Jan Harzan | Exo News

MUFON Sets Up Permanent Headquarters in Cincinnati

April 5, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Maija Zummo March 23, 2021 (citybeat.com)

• Launched in 1969, today MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) has more than 600 trained investigators and 4,200 members across the world to investigate UFO sightings, collect research data in the worldwide MUFON database, educate the public on the UFO phenomenon, and promote research on UFOs with an eye towards scientific breakthroughs and improving life on our planet.

• Historically, MUFON has moved to wherever its executive director is located. In 2012, MUFON headquarters moved from Cincinnati, Ohio to Irvine, California. Current executive director David MacDonald is based out of Cincinnati. So MUFON is returning to the Queen City permanently.

• “Cincinnati is within a six-hour drive to 80% of the nation. It is also highly valued due to its many advantages to business,” says MacDonald. “Cincinnati is remarkably less expensive to live in as well as do business in than Southern California. One of Cincinnati’s largest corporate headquarters once said, ‘We have two problems to being in Cincinnati — one is to get people to move here, the second is getting them to leave.’”

• The Cincinnati area has a special connection to UFOs. “Wright Patterson is 45 minutes away,” MacDonald says. “There are quite a few (UFO) sightings in the Tri-State area, and it was the home of one of the most famous UFO pioneers in the world, Len Stringfield.”

• MacDonald says investigators are “the foundation of MUFON.” MUFON is actively recruiting more UFO hunters. But being a field investigator takes more than mild curiosity. Ideal candidates are stable, dependable and objective with hours of volunteer time available, and have “an above-average interest in the UFO phenomenon.” Each candidate has to pass a background check, attend MUFON University training online and take an exam before becoming an official trainee. After that, the trainee must shadow a professional investigator before they’re allowed out in the field alone.

• “This is one of the most exciting times for MUFON,” says MacDonald. “For 52 years, we’ve searched for the truth about UFOs and now it is breaking.” “Around 2018, the now-famous ‘Tic Tac’ videos were released. Recently, the United States government is being directed to release their classified information where it has been confirmed that a UFO (not a missile) flew over a commercial airliner near White Sands. An Israeli professor who was a high-ranking intelligence officer, publicly disclosed that UFOs are not only real, but they are here. But the blockbuster came a few weeks ago when the Pentagon acknowledged that they do in fact have crash debris from UFOs.”

• [Editor’s Note] MacDonald replaces former MUFON executive director Jan Harzan after Harzan was arrested for soliciting a 13 year old girl for sex online last summer in Huntington, California.

The truth is out there.

And possibly literally right here in the Queen City, as Cincinnati is once again home to nonprofit UFO investigation organization Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON.

Launched in 1969, MUFON has three goals, which its more than 600 trained investigators and 4,200 members across the world enact:
1. Investigate UFO sightings and collect the data in the MUFON Database for use by researchers worldwide.
2. Promote research on UFOs to discover the true nature of the phenomenon, with an eye towards scientific breakthroughs, and improving life on our planet.
3. Educate the public on the UFO phenomenon and its potential impact on society.

Although the organization has moved several times since its founding, it left Cincinnati in 2012 to relocate to Irvine, California. Now, its board of directors has declared MUFON is permanently returning to the Queen City, setting up headquarters near Lunken Airport.

Historically, MUFON has moved to wherever its executive director is located; current executive director David MacDonald is based out of Cincinnati. (MacDonald also previously served as director, hence MUFON’s former stint in the city.)

“Cincinnati is within a six-hour drive to 80% of the nation. It is also highly valued due to its many advantages to business,” MacDonald tells CityBeat. “Cincinnati is remarkably less expensive to live in as well as do business in than Southern California. One of Cincinnati’s largest corporate headquarters once said, ‘We have two problems to being in Cincinnati — one is to get people to move here, the second is getting them to leave.’”

But besides the logistics, MacDonald says making the move to Cincinnati permanent is valuable because the area has a special connection to UFOs.

