. He talked about meditation and trance states for communicating with aliens. He fiddled with an electro-magnetic field meter, telling them that this device can detect when aliens are present. It quickly got a high reading, causing Dr. ThepPhanom to exclaim "they are here." Unfortunately, the aliens were invisible.

Dr. ThepPhanom detecting aliens using his EMF meter.

As the interview went on, some of the Doctor's followers were out in the yard, and captured on video this object that allegedly made a single, high-speed pass over his house. It looks like an object that somebody simply tossed into the air, for someone else to film. How did they know the precise time to turn on the camera? At first I thought it was a fly buzzing over - that's how fast it went - but when slowed down it clearly was not a bug.

A "UFO" captured on video as it zipped by Dr. ThepPhanom's house

The  Kao Kala Group has a Blog about how they channel aliens and such:

Coordination for Disasters Warning (the Kao Kala Group), is a group of people who receive information in order to coordinate with other groups, in case of disasters, to provide warning when we receive the information from extraterrestrials, in order to warn the people, preparation of equipment and technology in order to help, enhancement the state of mind of the people who work and acknowledge this project.

 Currently their Blog contains "messages from the chief of Pluto that were sent by sound wave channeling at Kaokala hill, Nakhon Sawan province, Thailand on March 6, 1999." All the postings use the Thai calendar, so I cannot say when they were made, although Blogspot shows postings in 2011, then nothing until 2015. 

As near as I can tell, there is no such thing as "skepticism" in Thailand when it comes to claims of UFOs and aliens.