Science and UFOs: Part 2 — Occam’s Rusty Razor

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By Robert Hastings www.ufohastings.com 3-23-12

     As noted in Part 1, the late Dr. James E. McDonald—who held the title “Senior Physicist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics” at the University of Arizona—also holds the distinction of being one of the very few scientists to actually study the UFO phenomenon. In a prepared statement before the U.S. Congress’ House Committee on Science and Astronautics, delivered on July 29, 1968, McDonald said this:

“From time to time in the history of science, situations have arisen in which a problem of ultimately enormous importance went begging for adequate attention simply because that problem appeared to involve phenomena so far outside the current bounds of scientific knowledge that it was not even regarded as a legitimate subject of serious scientific concern. That is precisely the situation in which the UFO problem now lies. One of the principal results of my own recent intensive study of the UFO enigma is this: I have become convinced that the scientific community, not only in this country but throughout the world, has been casually ignoring as nonsense a matter of extraordinary scientific importance.”¹

McDonald arrived at that opinion after several authorized visits to the U.S. Air Force’s UFO Project Blue Book to review its files. Indignant at what he discovered, he wrote, “There are hundreds of good cases in the Air Force files that should have led to top-level scientific scrutiny of [UFOs] years ago, yet these cases have been swept under the rug in a most disturbing way by Project Blue Book investigators and their consultants.”²

McDonald’s full statement before Congress may be found in the U.S. Congressional Record, as well as on the Internet. While acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings undoubtedly had prosaic explanations, and that a great many questions about the phenomenon remained unanswered, McDonald succinctly summarized his conclusions regarding the most credible of the unexplained cases: “My own present opinion, based on two years of careful study, is that UFOs are probably extraterrestrial devices engaged in something that might very tentatively be termed ‘surveillance.’”³

Frequently, UFO skeptics—scientists and laypersons alike—invoke Occam’s Razor to support their position that there are far more likely, prosaic explanations for the UFO phenomenon than the extraterrestrial spaceship theory. Unlike McDonald, these persons have never studied UFOs and are, therefore, offering uninformed opinions—whether they choose to recognize this fact or not.

In essence, the principle of Occam’s Razor states that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation for an unexplained phenomenon is probably the correct one. In other words, conventional explanations—natural or man-made phenomena—undoubtedly account for all UFO sightings.

But is the basic premise of simplicity-as-truth always valid, or is it flawed? Consider, for example, gravity. The explanation for it offered by Isaac Newton—whereby physical objects possess an attractive property, proportional to their mass, that draws them toward one another—appears simple, straightforward, and fits the observable facts. Indeed, the English scientist’s revolutionary theory, experimentally validated, provided an explanation of gravity which endured unchallenged for over two hundred years. Then along came Albert Einstein.

In the early 20th Century, Einstein created his own, one-man scientific revolution by introducing the twin theories of Special and General Relativity. Among other things, General Relativity postulates that space and time are an inextricably interconnected entity which is distorted, or curved, by the presence of physical objects. In fact, said Einstein, gravity is actually a function of curved space-time. Hence, Newton’s apple did not fall to the ground because of the attractive property of the Earth. Rather, the Earth created a curved depression in space-time and the apple merely took the path of least resistance by sliding down into it. Oh, by the way, Einstein also found that gravity bends light.

One un-simple aspect of Special Relativity is the dilation of time, whereby it moves faster or slower, depending on whether it is being measured on a stationary or moving timepiece. Moreover, says Einstein, moving objects actually shorten in length in the direction they are traveling. And, last but not least, matter and energy are variations of the same thing and, sometimes, a handful of matter can release enough energy to destroy a city.

All of this is simple stuff, right? Old Occam would get it, wouldn’t he? Well, maybe not.

After an extensive evaluation of experimental data, science now considers Einstein’s explanation of gravity to be the correct one. But is it the simplest one, as Occam’s Razor dictates it should be? Is it less complicated, more reasonable and straightforward than Newton’s?

No, it is not. In fact, the bizarre, mind-bending, often paradoxical principles advanced by the two relativistic theories still elude the intellectual grasp of most of humanity one hundred years after they were published. Nevertheless, physicists have long considered Einstein’s ideas to be perceptive and accurate assessments of cosmological order and function. That said, those ideas certainly can not—by any stretch of the imagination—be described as simple, common sense answers to important questions.

If the concepts advanced by Einstein’s theories do not effectively challenge the simplicity-as-truth premise of Occam’s Razor, or sufficiently affront common sense, then consider what the other pillar of 20th Century science, the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, proposes.

One tenet, called the Uncertainty Principle, asserts that the more we know about a particle’s location in space, the less we can know about its velocity. Conversely, the more we know about any given particle’s velocity—by measuring it—the less we can know about its location. Another Quantum principle states that certain attributes of particles, including position, velocity, direction of movement, and spin, can not even be defined until they are observed. Before that moment, any given particle exists in what is termed a “superposition of states.” In other words, its very nature can not be said to exist until it has first been examined. Finally, Quantum Theory maintains that light—composed of waves of photons—exists as a “wave-particle duality”, in which it is neither one nor the other but nevertheless exhibits certain properties of both.

Physicists Gary and Kenny Felder write:

Quantum mechanics says that…the photon really, genuinely, and importantly, does not have a specific location until we measure one. [This] doesn’t seem to make sense. But another school of thought says, why should it make sense? After all, humans evolved in a world of ‘normal’ objects, and we developed a facility called ‘intuition’ that helped us survive in that world, by helping us predict the effects of our actions. That physical intuition was, and is, a great asset. But perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that it becomes a liability when we try to apply it to areas that we didn’t evolve for. Quantum mechanical laws generally only have measurable effects when applied to things that are too small to see, so we never evolved an understanding of them, so they seem bizarre. In fact, at roughly the same time that quantum mechanics first began to suggest that very small things defy our intuition, Einstein was proposing his special theory of relativity which shows that very fast things defy our intuition; and then his general theory of relativity, which concerns the odd behavior of very big things.⁴

In other words, taking into account both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, much of what early 21st Century scientists consider to be factual, that is, “real”, is not simple or straightforward at all. In fact, it’s downright counter-intuitive. Despite this state of affairs, the vast majority of UFO skeptics have yet to consider the possibility that alien visitation might also occur in a counter-intuitive manner, for example, by the utilization of higher-dimensional space—hyperspace—to effectively by-pass Einstein’s light-speed limitation. If ever there was a counter-intuitive theory, hyperspace is it. Nevertheless this concept is rapidly gaining support among theorists whose work involves deciphering cosmic architecture and operation.

So, instead of acknowledging the general lack of simplicity and, in fact, the predominance of counter-intuitive high-strangeness inherent in our current paradigm, UFO skeptics and debunkers ironically resort to quoting Occam’s Law as if it were an unassailable pillar of wisdom, applicable to all questions involving UFOs.