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Are the Aliens Us? UFOs May be Piloted by Time-Traveling Humans

January 28, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Leonard David January 20, 2020 (space.com)

• UFOs have captured the public’s attention for decades and the discovery of new exoplanets is on the rise. Could reports of people coming into contact with alien beings actually be our own human descendants returning from the future to study their own evolutionary past? Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte (pictured above), has advanced this theory in his book, Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon.

• Reasoning why aliens are likely humans in the distant future, Masters notes that contactees typically describe extraterrestrial visitors as bipedal, human-like beings with the ability to communicate with us in our own languages. They possess advanced technology that is clearly built upon today’s technological prowess. Unlike an alien traveling vast distances across the galaxy to happen upon us, our descendants would already know that humans are on this Earth at this time. Says Masters, “I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us.”

• Masters observes how much more we could learned about our own evolutionary history if we possessed the technology to visit the past. “The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature,” says Masters. “It’s probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can’t without access to that technology.” Masters thinks that some are simply space tourists. “Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history.”

• Jan Harzan, executive director of the Mutual UFO Network, or ‘MUFON’, agrees with Masters. “[W]e know for sure is that we are not alone,” Harzan says. “Now the question becomes, ‘Who are they?’ And Masters makes a great case for the time-traveler hypothesis.”

• UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer responds, “There is nothing (here) to take seriously, as it depends on the belief that ‘time travel’ is not only possible, but real.” “This is a highly dubious claim.” Sheaffer notes that Masters tries to deduce aliens’ evolutionary history from witness descriptions. “[H]e takes such accounts far too literally,” says Sheaffer.

• British astronomer and writer David Darling argues that there’s precious little credible evidence that big-brained aliens exist at all. He says that one of the least likely explanations for UFOs is that they are not of this world. So it’s just as reasonable to suppose that they might be time machines from our own future. But neither explanation is realistic, so “there’s really no need for such a thesis in the first place.” It’s all a myth.

• Larry Lemke, a retired NASA aerospace engineer, finds the prospect of time-travelling visitors from the future intriguing. “[T]hese (UFOs) don’t seem to be obeying the usual laws of aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics,” said Lemke. Considering reports of ‘missing time’ and the consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, some UFOs do demonstrate the effects of general relativity. The idea that somebody has figured out how to manipulate space-time, on a local scale with a low-energy approach, would explain a lot of things about the UFO phenomenon, including those baffling Tic-Tac-shaped objects reported by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators.

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public’s attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies by taking an interstellar off-ramp to Earth?

On the other hand, could those piloting UFOs be us — our future progeny that have mastered the landscape of time and space? Perhaps those

reports of people coming into contact with strange beings represent our distant human descendants, returning from the future to study us in their own evolutionary past.

The idea of us being them has been advanced before. But a recent book, “Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon” (Masters Creative LLC, 2019), takes a fresh look at this prospect, offering some thought-provoking proposals.

Multidisciplinary approach

The book was written by Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte. Masters thinks that – given the accelerating pace of change in science, technology, and engineering – it is likely that humans of the distant future could develop the knowledge and machinery necessary to return to the past.

The objective of the book, Masters said, is to spur a new and more informed discussion among believers and skeptics alike.

“I took a multidisciplinary approach in order to try and understand the oddities of this phenomenon,” Masters told Space.com. “Our job as scientists is

to be asking big questions and try to find answers to unknown questions. There’s something going on here, and we should be having a conversation about this. We should be at the forefront of trying to find out what it is.”

Human evolution

Dubbing these purported visitors “extratempestrials,” Masters notes that close-encounter accounts typically describe UFO tenants as bipedal, hairless, human-like beings with large brains, large eyes, small noses and small mouths. Further, the creatures are often said to have the ability to communicate with us in our own languages and possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, today’s technological prowess.

Masters believes that through a comprehensive analysis of consistent patterns of long-term biocultural change throughout human evolution — as well as recent advances in our understanding of time and time travel — we may begin to consider this future possibility in the context of a currently unexplained phenomenon.

“The book ties together those known aspects of our evolutionary history with what is still an unproven, unverified aspect of UFOs and aliens,” he said.

