Tag: Jacques Vallee

Skinwalker Ranch and Native American Legends

Article by Ryan Dube                                 October 2, 2020                                (topsecretwriters.com)

• The Sherman Ranch in Northeastern Utah, more infamously known as the ‘Skinwalker Ranch’, has a long history of paranormal phenomenon. It has been noted that the UFO “hotspots” that are located in the ‘four corners’ states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado – where the most intense number of UFO sightings and paranormal phenomenon occur – are typically close to US military installations. Another significant correlation is the fact that many of these hotspots are located near Native American reservations, namely the great Navajo Nation.

• Regarding the tribal history of Northeastern Utah in particular, the Ute Tribe’s ancestors occupied the area for over a thousand years. In the 19th century, the Utes (among other tribes hostile to the Navajo) allied with the United States Army to carry out some of the worst atrocities against the Navajo people. In 1863, part of the ‘Canyon Chelly Campaign’ included Kit Carson and General James Charlatan attempting to starve the Navajo by placing a bounty on Navajo livestock. Ultimately, military campaigns, starvation and bribery resulted in the Navajo surrender.

• Only a few Navajo surrendered, however. Adopting a scorched earth policy, Colonel Carson and his men scouted throughout Navajo-land, chasing, killing, capturing Navajo, confiscating and burning crops, and offering food, clothing and shelter to those who surrendered. Some Navajo were permitted to keep their flocks and drive them to Ft. Stanton, aka Bosque Redondo. The troops were aided by other Native American tribes with long-standing memory and enmity toward the Navajos, chiefly the Utes.

• The Navajo finally surrender en masse in the spring of 1864. This resulted in the “Long Walk”, when over 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to march for two months, over 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Two hundred Navajo died in this forced march. Some, however, escaped to the mountains such as Navajo Mountain and the Bears Ears. Anger and hatred grew in the Navajo hearts against the whites and the Utes. This resentment was handed down from generation to generation. Even today, Navajo ‘witches’ will conjure extra-dimensional beasts to ward off white men and Utes.

• Navajo witchcraft is apparent in stories of the Navajo “Skinwalker”. Skinwalkers were considered “wer-animals” – native people who used an animal skin to transform themselves into a particular animal. Still, anyone could see that they were not the animal, but a human in disguise.

• James Donahue, a writer who lived with a practicing witch on a Navajo reservation, relates witnessing such a shape-shifter. One evening in July 1980, he and his wife were alone at their house. Their dogs began to bark, and his wife told Donahue that there was a wolf in their yard. They tracked the wolf to an old Navajo “Hogan” or primitive structure. But as they tracked the animal, the wolf’s paw prints turned to a petite human woman’s footprints. They ended at the wall of the Hogan. It was plain to the Donahues that the woman had taken on the appearance of a wolf, then reverted back to her human body and walked through the wall of the locked Hogan structure.

• Anthropologists believe that most Native American tribes of this region are descendants of the Anasazi, or “Ancient Ones”. The Anasazi suffered a mysterious and sudden decline, much like the Mayans. Ancient petroglyphs found near Hopi villages providing a “mythical” history. The ‘Emergence Myth’ depicts spirits, or ‘kachinas’, emerging to this world through a hole in the ground at a sacred site near the Little Colorado River close to the Grand Canyon known as the ‘sipapu’.

• Las Vegas newsman and co-author of the 2005 book: Hunt for the Skinwalker, George Knapp notes that UFO events don’t begin to describe the rich array of unusual phenomena in the Skinwalker Ranch area. While Native American tribal leaders are reluctant to speak to outsiders, a local who knows the Ute tribe well told Knapp that the Utes take the tribal lore of strange creatures and sightings very seriously. Said the local, Hicks: “They think the Skinwalkers are powerful spirits that are here because of a curse that was put on them generations ago by the Navajos. And the center of the whole legend is this ranch. The Utes say the ranch is ‘the path of the Skinwalker.’ Tribal members are strictly forbidden from setting foot on the property” as Navajo ‘witches’ still conjure reality-bending, multi-dimensional magic that goes back to the days of the Ancient Anasazi.

• Tom Gorman and his wife bought and lived on the Skinwalker Ranch during the 1990s. When they first moved there, they were unloading furniture when Mrs. Gorman spotted an extremely large wolf walking across their pasture. It came right up and sat next to the Gorman’s dog. The Gormans even petted the animal. Then the wolf strolled over to the corral and grabbed a calf by the snout through the bars. Gorman and his father began beating on the wolf’s back with sticks but it wouldn’t release the calf. So Gorman grabbed a .357 Magnum pistol from his truck and shot the wolf twice at point-blank range. It dropped the calf and calmly looked at the family. Gorman shot it two more times, but the animal showed no sign of distress – or even blood. Gorman got his hunting rifle and shot the wolf again, this time causing part of its flesh fly off. But the wolf wasn’t even fazed. After a sixth shot, the wolf casually trotted across the field into a muddy thicket. Gorman and his father tracked the beast for about a mile, following its paw prints through the mud. But the tracks suddenly ended as if the wolf had simply vanished into thin air.

• When Gorman examined the chunk of wolf flesh, he said it looked and smelled like rotten meat [EN: the reanimated corpse of a wolf?]. None of his neighbors knew anything about any tame, over-sized wolves in the area. But many other witness accounts of Skinwalker sightings speak of strange misshapen, odd wolf-like creatures. A few weeks later, Mrs. Gorman encountered another wolf that was so large, its back was parallel with the top of her window as it stood beside her car. The wolf was accompanied by a dog-like animal that she couldn’t identify. Keep in mind that the appearance of the shapeshifter depends on the appearance of the human “witch” who forms the beast.

• An excerpt from Knapp’s book recounts a local describing the occurrences at a particular location: “Some very strange things have happened at the precise spot where I’m sitting. It is here that a visitor was accosted by a roaring but nearly invisible creature, something akin to the Predator of movie fame. It is here that a Ph.D. physicist reported that his mind was invaded, literally taken over, by some sort of hostile intelligence that warned him that he was not welcome. It is here that an entire team of researchers watched in awe as a bright door or portal opened up in the darkness and a large humanoid creature crawled out before quickly vanishing. And it is here that several animals–cattle and dogs–were mutilated, obliterated or simply disappeared.”

• A couple of years later, Gorman and his wife were driving on the ranch and saw something “low to the ground, heavily muscled, weighing perhaps 200 pounds, with curly red hair and a bushy tail” attacking – and almost playing with – one of their horses. When Gorman got within 40 feet of the animal, it literally vanished before his eyes. There were claw marks on the horse’s legs. Others reported seeing this beast as well.

• On another occasion, a friend was visiting the Gormans at the ranch. This visitor was alone meditating when they saw something “large and blurry” moving through the trees – not quite invisible, but camouflaged like in the Predator movie. It swiftly moved across the pasture, covering 100 yards in seconds. When it reached the man, it let out a ferocious roar. The visitor was so scared, he grabbed on to Gorman and wouldn’t let go. He has never returned to the ranch.

• On the night of March 12, 1997, barking dogs alerted the team to something lurking in a tree near the ranch house. Tom Gorman grabbed a hunting rifle and they all took off in their trucks toward the tree. At a distance of forty yards, they could see huge set of yellowish, reptilian eyes on head that had to be three feet wide. At the foot of the tree was a massive dog creature. Gorman shot at both animals. The creature on the ground vanished. The thing in the tree fell, landing heavily in the patch of snow below. When the men ran up to the tree, they found neither the animal nor any blood. They had a professional tracker come out the next day to no avail. But at the bottom of the tree, they found and photographed claw prints which they later matched to that of a prehistoric velociraptor.

• The common denominator to all of these sightings is that these creatures can be recognized from their imperfect gait, appearance and movements. In addition, sometimes the pastures would unexplainably light up at night like a football stadium, with shafts of light emanating from the ground. Others have said they’ve heard what sounded like heavy machinery operating under the earth. Tom, his son and his nephew once heard loud, disembodied male voices emanating from 20 feet above their heads, talking in some unintelligible language.

