THE UFO CHRONICLES


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     Maybe it was inevitable - given as how conflict had been hammered into his consciousness since the U.S. occupation of Vera Cruz in 1914 - that Douglas MacArthur would frame his farewell address to West Point in apocalyptic terms.

     The old Army general went head-to-head with some of the 20th-century's biggest militarists (Kaiser Wilhelm, Tojo, Chairman Mao); surely, his 1962 warning to cadets about an "ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy" was a glib metaphor.

     Except for a niggling little controversy that won't go away. And on the 36th anniversary of the termination of Project Blue Book - the official U.S. Air Force study that concluded unidentified flying objects weren't a threat to national security - examining government failures should be an annual media ritual each December.

     For decades, MacArthur's name has been linked to the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU), a top-secret military outfit allegedly founded in the 1940s to investigate UFOs. Long regarded as apocryphal by critics, the IPU's existence - if not its mission - was confirmed by the Army on at least three different occasions in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

     In its most recent accounting, the Army Intelligence and Security Command stated in 1990 that "the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, Scientific and Technical Branch, Counterintelligence Directorate, Department of the Army . . . records pertaining to the unit were surrendered to the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with Operation Bluebook."

     Naturally, there's no mention of the IPU in the Blue Book archives. In Indian Harbour Beach, retired USAF colonel Bill Coleman, once the top Blue Book spokesman and former chief PIO for the Air Force, has a succinct reaction to the IPU: "Never heard of it."

     "Majic Eyes Only," a new book by UFO investigator Ryan Wood, offers fragmentary glimpses into the IPU from government documents. Most intriguing - although it's been around for some time - is a letter from Gen. George Marshall to President Roosevelt. Shortly after American anti-aircraft batteries opened up on a UFO gliding over Los Angeles in 1942, Marshall claimed the Army Air Corps recovered debris that was "in all probability of interplanetary origin."

     "The challenge is, you become a buff on military intelligence history," says the author from his home in Broomfield, Colo., "but you never find what you're looking for. Anything truly damning and powerful has been cleaned up."

     George Orwell, who would've appreciated that sort of precision, once put it this way: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." But in this less articulate era, we just say it's time to stop pointing fingers and move on.

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     There’s the top 10 local stories, the top 10 Montana stories, the top 10 AP stories, health stories, business stories and Dave Barry’s top 10, too.

     My question is, how can you plan ahead when you’re always looking back?

     The truth is, these top 10 lists are an easy way out when there isn’t any “real” news. So to be a sport, I’ve made my own top 10 list for lack of other work.

     Needless to say, it was a big year for local “otherworldly” circles, to include UFOs, Big Foot stories, and other oddities that don’t get much publicity or get laughed at when they do.

     You certainly won’t find them on any top 10 list.

     Lynda Cowen, a 1963 graduate of Powell County High School who now lives in Texas, discussed her recent docudrama, “The Secret of Redgate,” this year, even though she filmed the movie last year in Deer Lodge.

     She told me her film was inspired by her brother’s own UFO encounters as a boy. The stories down in that small prison town are strange. I used to live there but I never heard any talk of UFOs. Back then, it was arsenic in the Clark Fork River and the local lumber mill that got all the attention — that and the prison siren that sounded curfew at 10 p.m. every night.

     “My brother consciously remembers having a lot of encounters with aliens as a child — playing with them as a child,” Cowen told me over the phone in March. “No one ever talked about this stuff growing up.”

     The film propelled Deer Lodge to the fore of Montana’s most mysterious destinations. The film also won the “People’s Choice Award” at the UFO Congress in Texas — selected by 700 people from 15 films as a matter of fact.

     This year’s talk of UFOs was nothing new. Last year, Timothy Good — perhaps the world’s leading UFO authority — came to Helena to interview Leo Dworshak.

     Dworshak’s book, “UFOs Are with Us — Take my Word,” shares his own alien encounter as a child. But what strikes me as strange is not Dworshak’s alleged encounter but rather how Good, who lives in England, found out about it.

     It seems that Good heard of Dworshak through a man named Lucius Farrila.[sic] And who’s Farrila [sic]you ask? He runs a UFO news clipping service in Arkansas.

     At any rate, even Art Bell’s “Coast To Coast AM” was interested in that story. They called me trying to track down Good. I don’t know if they ever connected though.

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     ZAMBOANGA CITY: An unidentified flying object was sighted hovering over a quiet village in Zamboanga City.

     The object, which appeared metallic, was spotted in the remote village of Lumbangan, about 10 kilometers east of Zamboanga.

     A witness claimed to have a photograph of the UFO hovering above a hill in the village. “I was taking pictures of the people digging for scrap and did not notice the flying object until I browsed the photographs from my laptop computer four days later.”

