The Rendle-Sham Case: Phony and Phonier

The supposed Rendlesham Forest UFO landing case (sometimes referred to as "the British Roswell") involved the supposed landing (or at least Close Encounter - the story is inconsistent) of a UFO in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, UK in December, 1980. Just like the story of the fish that got away gets bigger with each telling, the more time that passes, the more exciting the Rendle-sham case becomes. Practically each year, one of the supposed witnesses invents a new and dramatic claim to 'prove' that the case is real.

The so-called "Science Channel" imagines the Rendle-sham UFO

British skeptic Ian Ridpath has long stayed on top of this case. Here is his summary of it:

 Although the overall case is complex, the main aspects can be summarized as follows:

1.  Security guards saw bright lights apparently descending into Rendlesham Forest around 3 a.m on 1980 December 26. A bright fireball burned up over southern England at the same time.

2.  The guards went out into the forest and saw a flashing light between the trees, which they followed until they realized it was coming from a lighthouse (Orford Ness).

3.  After daybreak, indentations in the ground and marks on the trees were found in a clearing. Local police and a forester identified these as rabbit scrapings and cuts made by foresters.

4.  Two nights later the deputy base commander, Lt Col Charles Halt, investigated the area. He took radiation readings, which were background levels. He also saw a flashing light in the direction of Orford Ness but was unable to identify it.

5.  Col Halt reported seeing starlike objects that twinkled and hovered for hours, like stars. The brightest of these, which at times appeared to send down beams of light, was in the direction of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

At its most basic, the case comes down to the misinterpretation of a series of nocturnal lights – a fireball, a lighthouse, and some stars. Such misidentifications are standard fare for UFOlogy. It is only the concatenation of three different stimuli that makes it exceptional.

The BBC reported on July 13 that Col Halt is now claiming,

"I have confirmation that (Bentwaters radar operators)... saw the object go across their 60 mile (96km) scope in two or three seconds, thousands of miles an hour, he came back across their scope again, stopped near the water tower, they watched it and observed it go into the forest where we were," said Col Halt.

"At Wattisham, they picked up what they called a 'bogie' and lost it near Rendlesham Forest.

"Whatever was there was clearly under intelligent control."

Halt does not name the supposed radar operators, and does not say how he obtained this information. He claimed that the operators said nothing about this until after their retirement, for fear of being "decertified" for reporting a UFO. Even if this unlikely claim were true, it does not correspond to what the supposed witnesses are reporting. A UFO allegedly whizzing by at thousands of miles an hour does not match the UFO(s) allegedly seen hovering for hours above the forest, and even landing there.

Col. Halt claiming more "proof" for his alleged UFO encounter in 1980

Lee Speigel wrote in the Huffington Post on July 21 that Halt says this new information will 'blow the lid off' the Rendlesham Forest sightings.

We previously reported how Halt accused the U.S. government of covering up UFO information, and he believes there's a top secret agency that's in charge of anything to do with possible extraterrestrial visits to Earth.

"There is a contract civilian agency, that is fed information, that is controlling everything. It's made up of either former military, high-level government agencies or high-ranking, very knowledgeable scientists. I can almost guarantee you. That's the way we do it. And disinformation is the biggest thing," Halt told HuffPost on Friday.

The Daily Express of London reported on July 14 that Halt said:

• Rendlesham Forest was mobbed with US military personnel "hunting UFOs" at the time

• A "UFO exploded " before his eyes and another "shot down a laser beam" from 3,000 feet above

• The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) later hid documents relating to Rendlesham

• US personnel who "lost 40 minutes" during the sighting have been denied access to medical files

Speaking at a UFO conference in Woodbridge, Suffolk, he said: "There is no doubt in my mind we are not alone and there are some people (in power) who know this, but even Mr (Barack) Obama won't get through to them."

 This is not the first time that Halt has 'jazzed up' his account of the Rendle-sham incidents. Ridpath describes Halt's "iffy affidavit," written in 2010,  as a "disastrous attempt to rewrite the facts of the case," suggesting that "this product of his 30-year-old memory differs so substantively from what he said and wrote at the time that it would be destroyed in a court of law."


What are other "top witnesses" from Rendle-sham reporting?

Airman Larry Warren claimed to have seen a light in the forest that "blew up," then re-assembled itself, and alien beings came scampering out of it. He says they resembled "children in snowsuits." By his account, many other Air Force personnel saw these creatures, but nobody else has reported them.

Larry Warren's description of alien beings scampering out of the Rendle-sham saucer (from 1985 CNN special on Rendlesham).

Another supposed witness, John Burroughs, has implied while supposedly under hypnosis that he and Sgt. Penniston were abducted by beings onto the UFO for about 45 minutes, and brought back to a different place. Supposedly base personnel saw them being lifted up to the object, and worried that they would never be returned.
 

John Burroughs ham-acting his supposed UFO encounter under "hypnosis." Hilarious!

Sgt. Jim Penniston (ret.), however, relates a completely different UFO yarn, in spite of supposedly sharing in Burrough's UFO abduction. He claims that he touched the landed UFO, and received a message from it in the form of a "binary code," which he subsequently wrote down. However, he did not tell anyone about it for thirty years.

Part of Penniston's telepathically-received  'UFO Binary Code,' miraculously turning up in his notebook thirty years after the fact. It reveals the UFO to have been sent by Time Travelers from the year 8100.

 Penniston now says that the binary data from the Rendle-sham UFO was sent by Time Travelers, which makes sense since aliens would hardly be expected to encode their messages using ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. But time travelers from a future earth might possibly still be using ASCII 6,000 years from now (and probably Microsoft Windows as well). When Penniston was interviewed on a 2011 podcast by Angela Joiner, his story got all tangled up under her questioning.  (Hat tip to Danny Miller.) Penniston got confused whether he knew what the code meant as it was being transmitted. He  finally decided that he knew what six pages of it meant, but he thought that the rest of it "didn't mean nothin ." [If you have the patience to wade through over 200 comments on this posting, you'll see a spirited debate between two individuals who worked with Penniston on his "codes," raising substantial doubt about how many pages of  "codes" there are, and whether they were all written down in the same  year.]

If you can describe any of these "witnesses" as "credible," then you are much better at "believing things" than me.

Finally,

The Rendlesham Forest now has its own "UFO Trail." A UFO encounter is a terrible thing to waste.