• According to Pueblo history, there are two kinds of sipapus (holes in the ground). One is the original sipapu mythology, from which the ‘First People’ emerged from the ‘Lower World’. This is the portal through which the dead pass to the spirit world. Legend has it that the dead would reemerge after a few days, their bodies revived. But today only the spirits (e.g.: ‘kachinas’) may pass through the sipapu. Secondly, Native Americans believe that the numerous small holes in the ground, or on ice/in water, are sipapus from which spirits can come up to communicate with the humans. Such holes have been found at the Skinwalker Ranch. One cold day, Gorman found many of the holes dotted around his pasture. They were perfect, concentric circles, as if scooped up by a large ‘cookie cutter’. Smaller ones were also found there.

• Special bodies of water or even special places in the landscape are often considered to be sipapus as well. A circular impression was once carved out of the ice on a pond near the ranch. It was six feet in diameter and about a quarter-inch deep into the half-inch thick ice. But there were no muddy footprints at the bank. The ice could not have supported much weight anyway.

• In 1995 and 1996, the Gormans and others reported 12 separate incidents of seeing large orange circles flying over the trees of the homestead. They would commonly see floating spheres of different sizes and colors. Gorman claims that holes would open up on the orange spheres for other smaller spheres to fly out. By early 1996, sightings of blue spheres the size of a softball, made of glass, and filled with bubbling blue liquids that seemed to rotate inside, became commonplace at the ranch. In April 1996, the Gormans watched a blue orb repeatedly circle the head of one of their horses. The horse was illuminated by an intense blue light, and there was a sound like static electricity in the air. The orb seemed to be intelligently controlled. When Gorman approached the horse with a flashlight, the orb darted off, maneuvering through tree branches with speed and dexterity.

• The Navajo refer to the use of “lightning” which they utilize through Navajo witchcraft as either positive protection or as a negative weapon. Witches can also conjure a form of magic called the “Frenzy Way” which magically influences the minds and emotions of others. The Gormans say the blue spheres seemed to generate severe psychological effects on the family. Family members felt waves of fear roll over them whenever the blue orbs appeared.

• One evening in May 1996, Gorman was outside with three of his dogs when he noticed a blue orb darting around in the field near the ranch house. Gorman urged his dogs to go after the orb. The three dogs chased and snapped at the orb, but it dodged and maneuvered just beyond their reach. The orb led the dogs out across the pasture and into the thick brush that borders the field. Gorman says he heard the dogs make three terrible yelps, then they were silent. The next morning, Gorman found there three round spots of dried and brittle vegetation. In the middle of each circle was a black, greasy lump. Gorman surmised that his dogs had been incinerated. After this encounter, the Gormans decided to sell the ranch and move.

• The famous scientist and Ufologist, Jacques Vallee, believes that UFOs are “windows” to other dimensions manipulated by intelligent, often mischievous, always enigmatic beings. Did the the Anasazi/ Ancient Ones learn to harness these “windows”? Navajo mythology speaks of a ‘trickster’ being who, through his foolish actions, reveals the limitations of the spiritual and material realities and the consequences of transgressing them for one’s own ego. According to Vallee, “The UFO phenomenon …represents a level of consciousness that we have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them. It…generally behaves as a control system…that is subtly manipulating human consciousness.”

• With the creation of these extra-dimensional ‘windows’, a picture starts to form of a misleading and malevolent ‘trickster’ being or force that is able to pass through dimensional wormholes and enter our plane of reality at will. The Ancient Anasazi’s spiritual practices and rituals may have weakened the fabric of space and time between the spiritual worlds. The horrors and bloodshed brought by the white colonists may have created a consciousness of retaliation that gives malevolent spiritual forces free reign in this region of Northeastern Utah.

 

The Skinwalker Ranch in Northeastern Utah, otherwise known as the Sherman Ranch, has a long history of paranormal phenomenon. This phenomenon received the most media attention after the December 2005 publication of Hunt for the Skinwalker, a detailed book about the ranch and the NIDS investigation, co-written by Dr. Colm Kelleher and George Knapp.

The Skinwalker and Other Dimensions

The purpose of this article is not meant to outline the activities at the ranch – the NIDS investigation and Knapp’s visit to the ranch was described in great detail in Hunt for the Skinwalker.

The purpose of this article is to compare many of the phenomenon observed by the researchers at the ranch, with the long and fascinating Native American history in the area. The parallels that are uncovered when the two are placed side by side are very interesting, as well as somewhat disconcerting.

To place the phenomenon into a historical context, it’s important to explore the history of Northeastern Utah – in particular the history of the land before Europeans ever arrived and during their arrival.

Many people recognize the significance that most of the UFO “hotspots” which are located from Utah down through Arizona and New Mexico, are also located near military installations. But another significant correlation is the fact that many of these hotspots are located bordering or at least neighboring Native American reservations.

Many people don’t realize that the area of the country where most of the intense number of UFO sightings and paranormal phenomenon occur – New Mexico, Arizona and Utah – is also the location of a country within a country – the great Navajo Nation.

    the ‘Long Walk’ of the Navajo nation

THE NAVAJO NATION — A third world country

September 2002
I had not realized that there is a third world country in the USA, but there is. It is the Navajo Nation. This country is a huge area in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah that is mostly desert and mountains. I recently spent nine days in the area doing a pastors’ conference, preaching and lecturing. The country is awe inspiring for the stark beauty of the landscape.

Not only is the land beautiful – but it is rich in Native American history, culture, as well as an entire host of strange phenomenon, including UFO’s.

A Wicked Past

Anyone familiar with the infiltration of this area of the country by white settlers will recall the horrors, the slaughter, and the unimaginable actions by both the United States military and the Natives of the area.

The tribal history of Utah in particular, including the Ute Tribe, who’s ancestors occupied the area for over a thousand years, includes a great deal of tragedy and horror. It’s important to make note of the fact that the Utes allied with the United States army in attacks against the Navajo people.

The mid 1800’s saw some of the worst atrocities by the United States Army against the Navajo people of this region. In 1863, part of the Canyon Chelly Campaign included Kit Carson and General James Charlatan attempting to starve the Navajo by placing a bounty on Navajo livestock.

This is an important footnote for our following observations – that this was an important target of the whites to obtain submission from the Navajo – the reduction of Navajo livestock. Livestock are often a target of the strange UFO phenomenon – such as the cattle mutilations.

After numerous military campaigns, the conflicts with their Utes neighbors, and pressure from New Mexican allies – the resulting starvation of the Navajo, followed by the use of bribery, resulted in a massive Navajo surrender: Few Navajo surrendered and with a scorched earth policy, he [Colonel Kit Carson] and his men scouted throughout Navajoland, chasing, killing, capturing some Navajo, confiscating and burning crops, and offering food, clothing and shelter to those who surrendered. Some Navajo were permitted to keep their flocks and drive them to Ft. Stanton, aka Bosque Redondo. The troops were aided by other Native American tribes with long-standing memory and enmity toward the Navajos, chiefly the Utes.

This massive Navajo surrender resulted in an 8,000 Navajo march, called the “Long Walk”, before being incarcerated at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

In the spring of 1864, over 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to march over 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Approximately 200 Navajo died during the two month long march, known as the Long Walk of the Navajo.

This is an important second item to note – that those who didn’t surrender escaped to the mountains, in particular Navajo Mountain and the Bears Ears.

There they waited for the release of their relatives. It isn’t hard to imagine the anger and hatred that grew in the hearts of those who escaped the fate of the Long Walk toward the whites, and possibly toward the Ute as well.

The tradition of the Navajo to maintain an oral history means that only the Navajo truly understand the magnitude of the effect this event had on the hearts and minds of the Navajo people. The generational memory of the Navajo run deep…we can be certain that any resentment from this event has been handed down from generation to generation.

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1091 Media Acquires UFO Documentary ‘The Phenomenon’

 

Article by Mia Galuppo                      November 13, 2019                         (hollywoodreporter.com)

• The media distributor ‘1091 Media’ (formerly ‘The Orchard’) announced that it will release the UFO documentary The Phenomenon, in theaters nationwide in June 2020, and digitally in September. Filmmaker James Fox collaborated with writer Marc Barasch to develop and produce the feature length documentary. (see James Fox interview below) Actor Peter Coyote narrates. Said Fox, “Our team has assembled the most compelling testimony and evidence from around the world that will lead even the most ardent skeptics to the inescapable conclusion that we are not alone.”