     “I was aghast at the picture and could not believe it. Of the three frames of photographs taken in the same site, the flying object appeared only on the second frame. It was not on the first frame and gone on the third,” he said.

     He said the object resembled a dark metallic disc with what appeared to be a dome on its top and it emitted neither sounds nor smoke. It was unknown if there were other witnesses, but he said some 70 people were in the garbage dump at the time the UFO hovered behind them.

     “It was past 10 in the morning and I am sure I heard no sound of aircraft in the village. The UFO was behind just up there,” he said.

     The witness reported the sighting to an international scientific research organization in the United States, the UFO Evidence, and sent a copy of the photograph.

     The Wikipedia website defines a UFO as “any airborne object or optical phenomenon, detected visually or by radar, whose nature is not readily known. Interest in these objects stems from continued speculation that some of them may be the products of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

     There have been numerous UFO sightings in the Philippines in the past.

     Filipinos reported seeing UFOs in 1979 in Cebu, Bohol and Negros. On April 19, 2000, a UFO was spotted near a beer brewery office in Manila. On June 28, 2002, a UFO was spotted hovering over a remote village in Polomolok town in South Cotabato.

     Two sightings were again reported in Dumaguete City on December 15 and March 11 in the same year. On January 16, 2004, a disc-shaped flying object was seen over San Jose del Monte, Bulacan. Many other sightings have been reported since 1990.

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     In 1947, U.S. Army Lieutenant Walter Haut was ordered to announce, in an official Army news release, that a flying saucer had landed in Roswell, New Mexico. And so he did. However, almost immediately after, that claim was retracted— on second thought-- and substituted with a feeble story about a misidentified weather balloon. Yeah, because up close these two things look so much alike and are easy to confuse with each other.

     And then poor Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer sent to investigate the “alleged” alien craft — I mean, weather balloon-- on which that supposed report is based was set up by his military superiors as the patsy for making that clumsy “mistake”. Be aware and advised, a crashed weather balloon does not leave the amount or type of debris reportedly found at the crash sight. What’s really going on here?

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     Thousands of the government's most sensitive secret documents are being held back from publication under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that they may be contaminated by asbestos.

     Ministry of Defence officials say the documents were stored in an area of the old War Office building in Whitehall where asbestos was discovered a number of years ago.

     Dozens of requests for information made under the FoI have already been turned down by the ministry, and a number of documents dating back to 1975, which were due for automatic release under the 30-year rule, are also being held back.

     Officials say that the contents of each file will eventually be considered for release once it has been decontaminated and copied. That process is unlikely to be completed before summer of 2007 at the earliest.

     Some 63,000 files, containing around 10m pages, are affected.

     The MoD has turned down 27 requests for information, concerning 288 files, which were made under the act.

     Of the approximately two dozen files which the Guardian has identified none appear to concern routine matters. All bear titles which suggest that they would have remained unseen for many years had the Freedom of Information Act not become law.

     One is entitled Sale of Arms to Saudi Arabia. Another is Production of Chemical Weapons, while a third is Medical Aspects of Interrogation. Several files about SAS operations in Borneo are being withheld, as are others about the financing of GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping organisation.

     There are also a number of files with intriguing titles such as Operation Tiara, Operation Grape, and Project R1, as well as some which contain details of supposed UFO sightings.

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     On the evening of December 26 several witnesses -- Marcelo Pintacuda among them, as he performed various duties at the Port of Necochea-Quequén-- noticed a large strange circcular object, yellow in color, that flew over the skies of Necochea. He managed to capture the image on his cellphone.

     The object vanished toward the west of the city after having been visible for several minutes.

     Mr. Pintacuda was engaged in supervising the unloading of fuel oil from the Antares I vessel to the Necochea Power Station, property of Centrales de la Costa Atlantica SA, which employs this fuel for operating purposes.

     The Necochea Power Station is located in the Port of Necoceha next to the Quequén River and facing the sea. Pintacuda is an agent for this branch and was engaged in fire watch activities at the time during the unloading of 8000 tons of fuel oil to the station.

     The incident is currently under investigation and the images are being downloaded presently from his Motorola C650 cellphone. The month of December has been rich in UFO activity over Necochea. We should keep in mind the cases involving employees of the DYCASA company, who are working on the expansion of the breakwater in the port itself, which also faces the Necochea Power Station.

     A considerable number of people saw this large object that vanished over the sea and toward the south. The cases involving a Necochean family that saw a similar round object as they returned home along the coastal route, and another family that sew a similar object over the beach should not be discarded.

     As we said, all cases are currently under investigation.

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)
* SOURCE: Planeta UFO

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     An Indiana man has published his own magazine entitled "UFO Sightings of Illinois" and is offering it for sale.