As noted above, with rare exceptions, these persons have undertaken no research on the UFO phenomenon and, therefore, their reaction to the UFO topic is almost always a smoke screen—recognized or not—to hide the fact that they have not done their homework, and have no idea what they are talking about. Ostensibly, this type of evasive and disingenuous behavior would be abhorrent someone who strives to be scientific—meaning basing one’s opinions on the evidence—nevertheless, it is continuously and pervasively exhibited by UFO skeptics, laypersons and professional scientists alike.

Granted, simplistic sloganeering—Long Live Occam!—does require far less effort than actually doing research, but does it bring one any closer to the facts? One is tempted to conclude that by not investigating the UFO phenomenon—prior to making unequivocal pronouncements about it—many skeptics are attempting to avoid the potential threat to their own worldview, which might arise should they actually research the subject and unexpectedly discover that things are not as previously assumed.

Yup, whether one is intellectually timid, or just plain pompous, it’s simply much easier and safer to presuppose that some things, like aliens visiting Earth, can not possibly be true. Clearly, practicing science by slogan has the added benefit of not having to step outside one’s comfort zone.

Observations Trump Assumptions

Furthermore, there exists another fundamental flaw with Occam’s Razor: The integrity of the assumptions underlying the premise of what is “simple” or “likely”. As regards UFO sightings, a skeptic will assert that an atmospheric mirage or exotic military aircraft is the simpler, more likely explanation for what appeared to the observer to be an alien spaceship. But these “explanations” almost always have less to do with the specific aspects of the sighting itself—the observed phenomenon—than they do with what the skeptic presumes to be the remote prospect of interplanetary travel. Since the probability of such a thing is near zero, the reasoning goes, so is the likelihood that an alien spaceship was actually sighted by a human observer.

In other words, this approach to “analyzing” UFO sightings has far less to do with observation than it does with preconceived notions, dressed-up as rational skepticism. Consequently, the simplest-explanation strategy as applied to UFO sightings is almost always fallacious because, although the debunkers would have you believe otherwise, an unacknowledged, subjective point-of-view usually taints the basic premise of their argument.

The important point here is that this presumption, flawed or not, is the basis for the skeptic’s assessment of the event, rather than the facts of the case themselves.

Moreover, as researcher Joe Nyman astutely notes, “Scientists, when confronted with the unexplainable, will often appeal to Occam’s Razor, or the Principle of Parsimony, to reduce the level of exotic explanation, but often overlook the next step, that the simpler explanation is really a hypothesis that must be tested. If the simpler hypothesis does not fit the facts, it too must be discarded.”⁵


Although this necessary testing is almost never undertaken, most UFO skeptics are nevertheless inclined to believe that their merely having offered an alternate explanation for a given sighting is sufficient. Although that “simpler” proposal is completely unproved, their confident demeanor suggests that they truly believe that they have all but solved the case.

Dr. Robert Kirshner of Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has also questioned the presumed wisdom underlying the simple-is-correct premise when investigating or, at least, making pronouncements about reality. Commenting upon the approach of those astronomers and cosmologists who are tempted to summarize the nature of universe in one straightforward, elegant theory, Kirshner cautions, “...the aesthetic approach, the simplest thing that you can think of, is not always a guide to the truth. Sometimes, you just have to go look—and you discover that the universe is actually much richer and more complicated than your imagination. In fact, it’s always more complicated than you imagined.”⁶


Clearly, Occam’s Razor—as a definitive, irrefutable guide for gauging the nature of unexplained phenomena, including UFOs—leaves a lot to be desired.

I sent my book’s “Occam’s Rusty Razor” excerpt to Dr. Henry H. Bauer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Science Studies and Dean Emeritus of Arts and Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, for his critique. Bauer had previously submitted an abstract to the 24th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) titled “The Two-Edged Sword of Skepticism: Occam’s Razor and Occam’s Lobotomy”. He offered these comments:

I find nothing major to quarrel with. I agree thoroughly with these strong points: That the data should be determinative; that the Razor should be a hypothesis, maybe a first guess, but no more than that; that judging what is “simple” depends on prior knowledge, on “common sense”, which changes over time; that our common sense is formed by experience of events at the human scale. One might emphasize that with the much-maligned saying that ‘There’s the known unknown and also the unknown unknown, [which is] totally unforeseeable.’⁷

My own, 39-year UFO research career is summarized in my 600-page book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, which is available at my website, www.ufohastings.com. (Unless you want to pay scalper-rates for it on Amazon.)

On September 27, 2010, I co-hosted the UFOs and Nukes press conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. which CNN streamed live:

As I readily acknowledged in my book, my research material does not qualify as scientific data. The testimony offered by my ex-military sources is simply anecdotal evidence, often reluctantly revealed, by dozens of highly-reliable individuals whose professional responsibilities had inadvertently and unexpectedly placed them in a position to experience the UFO phenomenon within an environment inaccessible to most persons. Those who have not worked with nuclear weapons—which is to say the vast majority of us—have obviously had no opportunity to witness UFO activity in such a highly-restricted setting.

Therefore, it seems to me, whether one is a scientist or a layperson, we should all at least listen to what these persons have to say. To automatically dismiss their now-numerous, detailed accounts of UFO encounters at nuclear weapons sites as mere fantasies, or fabrications, is to suggest that those who held the fate of the entire planet in their hands during the Cold War were dangerously demented or otherwise untrustworthy. Surely, this was not the case.

References:

1. McDonald, Dr. James E. “Prepared Statement before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics”, July 29, 1968
2. [Tucson] Daily Citizen, March 1, 1967
3. McDonald, Dr. James E. “Prepared Statement before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics”, July 29, 1968
4. Felder, Gary and Kenny. “Quantum Mechanics: The Young Double-Slit Experiment”, self-published, 1998
5. Nyman, Joseph, MUFON UFO Journal, issue information temporarily unavailable
6. Dr. Robert Kirshner to Robert Hastings, confirmation of quotation in personal communication, June 2, 2008
7. Dr. Henry Bauer to Robert Hastings, R., personal communication, March 10, 2012

. . . More


See Also:

Science and UFOs: Part 1 — The Condon Committee Con Job

Remembering Dr. James E. McDonald

Scientists and UFOs

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Remembering Scotty Littleton: An Eye Witness Account of The Battle of Los Angeles - Part II (70th Anniversary)

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By C. Scott Littleton Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Occidental College Los Angeles, CA © 2006-2012

In honor and memoriam for our dear friend and colleague, Scotty Littleton–we reproduce his eyewitness account of one of the most significant UFO events in history on this 70th anniversary–FW.

- Part II -

          At first, it was widely suspected that a high-altitude, carrier-based Japanese observation plane had strayed over the L.A. area. Or perhaps one of our own military planes was the culprit—although no 1942-vintage airplane was capable of standing still in the air. The one thing we did learn after the war was that neither the Japanese nor our own military have an “official” record of any of their aircraft flying over the L.A. basin that fabled evening. Even the presence of our pursuit planes, which was absolutely certain, has been denied. Of course, all concerned could be lying—though the probability of such a lie persisting for over sixty years is remote. That is, assuming what we saw was a terrestrial craft.