 

A Skeptic at MUFON's 50th Anniversary Symposium, Part 1

This year's MUFON Symposium returned to southern California, in Irvine, so I signed up. Other than it being MUFON's 50th anniversary, there was no over-arching UFOlogical theme, like the much-derided "Secret Space Program" theme in 2017 (although the idea of "time travel" seemed to come up a lot in the talks). I didn't attend the Friday evening banquet with longtime MUFON director John Schuessler, whose theme was "MUFON at Fifty - A Fantastic Journey."

Jim Penniston spins his Tales from the Rendlesham Woods.

The first speaker on Saturday morning was Jim Penniston, whose talk was titled "Rendlesham - Days of Future Past." Penniston's story of encountering a landed craft in the woods outside the U.S. Air Force base at Rendlesham, U.K. in 1980 is well-known in UFOlogy. This case is sometimes referred to as the "British Roswell." The British skeptic Ian Ridpath provides the best summary and analysis of this extremely complicated case. 

Penniston opened by asking how many people had heard about the Rendlesham case? Practically everybody. "Half of what you know about Rendlesham is wrong!," he claimed. This is obviously a swipe at certain other individuals enjoying the Rendlesham spotlight, and whose tales are incompatible with his. For example, John Burroughs says that he and Penniston were abducted by aliens in the forest, and Larry Warren claims to have seen aliens scampering out of the craft. Penniston related a tale about chasing "the airman" (presumably Burroughs) over a fence and across a farmer's field, for reasons that escape me.

Penniston claims that he saw a landed craft in the woods that night. He paced off its size, it was 9 feet long and it was about 7 1/2 feet tall.. He showed pages from his "real-time response notes" supposedly describing the incident. (Unfortunately, that supposedly "real-time" notebook didn't surface until many years after the incident.)  When he approached the craft and placed his hand on it, he perceived a blinding white light, "and I began to see ones and zeroes." Later he wrote about 16 pages of the binary code in his wonderful notebook. The craft supposedly lifted off silently, and disappeared. Penniston claims to have been required to attend debriefings and special meetings for "containment" of the story, and for "witness control." That's the UFO cover-up, you understand.

Penniston was not a very inspiring speaker, and there was much fumbling with A/V issues. He said that the scribblings of binary in his notebook have been analyzed, and supposedly represent the locations of various UFO-related and mystical sites around the world. He concluded his talk with the idea that the beings in the craft are not extraterrestrials, but somehow are our future selves (who must actually be quite small to fit into the dimensions that he gave of the craft, unless like Dr. Who's time-traveling TARDIS, "it's bigger on the inside"). 

Clas Svahn

The next speaker was the Swedish researcher and archivist Clas Svahn, who has been studying UFOs since the late 1960s (as have I). He has investigated over 1,500 UFO cases (here is his very interesting interview of Betty Hill), and has published 30 books. His talk was titled "The Real X-Files and the Mystery of the Ghost Rockets."

The first part of the title refers to the vast UFO and Fortean-related archive Svahn and his colleagues have long been assembling, the Archives for the Unexplained (AFU). It contain four separate libraries, has 20,000 UFO reports from Sweden, and files from many countries, in addition to books, papers, news clippings, microfilms,films, DVDs,  and UFO-related toys (they even have a store selling surplus materials from their collections). His soon-to-be published book will illustrate the contents of the archives.

The second part of the title refers to the legendary "Ghost Rockets" reportedly seen in Sweden beginning in 1946, the year before Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting. A Ghost Rocket sighting begins with an object in the sky that looks like a rocket. It might fly around and change directions, but then it always crashes into a lake, and disappears. The Swedish military has investigated over 1,000 reports of Ghost Rockets, yet despite numerous searches of lakes involving divers, metal detectors, and sonar, nobody has ever recovered a single artifact from any supposed "ghost rocket." Hence the name - like all ghosts, ghost rockets simply disappear. Svahn showed some photos of an expedition he went on to a very remote, difficult-to-reach lake in Sweden, into which a ghost rocket had been reliably witnessed to plunge. They had to walk miles carrying their tents, supplies, and equipment. Their first few attempts didn't find any fragments, but they plan to go back again with better equipment. If they find any strange metamaterials, they can always send them to "To The Stars" for expert analysis!

UFO artist and violinist serenades the Symposium attendees

Next to speak was the Brazilian researcher A. J. Geveard, whose title was "UFOs in Brazil - An Official Matter." He has been a full-time UFOlogist since 1985. He said that Brazil's government has an official UFO investigation program, all of whose documents are unclassified and available to the public. Argentina also has government-run UFO investigations, but it is run by skeptics. This is disgraceful, he says!

In Brazil, UFOs seem to want to attack people. Some of the crafts would "suck blood and energy" from people. The only place people were safe was in the church; apparently the aliens recognize the ancient principle of religious Sanctuary. The most dramatic incidents occurred in Varginha, where at least two creatures were captured while still alive. The Military Policeman who captured one of the creatures carried it on his lap to the hospital. He died three weeks later at the age of 23. The dead creatures were taken to Campinas University, presumably to have an alien autopsy. The army and the government, of course, still deny that anything happened at Varginha, but Geveard insists that Varginha was "ten times better than Roswell."

A. J. Geveard.

Next to speak was Paul Stonehill, who was born in the Soviet Union, on "The Turbulent History of Alien Visitors to Russia and the USSR." He told of numerous encounters between the Russian and Soviet military, and aliens. Indeed, UFOs have shot down military jets. I had heard Stonehill speak before, at the UFO Congress in 2013, and this sounded much like that same talk:

He explained that there were all kinds of UFOs in the Russian territories, ancient and modern. UFOs are depicted in ancient rock carvings, and there are "out of place" artifacts in ancient rock strata. The KGB was very interested in UFOs and paranormal phenomena, but Stalin had the records destroyed. Later there was an official Soviet military program for recording and studying UFO reports. In 1982, a UFO almost started World War III by initiating a nuclear missile's launch sequence for 15 minutes. Unlike UFOs in the U.S., which are reported to be peaceful and try to interfere with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, in the USSR UFOs apparently are warlike, and try to launch such missiles.

Stonehill also talked quite a bit about USOs - Unidentified Submersible Objects. Soviet divers have found themselves next to underwater humanoids working on recovering something, wearing no breathing apparatus.