     In a telephone interview last week, Phillip Dean said he has sent a copy of the 24-page, 8 1/2 by 11-inch magazine to every newspaper editor in the state.

     "I've had a few answers back and I'll be starting on similar magazine covering Indiana, and from there I'll begin magazines focusing on UFOs in Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, New York and the nation's capital, Washington D.C."

     Dean said his fascination with unexplained flying objects started 45 years ago, when he saw an article in the Paris Beacon News.

     "It was about something that happened out West - a sighting of some objects - and that started me collecting articles," Dean said. "A friend and I talked about UFOs for years, but I never took them seriously, though I always took it for granted that they existed.

     "Of course, that led to ordering books and magazines from all over the country," he added. "As years go by, the material becomes almost like an addiction. My magazine came out this year. Getting started is the hard part, as anyone in this business can tell you. You got to first pay your dues. I've had some responses from newspaper editors south of here and north of here and in East St. Louis."

     Dean said he has sold about 15 copies of his magazine so far. He said most of the articles reprinted in his magazine are from magazines and books printed 15 to 30 years ago.

     Among the articles that interest him the most, one regards a sighting west of Paris, Ill., in which a jet plane is reportedly taken by bell-shaped object.

     "The person that saw it was a down-to-earth person. His son was on the police force," Dean said. "It happened right on his farm and not all that far away. Then two Air Force men showed up and admitted they had lost a jet in that area but saw to it that nothing about it showed up in the newspapers. The same thing happened on south edge of Paris too, over an area called 'the Y' when a bell-shaped object took a small private plane right there."

     Both of these incidents occurred in the late 1950s, Dean said.

     He conducts almost all his own research by mail, Dean said, adding that he has also talked with several "actual eye witnesses."

     The following are excerpts from the magazine:

     Aledo, Illinois, July 24, 1978

     "Mary and Robert Berglund and their 12-year-old granddaughter were driving home from Rock Island when they saw a big ball of fire in the western sky. Mrs. Berglund said that it kept getting bigger and redder. They said it appeared to land and seemed to be on fire."

     Franklin Park, Illinois

     June 17, 1979

     "Fear of being ridiculed made the campers hesitate to immediately reveal the terrifying incident.

     On May 28th, 24-year-old Camp Delaware counselor Ira Leifer led 13 boys on a hike up Blueberry Hill. The boys averaged in age from 13 to 15.

     At 3:45, the group reached the top of the hill. Few trees obscured the sky. The day was sunny and hot.

     Suddenly, a high-pitched whine was heard coming from above.

     Startled, the campers looked up. A pulsating, metallic saucer, about 20 feet in diameter, was hovering 50 to 60 feet above the ground.

     The UFO had a flat, shiny, reflective bottom, and its half-dome shape was topped by a smaller dome giving off a reddish glow.

     The entire saucer was surrounded by a purplish mist, and the glowing red dome was revolving.

     The total observation time was about 30 seconds. During this time, the saucer was completely silent. The campers stood in awe.

     When the high-pitched sound was heard again, the saucer began to move. The boys screamed and ran for their lives, realizing the UFO was after them!

     Then, just as it was about to grab them, it suddenly took off straight up.

     Ira found it impossible to control the panic-stricken group. They all raced to the safety of the camp.

     Afraid of being called crazy and irresponsible, the campers decided to keep the close encounter a secret. But after being assured by friends that UFO sightings should be reported to aid in their study, the campers bravely stepped forward and told the startling truth."

     Moline, Illinois, March 9, 1967

     "William Fisher, a patrolman of Moline police force, sighted and filmed a UFO, about 1:30 p.m. On the film it shows a glowing oval against a dark background."

     Elmwood Park, Illinois Nov. 4, 1957

     "Patrolman Joseph Lusasek, Patrolman Clifford Scahu and Fireman Robert Volt at 3:12 a.m. spotted an object about 250 feet in the air. They turned on the spotlight of their squad car on the object that was over Elmwood Cemetery and radioed Officer Daniel DeGiovanni who was on duty at Elmwood Park police station.

     "The object was a bright red-orange color and appeared to be folding into itself. It shot up about 200 feet when the spotlight hit it. Also when the spotlight hit it the object puffed out. The object took off and was last seen at 3:22 a.m. DeGiovanni saw it before it disappeared. Before sight of it was lost, it appeared to fold inward from the bottom."

     Near Havana, Ill. March 14, 1946

     "Paul Cummings Jr. was driving from Canton to Lincoln, Illinois and was about 10 miles east of Havana when he saw a bright ball of orange in color. It appeared in the middle of the road about 1 mile ahead. Douglas Gowdy was with him. The object came toward them about one foot above pavement. It occupied the whole roadbed. Paul drove off the road and both men jumped out. No sound of heat."

