MUFON Caught New Jersey UFO Hoaxers!

By Roger Marsh
UFO Examiner
4-6-09

     A Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) report concerning the now-famous Morris County, NJ, UFO scam describes the sighting as something manmade.

Joe Rudy, 28, and Chris Russo, 29, have been charged with disorderly conduct, after prosecutors there learned of the hoax on YouTube, where they actually showed us how they did it - red flares, helium balloons and fishing line. The first attempt at a hoax appears to be a report filed with MUFON on Jan. 5, 2009. Other hoax dates are Feb. 7 and Feb. 17, 2009.

But MUFON called this one correctly on Jan. 7, 2009.

Photo Analyst Marc D'Antonio, with FX Models, LLC, was brought in on the case after the January 5, 2009, report by MUFON's Richard Lang, a STAR team coordinator. The STAR team is MUFON's recent push to get investigations rolling quickly, especially in cases where there may be ground evidence. Lang provided D'Antonio with a video tape of the event.

The following is D'Antonio's statement on the case from Jan. 7.

"I noted that the lights seemed to operate independently, and were brightening and dimming independently, as in a flickering effect, indicative of a typical flame-based light source that I have seen countless times. By flame-based I mean a flying light created by a Chinese Lantern or a flare.

"A Chinese Lantern, as you already must know, is a paper balloon envelope with a heat source suspended underneath in the opening that heats the envelope making a crude hot air balloon until the flame goes out.

"Further, in the report, the indication was that the lights went out one by one.

"This is very telling. When lights go out one-by-one, that usually means that they were LIT one after another.

"A flare that lasts 20 minutes has burned for 4-5, say by the time the LAST one in the chain is lit, and they are all released if performed by a person or two. So this staggered fadeout pattern is expected in such situations and is what happened in this case.

"Whether this event was due to Chinese Lanterns, as I thought they could be, or flares, didn't matter actually.

"It was clear to me after viewing the video that this is not a UFO, but was a man-made hoax event.

"I informed the STAR team, that in my opinion, this was a man-made event, and not a true UFO of any kind. I suggested obtaining prevailing wind data for that evening and guessing how long the lights were visible, figure out a probable drift pattern and search for debris.

"The MUFON STAR team, using good science, did a search, and in fact they found debris from the "apparatus" along the path that the object took. So this was a good team effort, with the expected result for a hoax event."

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Morristown UFO: " . . . The Biggest Dupe — Perhaps Not Surprisingly — Was Bill Birnes"

UFO Hoaxers Face Punishment for Their Crime

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Morristown UFO: " . . . The Biggest Dupe — Perhaps Not Surprisingly — Was Bill Birnes"

Nicely done, Newsweak

By Billy Cox
De Void
4-3-09

     It’s easy to make people look idiotic; after all, 73 percent of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So the stunt pulled off by 20-something wags Joe Rudy and Chris Russo can’t be called a public service. What it does do is illuminate (as if we actually needed more data) the weird schizoid nature of media bias in the UFO arena.

Over a five-day stretch in January and February, in a stated “mission to help people think rationally and question the credibility of so-called UFO professionals,” the New Jersey residents dispatched trains of balloons and flares into the night sky near Morristown.

They shot their own footage, then sat back as local TV stations lapped it up like housecats. Local 911 dispatchers got a handful of calls and another family videotaped it, too. In an effort to keep the hoax going, Russo lied to a News 12 TV crew in rejecting police suspicions that it was flares: “From what we saw? No way — the way they were moving around. I mean, they zipped over our car.”

TV anchors who’ve likely never filed a Freedom of Information Act against the feds for UFO data were absolutely charmed by these featureless nocturnal blobs of light. With an assist from Fox News, the story went national, and the biggest dupe — perhaps not surprisingly — was Bill Birnes.

Given the unfiltered credulous slop that too often permeates his UFO Magazine, Birnes was always something of a bird waiting for a windshield. Ironically, UFO Hunters, his springboard into The History Channel’s prime-time rotation, appeared to have elevated its game this season following a desultory debut last year. But after analyzing the Morristown flap, UFO Hunters took the bait: “Police say the unidentified flying object was nothing more than flares — a theory that UFO Hunters has already tested and proven implausible.”

On April Fool’s Day, Rudy and Russo howled about their well-documented coup at http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-04-01.html. What’s actually more revealing is how, within hours, Newsweek was the first to cheerlead the caper for its novel approach to promoting critical thinking. “Nicely done, guys,” wrote Sharon Begley for the magazine’s Web page.

Never mind how, two days later, Morris County prosecutor Robert Bianchi considered the aviation-safety implications of what they’d done and pressed disorderly person charges against the champions of critical thinking. They could’ve gotten away with it if they’d just kept their pie holes shut. "If there is a single word to describe this,” said Biachi, “it is in essence stupidity."

A better question might be: What’s up at Newsweek? On 1/18/08, soon after the Stephenville, Tex., UFO incident, editors allowed Charles Euchner, a “lecturer in English at Yale,” to ascribe the sightings — which witnesses also said included pursuit by jet fighters — to delusions brought on by collective sleep deprivation.

A few days later, the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve base in Fort Worth reversed its earlier denial and admitted it had F-16s in the air over Stephenville that night. No mention of the UFO by the Air Force, of course.