• The Phenomenon takes an expansive look at 70 years’ worth of history behind proving the existence of UFOs, and features never-before-seen footage and interviews with key eyewitnesses, experts and officials including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, former Deputy Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence Christopher Mellon, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and French astronomer and ufologist Jacques Vallee.

• Added Barasch, “This film explores not only the reality of UFOs, but their challenge to our preconceptions about reality, our collective life on this planet, and really, our place in the cosmos. We hope our film will have a provocative cultural impact, framing a new understanding, and catalyzing fresh ways of looking not only at ‘The Phenomenon’, but at ourselves and the ever-evolving future of humanity.”

 

1091 Media has acquired North American and digital rights to the UFO documentary The Phenomenon, with a nationwide theatrical release set for June of next year, followed by a digital release in September.

The film takes an expansive looks at 70 years’ worth of history behind proving the existence of UFOs, right up to the latest discoveries.

                            James Fox

The Phenomenon features never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with key eyewitnesses, experts and officials. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Clinton’s White House chief of staff John Podesta, former Deputy Undersecretary for Defense Intelligence Christopher Mellon, and former U.S. Energy Secretary and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, as well as Jacques Vallee, who served as a scientific consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, were all interviewed for the doc.

James Fox, the filmmaker behind Sci-Fi Channel’s Out of the Blue and History’s I Know What I Saw, directed The Phenomenon and co-wrote it with Marc Barasch. E.T. actor Peter Coyote narrates.

“I’m excited to have joined forces with 1091 and a brilliant team of collaborators on my latest feature-length documentary film, The Phenomenon,” Fox said Wednesday in a statement. “Our team has assembled the most compelling testimony and evidence from around the world that will lead even the most ardent skeptics to the inescapable conclusion that we are not alone.”

Added Barasch: “This film explores not only the reality of UFOs, but their challenge to our preconceptions about reality, our collective life on this planet, and really, our place in the cosmos. We hope our film will have a provocative cultural impact, framing a new understanding, and catalyzing fresh ways of looking not only at The Phenomenon, but at ourselves and the ever-evolving future of humanity.”

Said Jim Martin, vp for 1091 Media, “We are thrilled to be partnering with James to bring his most stunning work to the widest audience possible.”

 

24:02 minute video interview of James Fox by Martin Willis on The Phenomenon (YouTube)

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I Study UFOs and This Is the Best UFO Documentary Ever Made

[ExoNews Update] 

Article by MJ Banias                     October 16, 2019                       (vice.com)

• On October 22nd the UFO documentary Witness of Another World, premiered on Vimeo and Amazon Prime.  (see 1:50 minute trailer below)  Directed by Alan Stivelman, the film is distributed by 1091 Media, formerly the Orchard, which has an established line-up of documentaries that focus on the paranormal and the ufological.

• The writer, MJ Banias, likes this movie because it focuses on “the people at the center of the frenzy, and the trauma they experience.” He says it is “the best documentary on the subject that I have ever seen.”

• Stivelman set out to make a different UFO documentary. But the film ended up being an allegory about the deleterious effect that a famous UFO sighting in South America in 1978 had on young boy named Juan Pérez. As the documentary shows, it marked him for the rest of his life and ruined Pérez’s life. Stivelman’s Witness of Another World is successful because it really isn’t about UFOs, but about the people who have alleged encounters with them.

• What the film portrays is a man who is living alone, emotionally and socially removed from his peers and family, still haunted by his alien encounter and wondering “why he had to have lived through that.” Watching Pérez break down on camera is one of the film’s most powerful moments. Says Stivelman, “It’s deep, emotional, and filmed in a way that fully encompasses what the abduction experience must’ve felt like. The film’s also shot more like a feature than a documentary with beautiful reenactments. This really set the title apart from the rest in the genre…” said Jim Martin, Vice President of Paranormal Content for 1091 Media.

• The film also features Jacques Vallée who interviewed Pérez when he was a boy, and has since held a firm conviction that the young gaucho had an encounter with a non-human intelligence. But since the film is about Pérez’s experience, it still works even if you don’t believe the UFO premise. Stivelman says that the audience is left “to draw their own conclusions.”

• [Editor’s Note]  MJ Banias is right where the Deep State wants mainstream media journalists to be – admitting that there is too much evidence to deny the existence UFOs but not willing to admit to the bigger picture, i.e.: that UFOs are integral to the extraterrestrial presence. For the past seventy years, the Deep State has been actively denying and covering up the true existence of ET-controlled UFOs and our secret space program which interacts with these beings, and instilling this falsehood as ‘rational’. Apparently, Banias has been guzzling the Deep State’s rhetorical kool aid for so long that he is brainwashed, along with the majority of the public.

Banias starts this article by stating: “I have seen a lot of UFO documentaries, and after a while, they start to get boring. They tend to tell the same old stories, or promote some snake-oil-selling UFO “expert.” Then Banias says, “UFO documentaries usually make the same mistake: they try to “prove” that UFOs are real, or that they are alien, or interdimensional, or paranormal, or something else. They all inevitably fail.” Here Banias reveals his bias against UFO researchers whom he compares to “snake-oil salesmen”.

Banias says that the movie is saved because it doesn’t focus on the silly notion of UFOs, but the people who’s lives are negatively affected because they believed in UFOs. The UFO, says Banias, is “really just a MacGuffin”, or a plot device, and the viewer isn’t required to believe any of it. The moral here is that believing in UFOs will end up ruining your life.

Not two weeks after this article was published, Banias again displayed his Deep State mindset in an October 29th Vice article titled: “QAnon and UFO Conspiracies Are Merging” in which he casts aspersions against UFO researchers such as Jordan Sather, Michael Salla and Steven Greer. In this more recent article, Banias attacks the government insider group known as ‘QAnon’ for spreading ‘disinformation’ that the Deep State is hiding the UFO/extraterrestrial presence from the public. Banias belittles both the “UFO conspiracy” and the “QAnon conspiracy”, branding their common link as “particularly dangerous”.

Banias says, “[Q] is beginning to find an audience among UFO hunters and people who believe the government is hiding aliens.” He touts the Deep State position that UFO and aliens are a figment of the imagination, that there is no such thing as a “secret space program”, and that the US government is innocent of any cover-up to prevent UFO/ET “Disclosure”.

According to Banias, it isn’t the Deep State government that has been using the media to mind-control the public into ridiculing and rejecting the UFO/ET reality, but it is this conspiracy movement itself that is “sewing discord and mistrust in established institutions, such as the government or military, [as] a known tool of psychological warfare and social engineering. Conspiracies, conspiracy theorists and those individuals who promote them can be far from harmless,” says Banias.

And then, incredibly, Banias employs yet another notorious Deep State tactic in its mind-control playbook by the triggering the public’s fear that the Russians are behind QAnon in order to “generate mistrust within [an American] populace”.

In rebuttal to Banias’ outrageous accusations, Jordan Sather responded to Banias’ article in an episode of Sather’s ‘Destroying the Illusion” YouTube channel (see 44:35 minute video below). Likewise, Dr Michael Salla posted a scathing article on ExoPolitics.org and ExoNews.org (see Salla’s article here) pointing out that QAnon has revealed how compromised “journalists” are compensated for following the “talking points” that the Deep State sends to journalist’s private email accounts at 4 am each morning to control their “news commentary”. Dr Salla also points out that the UK intelligence community, as well as the other “Five Eyes” nations’ intelligence agencies, regularly targets and destroys the reputation of anyone contesting the Deep State’s talking points. Indeed, this has been a Deep State policy since the CIA/Robertson Panel’s “Durant Report” in 1953, recommending that the mass media ‘evoke a strong psychological reaction’ by debunking so-called “flying saucers”.

As Dr Salla puts it, “Banias is merely providing a new twist to the decades-long psychological warfare policy of discrediting UFO researchers and reports.” These two recent articles by MJ Banias, both published on the Vice.com website, “suggests he is either simply naïve or has begun receiving 4 am talking points”.

