Mercury Rapids - Articles

We are constantly being told that the UFO enigma began in 1947, with the Kenneth Arnold sighting in Washington state and the Roswell Incident a few months later, but any student of ufology will know that the subject has been with us for much, much longer.

The following story dates not from antiquity, but from 1943, yet it demonstrates how unsuspecting folk have been encountering UFO-related phenomena since long before the term ‘flying saucer’ was dreamed up.

John Warren was an armourer serving in the RAF during World War II. At the time of his encounter, he was stationed in Norfolk at RAF Ludham, a radar facility close to the large airfield at RAF Coltishall. What follows is from the archives of UFOData's features editor, Philip Mantle. Philip interviewed Mr Warren back in 1987 and he recounts a fascinating sighting during a late-night walk through the East Anglian countryside.

One night in May of 1943 (John could not give an exact date), Mr Warren had been to North Walsham, a town roughly nine miles from RAF Ludham, and had got a lift in a truck to Catfield, a village about three and a half miles from his camp. Being a little worse for wear, John, who was about twenty-two at the time, decided to sleep under a railway signal box. Some time later, he awoke and made the decision to walk back to the base.

A little over a mile from the camp, he noticed a light in one of the fields that bordered the narrow, country lane. As he drew closer, he saw a figure standing in the field. Not expecting to encounter anybody that late at night, John became a little nervous and quickened his pace slightly. As he drew closer, he noticed that the figure was wearing what appeared to be a greyish-white ‘boiler suit’. Attached to the front of the suit was a box that cast a greenish glow onto the face of the figure. The face was visible beneath the helmet that John likened to an old-fashioned divers’ helmet.

The figure stared at John as he approached, with a smile on its face that terrified the young airman. He said the face was round, without any noticeable cheekbones or chin.

As he passed the figure, which was standing behind the bushes that bordered the field and about thirty to a hundred yards away from John, he saw a large, domed object in the field behind this grinning entity. A second figure was moving around, doing something with the ground, as though taking samples.

The domed object reminded John of a large bell tent. It was stony-grey in colour and gave off no light.

John passed their location and kept on going, walking quickly, terrified, but not running for his life. He glanced back and saw that both figures were now doing something in the ground around the ‘bell tent’. Then he looked forward again and kept going until he reached RAF Ludham.

He wondered if they were German agents that might have landed on the nearby coast. However, he could not imagine what they were doing in those odd suits with the green, glowing light. Also, a structure the size of the dome he saw would have been awkward to carry over the countryside from the coastline, some seven or eight miles distant.

John got back to his camp and the safety of the Nissen huts in which the men were billeted. He settled into bed, wondering about what he had just witnessed, when he was startled by something coming through the window!

Fearful that the entities from the field had come for him, John was relieved to discover that it was a friend of his returning from a late-night romantic liaison. ‘Taffy’, though, looked scared to death when John saw him. He asked his friend if anything was wrong, but Taffy declined to elaborate. He just said that he had an early start and was going to bed.

Taffy was a cook, so the next morning after breakfast, John asked him what had frightened him so much the previous night. Taffy explained that he had seen something outside of Catfield and had run all the way back to the base. John didn’t tell him that he had also seen something. Taffy didn’t go into any details beyond ‘seeing something’.

Before the night he saw the figures and their dome-shaped ‘craft’, John had used that road many times, going to a local swimming spot, but afterwards, he never went along that road alone and never went swimming there again. He confined his drinking to either the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) or went to the pub in Ludham, which took him along a different road.

Being 1943, John had never heard of flying saucers and didn’t even equate what he saw as having anything other than an earthly explanation, but as the years have passed, John now believes that what he saw was not of this world. This was reinforced when he saw a strange object that was shaped like an ice cream cornet over his home town of Batley, West Yorkshire, in about 1947. He and a friend saw this object in the sky before it simply disappeared in the blink of an eye.

If John Warren did see an extra-terrestrial craft in that East Anglian field in 1943, what were its occupants doing poking holes in the ground? Why did they simply watch him with a fixed grin as he hurried past? If they were German agents, surely they would have stopped this lone airman from divulging their location.

What had happened to Taffy? It seems that he also saw the same thing as John, but it had terrified him so much that he had ran back to the base. If the family of Taffy (John said his real name was Jennings or Jenkins and that he was Welsh) are reading this, perhaps he told them of his wartime encounter. If so, we would appreciate a call, a letter or an email to http://www.ufodata.co.uk

This is a fascinating story from a time before ‘flying saucers’ were the vogue. It demonstrates that the UFO phenomenon did not begin in the United States in 1947.

Below are John's actual sketches of what he saw and a plan of the camp (click the images for full size):

UFO FILES:

Deep Sea UFOs

The History Channel, Sunday, 16^th July, 2006

After a break of several months, The History Channel’s excellent series, UFO Files, returned to the airwaves with a show about Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs). This is an aspect of the UFO phenomenon that is rarely reported, yet is more common than one may realise. Only recently, an object was spotted entering the ocean off the South African coast, reinforcing the views of many that UFOs are at home flying either in the sky or under the sea.

As the Earth is 75% covered with water, it makes sense that unexplained objects are seen either on or beneath the sea and this programme explores the possibilities not only of alien activity under the surf, but also of what submersibles we may be able to create that might match the characteristics of the reported sightings.

The Santa Catalina Channel separates mainland California from the island of Catalina. This stretch of water is as deep as Mount Everest is high and objects have been seen both entering the water and emerging.

Preston Dennett is a California UFO researcher who has written several books on the subject (one of which, Extraterrestrial Visitations, will be reviewed in a future issue of UFOData Magazine). He explained that in 1992, hundreds of unexplained objects were sighted near the Santa Monica Mountains. Many of these objects were seen, not descending from the sky, but rising up, as though emerging from the water nearby.

Over two hundred craft were seen emerging silently from the ocean on June 14^th, 1992. They hovered for several seconds before shooting off into the sky. Witnesses filed reports with the police as far away as Malibu. The programme then played an actual recording of a phone call by a witness to the police. The caller almost sounded ashamed to be reporting what he had seen. Unfortunately, we did not hear the police officer’s response. The wealth of reports filtered up to the US Coast Guard, but they refused a request to search the area of the sightings.

In 1989, a large object was seen by multiple witnesses (and picked up on sonar) resting on the surface of the water in the Pacific Ocean. It released several, smaller objects before submerging. It was tracked on sonar heading south towards the Santa Catalina Channel before disappearing.

Several researchers, such as Bill Birnes and Stanton Friedman, continue to investigate reports of USOs, assessing their intentions and/or threat level.

It seems that one thing that USOs do more regularly than UFOs is to ‘split apart’ or release large numbers of smaller craft. UFOs have been known to do this also, but with the underwater variety, it seems more common.

In 1960, the Argentinean Navy tracked two unidentified submerged objects in the Golfo Nuevo, 650 miles south of Buenos Aires. At first it was thought that they were US submarines, but then they appeared to break apart and fly out of the water. Paul Stonehill, co-author with Philip Mantle of UFO-USSR, explained how the objects simply emerged from the water and vanished. Paul went on to tell us that the Soviet leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, was so impressed with the report that he ordered his representative in Buenos Aires to find out more about the event.