On the other hand, we’re still waiting for Newsweek to tell us how sleep-deprivation victims managed to see those F-16s.

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UFO Hoaxers Face Punishment for Their Crime

Phoenix man: Neighbor Caused Monday's Mysterious Lights


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UFO Hoaxers Face Punishment for Their Crime

2 Morris County men face charges in UFO hoax

By Abbott Koloff
Daily Record
4-3-09

Mysterious lights were road flares tied to helium balloons

     Two young men who admitted to creating a UFO hoax earlier this year will be charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor that typically carries a fine but no jail time, Morris County law enforcement officials announced Thursday night.

Chris Russo, 29, of Morris Plains, and Joe Rudy, 28, of Chester Township, admitted the hoax on a Web site on Wednesday, saying they launched road flares tied to helium balloons on five occasions, leading local residents to call police and the news media with accounts of mysterious red lights in the sky. They said they perpetrated the hoax to call attention to so-called UFO experts who ascribe extraterrestrial origins to events without evidence.

Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi called a press conference to announce the charges, saying the two men seemed to know that they had created a fire danger and a hazard to airplanes. He said their actions caused "public hysteria" and referred to the prank, along with posting their activities on the Internet, as "stupidity."

"These individuals were not smart enough to not put it on the Internet," Bianchi said. He added that they "otherwise appear to be decent, law-abiding individuals."

The lights turned out to be exactly what law enforcement authorities said they were after the first incident, on Jan. 5, when five lights floated over Hanover Township and the Morristown Airport before disappearing. The two men posted an account of their activities on April Fool's Day on a Web site called eSkeptic.com.

"That was a coincidence," Russo said in an interview early on Thursday, adding that the story on eSkeptic was originally supposed to be published a week ago.

The two men said they stopped sending up flares after Bianchi's office began investigating in February and federal aviation authorities said the lights might present a hazard to airplanes flying into Newark Liberty International Airport. That scared them, they acknowledged.

"We stopped, not out of fear, but because we respect the law," Russo, a salesman, said.

Bianchi said the two men face up to five counts of disorderly conduct, one for each time they committed the hoax.

A little more than an hour before Thursday night's press conference, Russo said he had not yet been contacted by law enforcement authorities. Earlier in the day, he and Rudy said they didn't expect to be criminally charged. Neither responded to phone messages left later Thursday night.

The two men posted videos on the Internet showing them preparing the flares, tying them to balloons with fishing line and duct tape, and then launching them. However, some UFO watchers would not acknowledge that the lights were a hoax.

Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine, created a documentary video about the Morris County lights that was posted on the History Channel's Web site. In the video, he said the lights had nothing to do with balloons. He indicated in a phone message Thursday that he stands by that statement, saying he knew some lights seen in Morris about the same time were flares attached to balloons.

"What we were tracking was something very different," Birnes said.

He said he was focusing on five lights seen on Jan. 5 and videotaped by a pilot from Whippany -- the same night Russo and Rudy made their first launch of five flares.

"I don't think people like Bill Birnes easily admit that they are wrong," said Rudy, a former teacher who now gives music lessons.

Russo and Rudy said they launched flares on five occasions -- Jan. 5, Jan. 26, Jan. 29, Feb. 7 and Feb. 17. The Jan. 26 launch took place in the Chester area, they said. The rest of the launches were from a field in Hanover, the township where they grew up and graduated from Whippany Park High School in the late 1990s. They launched five lights on each of the first four nights and nine on Feb. 17.

They said they got the idea late last year, when they were talking about what they referred to as pseudo sciences such as astrology and UFO observations. They said they did some research and tried to reduce potential hazards by launching the flares on nights when the ground was wet. They didn't call police, because they knew that would be a crime, but acknowledged calling media outlets to make sure the lights received attention.

"Our main objective was to bring UFOlogists out of the woodwork," Rudy said.

They said they were happy that police immediately recognized the lights for what they were, because they didn't want to create a panic. But even as police made that determination, and newspapers reported observers saying the lights appeared to be attached to balloons, some people refused to believe it.

Morristown police Chief Peter Demnitz said earlier this year that he received a call from an angry woman upset that he appeared to debunk the idea of the lights being extraterrestrial. And on Web sites Thursday, Russo and Rudy said some people depicted them as government agents out to cover up the truth.

"Among the true believers, we seem to be villains," Rudy said.

More . . .

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Phoenix man: Neighbor Caused Monday's Mysterious Lights

Mysterious red dots in the sky baffling Valley residents

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UFOs Reported Over N.J.

By Philly.com
2-18-09

     PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Once again, mysterious red lights in the sky have residents in north-central New Jersey scratching their heads.

It's the third time in about a month that Morris County residents have reported seeing the lights.

Police in Morris Plains, Morris Township, Hanover and Morristown each reported getting a few calls from residents last night night.

The callers say they saw as many as 10 red lights floating in the sky, moving in unison and in the same direction as the wind from about 8:45 p.m. to 9 p.m.

No one knows where the lights are coming from, but a Michigan-based maker of Sky Lanterns says it could be his product. The lanterns have balloons and wax-infused cloth and are set aloft during celebrations.

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'Sky Lanterns' Laid To Blame (Again) For Recent UFO Sightings

Lanterns Spark UFO Scare

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