In previous issues I discussed the Walton case and appealed for someone to give me a coherent and convincing account of the case as a hoax. Many ufologists believe it to have been a hoax but they all base their arguments on what might have inspired it, possible motives and the results of polygraph tests. So far as I know, no one has given an explanation of how the hoax was devised and executed, and which characters in the story were involved in it and which were not. Most hoaxes are very simple and involve only one or two persons, but this is one of the most complicated and ingenious hoaxes I have ever heard of. As I have said before, the question is not why was it done, but how? Would someone like to take up the challenge?
Awkward question
An awkward question often put to proponents of the ETH is: If we have been
subjected to visits by alien spacecraft for at least the past fifty years,
why do we still have no convincing proof of their existence? The answer,
of course, is that proof was obtained long ago but is being concealed by
US government agencies. Many ETH proponents obviously do not believe this,
but there are some, outside the lunatic fringe, who do.
Is there any rational basis for such a belief? The answer must be: No. It
is one of the silliest notions among some very silly ones entertained by
ufologists, and it is an unnecessary distraction from serious attempts to
investigate unusual aerial phenomena. Although it has generated a vast
literature, the cover-up theory simply cannot stand up to critical
examination. I think it is time that it was disposed of and treated with
the contempt it deserves.
World picture
First, it should be noted that to hold this belief in a UFO cover-up
requires one to have a very strange world-picture. This is centred on the
USA. The rest of the world is its back yard. This means that if something
important is kept secret in the USA, the rest of the world will either not
know about it or will obligingly keep it secret also. If this seems too
unlikely, then we must assume that the pilots of the flying saucers are
under strict instructions to confine their activities to US territory,
which is even more absurd and unlikely. This sort of problem doesn't worry
American ufologists, as they tacitly assume that America can easily apply
pressure on other governments to conceal UFO evidence. The US Air Force
has recovery teams in constant readiness to retrieve the wreckage of
crashed saucers from anywhere in the world without arousing the suspicions
of anyone except ufologists and contributors to supermarket tabloids.
Not quite credible
Some of the more thoughtful ETHers realise that this is somehow not quite
credible, so they try to give the impression that physical proof of UFO
reality becomes available only very rarely, and then only in the United
States. An adept at this line of argument is Kevin Randle. In his book A
History of UFO Crashes (1) he catalogues 85 reports of alleged UFO
crashes, of which he labels two as "authentic" and one as "probably
authentic". Conveniently, these three events took place in the USA, thus
eliminating the problem of hushing up crashed saucers in other parts of
the world without attributing omniscience and omnipotence to the US
government and its air force. Randle's findings thus neatly confirm the
belief that saucers crash very rarely and only in the USA.
However, it is difficult to see how the secret has been kept in the USA
for such a long time. Once more, Kevin Randle comes to the rescue. In his
book Conspiracy of Silence he writes: "In today's environment, the
government no longer needs to hide the truth and engineer diversions. At
some point, we began doing it ourselves and blaming the government for
it." (2) One way in which ufologists hide the truth and prevent everyone
from learning the secret of the saucers is by failing to agree with
Randle's interpretation of the Roswell incident of 1947.
Randle's approach is typical of the UFO believer. He insists that his is
the correct interpretation and that ufologists who disagree with him are
either dishonest or mistaken. Of course, the problem is that he has
painted himself into a corner. As I have pointed out above, he has
dismissed nearly all UFO crash stories as hoaxes because he knows that it
would be impossible to maintain secrecy if there were too many of them.
However, he is not prepared to go all the way and abandon the fantasy
about saucer wreckage and aliens held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
so it is necessary to arrive at a definitive version of the Roswell
incident in order to give it credibility. The definitive version must be
his version, of course.
Unreliable witnesses
He has already demolished the stories of some of the witnesses, in the
manner of sceptics such as Philip Klass and Kal Korff, but the ones he
champions have been revealed as equally unreliable. For example, he
continues to defend Frank Kaufmann despite the fact that Kaufmann
radically changed his story and made it more dramatic. Initially, Kaufmann
had claimed that a friend of his, a warrant officer named Robert Thomas,
had told him that he was involved in some way with the retrieval of a
crashed saucer north of Roswell. He later claimed that he himself was a
member of the team sent to recover the wreckage and alien bodies.
As if this wasn't enough to discredit Kaufmann's testimony, Philip Klass
established that in 1947 he was not serving in the US Army Air Force. He
left the service in 1945 and was employed at Roswell as a civilian in the
personnel department. (3) Thus it would be absurd to suppose that he would
have been assigned to a team to recover a crashed saucer, balloon,
aircraft or whatever.
