Alien Intrusion Page 19
The whole ETH/government conspiracy theory was now a racing juggernaut that has not abated to the present day.
Martin Kottmeyer is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychosocial aspects of the UFO phenomenon.[40] With the benefit of hindsight, he comments on the Keyhoe factor in the heady days of the explosion of the modern UFO era:
Keyhoe’s thesis in these early books was impressionistic and airy speculation. He cites no evidence of downed saucers with TV cameras. He cites no alien informants explaining their missions… . There really wasn’t any evidence to build on. Some of the cases even argue against it. Keyhoe expresses the opinion: “The Mantell case alone proves we’ve been observed from space ships… .” Whatever their faults in retrospect, Keyhoe’s writings were seminal in directing the future course of the UFO mythos. Keyhoe was read by many, and heard in the media by many more. UFOlogists adopted his thesis sometimes explicitly, often implicitly [emphasis added].[41]
Trying to stop the juggernaut
So the modern UFO era got off to a flying start, albeit on “something that wasn’t.” If Keyhoe had had access to all of the information at the time (an issue I have repeatedly highlighted), one wonders whether such conspiracy theories would have accelerated at such a rate. The ETH, and government complicity, quickly became accepted as fact by many. This changed the world view of many observers, further clouding impartiality on the subject. Keyhoe became the first director of the NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena). Independent of government, this was a pro-UFO/ETH organization. Notwithstanding this, they quickly became adept at identifying hoaxers and “repeaters” (serial sighters). But the establishment of this group, with Keyhoe at the helm, only served to inspire more claims.
Nonetheless, there are many sightings that remain difficult to explain as mistaken natural phenomena. One such case around that time became known as the “Lubbock lights.” In August 1951, several university professors saw a formation of strange lights in the night sky at Lubbock, Texas. Described as softly glowing bluish-green objects, after initially disappearing, they reappeared an hour after the original sighting. Then on a third occasion, the lights descended and circled over another observer’s house, a Mr. Joe Bryant. He thought they were plovers, a common bird in that part of Texas.
Later, it was discovered that a college freshman, Carl Hart Jr., managed to take some amazing photos of the lights. Hart vehemently denied that the photos were fake, a position he maintained even decades later.
The Lubbock Lights. Note that they are flying in formation.
The U.S. Air Force and Blue Book chief, Edward Ruppelt, gave the young Hart a very difficult time. But they reported that his story “could not be ‘picked apart.’ ”[42]
The Air Force eventually decided that the objects were birds, and that the reflection of newly installed streetlights in Lubbock caused the glowing appearance. However, this is an inadequate explanation because the lights were seen in many different parts of Texas. Later, Ruppelt was to eventually admit that he never found an explanation for them:
The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine.[43]
Welcome to Earth, my Venusian friends
A flood of similarly inexplicable sightings has occurred over the years, but George Adamski added a new dimension with his 1953 book The Flying Saucers Have Landed. A Polish immigrant to the United States, Adamski was the first person to widely publicize his claim of meeting an extraterrestrial. This event occurred in the California desert in 1952, when he allegedly met a longhaired blond man from Venus called Orthon. Warning of impending doom for mankind if we did not change our ways, Orthon hopped aboard his ship and flew away. However, there were to be many subsequent contacts, and even free joyrides around the solar system for Adamski, who was even invited to attend a “galactic council” meeting on Saturn, appearing as Earth’s representative. He also provided detailed descriptions of the actual spaceships and their interiors.
Adamski’s first and subsequent books “sold like hot cakes,” and he became an in-demand celebrity all over the world — including meeting European royalty. In many writings he became referred to as “Professor Adamski” (he often signed his name as such, in correspondences) leading many to falsely believe that he was an accredited scientist, when in fact he was never formally educated.
The modern extraterrestrial contact movement can undoubtedly be traced back to the high-profile Adamski. But Adamski’s accounts, like the Mantell/Keyhoe episode, were based on fallacy rather than fact.