 

44:35 minute rebuttal against MJ Banias by Jordan Sather (‘Destroying the Illusion’ Youtube channel)

 

 

I have seen a lot of UFO documentaries, and after a while, they start to get boring. They tend to tell the same old stories, or promote some snake-oil-selling UFO “expert.” Perhaps the biggest issue I take with UFO documentaries is that they never focus on what actually matters: the people at the center of the frenzy, and the trauma they experience.

By this measure, Alan Stivelman’s film Witness of Another World is the best documentary on the subject that I have ever seen.
Witness of Another World tells the story of Juan Pérez, a lonely gaucho who, as a young boy, allegedly had an encounter with an anomalous aerial vehicle and the strange entities inside. In the 1970s, this incident made headline news in South America and, as the documentary shows, very much ruined Pérez’s life. The film dives into Pérez’s life 40 years later. Living alone, Pérez is still haunted by his alleged encounter.

“In the beginning, I proposed to make this film in order to decode the mystery behind the UFO phenomenon,” said Stivelman. “This mission was overshadowed by the acute sadness that Juan brought with him and the desire to understand why he had to have lived through that supernatural experience that marked him for the rest of his life.”

UFO documentaries usually make the same mistake: they try to “prove” that UFOs are real, or that they are alien, or interdimensional, or paranormal, or something else. They all inevitably fail. Stivelman’s Witness of Another World is successful because it really isn’t about UFOs, but about the people who have alleged encounters with them.

Yes, it is a movie about an alleged UFO encounter from 1978, but the UFO is really just a MacGuffin. Pérez is the real story here, and the conflicts he has with other people are really what the film is about. Watching Pérez break down on camera is one of the film’s most powerful moments. It is jarring and painful—a close up shot of his face, lined with wrinkles that don’t seem to match his boyish bravado in the previous scenes.

“It was there, as a filmmaker, that I had to make a crucial decision for the rest of the shooting. To continue with the investigation of the UFO phenomenon, to stay only in the phenomenological aspect, or to attend to Juan, to his suffering, and to look for a way to help him,” Stivelman said.

The film is distributed by 1091 Media, formerly the Orchard, which has an established line-up of documentaries that focus on the paranormal and Ufological.

 1:50 minute trailer for “Witness of Another World” documentary (Humano Films YouTube)

 

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Angels, Airships, and Aliens: The 3,500-Year History of UFO Sightings

Listen to “E108 9-28-19 Angels, Airships, and Aliens: The 3,500-Year History of UFO Sightings” on Spreaker.
Article by Matt Blitz                       September 24, 2019                        (popularmechanics.com)

• The US Navy has admitted that the three released videos of ‘unidentified aerial phenomenon’ are authentic, each depicting quick-moving oblong-shaped objects. The Navy has yet to identify the objects in these videos. The term “UAP” has replaced “UFO” which still carries a lot of historical “baggage” and stigma, and discourages people from reporting a sighting. Journalist Leslie Kean who helped break the New York Times story in December 2017 about the Navy’s UAP sightings says, “That term (UFO) is so loaded at this point, that you are never going to change people’s understanding of what it means.” “All you can do is adopt a new one.”

• But this is not a new phenomenon. Humans have seen and encountered unidentified flying objects for millennia. The only thing that’s changed is how people have interpreted these events over the years. Here is a summary of four eras of UFOs:

• Biblical Beginnings – Diana Walsh Pasulka, author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and a professor of philosophy and religion at UNC Wilmington reports that “Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all the major religions actually have pictures and anecdotes of aerial phenomenon.” In nearly every religion, there are “contact events” where an important figure makes contact with a heavenly figure. Moses and the burning bush, Mohammad and the angel Gabriel, and the Virgin Mary’s own angelic visitation. “These are human’s first contact with something they interpret to not be human or of this planet. And, if they are [not of this planet], they are de facto extraterrestrial.” Unexplainable phenomena can become religion.

• The Era of Airships – In his 2010 book Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, French astronomer Jacques Vallee analyzed 500 historical UFO reports. The earliest sighting dates back nearly 3,500 years to modern-day Sudan, when a falling star “the like had not happened before” struck down the Nubians to give the Egyptians a military victory. These mysterious sightings dot human history and culminate in Dubuque, Iowa in 1879 when a “large, unexplained airship” was visible for an hour before it “disappeared on the horizon.”

• According to Pasulka, by the late 19th century humans began to shift their interpretation of the unknown from a religious framework to a technological one. In 1896 and 1897, mysterious “airships” were seen all over the U.S. with many witnesses signing affidavits. Thomas Edison remarked “it is absolutely impossible to imagine that a man could construct a successful airship and keep the matter a secret.” But by the late 19th century, hydrogen-filled airships were in development.

• The Dawn of the UFO – Late into World War II, American fighter pilots started observing orange, glowing lights they dubbed “foo fighters”. Rumors circulated about the Nazi’s using advanced technology and even establishing a lunar base. But American scientists explained it away as “electrostatic phenomena”. Then in 1947, Kenneth Arnold saw strange round craft flying in formation in excess of 1,000 miles per hour. Again, the Army dismissed it as a mirage or hallucination. But others came forward to say they had also seen similar aerial phenomenon.

• A few years later, the Air Force coined the term ‘UFO’ and it was prominently used in the Robertson Report, the same scientific panel that dismissed the ‘foo fighters’. The convenient excuse for these UFOs became the Soviet’s testing of secret weapons. But the US military brass “wrote that off pretty early on because of the extreme sophistication of the technology,” says Kean. “It was unimaginable that the Russians could have something like this.”

• An Extraterrestrial Threat? – The US Air Force created a secret project code-named “Sign” to investigate these UFO incidents. Kean says that there were “so many documents that show at the highest levels [the U.S. military] didn’t know what they were.” Some believed that these aerial phenomena were not from this planet. Then the July 1952 sightings over Washington D.C. convinced the government that the phenomenon could not be ignored. The military told the FBI that “the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars”. The military told the public was that there was no “conceivable threat to the United States”, while they secretly feared a national security threat. Says Kean, “They just didn’t know what else to do at that point.”

• The Mystery Remains – The Robertson Panel in 1953 determined to debunk UFO sightings as either man-made or natural phenomenon. And that’s exactly what federal authorities did for more than six decades. But recent events suggest a new government strategy in the works. As of the 2017 New York Times article, the government confirmed that it had been investigating the UFO/UAP phenomenon in a $22 million Pentagon program that officially ended in 2012, but insiders said it continued until 2017 when its head, Luis Elizondo, resigned. The program studied physical effects from encounters with the objects and the theoretical technology that could enable the UAPs to perform as they did. But most interesting was that the program had recovered materials from these UAPs.

• Kean thinks there is a lot of research going on behind-the-scenes. As it is presumed that the U.S. isn’t the only country in possession of UAP materials, there is a secretive global race associated with this research. Says Kean, “From what I’ve been told, it’s a competitive thing. Whoever understands the technology first has a real advantage. My sense of it is that there’s an undercurrent of competition among Russia, China, and the U.S.”

• Sources have also told her that the physics of how these objects move has already been cracked. “What they’ve figured out is very futuristic,” says Kean. “[T]hey can understand how it’s done.” Scientists and medical experts are also attempting to understand the biological effects on those humans who’ve come close to these phenomenon.

• More than two-thirds of Americans believe that the US government knows more about UFOs than they are telling the public. It’s becoming common to see UFO videos on YouTube. But are they extraterrestrial? “It’s a valid hypothesis,” says Kean. Or could they be explained as inter-dimensional, or time travelers, or super-secret weapons or aircraft developed by another nation on this planet? What was a mystery in ancient times remains a mystery today.

This past week, the U.S. Navy confirmed that several videos—two of which were first released by The New York Times in 2017 depicting so-called “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP)—are authentic. The three videos, (another was later published by The Washington Post), each depicting quick-moving oblong-shaped objects, were shot by Navy pilots during training exercises in 2004 and 2015. The Navy has yet to identify the objects in the video, and along with the Department of Defense, said the videos should have never been made public.