Michael P. Masters

The final speaker of the afternoon was anthropologist Michael P. Masters, PhD, who lectured on "A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon." He is selling not just a book, but T-shirts and such for his "Multidisciplinary" approach, so I guess it must be very important. He started out talking about bipedalism and how significant that was in human evolutionary history. It initiated the brain/behavior feedback loop, he said. This is rare among mammals, and is likely even rarer on earthlike exoplanets. Bipedal animals are constantly fighting gravity, he explained, and since earth is [reportedly] small compared to known exoplanets, which would have stronger gravity, he suggests that bipedalism would be unlikely to develop. And hence intelligent life. Of course, it's likely that many smaller earth-sized exoplanets exist, but we don't see them because it's easier to detect the larger ones. Also, a creature with six or eight limbs wouldn't need to worry about becoming bipedal. Masters tries to deduce aliens' evolutionary history from witness descriptions, suggesting that he takes such accounts far too literally.

Can you travel backwards in time? Masters thinks that you can. Rotation, he says, creates relativistic frame dragging, warping spacetime. This can ultimately cause light cones to tip over, enabling one to travel to the past. This might, he suggests, give rise to "time tourism" surrounding major historical events. Noting the serious problems with the extraterrestrial hypothesis - the extreme distances between stars, and the supposed difficulty in evolving bipedalism, Masters suggests (like Penniston) that the beings in UFOs are not aliens, but our future selves. He calls them "extratempestrials."

In the vendors' room: the Earth isn't flat - it's Hollow!!

[More to follow]

The New Yorker's Credulous Article on Pentagon UFOs - Part 2

(Continued from Part 1.)

Having given us a crash course in UFO history,  author Lewis-Kraus returns to his Hagiography of Leslie Kean:

Once it was clear that U.F.O.s were going to be her life’s work, Kean resolved to ally herself with the research tradition that Hynek had pioneered. Ufologists liked to dwell on certain historic encounters, like Roswell, where any solid evidence that might once have existed had become hopelessly entangled with mythology. Kean chose to focus on “the really good cases” that had been reported since the close of Blue Book, including those that involved professional observers, such as pilots, and ideally multiple witnesses; those that had been substantiated with photos or radar tracks; and especially those in which experts had eliminated other interpretations.

The first such "really good" case mentioned is the famous Rendlesham case in Suffolk, UK, December 1980  (which the late James Moseley always referred to as "Rendle-sham"). 

The details of the incident as it is described in Kean’s book are sensational, to say the least. Another witness, Sergeant James Penniston, said that he got close enough to a silent triangular craft to feel its electric charge and to note the hieroglyphic-like designs etched into its surface.

The claims associated with Rendle-sham may well be "sensational," but the facts dedidedly less so. I have already described some of the many absurdities claimed about this case. As for Penniston, he claims that he touched the landed UFO, and received a message from it in the form of a "binary code," which he subsequently wrote down. However, he did not tell anyone about it for thirty years. (Highly-publicized UFO cases, like fine wines, often improve with age.)  Penniston now says that the binary data from the Rendle-sham UFO was sent by Time Travelers. Remember, this is a "really good case," unlike all those flakey ones.

 

Part of Penniston's telepathically-received  'UFO Binary Code,' miraculously turning up in his notebook thirty years after the fact. It reveals the UFO to have been sent by Time Travelers from the year 8100.

 

Later on, Lewis-Kraus tells us,

One dogged British researcher has convincingly shown that the Rendlesham case, or Britain’s Roswell, probably consisted of a concatenation of a meteor, a lighthouse perceived through woods and fog, and the uncanny sounds made by a muntjac deer. Eyewitness reports are subject to considerable embroidery over time, and strings of improbable coincidences can easily be rendered into an occult pattern by a human mind prone to misapprehension and eager for meaning. The researcher had exhaustively demystified the case, and I was perturbed to learn that Kean seemed unfazed by his verdict. When I asked her about it, she did little more than shrug, as though to suggest that such fluky accounts violated Occam’s razor. 

He doesn't want to tell us the British researcher's name - it is Ian Ridpath. Nor does he give us the URL that "exhaustively demystified the case" - it is here. Mustn't give skepticism too much of a boost. Or upset Leslie! So much for "journalistic objectivity!" Obviously wavering in The Faith, at least a little, he asked Leslie about it.

Even if Rendlesham was “complex,” she said, it was still “one of the top ten U.F.O. encounters of all time.” And, besides, there were always other cases. Hynek, in “The UFO Experience,” had contended that U.F.O. sightings represented a phenomenon that had to be taken in aggregate—hundreds upon hundreds of incredible stories told by credible people.

So even if the Rendle-sham case has a logical explanation, it is nonetheless a "top ten" UFO case, a Golden Oldie, so that counts for something, I guess. And here she repeats Hynek's "bundle of sticks" analogy, which I heard him make many times: any one stick might be broken, but taken together they are too strong to break. To which the obvious reply is: If each case is a zero, the sum of any number of zeroes is zero.

 

For another "really good" case,

Kean selected an incident that occurred in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a rural hamlet southeast of Pittsburgh, on December 9, 1965, in which an object the size of a Volkswagen Beetle allegedly hurtled from the sky. According to multiple witnesses, the acorn-shaped bulk had been removed from the woods on a flatbed truck as service members guarded the area with guns. 

Allegedly. The problem is, we know exactly what people saw in the sky near Kecksburg, and indeed across the entire region. It was the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965, well documented in Sky and Telescope magazine (February, 1966) and other astronomical publications. This has been pointed out repeatedly by skeptics for decades, but somehow the word doesn't seem to have reached Kean. She lives in a bubble of overwhelmingly pro-UFO information, and apparently thinks that there is nothing of value outside it. As for the claims about soldiers in the woods recovering a crashed UFO, as I said about Rendle-sham, highly-publicized UFO cases, like fine wines, often improve with age. 

from Chamberlain, Von Del, 1968: Meteorites of Michigan, Geological Survey Bulletin 5, East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan Department of Conservation, Geological Survey Division, pp. 1-5.