Nonsense
All the nonsense written about Roswell by ufologists is, as Philip Klass
says, a cover-up. They are trying to cover up the fact that the wreckage
retrieved from the ranch near Corona was merely a balloon rig, probably
one of the Mogul experiments. This rather dull fact is not the sort of
thing to sell books or gain standing ovations at those silly UFO
conferences.
ETH proponents cannot accept that all their warnings about alien invasion
over the years have come to nothing and that, after more than 50 years, it
is obvious that the UFOs present no threat to the security of the United
States or any other nation. As Martin Kottmeyer puts it:
Credit first where it is due. The Air Force got it right and told it straight. No material threat to national security existed. The invasion never took place. . . . The sense of urgency, the sense that it may be too late, the sense that our existence was dependent upon a correctly performed investigation was irrational fear. The Air Force repeatedly tried to get across the message that ufologists were wrong but they were in no mood to listen. It is dogma among ufologists that the Air Force was incompetent or worse, yet if that is accepted as a proper, measured evaluation, what word is proper to describe the body of thought presented by these ufologists? The Air Force did not perform flawlessly in the details, but they had the big picture in more than sufficient focus to understand it was a nuisance problem and not one of life and death significance. (4)
That just about sums it up. Let us hear no more about secret crashed saucers until someone can explain exactly how government agencies can keep secrets indefinitely about things over which they have absolutely no control. It is time for certain ufologists to grow up and leave the absurd government-secrecy angle to the hack writers and the lunatic fringe.
References
1. Randle, Kevin D. A History of UFO Crashes, New York, Avon Books, 1995
2. Randle, Kevin D. Conspiracy of Silence, New York, Avon Books, 1997, 242
3. Klass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup, Amherst, New
York, Prometheus Books, 1997, 198
4. Kottmeyer, Martin. "Shams and Shepherds", Magonia, 46, June 1993, 11
THERE HAVE been many UFO reports from aircraft, and there are a few cases
in which the destruction or disappearance of aircraft have been attributed
by some ufologists to encounters with UFOs. Two of the most interesting
are the Kinross incident of 1953 and the the disappearance of Frederick
Valentich in 1978.
One of the main problems with the Kinross case is the confusion as to what
did or did not happen. All that seems to be generally agreed is that, on
the evening of 23 November 1953, an F-89C interceptor, piloted by Lt.
Felix Moncla, with Lt. R.R. Wilson as radar observer, was sent on an
intercept mission. It disappeared and no trace of it has ever been found.
According to Dr Menzel, the purpose of the mission was to identify an
unknown aircraft observed on radar. The aircraft was identified as a
Canadian C-47 airliner. The Air Force plane, on its way back to its base,
crashed into Lake Michigan. The radar picked up a phantom echo near it.
The two blips seemed to merge just before the aircraft disappeared. Menzel
attributes this phantom blip to abnormal radar propagation, as " . . . the
night had been a stormy one and atmospheric conditions had been conducive
to abnormal returns". (1)
Donald Keyhoe gives us a rather different story. He tells us that the jet
was scrambled to check on a UFO flying over the Soo Locks (between Lake
Huron and Lake Superior). The aircraft followed the UFO out over Lake
Superior. The GCI controller saw the blips of the aircraft and the UFO
suddenly merge and the combined blip went off the scope.
While the search was still going on, Truax Air Force Base sent an official
release to Associated Press which stated: "The plane was followed by radar
until it merged with an object 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper
Michigan." This story was soon changed and the Air Force said that the
radar operators had misread the scope and the object was actually a
Canadian airliner that was off course.
The Canadian airlines denied that they had any flights in the area at the
time, so eventually the Air Force changed its story and said that the
aircraft was a Royal Canadian Air Force plane on a routine flight. When
NICAP checked this with the RCAF they denied that there had been any such
flight.
Air Force officers are said to have told two different stories to Lt.
Moncla's widow. She was first told that the plane had been flying too low
and had crashed into the lake. She was told by another officer that the
plane had exploded at a high altitude. (2)
Attempts to obtain further details of this incident from the US Air Force
have so far been unsuccessful.
Evidently, Menzel's assertion that the aircraft crashed into Lake Michigan
is wrong, so one wonders about the accuracy of his accounts of other
important cases. The generally agreed details of the case are very
sketchy, so any theory as to what really happened can be little better
than guesswork.
The Valentich disappearance is notable chiefly for the number of theories
put forward to explain it, ranging from the plausible to the absurd.