In recent decades several Ufologists have suggested that it might have been one of the largest mass UFO sightings in history, as it involved well over a million people. Only the sightings over Mexico City in the mid 1990s exceed it in terms of the total number of percipients.

To be sure, no one suggested this theory at the time, as it wasn’t until five years later, in 1947, after civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold’s landmark sighting of nine “flying saucers” over Mt. Rainer in June of that year, that the notion that UFOs from other planets might be invading our skies became widespread—although if the theory that a crash retrieval occurred at Cape Giradeau, MO, in 1941 is correct, it’s quite possible that the government had at least a modicum of knowledge about the phenomenon by 1942.

Several years ago, I joined forces with Ufologist Frank Warren, who’s been fascinated by this event for many years—although he’s of course much too young to have observed it personally. With the help of well-known Navy photo-analyst and UFO investigator, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Frank and I have pretty well determined the craft’s path before it appeared in the sky over Hermosa Beach. It was initially observed by several residents of the Pacific Palisades rising over the Santa Monica Mountains around 2:45 a.m. From there, it seems to have moved southeast across Santa Monica and West L.A. in the direction of the Baldwin Hills, which separate Culver City from Inglewood and the flatlands to the south.


A Los Angeles Times reporter living in the San Gabriel Valley, a dozen miles or so to the east, had been alerted to what was happening by colleagues at the paper. He jumped in his car and began driving west as rapidly as he could toward the sound of the guns, arriving at the northern edge of the Baldwin Hills, in the vicinity of Jefferson and La Cienega, in time to photograph the object as it rose over the ridge line. I should add that there’s been some debate over exactly where the Times reporter took his famous picture. Some have held that he caught the object flying over Palos Verdes. But all indications point to a spot on the ridgeline just east of where La Cienega Blvd. cuts through it.


I’ve investigated this aspect of the matter and am pretty sure that I’ve found the spot, despite the fact that the terrain has changed significantly in the last sixty-odd years as the area has become more and more developed.

This image, which was published in the Times on February 26, is the only picture we have of the craft, at least to date. As you can see, it’s caught in the beams of several searchlights and is surround by white dots created by exploding shells.

Several residents who lived just north of the hills in question saw the object clearly. From their reports, it was round with a slight hump in the middle of the top, that is, its dorsal side. A similar configuration can be seen in on one of the Mexico City UFOs. Moreover, a woman named Katie, who observed it from the window of her home in the Baldwin Hills, recalled that in addition to having a hump it was huge, elliptical, and glowing bright orange, although my mother and I failed to spot either the hump or, as I indicated a moment ago, the possibly reflective orange glow. Indeed, I strongly suspect that what we saw was the object’s ventral, or “belly” side, which at that altitude was simply glowing white. In any case, as the Times image clearly indicates, the anti-aircraft barrage had begun, and the searchlights were following it steadily.

From the width of the light beams at the point they reached the object], plus the knowledge that at least one of them came from a searchlight battery in Manhattan Beach, some ten miles away (the others appear to have come from Inglewood or El Segundo), Frank Warren has concluded that it must have been considerably larger, that is, around 800 feet in length, and I agree with this estimate.

After crossing the Baldwin Hills, the object appears to have turned westward toward El Segundo—directly over the aircraft plants located there, including Douglas, North American, and Lockheed, which makes one wonder if the craft was specifically interested in them.

When it reached the coast, it rose to a higher altitude and slowly followed the edge of the ocean due south to the point where we first saw it. Then, as I indicated earlier, it veered southeastward over Redondo Beach, blithely ignoring everything we were throwing at it, and soon disappeared from sight behind the town’s low hills.

However, we can now tentatively pick it up over Redondo. Another possible eyewitness, who claims to have lived in Redondo Beach and to have been five years old at the time, has recently come to my attention. He—I’ve yet to discover his name—says that he recalls watching the craft descend as it passed slowly over his family home on Irena Street, which is about a mile back from the ocean. The man also claims that his father at first thought it was coming in for a landing, perhaps at the nearby Lomita airstrip, and that the latter and several neighbors jumped into a pickup truck and tried to follow the object. But apparently it soon regained altitude and passed over the Palos Verdes Hills to the south. He also recalls noting that the “stern” of the craft was rectangular, with rounded edges, ands very thick.

While this account, gleaned from the Internet, is extremely shaky, and there are reasons to question some other assertions made by the same “eyewitness,” the fact that my mother and I lost sight of the object as it descended in the direction of Redondo Beach does lend some credence to this report.

As I said, it’s now pretty certain, from eyewitness accounts collected years after the fact, that something did in fact crash-land on South Vermont Avenue that morning, and that it was almost certainly an American pursuit plane, forced down either by the object itself or by “friendly fire.”

click on image to enlarge

According to one account, it was immediately hauled away on a flat-bed truck under a tarp, as the military apparently didn’t want the public to know that it had shot down one of its own plans. However, the witness in question caught a glimpse of the markings on the fuselage before it was covered up. They clearly indicate that it was one of ours. (What happened to the pilot is unknown.). I should add here that add Frank Warren tells me that he’s come across an eyewitness account of another possible plane crash that morning, this time in Hollywood somewhere. Again, the downed aircraft seems to have been hauled off almost immediately on a flat-bed truck. The witness claims to have seen “Japanese letters” on the fuselage, although this is extremely doubtful. The Japanese used Arabic numbers on all of their WWII planes, and he may simply have assumed that it was a Japanese plane, and then perceived the rest of what he saw in terms of that assumption. If a second plane did crash in Hollywood somewhere, it was also almost certainly one of ours.

It’s recently been suggested, on the basis of what in my opinion is some pretty shaky evidence that the craft itself ultimately crashed in the ocean off San Diego and was recovered by Navy divers.


This might possibly explain its apparent descent over Redondo Beach. Perhaps the object had in fact been wounded by the intense anti-aircraft fire and, after nearly crashing into Redondo Beach, eventually lost control, and went into the sea. Yet another recent assertion, equally shaky, is that it landed more or less intact on San Clemente Island, in those days a Navy bombing range, and was commandeered by either the Navy or the Marine Corps, presumably along with its occupants, assuming they survived the landing. If there’s any validity to these theories, the military may already have had a fair amount of evidence in hand by the times of the Roswell crash in 1947, in addition to any it might have garnered prior to 1942.

As far as civilian casualties were concerned, there was only a handful. According to the Times, five people died from heart attacks and automobile accidents, and there were some injuries from falling shrapnel. There was also some minor property damage, again mostly from shrapnel. Yes, there were a great many jangled nerves that morning, but the overall impact of the event was slight compared to other disasters—earthquakes, fires, floods, etc.—the region has experienced over the years.

