Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

Lubbock Lights

The most famous of the Lubbock Lights photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. In 1951.

It seems that every time I sit down to add to this blog, I’m exposing another myth or solving another mystery. It begins to look as if I’m really a debunker in disguise. The truth is that I believe that we must publish, as quickly as we can, the solutions to mysteries that have baffled us for years. I’m fascinated by answers to long held mysteries which is why I often jump at the chance to expose them. Coming up in later blogs will be the solution to the disappearance of the Stardust and a possible solution to the disappearance of an Air Force interceptor in 1953.

There are mysteries out there that remain intriguing. In August 1951 four college professors saw strange lights fly overhead in Lubbock, Texas, and the Lubbock Lights mystery was born. Many of those sightings have since been solved, and the solutions offered make sense. There is, however, one part of the case that remains as mysterious today as it did more than fifty years ago and that is the photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr.

On February 1, 1993, I had the opportunity to interview Carl Hart about the photographs. What follows is that interview. (For those interested in more about the Lubbock Lights, I suggest a look at my 1997 book, Conspiracy of Silence.) I offer the notes of the interview without commentary (well, not much).

After learning that the man I was talking with had taken the famous pictures, I asked, “Were you looking for the lights when you saw them?”

He said, “Oh, no. Of course this was summer time and very hot. We didn’t have anything like central air conditioning. I slept with the windows open and I liked to sleep with my head stuck out the window and there they were.”

“You saw them fly over one time?”

“Oh, I think if I remember there were like three formations… of course they had been in the news here for a week or two before I happened to see them and they usually showed up in several flights when they would so… when I saw them I went on outside with my camera…”

“Did you get a feel for the size of the objects or how high above you they were?”

“Not really… the only thing I saw was lights. Wasn’t any other objects associated with them. Wasn’t any noise…”

“Now you were questioned quite closely by the Air Force…”

“The Air Force and everybody else.”

“Did the Air Force give you a final conclusion of what they thought you had photographed?”

“No, no they didn’t. I never did hear an official version. I heard some unofficial things that came out later… about how they thought I had faked them somehow or another.” (Attempts to duplicate the pictures by a professional photographer failed… and because of that, this part of the mystery remains unsolved.)

“Of course you hadn’t faked them…”

“No.”

“You have no idea what they were?”

“I really don’t. I’m not even sure who it was. There was someone tried to duplicate the light in a laboratory by reflecting light off a pan of water where they could cause a ripple run down the water and they could cause them to move and his theory was that it was a cold air inversion and that it had waves in it like the ocean and the sensation of them moving across the sky so I don’t know if that’s what happened or not.” (This was Dr. Donald Menzel whose results were published in 1952. Later Menzel decided, without evidence, that Hart had faked the pictures. Menzel, it seems, could not admit that some aspects of the UFO phenomenon were inexplicable.)

“You really have no clue about what you saw…”

“I really don’t. Nothing’s ever come forward to explain those and there wasn’t anything for me to judge them by other than just the lights on the bottom of just one object or group of individual lights… They were lights either on something or individually.”

Did you know the professors who had seen the things the first night?”

“Later on I did. I didn’t know them at the time.”

“Were they aware you had taken the pictures?”

“Oh, yeah. I think there were some of the ones felt like I had stolen their glory… They weren’t too receptive of what I had done as best I could recall.”

“Have you made any money off this thing?”

“I might have made three or four hundred dollars total over the years,” he said.

“The pictures appear in books and magazines all the time.”

“I wasn’t aware enough of what was going on to copyright them. If anyone paid my anything it was to save themselves from possible legal problems later on… for several years people would ask before they would use them… My advice from a friend and professional journalist at the time was that if you copyright them somebody’s going to think you faked tem and are trying to make money out of them”

Hart did tell me that he doesn’t particularly disbelieve in flying saucers. He said, “I’m kind of open minded on that. If one would show up some place else here, I think I’d accept.”

I asked him one last time if he knew what he had photographed.

“I really don’t.”

(I have found that those faking UFO pictures eventually come clean, admitting the hoax, sometimes decades later. With Hart, although no one would really care at this late date if he had faked them or not, he maintained he didn’t know what he had photographed that night. Because of that, the photographic part of the Lubbock Lights remains unsolved.)

