Investigators may never be able to reassemble all of the facts surrounding the events that took place over Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997. However, there is no doubt in the minds of most that what occurred was extraordinarily bizarre in nature, and that many thousands of witnesses can attest to the events.
—PETER B. DAVENPORT
photographs of UFOs Alleged UFO photographs have long been a source of difficulties, as well as constituting an important supportive element in the case for the UFO. Of the many hundreds of offerings received by private UFO research groups and official agencies, most are utterly worthless for one or more reasons: (1) The imagery is so poor that no meaningful information content is present. (2) If a structural object does appear in the picture, the circumstances surrounding the taking of the photograph are usually such that fraud is either reasonably suspected or clearly evident. (3) Some vital element (such as the original negative), which would aid in a more definitive analysis, is usually missing. (4) The testimony of the photographer and/or supporting witnesses may be internally inconsistent or not in agreement with features observable in the photo(s). (5) Inconsistencies within the photo itself suggesting a montage or double exposure, are often found.
Former assistant director of the now defunct National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Stuart Nixon, characterized the general situation very well when he said: “…NICAP has never analyzed a structured-object picture that is fully consistent with the claim an extraordinary flying device was photographed. In every case, there has been some small detail, or group of details, that raised the suspicion of a hoax or a mistake.”
One might easily conclude from all this that any and all photographs purporting to show UFOs should be promptly and mercilessly rejected. However, to do so might conceivably result in overlooking the genuine article if and when it does happen along.
The samples chosen for the UFO Photo Gallery which follows are typical. Included in this collection are “classics” from three categories: (1) allegedly “real” UFOs that many UFOlogists believe could be extraterrestrial space ships; (2) photos that are highly suspect but not proven to be false; and (3) confessed or otherwise proven hoaxes.
Can you tell which is which? Who really knows?
—RONALD D. STORY
Piata Beach (Brazil) photos The following events reportedly happened on the afternoon of April 24, 1959, as Sr. Helio Aguiar, a thirty-two-year-old statistician employed by a bank in Bahia, Brazil, was riding his motorcycle down the highway to Itapan. As he was passing Piata Beach, in the Amaralina District, he noticed a silvery, domed disk, shaped something like a Cardinal’s hat, with a number of “windows” visible around the base of the dome on top. The underside of this object showed four strange markings, or symbols, faintly visible in the photographs taken. (See Aguiar’s drawings superimposed on the photographs.)
About that time, his motorcycle engine stopped and he got off to unpack his camera. He adjusted it and took three quick shots as the object made a leisurely sweeping turn (from the sea toward him) over the surf. He then began to feel a strange pressure in his brain, and a state of progressive confusion overtook him. He felt vaguely as though he was being ordered by somebody to write something down. As he was winding the film to take a fourth picture, he lost all sense of what was happening.
The next thing Aguiar knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle and the UFO was gone. In his hand he held a piece of paper bearing a message in his own handwriting. It said, “Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike purposes. The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant and ready to intervene.”
As he tried to recall the experience, he remembered that the craft was a dark silvery metallic color, with a somewhat luminous orange-colored dome. The “windows” were small and square, and appeared more like panels or ports running around the base of the dome. There were three tubes, or rib-like structures of some kind, running parallel from the dome to the edge of the disk on one side; and it had four small semi-spherical protuberances on the underside, equally spaced near the center of the disk. Three of the markings on the underside of the flange of the disk were faintly distinguishable in the photographs taken, but they do not conform to any symbol or language known today.
Although the object moved in a sweeping curve in its flight path, it did not seem to employ aerodynamic lift to remain aloft. When first seen, it was traveling edge forward in a very steep bank, and then its position changed so that in the last photo it is traveling dome forward in a maximum drag condition, with the full area of the disk flat against its line of flight. Aguiar did not see it leave.