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A ‘Turning Point’ on UFOs: Physicist Michio Kaku Tells Ufology Conference the Truth is Out There

September 27, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E107 9-27-19 A ‘Turning Point’ on UFOs: Physicist Michio Kaku Tells Ufology Conference the Truth is Out There” on Spreaker.Article by Melissa Rossi September 13, 2019 (yahoo.com)

• Michio Kaku, a well-known science writer and professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, spoke to the audience at the Ufology World Congress in Barcelona, Spain (September 6-9, 2019) about UFOs and the true extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Kaku exhorted the audience of 1,000 at the Hesperia Barcelona Tower hotel, that if they were ever taken aboard an extraterrestrial craft, “For God’s sake, steal something! … a pocketed alien paper clip, alien fork, even a bit of “alien dandruff” that would yield useful chemical and genetic information to scientists. Scientists such as Kaku at the conference called for the world to take the study of UFOs more seriously and respectable.

• The field of astrobiology – the study of life outside Earth – has been invigorated by some provocative findings released over the past 20 months. The US Navy video was released of UFOs behaving like no known aircraft. Kaku told the crowd, “We now know they fly between Mach 5 and Mach 20 — five to 20 times the speed of sound. We know they zigzag so fast that any pilot would be crushed by centrifugal force. That they have no exhaust that we can see.” “The explanations usually invoked for UFO sightings — meteors, weather balloons, even the planet Venus — can’t explain these live-action high-precision shots.” Then Kaku reached his conclusion: either they are of human origin, representing a technology so cutting-edge that even leading scientists are puzzled by it. Or, he said, “maybe they are evidence of an advanced outer space civilization.” After all, Kaku noted, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, while earthly science was born 300 years ago. On any of 4,000 recently discovered exoplanets, where life as we know it might be able to exist, alien civilizations may well have had much longer to advance their scientific and technological skills. In fact, Kaku surmised that pilots in alien spacecraft may be cybernetic or robotic.

• “We’ve reached a turning point,” said Kaku. “It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they’re not from intelligent beings in outer space.”

• In a throwback to the ’50s and ’60s, when sightings of flying saucers were front-page news, the media is now giving the topic more airtime and more ink. Congress is demanding more information. New TV shows and documentaries are popping up. There is a renewed interest in the 1947 Roswell incident, the Rendlesham Forest incident, and in Area 51. Rock star Tom DeLonge has created a research academy and History channel series that explores the Pentagon’s own UFO study program, which released several Navy cockpit videos of “unidentified aerial phenomenon’.

• The Pentagon study – the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ – also revealed hint that the Defense Department is studying far more than the existence of extraterrestrial UFOs in the skies, but also how they work. Titles of AATIP reports have surfaced that include “Traversable Wormholes,” “Invisibility Cloaks,” “Space Communication Implications of Quantum Entanglement” and “Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.” The head of that Pentagon program, Luis Elizondo, left the government in 2017 to join DeLonge’s UFO research academy. Billionaire Robert Bigelow and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon are also consultants with the academy.

• Formerly with the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense’s UFO program in the 1990’s, Nick Pope says, “We’re in game-changing, paradigm-busting territory.” Pope said UFOs are the topic that Brits most often ask their government about. Citing reports from European governments as well as the U.S. and accounts of sightings by “police officers, pilots and military personnel,” he hopes to “bring the subject out of the fringe and into the mainstream.” Pope believes that “more likely than not,” some UFOs may be of extraterrestrial origin.

• The conference’s three days of lectures and workshops explored the diversity of UFO craft (shaped like barbells, cigars, shiny orbs or even Tic Tacs), the numerous varieties of alien races (from the lizard-like Dracos and large-eyed, hairless Greys to the tall, human-like Nordics), and the phenomena of crop circles, lucid dreaming, and preparing the pineal gland for alien arrivals by learning “the language of light.”

• Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan spoke about the three-fingered mummies from Peru. Social scientists J.J. and Desiree Hurtak spoke about pyramids on Mars, UFOs spotted near the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant, footprints of giants in South Africa, and alien corpses that are under top-secret control. Spanish parapsychology investigator Sergio Ruiz said that he has been studying demonic possession, and the first thing that’s taught is that victims of possession may in fact have been overtaken by extraterrestrials.