Fay Clark’s UFO Photograph

A number of years ago, more than I like to think about, I used to visit newspaper morgues and ask about UFO stories. Sometimes I got lucky and found information on cases that hadn’t been reported outside the local area. In Cedar Rapids I was given a photograph of two objects (seen at the left) as they flew over town. I deduced the date as late August or early September based on evidence in the picture and was told that it had been taken by Fay Clark, one time the mayor of little Hiawatha, Iowa.

Later I learned that the picture (seen here) had been taken on September 3, 1955, and was pleased that I had figured the time of year properly. I learned that Sam Stochl had been commissioned by the mayor, Clark, to take aerial photographs of Hiawatha but he hadn’t seen the objects that appeared in the picture. Clark said that “knowing the airplane was flying at 1,200 feet… we can triangulate the objects as approximately 33 feet in diameter… at an altitude of 800 feet.”

All well and good, but the picture always struck me as looking as if the objects had been drawn on the photographic paper and then the picture printed. You might remember how you could put designs on Easter eggs using wax to protect the shell from the dye. I always thought the objects had that sort of a quality too them. I especially thought this after learning that no one had seen the objects in broad daylight.

Now I learn a little more about Fay Clark. He is credited with founding Hiawatha. He was a rock hound, a flying saucer enthusiast and had an interest in photography. He wrote about book in 1958, Beyond the Light, about astral projection and parapsychology.

Given this information, especially about his interests in UFOs and photography, given the look of the photograph, and given that the actual photographer, Sam Stochl didn’t see the objects, I think we can conclude that Clark created the photograph. It was undoubtedly meant as a local oddity and nothing more, though it has appeared in one book published for a national audience some years later.

This is just another in a long list of UFO photographs that doesn’t deserve much more than a casual glance. And even if we called the photograph authentic (meaning of real UFOs) there isn’t much more we can do. There are no eyewitnesses and the evidence offered is of little value without additional information. It is an oddity, it is interesting, and it does nothing to increase our knowledge.

Trindade UFO Photographs

(Note: When people suggest there is no evidence of alien visitation, one of the first things pointed to are the photographs taken in 1958. Skeptics have said that only the photographer saw the object, that he was a note “trick” photographer, and that these pictures have been proven to be a hoax. Now, thanks to friends in Brazil, we have a witness who was there and who can shed some light on the topic. My thanks to A. J. Gevaerd, Alexandre de Carvalho Borges and Eduardo Rado for their work and the permission to reprint the article.)

Flushing Queens UFO Photographs

The witness, a president of an advertizing agency, told Air Force investigators that he, and others were traveling from New York to Washington, D.C. Because the sky was beautiful, with the sun setting, he decided to take several pictures. Holding the camera outside the car window, as they traveled at sixty-five miles an hour. The witness told the Air Force that his vision was limited because they were in a sports car, and that he didn’t see anything strange in the sky. The objects were seen when the slide film was developed.

After they returned to New York, and with the film being projected, for the first time, they saw the objects near the bridge. The witness had the pictures blown up so that the objects were about a foot in diameter. He said that they were domed discs, with indentations on the dome. He believed they were metallic, and that they were reflecting the light of the sun. According to him, based on their position at the bridge, the objects were moving to the south, following the river. The witness knew that the Air Force had been investigating UFOs and thought they would be best qualified to analyze the photographs. An Air Force officer, Lieutenant Conaway, from the Information Office at Suffolk County Air Force Base, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Hector Quintanilla, of Project Blue Book, investigated. He assured the witness that his original photographs would be returned, but that the Air Force couldn’t properly analyze anything other than the original negatives. Since these were color slides, the Air Force officer wanted the original transparencies.

Conaway was concerned because the man told him that the photographs were valuable. According to the report, in a sentense that was underlined, Conaway noted that the man had said he “had numerous money offers from magazines.”

Conaway was told by Quintanilla that Air Force regulations demanded that he sent the original negatives and that the forms be completed properly. Quintanilla then told Conaway that the witness was probably trying to get the “Air Force to say that his photographs are authentic. Well, all photographs were authentic, but UFOs aren’t.”

Although the photographs were provided to the Air Force, apparently the paperwork, that is the report by the witness, was not completed quickly enough. The Air Force returned the photographs before they received the report. Therefore, according to the Air Force, the case was labeled as “insufficient data for a scientific analysis.” In this case, it meant that the witness had not complied with Air Force requests to complete their rather lengthy forms.

One of the Air Force forms, in which the officer asked specific questions, ended with a summary. It directed that the investigator “State your own personal evaluation of the report. What do youthink the object was? Do you think something other than the sighting motivated the caller? Include anything which may add to the objectivity of the report. Include your evaluation of the caller’s reliability.”

