This year's IUN conference was held at Sheffield Hallam
University - formerly Sheffield Polytechnic - so unlike previous
years there was plenty of room for audience, speakers and the
numerous bookstalls distributed around the hall. Both days began
with a dazzling video sequence of major UFO-related topics - the
Mandelbrot hoax, the NASA Shuttle [reputedly involved in a
close encounter with a UFO], the CIA, the Roswell
newscutting, Bob Lazaar, Secret Weapons, a Strieber entity, the
Face on Mars, and so on. Accompanied by Jean Michel-Jarre's
atmospheric music this was a superb piece of marketing which was
met with warm applause from the audience. The first lecture on
Saturday was by Ole Johnny Braenne from Norway, who described how
the celebrated 1952 Spitzbergen UFO crash was nothing more than
complete fiction. The story was invented by a West German
newspaper and never featured in the Norwegian press. The original
story was that six UFOs were detected on radar and chased by the
Norwegian Air Force. The saucers crashed and were subsequently
located half buried in ice. The UFOs were blue/silver disks which
were transported to a Norwegian Air Force base where they were
inspected by scientists from the UK and the USA. Already we can
see all the key motifs of the early crash-retrieval reports -
technologically superior UFOs that have a peculiar habit of
crashing, UFOs that show up on radar, saucers being retrieved by
the Air Force and then sent to a "secret" base,
internationally renowned scientists flying in to examine the
wreckage - exactly the same motifs which later resurfaced in
Moore and Berlitz' resurrection of the Roswell myth.
From 1954 the myth took on a life of its own as several
variations developed. Ole described four main variants, these
were:
[1] the rumour that in fact the UFOs were secret German
experimental craft,
[2] that unknown non terrestrial metals were
identified,
[3] a French UFO article alleged that the saucer had
been retrieved by Canadian commandos and taken to a Swiss base,
and
[4] a Norwegian newspaper altered the location to
Heligoland and added a more detailed description of the interior
of the craft.
Ole noted yet another parallel with Roswell. The craft was
allegedly composed of very tough material which could not be
damaged.
Despite its highly dubious nature the Spitsbergen case was
subsequently promoted by a number of credulous but popular UFO
writers in the 1950s and 1960s. In Behind the Flying Saucers
Frank Edwards claimed that he had corresponded with the General
who oversaw the recovery operation. Ole had tried but failed to
track down this General and Edwards' correspondence. In 1968
Arthur Shuttlewood promoted yet another variation of the story in Warnings
From Flying Friends. In 1973 the Condon Committee tried to
get to the bottom of the mystery by examining the UK Ministry of
Defence's files and correspondence. Nothing relevant was found.
There is no mention of a UFO crash in the Spitzbergen local press
for the whole of 1952. The Norwegian equivalent of Who's Who
contains none of the names of the military personnel supposedly
involved in the recovery operation in all of its editions between
1912 and 1970. Military records contain none of the names of the
people allegedly responsible for the recovery of the craft.
According to Ole in 1952 the Norwegian Air Force had only two
squadrons of Vampire jets - both of which could not carry enough
fuel to fly to Spitsbergen. Despite this overwhelming negative
evidence Ole had tracked down more than 200 UFO books and
articles which continued to promote the Spitsbergen crash as
fact. Ole's skeptical conclusion was that the entire story was
fabricated. This was a superb piece of UFO research which
deserves the highest praise.
The next lecture was Philip Mantle of BUFORA and the
Independent UFO Network. This was another well presented lecture
detailing many of the more well known British UFO cases over the
past decade. Philip described his involvement in the Skipton
hills flaps of the early 1980s, Tony Dodds' celebrated
photographs, the York Minster Fire and the Peter Beard hoax. This
was followed by the Ilkley Moor entity photograph, the 1989
Abingdon UFO film (which Philip suggested was possibly a Remotely
Piloted Vehicle) and the BVM photographic hoax from Hungary.
Philip was at pains to point out that many of the cases he had
investigated turned out to have mundane explanations and that he
had always believed the Gulf Breeze photographs to be hoaxes.