Although there’s never been a definitive, “official” explanation of this episode, a great many unofficial ones have been advanced over the years, including an errant barrage balloon that had lost its tether over one of the El Segundo aircraft plants, a lost Army weather balloon (shades of Roswell!), or an off-course private pilot, perhaps in a vintage Piper Cub—although civilian aircraft had been firmly banned from the skies over Southern since the outbreak of the war. It’s even been suggested that the whole thing was caused by a flock of high-flying sea birds. But none of these explanations comes anywhere close to being satisfactory. Indeed, from most reports, as well as the Times photograph, the object appears to have been a huge, glowing, saucer-shaped object with a distinct protuberance on its dorsal side. To be sure, unlike the witnesses who observed it in at a much lower level in Culver City and the Baldwin Hills, my mother and I saw only a bright, shimmering lozenge caught in the glare of the searchlights.

Nevertheless, despite the Redondo Beach man’s atypical—and perhaps skewed—recollection (after all, he claims to have been five year-old at the time), what we saw, together with the majority of the descriptions Frank and I have collected, as well as the object caught in the Times reporter’s photograph, all jibe closely with literally tens of thousands of eyewitness accounts of UFOs in this country and elsewhere that have come to light in the course of the last six decades. (For a magisterial account of that history, I heartily recommend a book that I’m sure many readers are already familiar with: Richard M. Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973, the second edition of which was published by Hampton Roads in 2002.)

The aspect of this episode that clinches the extraterrestrial theory here, at least in my opinion, is the fact that the object was able to resist the impact of over 1,400 rounds of high explosive, antiaircraft shells. No contemporary aircraft, let alone any World War II planes, could have withstood that barrage. I suspect that the object was surrounded by an electromagnetic force field of some sort, which deflected the shells and caused them to explode harmlessly. This EMF field could perhaps have caused our planes to lose control and crash when they flew too close to it.

To be sure, in the postwar era, after we’d obtained the technology to build sophisticated air-to-air rockets from captured German scientists, it was another story. At that point, it appears that we did have the capability to shoot down UFOs, at least occasionally, which in part explain the spate of UFO crashes—including, perhaps, the ones at Roswell and Aztec—in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But not in 1942.

That the whole business has been covered up by the government for the past sixty-four years seems almost certain. Indeed, most Ufologists are convinced that a similar cover-up has been in place regarding the Roswell crash since 1947, to say nothing of what’s been going on at Area 51. Perhaps they—that is, the government—had a model based on their response to the February, 1942, incident that it brought to bear in hushing up later episodes. Or perhaps they’ve simply been in denial for the past six decades. Extremely doubtful, but remotely possible.

Maybe someday the truth about the “Battle of Los Angeles” will finally come out, along with the truth about so many other anomalous phenomena that so many people all over the world have seen—and continue to see—in the sky, both before and after 1942. Then again, it just may prove to have been a remarkably flack-resistant barrage balloon that our gunners simply couldn’t bring down. But I certainly wouldn’t bet a bundle on that possibility!

In sum, in light of the evidence, that is,

• The object’s purposeful, intelligently controlled flight pattern;

• Its invulnerability to an intense anti-aircraft barrage;

• Its size (perhaps 800 feet in diameter);

• Its bright white (and, in some accounts, orange) glow, which was evident even in the searchlight beams;

• Its configuration (oval, with a protuberance on the dorsal side);

• Its probable EMF impact on our pursuit planes that flew too close;

• And the absence of any post-war Japanese record of one of their planes being over Los Angeles that night,

I submit that the most efficient explanation for the object that triggered the “Battle of Los Angeles” in the early morning hours of February 25, 1942, is that it was a genuine, honest-to-God, unidentified flying object that came from beyond this planet. In other words, I’m convinced that what I witnessed that night when I was eight years-old from in front of 2500 Strand in Hermosa Beach was a classic UFO episode, one that must be ranked among the most important episodes in the history of this remarkable phenomenon, if only because it was witnessed by more than a million anxious Southern Californians, all of whom prayed—successfully, as it turned out—that it was not the harbinger of a Japanese attack.


Unfortunately, the probability that the object in question reflected something far more profound than that has only begun to surface after the great majority of those who saw it have passed on to their rewards. However, Frank Warren and I are hot on the trail of several more key eye-witnesses and/or their progeny, as well as some additional photographs. So please stay tuned!

(See Part I)


See Also:

EXCLUSIVE Lights Over Los Angeles

EXCLUSIVE Lights Over Los Angeles (II)

Rest in Peace Dear Friend | C. Scott (Scotty) Littleton Passes

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Uruguay Air Force Openly Researches UFOs for More Than Three Decades – Interview with Colonel Ariel Sanchez (Part II)

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By A. J. Gevaerd Editor Brazilian UFO Magazine 2-9-12

The UFO played with pilots

AJ: For how long did they try to intercept the UFO in that second attempt?

CAS: Just for a few minutes, because it vanished when the pilots tried to approach. Strangely enough, the object always returned to the same spot after our aircraft moved away — as if it were playing with our crewmen. There was a moment when the UFO was surrounding the dam and our pilots tried to reach it with a fast maneuver - one with a 30 or 40-second response.

AJ: Then what happened?

CAS: When the object noticed the maneuver it moved away to the West at a high speed.

AJ: What happened to the pilots after such an experience?

CAS: Due to the stress they cancelled their training and returned to the Durazno Air Base (FAU’s most important site, located in the middle of the country). By getting there they reported the event to the officials. At the same time they learned that Montevideo had been hit by a blackout. It lasted for a few minutes and affected the whole city. It was due to the overheating of a power line which came from the exact spot where the UFO was seen over the dam. I should add that the Durazno base is where pilot trainings are mostly held. There are many different aircraft stationed there.

AJ: Did Cridovni consider one fact against the other? That is, did you associate the UFO over the dam with the blackout in Montevideo?

CAS: Yes. We believed the object must have affected the power line in some way causing the overheating. This is a supposition based on technical data provided by the power company itself (Usinas y Trasmisiones Eléctricas - UTE). Their technicians detected an overheating in some transformers in the line that supplies the capital city. We suppose this might be a result of that incident. After all, there must be a reason why it was over the dam. It must have been doing something there. What it was we don’t know. Security guards and employees also witnessed the object flight around the dam that night. The object was seen from the ground and from the air. This leaves no doubt about its materiality.

AJ: Did you talk with the Pucara pilots? How was their emotional?

CAS: They were quite surprised with what they had seen. I personally interviewed the four of them, one by one, pursuant to our protocol for investigation. All narratives were coincident regarding the shape and maneuvers of the object. Our crewmen were affected by what they experienced.

AJ: Do they still work in the Air Force?

CAS: Only one of them remains in the Air Force.

A protocol for interception

AJ:Would you like to have been in their feet? What would have been your reaction if you were in one of those Pucara?

CAS: I would love to have been there (laughing), but I think my reaction would also be one of total surprise. Actually, I don’t know what I would do at the time. One never knows. The aircraft involved were twoturboprop-engined fighters. There could have been some kind of hostility between the parties. However, in such situation the pilot must ask for permission before taking any action such as to fire a missile. There is a protocol for that in our country. According to Uruguayan law, we can’t fire at an aircraft unless under presidential orders or in a real combat situation. A pilot might think about doing something, but will be subjected to superior orders and to the protocol for interception of unknown vehicles.