Sceptics suggest that what was seen were submarines firing torpedoes, but it has been noted that in 1960, the firing of six or more torpedoes simultaneously was not possible.

In March, 1963, American submarines were involved in exercises, with a fleet of surface ships, a hundred miles off the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. One of the subs broke off from its assigned course and began pursuing an unidentified object that their scopes told them was travelling in excess of 150 knots at a depth of 20,000 feet!

Bruce Maccabee told us that such speeds and depths were, and still are, impossible for today’s submersibles, with the crush depth for submarines being about 7,000 feet. The USO was tracked for four days by the carrier group, with the object moving at impossible speeds before stopping. Reports were sent to CINCLANT (Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Command), but no determination was made as to the nature of the unidentified craft.

Stanton Friedman pointed out that when UFOs are spotted in the sky, people see them and report them, but when a deep sea object is sighted, it is usually only the navy that makes out a report and we never learn anything beyond that.

We are then shown a clip from a newsreel, informing us that US Navy experimental balloons are the sole cause of ‘flying saucer’ sightings. Nice try, chaps!

November 11^th, 1972, and the Norwegian Navy began tracking a USO for two weeks in the Sognefjord, one of the longest and deepest fjords in the world. A fleet of ships and submarine-hunting helicopters were tasked with locating the object. On November 20^th, the object was seen exiting the water. It was described as ‘a massive, silent, cigar-shaped object’.

One of the ships opened fire on the object, but it simply sank back down beneath the waves. Depth charges were dropped to no avail. Then a plan was drawn up to blockade the fjord and trap the USO, but the object disappeared.

On 11^th October, 1492, the ship carrying Christopher Columbus, the Santa Maria, passed over what we now know is one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also inside the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Strange lights were seen flashing deep under the water. Then a large, disc-shaped object rose out of the water and sped off into the night sky. A few, short hours later, Columbus would discover the New World.

USO researcher, Carl Feindt, explained how Columbus’ log described the object as being like ‘the flickering of a wax candle’, rising and falling. Camp fires on the shore could not be used as an explanation, as land was far beyond the horizon. Indeed, Columbus’ log books describe many bizarre occurrences witnessed during their long voyage to new lands. These included seeing birds that should not have been far from land, yet they were far out to sea, a heavy mast, weighing 120 tons, floating in the ocean (they were the first European ships out there, remember) and stars that danced around the sky.

In 329BC, the army of Alexander the Great encountered two, silver discs that emerged from the Jaxartes River in India. It is said that he was so impressed by this sight that he spent six years exploring the river in the world’s first diving bell! Some suggest, though, that Alexander was not searching for USOs, but for the fabled land of Atlantis.

Over the years, the legend of Atlantis has diversified from being a philosophical tale about the dangers of man’s vanities to becoming a myth of a lost civilisation that utilises advanced technology to survive beneath the ocean. Some even suggest that the Atlanteans themselves were extraterrestrials.

Sticking with the ancient world, Paul Stonehill returned to tell us about inscriptions at Abydos in Egypt that resemble a submarine and a helicopter (he missed out the fighter jet!). Sorry to burst Paul’s bubble here, but those glyphs are what is known as a palimpsest, where hieroglyphics are carved over the top of old ones (after the previous ones were plastered over). Years later, the plaster has fallen off to reveal the mixed-up carvings. Nothing to do with ancient technology, I'm afraid…

In 1067AD, a ‘flaming object’ was seen to enter the sea off the English coast, then it remerged before sinking below the waves once more.

On August 1^st, 1904, the cargo ship, Mohican, on its way to Philadelphia, was ‘enshrouded in a strange, metallic vapour that glowed like phosphorous’. Carl Feindt has researched this case and said that the ‘cloud’ approached the ship from across the ocean. As it enveloped his vessel, the captain tried to busy his crew, but nothing could be moved while the vapour surrounded them. The ship’s compass spun wildly and the decks became magnetised.

On October 4^th, 1967, at about 11:20pm, one of the most famous USO cases in history occurred in the Nova Scotia town of Shag Harbour. This small community has become known as the Canadian Roswell in recent years and the case is interesting because not only were there multiple eyewitnesses, but there are government documents verifying that something fell into the ocean that night.

Chris Styles, co-author of the book, Dark Object, took up the story. At the time of the incident, nobody thought that what entered the water was a UFO. It was generally assumed that an aircraft had gone down and a search began for possible survivors.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) searched the ‘crash site’ in boats until 3am, finding nothing. Later, Canadian Navy divers arrived and they, too, began searching beneath the water. Eventually, an official report was filed, labelling what had crashed into the sea as a ‘UFO’. The report stated that the object had travelled from south to north along the coastline before entering the water off Shag Harbour.

RCMP officers on the shoreline watched the object travelling under the surface, leaving a trail of foam in the water.

Later, reports emerged that a second craft had entered the water to rendezvous with the first object. Styles claimed that the authorities knew exactly where the objects were and that the second craft assisted the first in moving towards the Gulf of Maine, where they both broke the surface and flew away. In fact, a photograph exists of two objects leaving the water of Shag Harbour and flying off.

The official report clearly states that what crashed into Shag Harbour was ‘no known object’.

The island of Puerto Rico is generally considered to be the Americas’ greatest hotspot for USO sightings. Local group, Project Argus, took us to the Laguna Cartagena, a wildlife reserve in the south-west of the island. It is also a major hotspot for USO activity.

On October 8^th, 2002, at about 9:30pm, local police officer and Argus member, Carlos Torres saw a red, glowing USO flash out of the Laguna Cartagena. It then hovered just above the surface for several minutes before crashing back into the lake.

November 20^th, 2004, produced what may be a video of the object emerging from the lagoon and flying away. Another Argus member shot the night vision footage of what appears to be a rotating, disc-shaped craft.

Route 303 has officially become Puerto Rico’s ‘Extraterrestrial Highway’. This happened after a 1997 incident in which a UFO was said to crash nearby, leaving scorched ground and many bemused witnesses.

Researchers on the island are suspicious of US Navy research balloons that are launched regularly over the Lajas region. They claim that their real function is to observe UFO and USO activity. Project Argus claim that government documents exist that secret investigations took place into UFO and USO activity in the region, but the conclusions were that the objects posed no threat.

Some researchers believe that a major USO base exists in the deep waters off Cabo Rojo, west of Lajas, with submerged caverns that might reach all the way to the Laguna Cartagena.

In 1969, sailors aboard the USS Calcaterra witnessed a USO that displayed remarkable properties in the frozen waters of Antarctica. They reported a huge, submarine-shaped object burst from beneath the thick ice and rocket into the sky.

Revered Russian researcher, Vladimir Ajaja, told of an incident that happened near Leningrad in the winter of 1976. A USO crashed down through the ice, manoeuvred underwater before breaking back through. Carl Feindt reported that USOs appear to melt the ice they break through, leaving a clean hole, rather than smashing their way, sending chunks flying in all directions, as a meteorite would (plus meteorites don’t generally re-emerge and fly away!).

In 1988, famous (or infamous, depending upon one’s viewpoint) UFO photographer, Ed Walters snapped an image of a USO in Gulf Breeze atop what appears to be a waterspout. This has caused some researchers to suggest that UFOs/USOs use water as a fuel source. There have been other reports of unidentified craft sucking up water from lakes and reservoirs.

