Monday, August 6, 2012

News from Across the Galaxy - MUFON "Blockbuster" Fizzles!

As noted in a previous Galactic news dispatch of June 4,
The upcoming MUFON symposium in now promising "Blockbuster UFO Discoveries!"  They won't reveal what these are: you'll just have to register for the Symposium to find out. I'm sure they need to hype it like that to fill the seats. The non-member registration price has been raised to $329, up from about $225 last year (I can't find the exact figure), and the location has been changed from southern California, a tourist mecca, to northern Kentucky, not exactly a major tourist destination.
Well, today was the day. The Schedule at the Symposium read,
Sunday August 5
9:00am-4:00pm
National Air Force Museum at Wright–Patterson Air Force Base
4:30pm-6:30pm
National Release of “Blockbuster” UFO discovery
UFO zapped by radar in Kingman, AZ
And what was the "Blockbuster"? According to Jack Brewer in The Examiner,
researcher Harry Drew took the podium in Covington, Ky., explaining he is convinced he has located two sites where alien craft landed or crashed in 1953. The sites are in the vicinity of Kingman, Ariz. Drew explained he believes the craft were brought down by triangulated radar running at boosted power to extend range. According to Drew, military personnel quickly retrieved and cleaned up the wreckage. The archaeologist and historian apparently included photos of the sites in his presentation, as well as presented information contradicting past accounts of the case and alleged crashes.
supposed UFO recovered at Kingman
Wow! More stories about saucers that crashed sixty years ago! It's a Blockbuster! (Actually, it's very Old News: a Google search of UFO CRASH KINGMAN 1953 returns 160,000 hits!) Brewer adds, "Don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player."

The Blogosphere was quick to dismiss MUFON's grandstanding. The UFO and Conspiracy website GodlikeProductions quickly sported a thread, "MUFON 'Blockbuster' Announcement Peters Out Without A Bang."    The Following the Nerd "Paranormal" Blog said, "The big build up to an earth shattering announcement from MUFON yesterday that they would rock the UFO community to their core proved to be more than a disappointment."

But if anyone has a True Blockbuster up his sleeve, it must be Steven Greer, who has kept it uncharacteristically quiet. In a previous Galactic News Dispatch on July 29, I noted
Steven Greer of CSETI announces that "The Disclosure Project and CSETI has teamed up with Emmy award winning filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka to make an historic new documentary on Disclosure, Contact and the suppression of New Energy." However, "No major studio or media group will touch this story : It is simply too explosive and world- changing for large corporate interests to embrace." So he is collecting nickels and dimes (and hopefully plenty of dollars, too, from folks just like you.) And it looks like he is very close to meeting his goal.
At that time I hadn't seen Greer's Blog posting of July 28. In it he announces meeting the fundraising goal for that movie. But he still needs more money! Why?
There is a chance that we may be able to include in the film “Sirius” the scientific testing of a possible Extraterrestrial Biological Entity (EBE) that has been recovered and is deceased. This EBE is in the possession of a cooperative institute desiring further scientific evaluation of the possible ET. We cannot reveal at this time the location of this being or the name of the person or persons who possess it.
Dr. Jan Bravo- who is a STAR Board member and a fellow Emergency Physician- and I have actually visited the group that possesses this EBE and have personally and professionally examined the being. It is indeed an actual deceased body, and most certainly is not plastic or man-made. It has a head, 2 arms and 2 legs and is humanoid . We have seen and examined X-Rays of the being. Its anatomy however is not homo sapien (modern human) or any known hominid (predecessors to humans).
As you can imagine, the security and scientific issues surrounding the further testing of this potentially explosive and world- changing evidence are mind-boggling. However, we feel we simply must proceed expeditiously but cautiously. The cost of doing proper MRI testing, full and dispositive  forensic-level DNA testing and carbon dating with other isotope testing are considerable and certainly not currently funded. We must rule out other hominids, bizarre genetic defects and so forth. But it is most certainly an actual biological specimen – and it may be – well, what it looks like.
In fact, nobody seems to have noticed this remarkable claim until one commenter, Bjorn Tolouse, posted a thread about it on the JREF forums. As I noted in a comment on the last News posting,
all Greer needs to do is pick up the phone and call Ray Santilli, the guy who produced that hoax "alien autopsy" video. "Ray, this is Steven Greer. Remember how much money you made on that fake alien autopsy film? Well, I have a REAL dead alien - how much money do you think we could get for a video of that?"
Then on a truly tragic note, Greer writes on his Blog on August 6 that the father of the Sirius filmmaker, Amardeep Kaleka, was among those gunned down in the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. The mind boggles at such senseless slaughter.