Photo #1 Photo #2 Photo #3 Photo #4
The APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) photographic consultant at the time, John Hopf, gave the following report:
“Working from the highly enlarged prints made from the original negatives, it is quite certain that these are authentic photographs of an unconventional aerial object actually over the water. By lining up the horizon as has been done in the composite print, and assuming equal enlargement of the originals, the apparent maneuver of the object may be noted. The apparent size of the object increases from view No. I to view No. 3, indicating the object was approaching the camera.
“In views Nos. 1 and 2 we seem to be looking at the bottom of the disk. The spots (indentations or protrusions) are not distinct enough to determine their nature and shadow effect from these is lost in the grain pattern.
“The altitude of the disk increased from view No. 3 to view No. 4 as the water is no longer visible in the last view. Only the shiny central dome is visible in this view. This may be due to the reflectivity matching that of the sky and being concealed by the grain.”
As in most cases of alleged UFO photographs, the authenticity of the story and accompanying photos is left open to debate.
—APRO
Pope, Nick (b. 1965). Nick Pope is a government employee in the British Ministry of Defence. In 1991 he was posted to a division called Secretariat (Air Staff), where for the next three years his job was to investigate UFO sightings to see if there was evidence of any threat to the defense of the United Kingdom. The job that he did was broadly analogous to the work done by the now defunct USAF study, Project Blue Book. Through his official research and investigation of the UFO phenomenon Pope became involved in related subjects such as alien abductions, crop circles and animal mutilations.
When he was promoted in 1994, and moved to another position, he continued his research privately, specializing in work with abductees. Concerned by the defense and national security implications of the UFO phenomenon he spoke out publicly, and wrote a book about his work, entitled Open Skies, Closed Minds. Later, he wrote The Uninvited, dealing with alien contact/abduction cases, and a speculative novel about alien invasion, entitled Operation Thunder Child.
Address:
50 Hogarth Crescent
Merton Abbey
London SW19 2DW
U.K.
POSITION STATEMENT: On the basis of my official research and investigation into UFO sightings and reports of alien contact, I am personally convinced that intelligent extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth. I say this on the basis of the data available to me at the Ministry of Defence, both in terms of the historic records and the several hundred new cases that I investigated each year.
While around ninety five percent of sightings could be explained in terms of misidentifications of known objects and phenomena, there was a hard core of cases that defied any conventional explanation and involved craft capable of speeds and maneuvers beyond the capabilities of our own technology. I was particularly interested in UFO sightings that could be correlated by radar and in reports where the witnesses were military personnel; such cases were directly responsible for my gradual conversion from skeptic to believer.
Nick Pope
Although a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, I am wary of the UFOlogical obsession with official coverup
s and conspiracies. I generally find such ideas to be unconvincing and ill-informed. While excited by the possibility of open contact with extraterrestrials, my defense background has instilled me with a natural caution, and I believe that governments should make some contingency plans for such a scenario, not least to counter the potential biological hazard that may stem from such contact.
It seems to me that UFOlogists need to adopt more of an empirical, methodological approach to their work, and should try to get away from the believer versus skeptic mindset. Bridges need to be built with the scientific community, not least because undisputed proof that we are not alone in the universe is more likely to come from optical or radio astronomy than from UFOlogy.
—NICK POPE
Portage County (Ohio) police chase One of the most dramatic encounters by police officers with an apparently structured, low-level UFO occurred in the early morning of April 17, 1966. Officers of the Portage County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Department first saw the object rise up from near ground level, bathing them in light, near Ravenna, Ohio, about 5 A.M. Ordered by the sergeant to pursue the object, they chased it for eighty-five miles across the border into Pennsylvania, as it seemed to play a cat-and-mouse game with them. Along the route, police officers from other jurisdictions also saw the object and joined in the chase.
Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and Mounted Deputy Wilbur “Barney” Neff had left their scout car to investigate an apparently abandoned automobile on Route 224. Spaur described the first sighting in these words:
“I always look behind me so no one can come up behind me. And when I looked in this wooded area behind us, I saw this thing. At this time it was coming up…to about treetop level, I’d say about one hundred feet. It started moving toward us….As it came over the trees, I looked at Barney and he was still watching the car…and he didn’t say nothing and the thing kept getting brighter and the area started to get light…. I told him to look over his shoulder, and he did.
“He just stood there with his mouth open for a minute, as bright as it was, and he looked down. And I started looking down and I looked at my hands and my clothes weren’t burning or anything, when it stopped, right over on top of us. The only thing, the only sound in the whole area was a hum…like a transformer being loaded or an overloaded transformer when it changes….
“I was petrified, and, uh, so I moved my right foot, and everything seemed to work all right. And evidently he made the same decision I did, to get something between me and it, or us and it, or whatever you would say. So we both went for the car, we got to the car and we sat there….”
The UFO as sketched by Deputy Spaur
As they watched, the UFO moved toward the east, and then stopped again. Spaur picked up the microphone and reported it to the dispatcher. At this time, the object was about 250 feet away, brilliantly lighting up the area (“It was very bright; it’d make your eyes water,” Spaur said.) Sergeant Schoen-felt, on duty at the station, told them to follow it and keep it under observation while they tried to get a photo unit to the scene.
Spaur and Neff turned south on Route 183, then back east on Route 224, which placed the object to their north, out the left window. “At this time,” said Spaur, “it came straight south, just one motion, buddy, just a smooth glide…” and began moving east with them pacing it, just to their right at an estimated altitude of 300-500 feet, illuminating the ground beneath it. Once more the UFO darted to the north, now left of the car, and they sped up to over 100 mph to keep up with it.
As the sky became lighter with predawn light, Spaur and Neff saw the UFO in silhouette, with a vertical projection at its rear. The object began to take on a metallic appearance as the chase continued. Spaur kept up a running conversation with other police cars that were trying to catch up with them. Once when they made a wrong turn at an intersection, the object stopped, then turned and came back to their position.
Police Officer Wayne Huston of Fast Palestine, Ohio, situated near the Pennsylvania border, had been monitoring the radio broadcasts and was parked at an intersection he knew the Portage County officers would be passing soon. Shortly afterward he saw the UFO pass by with the sheriff’s cruiser in hot pursuit. He swung out and joined the chase. At Conway, Pennsylvania, Spaur spotted another parked police car and stopped to enlist his aid, since their cruiser was almost out of gas. The Pennsylvania officer called his dispatcher.
According to Spaur, as the four officers stood and watched the UFO, which had stopped and was hovering, there was traffic on the radio about jets being scrambled to chase the UFO, and “…we could see these planes coming in….When they started talking about fighter planes, it was just as if that thing heard every word that was said; it went PSSSSHHEW, straight up; and I mean when it went up, friend, it didn’t play no games; it went straight up.”
The Air Force later “identified” the UFO as a satellite, seen part of the time, and confused with the planet Venus. Under pressure from Ohio officials, Major Hector Quintanilla, chief of Project Blue Book, had an acrimonious confrontation with the witnesses and refused to change the identification, although it was pointed out to him that they had seen the UFO in addition to Venus and the moon at the conclusion of the observation. Major Quintanilla also denied that any jets had been scrambled.
William B. Weitzel conducted an exhaustive investigation on behalf of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), obtaining taped interviews, signed statements, sketches, and all pertinent data, which was assembled into a massive report that was made available to congressional investigators. When the University of Colorado UFO Project was initiated in 1966, a copy of Weitzel’s report was hand-delivered to the director, Dr. Edward U. Condon, for his consideration. The Condon Report, published two years later, does not mention the case.
—RICHARD HALL
powerlessness The vitality of the UFO mythos lies in its presumption that there exists a higher power in the external world that is able to provoke fear and desire due to the alien’s ability to command forces that man does not. The existence of a futuristic technology that, at our level of development, appears supernatural and magical is a necessary premise in the argument that extraterrestrials are able to cross vast distances of space to visit our world. Such a power could in principle render the most powerful individuals subservient and all of us would, in principle, be vulnerable to their will.
