(Page edited by Steve Gamble and any views expressed are his and his alone.)
These are some of my current ideas on UFO Research:
The following, highly speculative, article offers an alternative view to the classic scenario that the Abduction phenomenon must be the result of the actions of extraterrestrial beings. I believe that as yet there is not enough hard data to be able to identify the agent behind abductions. It may well be after extensive investigation that many or all of the abduction cases turn out to be something closer to home such as the witnesses all being fantasy prone individuals, or indeed some other causative agent is identified.
Since the publication of the reports about the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill and of Antonio Vilas Boas in the mid-1960s the abduction of human beings by some mysterious force has gained in prominence. Although these are amongst the most spectacular of UFO reports it must be remembered that they constitute only a small proportion of all UFO reports, maybe only 1 to 2% of the total. Indeed some researchers believe that, since abductions appear to be radically different from other UFO reports, that the only connection they have with UFOs is an accident of history. And since the term Alien actually only means something or somebody in the wrong place, it is not essential that Aliens are extraterrestrial. After all, most governments class people not born in their country as Aliens.
Many researchers who believe that abduction cases are a genuine part of UFO phenomena believe that the force responsible for abductions might be extraterrestrial. Are they correct in this belief? I believe that time travellers could just as well, if not better, explain the evidence available.
One of the features of many abduction reports is missing time. In missing time cases the witness may undertake a task which they know should have taken a well defined time but appears to have taken them much longer for no apparent reason. Consider the Betty and Barney Hill case where they were travelling home from a visit to Canada to their home in New Hampshire. This journey took them around two hours longer than they estimated. Or consider the case of the witness who set off from his home in Northampton to visit a relative in a village around 20 minutes from his home. Along the journey his motorcycle stalled and he observed a strange object hovering over a nearby field. He observed the object for about 5 minutes before it disappeared and his motorcycle restarted. Yet he was over one and a half-hours late arriving at his destination.
Less well known are those abduction cases where the witness undertakes a task, for example goes on a journey, and completes the task in an impossibly short time. Consider the witness who was travelling in his car along the A34 in Berkshire. As he went round a roundabout the 6pm news came on the car radio. He knew that about 1-mile beyond the roundabout he had to turn off the main road and would be at his destination in about half an hour. The radio signal started to break-up; he looked down and tried to re-tune the radio. When he looked back at the road the previous good weather had changed to rain, yet within quarter of a mile or so the rain disappeared and the sky was cloudless. He did not recognise where he was, but then he came upon a road sign. He was still on the main road, about 20 miles beyond his turnoff. Realising he would now be late, he checked the time - it was 6:05pm, in less than 5 minutes he had travelled over 20 miles. There are other similar cases.
Whatever is responsible in these cases seems to be causing a change in the passage of time, either a gain or loss of time. If the force responsible for abductions were extraterrestrial then the 'Aliens' would have not only to have overcome the problems of long distance spaceflight but also would have developed some way of manipulating time. Two miracles for the price of one! If the force responsible for abduction is some form of time travelling being, they would have already conquered time and so the ability to transport somebody backward or forward in time would be second nature.
Some abduction researchers believe that the 'Aliens' are visitors from a dying planet who are here to carry out genetic experiments because of weaknesses in their own genetic makeup. It is highly unlikely that any being that evolved entirely separately in a different part of the universe would have biochemistry that is compatible to this degree with our own.
In terms of spaceflight, beings from earth have only made the short hop to visit our moon yet we have made huge strides in recent years in the analysis and understanding of our own genetic makeup and the genetic makeup of many other species on earth. Any race that could undertake long distance interplanetary travel is likely to have made similar advances in other areas of science. They should have the chemical skills to mess around with their own genetic material without contaminating with ours. Even if they were not skilled in biochemistry (in which case they would not need to take samples from humans) much of the material they would be interested in is available in on-line libraries and databases which they could easily tap.
Abduction researchers report that the 'Aliens' tend to abduct different members of the same families at different stages of their lives. One of the great fads amongst humans is to try to trace their ancestral lines. If the 'Aliens' were just interested in forming a pool of human genetic material probably the abductions would be just random people, not groups within a family. The focusing on particular families suggests more likely an interest in that family with the genes a means of examining the links between individuals. This kind of behaviour is more typical of somebody trying to trace a (their?) family tree. Could the 'Aliens' be the witness's decendants come back to trace their roots?