By 1954, Adamski was “catching flak” from a number of quarters including science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who labeled Adamski’s photographs of the Venusian mothership and scout ships as frauds. Clarke pointed out that:
The uncanny resemblance [of the “scout ships”] to electric light fittings with table tennis balls underneath them has already been pointed out.[44]
Then in October 1957, UFO investigator James W. Moseley (who now writes a satirical UFO magazine called Saucer Smear) severely attacked Adamski’s credibility. Based on personal interviews with Adamski, he was able to demonstrate deliberate misquotations of prominent witnesses who supported his claims, and prove that one of Adamski’s encounters was a preplanned, orchestrated event. He demonstrated this from tape recordings Adamski had played to co-workers about a week before the contact took place. Moseley also showed Adamski to be a plagiarist as well as a fraud. He had “lifted” some passages from an earlier book by another author. Although now dead and widely discredited, he is the “father” of the contactee phenomenon, and many still endorse his work. The George Adamski Foundation in California continues its “work” to this day.[45]
A common trait with the early contactees like Adamski was that the space brothers claimed to be coming from planets within our solar system, including our own moon. It should be remembered that human exploration of the solar system was still many years away, nuclear weapons had already been used against mankind, and the Cold War was heating up. These were unstable times, and perhaps it was the content of the messages that Adamski gave, more so than his speculative contacts, that people wanted to hear. The messages were warnings that mankind needed to stop its warring ways (remember the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still?). Of Adamski, it was said:
Adamski and most of the other leading contactees of the 1950s were utopians. “George Adamski had a vision of a better world, and that vision apparently became reality for him.”[46]
The messages of the space brothers are no different today, and still have the same appeal. “We are here to help you; we will not let you destroy yourselves… . You will be saved.” In a time when conventional religious beliefs are waning, the perceived technological answer has mass appeal and a growing credibility. With all those witnesses and their sightings, “something must be happening.”
{See The “real” Mexican wave}
A skeptic’s paradise
The rise of contactees and believers also gave rise to an active group of non-believers. The UFO skeptics were, and still are, greatly concerned at the transforming of society’s beliefs, taking place due to what they see as, at best, mistaken anomalies, and at worst, deliberate frauds and hoaxes.
One major debunking of the UFO phenomenon was the Condon Report of 1969. This research project was also known as the University of Colorado UFO Project. Spearheaded by physicist Edward J. Condon with a $525,000 grant, it was decided that an autonomous panel, with no prior UFO experience (and therefore no predetermined opinions) would collaborate with all relevant agencies to determine the truth about UFOs. But far from being the death knell for UFO beliefs, the mismanagement of the project became a glaring example of the government’s supposed desire to cover up and deceive the public. Unfortunately, right from the start, Condon himself gave the impression that UFOs were merely a nagging psycho-social problem that the Air Force wanted buried once and for all. There were damning leaked internal memos that further undermined
the integrity of the investigation and inflamed proponents of the ETH. Keyhoe’s NICAP eventually broke off relations with the study group.[47] Even the world’s most famous UFO debunker, a 30-plus-year investigator named Philip J. Klass, conceded that, “I cannot endorse the Colorado investigation as having been well managed.”[48]
Nonetheless, despite being badly managed, the Condon Report represents the largest single investigation ever carried out by mainstream scientists on the UFO problem. Its findings eventually led to the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969, and like projects Sign and Grudge before, it reached much the same conclusion, saying:
Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. It has been argued that this lack of contribution to science is due to the fact that very little scientific effort has been put on the subject. We do not agree. We feel that the reason that there has been very little scientific study of the subject is that those scientists who are most directly concerned, astronomers, atmospheric physicists, chemists, and psychologists, having had ample opportunity to look into the matter, have individually decided that UFO phenomena do not offer a fruitful field in which to look for major scientific discoveries.[49] [The full text of the Condon Report, which contains many details of sightings, including photographs, is readily available online.]
Ever since, UFO organizations, individuals, scientists, and members of Congress have petitioned for a new federal inquiry — without success.[50] It seems the authorities are in the position of being “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” On several occasions UFOlogists have petitioned for the release of classified documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In many cases, before the information was released to the public, much of the information in these documents had been erased “in the interests of national security.” The authorities have claimed that the information contained details of security protocols and methods for gathering intelligence and information which are top secret. Conspiracy theorists use these points to strengthen their arguments and their criticisms of the government.