     Crop Circle

     MILAN, Ill. (UPI) - Farmer James Lawson doesn't know what made the perfect 40 to 50 -foot circle in his cornfield and he isn't ready to accept it was a UFO.

     "I was just making my first trip (on a combine) through the field," Lawson said. "The first thing I thought of was a UFO.

     "I thought 'holy smokes, what is this?' "The corn stalks are flattened in neat rows and clockwise swirl, hidden from the nearest intersection but visible from inside the field.

     "It feels weird. There's no road coming in, " said Lawson, 70. "It could've been here quite a while but the ears are still on the stalks. Maybe it's been a month or so."

     Since 1980, more than 600 similar circles have been reported in Britain with 250 recorded in 1989. Crop circle reports have also come in from the Soviet Union, Japan and New England..."

     Carbondale, Illinois Southern Illinoisan October 18, 1973

     "It didn't make any noise," Downs said.

     Interested persons may reach Dean by mail at Phil's Catalogue, P.O. Box 177 West Terre Haute, IN 47885.

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     During the nights of 26 and 27 December 1980, US servicemen at RAF Woodbridge and Bentwaters reported mysterious lights in Rendlesham Forest.

     The strange lights included a glowing metallic triangle and a hovering object with red and blue lights.

     UFO enthusiasts are hoping there might be more sightings during the night.

     Brenda Butler, a local resident who has written about the events of 1980, believes the sightings of 25 years ago were real.

     Patrol car lights

     "People who were coming up the Butley Road and who were in Woodbridge, Melton, Leiston and all around the area saw structured craft," she said.

     "And that's not the first time - we can go way back to the 1600s and we've had lights in the sky and in the forest."

     In 2003, Kevin Conde, a former US security policeman said he had been responsible for the lights in the forest.

     He said he and another airman shined patrol car lights through the trees and made noises on a loudspeaker as a prank.

     "We just drove through the forest flashing the lights through the fog," he said.

     Despite Mr Conde's claim, some witnesses do not believe they saw patrol car lights in Rendlesham Forest.

     US Air Force Sergeant John Burroughs said: "The blue lights coming down from the sky...I still have never heard of any technology capable of doing what I saw happening."

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      Say the name ''Roswell'' and some people immediately think of gray-skinned space aliens with oval-shaped heads and shadowy government agents in black suits.

     Walter Klinikowski, a Catasauqua native and retired Air Force colonel, is not one of those people.

     Klinikowski was stationed at the New Mexico Air Force base in summer 1947 when the military recovered a flying disc in the desert. Many people believe they found — and have subsequently covered up — an alien spacecraft. Klinikowski has another theory.

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     Off in the distance over San Francisco Bay, the small silhouette in mid-air looked like a military helicopter on a mission. It appeared to be heading slowly straight at us, descending toward our boat in northwestern San Pablo Bay.

     We didn't want to take our eyes off our rod tips. That is because the bite of a big sturgeon, a one-second pull-down, can come and go in the quick moment it takes to look away.

     But the black object continued its descent and approach. Terry Radov stole a peek and suggested it might not be helicopter after all . . .

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      December 23, 2005: NASA scientists have observed an explosion on the moon. The blast, equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT, occurred near the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) on Nov. 7, 2005, when a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid slammed into the ground traveling 27 km/s.

     "What a surprise," says Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) researcher Rob Suggs, who recorded the impact's flash. He and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, "we caught one," says Suggs.

     The object that hit the moon was "probably a Taurid," says MSFC meteor expert Bill Cooke. In other words, it was part of the same meteor shower that peppered Earth with fireballs in late October and early November 2005. (See "Fireball Sightings" from Science@NASA.)

     The moon was peppered, too, but unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to intercept meteoroids and turn them into harmless streaks of light. On the moon, meteoroids hit the ground--and explode.

     "The flash we saw," says Suggs, "was about as bright as a 7th magnitude star." That's two and a half times dimmer than the faintest star a person can see with their unaided eye, but it was an easy catch for the group's 10-inch telescope.

     Cooke estimates that the impact gouged a crater in the moon's surface "about 3 meters wide and 0.4 meters deep." As moon craters go, that's small. "Even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't see it," notes Cooke. The moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide.

     This isn't the first time meteoroids have been seen hitting the moon. During the Leonid meteor storms of 1999 and 2001, amateur and professional astronomers witnessed at least half-a-dozen flashes ranging in brightness from 7th to 3rd magnitude. Many of the explosions were photographed simultaneously by widely separated observers.

     Since the Leonids of 2001, astronomers have not spent much time hunting for lunar meteors. "It's gone out of fashion," says Suggs. But with NASA planning to return to the moon by 2018, he says, it's time to start watching again.

