Podcast UFO

By Charles Lear

I’m a fan of 1970’s UFO documentaries.  They have cool, period, analog synthesizers in the scores, descriptions of classic cases and the best of them maintain a decent sense of journalistic integrity.  My favorite is, “UFOs:  It Has Begun” which is a 1979 re-release of a 1974 documentary,  “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future” based on a book of the same title by Robert Emenegger.

The movie is hosted by Rod Serling and has Burgess Meredith and Jose Ferrer as well.  Once you get past Serling’s delightful cheesy introduction, and Meredith’s somber narration of the story of Ezekiel as a UFO sighting along with other “historical” encounters, there are some excellent cases dramatized and discussed.  Notable figures presenting testimony include researcher Jaques Vallée with a stunning hair helmet, J. Allen Hynek and Robert Friend, science advisor and director respectively of Project Blue Book, Al Chop, an Air Force press operator present in the Washington National Airport radar room during the famous 1952 event, and Lonnie Zamora discussing his 1964 Socorro sighting.  The movie was made with the cooperation of the Air Force, and with this in mind, a very strange case is brought to light by Robert Friend that involves a contactee, Naval Intelligence and the C.I.A.

In the movie, Friend speaks of intelligence officers conducting an interview with someone claiming to be in contact with an alien entity.  For proof the officers put forth technical questions beyond the contactee’s capability and they received accurate answers.  One of the officers, told that he could establish contact directly, went into a trance, was questioned by the other officer, and both were convinced that contact had indeed occured.  The officers went back to Washington and a demonstration was done where the same officer again went into a trance and series of questions was put to him, or rather, to the entity he was channeling.  After receiving their answers, the questioners asked if they could be shown a flying saucer, and the reply was to look out a window.  Friend was told during a subsequent briefing on the incident, that a flying saucer did, indeed appear, and fly off.  Did this really happen?  My armchair internet research has revealed that the story has some bizarre truth to it.

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By Charles Lear

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published an article and sidebar that startled a lot of people.  The article was about a Pentagon program to investigate UFOs, which was proudly championed by former United States Senator and Minority Leader from Nevada, Harry Reid.  The sidebar was about an 2004 encounter with a UFO by two Navy pilots and included an embedded 76 second video purported to have been taken during the encounter.  The fact that the Times had published a UFO story was almost stranger than the stories themselves because it was well known, at least among ufologists, that The New York Times NEVER reported on UFOs.  The encounter is now referred to as “The Nimitz Encounter.”  This should have been The Case that put to rest the question of whether some UFOs are intelligently controlled craft of non-human origin and the claim that the “Government” has hidden evidence in its possession.  It should have but it didn’t.

For those who are unfamiliar with the details of the case I present the “Executive Summary” from a confidential report “prepared by and for the military” according to the KLAS I-Team who released it.

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By Charles Lear

If you have an interest in UFOs you’ve probably come across the 2010 Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport case, which involved a UFO hovering over the airport sighted by a descending flight crew. The airport was shut down for an hour and the case made international news.  China has a relatively open official policy regarding UFOs but according to researcher, Chuck Fei, any spiritual or quasi-religious activities associated with UFOs are strongly discouraged.  Besides discovering some interesting cases, research into Chinese UFOs reveals an interesting relationship involving the subject between China and the Western powers of the United States and Britain.

At the 2016 Citizen Hearing before six former members of the U.S. Congress, UFO researcher and former Chinese diplomat Sun Shili, stated, “After years of research, a large number of Chinese UFO scholars, including myself, are convinced of the authenticity of UFOs and the existence of UFOs and aliens.”  Shili was a chairman of Beijing UFO Research Society and that organization has a policy similar to many Chinese UFO research groups that requires its members to have college degrees.  The group is respected by the government and air force officials have been known to attend meetings.  The focus of most UFO research in China is very scientific and speculation is kept to a minimum.

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By Charles Lear

 By coincidence, two UFOlogists who studied mass sightings by school children ended up dying an untimely death.  One was John E. Mack, an Ariel School sighting researcher who was hit by a car in London in 2004 and the other was James E. McDonald who researched the Westall sighting in Australia and took his own life in 1971 in Tucson, Arizona.  Both were reputable scientists with careers in psychiatry and meteorology respectively and both suffered attacks on their credibility due to their pursuit of UFOlogy.  Due to different public attitudes towards UFO research during their times, Mack was able to withstand an investigation by the Dean of Harvard Medical School which threatened his position there and write best-selling books on the abduction phenomenon, whereas McDonald endured multiple threats to his career, funded his own research without book deals and was publicly humiliated at a congressional hearing.  Still reeling from this he received the blow of his wife’s request for a divorce, which seems to have led to his suicide.

McDonald, born May 7, 1920, was one of very few scientists of his time who were willing to go on the record and advocate for the extra-terrestrial hypothesis as an explanation for UFOs.  He had a PhD from Iowa State University, taught at the University of Chicago and then the University of Arizona where he helped establish a meteorological and atmospherics program.  His interest in UFOs started with his own sighting in 1954 while driving in Arizona with two other meteorologists.  What was seen was a less than dramatic distant point of light but the fact that three scientists who specialized in atmospheric observation were unable to identify it signaled to McDonald that there was a need for a focus on “the UFO problem” by the scientific community.  He began investigating on his own and joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon.  After interviewing between 150 to 200 witnesses from 1956 to 1966 in his home area of Tucson, Arizona he was, in his own words, ”far from overwhelmed with the importance of the UFO problem.”  His attitude would change in 1966, sparked by a sense of betrayal felt by himself and many other investigators, witnesses, and members of the general public.  This was brought on by the growing realization that the U.S. Air Force investigation into UFOs had become nothing more than a public relations campaign designed to downplay and debunk as many incidents as possible.

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