Theoretically, electromagnetic propulsion could allow submersibles to travel at great speeds underwater. An EM field around a craft would reduce drag, thus allowing it to perform manoeuvres impossible for traditional submarines. The US Navy actually experimented with an EM sub in the 1960s, with a degree of success.

Marko Princevac, of the University of California Riverside, has created an experiment, devised to prove that supersonic propulsion underwater is possible. He found that a streamlined object would move underwater better than, say, a cube… duh! Princevac’s data shows that, while an aircraft travelling at Mach 1 requires 15,000 horsepower of energy, a submersible travelling at the same speed would require over 1 million horsepower. At the moment we do not have the technology to build such an engine that would work beneath the sea.

Deep Sea UFOs was another great episode from UFO Files, with some excellent graphics and informative interviews. So now, we not only have to watch the skies, we must keep our other eye on the seas!

The images used are the property of the copyright holders and are only used here for review purposes.

UFO FILES

Real UFOs

The History Channel, Sunday 12^th February 2006

In the latest episode of UFO Files, we are taken on a tour of man-made flying saucers from World War II to the present day and asked to consider the possibility that all UFO sightings are of top secret, terrestrial aircraft.

As defeat loomed for Hitler’s Germany in 1944-45, Nazi scientists were tasked with developing new and exotic weapons that might turn the tide of the war. The most famous of these new super weapons were the V-1 and V-2 rockets developed and launched from Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.

However other projects were also underway. A man named Viktor Schauberger designed a flying disc-type aircraft. It was hoped that this craft would manoeuvre like a helicopter, using magnetic rotation to create lift, but also be able to travel at supersonic speeds and be undetectable to the enemy. Working with other brilliant engineers and scientists, several disc designs were tested and even flown.

As the war drew to a close, German science worked feverishly to develop these new weapons: flying saucers, rockets, jet aircraft and who knows what else, but time was running out for them. Allied bombing raids were causing great damage and Allied troops were closing in on all fronts.

As Germany surrendered, a frantic scramble between the western powers and the Soviet Union began to capture the brilliant German scientists behind what was at the time the most advanced aviation technology on the planet. The US managed to capture factories that were producing V-2 rockets and men such as Werner Von Braun, while the Soviets got their hands on the latest Nazi jet aircraft and a good number of rocket scientists.

After the war, Schauberger and other flying saucer designers such as Rudolf Schreiver and Walter Meithe ended up working for the Americans, while their former comrade, Andreas Epp, is said to have worked for the Soviet Union. As the struggle for global nuclear dominance intensified, flying disc research continued in secret.

Then in 1947, the UFO sighting of pilot, Kenneth Arnold, made headlines around the world. He described nine, crescent-shaped craft travelling at over twelve-hundred miles per hour, a speed almost unheard of in those days. ‘UFO fever’ gripped America and thousands of reports began to flood in. Military officials appeared on television, calming public fears, but also declaring that they were not testing or flying saucer-shaped rockets or aircraft.

Then in July of that year, a flying disc was reported to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. It was quickly explained away as being a weather balloon. In private, US generals were concerned that these UFO sightings could be secret aircraft from the Soviet Union, designed by their captured German scientists.

Many blueprints and plans for Nazi jet aircraft had been captured at the end of the Second World War and one of these was the Horton 229, a flying wing jet that bore a striking resemblance to Arnold’s crescent-shaped UFOs. It was feared that the Soviets had developed a flying, supersonic version of this jet.

As the Cold War evolved in the 1950s, and the Korean conflict brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, the public’s paranoia was reflected in popular movies such as Earth Vs The Flying Saucers and Invaders from Mars. The US military used this fear as a smokescreen to hide its top secret projects in places such as Area 51 in Nevada, where tests of all kinds of exotic aircraft, rockets, balloons, high-altitude parachute drops and satellites were performed.

Project Mogul, the use of high-altitude balloons with trains of radar reflectors designed to detect Soviet atomic testing, came out of this era and was the final explanation for what crashed in Roswell.

With the Soviets taking the lead in jet fighter technology in the Korean War, the Americans needed to catch up and radar-invisible, supersonic flying saucers were one avenue of possibility.

In 1952, the US Air Force became aware of a project by the Canadian avionics company, Avro, to build a flying saucer. British designer, John Frost, was the mastermind of the idea, inspired by UFO sightings from all over the world. He learned of Nazi flying saucer projects and eventually met with Walter Meithe., who said he had worked for ten years on German saucers and also showed Frost plans and photographs of his work.

With a $10 million grant from the USAF, Frost set up his special projects division at Avro and began work on a supersonic flying saucer.

The first attempt was with ‘Project Y’, a spade-shaped aircraft that would serve as a tail-less, supersonic, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet interceptor. After several failed tests, Project Y was abandoned.

Frost’s next attempt was to create a circular aircraft that utilised rotary engines set along the outside edge of the airframe. This was called ‘Project Y-2’. A test of a 50-foot, six-engined design almost ended in disaster for the entire team when the tethered engines spun out of control, almost destroying the hangar. The supersonic Y-2 project was suspended and a smaller, test design was commissioned. This was to become known as the Avrocar.

The Avrocar was designed to fly forwards at 300 mph at thirty-thousand feet and to land and take off vertically. In 1959, the first two prototypes were rolled out. It was hoped that this design could become a kind of flying Jeep for the US military. Early test flights proved that the craft could fly, although it only moved a few inches above the ground. Problems were also discovered when it flew over grassy areas, with the engine intakes sucking up all sorts of debris. The circular design was also very difficult for the pilot to handle, making the craft unwieldy and problematic to steer. Despite attempts to make the Avrocar more stable, the program was eventually scrapped in 1961.

Forty years ago, Jack Pickett, a publisher of American military magazines, was visiting MacDill AFB in Florida when he saw what appeared to be four flying saucers parked outside in a restricted area. They ranged in size from twenty to a hundred and nineteen feet in diameter and perfectly circular. Pickett was shown photographs of the craft in flight, sometimes with conventional jet escorts. He was told that the craft, which had a large, vertical tail section, were capable of 15,500 mph and had even achieved space flight. Pickett asked why such an amazing project had been discontinued (the craft were in a section for scrapped airplanes) and was told that better, more stable designs had replaced them.

During the 1960s, UFO reports continued to make the news headlines. Alan Brown was the chief engineer of the US stealth project at the Lockheed Skunkworks. He is convinced that all UFO reports can be attributed to secret US military aircraft. He maintains that the amount of testing that went on at Area 51 made it inevitable that people would see strange-shaped aircraft in the skies from time to time.

In 1978, Warren Botz was attending a flight reunion at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, when he saw disc-shaped aircraft parked in a hangar. His description of the craft almost exactly matches that of Jack Pickett’s circular aeroplanes.

In 1988, the USAF revealed to the world the F-117 stealth fighter. Alan Brown said that the only reason that this remarkable aircraft was unveiled was because they had to begin flying it in daylight because of several night-flight test accidents that had resulted in the loss of pilots. It was hoped that confirming the existence of this plane to the world would reduce the number of UFO reports. Not surprisingly, reports of triangular UFOs began to appear in the news.