     There are many questions that need answering: "How often do big meteoroids strike the moon? Does this happen only during meteor showers like the Leonids and Taurids? Or can we expect strikes throughout the year from 'sporadic meteors?'" asks Suggs. Explorers on the moon are going to want to know.

     "The chance of an astronaut being directly hit by a big meteoroid is miniscule," says Cooke. Although, he allows, the odds are not well known "because we haven't done enough observing to gather the data we need to calculate the odds." Furthermore, while the danger of a direct hit is almost nil for an individual astronaut, it might add up to something appreciable for an entire lunar outpost.

     Of greater concern, believes Suggs, is the spray—"the secondary meteoroids produced by the blast." No one knows how far the spray reaches and exactly what form it takes.

     Also, ground-shaking impacts could kick up moondust, possibly over a wide area. Moondust is electrostatically charged and notoriously clingy. (See "Mesmerized by Moondust" from Science@NASA.) Even a small amount of moondust can be a great nuisance: it gets into spacesuit joints and seals, clings to faceplates, and even makes the air smell when it is tramped indoors by moonwalkers. Could meteoroid impacts be a source of lunar "dust storms?" Another question for the future....

     Suggs and his team plan to make more observations. "We're contemplating a long-term monitoring program active not only during major meteor showers, but also at times in between. We need to develop software to find these flashes automatically," he continues. "Staring at 4 hours of tape to find a split-second flash can get boring; this is a job for a computer."

     With improvements, their system might catch lots of lunar meteors. Says Suggs, "I'm ready for more surprises."

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      The literate world is well aware that a controversy about the reality of the UFO phenomenon has raged for decades. Arrayed on one side are the enthusiasts - the casual, the serious and the bizarre - along with thousands of highly qualified pilot-witnesses, high-ranking military personnel, intensely interested scientists, and even an astronaut or two. All regard the hundreds of thousands of global sighting reports as a scientific problem of major significance, and all demand that science finally conducts a thorough, objective investigation. Centrally opposed to this position are a large number of mainstream scientists, most of whom are not only indifferent to the subject of UFOs, but also grossly uninformed about the weight of the evidence. Allied with them is a strange amalgam of groups that includes official spokesmen for the United States Air Force, Bible Belt Fundamentalist preachers such as Pat Robertson, and a small but vociferous band of self-described "rationalist" debunkers (who probably look upon their religious brethren as hopelessly superstitious). Clearly, the battle against a scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon makes strange bedfellows.

     A few years ago, when those of us in the research community heard rumors of a two-tiered scientific investigation to be undertaken at Harvard University by experimental psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy, we were curious but wary. Dr. McNally, we were told, intended to test a group of self-described UFO abductees for the presence of certain symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He would employ as a model a similar test used years before, in which a group of Vietnam veterans tape recorded their traumatic war experiences and then, at a later time, were scientifically measured for signs of stress as they heard their taped accounts played back. Dr. Clancy planned to employ a word memorization test, which was supposed to reveal a subject's tendency towards false memories. Unfortunately, neither McNally nor Clancy intended to carry out any actual investigations of UFO abduction reports or examine any physical evidence. They would remain in the laboratory, limiting their project to the ostensibly scientific testing of their abductee subjects' veracity.

     Early in the Susan Clancy enterprise, any hopes I had for her objectivity evaporated when I learned that her purported abductee subjects were to be self-selected. She had placed ads in a number of newspapers, asking for those who believed they had had UFO abduction experiences to contact her. Little or no vetting took place, and her unscientific protocol thus opened the laboratory door to anyone who claimed to be an abductee. Her subjects were not a group whose accounts had been investigated and accepted as reliable by experienced researchers, but instead, Clancy accepted virtually anyone who came in off the street and told her they were, indeed, abductees. Some of her subjects had such tenuous, even vapid reasons for believing they were abductees - a "mysterious bruise" or a "vague feeling" - that knowledgeable researchers would have immediately shown them the door. The uncritical Dr. Clancy, however, made them part of the "abductee" group she studied!

     Anyone familiar with the phenomenon is aware that very few abductees will come forward to discuss their experiences publicly, or to subject themselves to "testing" of any kind by people or organizations that they do not know and trust. Doing so would be to run the very real risk of becoming targets for career-threatening ridicule. Obviously, the more highly credentialed abductees are the most hesitant to volunteer as test subjects because they have the most to lose. Neither the NASA research scientist, the NASA engineer, nor the many psychiatrists, psychologists, police officers and military professionals who, over the years, have reported their abduction experiences to me, would ever involve themselves in what might well turn out to be sensationalist and incompetently mounted tests of one kind or another. Adding to that basic flaw in her study, my second concern had to do with the fact that neither Clancy, whom I had twice met, nor McNally made any attempt to contact Dr. David Jacobs or me. They were both undoubtedly aware that the two of us have accumulated between us masses of data after decades of work with literally hundreds of abductees. We were never consulted on any issue, nor was our help in vetting test subjects called for. In retrospect, Dr. Jacobs and I could have easily prevented the two testers - innocent of the complex work of actual investigation - from making many of the egregious errors which have so seriously damaged their work.