I do not necessarily believe that whatever is the causative agent behind UFO abductions is time travellers, but the above illustrates how much of the same data which is used by researchers to make a case for extraterrestrial aliens can be used to make a case for an alternative hypothesis. Indeed, we could extend the arguement somewhat. As stated above, some supporters of the Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis believe that abductions occur for the collection of genetic material. But what other genetic links could there be? Some people believe that only some people see UFOs (and by extrapolation 'Aliens') because they have some ability or are sensitive in some way which the majority of people are not. This could well be some form of inherited trait which passes down the genes. Again, some people have suggested that UFO Abductions could be some previously unrecognised form of psychiatric or neurological disorder. Again there is a growing body of evidence that many psychological disorders are genetic.
During a thunderstorm on the night of 2nd July 1947, Mac Brazel a rancher from near Corona, New Mexico heard a loud crash. The next day he went out horseback riding with Timothy Proctor, the son of a neighbour and came upon a field with debris scattered about. It is often overlooked that there were other reports of UFOs in the Roswell and Corona area on that night.
The debris field was 3/4 of a mile long and 300 feet wide. It was oriented in a northwest to southeast direction. There was a gouge in the northwest side of the debris field that was 500 feet long and 10 feet wide. The debris on the field mostly consisted of I-beams and parchment like, paper-thin pieces of metal material. The material was very light in weight, a dull grey in colour, and most pieces were 6 to 7 inches in length. Some pieces that were even thinner than paper could not be broken in half, cut or burnt.
Mac Brazel collected several pieces of the debris and went back to his ranch. On July 6, Brazel went into Roswell to report what he had seen and to show a piece of the debris to Sheriff Wilcox. The sheriff decided to call the local air base. During this time Frank Joyce called in from the local radio station to see if anything newsworthy was happening around town. Brazel gave him the information about what he had found.
Major Jesse A. Marcel and a few other military personnel arrived from the base only a few minutes after the sheriff had finished talking to the people at the base. Brazel and the military personnel left and returned to the base. Later that day Brazel, Marcel and Lewis Cavitt went back to the Ranch. The next morning (July 7) they went to the crash site. The military retrieved some of the debris and returned to Roswell, arriving back late in the evening.
On July 8, the military came back and sealed off the area. They took Brazel into custody. According to some accounts, that same day they found a second crash site two and 1/2 miles southeast of the first. Barney Barnett and 4 archaeologists had stumbled onto the new site a few minutes before the military had arrived there. At the site they found a "pretty good sized metallic dull grey object" and 4 small alien bodies. They were 4 to 5 feet tall, with large pear shaped heads, small bodies and skinny arms and legs. They had two large eyes, no ears and no hair. Their skin was pinkish grey and leathery. They were wearing a one piece grey suits. The civilians were escorted out of the area when the military arrived. In a recent book updating his work on the Roswell events Kevin Randle makes a case for the military being aware of the 'second' site before Brazel arrived with his material.
On July 9th the military escorted Brazel to the radio station, there he was interviewed on air by Frank Joyce and stated that he saw a weather balloon. He left again with the military and didn't get back to his ranch until around July 15. As he left Brazel commented to Joyce "Those little green men, well they are not green". In none of the published accounts of the Roswell incident is there mention that anything other than bits of foil and small cross-section beams being recovered from the Foster Ranch where Brazel farmed. If Brazel had seen bodies of some description he must have seen them elsewhere.
Later when asked about what had happened Brazel said he had given an oath and could not talk about it. However it is strange that the military should detain Brazel for a week, when he was clearly co-operating on 9th July and, at least publicly, accepted the crashed balloon story.
The Incident remained closed and the public and UFO research organisations at large accepted the weather balloon story until 1970 when Jesse A. Marcel broke the silence and told his part in the story.
The case has been extensively researched by Stanton Friedman and independently by the team of Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt. Between them they have discovered around 200 witnesses who claim to have been involved in the recovery or subsequent handling of the Roswell material. Researcher John Keel has suggested that the Roswell material might be the remains of a Japanese Feugo balloon, a balloon with a bomb attached launched towards the USA during World War 2. These were still being discovered in remote parts of the USA in the late 1940s.
In 1994 at the request of US Senator Steven Schiff the General Audit Office started an inquiry into the incident and subsequent cover-up. The GAO required the US Air Force to reopen the inquiry. After a nine-month study the Air Force announced that the Roswell object had not been a weather balloon but a balloon involved in a top-secret project to study Soviet atomic explosions (Project Mogul). Many UFO investigators remain unconvinced by this explanation.