With the end of the Cold War, it wasn’t until the Gulf War in 1991 that the F-117 saw its first action, impressing the world with its stealth capabilities and accurate bombing power. Despite all of its success, though, the stealth fighter still had to be piloted by a human being.

The next phase of aerial combat will be with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Already, we have UAVs designed for reconnaissance, such as the Sikorsky Aerobot, but the future lies with UAVs that can perform in combat. It is likely that such craft are already in existence and have probably already been used in the ‘War on Terror’.

If supersonic flying saucer technology has been abandoned in favour of triangular stealth aircraft and slow-moving, circular drones, how does this explain the continued raft of UFO sightings that contain disc-shaped objects moving at unbelievable speeds and defying the known laws of physics? Are the US military still developing flying saucers?

This program offered a brief glimpse into the world of secret aviation development and the craft described are incredible feats of engineering, but to suggest that all UFO reports can be explained as test flights of these craft is absurd. What about close-up sightings on the ground where non-human figures are seen? What about sightings in orbit by US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts? If the US military has craft that can achieve orbit so easily, why are we still sending people and equipment up on the top of a gigantic firecracker?

It is clear that the more we try to answer these questions, the more questions we create from the answers.

The images used are the property of the copyright holders and are only used here for review purposes.

UFO FILES

UFOs and the White House

The History Channel, Sunday 29^th January, 2006

The third episode of The History Channel’s UFO-based series was entitled UFOS and the White House. It sought to explore the relationship between the subject of UFOs and ‘the highest office in the land’, that of the President of the United States. In fact, every US president has had some involvement with the subject of UFOs, in one form or another since World War II.

Beginning in 1942, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt incumbent in the Oval Office, a radar blip in Los Angeles, California, instigated what has become known in UFO lore as The Battle of Los Angeles. American forces scrambled and thousands of anti-aircraft rounds were fired into the night sky. Yet to this day, nobody is certain as to what they were firing at. In fact, the only damage caused that night was from the AA shells that landed on Los Angeles.

Roosevelt immediately set General George C Marshall the task of explaining just what had happened. Marshall’s report was vague, suggesting that up to fifteen aircraft may have been involved, ranging in speeds from ‘very slow’ to two hundred miles per hour and varying in altitude from nine thousand to eighteen thousand feet. No bombs were dropped and no aircraft were shot down.

The only evidence of anything in the sky that night appeared in the form of a photograph of searchlights illuminated a bright, disc-shaped object. The mystery remained, as more pressing matters for the president, the newly-joined war, came to the fore.

President Harry S Truman succeeded Roosevelt in 1945 and saw the Second World War end in victory for the Allies. Almost immediately, though, a new threat emerged – that of the communist east and particularly, the Soviet Union under Stalin.

In 1947, Truman was informed of the so-called Roswell Incident in New Mexico. Official histories and biographies of the Truman presidency make no mention of UFOs, but the man who briefed the president, General Robert Landry, does reference unidentified flying objects being mentioned in the White House at the time. Landry, who worked closely with the CIA, was tasked to brief Truman orally every three months about the UFO subject. These meetings, perhaps as many as eighteen of them, were not notated, there were to be no records of their ever taking place.

Then, in 1952, UFOs became big news as Washington DC became the centre of a major flap. Objects were seen entering the restricted airspace over the capital, both visually and on radar. Fighter jets were scrambled, but as soon as they approached the invading craft, they vanished, only to reappear when the jets returned to base. To allay public fears, the UFOs were dismissed as temperature inversions and that there was no threat to public safety. Truman appeared on television and genially said that flying saucers ‘were always going on’, but it was no big deal, it seemed.

In 1953, Dwight David Eisenhower began the first of two terms in the White House. While, officially, Truman never had any first-hand knowledge of UFOs, it is said that Eisenhower had a ten minute sighting for himself, while aboard a ship off the British coast in 1952, of a bluish-coloured object. Ike was said to have declared that he would look into the matter further, but nothing of the incident was ever heard again.

The Fifties saw flying saucers enter the popular culture in fabulous movies of alien invasion, but it was this era that saw the real secrecy begin to really enshroud the UFO subject.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s term was cut short, but his legacy was a lasting one. The US space program owed much to the aspirations of JFK and his famous speech vowing that a man would be set upon the Moon and returned safely to the Earth is still inspirational to this day. In 1963, the year he died, Kennedy was sailing on his boat off his Cape Cod home when he and his companions saw a sixty-foot, metallic object. Kennedy decided that nobody should speak of it, so it is something of an unsubstantiated tale.

While JFK appeared to have little interest in UFOs (he had more pressing matters, such as Soviet missiles in Cuba to attend to), his brother, Robert Kennedy is known to have been keenly interested in the subject. He exchanged several letters about unidentified flying objects with researchers and then-Congressman Gerald Ford. It is thought, though, that John F Kennedy was the first president to be kept in the dark by the security and intelligence services about the reality of the UFO subject.

After JFK’s assassination, his vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, became president. As vice-president, he had answered a letter from a member of the public concerning UFOs and suggested that they contact the executive secretary of NASA, Dr E.C. Welsh. This was a puzzling suggestion, as it was generally the US Air Force that dealt with UFO data.

It was during LBJ’s term that the Kecksberg crash occurred in 1965. Officially explained away as a meteorite impact, it was curious to note that, while the president was at his ranch in Austin, Texas, he was joined the day after the crash by the head of NASA, the governor of Pennsylvania and all of the joint chiefs-of-staff. The meeting concerned the Vietnam War – officially – but the fact that they all arrived to speak with LBJ the day after the Kecksberg incident is interesting. What would the governor of Pennsylvania, in which Kecksberg sits, and the head of NASA have to add to a meeting concerning Vietnam?

It is said that President Richard Milhous Nixon possessed a huge collection of books about UFOs. Rumours abound that he wanted to make the truth about UFOs public and that he engineered meetings to promote this agenda.

One step in this program of disclosure was the production of the TV show, UFOs: Past, Present and Future, by Robert Emenegger. This was later re-released as UFOs: It Has Begun, a review of which can be found in the first issue of the UFOData Report. Emenegger was specifically asked by the Republican Party to produce this documentary using only official government people. Emenegger was a friend of Nixon’s chief-of-staff and so was accepted as a trusted confidante. He was told by another party that a UFO had landed at Holloman Air Force Base and the entire incident had been recorded on film. He travelled to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio and entered a deep bunker, where Colonel George Weinbrenner, the commander of foreign technology, had an office. He asked Weinbrenner about the Holloman landing and instead of laughing, the colonel handed Emenegger a book on UFOs signed by Dr Allan J Hynek. Perplexed, he asked his friend at the White House about the Holloman event, but was told that something might have happened, but he was unsure if the president knew anything about it. Emenegger never received the Holloman footage for his documentary, but it has emerged that at least two former presidents had seen the footage. Was Nixon one of these?

Gerald Rudolph Ford had entered the UFO fray while acting as a congressman in 1966. He helped orchestrate public congressional hearings into the subject in April of that year.

As president, he had people advising him that are still around today – Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George HW Bush, the current president’s father. After leaving office in 1976, Ford replied in a letter to George Filer that during his political career, he had made many enquiries to the Air Force concerning UFOs, but they had always denied any UFO allegations (whatever those allegations might be!).