But it refuses to go away
For all the attempts at debunking by skeptics, and despite the lack of hard scientific evidence, all over our planet the UFO phenomenon continues to escalate. As a researcher of the issue, I believe that this is a much bigger and deeper problem than the average person knows. These are not isolated incidents affecting a couple of thousand “cranks and nutcases.”
It is true that the majority of sightings are the result of mistaken identity, and some have proven to be conscious lies or imaginary events. Similarly, in the realm of abductions, a great percentage may be psychological delusions, hoaxes, and shallow attempts to gain attention and fame. But despite the myriad of explanations, too many ordinary people with far more to lose than to gain by telling fanciful stories go to their graves never resiling from their accounts of the events. There is no question that something mysterious, quite real, and very serious is going on. Sadly, much of this is being exploited by those bringing their various agendas to the evidence. However, I have genuine respect for those involved in genuine UFO research, and enormous compassion for those who have been subject to seemingly inexplicable sightings and the terrifying ordeals of abduction experiences, often with very distressing consequences. To not have closure about why such things are happening to them must be emotionally devastating.
In their desire to believe, many UFO advocates do themselves a disservice. They scream for official inquiries, but often reject the findings if they do not agree with their own hypotheses. The “noise” generated by the ETH and IDH proponents seems to increase the belief that governments are hiding the truth. In a society that appears to thrive on anti-establishment ideas, a good conspiracy will always attract attention, as will be evidenced in the next chapter.
Endnotes
[1]Ronald D. Story, editor, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters (London: Constable & Robinson, 2002), p. 739–740.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Joe Nickell, p. 476–477.
[4]Ibid., p. 304–305.
[5]J. Allen Hynek, Fate, June 1976, cited in Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 304–305.
[6]Hynek, Lumieres dans la Nuit, No. 168, October 1977, cited in Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 304–305.
[7]Hynek, Newsweek, November 21, 1977, cited in Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 304–305.
[8]Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk/Concepts of Outer Space (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 21, cited in William T. Alnor, UFOs in the New Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 81.
[9]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Loren E. Gross and Lucius Farish, p. 17–21.
[10]Ibid., in an article by Randall Fitzgerald, p. 61.
[11]John Ankerberg and John Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1992), p. 8.
[12]Alnor, UFOs in the New Age, p. 184.
[13]Official policy statement of Flying Saucer Review, cited in Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 12.
[14]Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 12.
[15]J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, The Edge of Reality (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company), p. xii–xiii, cited in “The Premise of Spiritual Warfare,”
[16]Hynek, Today’s Student, April 3, 1978, cited in Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 304–305.
[17]Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 10–11.
[18]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Jacques Vallée, p. 753–754.
[19]Jacques Vallée, The Invisible College (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975), p. 207, cited in Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 19.
[20]John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse (Lilburn, GA: Illuminet Press, 1996), p. 266, cited in Chuck Missler and Mark Eastman, Alien Encounters, (Indianapolis, IN: Koinonia House, 2003), p. 248.
[21]Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 13.
[22]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Randall Fitzgerald, p. 306.
[23]“In Search of Gordon Cooper’s UFOs,”
[24]Ibid.
[25]Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” radio show, September 1999, cited in “Gordon Cooper: No Mercury UFO,”
[26]“In Search of Gordon Cooper’s UFOs,”
[27]Ibid.
[28]Ibid.
[29]Ibid.
[30]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Brad Steiger, p. 673–674.
[31]“In Search of Gordon Cooper’s UFOs,”
[32] Jacques Vallée, Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 14, cited in Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 13.
[33]“Blue Book Files Released,” Canadian UFO Report, Vol. 4, No. 4, p. 20, 1977, cited in Ankerberg and Weldon, The Facts on UFO’s and Other Supernatural Phenomena, p. 13.
[34]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Martin S. Kottmeyer, p. 553–562.