The Great British UFO Show 2

Leeds Rugby Supporters’ Club, Headingley, Leeds

21^st – 22^nd October, 2006

Some say that ufology is a fringe subject. Some say that it is dead or on the wane. Judging from two sold-out days at The Great British UFO Show in Leeds, I’d say that ufology is alive and well and as strong as ever.

Over the weekend of 21^st to 22^nd of October, 2006, nine speakers would deliver lectures that would keep the audience spellbound with subjects ranging from political conspiracies to crop patterns and, of course, UFOs. From the UK, we had Tony Topping, David Shayler, Philip Mantle, Sacha Christie, Rob Whitehead, Alan Foster and Russel Callaghan. From overseas, Odd Gunnar Roed from Norway and Maurizio Baiata from Italy both provided excellent talks.

Each speaker was filmed and a DVD set of the entire weekend will be released through ufodata.co.uk soon. Thanks should also go out to Paul France, who took some amazing photographs of the event.

So, let’s get on with the show, as they say. First up on Saturday was Tony Topping. Tony hails from Selby, North Yorkshire, and he spoke openly and with great power about his experiences. From childhood, he has endured terrifying dreams and nightmares about being taken from his home. He believes dark forces are out there, manipulating our minds and perceptions of reality for some deep, covert objective.

He told of how he has suffered psychic attacks from unknown assailants and how he learned that children were needed by the forces behind them for some unknown purpose. The strain on his mind was so great that he became suicidal.

Tony showed video of black helicopters, as well as bright objects in the sky that he had filmed. He told of how, one day, near a canal in Selby, he observed a fighter jet chasing a UFO across the sky, after the object rose from a field, with a brilliant flash of light.

Tony went on to talk about a case from New Zealand where a man called Alec Newald was abducted by extra-terrestrials for ten days, returning dazed and confused. When he told the authorities about what had happened to him, he was contacted by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the famous Chatham House group), but when Alec refused to cooperate with them, he was promptly jailed. A book of Alec’s story, Coevolution: The True Story of a Man Taken for Ten Days to an Extraterrestrial Civilization, is now available.

Tony has come to the conclusion that most UFOs are actually not from outer space, but emanate from either the poles or the interior of the Earth, perhaps both. He is certain that many come from beneath the oceans. He recounted Operation High Jump, that huge operation in Antarctica, led by US Admiral Byrd, which is barely known to the public, but allegedly cost thousands of lives when they encountered ‘something’ down at the bottom of the world.

Tony’s experiences, including contacts with extra-terrestrials, have had such a profound effect upon him that he now shields himself from personal relationships, fearing for the lives of anybody with whom he might become intimate. His website can be found at http://www.etlife.co.uk.

Former MI5 officer and whistle-blower, David Shayler kindly stepped in at very short notice when advertised speaker, Anthony Mallin, had to cancel his appearance because of ill health. He delivered a brilliant lecture and it was great to see him talking with our delegates afterwards. He had quite a crowd around him!

David spoke of how he came to be involved with MI5 in 1991, replying to a job advertisement, thinking he was going to work in the media. While at his post, he learned of an MI6 plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. The operation went ahead without the permission of the Home Secretary, failed and many innocent civilians lost their lives. David became disillusioned with the way the security services operated outside of the law and left MI5.

David and his partner, Annie Machon, fled to France, where they lived for two years before returning to the UK and being promptly arrested. He was sentenced to six months in prison in 2002 and served seven weeks of that time before being released.

With his knowledge of how the security services go about their business, it is obvious to David that many so-called terrorist attacks are really ‘false flag’ operations, in which these secret agencies instigate atrocities and then blame terrorist groups. They may learn of plots by genuine terrorist cells and make them happen, perhaps funding and supplying the groups covertly or undertaking the attacks themselves. The bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993, the devastating attack on 9/11 and the London bombings of 7/7 are all prime examples of false flag operations.

Another example that David covered was Gladio. This was a NATO, CIA and MI6 operation in Italy after World War Two that staged terror attacks and blamed communist activists. When it seemed that Italy would have Europe’s first democratically-elected communist government in the 1970s, Gladio instigated the assassination of Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, and the blame fell on the Red Brigade.

David kept the audience spellbound and we cannot thank him enough for stepping up at such short notice.

After lunch, Norway’s Odd Gunnar Roed stepped onto the stage and gave a fascinating talk about unexplained tracks found in his home country in the 1990s. These huge gouges in the earth appear to have been created by something hitting the ground, scraping out huge furrows and then leaving again.

Studies by geologists have yet to find an explanation for them, but prosaic explanations, such as tracks left by heavy vehicles, have been discounted.

Some of the tracks end at huge boulders, weighing many, many tons, suggesting that some force shifted these great lumps of rock, seemingly with ease. What is inexplicable is that the tracks often pass through areas of foliage, yet there is no damage to the plants, except in one case, where bark was scraped from a tree.

Odd Gunnar explained that it had been suggested that something made of ice could have fallen from space (a mini-c0met, I suppose you could call it), broken up and created the tracks in impact, the ice then melting and leaving no trace. However, the tracks do not all lead in the same direction, as one would expect if something fell from the sky.