Sergeant Robert Becker filled out the form and wrote, “According to the caller’s description, he did photograph some type of object, rather than an optical illusion. I would not however, exclude the possibility of uncommonly shaped high or middle clouds. I did not form any opinion of some motivation for calling. I did not[e] one apparent contradiction; he said he was just photographing a beutiful (sic) sunset, yet his discription (sic) of the photos sounds to me like he might have, in fact, been shooting at the objects.”

The problem here is that the witness had, quite clearly, studied the photographs for a long period before alerting the Air Force. He told Air Force investigators that they had studied the photographs. That study certainly could have contributed to the witnesses telling of the story, suggesting that the witness had actually tried to photograph the objects rather than just a beautiful sky.

The Air Force attitude here is also of interest. Their bias, that photographs are real, but UFOs are not is interesting. He suggests that by this point, June 1968, they were just attempting to explain rather than investigate.

The Amana Photographs — November 22, 1975

High school student Mark Leonard was attempting to take time exposures of the moon on the evening of November 22, 1975 when his attention was drawn to a bright light overhead. He thought it would be a good reference point for a shot across the pond and centered the light in the view finder and snapped the shutter. When he looked through the view finder again, he saw that the object had moved. He centered it again and took the second picture. After that exposure, he saw that the object had moved so far, he had to move the camera so that he could take the third, and last, of the photographs. The object finally moved behind some trees and was no longer in view.

Leonard said that the light seemed to flicker as it moved, not unlike the way a railroad engines front light sweeps from side to side. He believed that it was accelerating to the north as it disappeared.

Leonard was quick to show investigators all the negatives he had taken that night. There was no evidence that he had been experimenting with trick photography. The film seemed to bear out the tale he told.

Plotting the flight path on a map, revealed that it seemed to be flying too slowly to be meteors or aircraft. At ten miles distance, the object would have been moving at only sixty miles an hour and it is unlikely that the object was that far away. Operations at the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Airport had been suspended for the night by the time the object was photographed. That certainly ruled out commercial aircraft.

Although the explanation has been found, it is one that is somewhat speculative. The speeds were plotted assuming that the object was flying perpendicular to the camera. If, however, it was flying at an angle away from the camera, the speed computations would be flawed. Leonard said that he heard no sound of an engine, but with the wind blowing away from him, he might not have heard it.

The sighting is most likely of a small, private aircraft heading either to the Cedar Rapids Municipal Airport, or to one of the other small fields that dot the area around Amana. The weather was fair, though cold. Given that, it could be a private aircraft operating under visual flight rules with no flight plan filed and no way to discover, when the investigation began, if such a flight had taken place.

The Legend of the Joplin Spooklight

The legend of the Joplin, Missouri Spooklight began in 1884 when, according to a pamphlet written by the original owner of the Spooklight Museum, Spooky (Arthur P.) Meadows, a young Quapaw Indian girl saw it weaving through the trees in northeastern Oklahoma.

Or, maybe it began when a miner, heading home just after dark, got lost in the woods. Some say that his wife, fearing the worst, grabbed an old lantern and set out to look for him, wandering until dawn. When her husband failed to return a second night, she set out again, and from that point on, each night, until she died. Now her ghost, carrying that lantern, searches for her husband.

Some say her lantern is the light that the Quapaw girl saw. Others suggest that the light was already there when the first of the white man arrived in the area around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some thought it might have actually appeared about the time of Christ, but there were no humans around the area two thousand years ago. At least none who left a record for us to find.

Whatever the source of the light, or origin of the legend, the light is still there. I know because I have seen it. It appeared on each of the nights I was there, showing up about dusk and flashing around the sky until we left four or five hours later. Given what I know, I suspect it stayed until dawn and then gradually faded into the brightness of the day.

I spent a week in Joplin with Monty Skelton who, at one time, was the president of the North American UFO Organization. That first night, in the mid-1970s, as we pulled up near the somewhat dilapidated Spooklight Museum, about dusk, the light twinkled into existence hovering down the road. As Skelton stopped the car, I pulled my camera from the back, set up the tripod, and began to shoot. I hadn’t expected to see anything and hadn’t been fully prepared. I had only part of a roll of film.

Garland Middleton, who owned the museum in the 1970s, told me later that night, “I’ve seen a lot of people try to take pictures, but none of them got anything.”