The next speaker was Hilary Evans, the respected Fortean writer. The title of Evans' illuminating talk was "Whatever Happened to Flying Saucers?". Evans began by stating that once upon a time there really were flying saucer reports, but now all we have are abduction reports. Why? In the 1950s George Adamski's tales of meeting blond-haired Venusians were dismissed by UFOlogists but now such tales would undoubtedly be accepted by the UFO community. Why ?
Evans went on to describe what is known as the
"psycho-social" explanation for alleged UFO abductions.
Throughout history people have looked to the skies for proof of
divine beings - from Biblical times through to H.G. Wells' War
of the Worlds. From the rise of Spiritualism in the Victorian
period to the "golden age" of science fiction
epitomised by Amazing Stories, a hugely popular science
fiction magazine edited by Hugo Gernsbach in the 1920s. Evans
talk drew heavily on slides of these early tales of what the
spacemen and their spaceships looked like, and what they were
capable of doing to mere mortals. According to Evans these
stories primed society to accept the reality of alien
intervention in human affairs which resulted in the mass panics
induced by the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of 1938 and
Kenneth Arnold's seminal sighting in 1947. Critically both events
were misinterpreted by the world and then seized upon by Ray
Palmer in his 1950s magazine Strange Stories.
Evans' talk went on to examine the way the alien myth
developed following Ray Palmer's creation of the UFO myth.
According to Evans' perspective Contact stories such as Adamski's
were based on science fiction stories like Schirmer's The
Green Man. The Apollo landings of 1969 triggered the massive
increase in contact claims of the early 1970s.
Evans suggested that Whitley Strieber's contact story was
originally presented as a factual account of a real flesh-and-
blood meeting with aliens but that later Strieber had changed his
mind and was unable to distinguish between his own fantasies and
reality. This led to a discussion of the Fantasy Prone
Personality, which affects 5 per cent of the population, and
Altered States of Consciousness. Evans believes that alien
abduction claims are the result of witnesses creating a socially
acceptable myth. This would explain for example why visions of
the Blessed Virgin Mary are only reported from cultures with
deeply held Catholic views. According to Evans UFOlogists are
guilty of reinforcing the alien abduction myth because they fail
to see the claim in its historical context. At this point in the
lecture I noticed Budd Hopkins slipping away in disgust.
Evans went on to explain that UFO abduction claims are made by
people who NEED to externalise their innermost crises. This is
proven by the fact that some abductees have later admitted to
inventing their claims for rather peculiar reasons. Carl Jung
foresaw the alien abduction claim in his 1959 book Flying
Saucers, which was ignored by UFOlogists and misunderstood by
his peers. Evans demanded to know why the vast majority of
abduction claims were being made in white middle-class societies
in developed nations. This, he believed, was because such claims
were more acceptable in those communities than in other cultures.
Evans' lecture was another brave exposition of the
psycho-social model that met with somewhat muted applause. This
was clearly not the sort of material that the audience wanted to
hear, but Evans gave them a radically different perspective to
that promoted by most mainstream UFO proponents.
Next was Jenny Randles talking about "Wonderland" -
a small area in north Cheshire that has produced countless
paranormal claims over the past century or so. Randles admitted
to being fascinated by what has become known as "window
areas" - areas where the normal rules of time and space
appear to occasionally break down. The Cheshire window area has
already featured in CW12 but this lecture introduced a wide range
of unusual phenomena that for some reason appear to cluster in
this small undistinguished area. These phenomena include :
- alien contact claims dating back to the "Zomdic"
case at Runcorn in the 1950s,
- several poltergeist cases,
- sightings of green fireballs similar to those in New Mexico
during the early 1950s and in East Anglia in the early 1980s,
-crop circles dating back to the 1930s and 1940s,
- accounts of meetings with fairies and pixies,
- a phantom monk,
- humming/screeching sounds at night [vortices?],
- close encounter cases involving police officers,
- UFOs that fade in and out of reality,
- time lapse cases,
- spontaneous human combustion,
- ghosts,
- car stop cases,
- the famous "Cow nap" case from 1978 (at the
"Devil's Garden"),
and so on, and so on. All this evidence is presented in Jenny's new book Mysteries of the Mersey Valley (Sigma).
It was interesting that Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice
In Wonderland, lived in this area. Were his fictional stories
based on local folklore ? Did the area boast a history of
paranormal claims dating back centuries?