James Earl Carter’s presidency was described by UFO researchers as a golden age for the subject. In 1969, as governor of Georgia, he filled out a UFO sighting report. To this day, he insists that he saw something that he could not explain, even though the official explanation was that he saw the planet Venus.

Carter had promised to make public everything he could about the UFO subject, but failed to do so. He was said to have contacted the then head of the CIA, George HW Bush, and asked for all the files on UFOs. Bush replied to him that such information was on a ‘need to know’ basis and that the president did not need to know, no matter how curious he was. Despite this stonewalling, however, more than half of all UFO documents released under the Freedom of Information Act over the past thirty years came to light during Carter’s term.

Ronald Wilson Reagan is said to have had at least two UFO encounters in his life before reaching the Oval Office. The first came to light in the biography of actress Lucille Ball, in which she described how Ronald and his wife, Nancy, had arrived late to a Hollywood party. They explained that they had seen a UFO on the drive over there and were very excited about their sighting.

The second incident occurred when he was governor of California. He was flying in an aircraft with his entourage when they spotted a light zigzagging alongside the aircraft. He ordered his pilot to follow the UFO and they did so for several minutes before it shot away at high speed.

Several times during his presidency, Reagan referred to UFOs and aliens in his speeches, most notably in his address to the United Nations in 1987. Presidential speeches are heavily vetted, with dozens of people scrutinizing every word. So for such ‘far out’ subjects to be used on several occasions is an important point to reflect upon. In fact, Reagan’s speechwriter at the time of the UN address took out the ‘alien invasion’ section, but was ordered to put it back in by Reagan himself.

It should be noted that while Reagan was making these speeches that referred to UFOs and aliens, his vice-president was George HW Bush, the former CIA director that had stonewalled Carter about the same subject.

When George Herbert Walker Bush became president in 1989, he became perhaps the best-informed commander-in-chief on the UFO subject ever. He had served as director of the CIA under Carter and had been Reagan’s vice-president. It is likely that he had come into contact with a great deal of UFO-related material over the years.

During his term, though, he only referred to the subject in speeches in a joking manner. Despite this, though, it is thought that he and his staff, especially Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, knew a great deal about the subject and worked to keep the lid tightly shut.

Despite little being available to link Bush Sr. to UFOs, it is generally thought, that with his political, intelligence and even business connections, he is the one president that knows most about the subject.

William Jefferson Clinton succeeded George HW Bush in 1993 and, like the last Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, he did a great deal to declassify UFO reports and get them out in the open.

In November 1995, he gave a speech in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in which he says that as far as he knew there were no alien bodies recovered at Roswell in 1947, but if they did, he wanted to know about it. The Roswell report released in 1994 by the USAF made no mention of any bodies, but the report issued in 1997 tried to explain the bodies away as crash-test dummies dropped from aircraft.

George Walker Bush, son of George HW Bush, promised to release the truth about UFOs while on the campaign trail prior to his election in 2000-2001. Needless to say, he has still to act on this vow.

It is thought that in this administration, the person who is in the know about UFOs is vice-president, Dick Cheney. Indeed, when UFO researcher, Grant Cameron, asked Cheney if he had ever been briefed about UFOs during a radio phone-in show, instead of simply saying: “No.” or some other dismissive comment, he said that if he had been briefed about UFOs, that it would be classified and he wouldn’t be able to talk about it. An incredible statement that proves that the UFO subject is still so highly regarded by the US government that it would be classified information!

While presidents come and go, the intelligence agencies remain and they want to keep tight control of official UFO research. Few presidents are really in the loop concerning the subject, but unidentified flying objects are still a cause for concern to this day.

In 2005, an unidentified object was detected over Washington DC. Pandemonium erupted as a terrorist attack akin to 9/11 was feared. People ran for shelter and the president and his staff were whisked to safety. The object was later explained away as a ‘radar blip’.

UFO Files continues to be high quality, serious programming (unlike Discovery’s World’s Strangest UFO Stories, which persists in ridiculing the subject) and this episode was extremely interesting. While little was deduced about the involvement of the office of the president in UFO matters, we got a glimpse into the workings of government and their continued interest in the subject. A subject that, according to Dick Cheney, is still classified.

All images are the property of the respective copyright holders and are used here solely for review purposes.

THE UFO FILES:

Britain’s Roswell

The History Channel, Sunday 22^nd January 2006

The second episode of The History Channel’s new series, The UFO Files, featured what some believe may be the single most important UFO case in history, most certainly the biggest case in the UK. That event has become known as the Rendlesham Incident, or Britain’s Roswell.

In December of 1980, peculiar lights were reported over the twin RAF bases of Woodbridge & Bentwaters in Suffolk. Many US Air Force personnel reported these objects, physical evidence was found, on-site recordings were made and official documents were filed and classified. Rumours abounded for three years until the famous Halt Memorandum was released through the US Freedom of Information Act, thus crystallizing the Rendlesham Incident in the minds of UFO researchers around the globe.

This program featured many, but not all, of the main players in the story, focussing on the men that were, or claimed to be, there. We also heard from researchers that helped push this startling event into the public domain, although the people that broke the story, to such an extent that it briefly made the front pages of national newspapers, were strangely absent.

We began with an overview of the Bentwaters base. In 1980, it was one of the largest, most important in Europe, with over 12,000 personnel serving and protecting a significant nuclear arsenal. It was the height of the Cold War, with tensions between NATO and the Soviet Union at boiling point. Vigilance was not only necessary, it was imperative.

John Burroughs told of how he and his sergeant saw odd lights in the dense forest that separated the two bases. Alarmed by what they had seen, they headed back to the security point and phoned in their sighting on a secure line. Tech. Sergeant Jim Penniston was dispatched to their position and the group headed out into the forest.

Penniston saw the lights and at first thought he was looking at a downed aircraft. He called in his fears and questioned the two men present. Burroughs and Penniston, along with the sergeant’s driver, drove deeper into the trees to investigate. Burrough’s sergeant was to afraid to assist and he was left behind.

Burroughs and Penniston left their jeep and walked towards the lights. Their radios suffered from strong interference and the closer they got to their goal, the more certain they became that this was no plane crash.

In a clearing, they were illuminated by a blinding light. Penniston approached the light and it dimmed to reveal a large, dark, pyramidal object, roughly nine feet wide by eight feet high. He took several photographs and constantly made notes, but his handwriting became more illegible the closer he got to the object. He saw peculiar symbols on the object and he drew these into his notepad. Other than these markings, he could make out no other features. He reached out and touched the craft, finding it warm to the touch and as smooth as glass. Light emanated from the fabric of the hull.

There was another blinding flash and the men dove for cover. The craft lifted up out of the trees and sped away into the night sky. Penniston said that he had never seen an aircraft move as fast in his Air Force career.

Then they saw another light flashing in the trees, but they almost immediately realised that this was the beam from the Orford Ness lighthouse, some five miles distant. Their radios began working normally and they called in a report.

On returning to the base, they were debriefed, but fearing for their careers, the men gave a ‘sanitised’ report, omitting the more weird aspects to their experience. Their superior officer warned them that ‘some things were best left alone’.

Unable to put the event out of his mind, Penniston returned to the site in Rendlesham Forest the next day and found depressions in the ground where the UFO had been seen. They were in a triangular formation, exactly 9.8 feet apart. He made plaster of Paris moulds of the indentations. He decided not to hand over his moulds to his superiors.