 

Lewis-Kraus Continues,

Kean’s book, which was praised by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku as “the gold standard for U.F.O. research,” and to which John Podesta had contributed a foreword, enhanced and expanded her influence. In June of 2011, Podesta invited Kean to make a confidential presentation at a think tank he founded, the Center for American Progress... In August, 2014, Kean visited the West Wing to meet again with Podesta, who was by then an adviser to President Obama. She had scaled down her request, proposing that a single individual in the Office of Science and Technology Policy be assigned to handle the issue. Nothing came of it.

What we are not told is that Michio Kaku is a UFO believer, who has warned about possible alien invasions and such. His book, Physics of the Impossible, deals with the supposed physics of "phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel." The great majority of Kaku's colleagues in physics would dismiss this as nonsense.

Now we come to - The Fly! Lewis-Kraus somewhat apologetically writes that Kean

had a cordial relationship with the Chilean government’s Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (cefaa). She had begun breaking stories from its case files with an atypical recklessness. Kean’s work from this period, mostly published on the Huffington Post, shows signs of agitation and evangelism. In March of 2012, she wrote an article called “UFO Caught on Tape Over Santiago Air Base,” which referred to a video provided by cefaa. Kean described the video as showing “a dome-shaped, flat-bottomed object with no visible means of propulsion . . . flying at velocities too high to be man-made.” She asked, “Is this the case UFO skeptics have been dreading?”

However, the CEFAA video was widely panned - and not just by skeptics - as simply showing a fly buzzing around. (Note that the Huffington Post article, co-authored by Ralph Blumenthal, Kean's co-author of her New York Times articles about AATIP and Pentagon UFOs, was updated in 2017, undoubtedly to make it less embarrassing. I was not able to find the original article in the Internet Archive, or anywhere else.)  Lewis-Kraus does mention my debunking of the Chilean Fly UFO video, again without giving anyone the URL to enable them to check it themselves.

When Kean wrote about the cefaa video, debunkers leaped at the chance to point out that the object in the case they had been dreading was in all probability a housefly or a beetle buzzing around the camera lens. Robert Sheaffer, the proprietor of a blog called Bad UFOs, wrote in his column in the Skeptical Inquirer, “Indeed, the very fact that a video of a fly doing loops is being cited by some of the world’s top UFOlogists as among the best UFO images of all time reveals how utterly lightweight even the best UFO photos and videos are.” Kean consulted with four entomologists, who mostly declined to issue a categorical judgment on the matter, and urged patience with cefaa’s ongoing investigation.

Kean still has not admitted that she was fooled by a fly buzzing around. She posted some completely irrelevant pictures of beetles, then tried to pass the buck to certain "entomologists," as if even they could identify the species of an insect buzzing around and flying rapid loops in front of the camera.

(Continued in Part 3)

 

The Day the Skeptics Society Wasn't Skeptical - "Best Evidence for UFOs"

Normally the Skeptics Society is a pretty reliable source of information concerning paranormal and pseudo-scientific claims. So imagine my surprise (and dismay) to read in the weekly E-Skeptic of March 28, 2012 a totally uncritical review of Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. Titled "Best Evidence for UFOs" by George Michael, it praises Kean's "numerous credible eyewitnesses to UFO encounters and authoritative sources." He thinks she makes an " impressive case," and praises her "academic rigor." Plainly, either Michael did not read the same book I did, or he was entirely hornswoggled by the way that the crafty Kean disguises her hard-core UFO belief as respectable agnosticism.

Michael is totally uncritical of  the claims and statements in Kean's book. Given that the title of the magazine is "Skeptic," why did it never occur to him to question any of the assertions made by Kean, instead of just accepting each and every one as Gospel truth? Did it not occur to him that, in a book written by a hard-core UFO believer (Kean's mentor in UFOlogy was the late Budd Hopkins), one needs to verify the accuracy of the picture the author is trying to paint? Are all these UFO cases really unexplained? What have we skeptics been doing, sitting on our hands, or scratching our heads, during the decades since these Oldie-But-Moldy UFO claims were made?

The author is obviously totally clueless about the history of the UFO controversy. Otherwise, he would realize that many of Kean’s “unexplained” cases have been explained in detail by Philip J. Klass and others, years ago. Kean simply ignores all explanations and commentaries that she doesn’t like. To me that does not constitute "academic rigor," as Mr. Michael seems to think. But he apparently has never read any of Klass' UFO books, and I suspect doesn't even know who Klass was (or else he would have asked himself, "What did Klass write about this case during the 70s or 80s?"). I have already written a review of Kean's book, “‘Unexplained’ Cases—Only If You Ignore All Explanations,” that was published in the Skeptical Inquirer, March/April, 2011. I have now placed a copy of that review on my website, for those who would like to see what a critical analysis of Kean's dubious pro-UFO claims might look like.

The British UFO skeptic Ian Ridpath wrote:

In his review of Leslie Kean’s book, George Michael too readily takes the author’s word for various UFO cases that have turned out, on investigation, not to be quite as the author describes them. A case in point is the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, which he calls “Perhaps the most notable reported military case involving a UFO”. A little research (even a glance at Wikipedia, for example) would have shown that explanations for all major aspects of that case have been in print for over 25 years. To address the points he raises: No unusual radiation was detected at the site, the supposed landing marks were made by forest animals, and the story of examining a landed craft for 45 minutes is something that was made up many years after the event by one of the witnesses, apparently bent on becoming a UFO celebrity. I would not expect to learn that from a book by an uncritical UFO proponent such as Leslie Kean, but I would have expected to hear it in a review on these pages... There are quite a few other cases he needs to learn about, too.

Peter Brookesmith, longtime paranormal researcher and regular contributor to Fortean Times, says

This review contains what must surely be the most distorted version of the Rendlesham Incident to see the light....where was the wary & informed editorial control? It's not even as if this worthless tract has never been kicked in the fundament (and not only in hard-line skeptical journals) by other reviewers: it's been out & about for a while. So the real question is, how come the review was published by E-Skeptic at all?

(The correct spelling is "Oberg")

As far back as August, 2010 skeptic James Oberg wrote for MSNBC that Kean's book was based on a "questionable foundation." He quickly glanced at a list of supposed "unexplained" cases given by Kean, and immediately pulled out ten that he knew to be caused by Russian space launches.

E-Skeptic is probably unaware that Kean's book was also made into an equally bad one-sided pro-UFO documentary on the History Channel. I have also written a critique of the misrepresentations made on this show.

