In the seventies, I became greatly influenced by UFO writers, such as John Keel, Peter Kor, Allen Greenfield, et al., who propounded one version or another of what might be called a “4-D” (fourth dimensional) interpretation. I still feel that UFOS, as well as most “psychic” events, are manifestations of some sort from another realm or dimension. They may have a degree of physical reality, but they are beyond our present science and present powers of human comprehension.
Although I disagreed strongly with NICAP’s effort to blame everything on the Air Force, I now believe that there is a governmental coverup—whether deliberate or not remains to be seen—which has prevented the public from taking UFOs as seriously as they should. Were the public to realize that UFOs are a serious and continuing problem, governmental funds (in the millions) could be devoted to scientific attempts to solve the mystery properly; and eventually, with enough money, and given our present level of technology, some progress in that direction would be inevitable.
As things stand now, the field is still largely inhabited by amateurs, including teenaged hobbyists, cultists, and disturbed people of all sorts. In recent years, however, a few “real” scientists have taken a serious interest in UFOs and have been willing to say so publicly, which is a good trend. However, their pro-UFO bias largely invalidates their work.
Today, whereas most UFOlogists still prefer 3-D “nuts and bolts” saucers and space people, I prefer 3-D, 4-D, or 4-D entities. Also, while some others believe that our visitors were around for a few years and then went away, I feel rather that, whatever this phenomenon is, it has been a permanent part of the Earth’s environment at least since the dawn of recorded history, and remains here now.
My skepticism is caused by the fact that our supposed visitors are just too much like us—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. They never seem to tell us anything we don’t already know. Their technology is only a very few years ahead of our own.
Granted that intelligent life probably exists throughout the universe, it is still a weird coincidence indeed that we are being visited by creatures who are almost precisely at our own stage of evolution. If they were a little less developed, they couldn’t get here at all, and if they were much more developed, we might not even recognize them as intelligent life forms. After all, evolution has been going on for billions of years and hopefully will continue for a few billion years more!
It is absurd to believe that a highly developed race would engage in silly genetic and sexual experiments with Earthlings. These creatures seem to be obsessed with sex—just as we are! Abductions apparently have some sort of reality, but it is definitely not a 3-D physical reality. Just what is involved, we do not know.
What is really happening, in my opinion, is that we are having occasional contacts with another realm of being—another dimension, or whatever. There is a vast spectrum of weirdness that includes saucers as well as the paranormal. One cannot be separated from the other, as tempting as it might be to do so. The reality behind the saucers is the ultimate reality behind science and religion. At our present stage of knowledge, we cannot understand it all well, but hopefully someday we will.
—JAMES W. MOSELEY
Mothman A manlike flying creature with glowing red hypnotic eyes, a wingspread of ten feet and a predilection for chasing automobiles at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour, Mothman terrorized residents of the Point Pleasant, West Virginia, area during 1966-67. Several witnesses were interviewed by various UFO investigators, including John Keel and the writer, who wrote their findings in two different books. A television newsman gave the nickname “Mothman” to the phenomenon, no doubt inspired by the TV program, “Batman.” Like the term, “flying saucer,” the satirical apellation became permanently attached, both to the Point Pleasant sightings and to such phenomena as a class. As with many other strange-creature reports, such as “Bigfoot,” and seemingly allied events such as visitations by “men in black,” many witnesses and investigators believed there was a connection between Mothman and the numerous UFO sightings in the area at the same time. Later, some witnesses, investigators, and area residents would believe the phenomena represented a portent of the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 16, 1967. These beliefs, blended with a tradition that Cornstalk, an Indian chief, had placed a curse on the town, tended to adapt Mothman to the folklore of the area.
Despite the mythlike quality of the occurrences when considered ten years afterward, two books, this writer’s The Silver Bridge (1970) and Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies (1975), record interviews with eyewitnesses and otherwise substantiate the events.
The best-documented sighting of Mothman involved four witnesses and occurred on November 17, 1966. Two newly married couples, Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, were driving together in the “TNT” area, an abandoned World War II munitions manufacturing-storage complex, when they encountered a frightening six-foot figure, with wings and glowing red eyes, emerging from behind an abandoned power plant.
“It was more or less running,” Mallette reported, “trying to balance itself with its wings which spread slightly outward. It staggered like a crippled chicken as it disappeared around the corner of the building.”
The party fled homeward toward Point Pleasant, but believed Mothman was following them. Suddenly, as they rounded a sharp curve, they saw the creature standing near the highway on a hillside. Instead of flapping its huge wings, it took off vertically, shooting upward like a rocket at great speed, but without visible means of propulsion. As they continued speeding homeward they could see the shadow of the creature, cast by the moon, still following them, even though they were driving at almost a hundred miles per hour.