Two nights later, Deputy Base Commander, Lt. Col. Charles Halt, was enjoying a relaxing evening at an officer’s Christmas party when one of his men arrived in an agitated state and reported to Halt that “It’s back!”

Halt was determined to put this nonsense to rest. His men were supposed to be protecting billions of dollars worth of military hardware, not chasing phantom lights through the trees. He organised a security detail and they headed out into the forest. On arriving, Halt found that a security cordon had been set in place and large, mobile units known as Light-Alls deployed, although they would not work properly for some reason.

Although the UFO was no longer visible, Halt and his men headed into the trees, armed with a still camera, a Geiger counter, a night vision scope and Halt’s personal cassette recorder, upon which he captured one of the most amazing pieces of audio footage ever. Halt was certain that he could find a logical explanation for the UFO reports.

Then we were treated to the actual recording Halt made on his recorder (a copy of which can be found on the free CD with the first issue of the UFOData Report).

The Light-Alls refused to work, so they headed into the woods without the illumination afforded by the mobile units. They soon found that their radios became subject to the same interference that had plagued Burroughs and Penniston two nights previously. Halt saw that several trees had been damaged as though something large had moved through the forest, snapping off branches and scouring off bark as it went. He ordered for photographs to be taken. The Geiger counter began registering high levels of radiation on the sides of the trees that had been damaged, the sides that faced the alleged landing site.

Suddenly, the animals on the adjacent farm began making a great deal of noise and a glowing, red light appeared in the trees. Halt described it as looking like an eye winking at them. It moved through the trees towards their position. Halt said that it looked like it was dripping what looked like molten metal. Then it moved out into the farmer’s field and hovered there for about twenty or thirty seconds before silently exploding into multiple white objects that sped away. On investigating the field, Halt’s men could find no evidence of burn marks or debris that might be left behind from what they had witnessed.

The object then reappeared, heading their way from the south and stopping overhead. It shone down what Halt described as a beam that was laser-like in its intensity. Halt’s shock at what he is seeing is clearly evident on the tape. The beam then goes out and the object moves on over the base, specifically, some said, the nuclear weapons storage area, and begins shining its beam down to the ground again. It was here that Halt’s recorder ran out of tape.

With the craft still hovering over the airfield, Halt decided that they should return to the base. They were met by John Burroughs and Adrian Bustinza. Burroughs was concerned about Halt’s men, they seemed very shaken, he said. Then he saw a blue light in the field and pointed it out to the colonel. Halt gave him permission to check it out and he and Bustinza headed into the field, while Halt and his team went back to the base.

Burroughs and Bustinza ran towards the blue glow and just as they reached it, with Burroughs in the lead, it vanished. Bustinza told him that he had seen him enter the blue light and disappear. He could not believe it. Burroughs had more questions than answers.

By January of 1981, the bases were full of rumours about what had gone on just after Christmas. Former head of the MOD UFO desk, Nick Pope, asserted that these men were highly-trained professionals, expert witnesses with many years of experience in most cases. The investigation that followed remains controversial twenty-five years later.

According to the airmen, they became involved, against their will, in a government cover-up. At first, routine was conformed to. Halt debriefed his men, as regulations required, and statements were taken. Penniston claimed that after the meetings with Halt, things ‘began to get heavy’.

Two weeks after the debriefings, Penniston said he was interrogated by high-ranking officials from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Georgina Bruni, author of You Can’t Tell The People, explained that the OSI had the power to question anybody. They could walk into a general’s office and arrest him if the liked.

Penniston gave the OSI his statement and offered them the sketches he had made during his sighting. After this, Penniston cannot remember much about the interrogation, but he believes that he may have given consent for truth drugs such as sodium pentathol to be administered.

During the OSI’s investigation, in which more and more people were called in, Adrian Bustinza was questioned so aggressively that he refuses to speak publicly about the incident to this day. Georgina Bruni says she has spoken with him, however, and he told her that the OSI forced him to agree, with a thinly-veiled threat of death, that what he saw was the light from Orford Ness. Other witnesses were also told to drop their stories about a UFO.

A short time later, Burroughs and Halt said that they saw activity going on in the forest, with personnel partaking in covert activities at the landing site. Halt’s and Penniston’s photographs came back from the processing lab completely fogged out. Penniston believes that the photos were intentionally whited-out. Even Halt, the highest ranking eyewitness, believes he was kept out of the loop of the investigation. He was asked to type up a memo describing the incident. He did so, believing it would be shared with the British authorities. The memo was not meant to be a definitive account of the incident and Halt made several mistakes and omissions, but he assumed that it would create enough interest for a proper investigation to be started. The memo was filed away.

Three years later, the News of the World ran a headline story entitled: UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK And That’s OFFICIAL. The article was based around Halt’s memo that had been released via the US Freedom of Information Act. The programme claimed that the memo was brought into the open by Larry Warren, a former security policeman at the base. Peter Robbins (who co-authored with Warren the book, Left At East Gate) explained how it was Warren’s information that led to the memo being released to the public.

Warren’s story is somewhat different to the one described in the Halt Memo:

On December, 29^th 1980, a nineteen-year old Warren was ordered from his security post and told to go into the woods to assist with Colonel Halt’s investigation. On reaching a clearing, he saw a group of military personnel standing around a glowing object.

He described Air Force officers conversing with three, small, child-like figures. Warren said that it seemed like some sort of protocol was being enacted, but before he could witness further, he was dismissed from the scene. The next day, he was taken for debriefing with several other witnesses and shown film footage of military/UFO interactions going back to perhaps the 1940s. Afterwards, Warren’s memories become disjointed. He recalls being in an underground facility with medical personnel and of being in some sort of mess hall all alone. He thinks that these may have been implanted memories, used in an attempt to fog his actual recall of the UFO sighting.

Warren’s pronouncements infuriated the other witnesses. They said that Warren’s story was a pure fabrication and that nothing he said can be believed. Although his story does match with some of the events described by the others, he is the only one saying that he saw aliens. Also, nobody else can recall him being on the scene at the time of the incident. Warren remains firm, however, that what he has told us is the truth.

While the reports from these highly-trained witnesses are compelling, it is, the narrator told us, the discrepancies in their stories that cause concern.

Astronomer and retired Air Force major, James McGaha, was convinced that what the witnesses saw on those nights was the Orford Ness lighthouse. He explained that at night, the beam from the lighthouse can be scattered by the trees, creating weird effects. John Burroughs disagreed and reminded us that in his report, he clearly stated that they saw and quickly recognised the beam from the lighthouse. Georgina Bruni told us that no lighthouse can move through the trees, dart about the sky and shine beams down to the ground. McGaha countered this by saying that on the night of the 25^th December, a Soviet Cosmos satellite re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and would have looked like a very bright fireball. He fails to account for the discrepancy in the dates, however, plus the fact that such an event would be transitory and not last for several hours, as described by the witnesses.

In 2002, declassified government files shed new light on what happened that night in 1980. The documents showed that an RAF investigation had taken place in 1981 and that the investigators were happy that what the witnesses described was not the Orford Ness Lighthouse. The files also state that the radar facilities at the time were faulty and that no recordings were made of any radar contacts. In fact, the files say that the radar camera recorder was switched off. Listen to the fascinating interview with Gary Baker on the free UFOData Report CD for more about this amazing statement.