Apparently Mr. Michael is also unaware that the big controversy underway in UFOlogy at the moment involves Kean promoting a video of a fly buzzing around as being possibly "the case UFO skeptics have been dreading."   Even many of the UFO proponents are choking on that one, as her position is so obviously illogical. Had Michael known that Kean was vigorously defending such an obvious absurdity, I cannot imagine how he possibly could have written such a fawning review.

Unfortunately, now Leslie Kean will be able to boast to reporters that her book has been given the 'seal of approval' of Skeptic magazine for its "academic rigor." As Ian Ridpath noted, if Michael had even bothered to check Wikipedia, he would have seen the problems in Kean's version of the Rendlesham case. Let us hope that in future articles concerning UFOs, the Skeptics Society will utilize the services of authors and reviewers whose understanding of the UFO controversy is better than paper-thin, and who will check out the validity of pro-UFO claims before credulously swallowing them.

A Skeptical Look at the 2017 UFO Congress - Part 4

Ben Hansen: The former host of Fact or Faked presented an "Analysis of Recent Presidential UFO Comments." He mostly dealt with the body language of presidents and presidential candidates on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, when asked about the government and UFOs. 70% of communication, he said, is non-verbal. Drawing upon his background in law enforcement, and using techniques that investigators typically use in crime investigations, Hansen analyzed body language and gestures to try to divine what the subjects really are thinking.

The big guy, Ben Hansen, with yours truly (2016 UFO Congress).

Hansen found that former president Clinton displayed "significant apprehension" when Kimmel asked him about aliens, although the cause of that apprehension is, he emphasized, unknown. When President Obama was asked a similar question by Kimmel, he displayed extremely rapid breathing, about four times the normal resting rate. Obama said "I can't reveal anything," which is "no actual denial" of aliens, according to Hansen. When Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton about aliens, she said that she wants to look into that question again, implying that the question has significance and has not be properly answered. Hansen noted that Hillary's choice of John Posesta, a well-known UFO believer, as her campaign manager was a risky move for Hillary, as it could open her up to potential embarrassment over his UFO pronouncements.

Hansen reached no firm conclusions, but this exercise was a lot of fun.

Richard Dolan spoke on Media Bias in UFO Coverage. "The mainstream media is not your friend," he said. The mainstream media literally "makes us sick." While we can probably all agree that media bias is something very real, each medium to its own bias, I wouldn't go as far as that.

Richard Dolan

Dolan reviewed some examples of media coverage of flying saucers in the 1940s and 50s, illustrating what he called "the ridicule factor." He told how the National Enquirer began serious coverage of UFO incidents in the 1970s. The paper's owner, Generoso Pope, had worked  in Psi Ops, or psychological warfare, with the CIA in the 1950s.

The New York Times, he said, publishes CIA and Air Force "disinformation." But, according to Dolan, the mainstream media is influenced by more than just the CIA. "Control is international." (By whom? The Illuminati?)

Somebody was displaying outdoors supposed '5,000 year old artifacts' allegedly found in graves in Mexico. I'm quite sure they are of much more recent vintage than that, especially given the alien motifs.

Col. Charles Halt

Col. Charles Halt (ret.) spoke on "Bentwaters Revisited". He repeated his usual claims, some of which we saw in the panel the previous day. He claims that he saw three triangular nocturnal light UFOs from the Air Traffic Control tower. He said the object they saw was red, and the Orford Ness lighthouse does not shine red light onto land. (This is in reference to the hypothesis that what they saw at one particular time in the forest was, in fact, the rotating beam of the distant lighthouse. For a full explanation of this, see Ian Ridpath's Rendlesham pages.) Halt made certain that we knew that airman Larry Warren is lying in his rival version of Rendlesham UFO events, repeating this a number of times.

Dr. Erling Strand is the director of Project Hessdalen in Norway, where people reportedly see all manner of strange light phenomena, especially at night. ("dalen" is pronounced like "dalek", so it's like Hess-dalek).  Many of these lights appear to hug the mountain ridge-line, or the horizon, suggesting they could be phenomena of meteorological optics, mirages and such. Others are the usual wiggly-camera blurfos, and some frankly suggest that some of the local folks are doing their best to give the sky watchers something to look at.

Dr. Erling Strand

Strand founded Project Hessdalen in 1983 to study the phenomenon, and they have been at it ever since. I thought to myself, they have been studying this thing diligently for thirty-four years, and haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet? They are studying the alleged phenomenon with cameras, diffraction gratings, and other equipment, measuring, and recording the objects. About the only thing they didn't seem to be doing was using telescopes or binoculars to get a better look at them. Now they have a "science camp" at Hessdalen each summer, as students (and others) gather to see and phototograph the lights.

The most famous of the Hessdalen photos, caused by a moving, wiggly camera? French investigator Dominique Caudron suggests that "this pseudo trajectory is only a shake effect, which reaches nearly 10 °"

Later I spoke with Dr. Strand, asking him if the Hessdalen Project has any telescopes, or binoculars. Yes, we have them, he replied, but we don't use them much. It's too hard to keep the objects in view when they keep moving. (Not so hard if you use binoculars, though.) I reminded him that he had shown us a photo of an 'anomalous' object (looking to me like a mirage image of a very distant mountain peak) that was visible for four hours. To me it is inconceivable that a supposedly anomalous object could just hover in plain view for hours at a time, and no "researcher" puts a telescope on it. Other objects reportedly remained still, or moved slowly, for many minutes. Dr. Strand was not interested in discussing the matter further. I was left with the suspicion that Strand and his crew do not want this "mystery" to be explained, for then the excitement would be over.

James Fox

James Fox spoke on "the Phoenix Lights After 20 years." Much of what Fox said in his talk was a repeat of what he had said in the earlier Phoenix Lights panel, especially concerning Governor Symington, so I won't repeat it here. Joining him were two women who had witnesed the 'flying triangle,' and they spoke at length on their recollections of it, and their reactions to it. 

Fox said he was told, by somebody who presumably was in a position to know, that "We went to Defcon 3" that night. In other words, that the Phoenix Lights UFOs triggered U.S. air defenses to a war-ready state, which is quite absurd. There would have been enormous consequences following such a development, instead of the several-month "yawn" until UFO enthusiasts could build up sufficient interest in this incident to get the media reporting it. Fox noted that this incident was the same night that President Clinton seriously injured his knee while visiting golfer Greg Norman in Florida.  He speculated that perhaps, because of the alleged Defcon emergency, the Secret Service was in such a hurry to rush the president off to a safe place that he was injured in the process?