AJ: Besides this case involving the military is there any other involving civilians but equally intriguing? Could you describe it?

CAS: Yes. There is a case involving an Air Force aircraft which was being used to transport civilians around the continent. It was also operated by civilians. They were flying between Asuncion, in Paraguay, and Montevideo. It happened in 1979 and was investigated. The aircraft was already in Uruguayan air space when a luminous ball started to follow it. The object was beside the aircraft during the remaining trajectory until the capital city. When the crew saw the object, they asked the control tower whether another aircraft might be without communication causing that phenomenon to happen. They thought it might be an aircraft the tower hadn’t spotted. The answer was that there were no other aircraft of such characteristics around there.

AJ: What happened next? What was the pilot’s response?

CAS: All crew and passengers saw the object and were not happy to have an UFO right next to them. They were especially concerned about their flight safety. The pilot wanted to see if the object would respond to any signal so he turned on the landing lights, which are quite powerful. At that moment, the UFO which was nearly 700m away came closer to the left wing. The crew was even more scared and a strange odor of burned plastic was felt. Something like burning bakelite — a material which makes the aircraft control panel. Then the pilot turned off the lights and the object reacted moving away. We could say that such objects react to the light somehow.

AJ: How long did that last? Was there any harm to the aircraft equipment?

CAS: No. It was very brief, maybe one or two minutes. It was for a short time, because when the UFO came closer to the aircraft everybody felt the smell of burned plastic so the pilot turned off the landing lights which seemed to have attracted the object closer. There was no smoke in the cabin, only the smell of burned plastic. That was enough to generate fear of fire in the aircraft’s controls. The smell went out though the ventilation system and the object moved away.

AJ: Did you interview the crew and pilots?

CAS: No. That time I was not in the Committee. I came 10 years after that, in 1989. However, I checked all details about how the passenger saw the object. For example, one of them even had a camera. The pilot was informed and asked the passenger to take pictures. Meanwhile, all passengers were looking at the object and the captain was trying to avoid panic. When they were near Montevideo asking for permission to land the object was not so close anymore. The aircraft descended slowly through the clouds and the object was seen again during the landing procedures, but it was very distant. When everyone left the plane, witnesses were interviewed and the photo negatives were collected by the authorities.

AJ: What happened to those pictures? Were they analyzed?

CAS: They were analyzed and we have an interesting report. The findings are a little subjective. Specialists say the image in the picture was the result of a powerful light source. The pilots were also surprised to see an object at such a high altitude. That made them reject the possibility of common luminous phenomena such as plasma, emissions from power lines or even meteorological plasma. It is very difficult to reach that altitude and respond to the aircraft lights as the object did. The UFO was not simply hovering. It was following the aircraft at a certain speed. This is one of the unconventional cases we found disclosed at the Committee
files.

AJ: How about cases involving ordinary people who called you to report a sighting? Which was most surprising?

CAS: There are many cases we could talk about. Some are old others are more recent, but all of them are very interesting. For example, once a family was in a resort in the state of Tacuarembó. They were all watching TV before going to bed when they noticed some interference in their TV. Initially they thought it could be the wind turning the antenna outside. So one of them went out and looked above. He saw the antenna was ok, but there was a luminous object over the house.

All hiding inside home

AJ: What happened next? Was it the UFO causing the interference in their TV?

CAS: Apparently, yes. When all went outside they witnessed the object moving towards a field where it displayed different maneuvers. It was a red object which moved very fast at a low altitude. Then the family got scared and runned back inside home, but the father and sons remained at the window watching the show. The UFO drew near the house, coming and going, until it went over the building. There was a loud noise and the antenna fell to the ground. Obviously, the object crashed against the antenna causing it to fall.

AJ: Maybe those were unskilled pilots...

CAS: Yes. Unskilled (laughing). Besides the noise from the antenna there was only a light and a coming and going buzz outside the house. The father then took a gun in order to defend his family, but the lights in the house didn’t take long to shut down. The house was powered by a nearby mill. They all remained entrenched inside the house watching the dancing light through the window. They saw it again over the field a bit far away. It continued to move from one side to another until it disappears. No one could sleep that night.

AJ: Was there any relevant physical evidence or marks the object might have left over the field?

CAS: The next day when the family went out with the farm workers to check the place they found burned spots on the ground and other strange things. The most surprising fact was a burned stone. There was a large circular mark on the grass which also reached a stone. Well, we need a significant level of heat in order to burn a stone. That should be a source capable of generating five or six thousand degrees. However, this would burn the grass completely, which was only slightly burned. How do we explain that?

AJ: Was there any explanation from experts?

CAS: Some civilian ufology groups also looked into this case and provided us with some information. It was a very interesting research and the case remains opened because we could never scientifically determine what caused those effects. The burning marks remained there for many years as observed by many members of our group. It happened almost 30 years ago, but it was very significant in a moment when the Committee had just started its works.

AJ: This is one of those classic cases in world’s Ufology. They can happen in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, France, USA, and so on. They are undeniable. What is Cridovni’s position towards these cases? What had the witness seen? Was it a ship from outer space?

CAS: This is what frustrates us, because we don’t know what they are. At the same time, we could not guarantee they have a terrestrial origin or that they are physical phenomena. In fact, for the cases I’ve just mentioned we could not find a conventional or scientific explanation. We could argue that they were some kind of gas in a round accumulation and that they could go up into the sky and even follow an aircraft. However, these are not reasonable explanations or something accepted by Physics.

AJ: So we could say these are material vehicles built with technology unavailable on Earth? In other words, could we say they are alien ships?

CAS: Well, what happened to that family in Tacuarembó happened again in different places? This is a typical sighting and there are many other cases involving solid artifacts such as classical flying saucers. In our files we have all kinds of cases you see in the “X-Files” series. It is true! We have no answer to them. We don’t know if we are dealing with known physical phenomena or something else. There are curious theories to explain them such as the one presented by Project Hessdalen, from Norway, saying those are micro-black-holes formed at low altitudes in the atmosphere (See DVD Portal, code DVD-032, UFO video collection).

AJ: What if they are real extraterrestrial vehicles?

CAS: The Air Force does not discard any possibility. At the same time we don’t have any evidence to support anything.

AJ: Isn’t there a fear to label cases with an ultimate explanation?

CAS: Of course. We have no elements to help in determining the nature of these vehicles. We must say that these are very strange cases and we keep the door open to different hypothesis. There are some very common standards in everything we research. This is why we created the Regional Center for the Investigation of Aerospace and Terrestrial Phenomena (Crifat). This is a civilian institution also formed by people outside the Air Force. We found a pattern in these cases which are the same in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, etc. Yet we don’t know what they mean. Therefore, it’s good to keep in touch with investigation groups from different countries so that we can exchange information and maybe reach some conclusions we could not reach alone.