In this minimal respect, UFO belief is analogous to religion and supernatural beliefs such as witchcraft that premise the existence of animistic forces greater than oneself. Such beliefs can be useful in fantasy by allowing oneself to believe that one is a victim of willful intention rather than blind randomness, thus imparting meaning and drama to misfortunes.
The dominant emotion in UFO encounters tends to be fear. (Moravec, 1987) When one is present, chaos reigns. Witnesses are paralyzed. Vehicles lose power. Television and radio is disrupted. Animals go crazy. Power grids black out. Fires erupt. Things fall apart. Abductions also tend to be nightmarish horrors in which the victim feels powerless. Pain is ubiquitous. The aliens come from dying worlds. The government and sinister Men in Black try to cover up the truth. The end of the world or some similar cataclysm is nigh. While Jung suggested UFOs might be mandalas and thus symbols of wholeness, the presence of tranquil emotions are strikingly rare and decisively refute the idea that the circularity of saucers is due to desires for order.
Studies of UFO belief repeatedly implicate the frustration of the will to power, i.e., the generalized drive to dominate and master. Walter Kaufman’s treatment of Nietzsche’s formulation of the concept is recommended for a full exposition. (Kaufman, 1980) Stephen P. Resta’s study found strength of UFO belief is well correlated with externality—a generalized attitude that one has little control over one’s life. (Resta, 1975) Resta also tested for anomie and did find a correlation. This would be consistent with paranoia. Paranoia acts as a defense against depression and meaninglessness.
There is a significant correlation be
tween UFO belief and belief in witches, necromancy, and ghosts. (Zusne and Jones, 1982) Witchcraft in some form is found in all societies and practiced most avidly by those lacking, but desiring, power.
Donald Warren’s Gallup poll analysis found elevated levels of UFO belief among individuals who failed to achieve the economic level of status that their education would lead society to expect of them. (Warren, 1970)
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
References
Moravec, Mark. “UFOs as Psychological and Parapsychological Phenomena” in Evans, Hilary, ed. UFOs: 1947-1987: The 40-Year Search for an Explanation (Fortean Times, 1988).
Kaufman, Walter. Discovering the Mind, Volume 2 (McGraw-Hill, 1980).
Resta, Stephen P. “The relationship of anomie and externality to the strength of belief in Unidentified Flying Objects” (dissertation, Loyola College Graduate School, Baltimore, Maryland, 30 October 1975).
Zusne, Leonard and Jones, Warren H. Anomalistic Psychology (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982).
Warren, Donald. “Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings” Science (November 6, 1970).
Principle of Mediocrity The Principle (or assumption) of Mediocrity (also known as the Copernican Principle) holds that conditions favorable for the evolution of life and intelligence are prevalent throughout the universe. The implication is that intelligent life is common, not rare, and thus we humans are not so special.
The Principle of Mediocrity is basically the reverse of the Anthropic Principle, according to which we humans may be the only case of intelligent life in the universe. However, just as Copernicus dislodged us from the center of the solar system, the Principle of Mediocrity goes hand-in-hand with the Principle of Uniformity of Nature in assuming that the same laws of nature and natural processes that produced intelligent life on Earth are typical, not exceptional, undermining the age-old religious principle of Special Creation.
—RONALD D. STORY
Prison Earth theory Though rarely considered in serious discussions of the nature of the relationship of Earth to the rest of life in the cosmos, the idea that the Earth is a prison has had a minor notoriety. One could hear it now and again on talk shows during the fifties and sixties perhaps as an effort to show an urbane wittiness of the Mark Twain sort. At some point, it seemed to sink into obscurity. Yet the idea developed a respectable pedigree along the way that deserves mention.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 77