Fox and others kept mentioning queries about the incident made to Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, which denied having any planes in the air at the time. They were telling the truth. All of the planes involved in the Phoenmix Lights incidents, the triangle and the flare drop, were Air National Guard planes from Operation Snowbird, flying out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. The Air Force and the Air National Guard have completely different command structures, and neither knows much about what the other is doing.

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Smithsonian-Affiliated "National Atomic Testing Museum" Promises UFO "Secrets" Revealed

The National Atomic Testing Museum is a relatively new, and seemingly professional, museum a few miles east of the Las Vegas Strip on Flamingo Road. I visited it about two years ago, and was very impressed by its powerful and relevant exhibits on the subject of atomic testing and the Cold War.

Now that museum, which is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, is getting heavily into claims about Area 51 and UFOs. It has a special exhibition on "Area 51," which requires a separate admission ticket. I did not see this exhibit, but I understand that it depicts ongoing classified projects, which would seem to place the museum in the same business as Wikileaks. Whether a Smithsonian-affiliated museum ought to be doing this is a serious moral and legal question. I thought that the Area 51 exhibit restricted itself to aerospace-related matters, but Lee Speigel writes in the Huffington Post, "Among the many items displayed are materials presented as "Authentic Alien Artifact" -- samples of small objects originating from an alleged UFO crash in Russia." So if you want to see an "Authentic Alien Artifact," the National Atomic Testing Museum claims to have one.

Lee Speigel's photo of an "Authentic Alien Artifact."

Not satisfied with that absurdity, the National Atomic Testing Museum is now getting into full-fledged promotion of UFO claims. On September 22, they are sponsoring an "Area 51 Special Lecture - Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed." There is nothing whatever skeptical about this panel.

The entrance to the National Atomic Testing Museum

One of the speakers is Nick Pope, who for years has been warning about an "alien invasion." Most recently, just before the London Olympics Pope warned, "The government must - and has planned - for the worst-case scenario: alien attack and alien invasion. Space shuttles, lasers and directed-energy weapons are all committed via the Alien Invasion War Plan to defence against any alien ships in orbit," he said, apparently unaware that America's Space Shuttle orbiters have been dispersed to various museums, and the rest of the  system scrapped.

Another speaker is Col. Charles Halt (USAF Retired), who was the deputy base commander of  the Bentwaters U.S. Air Force Base in England, and a major witness to the supposed Rendlesham "UFO landing"  in December, 1980. As noted by the British skeptic Ian Ridpath, the tale told by Col. Halt about this incident has "improved" dramatically over the years. In 1980, he claimed only to have witnessed "starlike" objects in the sky. By 2010, his account had expanded so that the objects zoomed up over his head and sent down a laser-like beam at his feet. The audience at Las Vegas will surely hear the new and improved version of Col. Halt's tale, with no hint of any reasons to question it. As Ridpath wrote in reference to a posting by Dr. David Clarke,

Halt’s superior officer at the time of the events, Col Conrad, has been scathing of his claims, saying: “He should be ashamed and embarrassed by his allegation that his country and England both conspired to deceive their citizens over this issue. He knows better.”

Former intelligence officer Col. John Alexander (U.S. Army Retired), is also speaking. He probably organized this lecture event. Alexander is a bit unusual among UFO proponents in that he absolutely does not believe that the U.S. Government is covering up any "UFO secrets," or is engaged in any "UFO conspiracy." So that rules out belief in the Roswell Crash (which got him jeered while speaking at the MUFON Symposium last year). Yet Alexander apparently believes in a British UFO cover-up, as he is a strong proponent of Col. Halt and the other supposed witnesses at Rendlesham. James McGaha and I each told Alexander personally about Col. Halt's changing UFO claims, and asked how could he continue to have confidence in Halt's story? But Alexander does not seem troubled by Halt's inconsistency in the least, or by the dressing-down of Col. Halt by his superior officer, Col. Conrad; why give up on a UFO story as good as this one??!!!

Also speaking are retired Air Force Cols. William Coleman and Robert Friend. Col. Friend was the director of  the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book. Coleman, an Air Force public information spokesman, was the producer of the former NBC-TV program "Project UFO," which ran two seasons (1978 and 1979). The show was so bad that, as I wrote in Psychic Vibrations (SI Fall 1979; book, p. 15):

Edward Winters, one of the stars of the series, explained how the writers for Project UFO got their material: “As I understand the story, the Air Force finally got tired of looking at us, because they said, ‘Anything your writers can dream up, we can find … There are over 12,000 cases in the Blue Book report.’ So instead of finding it first and then writing about it, they let the writers write it and then they go find one like it!” 

If either of these gentlemen, Col. Friend or Col. Coleman, ever actually had any "UFO secrets," they should have appeared in the Blue Book files. Or at least in Project UFO.

James McGaha contacted the Director of the National Atomic Testing Museum, Allan Palmer, to get an explanation of why such sensationalist material was being presented under the auspices of the museum, but received no clear explanation. His attempts to get a comment on this matter from the Smithsonian has thus far been likewise unsuccessful.

For whatever reason, we are now seeing once-respected names dragging themselves through the swamp of UFO and alien claims. First the National Geographic, embracing UFO claims as if there were no tomorrow, with Chasing UFOs merely the most egregious example. Now even a Smithsonian-affiliated museum is shamelessly promoting entirely uncritical UFO claims. What will be next: Bigfoot exhibits? Astrological displays? Are museums to be the next venue for tabloid entertainment? If America's museums are willing to shed all scholarly rigor and self-respect to bring more visitors through the doors, then it will be a sorry day for science education in America.

(March 22, 2014: Another Blog posting on this same subject: More Museum Shenanigans.)

A Skeptical Look at the 2017 UFO Congress - Part 3

David Marler

David Marler: The 75th Anniversary of the Battle of L.A. This incident, he says, introduced the term "flying saucer" in 1942, five years before Kenneth Arnold. This was just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and 36 hours after a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired on an oil terminal near Santa Barbara (doing minimal dmamge). Further Japanese attacks were expected along the west coast, and "hysteria was

definitely a component." But, Marler said, we cannot necessarily dismiss the entire incident because of this.