• Jan Harzan, executive director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), claims that “We are definitely not alone. It’s a fact!” Harzan said the majority of the 500 or more UFO reports his organization receives monthly are dismissed. But “about 5 percent appear to be legitimate.” That implies around 300 genuine sightings of alien craft per year. When asked why beings from outer space would have any interest in Earth, most speakers said they were coming in peace and to help humanity. Harzan, said that most extraterrestrial sources are concerned about saving the planet from destruction.

• But American “exopolitics lawyer”, Alfred Webre, said that extraterrestrials are coming to Earth to recruit human slave labor. Said Webre, “There are some estimates that 60 million humans are enslaved in industrial facilities in the solar systems, producing products used through the galaxy.” Even worse, the race known as Draco-Reptilians, believed to come from the Orion constellation, have a taste for human babies. Webre said that our world is actually being overseen by a regional galactic government of “seven or eight civilizations,” and humanity will be “rejoining the (peaceful) galactic community of nations.”

BARCELONA, Spain — For the often-ridiculed followers of ufology, the study of unidentified flying objects, there was a sense of validation when the celebrated physicist and author Michio Kaku took a break from his work on string field theory to address the Ufology World Congress here last weekend and offer some advice on how to behave aboard an alien spaceship.

“For God’s sake, steal something!” he exhorted the audience of 1,000 at the Hesperia Barcelona Tower hotel, famous for its spaceship bar perched off the 29th floor. Kaku said a pocketed alien paper clip, alien fork, even a bit of “alien dandruff” would yield useful chemical and genetic information to scientists.

It is, of course, a matter of speculation whether extraterrestrials have hair, let alone dandruff. Drawings based on the descriptions of people who claim to have seen them typically depict them as bald, although there is also believed to be a race of blond

humanoid aliens known as “Nordics.”

Kaku, a well-known science writer, media personality and professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, also spoke to Yahoo News about assorted planetary matters, including his concerns about a future traffic jam in orbits around the moon, in a separate interview.

Even without extraterrestrial dandruff to analyze, the field of astrobiology, the study of life outside Earth, has been invigorated recently by some provocative findings released over the past 20 months. Researchers have been poring over recently declassified videos shot by U.S. Navy pilots over the East Coast in 2015, showing mysterious flying objects that behave like no known aircraft. Thanks to newly updated radar systems in Navy jets, the videos have aided scientists by providing “testability” and previously unknown metrics about UFOs. “We now know they fly between Mach 5 and Mach 20 — five to 20 times the speed of sound,” Kaku said. “We know they zigzag so fast that any pilot would be crushed by centrifugal force. That they have no exhaust that we can see.” The explanations usually invoked for UFO sightings — meteors, weather balloons, even the planet Venus — can’t explain these live-action high-precision shots, said Kaku, leading to either of two possible conclusions: They are of human origin, representing a technology so cutting-edge that even leading scientists are puzzled by it. Or, he said, “maybe they are evidence of an advanced outer space civilization.”

Could they be Russian, not Martian? Perhaps, Kaku allowed, given that last year Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that “Russia had built a hypersonic flying vehicle that can zigzag.” The U.S. and China are also working on hypersonic drones. On the other hand, Kaku emphasized, “maybe they are extraterrestrial.” After all, he noted, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, while earthly science was born merely 300 years ago; on any of 4,000 recently discovered exoplanets, where life as we know it might be able to exist, alien civilizations may well have had much longer to advance their scientific and technological skills.

Even if not smoking-gun proof, the declassified videos — bolstered by confirmation of multiple sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles during 2014 and 2015, including at least one near-collision — are giving ufology new weight. “We’ve reached a turning point,” Kaku said. “It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they’re not from intelligent beings in outer space.”

The possibility that they are vehicles from other planetary civilizations, Kaku told Yahoo, “now has to be put on the table.”