     The results of McNally's test for signs of posttraumatic stress disorder were significant. Those reporting abductions showed virtually the same intensely emotional reactions upon hearing their taped accounts replayed as did the Vietnam vets when they heard the tapes of their traumatic war experiences. But as we soon learned in McNally's analysis of the test results, the devil was not in the details themselves but in his interpretation of the details. He announced that, since we "know" that UFO abductions don't exist, all of his subjects' accounts have to be false memories. And since they registered just as powerfully as "true" memories, what the test shows, he explained, is that "false" memories can be just as traumatic as "real" memories! This classic illustration of "heads I win, tails you lose" circular reasoning provides a perfect example of ideology trumping science. Unfortunately, as astronomer J. Allen Hynek once remarked, science is not always what scientists do. In effect, McNally seemed to be saying that even if his own test results support the traumatic reality of the abduction phenomenon, that fact changes nothing since UFO ABDUCTIONS JUST DO NOT EXIST, and that somehow, someway, he will make his test results fit his hypothesis! McNally's ideological interpretation of the test results - a clear example of "faith-based science" - is just as rigid in its way as the creationists' willful denigration of evolution, no matter what the fossil records have revealed.

     Susan Clancy's word memorization test as an indication of false memories is far more tenuous than McNally's test for the presence of posttraumatic stress. (This is perhaps not the place to go into its technical inadequacies, other than to reiterate what I have already said about its fatal flaw - the reliance upon an unvetted, self-selected sample. I will return to the specifics of her work in a later paper.) Instead, the problem I would like to discuss is her use of a rather simple word memorization protocol to ratify her belief that a subject's demonstrably traumatic memories are false. Clancy baldly stated in an early newspaper interview that she assumed everyone would accept the idea that all abduction experiences were false memories, because "everyone" knew there were no such things as UFO abductions. This, she apparently thought, was settled truth - and another illustration of irrational, faith-based science. So, at the outset of their work, neither she nor McNally intended to raise even the possibility that such things as UFO abductions might have occurred, let alone to actually investigate that possibility. The ideology they shared assumed that such experiences were, ipso facto, false memories, a theory the two seem to believe as fervently as the Pope believes in the virgin birth.

     Another analogy comes to mind. Instead of a group of abductees, imagine an equal number of women who have reported rape experiences and who are now to be tested by a pair of experimental psychologists. The psychologists state at the outset that they do not believe any of these women were actually raped and are proceeding on that assumption. Thus their goal is not to investigate the veracity of the women's claims but to discover a way of establishing their "tendencies to fantasize and form false memories." Since the testers "know" in advance that these rape memories are false, no police investigation into the alleged rape accounts is necessary - no examination of physical or medical evidence, no visits to alleged crime scenes, no interviews with possible witnesses, and no checks on the reputations of the rape victims. In short, nothing will be undertaken that might support the reality of their experiences. An outrageous, even inhumane idea, of course, but analogous to the Clancy-McNally attitude to UFO abductees.

     As I pointed out above, Clancy carried out no investigation of any of her subjects' abduction reports - no inquiries into supporting witnesses, no visits to alleged sites, no search for physical evidence, no interviews with friends and family members. Everything she did apparently took place in the laboratory, by way of her word memorization test and personal interviews, though she apparently lacked a firm grounding in the literature, history or complexity of the UFO phenomenon. Recently I appeared on "Larry King Live," along with Clancy and several others, when one of the guests showed a blow-up of the world-famous Trent UFO photographs from McMinnville, Oregon, arguably the best-known UFO photos in existence. They were prominently featured in "Life" magazine in 1950, and have been reproduced hundreds of times since in many publications. What's more, in 1969, after careful analysis, an investigator for the skeptical Condon Committee described the McMinnville photo case this way: "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses." Optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee has investigated this case thoroughly, flying to McMinneville, interviewing the Trents, their family and neighbors, taking his own test photos from the same location, and carrying out literally months of optical analysis of the original pictures. Maccabee's work has been published widely, but the photos themselves should be familiar to anyone with even a cursory involvement in UFO study and research. Yet, during the Larry King program, abduction authority Susan Clancy glanced at the photos on the monitor and said something like this: "that could be anything...someone who threw up a hubcap or a Frisbee or something." Her evident ignorance of this case, and, by extension, of the literature and history of the UFO phenomenon, was aptly illustrated by this glib, contemptuous wisecrack, a remark one might expect to hear late at night in a Texas barroom, but not from someone holding a Ph.D. degree from Harvard. Earlier, when King asked her how she became interested in the subject of UFO abductions, she began her answer this way: "I've been studying aliens for..." Studying aliens? Again, this peculiar description of her work in the laboratory is not what one would expect to hear from an experimental psychologist on an ostensibly serious TV program.