Whatever the cause of these enigmatic gouges in the earth, they are fascinating, but an explanation may never be found.

Odd Gunnar then presented a slide show of the famous Hessdalen Lights. He showed us his favourite photographs of the lights, which included long-exposure images that indicated they flashed on and off or pulsated. Many theories abound about the cause of the lights, but they are still essentially unexplained.

Our thanks go to Odd Gunnar for making the journey from Norway to speak at the conference.

UFOData Magazine features editor, Philip Mantle, gave a fascinating talk about the infamous Alien Autopsy. Philip was present right at the beginning of the AA saga, so he could speak first-hand about the real story behind the controversy.

He showed the autopsy footage in its entirety, explaining how Ray Santilli claimed to have come into possession of the film, what part he (Philip) had to play in getting it to the public’s attention and how it was released to the world to such fanfare and hype.

Philip also told the story of his and others’ investigations into the footage, how the props used in the film seemed authentic and even how professional experts were duped by it, how some investigators were led, by directions from ‘the cameraman’, to the crash site and how there are many that still believe that there is a grain of truth in the autopsy story. Despite Santilli knowing next to nothing about the UFO subject, he knew about the showbiz industry and his project was a masterstroke of ingenuity and attention to detail.

When Santilli and his partner, Gary Shoefield, came clean and admitted that they had created the autopsy footage, along with the ‘debris’ shots, Philip explained his small part in the Eamonn Holmes programme, Eamonn Investigates The Alien Autopsy, telling about his interview in a small café, a location that baffled him.

He talked about UFOData’s documentary, Alien Autopsy: A Little Bit Of This And A Little Bit Of That…, in which he and Russel Callaghan interviewed Keith Bateman and his staff. Keith explained how he was commissioned by Santilli to create some autopsy footage and the infamous ‘tent footage’ was the result.

Finally, Philip told of the impending legal action against Santilli. It seems that a case of consumer fraud is to be brought against him by several of the television companies that paid money for the alien autopsy footage. If it goes to court, there may be interesting developments, especially if Santilli has to finally produce some of the actual footage that he claims is genuine to save his bacon, so to speak.

The final speaker of the day was UFOData’s own roving researcher, Sacha Christie. Speaking publicly for the first time about her own experiences, Sacha did an excellent job and we are all very proud of her.

Sacha told of the night in Wales, ten years ago, that would change her life forever. She, her son and her friends were staying at a holiday cottage in Glyn Cyriog and one night, a light appeared in the sky. They watched as it hovered above them for a long time before another light appeared to land or hover just above the ground quite close to them. Everybody was remarkably calm, even though an apparently a genuine UFO incident was going around them. Sacha’s son, Louis, then tugged at his mum’s sleeve and said that something had reached out from the bushes and touched his leg. It was then that they decided to go back inside. Almost everybody else decided to go to bed, despite a large UFO hovering not far above their cottage, but Sacha ventured back outside.

She looked up at the round, glowing object, that reminded her of a mushroom, with spokes extending out from the centre to the edge, and called out to it, asking what it was going to do next. Then she heard footsteps and something tugged on the back of her jacket. She panicked and fled back to the cottage. The next day, Sacha, her son and her boyfriend left the cottage, never to return.

Afterwards, Sacha’s life changed completely. She became afraid of the dark and had to sleep with the light on. Animals became attracted to her for some reason, with birds and insects landing on her after avoiding other people. Her allergies to several things mysteriously vanished. Not everything was beneficial, however.

Bravely, Sacha went on to explain how she began drinking, became an insomniac and eventually resorted to drug-taking, losing a lot of weight. Sacha is grateful to the many friends she has made since becoming an active UFO researcher and although sharing her experiences with them has helped, it still took a great deal of courage for her to climb on stage and open up to a large audience. Thank you, Sash!

With the speaker line-up complete for the day, we had to rush around and get the room ready for the evening’s entertainment. Musical duo, Full Fat Funk, entertained the audience with a mix of tunes and, boy, were they loud! In between sets, bingo was played and hoots of ‘Conspiracy!’ resounded when Russ won. Fix!

Sunday’s events got underway with Rob Whitehead from LAPIS giving an entertaining talk about some of the UFO cases he has investigated.

Rob said that this was the first time he had spoken in front of an audience, but you wouldn’t have known. His talk was funny, insightful and honest. Rob calls a spade a spade and that can be refreshing.

Playing a video of orange lights that he was sent in by a member of the public, we saw them moving about the sky, seemingly making patterns that resembled constellations. The audience laughed when the chap behind the camera suddenly announced that, “The dog’s been sick!” The lights eventually moved into a roughly linear formation.

Rob then showed another video that he had taken himself, showing similar lights above St. Annes. Rob suspected that these orange orbs were quite close and, after sending somebody to investigate, found that they were lanterns released only a couple of streets away for a birthday party.

This year there have been many reports of these orange lights and the media has been gripped by UFO fever. The sad thing, Rob explained, is that they hardly ever ask reputable UFO investigators what these orbs may actually be. Thai lanterns, available for only a few pounds, have been the bane of ufology in 2006.