Still, in the absence of even a molecule of aliens’ DNA, if they have DNA — Kaku cautioned that pilots in alien spacecraft may be cybernetic or robotic — astrobiology remains largely a discipline without a material subject matter. Which is why Kaku wants something scientists can touch and examine in the lab, predicting that “it will end the debate right then and there.”

Whatever the state of provability, ETs and spinning discs are again the rage, as evidenced in more than just ticket prices for the three-day Ufology World Congress, which ranged up to $1,600 for premium seating and a “meet-and-greet” with Kaku.

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UFOs Remain Elusive Despite Decades of Study

August 1, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E49 8-01-19 UFOs Remain Elusive Despite Decades of Study” on Spreaker.
by Leonard David June 27, 2019 (livescience.com)

• The Mutual UFO Network, or ‘MUFON’, celebrates 50 years of UFO investigation and research. Based in Irvine, California, the all-volunteer, nonprofit organization has endeavored since 1969 to be the ‘refuge seeking answers to that most ancient question, are we alone in the universe?’ The answer, very simply, is no.

• Jan Harzan has been the executive director for MUFON since August 2013. “I’ve seen these craft. I know they are real,” he told Space.com. “I can’t tell you where they’re from. …But they are advanced technology.” Harzan continues, “We have over 100,000 UFO cases in our files … and it’s growing. We currently have worldwide over 500 certified MUFON field investigators that go out and look at each one of these cases.”

• A MUFON Science Review Board consists of scientists with degrees in physics, chemistry, geology and electrical engineering. Their work experience includes NASA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and France’s national space program, CNES. The MUFON Board reviews the best cases and strongest cases that cannot be identified as any known object.

• Nearly 34% of reports coming into MUFON can be identified, be they aircraft, rocket launches, satellites, drones, astronomical events, or even Chinese lanterns. For example, Google’s Project Loon uses high-flying balloons to bring Wi-Fi internet to rural areas. It has repeatedly prompted UFO reports. “But on the other hand,” says Harzan, “when you read some of the reports – we call it the 5% – one out of twenty – that are incredible observations by very articulate and credible people, you get about 5% of cases that are so rock solid.”

• Harzan says that these extraterrestrial beings have advanced physics that we don’t yet understand, and which our current science is incapable of understanding. “I personally believe,” says Harzan, “once we do, we’ll be out there doing the same thing that they are doing. We’re probably 20 to 30 years away from being the aliens.”

• Former UFO investigator for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, Nick Pope compares the UFO community, and the MUFON subset, to a “broad church” – a group of people who have a range of different views, yet bound together by a common interest. As in the UFO community, MUFON has had its disputes and feuds. Pope maintains that “None of this detracts from the fact that [MUFON] provides a valuable service to UFO witnesses, with field investigators looking into the sightings, sometimes turning up a conventional explanation and other times simply giving perplexed witnesses someone with whom to engage.”

• “MUFON is clearly at a disadvantage,” Pope says, “given that most of their members are nonscientists.” But he doesn’t think this is necessarily a problem. MUFON provides the necessary day-to-day business of investigating UFOs, with interviews, evidence gathering, tracking down leads, and double checking facts. “Scientific advice should be sought when necessary – for instance, if a soil sample needs to be checked for radioactivity,” Pope said. “I don’t think we should get too hung up on whether or not MUFON as a whole is sufficiently scientific.”

• It is becoming harder to weed out and identify “real” UFOs, Harzan admitted. In 1987, MUFON fired two investigators who labeled some MUFON-endorsed Gulf Breeze photos as a hoax and disavowed their report. This caused a stir in the organization. In 2017, MUFON lost a number of experienced investigators when they invited proponents of the breakaway “secret space program” to participate in its symposium panels in Las Vegas. Robert Sheaffer, a leading UFO skeptic says, “MUFON proclaims its dedication to the scientific method in UFO investigations, but it seldom lives up to that ideal.”

• Sheaffer also points to MUFON providing cases for the producers of the TV series “Hangar 1”, which premiered in 2014 on The History Channel, which was “almost universally panned by serious UFO investigators for its sensationalist approach. “However, it too has been extremely successful in bringing people into MUFON,” said Sheaffer.