The files also showed that the investigations had been based around Halt’s memo, which stated that the sightings began on the 27^th December, when the sightings had begun on the 25^th. The programme is wrong here, because the first sighting was after midnight on the 26^th December, long after any sighting of the Cosmos satellite may or may not have been made. The only photographs made available show the clearing, but no evidence of a landed craft. According to the investigation, what happened that night was ‘no threat to national security’.

If, Larry Warren asked, UFOs beaming down lights onto a nuclear weapons storage area isn’t of defence significance, what is?

James McGaha responded that if a real UFO had been hovering over the base, shining down beams of light, then everybody would have been awoken and placed on a high state of alert. That didn’t happen, he said.

Nick Pope declared that, as a great many of the key staff of the base were on leave, there was a decision-making vacuum. I find this an astounding statement to make. Lt. Col. Halt was the deputy base commander. He went on to become the actual base commander. If he can’t make the appropriate decisions during an incident of this nature, who can?

The narrator went on to say that the Rendlesham Forest Incident is likely to remain a mystery.

What we are left with are a few government documents that are often contradictory or incomplete, the stories of the eyewitnesses and the physical evidence, like Jim Penniston’s plaster moulds and drawings and Halt’s tape recording.

Nick Pope closed by saying that everybody has heard of Roswell, but only UFO researchers know about Rendlesham. It is time that this case is placed alongside, or even above Roswell, as perhaps the most significant UFO encounter of all time.

Britain’s Roswell gave us a serious, if sometimes incomplete or erroneous portrait of the events during the Rendlesham Incident. No mention was made of researchers such as Brenda Butler and Dot Street, who gathered many eyewitness reports from local people who also saw strange lights in the sky at the same time, and were among the first people to break the story.

That said, the programme did try to focus on the events as reported by the eyewitnesses and any sceptical explanations were addressed, but not allowed to take over the programme, as often happens with this sort of documentary. The ambivalence shown towards the events, though, is infuriating. To simply suggest that the incident ‘will remain a mystery’ is like saying ‘just forget about it and it will go away’.

I agree with Nick Pope that this incident should be elevated high above Roswell and any and all government documents related to this event should be released to the public. I’m sure you all agree. I’m also certain that it ain’t gonna happen! If the base commander can be kept in the dark, then us plebs in the ‘real world’ most certainly can.

All images are the property of the respective copyright holders and are used here solely for review purposes.

UFO Files & The World’s Strangest UFO Stories

On Sunday, 15^th January 2006, two of the top documentary channels on television each launched a brand new series devoted to the subject of UFOs. The History Channel began with The UFO Files at 8pm and at 10pm, the Discovery Channel launched The World’s Strangest UFO Stories.

Both shows picked popular topics for their premieres and both programs had high production values, although World’s Strangest had a jauntier, more humorous approach to the subject. The fact that major ‘real-life’ documentary channels chose to broadcast brand new series of this type clearly demonstrates that the UFO subject is far from dead. In fact the introduction to the Discovery Channel’s effort stated that ‘across the planet, tales of extra-terrestrial encounters appear to be on the increase’.

The UFO Files began with Beyond The War of the Worlds and was less about UFOs than it was about acclimating the general public to the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

We were given a history of science fiction, from the early days of astronomy to the discovery that the planets in the sky were other worlds, separate, but perhaps not dissimilar to the Earth. Nineteenth-century writers such as Jules Verne and HG Wells took the phenomenal advances of science at that time and adapted them into speculative works of fiction and fantasy.

In 1897, Wells published his third book and The War of the Worlds became a popular sensation. Its central idea that Martians invaded England, then the world’s major superpower, and quickly decimated the might of the British Empire sent shockwaves through society. His striding, metal tripods that employed death rays and poison gas terrified the public and the book is just as popular today as it was over a hundred years ago.

A hefty section devoted itself to the infamous Orson Welles radio broadcast of 1938. This adaptation of Wells’ novel had the Martians invading New Jersey and, with its use of the idiom of the ‘breaking news’ format, created panic amongst sections of the American population. Orson Welles made a public apology, but this did not prevent others from trying the same methods and similar broadcasts in Ecuador in 1949, in which rioters killed 15 people, and Buffalo, New York in 1968, still caused a great deal of concern.

With the launch of unmanned probes to Mars in the Sixties and Seventies, humankind got its first close-up views of the Red Planet. What we saw was a world pockmarked with craters and with an atmosphere so thin that life as we know it would be impossible.

Then in 1976, the Viking Orbiter snapped what appeared to be a massive face on the Martian surface. The Cydonia Face caused a sensation and many believed it was an artificial construction. Later, more high resolution images from Mars Global Surveyor seemed to prove that the Face was nothing more than a mesa, a desert hill that simply looked like a face in a certain light. To this day, though, many researchers still believe that the Face is a remnant of some long-gone Martian civilisation.

The Viking landers touched down on the desolate plains of Mars and performed experiments that, at first, seemed to indicate the presence of life. These findings from one experiment were discarded, however, but its designer, Dr Gilbert Levin, stands by the results of the experiment to this day. This was conveniently omitted from the program.

As NASA continues its missions to Mars, building up to manned landings, it has become clear that we are going to find nothing resembling Wells’ Martians there. This has not diluted the love that people have for Wells’ The War of the Worlds in any way, though. This year, Steven Spielberg released his blockbuster version of the novel (although it was in reality a remake of the George Pal 1953 movie) and in 2007, a CGI movie version of the classic 1978 album, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, is scheduled for release.

While this program provided a fascinating history of the impact of Wells’ novel, its value as a UFO documentary is less impressive. It did show how the population can be manipulated by the media into a frenzy of paranoia and panic with the threat of an alien invasion.

The World’s Strangest UFO Stories began on the Discovery Channel at 10pm with a show entitled Roswell: The Truth. Comedian, Mark Williams, hosted the show and it was a light-hearted affair, despite the fact that it was a serious subject to many of the people involved.

After a history of the Roswell Incident, in which the Roswell Army Airfield (RAAF) issued an official press release stating that a flying disc had been captured on a ranch near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, we were introduced to Stanton Friedman, the man that brought the incident back into the limelight in 1978.

He told how he interviewed the intelligence officer of the RAAF, Major Jesse Marcel, and how he was informed that it was no weather balloon that crashed that fateful day in July, 1947, but a craft from another world. Marcel’s son, also named Jesse and now a flight-surgeon in the US Air Force, also told how he handled pieces of debris from the crash and that it was not from a balloon, top secret or not.

Thus began a rollercoaster ride of theories and speculation and debunking from such people as Nick Redfern, Dave Thomas, Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and even the townsfolk of Roswell themselves.

We heard about Project Mogul, a top secret project using balloons to carry huge trains of sensors into the sky to detect Soviet nuclear tests (even though the Soviets didn’t detonate their first atomic bombs until 1949). We heard about alien bodies being recovered and how the families of those involved were threatened into silence.

We heard about experiments with Nazi technology and poor monkeys being sacrificed in such tests. We heard about multiple UFO crashes on that day. And we heard how UFO researchers are ‘cashing in’ on the story, while sceptics bemoan that they cannot demand a thousand dollars per lecture.