Randles proposed that there is something special about this
rural area - something which Science should be researching not
ignoring. She challenged the audience to go away and search for
more window areas to study and understand. Let us hope the study
of such areas brings further clues about why apparently disparate
phenomena should cluster in this way. Is this clustering an
illusion due to sociological factors, or is there a common factor
in these "window areas" which occasionally affects the
way witnesses perceive the world ? This was a fascinating lecture
which took us straight to the heart of the anomaly problem.
Enter the Superstar. The public just love Budd Hopkins.
Nothing Hopkins says is challenged - not even the ludicrous tripe
dished up at the Sheffield Conference by one of the world's most
well known UFO authors. Hopkins began his unabashed promotion of
the "Linda" case by claiming that "We have reason
to believe that there are many other witnesses".
Unfortunately - according to Hopkins' reasoning - because the
case hasn't yet been publicised these witnesses have yet to come
forward to confirm "Linda's" claim that she and her
children were floated into a giant brightly lit UFO hovering
above Downtown Manhattan at 3 am in the morning. A colleague of
mine was sat next to me and laughed out loud at this absurd
statement - sadly one of only a handful of members of the 250
strong audience who knew the facts. At this someone in front of
us turned round and told us to shut up, "Who are you ? Why
do you people bother coming here ?". Why indeed ? According
to material in my possession Linda's real name has been published
in countless magazine articles whilst the case itself has been
promoted in Omni, the New York Times, MUFON UFO
Journal and IUR, so why did Hopkins claim otherwise ?
Hopkins' lecture continued on its merry way, oblivious to the
major problems that have been voiced about the case by its
critics. Here are some of Hopkins' latest claims:
- the nasal implant inserted into "Linda" 's nose by
the aliens has been recovered, photographed and examined in
laboratories. An intriguing slide was shown which purported to be
a side-on view of one of these nasal implants;
- 3 independent video tapes of the encounter allegedly exist
[!!];
- several independent witnesses claim that they saw the UFO
but mistakenly thought it was part of a movie with special
effects [which rather conveniently explains why they didn't come
forward at the time of the abduction to confirm that it
"really" happened];
- "Dan" and "Richard" kidnapped
"Linda" in order to determine whether or not she had
webbed feet [apparently - according to "Richard" and
"Dan" this would be proof that "Linda" was
actually an alien - in fact it is surely proof that
"Richard" and "Dan" know a great deal about
the alien abduction literature than they are letting on];
- "Dan" has subsequently had a nervous breakdown
[presumably this means he can no longer be contacted so that his
story can be verified];
- the UFO was so bright that there was "enough light for
thousands of people to see them", "the whole sky was
lit up" [so why the distinct lack of independent witnesses
?]; and
- the UFO abducted "Linda" and her two children and
then crashed into the Hudson River but didn't resurface [note the
same motif as the early crash-retrieval reports again]. A local
coastguard unit failed to pick up the UFO on its radar system.
At this point in Hopkins' lecture I have to admit I was
laughing so much that I stopped taking notes. This is the kind of
case which the Official Skeptics must take enormous delight in
using to discredit UFOlogists and the fascinating phenomena we
study. There are dozens of major objections to what is being
claimed. For example, quite aside from the fact that
"Richard" and "Dan" have only ever visited
"Linda" [do they really exist], Jenny Randles has
informed me that there is a major problem with the drawings which
have been produced by "Janet Kimball" and
"Dan". "Janet Kimball" -if she exists -
claims she was driving her car over Brooklyn Bridge when her car
stalled inexplicably. She claims that she observed the abduction
from this vantage point along with other witnesses in stalled
cars. "Dan" claims he was positioned much closer, less
than 500 feet away. Both witnesses draw the "abduction"
as if they were face on but in fact both groups of witnesses were
viewing the alleged event from different angles. Why is this?
It seems strange that two of the three major witnesses have
only ever corresponded with Hopkins - just as with the Gulf
Breeze hoax "Dan" and "Richard" could be
fabrications by the primary witness in an attempt to support her
claims.
Problems exist over the distance between "Janet
Kimball" and "Linda" 's apartment block. According
to Dr Willy Smith's important article in IUR Vol 18 No 2
it would have been impossible for "Janet Kimball" to
have drawn the alleged sighting depicting "Linda" 's
hair at a distance of 1560 feet - because at this distance human
eye sight is incapable of distinguishing such detail. This
argument is vigorously contested in IUR Vol 18 No 3.