End Part II

See Part I

. . . More


See Also:

Uruguay: 50 Years of X-Files

Uruguay: Air Force Declassifies UFO Files, ET Hypothesis Not Dismissed

Uruguay Joins the Party

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Deconstructing The Debunkers: A Response

PART II

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By Budd Hopkins
www.intrudersfoundation.org
2-15-11



See Part I

VII

     The case in which she seems to be most heavily invested involved a man named Jim Mortellaro, and it was here that I made a major error: I went public with the case before I had thoroughly checked out all of its many dangling appurtenances. In my quasi-therapeutic role I automatically seek to protect the witness in order to gently learn the details of his/her claimed experience, but at the same time it was becoming clear to me that psychologically, Mortellaro was decidedly fragile. Yet since his case seemed to provide a wealth of physical evidence, I continued with it longer than I should have. After working for decades with hundreds of people reporting UFO experiences and trying my best to help them, I guess I’m entitled to at least one unfortunate error of judgment.

One of the problems with the Mortellaro case is the fact that the man was personally rather odd which cast him into an unusual category, a rarity among abductees I’ve worked with. Also, Ms. Rainey clearly did not like him from the first moment, and since the poor, arrogant man seemed to have few friends or supporters and a seriously ill wife at home - or so he claimed - I granted him more leeway than I should have. (I seem to instinctively gravitate to the underdog, a personal quirk I discuss at length in my memoir, Art, Life and UFOs.) Though my ex was never what one would call an independent investigator of UFO abduction cases, she did function as a kind of kibitzer in the Mortellaro case, wandering into meetings of our IF advisory committee, listening for a bit, expressing her anti-Mortellaro position, and then leaving. But essentially, this case is the centerpiece of her article, occupying as it does about eight columns of print.

Here, again, the reader must be on the alert for her characteristic hyperbole and exaggerations of fact. About the increasing dissension among us over Mortellaro’s trustworthiness, she asserts that “three…Committee members eventually resigned including two psychotherapists and an engineer.” Pretty damning stuff, except that it’s not true. One of the only two therapists in the group, Jed Turnbull, is still with us and the second had to drop out months after the Mortellaro affair because he had married, moved far out on Long Island, become a new father, and consequently found it difficult to come to Manhattan to our meetings and seminars. We had no ‘engineer’ on the committee, though my friend Joe Orsini, a medical writer and researcher, did resign, partly because of the Mortellaro question. The irony of all of this is that Mortellaro’s increasingly bizarre claims - mostly about non-UFO issues - were uncovered ’in-house,’ and it was a final phone call I made to him and a trick question that ended all doubt. So, instead of the case being undone by an intrepid outside debunker (or by Ms. Rainey), it was ultimately broken by us, the IF advisory committee, and that was that. Why she now makes so much of it is a mystery to me.

In retrospect, because of my early interviews with his parents in which they described Jim’s childhood behavior as similar to that which I’d often noticed in traumatized young abductees, and because of certain things he later said in my interviews with him, I am still not sure if he is simply a fantasist, lying and inventing because of some major psychological flaw, or if he is an abductee with unusual mental problems. You pays your money and you takes your choice, though mental problems obtrude in either decision.

Unfortunately, such psychological problems as his are not rare. All of us have probably at one time or another known people who project a heightened, even perhaps grandiose and infallible, sense of themselves, despite a real lifetime of quite middling accomplishments. Such narcissists paper over their own failings with invented or padded C. V’s (two Ph.D.s in Jim’s case), forged documents or the like, and present themselves as accomplished authorities in some often arcane field of endeavor (his was electronics). When challenged they often react with anger and a growing sense of paranoia; thus they invariably have few friends (Jim had almost none) and fraught personal and family relationships. They can also be extraordinarily vindictive. (In Mortellaro’s case, I knew that he sometimes carried a gun.)

Such mentally skewed people are to be pitied, of course, and I, to my ultimate regret, pitied Jim Mortellaro.

VIII
The Beanie Case: During a trip to Albuquerque in the early Nineties, I worked with a delightful woman, “Brenda,” who recalled a number of personal abduction experiences. Her husband, “Tom,“ a retired New Mexico State Police officer, was completely supportive of his wife’s explorations with me, and some time after I returned to New York Brenda and her husband phoned me with an intriguing story. At a local MUFON meeting they had been approached by a woman about their age (mid-to-late-sixties?) who wanted desperately to talk to someone about troubling memories of a UFO experience she’d had some thirty years before. Beanie, so nicknamed because her last name was Bean, had seen a notice in the paper about the MUFON meeting and attended, seeking help.

She told Brenda and Tom that she had been watching a TV program which included troubling images from Somalia of starving children with wizened bodies and disproportionately large craniums. These distorted bodies caused her to remember an incident she had long ago tried to put out of her mind. At the time, around 1963, she was the medical technician in a tiny hospital in the town of Santa Rosa, some distance down the highway from Albuquerque, and one of her jobs was to ride in the ambulance, answering emergency calls and administering first aid. She explained that one day she had received a call and her friend; the owner of the ambulance, a reconfigured station wagon picked her up. The only information they had, she said, was the location and the report that there had been an accident. When they arrived in the designated area, she saw two state police cars parked in one of the barren fields, so they drove up to the site. Each police car was manned by a single state trooper, and when Beanie and the ambulance driver got out, the two men showed them three little bodies laid out, all three somewhat burned and all obviously dead. She vividly recalls asking, “Where are their parents?” The older trooper, a friend of Beanie’s, explained, “I don’t know what we have here, but I better call the Air Force.“

Now for anyone reading this account of the case who finds himself/herself bored or confused, please understand that the incident is unfamiliar to most everyone in the UFO field, having never been much written about or publicly discussed. The account my ex presents in her screed is extremely brief, concentrating as it does on any little details that she felt might tend to make it seem false or outrageous, so I feel an obligation to at least get the facts down clearly and accurately.

Beanie told Brenda and Tom what she later told me, that she saw some metallic wreckage wedged in a hillock, and that the wrecked object was about the size of a Volkswagen beetle. She checked the bodies for vital signs and then she and her driver put two of the obviously dead figures on the gurney and took them to the ambulance; a folding stretcher was used for the third. At the hospital the bodies were taken as usual through the rear emergency room door and into the X-ray room where she X-rayed all of them. “I could get all of one body from the neck to the pelvis on one palette, they were that small,“ she later told me. The sole doctor in the town was summoned to examine them and sign the death certificates, but apparently few if any others went into the room. (It may be significant that the hospital was run by a religious order of nuns, a regime that ended a few years later). Beanie made some notes and hung her X-rays on their hangers to dry, but shortly thereafter a group of military officers and men arrived and brusquely removed both the bodies and the X-rays. They demanded all of Beanie’s notes, ordered no one to ever speak about the incident, made a few final threats - “Remember, the army has a long arm” - and left. “They even took my hangers for the X-rays,” she complained later.