Timothy Good in Above Top Secret states that shortly after the Roswell incident Marcel was promoted to Lt. Col. and transferred to work on a project to detect fallout from Soviet atomic explosions in the upper atmosphere [? Project Mogul]. If Marcel later worked on Mogul he should have been able to identify what he recovered in 1947 as one of the projects balloons and, if he had, it is unlikely he would have come forward in later years. Some people have held that it was due to the secret nature of the Mogul project that the US Army Airforce could not give this as the true explanation at the time. There have been many accounts of the balloons used in the Mogul project being described over the intervening years, so there would have been plenty of opportunity to correct the Roswell report.
In summer 1993 British businessman Ray Santilli came forward saying he had obtained a quantity of 16mm film of the Roswell recovery operation. It was not until early 1995 that a video transfer of some portions of the material was shown to UFO investigators. This film is highly controversial and remains under investigation. It must be remembered that all physical evidence should be considered in relation to the testimony of the witness. At the time of writing researchers had not been allowed access to the original photographer. Since Ray Santilli came forward, other alleged Roswell films have also emerged. (See The Roswell Film below)
The area around Warminster in Wiltshire was host to a wide variety of UFO and other phenomena during the 1960s and 1970s. This link takes you to an article I wrote in UFO TIMES about a project to study these events.
Probably the subject of greatest and hottest debate in UFO research at the moment is the alleged footage of the Roswell Incident. But when you talk about the Roswell Film, which one do you mean? I have been able to identify a number of different pieces of film from at least three sources:
Tent Footage 1 - apparent preliminary examination of a body in a tent/shed shown to Reg Presley and some other researchers early 1995, source Ray Santilli
Tent Footage 2 - similar to above, but probably different sequence, shown to BUFORA early 1995, source Ray Santilli
Tent Footage 3 - similar to but different from both above, appears on video Penetrating the Web 2, source Bruce Barlow
Autopsy 1 - autopsy film shown to some researchers in April/May 1995, not shown since, source Ray Santilli
Autopsy 2 - similar, but different from above, widely used in documentaries etc, source Ray Santilli
Wreckage - show apparent control panels and other wreckage filmed inside tent/shed, source Ray Santilli
Hessman's Footage - undeveloped film given to researcher Michael Hessman by daughter of Roswell airman, little chance of recovering images, source Michael Hessman
And all this does not include the two guys who turned up at Michael Hessman's conference in Dusseldorf with their Roswell film. They claimed that they had found it amongst other films a girlfriend of one of them had inherited from an uncle. It turned out to be a cheap hoax by a German TV company. (Perhaps they should have contacted Morgana Productions who could have done a much better job for them!)
(As an aside for those who do not know, the Morgana photographs came to light a few days after some of the film held by Ray Santilli and his associates was broadcast world-wide in a series of documentaries. The photographs were of different stages in the construction of a very good replica of the alleged alien shown in the documentaries. In some of the documentaries the view that it would be difficult to make a model alien of that complexity was expressed. The Morgana people set out to show just how easy it was. BUFORA researcher John Spencer investigated these photos and was able to track down the originators. They worked for a small special effects company and said they had made the model using the photographs Ray Santilli had previously made available to newspapers for guidance.)
If UFO researchers are to be believed, the US government had managed to keep most of the information about the Roswell incident secret for nearly 50 years. For the US government to then lose one top secret film would be unfortunate, to lose two films would be careless and to lose three would be incredible. But perhaps people would like us to believe that 'genuine' UFO films are like buses - none come along for ages, then three come along together!
Throughout late 1997 and into 1998 a few researchers began to uncover people who said they knew people who had been involved in faking film which sounded very much like the Tent footage described above. Indeed at the BUFORA Research Evening in 1997 a statement was read out to the effect that names of suspected fakers had been passed to BUFORA for investigation. In the summer of 1998 various researchers went on record naming names. Finally, in January 1999 the people named by the researchers admitted in a Sunday newspaper that they had indeed faked the Tent footage. Where this leaves the rest of the alleged Roswell footage, who knows?
Although there are have been several dozen alleged crashed Flying
Saucer recoveries by different governments the important thing to
remember about the Roswell incident is that the US Army Air Force put
out a press release saying that something had been recovered. So the
UFOlogists and the authorities are agreed for once something DID
happen at Roswell. It is only about the nature of what happened -
crashed balloon or crashed Flying Saucer that they differ.