However, by far the most damning aspect of this celebrated
case is the fact that there are some very striking similarities
between the claimed "abduction" and the plot of a
fictional novel, "Night Eyes". These major problems
with the "Linda" case are so important that I have
published a revised edition of the controversial paper by Hansen,
Stefula and Butler which has been published on the MUFONET BBS.
The original paper by Hansen et. al. has been challenged in very
strong terms in both MUFON UFO Journal and International
UFO Reporter.
Despite the publication of these very negative findings the
controversy seems destined to continue for some time. However,
what is so sad here is that Budd Hopkins is actually a nice well-
meaning researcher who genuinely believes he is helping the
witnesses to come to terms with a real physical encounter with
aliens. Hopkins' research - quite understandably - has been
widely promoted on the international UFO lecture circuit and in
numerous TV appearances and newspaper articles. What can
UFOlogists do to persuade Hopkins that he is most definitely
wrong to accept the literal interpretation of alleged alien
abduction claims ? How much damage is Hopkins going to do before
the penny drops?
In the crop circle business I have repeatedly criticised
people I can prove to be cynical and outrageous liars. With
Hopkins it is different as no one can doubt Hopkins' sincerity.
What can we do?
The final lecture on Saturday was by Linda Moulton-Howe on
animal mutilation cases. I admit that at this point I left the
lecture hall - I never did like blood and gore. According to
people I spoke to afterwards Moulton-Howe's lecture aimed to link
crop circles, alien abductions and animal mutilations altogether
! Perhaps this is what people want to believe about UFOs?
On Sunday the first speaker was the Rev. Donald Thomas,
someone who has been involved in the UFO scene for many years.
This was basically a historical overview from someone who lived
throughout the 1960s and who also accepted the literal truth of
what was being claimed. Thomas' lecture featured classic case
such as the Lakenheath-Bentwaters multiple radar-visual military
encounter, the 1967 Police chase across Dartmoor [which has
always been dismissed by most UFOlogists and skeptics as a
mis-identification of the planet Venus, although I recall that it
featured on the front page of several national newspapers] and
the alleged landing of a spaceship at Broadlands Estate here in
Romsey in the mid 1960s. Giving the first lecture on a Sunday
morning is never very easy and Rev. Thomas' cause was not helped
by the poor quality of the tape recordings he had faithfully kept
of major UFO stories from this fascinating era.
I didn't make copious notes of the remaining Sunday lectures
as these were all basically repeats of earlier lectures at
Sheffield and elsewhere. Following Cynthia Hind's description and
video of an alleged abduction case from Zimbabwe there was more
from Linda-Moulton Howe on alleged animal mutilations by evil
aliens and much much more from Hopkins on the second greatest UFO
abduction case on record. This too was a scream!
Hopkin's new case involved a "nervous" young couple
- named at MUFON's July Symposium as "Sam" and
"Jenny Washburn" and their two sons. Hopkins met the
couple after one of his lectures in Brisbane, Australia in late
1992. They claimed that five days ago "Sam",
"Jenny" and one of their sons had all suffered
nosebleeds from the same nostril. For years "Sam" had
suffered from a terrifying recurring nightmare which had begun in
childhood. According to Hopkins these are both symptoms of
repeated abductions.
Hopkins then presented his ace card. The Washburns had given
Hopkins a series of polaroid prints showing a playground scene
with their children playing on swings and slides. Four of the
prints were bright red and featured sand, sea and some palm
trees. According to Hopkins these photographs were taken pointing
directly at the sun so the bright red nature of these prints
won't surprise anyone with a basic understanding of photography.
Anyhow, the punchline was this. According to Hopkins these three
prints SHOULD have included the young couple and their children
but by some dastardly clever trick the aliens had managed to
abduct them by making them invisible just as the camera's timer
opened the shutter!!
Subsequently, according to MUFON UFO Journal, Hopkins
subjected both adults to regression hypnosis to discover what
"really" happened. According to Sam the family were
approached by two small silver balls which hovered above the
beach. He saw Jenny and the two boys sucked up into a larger area
of brilliance. The silver balls reminded Sam of earlier
encounters with UFOs in his early childhood [important clue
here].