An artist’s rendering of the “Mothman”
(Drawn by Hal Crawford)
When city police responded to their report and drove to the “TNT” area, they found no evidence, though they reported unusual radio interference, ”like high-pitched beeping sounds.
This dramatic report might be written off as just a horror story, were it not for several other
independent sightings of the same phenomenon. On November 25, Tom Ury, a shoe-store manager, was driving north of Point Pleasant on Route 62, when he saw what he thought to be a helicopter rising from a wooded area several hundred yards from the road. As the object approached him, he perceived it to be a huge bird, of grayish-brown color, six feet in length, and with a wingspread of at least ten feet. Fearing it would attack his convertible, he accelerated to seventy miles per hour. It followed him for about a mile, then veered off and flew away.
Although largely confined to the Point Pleasant area, one sighting was reported fifty miles away in Charleston.
On November 26, Mrs. Ruth Foster, watching for her husband to arrive home from a late evening work shift, peered through a window in her front door and was horrified to meet the gaze of two huge bulbous red eyes staring back at her. She noted a white body with what she termed “close feathers,” standing almost six feet tall. A huge set of folded wings and a “peculiar face” were the only other details she could recall. During the following evening, a thirteen-year-old neighbor, Shelia Cain, along with a friend, saw a “gray-and-white-looking” birdlike creature while passing an auto junkyard. It, too, displayed glowing eyes, a common denominator of most of the sightings. The glowing eyes generally were the only facial features described by witnesses—neither a head nor beak are mentioned.
Another incident, about one hundred miles away, may also be connected. During the evening of November 15, Newell Partridge, who lived near Wallace, noted interference on his television set, and at the same time heard his German shepherd dog, “Bandit,” howling. He went outside and directed his flashlight toward the barn where the beam picked up glowing red eyes, “like bicycle reflectors.” The dog charged toward the eyes, but did not return to the house. The next morning Partridge tracked Bandit to the barn where the dog’s footprints in the soft mud went into a circle as if he were
baying some animal. But the footprints did not leave the circle, and when Partridge heard about the Point Pleasant incidents, he believed Mothman had snatched up and carried off his pet.
Within a framework of UFOlogical theory advanced by Keel, along with Jerome Clark, writing with Loren Coleman in The Unidentified and Creatures From the Outer Edge (1975 and 1978 respectively), the Point Pleasant sightings take on a “classic” pattern. Even the “men in black” appeared shortly after the initial Mothman and UFO sightings. Mary Hyre, a newspaper reporter, recounted how mysterious, oddly dressed visitors showed up at her office, inquiring about various investigators who had interviewed witnesses. Keel believes that certain locations may represent “window” areas, where, at certain times, massive unexplained phenomena of various kinds may occur. This could include the experience of Wood-row Derenberger, who, driving near Parkersburg about fifty miles north of Point Pleasant), claimed his van was forced off the road on the evening of November 2, that a UFO landed, and an OCCUPANT named “Indrid Cold” emerged from it to assure him that “We mean you no harm.”
There are two natural explanations suggested for Mothman. George Wolfe, Jr., of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, reported that, while hunting during the Thanksgiving weekend, he had seen a “seven-foot-tall bird that looked something like an ostrich.” Could Mothman have been a migratory bird, temporarily grounded from its travels? Dr. Robert L. Smith speculated the creature could have been a sandhill crane, the second largest American crane. “It stands almost as tall as a man, with its feathers a slate gray,” the scientist stated. Large, bright red fleshy rings around the crane’s eyes could have been mistaken for the red “hypnotic” eyes reported by witnesses. But its appearance in West Virginia during the winter was difficult to explain: Smith noted it winters in a warm climate and is rarely seen east of the Mississippi, except in Florida.
Despite their bizarre attributes, the Point Pleasant Mothman sightings are not unique. Ten years later, residents of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, would report a “flap” of unidentified flying creatures, which television newsmen of a later programming decade would call “Big Bird” Jerome Clark documents many “Big Bird” sightings in his article,” Unidentified Flapping Objects” in Oui magazine, October 1976, including an account of the creature’s allegedly attacking a witness. In Texas, like West Virginia, ornithologists tried to identify the phenomena with questionable success.
“Mothmen” and other mystery “animals” are interesting to UFOlogists because they are connected, either in origin, or by popular mythmaking, with the “flying saucer” phenomena.
—GRAY BARKER
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) The Midwest UFO Network was founded on May 31, 1969. Retaining the acronym MUFON, the name was changed on June 17, 1973, to the Mutual UFO Network, Inc., to reflect the worldwide scope of the organization.
MUFON is governed by a board of directors, composed of twenty-two men and women, which includes the corporate officers, four elected regional directors, and the directors of the major functional departments. In North America, each state or province is headed by a state or provincial director. Each state is geographically divided into groups of counties with a state section director correlating the investigative activities of the field investigators.
