THE UFO CHRONICLES


nam et ipsa scientia potestas est
- Knowledge is Power -

     In the last "My Strange New Mexico," we examined a mysterious film that many believe shows a UFO crashing in the desert of the White Sands Missile Range in 1997. In the film, a white, football-shaped craft plummets from the sky, skips violently across the ground and explodes. Where the film came from, who shot it, or even when it was first viewed, has remained uncertain.

After the column about this unusual film appeared in print and online, a number of intriguing e-mails have arrived at the top-secret "My Strange New Mexico" lair, printed out and delivered, of course, by a trained staff of flightless, 5-foot-tall owls.

One such e-mail, from someone calling himself Light Eye, read simply, "This video was made by Ted Loman. It's not a UFO crash."

Another, by Peter Gersten, former director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), stated, "Ted Loman produced the video on UFO crashes and created the opening scene of the skipping UFO."

Loman is a well-known UFO researcher. In 1973, Loman became convinced he needed to travel to a mountain in Baja, Mexico, where aliens were going to land, pick him up and return him to his home planet. Instead, his family forced him to go to a psychiatrist, and for the most part, he filed the incident away in his mind for around 17 years. Then, in 1989, he suffered a severe injury while melting silver in a laboratory - an injury that cost him his left eyesight, left him wearing a pirate-style eye patch and gave his father plenty of time to read to him about UFOs.

This led to 1997, when Loman began hosting and producing a weekly cable access show in Tucson, Arizona - "UFOAZ Talks," a live, one-hour show that examined the reported presence of UFOs in the West. In 1997, the show, by then widely syndicated, changed its name to "Off the Record," and in 2002, the show went off the air.

Loman moved to northern Idaho and finished work on a documentary about UFO crashes, entitled "It Fell From the Sky." It was as the opening scene for that hard-to-find documentary that the footage of the alleged White Sands crash may have first appeared.

Loman is currently on vacation in Mexico and unavailable for comment, but Gersten, who served with Loman on CAUS's board of directors, said, "The only thing that isn't real about ("It Fell From the Sky") is that opening scene. That is not real ... I don't remember if it was actually CGI or some sort of computer enhancement."

In an undated online clip from "UFO Connections," a Sacramento, Calif., cable-access show, Loman played the video of the crash, said the footage had not yet been professionally analyzed and claimed he didn't know when it was made.

Of the film, he said, "That came to me through Jaime Maussan. Right. And, uh, uh, I don't know where Jaime got it. Well, I just don't know where ... it's best to say I don't know where Jaime got this. But, I, uh, I believe it to be at White Sands. But I cannot, and I will not, confirm or deny that it is, uh, I'll leave it up to the viewers to, to, see it and watch it, and decide for themselves."

Bringing Maussan into the story, unfortunately, does not improve the film's credibility. Maussan is a popular Mexican television host - the self-proclaimed "Mike Wallace of Mexico" - and has a reputation as a recklessly gullible and even dishonest promoter of UFO hoaxes. His Web site is loaded with the sort of footage almost anyone with a trash can lid and a camcorder could produce, and he has inspired such online articles as UFOWatchDog.com's "Jaime Maussan: Damaging Serious UFOlogy One Hoax at a Time."

The film of the White Sands crash either came from Maussan or was made by Loman for his documentary. The absolute truth still remains to be learned, but unless Loman tries and succeeds at a little interstellar hitchhiking while in Mexico, the truth will come out eventually.

Labels: Crash, Ted Loman, Video, White Sands" UFO