LAY IT ON THE TABLE

From Fortean Times #105/December 1997
Copyright Rebecca Keith, 1997

Lately I've been doing some mild ranting about the state of ufology in the United States. I'm not happy with it. No one seems to be happy with it at the moment, but we all have different reasons.

The people who believe just about every UFO tale they hear (let's call them fringies) aren't happy because more conservative ufologists question them. The fringies think that one should be able to say anything without question. One of the favourite places for fringies (and those who like to watch them) to hang out on the internet is Skywatch International's e-mail list.

I confess I don't know a lot about Skywatch International or Col. Steve Wilson, who heads up the Organisation. From what I can tell, Wilson claims to have been in the United States Air Force and participated in several UFO crash retrieval operations as part of an elite crash retrieval team. He can also read Vegan -- if anyone can tell me what Vegan is and who speaks it, I would be most interested to know. But send some kind of proof along with your explanation because I'm not a fringie. I'm not going to just accept a claim because someone says it's so. If you want me to take you seriously, you had better be prepared to back up what you say.

Robert Dean claims he saw a document called The Assessment at SHAPE Supreme Headquarters. He says that the document was created at the request of NATO and dealt with the alien threat. Great. Let's see it, or talk to someone else who has seen it.

Stephen Greer can communicate with aliens. Great. Prove it. I want to hear the aliens. I want to hear them interacting with you. I want to see scientific evidence that shining a high-powered light actually attracts UFOs. I don't want to see fuzzy little lights in the sky and I don't want to hear odd beeping noises that turn out to be owls.

Derrel Sims claims to have 16 scientists studying "alien implants." Terrific. What are their names and qualifications? What makes the implants alien? How do we know they were implanted intentionally, not accidentally?

Alien autopsy you say, Mr. Santilli? Let's see some film from your video. Let's see the cameraman's credentials. Let's meet the cameraman.

Col. Corso wants us to believe that he was the single most important man of this century. Not only was he a good bowler, but he was also involved in the Bay of Pigs and with getting the POWs out of Korea. He also claims to have introduced alien technology gathered from the Roswell crash to American companies so that things like night vision equipment and integrated circuits could be invented. Of course, the real inventors of these things didn't know they were actually reverse-engineering alien technology, and he can't prove that because that was all part of the plan. No one was ever supposed to know where the technology came from. Too bad.

It's not that I don't believe that alien technology could be reverse engineered to produce technological advances for the human race or that aliens could be implanting humans, or that The Assessment exists. And we just might have an alien autopsy on film somewhere - although it is more than likely buried in the archives somewhere near President Kennedy's brain. I am open to the possibility of all of that. I just want some kind of documentation, and until people who claim these thing can offer the same, I find it hard to accept their claims. Their claims don't deserve the time it has taken to write these few paragraphs.

So, I'll move on to a few things that have happened recently in the USA. The Phoenix Lights (filmed sometime between 9:30pm and l0:00pm on 13 March) might turn out to be flares. There appears to be some decent evidence to merit this conclusion. Richard Motzer, a MUFON investigator in Arizona, reached this conclusion by studying videotapes from that evening and then comparing them with daytime footage shot from the same areas. He concluded that the lights were not over Phoenix, but beyond the Estrella Mountains near the Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range, where flares are routinely dropped during training exercises. Motzer's theory is supported by an admission from an Air National Guard unit that was in Arizona and jettisoning flares on 13 March. Of course, some don't accept this claim, but that is because they don't know all the facts or are too firmly entrenched in the "it was aliens" idea. I haven't seen all the evidence yet, but I see more support for the "flare theory" than for the "alien theory."

And finally, after two years' campaigning, the International Roswell Initiative has turned in more than 20,000 signatures to the White House and President Clinton. The petition asks that the President declassify and release any and all information relating to UFOs for the American public. The letter sent by IRI's founder/director Kent Jeffrey admonished the government by saying: "[the government] has handled Roswell, along with the UFO phenomenon in general, very poorly - all but ignoring the issue. Such a cavalier approach, in combination with the public's intense interest in the subject, has exacerbated feelings of distrust and suspicion about government actions and motives."

And he's right. So far, there has been no reaction from the President.

REBECCA KEITH MAKES HER VIRTUAL HOME ON THE INTERNET WHERE SHE INTERACTS WITH THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS IN UFOLOGY. E-MAIL: [email protected]