While a “UAP” may be an unfamiliar term, that’s sort of the point. UAPs are essentially the new UFO—but with a lot less historical baggage. A Navy spokesman told The Washington Post that the acronym “UFO” carries so much stigma that it discourages someone from reporting a sighting.

“That term is so loaded at this point, that you are never going to change people’s understanding of what it means,” journalist Leslie Kean, who co-wrote the 2017 New York Times investigation into the Pentagon’s UFO (or UAP) program, tells Popular Mechanics. “All you can do is adopt a new one.”

But humans didn’t just start seeing UFOs darting around above our heads in just the past few weeks…or in 2015, 2004, 1947, or even 1639. Humans have seen and encountered unidentified flying objects for millennia.

BIBLICAL BEGINNINGS

Unidentified flying objects have been recorded throughout human history. The only thing that’s changed is how people—stretched across thousands of years—have interpreted these unexplainable events.

“Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all the major religions actually have pictures and anecdotes of ariel phenomenon,” Diana Walsh Pasulka, author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology and a professor of philosophy and religion at UNC Wilmington tells Popular Mechanics.

Some of them were comets, asteroids, meteors, and other atmospheric optical phenomena that were scientifically unknown to our ancient ancestors, but others still defy modern explanations.

Pasulka explains in nearly every religion, there are “contact events” where an important figure makes contact with a heavenly figure. Moses and the burning bush, Mohammad and the angel Gabriel, and the Virgin Mary’s own angelic visitation.

“These are human’s first contact with something they interpret to not be human or of this planet. And, if they are [not of this planet], they are de facto extraterrestrial.”

Pasulka says the Torah’s tale of Jacob’s fight with an angel is a good example of an encounter with aerial phenomenon that was turned into a religious narrative. “When you go back to the original source and read it in its original language… it wouldn’t look like what the artists’ rendition of it are in Western history,” says Pasulka, “It would look like he’s fighting some kind of being from outer space.”

Pasulka isn’t saying that a biblical figure fought an alien and it turned into a religious text, but that vision of a figure descending from the sky could have come from a shared, human experience or observation. When religion is a lens to explain the universe, unexplainable phenomena can become religion.

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How the Increasing Belief in Extraterrestrials Inspires Our Real World

by D.W. Pasulka                  March 11, 2019                     (vice.com)

• It used to be that mainstream scientists such as Stephen Hawking would describe believers in UFOs and extraterrestrials as fringe “kranks”. But today, many respectable scientists not only believe in ET and UFOs, but claim to have been in communication with them, or have even had a close encounter. The article’s author, Diana Walsh Pasulka, has written a book entitled: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, which reveals how the increasing belief in nonhuman intelligence inspires our science and entertainment.

• Jacques Vallée is a computer scientist who has long been open to the reality of the extraterrestrial presence on and around the earth. He consulted on Steven Spielberg’s movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he paved the way for other Silicon Valley scientists and biotechnologists to draw from alien technology, using technology from alien spacecraft crash sites and information from mental downloads.

• Technology entrepreneur Rizwan Virk claims to have spoken with top researchers at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard who have actually seen alien “artifacts”. Virk also says that he accompanied several research scientists to an alien spaceship crash site in New Mexico, which was not the Roswell crash.

• Pasulka maintains that religions are social phenomena that emerge from their environments. Today’s digital environment (through films, phones, and computers) is producing new forms of religious beliefs which take for granted that extraterrestrials are in regular communication with humans on earth. The difference between these “religious” beliefs is that traditional religions require blind belief without real proof. The belief in extraterrestrial intelligence interacting with earth humans, however, is something that will be proven true.

• Until now, scientists and researchers have shied away from expressing their belief in an extraterrestrial presence, due to what Pasulka calls “the John Mack Effect.” Dr. John Mack was a Pulitzer Prize winning research psychiatrist working at Harvard University. In the 1990s Mack began a study of people who believed that they were in contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and found that they were not delusional, but were perfectly normal. Still, Harvard University questioned his motives in an internal investigation, and portrayed him as a ‘kook’. This produced a chilling effect related to the study of UFOs as scholars became unwilling to risk their reputations to study the phenomena.

• However, a recent presentation by Garry Nolan of Stanford University at the Harvard Medical School’s Consortium for Space Genetics, argued that the people who would be best equipped to explore space would be those whose brains were attuned to nontraditional forms of knowledge, and who have the ‘hyperintuition’ – the ability to know things beyond normal means, like a sixth sense. These are the types of people who should be chosen to investigate extraterrestrial destinations, says Nolan.

• For her book, Pasulka interviewed a biotechnologist named Thomas, who works in the field of cancer research. Thomas has introduced ‘implant technology’ to the field, using implant devices etched with a laser and coded so that human tissue recognizes and adapts to them. But he made a point not to reveal to his fellow scientists that he got the idea of an implant from alleged extraterrestrial technology. Says Thomas, “It would have been so far removed from their own belief systems that it would have been impossible for them to implement my vision. So, I keep that part secret.”

• The potential of almost unimaginable space infrastructures has created a new form of religion based on possible realism. Given the ways in which religious and spiritual beliefs develop, the emerging connection between Silicon Valley technopreneurs and alien technology is not surprising. As Vallée said, ‘the apparent absurdity of the claims does not mean they are not true’.

 

I first met Thomas* through a mutual friend. By most societal standards, Thomas would be considered “normal”—he’s a successful biotechnologist with a partner and kid, he enjoys long walks on the weekend and eating out. In his work, he helps create technologies that help people recover from illnesses, such as cancer. But the inspiration for some of Thomas’s most successful technologies—such as implant devices that are etched with a laser and coded so that human tissue recognizes them as itself, and not a foreign agent, or the use of an ancient stem cell that appears to help alleviate pain associated with cancer—is not something he openly shares. Why? Because, he explained to me, the implants were inspired by “nonhuman intelligence.” In other words, it wasn’t his own brilliant idea, nor was it another human’s. He believes that it came from a supernatural source, perhaps extraterrestrial.

His research protocol was, to be blunt, not transparent. He never told any of the scientists he recruited to his team where he acquired the idea for the new technology, because, according to Thomas, “First, they would have thought I was really weird, and second—and most importantly—it would have prevented them from being successful in implementing the necessary steps to create the technology. It would have been so far removed from their own belief systems that it would have been impossible for them to implement my vision. So, I keep that part secret.”

     Diana Walsh Pasulka

It has long been the case that people who believe in UFOs or extraterrestrials are characterized, as Stephen Hawking has described them, as “cranks” or fringe dwellers. Despite that association, some of the world’s brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning minds, among them the mathematician John Nash and the biochemist Kary Mullis, have had experiences they perceive to be close encounters. The University of Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, famous for his advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as his disbelief in God and religions, nonetheless has suggested that human civilization may have been seeded by an alien civilization.

More strikingly, according to research by psychologists, belief in extraterrestrials is increasing in unprecedented ways. I myself found this to be the case, especially among contemporary technopreneurs (entrepreneurs who use technology to make an innovation or fill a need), just like Thomas. A belief that was once on the fringe now appears to be the new black. Spending a day with high-functioning believers—as I have done several times in the past few months as research for my book American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology—reveals a lot about how the increasing belief in nonhuman intelligence inspires our real world as well as our entertainment.

                 Riz Virk

Perhaps the first technopreneur who has long been “out” concerning his belief in UFOs is Jacques Vallée, who worked on ARPANET (the proto-internet), a program funded by the military. In fact, he was working on this new technology while experimenting with telepathic phenomena, what some would call “woo-woo” science. Vallée was so well known for his study of UFOs that Steven Spielberg asked him to consult on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the movie is based on Vallée). He was one of the first vocal technologists to advocate for the study of UFOs, and he paved the way for a slew of other Silicon Valley scientists and biotechnologists who believe that the secret to their success is alien technology—in other words, artifacts found at alleged alien spacecraft crash sites or information provided to them through mental downloads.