I'm being interviewed in DC for Nat Geo "Secret History of UFOs"
Finally, in between the near-continuous re-runs of Chasing UFOs, you may have noticed that a new program has turned up in the National Geographic Channel's UFO rotation: The Secret History of UFOs. This is the show that I and a number of other skeptics interviewed for, as well as a lot of non-skeptics, too. The show follows the familiar formula for UFO documentaries: the UFO believers gush on and on about their amazing sighting, the object must have come from another world, etc., followed by a short explanation from a skeptic suggesting that there may well be a rational explanation for it. On the show we see skeptics James McGaha, Tim Printy, Matt Baxter, and Bryan Bonner, as well as myself. Especially entertaining is David Jacobs, who tells about "the threat" (the title of one of his books) that alien abductions pose to the human race. And there is nothing we can do to stop them! Still, it's a better show than Chasing UFOs!


6 comments:

  1. Wasn't the whole point of the MUFON STAR team to gather evidence? I went to a MUFON meeting last year and there was a STAR team guy there, talking about this great sighting where a family had multiple experiences and even took photos of an object close to the ground. This is the one:

    http://www.examiner.com/article/mufon-star-team-investigates-florida-cases

    Since then, I haven't seen anything about it. Granted, the photos he showed were terrible, and the next day I came up with a mundane explanation for them that I'm 90% sure is correct. But why does MUFON promote stuff, later bury it, and then claim more unsubstantiated stories are "blockbusters"?

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    Replies
    1. Because it is all about the hype and publicity. MUFON really is not interested in resolving cases. This has been going on for decades.
      Look at the case of Rendlesham on the recent program Bob mentioned. Despite having absolute proof that Halt misidentified the lighthouse (the tape and the film showing the lighthouse), Halt says he knows where the lighthouse was and it was not the lighthouse and Kean declares the explanation is ridiculous! If they admit even one part of the case has an explanation, they suddenly realize the entire case begins to crumble away.
      Of course, this goes with my thumbrule that the more a case is publicized, the less likely any explanation, no matter how good or accurate, will be accepted by the UFO proponents/groups promoting the case.

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    2. I would agree that MUFON has become more of a distraction than a real investigative group. In fact it is hard to find any group that I would point to including skeptics that do real investigative work regarding the UFO phenomenon. There are some exceptions but few come to the table without preconceived notions. It does look like Harry Drew did his homework but he also cloaks his work in kind of a odd secretive way. His last book 7 Days In May: The Kingman UFO Story, supposedly published in 2014, is no where to be found. Your point about Halt and the tape/lighthouse is probably correct but does not obliterate everything else. One miss-identification in the case does not prove all observations to be miss-identified. Picking and choosing bits and pieces that fit what your believes are does not really solve anything. That goes for Ufologists and skeptics alike.

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  2. The pic you showed with the caption "UFO zapped by radar in Kingman, AZ" was originally used to illustrate the (alleged) lightning stricken Roswell saucer in an article published nearly 30 years ago. The artist was David A. Hardy of Birmingham, England. Of course it may be that the Kingman UFO was virtually identical to the Roswell one. Whatever the case, MUFON are to be uncongratulated for providing nothing new under the sun (or under the stars either).

    Re Stephen Greer, does anyone know the origin of the term 'EBE'? It supposedly was coined by Detlev Bronk in 1947, as per the MJ-12 documents. OK, we can discount this, but where and from whom did this term originate? Paul Bennewitz maybe?

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    Replies
    1. cda,

      I had that same thought, "is that radar, or lightning, hitting the UFO?" I got that picture from a website http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cSiDFImeGIY/SXqiH9zZq_I/AAAAAAAADwQ/v2Z22Zd6sO0/s400/crashed_ufo.jpg that described it as the Kingman UFO. But like you said, one UFO crash looks just like any other.

      The very first time I heard the term "EBE" was, I'm fairly sure, in the legendary (farcical) TV show "UFO Coverup Live," telecast in 1988. Amazingly, I was actually in the studio of that show as it was being telecast. (I was the guest of Jim Oberg, who was on the show.) It really was a live show. Everyone you saw on the show (Cash, Landrum, etc.) were actually there. Except for the part about "Falcon" or whoever they were. The "aviary" guys were actually on tape when they talked about the "EBE" - and his taste for strawberry ice cream!

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  3. I notice that the sheep (on Brazel's ranch) in Hardy's painting have transformed into desert vegetation in the Kingman scene. Oh well!

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