     Though as a faith-based scientist, Susan Clancy has no problem asserting her absolute belief that all UFO abduction accounts are nothing more than false memories, she is left with the problem of explaining how these memories are generated. By what process can many thousands of extremely similar accounts from around the world come into the heads of this multitude - especially since her colleague, Richard McNally, has established that abduction memories have essentially the same traumatic qualities as memories of the Vietnam War? Clancy's solution was to cobble together a melange of theories, many of them mutually contradictory, in an attempt to account for the power and similarity of these "false" memories. Abduction researchers have long been familiar with the explanations Clancy offers, and over the years we have refused to deal with many individuals whose abduction accounts are either extremely tenuous, lacking in evidence, or easily explained away. Where we differ from Clancy is that she insists upon her a priori belief that every abduction case can be explained away by her various theories and that no actual investigation is necessary, whereas experienced investigators, being scientific skeptics, believe that abduction accounts, accompanied by supporting evidence of various types, deserve investigation before firm conclusions about their credibility can be drawn.

     Her first explanation - one that is currently popular with debunkers of every stripe - is that abduction memories are formed during episodes of sleep paralysis, a relatively rare neurological event that usually lasts a matter of seconds. The sleep paralysis explanation has been eagerly seized upon because a sizeable percentage of UFO abductions occur at night, in the subject's bedroom. There are, of course, myriad objections to the sleep paralysis theory, but it clearly self-destructs before one central problem: the large percentage of UFO abductions which occur in the daytime, when the abductee is up and about, driving a car, taking a walk, playing in the front yard, or even, in one case, driving a tractor. In fact, for the first twenty years of UFO abduction accounts, I am aware of none that reportedly took place inside one's home or bedroom. So, as science decrees, if a theory does not fit the data, it must be rejected.

     Clancy also indicts the use of hypnosis as the medium by which false memories are implanted in unsuspecting clients by unscrupulous hypnotists. The problem with this theory is that about 30% of the thousands of UFO abduction reports researchers have investigated were recalled without the use of hypnosis. Beyond that, virtually all abductees recall at least some aspects of their experiences without hypnosis. Otherwise, they would have had no reason to contact an investigator in the first place. In the light of these facts, the "hypnosis explanation" as to how "false" abduction recollections are generated also collapses.

     It should be added that further doubts about the efficacy of hypnosis in inducing false memories have been raised by recent experimental studies, such as the work of psychologists Steven Lynn and Irving Kirsch. They summarize their results this way: "The most appropriate conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that hypnosis does not reliably produce more false memories than are produced in a variety of non-hypnotic situations in which misleading information is conveyed to participants." It is also a matter of record that many hypnotherapists with no knowledge of the abduction phenomenon have, to their surprise, uncovered traumatic abduction recollections in subjects with whom they were working. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist highly skeptical of UFO reality who was treating Betty and Barney Hill for post traumatic stress, uncovered details of their terrifying abduction experience in what is now seen as the first systematically investigated UFO abduction case. Obviously, during hypnosis, his personal skepticism had no effect whatsoever on the Hills' recollections. There are many reasons to trust the process of hypnosis, if it is handled carefully and skeptically, with the use of false leads and other validating techniques (all of which I have discussed elsewhere). But it should be clear by now that objective science must reject Clancy's theory that hypnosis per se is implicated in the wholesale generation of false memories.

     One of the early theories used to explain UFO abduction reports insisted that such experiences were nothing more than a new "space age religion." Since the gods are supposedly dead, abductees have invented encounters with "godlike" alien beings to replace them. But that highly speculative theory was discounted years ago by serious researchers on both sides of the issue because of yet another major problem: the vast majority of UFO abductees feel that their abductions have been deeply traumatizing - sometimes even physically painful and injurious - and that the small, hairless, big-eyed UFO occupants they describe are anything but godlike. (Richard McNally's own test results buttress this abductee view). It should be pointed out, however, that one occasionally comes across an abductee who is fully aware of the emotional trauma he has suffered, but who is nevertheless willing to regard these experiences as being, in some way, spiritually uplifting. For such people, this positive view of traumatic events is probably a coping strategy, similar to that of certain battered wives who will not complain to the police, but instead insist that their abusive husbands really do love them. Perhaps, for some battered wives as well as for some traumatized abductees, this kind of coping strategy is a way of retaining one's self esteem by fighting off the sense of being a helpless victim and by insisting that somewhere, somehow their ordeals must have a silver lining. One is reminded of the many victims of Hurricane Katrina who have lost everything but whom, when interviewed on television, cling to the idea that their ghastly experiences have somehow been transformative and spiritually uplifting.