                            Garry Nolan

The gaming expert, technologist, and investor Rizwan Virk confirms this new direction in the belief and practices associated with UFOs. In an article on the website Hacker Noon, he wrote, “I can say that I have personally spoken to researchers from top universities (Stanford, MIT, Harvard) who have seen the “artifacts” that the article references, and other similar ones that are even more secretive (and perhaps more functional).” In my own research, I have also met scientists who believe in these artifacts; I’ve even accompanied several of them on an expedition to an alleged alien crash site in New Mexico, which, I was told, was “not Roswell.” But I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, we were, as I was blindfolded so I wouldn’t be able to identify the location.

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UNCW Professor Explores UFOs

by Ben Steelman                 March 8, 2019                   (newbernsj.com)

• In her book, “American Cosmic”, professor Diana Pasulka, chair of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, notes the similarities between people’s belief in extraterrestrial beings and starships, and people who believe in organized religion.

• For six years, Pasulka has focused on a small group of respectable academic scientists and researchers who believe that UFOs are real, ET beings have been in contact with us, and that the government knows much more than it’s telling. While many of these scientists remain anonymous, Pasulka was able to interview some including Jacques Vallee, the former NASA scientist and co-founder of ARPANET, an ancestor of the modern Internet.

• Several of the scientists Pasulka interviewed claim to have had non-verbal communication with alien beings. In some cases, the scientists believe the beings fed them inspirations or ideas for new innovations. For Pasulka, these descriptions sound a lot like traditional descriptions of divine inspiration or the Voice of God. She specifically notes the calling of Samuel in the Old Testament.

• ET believers’ often traffic in “artifacts” from UFO crashes which seem to possess uncanny powers. This reminds Pasulka of the medieval obsession with saints’ relics or with splinters from the True Cross.

• Descriptions of modern UFO encounters often involving loud humming, thunder, dancing lights and appearances of luminous beings — eerily similar to accounts of the miracles in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.

• Pasulka notes a sharp disconnect between the believers who see the alien intelligences as mostly benign, and modern media which prefers scary stories like “Independence Day” or “Signs.”

• Again and again, she finds parallels between Catholic miracles and UFO beliefs. Ultimately, Pasulka sees both quests as a search for answers to unknowable mysteries and for guidance to who we are and where we are going.

• [Editor’s Note]   Upon noting the similarities between ancient religions and modern UFO experiences, it isn’t such a great leap to speculate that these ancient religious accounts are actually descriptions of early human civilizations’ encounters with UFOs and extraterrestrial beings thousands of years ago, and they simply formed a religion around the experiences.

 

Depending on which poll you choose, between one-third and nearly half of Americans believe in unidentified flying objects, intelligent beings from other planets and those beings coming to visit (and, occasionally, probe) us.
The famed psychologist Carl Jung referred to UFOs as “a modern myth of things unseen.” For Jung, the question wasn’t so much whether UFOs exist or what they are as why we believe in them.

Diana Pasulka, a professor who chairs the department of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, takes much the same view in “American Cosmic.” For her, belief in starships and little green men proves remarkably similar to belief in organized (or disorganized) religion. At times, the two might be almost interchangeable.

            Diana Pasulka

Lots of “new” religions and cults place faith in UFOs, from Heaven’s Gate and Unarians to the Church of Scientologyand the Nation of Islam. A study of one such cult in the 1950s led psychologist Leon Festinger and colleagues to the theory of cognitive dissonance, how true believers adjust their worldviews when prophecy fails.

These, however, aren’t Pasulka’s real concern. For six years, she focused on a small tribe of academic scientists, published researchers with respectable records, who nevertheless believe UFOs are real, the government knows much more than it’s telling and non-human intelligences behind these craft have already contacted some of us.

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15th Century Painting is Proof of UFO Visit

by Sean Martin                      January 12, 2019                        (express.co.uk)

• “The Annunciation with Saint Emidius”, a painting by Carlo Crivelli which dates back to 1486 (shown below), depicts a UFO in the skies firing down a beam of light to the Virgin Mary. Ancient alien theorists interpret this scene as when the Virgin Mary was impregnated with her son, Jesus Christ. Thus, conspiracy theorists claim that Jesus was actually sent to Earth by a different race from another planet.

• The website Listverse states: “Their belief is that Jesus was not divine at all. Instead, it was the result of genetic engineering and the implanting of a child into the unsuspecting Immaculate Conception.” “Many people who claim to have been abducted (by aliens) state that they were inside their homes when a strange light shone from outside the buildings.”

• However, ufologist Jacques Vallee told Huffington Post that the painting is fictional, and there is no way the artist would know what is in the skies at the time of the supposed conception of Christ as it was painted almost 1500 years later.

• Similarly, the walls of the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta, Georgia (Eastern Europe) contain an 11th century portrait of Christ being crucified with a large crowd gathered around Him (shown above). But in the top left and right corners are what appear to be dome-shaped flying craft with three trails coming out of each. Theorists claim that this is proof of the existence of alien UFO’s 2000 years ago. Art historians claim that the strange craft actually represent guardian angels.

 

A Painting dating back to the 1400s could prove that aliens coexisted with humans on Earth and may have played a part in the story of the Bible.

“The Annunciation with Saint Emidius” 1486

The paining in question is the “The Annunciation with Saint Emidius,” by Carlo Crivelli which dates back to 1486. In it, a strange object is seen in the skies firing down a beam to the Virgin Mary, supposedly impregnating her with Jesus Christ. While the thin laser-like light was meant to stem from a formation of angels, conspiracy theorists claim it is a UFO firing the beam, and is more proof of ancient aliens.

Conspiracy theorists claim that Jesus was not divine, but was actually sent by a different race from another planet.

The website Listverse states: “Their belief is that Jesus was not divine at all. Instead, it was the result of genetic engineering and the implanting of a child into the unsuspecting Immaculate Conception.

“Supposedly, she was abducted and impregnated by an alien race.They argue that the beam of light striking Mary while she is indoors is consistent with modern-day alien abductions.

“Many people who claim to have been abducted state that they were inside their homes when a strange light shone from outside the buildings.”

However, computer scientist Jacques Vallee told Huffington Post that the painting is fictional, and there is no way the artist would know what is in the skies at the time of the supposed conception of Christ as it was painted almost 1500 years later.

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Meet J. Allen Hynek, the Astronomer Who First Classified UFO ‘Close Encounters’

by Greg Daugherty                      November 19, 2018                      (history.com)

• In 1947, a rash of reports of UFOs had the public on edge. The Air Force created Project Sign to investigate these UFO sightings. But they needed outside expertise to sift through the reports and come up with explanations for all of these sightings. Enter J. Allen Hynek.

• In 1948, Hynek was the 37-year-old director at Ohio State University’s McMillin Observatory. He had worked for the government during WWII developing new defense technologies for the war effort with a high security clearance. The Air Force approached him to be a consultant on ‘flying saucers’ for the government. “I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense,” Hynek recalled.

• Hynek’s UFO investigations under Project Sign resulted in twenty percent of the 237 cases that couldn’t be explained. In February 1949, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge, which said Hynek, “took as its premise that UFOs simply could not be.” The 1949 Grudge report concluded that the phenomena posed no danger to the United States, and warranted no further study.

• But UFO incidents continued, even from the Air Force’s own radar operators. The national media began treating the phenomenon more seriously. The Air Force had little choice but to revive Project Grudge under a new name: Project Blue Book. Hynek joined Project Blue Book in 1952 and would remain with it until its demise in 1969. But he had changed his mind about the existence of UFOs. “The witnesses I interviewed could have been lying, could have been insane or could have been hallucinating collectively—but I do not think so,” he recalled in 1977. Hynek deplored the ridicule that people who reported a UFO sighting often had to endure, causing untold numbers of others to never come forward, not to mention the loss of useful research data.

• “Given the controversial nature of the subject, it’s understandable that both scientists and witnesses are reluctant to come forward,” said Jacques Vallee, co-author with Dr. Hynek of The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

• On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union surprised the world by launching Sputnik, a serious blow to Americans’ sense of technological superiority. Hynek was on TV assuring Americans that their scientists were closely monitoring the situation. UFO sightings continued unabated.