After hearing many of these details from Brenda and Tom, I chatted with Beanie by phone and said that I wanted to come to Santa Rosa and talk with her face-to-face. I queried her on many details, far more than I’ve mentioned here. Meanwhile I spoke to Brenda’s husband Tom, the retired state trooper, and he told me that Beanie well remembered the older trooper who had been at the accident, and she was insistent that they locate him. “She was extremely anxious to find him, not knowing where he might reside or even if he was still alive,” Tom said. “It seems like ever since she had allowed herself to remember the incident, she was determined to find corroboration, and she’d known that trooper, Dutch, very well.”

This detail was, of course, extremely important, because the last person a hoaxer wants to locate is a “designated witness” who says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What incident?” Hoaxers of anything, when the subject of possible witnesses arises, will say something like, ”I don’t remember him exactly but I think he might have had…blonde hair… I don’t remember his name.” Beanie’s intense search for Dutch was a mark on the side of her honesty. Despite the strangeness of what I was hearing, that detail alone left me eager to learn more.

In my many phone calls back and forth between Tom and Brenda and me, I learned that Tom, through a state police old boy’s network, had located the town where Dutch had retired. Beanie, he said, was ecstatic, but when she and Tom inquired further they discovered that the poor man had just had a serious heart attack and was in the hospital. Beanie wanted to go to the city where he lay in the hospital and talk to him there, but Tom demurred. The man was evidently very sick and in fact died a few days later. Beanie then wanted to attend the funeral to talk to his widow, and actually persuaded Brenda and Tom to take her there, but according to Tom the widow was far from interested in talking to anyone about such a subject at such an emotional moment. Interestingly, Beanie did talk to Dutch’s brother, himself a sheriff, who said that his brother had never said anything to him about the incident, but he was not surprised; his brother was such an intense patriot that if the army had sworn him to secrecy, he would never have said anything about it, even to his own brother.

Meanwhile my friend Robert Bigelow agreed to pay my way to Santa Rosa, and that of astronomer Walter Webb, to look further into the case, and I immediately took him up on the offer. I flew to Albuquerque, met with Brenda and Tom, and began to spend time with Beanie. She was a short, plump, feisty woman who, like me, had suffered from both polio and cancer, but she seemed to be truthful and quite intelligent, speaking in a charming, homespun, country argot. Later, when Webb arrived, we chatted about the case which seemed to him rather dubious; for many researchers, UFO crash-retrievals were - and still are - a hard sell. I was also aware that he was not informed about many aspects of the Beanie case of which I had become aware. Essentially Walt was an astronomer, not someone with extensive experience in working face to face with people like Beanie and I was right to be concerned.

In a rented car Walt, Beanie and I drove out to Santa Rosa and when we arrived at the house of the widow of the ambulance driver, I asked Walt to wait in the car for a few minutes until I came out and invited him in. I was afraid that two strangers ‘from the East,’ charging in together at an elderly woman’s house, bearing a tape recorder and microphone, might seem a bit off-putting. I hoped that, along with Beanie, I could make some ingratiating small talk to put the widow at her ease, thereby beginning our questioning as gently as possible.

We were received politely by our hostess - in years past she and Beanie had been friends - and by several other family members, but it was clear that a visitor like me, inquiring about this strange subject, would have a job putting everyone at ease. After a few minutes of small talk, I decided to bring Walt into the conversation. I excused myself, saying that a colleague was waiting in the car and, making up some excuse for his absence, went out and brought him in. He came in quickly, bearing his equipment, and immediately asked the widow for a table so that he could put his instrument in the center of what he hastily improvised as a kind of circle so that he could record everyone. Since I had not yet mentioned tape recording any of the family, or asked permission, one can imagine the family’s shocked response.

If Walter Webb had set off a small cherry bomb in the room he couldn’t have caused more of a disruption. Family members scurried around, moving furniture and glancing uncertainly at one other, while I sat frozen with embarrassment. On the drive home I never said anything to Walt about his gaffe, not wanting to hurt his feelings, but I did tell Bob Bigelow about the problems his brusque and thoughtless behavior had caused. Needless to say, very little emerged from this first abortive visit to the family home, but my next visit, months later, at a calmer time and absent Mr. Webb, was extremely rewarding.

Because I was no longer a total stranger to the widow and her family I was received with warmth and a sense of friendship, so I will, at this point, jump ahead to what I learned during this last trip to Santa Rosa. I’ve made it clear that neither Beanie nor anyone else seemed to know, beyond, probably, 1963, exactly when the central incident with the bodies and the military’s arrival occurred. However, the family ambulance service was then a kind of cottage industry and the driver’s wife, now the elderly widow I was visiting, had managed all its business - paperwork, trip tickets, billing and so forth. It was on this visit to Santa Rosa that she explained to me they were never paid for the trip to pick up the bodies, and what’s more, she recalled that her trip book had a number of consecutive pages missing around the same time. And then came the shocker. She said that the next day the Air Force had gone to the ambulance and removed everything from the rear area - the sheets, various pieces of portable equipment and so on. “And we were never paid for any of it.“

This was, of course, an absolutely crucial piece of information. There is no reason that any ‘government body’ should seize sheets and other objects without explanation from the back of someone’s privately owned ambulance - unless it is a matter of so called ”national security.” The combination of the missing pages from her ticket book, the stolen sheets and ambulance equipment, and the widow’s still obvious anger about it after thirty years went a long, long way to establishing the veracity of Beanie’s account.

I should mention that Ms. Rainey was present during this visit, and she video-taped the widow’s words, but considering her recently expressed theory that the UFO phenomenon is “afloat” with hoaxes, she must now believe that this elderly woman is also a hoaxer. In her paper she dismisses the widow’s testimony in this way: “When pressed, she seemed to vaguely recall that the Air Force had indeed once stripped the ambulance clean and taken the billable trip ticket, as Beanie claimed.“ Ms. Rainey is good with adverbs: note the word “vaguely.” But she also wields verbs as well: “when pressed” I assume that what she is trying to get across is the idea that since she believes there was never an Air Force visit to the ambulance and no missing trip ticket, (facts Beanie had only learned from the widow) she is claiming that Beanie somehow forced the old lady to join her hoax by accepting her - Beanie’s - lies and then passing them on to me.

Another important statement was made that day by the widow’s son. Beanie had earlier thought that the ambulance might have been driven by this young man that fateful day, but she later decided that it had been his father. During this second visit to Santa Rosa, the son, now thirty years older, and with his family present, told me this: “I worked part-time in those days as a police dispatcher, so I was often around the police station, and I remember there was some talk about alien bodies.” Score another one for Beanie - unless, in Ms. Rainey’s rather paranoid view, the son, too, was also party to a gigantic, purposeless hoax.