     Equally damning of Clancy's religious explanation is the fact that the UFO reports of many abductees in more primitive cultures describe exactly the same details as do abductees in more advanced cultures, and yet these more primitive people work assiduously to make their UFO experiences fit into the schema of their traditional religions. Thus, in a well-known Zimbabwe incident, the natives who described small, white-skinned aliens in shiny one-piece jumpsuits insisted that they were the ghosts of their ancestors, who can now, apparently, fly around in wingless metal discs. Clancy would have us believe that many previously religious people have simply dropped their traditional beliefs and begun to worship the abducting aliens in a new kind of "false-memory religion," but in cases such as this African incident, the natives did the opposite. They forced the conventional "space age" UFO and the white-skinned aliens they had actually observed into strained conformity with their pre-existing religious beliefs. Thus their UFO experience can be seen as strengthening their traditional beliefs, rather than replacing them.

     Another shaky explanation Clancy mentions is that of media contamination. According to this idea, perfectly normal people are so influenced by something they've seen on TV or read in a book that, like helpless sponges, they adopt details from other people's abduction accounts and thus weave tenaciously held false memories from "an odd bruise" or a "strange feeling" or something equally tenuous. It is unnecessary to point out that experienced investigators would, at the outset, recognize these "wannabes" for what they were and refuse to deal with them. Furthermore, it seems obvious that these newly minted "wannabes" would be among the first to answer Clancy's ads soliciting abductees for her tests, because, in doing so they would achieve legitimacy by becoming part of her sample. Thus the central point of her "contamination" argument brilliantly exposes the original and most damaging flaw in her methodology: the self-selected and therefore completely unrepresentative nature of her subjects.

     So who were the people Clancy was attempting to test? Were there some apparently legitimate abductees among her sample? Possibly. Were there wannabes, publicity seekers and emotionally unstable people among her sample? Undoubtedly. And under these conditions, what kind of valid generalizations could she possibly make about the UFO abduction phenomenon?

     In the light of these crippling problems in her methodology, we must briefly consider which areas of the complex, many-sided abduction phenomenon which Clancy's faith-based attitude refused to consider. What kinds of data did she overlook? Here, briefly, are some examples:

# 1. She included no study of the patterns of well-known and clearly defined physical sequelae - scoop marks and straight-line cuts - that frequently appear on individuals after their abductions.

# 2. She included no reference to the patterns of ground traces - altered soil, tree branches snapped off from the top down, affects on the surrounding foliage, etc. that are often discovered at UFO landing sites after abductions.

# 3. She made no mention of the eye-witness testimony of neighbors observing a UFO hovering over a house where an abduction is taking place; of witnesses who search in vain for an abducted child who is later found outside a fully locked house; of the incidents in which the police are summoned because of the temporary disappearance of a baby from his crib or a child from her bedroom, but who turn up, unobserved, an hour or so later; or hundreds of similar cases in which abductees are known to be inexplicably missing.

# 4. She made no mention of the bizarre errors the UFO occupants often make, such as returning individuals from group abductions wearing someone else's clothes; replacing abductees in the wrong room or building after an abduction; or returning an individual to her bedroom in a locked and bolted house with her feet soiled and the back of her nightgown covered with damp leaves; or any of the scores of other such significant errors.

# 5. She made no mention of the hundreds of cases in which two or more individuals are abducted at once, and whose traumatic memories match in every detail.

# 6. She made no mention of a few accounts - such as the Travis Walton case or the Linda Cortile abduction - in which numerous witnesses see all or part of the abduction as it is being carried out.

# 7. She made no effort to interview the friends and family members of the people in her sample, or in fact anyone who might have insight into their general trustworthiness and emotional soundness. Instead, Susan Clancy alone, because of her faith in the non-existence of UFO abductions, decided that all of her subjects' abduction accounts were false, and that all of their traumatic recollections were nothing more than false memories. She is therefore implying - indirectly but absolutely - that none of her subjects can tell the difference between dream and reality. To the public at large, this means, in effect, that an experimental psychologist with a Harvard degree believes everyone claiming UFO abduction experiences is suffering from a form of mental illness.

      For me, in the absence of any actual investigation of their accounts, such a radical, blanket condemnation by Susan Clancy of her innocent and naively trusting subjects is both ethically reprehensible and a disgrace to science.

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