• In the 1960s, Hynek was the top expert on UFOs as scientific consultant to Project Blue Book. But he chafed at what he perceived as the project’s mandate to debunk UFO sightings, and the inadequate resources at his disposal. Air Force Major Hector Quintanilla, who headed the project from 1963 to 1969, writes that he considered Hynek a “liability.”

• Hynek frustrated UFO debunkers such as the U.S. Air Force. But in 1966, after suggesting that a UFO sighting in Michigan may have been an optical illusion created by swamp gas, he became a punchline for UFO believers as well.

• In his testimony for a Congressional hearing in 1966, Hynek stated, “[I]t is my opinion that the body of data accumulated since 1948…deserves close scrutiny by a civilian panel of physical and social scientists…”. The Air Force established a civilian committee of scientists to investigate UFOs, chaired by physicist, Dr. Edward U. Condon. In 1968, Hynek assailed the Condon Report’s conclusion that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified.” In 1969, Project Blue Book shut down for good.

• UFO sightings continued around the world. Hynek later quipped, “apparently [they] did not read the Condon Report”. Hynek went on with his research, free from the compromises and bullying of the U.S. Air Force.

• In 1972, Hynek published his first book, The UFO Experience. It introduced Hynek’s classifications of UFO incidents, which he called Close Encounters. Close Encounters of the First Kind meant UFOs seen at a close enough range to make out some details. In a Close Encounter of the Second Kind, the UFO had a physical effect, such as scorching trees, frightening animals or causing car motors to suddenly conk out. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, witnesses reported seeing occupants in or near a UFO.

• In 1977, Steven Spielberg released the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hynek was paid $1,000 for the use of the title, another $1,000 for the rights to use stories from the book and $1,500 for three days of technical consulting. He also had a brief cameo in the film, playing an awestruck scientist when the alien spacecraft comes into view.

• In 1978, Hynek retired from teaching. In 1973 he had founded the Center for UFO Studies which continues to this day. Hynek died in 1986, at age 75, from a brain tumor.

 

It’s September 1947, and the U.S. Air Force has a problem. A rash of reports about mysterious objects in the skies has the public on edge and the military baffled. The Air Force needs to figure out what’s going on—and fast. It launches an investigation it calls Project Sign.

By early 1948 the team realizes it needs some outside expertise to sift through the reports it’s receiving—specifically an astronomer who can determine which cases are easily explained by astronomical phenomena, such as planets, stars or meteors.

For J. Allen Hynek, then the 37-year-old director at Ohio State University’s McMillin Observatory, it would be a classic case of being in the right place at the right time—or, as he may have occasionally lamented, the wrong place at the wrong one.

The adventure begins

Hynek had worked for the government during the war, developing new defense technologies like the first radio-controlled fuse, so he already had a high security clearance and was a natural go-to.

“One day I had a visit from several men from the technical center at Wright-Patterson Air Force base, which was only 60 miles away in Dayton,” Hynek later wrote. “With some obvious embarrassment, the men eventually brought up the subject of ‘flying saucers’ and asked me if I would care to serve as consultant to the Air Force on the matter… The job didn’t seem as though it would take too much time, so I agreed.”

Little did Hynek realize that he was about to begin a lifelong odyssey that would make him one of the most famous and, at times, controversial scientists of the 20 century. Nor could he have guessed how much his own thinking about UFOs would change over that period as he persisted in bringing rigorous scientific inquiry to the subject.

“I had scarcely heard of UFOs in 1948 and, like every other scientist I knew, assumed that they were nonsense,” he recalled.

Project Sign ran for a year, during which the team reviewed 237 cases. In Hynek’s final report, he noted that about 32 percent of incidents could be attributed to astronomical phenomena, while another 35 percent had other explanations, such as balloons, rockets, flares or birds. Of the remaining 33 percent, 13 percent didn’t offer enough evidence to yield an explanation. That left 20 percent that provided investigators with some evidence but still couldn’t be explained.

The Air Force was loath to use the term “unidentified flying object,” so the mysterious 20 percent were simply classified as “unidentified.”

In February 1949, Project Sign was succeeded by Project Grudge. While Sign offered at least a pretense of scientific objectivity, Grudge seems to have been dismissive from the start, just as its angry-sounding name suggests. Hynek, who played no role in Project Grudge, said it “took as its premise that UFOs simply could not be.” Perhaps not surprisingly, its report, issued at the end of 1949, concluded that the phenomena posed no danger to the United States, having resulted from mass hysteria, deliberate hoaxes, mental illness or conventional objects that the witnesses had misinterpreted as otherworldly. It also suggested the subject wasn’t worth further study.

Project Blue Book is born

That might’ve been the end of it. But UFO incidents continued, including some puzzling reports from the Air Force’s own radar operators. The national media began treating the phenomenon more seriously; LIFE magazine did a 1952 cover story, and even the widely respected TV journalist Edward R. Murrow devoted a program to the topic, including an interview with Kenneth Arnold, a pilot whose 1947 sighting of mysterious objects over Mount Rainier in Washington state popularized the term “flying saucer.” The Air Force had little choice but to revive Project Grudge, which soon morphed into the more benignly named Project Blue Book.

Hynek joined Project Blue Book in 1952 and would remain with it until its demise in 1969. For him, it was a side gig as he continued to teach and to pursue other, non-UFO research, at Ohio State. In 1960 he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to chair its astronomy department.

As before, Hynek’s role was to review the reports of UFO sightings and determine whether there was a logical astronomical explanation. Typically that involved a lot of unglamorous paperwork; but now and then, for an especially puzzling case, he had a chance to get out into the field.

There he discovered something he might never have learned from simply reading the files: how normal the people who reported seeing UFOs tended to be. “The witnesses I interviewed could have been lying, could have been insane or could have been hallucinating collectively—but I do not think so,” he recalled in his 1977 book, The Hynek UFO Report.

“Their standing in the community, their lack of motive for perpetration of a hoax, their own puzzlement at the turn of events they believe they witnessed, and often their great reluctance to speak of the experience—all lend a subjective reality to their UFO experience.”

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UFOs: “Deception…Is The Key To This Whole Business”

by Nick Redfern           March 14, 2018          (mysteriousuniverse.org)

• The 1950’s was the heyday for the ‘Contactee/Space Brother’ movement wherein people like George Adamski (pictured above) were routinely visited by benevolent non-terrestrial beings. Also known as “Orthons”, these Space Brothers have appeared throughout history on mountain tops, in deserts, and have appeared to walk on water, or fly in the sky. The Contactee is a sort of psychic lightning-rod who is highly susceptible to receiving psychic messages. The Orthon will plant ideas and stories into the mind of the Contactee as a seed to spread these ideas to the rest of the population. These implanted ideas are meant to provide a helpful cultural message to humanity. Orthon was the name of Adamski’s Venusian ‘space brother’ whom he “met” in November 1952.

• In his book Looking for Orthon, the late Colin Bennett explains that these Orthon’s are figments of the imagination triggered by extraterrestrial forces for the purpose of implanting information into a susceptible Contactee, including the physical presence of the being itself. The Contactee is certain that he has met an actual physical being, and may even photograph it. So there is a measure of deception and manipulation happening. The psychic implant may also extend to materializing objects and situations.

• In his book Passport to Magonia, Jacques Vallee says that Orthons and Space Brothers may be a form of ‘alien’ life that has been with us for a long time. Such ethereal beings are part of the structure that creates a “mystical experience” in a Contactee. When someone says that they’ve seen a fairy being, and another says that is impossible as fairies don’t exist, it still leaves the idea of the possibility that nevertheless, they may in fact exist.

• Writes Vallee, “[Orthons] allow humanity to breathe and access a Matrix world in which anything that can be imagined can happen. It might be denied by [the] social-scientific left, but the truth is that dreams, fantasies, and mystical experiences of all kinds play an absolutely essential part in all human mental operations.”

• “George Adamski played a significant part in establishing New Age thinking,” continues Vallee. “It might be well to remember that the entire body of our moral philosophy and spiritual life is formed by visions and inspirations… Those who thoughtlessly dismiss mystical experience cut themselves off from all art, literature, and no small part of all thought and philosophy… The greatest tribute that can be paid to Adamski is that through both foul means and fair, he helped to create one of the very few routes to the unconscious that we have.”