At the worldwide level, the international coordinator, assisted by the continental coordinators, provide the liaison between MUFON and the national directors or foreign representatives in each nation. Since the field investigators comprise such an important segment of MUFON, the fourth edition of the copyrighted MUFON Field Investigator’s Manual edited by Walter H. Andrus, Jr., was released in 1995 and has been adopted by the English-speaking nations as a universal guide.
On July 16, 2000, founding member and veteran UFOlogist, John F. Schuessler became the International Director of MUFON, replacing Walter H. Andrus, Jr., who headed the organization for 30 years.
The objective of MUFON is to resolve the UFO mystery and all of its ramifications in a scientific manner. MUFON is dedicated to the express purpose of answering four basic questions pertaining to this enigma:
(1) Are UFOs some form of spacecraft controlled by an advanced intelligence conducting a surveillance of Earth, or do they constitute some unknown physical or psychological manifestation that is not understood by twentieth-century science?
(2) If UFOs are found to be extraterrestrial craft controlled by intelligent beings, what is their method of propulsion, or if they have the technique to operate in another dimension, how is this accomplished?
(3) Postulating that they may be controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence, where do they originate-in our universe or in another dimension?
(4) Assuming that some of the craft are piloted by beings, what can we learn from their apparently advanced science and civilization that could benefit mankind on the planet Earth?
Since 1970, one of the major activities of MUFON has been the sponsorship of an annual MUFON International UFO symposium, where internationally known scientists, engineers, researchers, and authors lectured on their particular specialization or contribution to resolving this perplexing scientific dilemma. In order to provide a permanent record of the presentations, the copyrighted proceeding’s are published annually for worldwide distribution.
The official monthly publication of the Mutual UFO Network is the MUFON UFO Journal formerly entitled Skylook and founded in 1967. Dwight Connelly is the present editor.
Address:
P.O. Box 369
Morrison, CO 80465
U.S.A.
Telephone:
(303) 932-7701
Fax:
(303) 932-9279
Web site:
www.mufon.com
E-mail:
[email protected]
Mysteries of Time and Space (Prentice-Hall, 1974) Brad Steiger thinks that alien visitors mold space and time so the human mind can perceive poltergeists, Sasquatch, and other unusual phenomena. They are intentionally confounding human notions of reality as a teaching method, tuning our minds to other dimensions and the intelligences that reside within them.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
N
NASA Fact Sheet on UFOs The official U.S. Government position on unidentified flying objects and possible alien visitors is quoted here (verbatim) from a “Fact Sheet” published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (dated May 17, 2000). The Fact Sheet is entitled “The US Government and Unidentified Flying Objects.”
No branch of the United States Government is currently involved with or responsible for investigations into the possibility of alien life on other planets or for investigating Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s). The US Air Force (USAF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have had intermittent, independent investigations of the possibility of alien life on other planets; however, none of these has produced factual evidence that life exists on other planets, nor that UFO’s are related to aliens. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated UFO’s; then in 1977, NASA was asked to examine the possibility of resuming UFO investigations. After studying all of the facts available, it was determined that nothing would be gained by further investigation, since there was an absence of tangible evidence.
In October 1992, NASA was directed by Congress to begin a detailed search for artificial radio signals from other civilizations under the NASA Towards Other Planetary Systems (TOPS)/High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) program (also known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project). Congress directed NASA to end this project in October 1993, citing pressures on the US Federal budget. The HRMS did not detect any confirmed signal before it was stopped. However, similar work will continue in a more limited manner through efforts of private groups and through academic institutions. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI Institute) in Mountain View, CA, effectively replaced the Government project, borrowing the signal processing system from NASA. The SETI Institute is a nonprofit corporati
on conducting research in a number of fields including all science and technology aspects of astronomy and planetary sciences, chemical evolution, the origin of life, biological evolution, and cultural evolution.
During several space missions, NASA astronauts have reported phenomena not immediately explainable; however, in every instance NASA determined that the observations could not be termed “abnormal” in the space environment. The 1947 to 1969 USAF investigations studied UFO’s under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated December 17, 1969. Of the total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remain “unidentified.”
The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;” a review of the University of Colorado’s report by the National Academy of Sciences; previous UFO studies; and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s. As a result of experience, investigations, and studies since 1948, the conclusions of Project Blue Book were: (1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever a threat to our national security; (2) there was no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and (3) there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles.
With the termination of Project Blue Book, the USAF regulation establishing and controlling the program for investigating and analyzing UFO’s was rescinded. Documentation regarding the former Project Blue Book investigation was permanently transferred to the Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records Service, in Washington, DC 20408, and is available for public review and analysis.
Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the USAF or NASA. Given the current environment of steadily decreasing defense and space budgets, it is unlikely that the Air Force or NASA will become involved in this type of costly project in the foreseeable future.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 71