• [Editor’s Note] I like this Jan Harzan. Harzan says that no, we are not alone. He isn’t afraid of allowing for an extraterrestrial explanation. He reports that “nearly 34% of reports coming into MUFON can be identified”, therefore 66% are not identified. And that “5% – one out of twenty – are “incredible observations by very articulate and credible people.” “Rock solid.” I agree that MUFON is no less a valid UFO organization than the “scientific” organizations such as SETI, or academic institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and the Smithsonian Museum. In fact, I prefer these citizen investigations and tend to trust their reports. These are people who are motivated by getting to the truth, and they are not likely to be bought off or influenced by Deep State agents. On the other hand, the aforementioned organizations and institutions are an obvious front for the Deep State, predisposed to refute and deny any existence of extraterrestrial UFOs at all.

In July, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) celebrates 50 years of investigating and promoting research on the unidentified flying object phenomenon. The all-volunteer, nonprofit, science-based organization has endeavored since 1969 to hunt down answers about baffling vehicles of unknown origin.

Based in Irvine, California, MUFON makes its credo clear-cut on its website: “Our goal is to be the inquisitive minds’ refuge seeking answers to that most ancient question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ The answer, very simply, is no. Whether you have UFO reports to share, armchair UFO investigator aspirations, or want to train and join our investigation team, MUFON is here for you. Won’t you please join us in our quest to discover the truth?”

After five decades, has there been any scientific pay dirt in studying UFOs? Are we inching closer to the truth that is perhaps out there?

Share the data

Jan Harzan is MUFON’s executive director, manning that post since August 2013.

“I’ve seen these craft. I know they are real,” he told Space.com. “I can’t tell you where they’re from. I don’t know if they are ours or belong to somebody else or whatever. But they are advanced technology.”

The world needs to understand UFOs, Harzan said. “This is real. We’ve got to put the data out there and share it. We have over 100,000 UFO cases in our files … and it’s growing. We currently have worldwide over 500 certified MUFON field investigators that go out and look at each one of these cases,” he said.

A MUFON Science Review Board (SRB) consists of scientists with degrees in physics, chemistry, geology and electrical engineering. Their work experience includes NASA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and France’s national space program, CNES. The SRB reviews the best cases from the year to identify the strongest cases that cannot be identified as any known object.

Big leap

Assuming that weirdness in the sky represents an alien visitation is a big leap. But who knows?

Nearly 34% of reports coming into MUFON can be identified, be they aircraft, rocket launches, satellites, astronomical happenings — even Chinese lanterns (small hot air balloons made of paper) or the proliferating number of military, police and citizen-run drones of all shapes and sizes. For example, Google’s Project Loon, which uses high-flying balloons to bring Wi-Fi internet to rural areas, has repeatedly stirred up UFO reports.

It is becoming harder to weed out and identify “real” UFOs, Harzan admitted.

“But on the other hand, when you read some of the reports — we call it the 5%, one out of 20 — that are incredible observations by very articulate and credible people,” he said, “you get about 5% of cases that are so rock solid.”

Old beliefs

Harzan said that the No. 1 stumbling block to advancement as a civilization is holding on to old beliefs. Is our science even capable of understanding what UFOs truly represent?

“We have to be able to let go of some old beliefs, because maybe the way we think the universe works isn’t how it really works,” Harzan said. “I personally believe that these are extraterrestrial beings that have advanced physics that we don’t yet understand. And once we do, we’ll be out there doing the same thing that they are doing. We’re probably 20 to 30 years away from being the aliens.”

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Irvine-Based UFO Group Marks 50 Years of Watching the Skies

July 8, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E23 7-8-19 Irvine-Based UFO Group Marks 50 Years of Watching the Skies” on Spreaker.
by Ben Brazil June 26, 2019 (latimes.com)

• The Mutual UFO Network, or ‘MUFON’, is an international research nonprofit that investigates UFO sightings. Headquartered in Irvine, California, the group has spent decades investigating reports and sightings of UFOs worldwide with chapters in all 50 states and about 40 countries. A symposium at Hotel Irvine July 26th to 28th marked the organization’s 50th anniversary.