During his flight across the Bass Strait to King Island on 21 October 1978
he told air traffic control that he had encountered a mysterious object.
He then reported engine trouble and, shortly afterwards, transmission
ceased. No traces of him or his aircraft were ever found.
Of course, some ufologists believed that he and his aircraft had been
spirited away by a saucer, but there were suspicious circumstances. He was
interested in UFOs and had recently seen the film Close Encounters of the
Third Kind. He filed a flight plan but then left the airfield, for some
unknown reason, for an hour, with the result that he would have to
complete his journey in the dark, although he was not an experienced night
flier. He failed to adjust his Search and Rescue time, until the
controller urged him to do so. He also failed to call the airfield on King
Island to arrange for the runway lights to be switched on.
Speculation has continued ever since this incident and includes the
following: he became disoriented and lost control of the aircraft; engine
failure; suicide; aircraft hit a net attached to a balloon towed by a boat
used by drug smugglers (if caught, they would cut the balloon free so
drugs would not be found in their boat); aircraft wrecked by military
laser-beam weapon experiment; abduction by UFO. And so on.
Perhaps the true facts about these two cases will never be known, but
concentration on the more mundane possible causes seems more likely to
lead to the truth than unbridled speculation.
References
1. Menzel, Donald H. and Boyd, Lyle G. The World of Flying Saucers, Garden
City, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1963, 154
2. Keyhoe, Donald E. Aliens from Space, St Albans, Herts, Granada, 1975,
191-192
J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno and Bob Pratt. Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings, St Paul, Minnesota, Llewellyn Publications, second edition, 1998. $9.95,
£7.99
Formations of strange lights seen by thousands, over a period of
years. Absurdly inadequate explanations offered by the authorities. What
is going on? Are these sightings really mysterious or are we being conned
by the authors of this book? It is worth taking a close look at this new
edition of a work which seems not to have generated any intense excitement
among ufologists when it first appeared.
A good example of the kind of sighting discussed in this book is as
follows. On the evening of 12 July 1984, a police officer answered a call
about a UFO in Bethel, Connecticut. "When he arrived at the scene, a
number of people were standing outside looking at the UFO, which he
described as a circular pattern of lights that flashed red and blue and
then green. It was almost directly overhead, no more than 500 feet in the
air, and was about 300 feet across. It made no sound, and he could see a
dark mass behind the lights that blocked out the stars." When the
policeman turned his spotlight on the object it projected a brilliant
flash of white light on him and about ten other witnesses. The object then
moved away to the north.
Most attempts to photograph these mysterious objects were unsuccessful,
perhaps indicating that the lights were not nearly as bright as witnesses
thought they were. However, during one of the more spectacular sightings,
on 26 May 1987, a police officer managed to get a good photograph of the
UFO which displayed a semi-circular pattern of very bright multicoloured
lights. This object disrupted traffic on the highway Interstate 84 as
motorists stopped to watch it. It was estimated that over 100 people saw
the UFO that night.
As the authors investigated the reports, they found they could not avoid
encountering the more bizarre incidents inevitably associated with UFO
sightings. They are apologetic about this. To introduce the chapter called
"High Strangeness" they write: "If you feel the reports discussed so far
offend logic and common sense, you may wish to skip this chapter. We had
mixed feelings about the following material ourselves and decided to
include it only after lengthy debate."
The authors found that some witnesses reported "missing time" and strange
dreams. To investigate these matters the authors, alas, allowed their
witnesses to be subjected to the baneful influence of Budd Hopkins.
It is easy to use the alien-abduction stories to dismiss the Hudson Valley
reports as fantasies and misdentifications of aircraft, but many of the
sightings appear to have been genuine multi-witness ones, unlike many
similar reports. We often read of spectacular UFOs which allegedly hover
over busy roads, but are invisible except to the occupants of one car, but
these appear to be different.
Attempts by the authorities to explain them away were usually
unconvincing. One of the favourite explanations was that they were
microlight aircraft flying in formation. How microlight aircraft can hover
silently, in tight formation, on windy nights was not explained. As the
authors put it: "An ultralight is little more than a hang glider with a
motor and a seat. It is illegal to fly ultralights after dark, and all of
these sightings took place at night. Furthermore, ultralight experts told
us it would be insane to fly one at night. We were also told that flying
in tight formation with ultralights would be practically impossible."
The Hudson Valley sightings certainly seem worth a second look by persons
independent of the original investigators. Not all possibilities seem to
have been considered. For instance, there is no mention of advertising
planes, which cause so many spurious UFO reports in America.