Marler's collection of  newspaper headlines.

On the night of Feb. 24-25, 1942, an unidentified radar target came in from the northwest. Authorities quickly ordered a blackout, and started shelling. No planes were sent up. The familiar version of the photograph showing converging spotlights was heavily retouched. Marler has found what appears to be the original negative of that photo. It is much less densely exposed than the retouched photo, but does not clearly show any object.

Marler's working hypothesis: a single unidentified aerial object flew over the Los Angeles region. I might agree, if that object were a balloon. Marler ruled out a balloon, on the grounds that it would have been destroyed by shrapnel from all the shells fired at it. But that assumes that the object was actually in the crosshairs where the shells were fired.

Wikipedia: "In 1983, the Office of Air Force History concluded that an analysis of the evidence points to meteorological balloons as the cause of the initial alarm"

Stanton Friedman

No UFO conference would be complete without Stanton Friedman, today speaking on Astronomy Versus UFOlogy.  Astronomers, he complained, ignore "large scale scientific studies," like Blue Book Special Report 14 (his favorite). He presented some well-known scientific blunders, such as statements that 'space travel is impossible.' Friedman claimed that interstellar travel using nuclear fusion propulsion is perfectly plausible. He maintained that scientific critics of the viability of interstellar travel, such as the late Nobel prize winning physicist Edward Purcell, "didn't know anything about space travel," although Purcell's objections are based in fundamental physics. Friedman also threw his usual punches at SETI - the "silly effort to investigate."

He showed Marjorie Fish's interpretation of Betty Hill's UFO star map without any disclaimer, even though its pretense of significance has now been completely refuted. He recommended the UFO research of Kathleen Marden and Linda Moulton Howe (!!!!).

Greg Bishop

Greg Bishop: The Co-Creation Hypothesis - A Fresh Approach to UFO Research. Bishop discussed the role of our minds in constructing what we see. "What causes UFO reports?" Our memories are reconstructions, not faithful images. Our mind fills in what we expect to see.

I'm not clear about what is supposed to be "fresh" here. He seems to be advocating a position similar to what British Forteans call the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. Throw in a touch of John Keel, Gray Barker, and Jacques Vallee, and Bishop seems to be walking a well-trod path.

John Alexander

Col. John B. Alexander (ret.) spoke on "UFO Encounters:  More Complex than We Imagine." He was very big on the Chris Bledsoe case, an alleged abductee who films orbs all the time, and now apparently has not only been miraculously cured of Crohn's disease by ETs, but has also "healed" others. Alexander was especially impressed by the fact that, talking with Bledsoe outdoors one evening, the "abductee" said he felt the ETs are here now. They looked up, and within about 30 seconds, a bright object was seen to flash across the sky. Later I suggested to Alexander that this impressive demonstration could have been arranged in advance, if Bledsoe had looked on-line to get the time that a brilliant flare from an Iridium satellite would be visible from that location. He didn't buy that.

Alexander repeated his theme that "disclosure has already happened," citing vague statements from various world leaders about ETs. Government employees can talk about UFOs, and nothing happens to them. In his view, the government knows that ETs are real, but it knows nothing can be done about them, and it has more urgent problems to worry about, anyway. So government ignores them.

The Roswell incident, he said, was caused by a Project Mogul spy balloon. There is no evidence of ET technology being used anywhere in any nation's space program.

Panel, Government and UFOs:  The usual suspects repeated the usual things.

Charles Halt repeated his claim that after the Rendlesham forest incident, Air Force agents came in and drugged the witnesses, changing their memories.

When the matter was raised of "missing files" concerning Rendlesham, or Roswell, John Alexander noted that many U.S. government agencies are required to report bi-annually on the linear feet of files they have destroyed. Given the mandate of purging old files, he says it is no surprise that many old government files cannot be found.

The night vision skywatch (from 2013 Congress).

Night Vision Skywatch: Once again, Ben Hansen, formerly the host of Fact or Fake: Paranormal Files on the SyFy channel, presented an outdoor public viewing using night vision cameras, projecting on giant screens. The weather was not very cooperative, there were a lot of clouds. The wind was so strong (a rainstorm was coming) one of the screens blew over several times. But we managed to see a few satellites go by, and a bird or bat or two. Ben did pretty well keeping the presentation on solid ground, emphasising that you will be seeing lots of satellites, birds, bats, airplanes, even moths, so don't assume it's aliens when you see something moving. But he left open the door to the possibility that you might see something truly extraordinary, which is why people would buy these expensive devices costing $2,000 and up. My advice: save your money, and buy a really good pair of binoculars, say 10x50. Night vision devices trade resolution for sensitivity. In binoculars you will be able to see everything these devices can see, and with much better resolution.

Are You Going to CSICon in New Orleans?

It's coming up in just a few weeks: the first CSI(COP) conference in several years, to be held in New Orleans on Oct. 27-30: http://www.csiconference.org/ .



"The conference dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking.

Separate history from legend and science from voodoo by joining the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) for four days of fun, mystery and reason, in New Orleans's famous French Quarter."

I will be there to speak about UFO Conspiracy Theories, on a panel with astronomer and UFO skeptic James McGaha, moderated by physicist Leonard Tramiel. I will be discussing how UFO conspiracy theories are put together, from the most plausible-sounding, to the most extreme. James will be talking about new developments in the claimed UFO landing at Bentwaters AFB / Rendlesham Forest in the U.K.

So, please come and spend Halloween with us in New Orleans, meet some skeptical celebrities like James "The Amazing" Randi, Eugenie Scott, Phil Plait, and chat about really interesting stuff. And don't forget to bring your Halloween costume! I won't tell you yet what mine is going to be.

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!!

The 2014 International UFO Congress, Part 4

The fourth day of the UFO Congress was Saturday Feb. 15, and the day of the highest attendance. Starting off the proceedings with a Bang was Dr. John Alexander, retired Colonel in the U.S. Army, and longtime leader in the Pentagon's foray into Weird Science: ESP, remote viewing, etc. Alexander appears on 18 different pages of the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson (but not in the movie), where he is portrayed as a sort of shadowy behind-the-scenes figure giving direction to all of the Pentagon's weird studies.