Jenny's testimony was more explicit. She recalls standing on
the beach and feeling something big hovering above the family.
Then she and her two sons were levitated into the UFO whilst Sam
stood on the beach holding the camera. Inside the UFO they were
approached by two small figures and separated. Jenny was then
subjected to the standard gynaecological examination. According
to Hopkins, the aliens were capable of abducting all four members
of the family by cloaking themselves inside a field of
invisibility which lasted most of an hour.
Of course this is all complete and utter nonsense but this
didn't stop Hopkins from promoting this as yet another proven
case of alien intervention. Just what can we do to stop this man?
How much more damage is Hopkins going to do to witnesses before
his "respected" UFO research is exposed and condemned
by the professional psychological community? Some of these
witnesses are children so what kind of psychological damage is
Hopkins doing to them?
One final point. Cynics might also point out that polaroids
don't produce negatives so potential UFO hoaxes are less easy to
detect. Sadly despite his obvious sincerity Hopkins never stops
to think for one second about problems like this. By leaving
himself open to exploitation Hopkins has followed hundreds of his
predecessors -all of them "respected" UFO researchers -
into the valley of despair. Oh dear!
If you want to read the original promotion of this case see MUFON
UFO Journal Number 293, September 1992 (103 Oldtowne Road,
Seguin, Texas, 78155). If you want to see the critique of this
case by Don Johnson and Dr Willy Smith plus Jerry Clark and Budd
Hopkins' response to the controversial paper by Stefula, Butler,
and Hansen get hold of vol 18 nos 2 and 3 of International UFO
Reporter (write to the J.Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies,
2457 West Peterson Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60659). I also
recommend that you obtain the excellent Journal of UFO Studies,
Vol 1 (1989) from the same address (# 18 including p&p) as
this contains some important articles summarising the debate from
both the pro-ETH angle and from mainstream
psychiatric/psychological perspectives.
On a more positive note Paul Devereux presented another
excellent lecture covering earth lights, altered states of
consciousness and UFO window areas. Like Evans, Devereux's
position is that UFOs are caused by natural mechanisms and
processes rather than alien intervention. There is a major
university study underway in the States examining the effect of
what might be natural light phenomena on the brain. Some of this
field research is based at Marfa in Texas, a location with a long
established folklore of nocturnal lights. Interestingly our own
Professor Ohtsuki visited this location in 1987 as part of his
ball lighting research. Devereux also very properly withdrew his
earlier promotion of the Hucker lights [Earth Lights
Revelation page 135-6] which he now believes to be car
headlights, a commonly-suggested explanation for anomalous light
phenomena.
During the break we were treated to the Alton Barnes video
film reported in CW18
plus a sensational film of an out-of-focus UFO [an aircraft
covered with bright lights ?] just before it allegedly crashed
into a forest in Ottowa, Canada in either November 1989 or 1991.
This is the "Guardian" film which has subsequently been
shown on Breakfast Time TV. Apparently it was sent anonymously to
Bob Oeschler by a "Commander X" - just like the bogus
MJ-12 documents were seeded into the UFO community by someone
with a warped sense of humour. I spoke to a young Canadian
UFOlogist during the interval who told me that he had personally
visited the site of the alleged UFO crash but found no evidence
of ground traces that might confirm the story. It seems that
nothing has been learnt from the disasters of promoting Roswell
and Spitsbergen. Readers will recall that Bob Oeschler's previous
involvement in major UFO stories has been widely criticised by
numerous UFO researchers, who have variously dismissed him as a
"crank", a "charlatan" and "a confidence
trickster". Times don't change do they!
All in all I enjoyed the Sheffield Conference. It was fun ripping the alien intelligence believers to shreds with their daft theories and sensational research. Once again it seems that UFOlogy is actually a composite of two directly opposed subjects - a battle ground between the religious fervour of the uncritical all-believing alien intelligence movement and the sociological/folk- lore approach of the more rational geo-physical/psycho-social movement. As I reported in my review of the 1992 Conference in UFO Brigantia, what are UFOlogists doing by wedding these two diametrically opposed subject areas together ? How can we cut ourselves away from the popular presentation of the UFO evidence? Isn't it time we publicly rejected the alien intelligence movement and called ourselves and our subject areas something else ?