We were treated to footage of Ray Santilli’s alien autopsy film and told how it still cannot be completely debunked.

Two official, government reports explained away the incident in various ways utilising several projects that spanned many years, as proof. It was all a case of mistaken identity, wasn’t it?

The show ended on a positive note. Roswell thrives on the publicity and subsequent tourism dollars. Ultimately, Williams said, if you believe that the Roswell Incident is a load of rubbish, then you have to believe that the people of the town that claim an alien spacecraft crashed there are either terribly mistaken or that they are lying – every single one of them… “and that’s very hard to do.”

For a show called Roswell: The Truth, few truths were uncovered. But that’s hardly surprising as the story has become more and more complex over the years. It did its level best to report what happened in an entertaining format and I think it did a good job. Sceptics and believers alike were given a fair shake of the stick and eventually, we are left to make up our own minds – which is how it should be.

Both series continue on their respective channels and we’ll bring you reviews and comment as they air.

All images are the property of their respective copyright owners and are used here solely for review purposes.

Interview with an Alien

Danny Wallace may be as annoying as a Big Brother contestant, but at least he gets the UFO subject on our TV screens. For a show titled Interview With An Alien, this hour-long production was peculiarly bereft of the promised ET chit-chat.

What the show did do, though, is take us through some excellent UFO stories, complete with compelling witness testimony and some excellently-made reconstructions.

Using captions and titles utilising Star Trek fonts, it could be argued that the producers are subliminally suggesting that UFOs are the stuff of science fiction, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt as we explore the evidence presented.

Danny Wallace tells us that over 80 million Americans believe that UFOs are extra-terrestrial craft. Our first port of call is Pahrump, Nevada, home of the Art Bell Show, which broadcasts on Coast To Coast AM radio to millions of listeners every night. Art Bell and his wife tell us of his own sighting of a giant triangle that glided over them one night.

On March 13^th, 1997, the UFO community was set alight by the Phoenix Lights. We hear from several eyewitnesses, including a policeman, who claim that what they saw were not aircraft flares, as the official explanation informs us. Of course, we have an astronomer who declares that what was seen that night could not possibly have been an alien spacecraft.

We are then presented with an incredible sighting from Lebanon, Missouri, in which six people, five of which are police officers, observed a huge, triangular craft moving across the sky. We hear actual police radio conversations and watch an impressive reconstruction. At first, the police thought that the initial report, from a truck driver, was a joke, until they saw it for themselves. The actual officers appeared on camera to describe what they saw.

It’s this kind of report that is extremely difficult for sceptics to dismiss and the producers of this show didn’t even try. We are told of the event and the programme moves on.

Wallace stands on the Greenwich Meridian and tells us about the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947, which brought us the term, ‘flying saucers’, even though what he saw was described as crescent-shaped in appearance and only moved ‘like a saucer skipping across a pond’.

This early wave of UFO sightings brought about intense interest from the military, culminating in special projects charged with the task of finding out what people were seeing.

We are reminded of the 1948 Eastern Airlines sighting, in which the pilots and one passenger reported seeing a 100-foot long object with windows travelling at about 700 mph. Such reports from respectable witnesses are also difficult to dismiss.

We are then told of UFO sightings by other pilots, both civilian and military. All of these men are reputable and none of them can explain what they saw. The reports caused such a stir that the US Air Force was forced to admit that they thought that the Earth was being visited by extra-terrestrial spacecraft.

Unfortunately, General Hoyt Vandenberg disagreed and accused the pilots of being ‘oddballs’. The sightings continued, however, and 1952 became the year in which the largest amount of reports ever were collected. We had the famous Washington Flap, which forced the CIA to set up the Robertson Panel, which concluded that UFOs should be stripped of their mystery. This was to be done by marginalising the phenomenon and subjecting it to ridicule to such an extent that people would no longer take reports seriously.

Fortunately this tactic did not work for a minute and reports continued to flood in. The public was still fascinated by the concept of aliens and Hollywood went on to cash in on this buzz by producing classic movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers and This Island Earth.

Such interest forced the USAF to set up Project Blue Book to investigate the continuing sightings of unidentified flying objects. Essentially a public relations exercise, Blue Book ran until 1969 and its goal was to debunk UFO reports by any means necessary. One of their top investigators was Dr. J Allen Hynek, an astronomer from Ohio University.

We are reminded of Blue Book case# 12548, in which a UFO was sighted on October 24^th, 1968 at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. Airmen on the ground saw a brightly-lit object hovering above the ground. A B52 was flying in the area and was diverted to investigate. The crew clearly saw a structured craft and they appear on camera to describe their experiences. The co-pilot, an Air Force captain, is certain that what he saw was an alien spacecraft. The navigator picked it up on his radar scope and we are shown photographs of the actual blip as it paced the aircraft. When it vanished from the scope, they turned the aircraft in an attempt to locate the UFO visually. They saw it hovering close to the ground. It was described as at least 200-feet in diameter, hundreds of feet long, glowing yellow, with a metallic cylinder that was attached.

The crew of the B52 and sixteen ground witnesses attested that they saw a UFO that night. Blue Book came to the astonishing conclusion that what they actually saw were nothing more than stars!

When the Air Force closed down Project Blue Book in 1969, after the Condon Committee decided that UFOs were of no scientific significance, Dr. Hynek was bemused by their findings. He had become a firm believer that there was something to the UFO enigma that warranted continued study.

Next up is the most famous UFO incident in history – the Roswell crash. We are told of the debris collected by Major Jesse Marcel of the Roswell Army Air Field and how it was decided that it was a crashed flying saucer. Then the story was changed and the world was told that it was nothing more than a downed weather balloon. Marcel, however, was adamant that what he saw and handled was not debris from any balloon.

Wallace, however, seems convinced by the official explanation that what was recovered was from a top secret project, codenamed Mogul. He clearly insinuates that the UFO aspects to the case were part of a huge money-making scam, from books to videos to the townspeople of Roswell themselves cashing in on their city’s new-found fame.

The final segment of the show is devoted to alien abductions. It is obvious that Wallace and the producers have no real interest in this phenomenon and that they think that anybody who says that they have been abducted is suffering from hypnogogic dreams or are victims of unscrupulous hypnotherapists.

We hear from Bud Hopkins and several abductees, all of whom are absolutely certain that something out-of-this-world happened to them, in many cases with terrifying results.

Academics such as Susan Clancy pour scorn on Hopkins’ hypnosis methods and tell us that abduction ‘memories’ are nothing more than dreams. They try to dismiss them by saying the experiences are akin to the old tales of incubi and succubi, but our modern minds interpret the imagery as alien in origin.

Of course, the sceptics conveniently forget about abductees that are taken from cars or elsewhere when they are wide awake!

Finally, we talk to astronomers about the possibilities of life ‘out there’ and that most scientist think that there is definitely intelligent life somewhere else in our galaxy. Frank Drake and Seth Shostak discuss their SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects. Drake tells us about a signal he picked up that turned out to be an aeroplane. The famous ‘Wow!’ signal doesn’t even get a look-in.

Wallace ends on the positive note that while scientists and believers may be diametrically opposed in their interpretations of UFOs, they both share the overwhelming desire that one day actual, open contact with aliens will be made.

While Interview With An Alien (why th