• Reports are gathered from each chapter and funneled through the Irvine office. Jan Harzan worked as Orange County MUFON section director from 1995 to 2013. He also earned a degree in nuclear engineering at UCLA and worked as an IBM executive for 37 years. Today the 64-year-old serves as the executive director of MUFON.

• For five decades, MUFON’s volunteers have investigated more than 120,000 cases. There are more than 600 trained investigators worldwide, as the organization receives about 500 to 1,000 reports a month. About 30% of them go unexplained. Harzan says the study of UFOs “has had this stigma for years.” “Anybody who saw a UFO was considered a crazy person.” “The military and intelligence community don’t think you or I have the right to know this stuff exists.”

• Harzan believes the stigma surrounding UFOs may be fading as more reports come to light. The New York Times recently reported that several Navy pilots reported encounters with UFOs, and US senators have received briefings on these sightings. “[W]e are entering a new era,” Harzan said. “It’s no longer, ‘Are UFOs fact or fiction?’ It’s ‘UFOs are real, deal with it.’ Now the questions will shift to who are they and why are they here?”

• Harzan thinks that aliens are intergalactic observers, monitoring the activities of the ‘apes with the nukes’. “They are interested in our nuclear capabilities,” Harzan says. “My personal opinion, I think they are watching over us to make sure we don’t kill ourselves.”

• When Harzan was a boy of 10 years old, he saw a UFO in his backyard in Thousand Oaks. The craft was about 10 feet long and 3 feet high, smooth and metallic on the outside with a corrugated metal landing gear. It hummed like a transformer on a telephone pole. Harzan says, “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t ours.”

• Investigator Linda Flechtner had experiences with UFOs when she was a teenager and started working with MUFON about six years ago out of the Irvine office. She’s always discussed UFOs with her brother and sister who’ve both been MUFON investigators for nearly 30 years. Of the 300 cases she’s investigated, about 20 of them are classified as ‘unidentified’. One of her most memorable cases involved a pilot who encountered an interactive orb as he was flying. “He chased it, and it played with him,” Flechtner said. “He said he tried to get (behind it) but it interacted with him. Then it took off.”

• MUFON will remain a sanctuary for the sky-gazers,” says Harzan, “… for people who have had (UFO) experiences, and … where people can come and get answers.”

The pilots must have been small.

Jan Harzan reckoned the craft was about 10 feet long and 3 feet high. He described it as smooth and metallic on the outside, something similar to a water tank, with corrugated metal landing gear. It hummed like a transformer on a telephone pole.

“It’s like it had been born as one piece,” Harzan said. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t ours.”

Harzan said he first saw a UFO at age 10 while standing in his backyard in Thousand Oaks. The experience, whatever it may have been, stuck with him. The 64-year-old Newport Beach resident now serves as the executive director of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, an international research nonprofit.

Harzan works out of MUFON headquarters in Irvine, the central hub of a network with locations in all 50 states and about 40 countries.

The organization is marking its 50th anniversary at its annual symposium, July 26 to 28 at Hotel Irvine.

The group has spent decades investigating reports and sightings worldwide, seeking to provide an answer to one of humanity’s central questions: Are we alone? But the organization has also acted as a refuge for those who believe they have experienced the incomprehensible and wonder what secrets the sky may harbor.

The nonprofit has investigated more than 120,000 cases. Most end up being drones, balloons, a planet. About 30% of cases go unexplained.

Everything is funneled through the Irvine office. Annual reports are gathered from each chapter.

About four people regularly work in the office. The conference room is filled with UFO-related books. The back wall is lined with dozens of file boxes spanning five decades of investigation.

“The military and intelligence community don’t think you or I have the right to know this stuff exists,” Harzan said.

Investigators are volunteers. They are trained with a field investigator manual. There are more than 600 investigators worldwide. The ranks are needed as the organization receives about 500 to 1,000 reports a month.

No one else it seems will listen to their stories without presupposition.

“It has had this stigma for years,” Harzan said. “Anybody who saw a UFO was considered a crazy person.”

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