Moving on to a more inexplicable case, Rob covered the experiences of the Devereaux family from High Bentham, Lancashire, in 2005. This case was featured on the Sky One programme, The Real 4400, and Rob showed clips from that show. The family had been driving in their car when they saw a bright light in the sky. They experienced about an hour of missing time and the incident affected them all greatly.

The new website for the Lancashire Anomalous Phenomena Investigation Society (LAPIS) will soon be online at www.lapis.org.uk.

Alan Foster devoted his ninety minutes to the subject of crop patterns. Largely dismissed as hoaxes by many, Alan explained how many patterns have features that would be difficult to fabricate and cannot be the result of a few circlemakers stomping around with wooden boards.

Some patterns appear to have been blasted with microwave radiation, causing the crop to become almost fluid and causing stem nodes to burst from the inside. Sometimes the crop is not laying flat, but bent about a foot (30cm) above the ground. This would be hard to achieve with planks and string. Quite often, visitors to patterns have seen vortices of energy rising from within, sometimes accompanied by orbs of light. Alan’s slideshow of beautiful crop pattern photographs was augmented with equally lovely paintings by his wife.

Alan is firm in his belief that crop patterns are some form of communication from elsewhere. He presents a good case and points out anomalies in some patterns that would be extremely difficult to hoax.

Three of my favourite patterns were highlighted by Alan. These were the famous Chilbolton messages of 2001, where a variation of the Arecibo radio signal was found in a field next to the Chilbolton Radio Telescope, along with an image of a face that bore a striking resemblance to the Cydonia Face on Mars. My other favourite was the Alien Head formation of 2002, which appeared only a few miles from the Chilbolton glyphs.

The Alien Head pattern was remarkable in that a message was encoded into the design and that message was deciphered. Although it was cryptic, it sends a shiver down my spine every time I read it:

"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEVE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING (BELL SOUND)".

Alan’s lecture was fascinating and illuminating and well worth getting a numb bum for.

After lunch, Maurizio Baiata took the stage and gave an enthralling talk about the work of Colonel Philip J. Corso. Maurizio is the editor of Italy’s best-selling UFO magazine, Area 51, and certainly knows his stuff.

Colonel Corso, who passed away in 1998 barely a year after his autobiography, The Day After Roswell, was published, was the head of the Pentagon’s Foreign Technology division in the early Sixties. He maintained that many technologies that we take for granted nowadays, such as fibre optics, lasers, integrated circuits and night vision lenses, were developed from alien systems recovered from the Roswell crash of 1947.

In interviews conducted by Maurizio and played for the audience, Corso claimed that rather than directly handing over alien technology to the private sector for development, his team basically planted seeds of ideas and then, over time, produced some of the alien stuff to help the research process. Of course, the inventors of these new technologies claim that back-engineering extra-terrestrial spacecraft had nothing to do with their research process, but remember that they were never told where the ideas or research samples came from.

Maurizio produced many documents that verify Corso’s movements during his active service and also several sketches, made by the colonel, of the aliens recovered from the Roswell crash. Maurizio made it quite clear, though, that nobody was to film or take photographs of the slides he presented.

Maurizio gave an animated talk and our audience enjoyed it immensely. We cannot thank him enough for making the trip from Rome to be with us this weekend.

To close The Great British UFO Show, UFOData Magazine editor and conference host, Russel Callaghan, talked about some of the problems with ufology today, especially in terms of the media.

There are some in the ‘UFO industry’ that want to own everything. They buy up videos taken by witnesses, forcing them to sign exclusivity contracts. They try to copyright common-use terms and threaten legal action when a certain word or acronym is used. More serious, though, is that they stifle debate because the evidence is not available for public scrutiny and examination. UFOData Magazine is about sharing information with the public at large, disseminating the evidence we receive with our readers and hoping that they may shed light on the subjects we cover.

Russel begged that if anybody ever filmed or photographed something strange, never to sign a contract granting exclusivity. Allow the footage or images to be used, but retain the rights so that you can do what you want with them.

With that out of the way, Russel went on to talk about UFO reports from airline pilots, playing clips from The History Channel’s excellent show, UFO Files. If eyewitness reports and radar traces from aviation professionals is not good evidence, then I don’t know what is!

He also showed footage from the Discovery Channel programme, Rocketships, of the famous ‘tether satellite’. The clip was actually shot from the Earth by somebody with a camcorder as the tether orbited, reflecting the sunlight and appearing like a Star Wars lightsabre drifting across the night sky. Amazing stuff.

Russel thanked everybody for attending, for those that gave such fantastic lectures and for those that helped out with the conference. He then slipped in the bombshell announcement that next year, the 60^th anniversary of the Roswell Incident, two of our guest speakers will be noted Roswell researcher, Kevin Randle and the only man who can definitely say that he has held a piece of the Roswell debris, Dr Jesse Marcel Jr. If everything goes according to plan, The Great British UFO Show 2007 will be an event not to be missed!

Everybody at UFOData Magazine would like to thank all of our friends and guests over the weekend for making the conference such a resounding success. See you next year.

Steve Johnson