Col. Alexander (left) with Lee Speigel of the Huffington Post

Life, Alexander said, may have originated somewhere in the universe 9 billion years before it did on earth. He went through the usual brief history of U.S. government involvement with UFOs. He mentioned a few UFO cases that he thinks are especially good:

• Bentwaters/Rendlesham. Highlights the testimony of Halt and Penniston. He did not mention how the testimony of each has significantly changed over the years. He is aware of this - I've mentioned it to him more than once - but it's something he prefers to ignore.
• Phoenix lights. They were certainly not A-10s with flares. (When I asked him afterward about this, he claimed that he didn't say anything about flares!)
• Gulf Breeze photos. Good grief!
• Coyne helicopter case. See Klass, UFOs the Public Deceived, chapters 16,17.
• B-52 radar picks up a visual UFO, Minot AFB, 1968. (Has anyone done any recent research on this case?)

What sets Alexander apart from most other UFOlogists is that he does not believe that there is any U.S. government coverup of UFOs, or any secret program. He accepts that the "Roswell crash" was actually a spy-balloon program, Project Mogul. UFO enthusiasts, he explained, do not know how the system works.  Even secret or "black" projects need to compete with each other for a fixed pool of money, and to justify those expenditures with results. Concerning UFOs, this is simply not happening.

As for the UFO coverup claims of British UFOlogist Nick Pope, Alexander pointed out that Nick's father, Geoffrey Pope, was a leading aerospace engineer who, upon hearing his son's claims about the British government having captured a UFO, remarked "it would have been in my hanger!" As for the MJ-12 papers (the second set, at least), he pointed out that Tim Cooper, the man who supposedly (and inexplicably) received these documents in the mail, has as of 2009 disavowed their validity.

Alexander is also a big believer in 'alternative healing' that supposedly cannot be explained, especially the faith healer John of God in Brazil. He also believes the recent claims of "Proof of Heaven."

Alexander mentioned the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah purchased by Robert Bigelow, where many strange incidents have been reported, some involving UFOs. "The Phenomenon" is "in control," he concludes. It knows how you will react to it. If you're having trouble deciding what to make of Alexander (and many people are), think of him as Jacques Vallee in a military uniform.

Jaime Maussan

Next was the well-known Mexican UFO promoter Jaime Maussan. I didn't hear this talk, but the description says, "Hear Jaime Maussan present the most recent evidence demonstrating that the UFO phenomenon is closer than ever before. The new technology and new techniques used by skywatchers around the world is allowing us to know how “close” we are to establishing some kind of contact or communication with other beings. While we do not know for sure yet, it is clear that contact will be sooner than expected." He showed a lot of videos. James McGaha told me that they all looked pretty fake.

In reviewing Maussan's talk last year to the UFO Congress, I wrote:

Maussan said that worldwide UFO sightings have increased dramatically recently because of December 21, 2012, and aliens are now sending us messages by creating meteorological formations in the sky. He showed what were supposedly "vortexes" in meteorological charts, "messages" he says of "the new time."

He showed many blurry photos and videos. There was a huge black sphere sucking energy out of the sun - probably a Mothership, he suggested. NASA's Spirit rover photographed a human figure on Mars, and also a "little house." We saw objects (probably satellites in low earth orbit) crossing the face of the moon. Russia, he says, now has the greatest number of UFO sightings of any country, and he showed Russian videos of supposed "motherships." He also played videos having very low-pitch "unexplained" sounds or hums. Maussan's talk was loony, but the audience loved it.

Rob Simone

After that came Rob Simone, "an award-winning media personality, TV host, author and for the last 3 years, guest host of the nationally syndicated talk show, Coast to Coast AM." His speech was "UFOs In The Headlines - Real Reporting on a Real Phenomenon." He showed the headlines, and discussed the cases, from newspaper coverage of UFO sightings and claims from all around the world. Most of them were cases that practically nobody has heard of, and go back to the 1950s, mostly in Europe. Actually, he did a fine job of locating and presenting these cases, several of which sound as if they were significant at the time, but since forgotten. This information needs to be recorded in a form that is searchable on-line.

Timothy Good

The well-known British UFOlogist Timothy Good, long known for promoting dubious claims, gave an even wilder talk than I expected: "Earth - An Alien Enterprise," in which he  promised to reveal "the shocking truth about the greatest coverup of all time." He reviewed some old claims of ET contact going back to the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. He showed some of Adamski's photos (Good has long been a low-key supporter of Adamski's claims.) Supposedly Adamski was given a special access card that got him into all military bases, the White House, etc. Adamski supposedly met with JFK twice. Good even showed a letter supposedly received by Adamski from an alien, written in alien-ese. He spent several minutes discussing Amicizia ("friendship"), a long-running Italian contactee case.

He also claimed that Neil Armstrong had revealed to a friend, long after his lunar landing, that other craft were already on the moon when he got there.

Good's new book, with the same title as his talk, promises to reveal:

• Genuine photographs of aliens and some of their craft
• A crashed alien craft and bodies stored in the U.S. Capitol in 1939
• Contacts with military personnel and several presidents
• Over 100 witnesses encounter two landed flying discs in a London suburb

 The final speaker on Saturday afternoon was George Noori, the longtime host of the late night, all night, paranormal and conspiracy radio show Coast to Coast AM, which he claimed to be the highest-rated show in the history of broadcasting. His talk consisted mostly of gossip, jokes, and chat (and his jokes were rather gross and gruesome). "Big foot = little penis," he said (which might come as a surprise to readers of Bigfoot porn).

Noori brought up on stage Lee Speigel of the Huffington Post, who talked about the Dead Bigfoot touring show, which was supposed to open in Phoenix that same weekend, but the arrangement fell through. (Speigel actually worked very hard on a last-minute plan to have the Bigfoot carcass show open right then, right there at Ft. McDowell, right alongside the UFO Congress. But that plan also fell through.)

During the question & answer time, an obviously disturbed man calling himself "the Reincarnated Christ" delivered a rambling, confused statement about how there is a conspiracy to conceal that the earth actually curves upward, and there is a glass sky 100 km above us. Noori ignored the boos and groans from the audience, and played with the guy like a cat with a mouse. (This is what he often does on his show.) Finally somebody grabbed a cane, and yanked the guy away.

After his talk, people lined to to meet George Noori (wearing sports coat), and have their picture taken with him.

Hang on, just one more posting to go!