 

As some readers of Mysterious Universe will know, one of my big interests is the Contactee/Space Brother phenomenon, which was most prominent in the 1950s. It’s a subject which is very often derided by many in Ufology (and, at times, with good reason…). But, that doesn’t take away the fact that the issue is an important one. Of those who tackled the whole controversy, certainly one of the most knowledgeable was the late Colin Bennett. He wrote what – in my opinion – remains the most important and insightful book on contactee George Adamski. The title of Colin’s book? Looking for Orthon – Orthon being the alleged name of the equally alleged alien that Adamski claimed to have met in November 1952.

Back in 2009, I interviewed Colin about his ideas on Adamski, the Space Brothers and the Contactee crowd. And, today, I thought I would share with you – and without interruption – Colin’s observations on those long-gone times of the 1950s when the Contactee movement ruled the ufological roost. Colin, who died in 2014, told me:

“Many Orthons have appeared throughout history. The equivalents to Adamski’s Venusian ‘space brother’ have appeared on mountain tops, in deserts, and have appeared to walk on water, or fly in the sky. Their sole function is to sow seeds in the head; just as a farmer grows a particular crop. These seeds act on the imagination, which replicates and amplifies whatever story-technology is around at the time. People such as Adamski and the rest of the contactees were, and still are, like psychic lightning-rods for certain brands of information. Undoubtedly, rich or poor, clever or dumb, they are possessed by a kind of higher cerebral disturbance, and like Moses, they are as prepared for the ‘visitation’ as they anxiously await for a new product brand, for the equivalent to RFID-type branding is what ‘contact’ is all about.

“Contactees are host-nutrients for whatever cultural sales lines are on offer from visions conjured up by clouds, sea or sand. The message is ‘consumed’ and thoroughly processed exactly as a viral product is absorbed. The incomprehensibility of the received stories is irrelevant. They represent a heavily codified branch of postmodern intellectual consumerism. In receiving ‘messages’ at all, Contactees are bar coded as it were, and elements of the induced story-technology are ready to crystallize out into that final alchemical stage called the mechanical real. But we must be careful here. As the alchemist said to his apprentice, ‘The game may be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.’

“Deception and all its ramifications is the key to this whole business. This does not burst the bubble of the mystery however, for manipulative levels of faction may well be our first clue as to how a possible alien mind might work. If the levels of deception of all kinds in human culture are anything to go by, the range of such within an alien culture must be both multiple and profound.”

“The ‘space-folk’ are sculptured by wars between rival viral memes competing for prime-time belief. It may be that, as an independent form of non-organic life, memes as active viral information can display an Orthon entity at a drop of a hat. They come complete with sets of cultural agendas. After they have rung the doorbell as it were, and the goods are sold, these metaphysical salesmen disappear like the traditional Men in Black, no doubt traveling on to seed other dreams in other towns and other heads. The goods we have unwittingly bought are half-formed memories of having met someone from another world.”

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The MJ12 Documents: The Government’s Position

by Nick Redfern         December 9, 2017           (mysteriousuniverse.org)

• In 1980, William Moore co-authored the book,The Roswell Incident. Soon thereafter, Moore was contacted by intelligence insiders who would covertly pass along intelligence information. In 1984, Moore’s friend, tv producer Jaime Shandera received a roll of film of photos of MJ-12 documents. Moore, Shandera, and Stanton Friedman studied and attempted to authenticate the documents for 2 ½ years.

• MJ-12 or Majestic 12 is a clandestine UFO/extraterrestrial oversight group, above the President, created in 1947 in the wake of the Roswell crash. It was/is comprised by twelve elite military, scientific, and intelligence officials.

• In 1987, Timothy Good published his book, Above Top Secret, and revealed the existence of MJ-12 along with leaked copies of MJ-12 documents. With the release of Good’s book, William Moore released his information on MJ-12 as well and it all went public.

• According to Jacques Vallee, when the FBI were given these MJ-12 documents, they turned away in disgust, professing no interest in the matter. When UFO debunker Philip Klass contacted the FBI about the alleged MJ-12 documents in 1988, the FBI opened an investigation. Also in 1988, an unauthorized Air Force agent gave the Dallas FBI office a file of MJ-12 documents. The Air Force immediately told the Dallas FBI that the documents were part of a number of these fake documents circulating around the United States. They told the Dallas FBI office to close the investigation.

• In 1993, the Air Force told this article’s writer, Nick Redfern, that they never had any MJ-12 documents in their possession and that MJ-12 doesn’t exist. Furthermore, the Air Force had never discussed MJ-12 with the FBI. The Air Force could not, however, provide any documents or evidence showing that they actually investigated the matter. Today, the FBI’s investigation into MJ-12 is officially “closed”.

• In the 1990s, investigator Timothy Cooper brought to the FBI hundreds more pages of MJ-12 documents, but they never made it to the public domain.

• Redfern ponders: ‘how was the Air Force able to determine that the papers were faked if no investigation on their part was undertaken?’ Was it just an opinion based on the unlikely nature and content of the documents?

• [Editor’s Note] Amazingly, Redfern takes the side of the Air Force cover-up, agreeing that the MJ-12 documents (presumably all of them) are bogus fakes. He considers the Air Force’s arbitrary dismissal of such a clandestine deep state government UFO committee to be “both understandable and reasonable”. Redfern ends the article flippantly, saying “[it] is time, methinks, for the rotted corpse to be laid to rest, once and for all,” the rotted corpse being the very existence of an MJ-12 oversight committee. It was all just a rumor. Really Nick?

 

It has been thirty years since the original, so-called “MJ12 documents” surfaced. In 1987, Timothy Good’s bestselling book Above Top Secret was published. One of the most-talked-about aspects of Good’s book was the mention of a supposed top secret research and development group established in 1947 to deal with highly classified UFO data. Referred to as either Majestic 12 or MJ12, it was said to have been created in the wake of the notorious events at Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. It was said to have been comprised of military personnel, scientists, and the elite of the U.S. Intelligence community. Not only that: Good published copies of what were said to be leaked MJ12 documents that told of (a) the establishment of the group; (b) the apparent crash of a UFO, complete with alien bodies, at Roswell; and (c) a briefing given in 1952 on the matter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Shortly after Good’s publication of the documents, additional copies surfaced in the United States. They came from the then research team of well-known ufologist Stanton Friedman, William Moore (the co-author, with Charles Berlitz, of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident) and Jaime Shandera (a television producer). Moore had been working quietly with a number of intelligence insiders who had contacted him shortly after publication of The Roswell Incident. From time to time various official-looking papers were passed onto Moore, the implication being that someone in the U.S. Government, military or Intelligence Community wished to make available information on UFOs that would otherwise have remained forever outside of the public domain.

It was as a result of Moore’s insider dealings that a roll of film negatives displaying the MJ12 documents was delivered in the mail to the home of Shandera in December 1984. Moore, Friedman and Shandera worked carefully and quietly for two and a half years in an attempt to determine the authenticity of the documents. With Timothy Good’s release, however, it was decided that the best course of action was to follow suit. As a result, a controversy was created that still continues to this day. At least, it continues to a small degree. Most people in Ufology have moved on from the MJ12 documents. But, they still occasionally cause a brief raising of eyebrows, such as when the latest batch surfaced earlier this year. Who remembers them now? I try not to.

Jacques Vallee, UFO author, investigator, and former principal investigator on Department of Defense computer networking projects-stated in his book Revelations that the FBI turned away from the MJ12 documents in “disgust” and professed no interest in the matter. Papers and comments made to me by the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, however, reflect a somewhat different scenario. It was in 1988 that the FBI’s investigation began – after the late UFO skeptic/debunker Philip Klass contacted the FBI and told them all about the supposedly leaked, highly-classified documents and who had put them in the public domain.

We also know – thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act – that what was possibly a separate autumn 1988 investigation was conducted by the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence division (operating out of Washington and New York). Some input into the investigation also came from the FBI office in Dallas, Texas – the involvement of the latter confirmed to me by the Dallas office in the early 1990s.

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