The first time I visited Santa Rosa, Beanie and I made a long drive to another town some distance away. She thought that a certain young trooper just may have been the officer in the second car that day, and through Tom we learned his address. I suggested that we not call the man in advance, that we just show up to take anyone there by surprise and thereby get a thoroughly unrehearsed account. So we drove and drove, endlessly it seemed, and when we arrived, the ex-trooper‘s divorced wife was home and told us that her husband had moved out years ago and she had lost contact with him, though she recalled that he was possibly working for a security company in the far east somewhere. That was that, and I only mention this abortive trip because my ex put it this way: “Neither she [Beanie] or Budd had tracked down or spoken to any of the long list of witnesses.” [Emphasis mine] I wish we had had even a short list of witnesses from this thirty-year-old incident, but we didn’t, so apparently the helpful Ms. Rainey invented such a list for us, but then scorns us for not trying to find them.

She quotes from an early letter from Walt Webb in which he berates Beanie for reporting some details about her initial experience which vary, one from one another. In isolation it doesn’t bother me that a woman of her age gets a few things mixed up about a frightening thirty-year-old experience; hoaxers, in fact, usually try to keep everything very straight, lest they trip themselves up. Obviously, Beanie had no such fear. My ex also attacks Beanie for “embellishing” her account, an activity which often accompanies a witness’s recollection of a long-ago experience; he or she often begins to wonder just how many odd incidents in one’s past might be UFO connected. For a long time a necessary aspect of my work involves trying to convince such witnesses that not every odd thing in their past is UFO connected, and that common sense must be brought to bear to sort things out. Also, the UFO community has accepted - perhaps uncritically - the complex, ongoing nature of one’s actual UFO experiences. One ostensible abductee has had three substantial books written about her ongoing UFO experiences by a prominent researcher, and no one seems to have complained. Beanie’s similar adventures might fill a paragraph or two.

I must apologize for trying the reader’s patience by their having to read all of this, but Ms. Rainey’s rather vicious tactics require it. Because it comes down to this: to be taken in by someone like Jim Mortellaro and to solve the case ’in-house’ is unfortunate but it harms very few people, while, in effect, to claim or imply that innocent people like Beanie and the elderly widow and her son, and Linda and her little boy and the score of witnesses in the Cortile case are all hoaxers is to call all of them liars, lowlife…virtual criminals. Just think, if they are simply telling the truth and that some of them were genuinely traumatized by actual events, they are being labeled as crooks and so on by my angry ex-wife. What a travesty of justice that would be. I can excuse readers who were temporarily taken in by her honest-seeming literary style, but I cannot excuse her, herself. She knows better, and if she has even the slightest doubt about her accusations, then she owes the individuals an apology and a retraction.

IX
A few added remarks: I am not addressing the so-called Dora case because I remember very little about it except my view that her bizarre “Colin Powell and Ralph Nader” claims made me reject the case at the time. No colleague I’ve talked to recalls my ever mentioning the case to them, either. The problem may be that I often receive calls from people whose psychological problems are obvious, and I may speak to them if only to offer some kind of friendship and support to obviously needy people. I might have done so in her case.

Readers will note that David Jacobs and I, being two different people with different case portfolios, are not both dealt with in my paper. We are not identical twins, as Ms. Rainey would like to imply. David, I believe, is writing his own response to “Emma’s” endless attacks, while I have produced this overlong reply.

I had not intended to be so detailed and long-winded, but once I got started I realized how many of Ms. Rainey’s false and misleading statements had to be answered. And the Beanie case, not being widely known, needed an extended discussion.

Now some brief comments about my investigative methods: For some thirty years I’ve been aware of the problems inherent in researching such a bizarre subject, one that’s compounded by the trauma and fear experienced by many of our subjects. Since the established psychological community does not take the subject of UFO abductions seriously, those concerned that they may have had such experiences have few choices about where to go for help. I’ve always been concerned that some of those who contact me have read books about UFOs and abductions, and so are aware of my work in the field and the things I’ve learned over the decades. Obviously I’m not able to control how this factor might affect any future interviews, hypnosis sessions, or any expectations the subjects may have as a result; I can only stay as neutral as possible and inform the person that I will not be able to tell him whether his experience is “real“ or not. My mantra is to say, “I wasn’t there when those things happened to you and I can’t be in your head; therefore only you can decide if it was all real or not.”

To mitigate some of these problems, I’ve always asked those contacting me with suspected abductions what they’ve already read, so I have a kind of baseline about their level of information. I also tell them to immediately cease reading anything about the subject (although in many instances they have not read anything). I inquire about additional witnesses or anyone they may have spoken to about their experiences shortly afterwards, and I ask them not to have any further discussions about the incidents. Obviously these other witnesses might be able to provide useful information in future independent interviews. In short, I’m very clear about the need to minimize outside influences on case information as much as possible, and Rainey‘s concerns about this manageable problem within the investigative process - exaggerated and used by her to dismiss decades of careful work by many researchers - are nothing new to me or to other serious investigators. At this point, it is the large volume of independent, similar accounts from around the world that compose a compelling wealth of case data.

When someone first contacts me about a possible UFO abduction, I always look for a number of different clues which indicate that the individual may, in fact, be an abductee, such as a few dramatic missing time episodes, childhood memories of ‘little people’ in their room, a scoop mark or two and signs of PTSD. So, by the time I agree to work with that person I feel I‘m not wasting my time. I‘m an artist and I have a life, so I don’t want to deal with iffy cases, and always want to avoid all time-wasting moments (such as the necessity for this long response). Also, both in general conversation and under hypnosis, I always pose a few false leading questions to see if the person is susceptible and thus seems to be trying to prove to me that he is a ‘real abductee.‘

Finally, as for the issue of hypnosis, I‘ve written, in a peer-reviewed, university press book, what I feel is a definitive statement of its value. I‘m not hopeful enough to assume the readers of this piece have read this more academic piece in UFOs & Abductions - Challenging the Borders of Knowledge, edited by Dr. David M. Jacobs, and published by the University Press of Kansas, but if you have doubts about hypnosis, please look it up. One example: a large percentage of abductees report their experiences, or major aspects of them, from conscious memory, without hypnosis. But what they recall is virtually the same as what emerges from others under hypnosis. So what can we assume?

Many more things can be said about my investigative technique. In all my books I’ve published long transcripts of interviews and hypnotic sessions, but apparently no one ever seems to find fault by pointing out errors. So go back to my books if you wish, and good luck in finding any mistakes or leading moments you‘d like to quote against me. I’m actually quite content with the investigative methods I‘ve used for decades.

Lastly, throughout all this work, my priority has always been, first and foremost, aiding the person with the experience. Research always follows as number two, and I’ve done the best I could following those priorities. My only regret at this point in my life are that there is not a larger pool of qualified people willing to continue this challenging work, despite the many lives that have been helped along the way, and despite the massive amount of intriguing data that have already been accumulated.

See Part I

More . . .

See Also:

UK UFO Debunker Strikes Again

Roswell Debunker Charles B. Moore Had a UFO Sighting of His Own

Stanton Friedman's Ongoing Task in Educating The Ignorant (Debunkers)

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