I finished the roll of film and the Spooklight was still there. Using binoculars, I watched it bob and weave, seeming to be about a hundred feet above the ground. It broke into three parts, and then five, and finally vanished for several seconds. Moments later it burst out again, outshining everything around it.

When it was totally dark, the outside lights of the museum had been turned on and I could see Middleton’s car, the door labeled “Spooklight,” sitting close to it. While others stood on the road watching the light, and other cars arrived and left, I walked over to the museum.

Middleton was sitting on a couch by an old wood burning stove. He had worked with the original owner, Meadows, had run the museum for him, opening it in morning and sometimes closing it at night. Meadows had been estranged from his own family telling Ron Bogue of the Joplin Globe, “I’ve got three sons. One of them I haven’t seen in twenty years. I don’t know where he is. My other two boys live in Kansas but they never come to see me… I don’t know them.” Middleton, who shared a love of the Spooklight became, to some extent, Meadows’s heir, replacing the family who had no time for him.

When Meadows died, Middleton took over the museum, living out on what Meadows had called “Spooklight Corner.” In the mid-seventies, there were two pool tables and three pinball machines in the museum. On one wall there were dozens of clippings about the light, several photographs of it and a short story about the museum. I read the clippings which told me little about the light and a lot about the legends including one that said river boat passengers had sometimes reported the light. Today I’m not sure what river boats the writer meant, or even what river the boats would have been traveling.

I studied the photographs which suggested that Middleton might have been exaggerating when he said that no one had much luck taking pictures. He was even selling post cards that had picture of the light on the front. It was apparently one of many taken by Meadows who had been a photographer in his younger years.

In the mid-1970s, Middleton was an old man, fairly tall and very thin. He was friendly and eager to talk about the light. He told me, “I first seen the light forty-years ago. It looks the same today as it did then. Now it usually stays away but it used to come right down the road, almost to the corner.”

Middleton, like so many of the others I talked to, told of friends who had been within twenty feet of the light. He said that he had once gotten to within fifteen feet, but that was years ago. “Nowadays it seems to stay away more. It doesn’t come very close but it’s always out there.”

There were a couple of teenagers in the museum. I asked these young men, who were playing pool, if they had seen the light. The taller of the two, who had slightly reddish hair and couldn’t have been more than eighteen said that he hadn’t really seen it and didn’t care to. He was just there to play pool. The other, shorter, stockier kid said that he had seen it but he wasn’t all that interested in it now. Pinball and pool had drawn him, and his friend, out to the museum. They could play uninterrupted because rarely anyone else came in to play pool.

Back outside, I traveled up the road where the Spooklight floated but when I reached the top of the last hill, the light vanished. Below me, stretched for miles, was part of Oklahoma. In the distance I could see lights flickering along a stretch of highway and some of them looked remarkably like the Spooklight but everyone said they weren’t.

“Besides,” said James Smith of Joplin, “the light was here long before the town or cars or electricity.”

Well, maybe.

We turned around and started back to the museum. In the rearview mirror we could catch glimpses of the light still hovering over the hilltops, seeming to pulsate and change color.

Although we tried to drive up on it several times, we always failed. One man volunteered that he sometimes came in from another direction, using some of the back roads and that way he could “fool it.” Once, as he turned onto “Spooklight Road” it had passed over his car. At least that is what he said.

He wasn’t alone in making such a claim. Others said that they had friends, family, cousins, or had just heard that the light sometimes came down the road. One man said that his brother reported that the Spooklight had touched the hood of his car, sitting on it for several seconds before disappearing. When I traced the brother, he said, no, that had been a friend. But then the friend related that he had heard it from someone else. The story had evolved into the old “friend of a friend” routine. I could never get to the original source.

I returned on a couple of other nights. Once I was there with Marta Poyner, a reporter for the Joplin Globe.She said that she had been out several times but had never seen the Spooklight. Just as we pulled up, it flared once and seemed to split into pieces. I pointed it out and she said, “Oh, I’ve seen that before. I always thought it was car headlights.”

One of those who had driven out that night overheard her comment and said, “It’s been here since 1811, long before there were any cars.”

We both took pictures, and just like the batch I had taken the first night, these too, came out, contrary to the legend. Once we had finished, we tried walking down the road to the light, but after a mile or so, we gave up. The light wasn’t any closer, and I had already tried to approach it in a car.

Back at the museum, I ran into John Wysong, a long time Joplin resident. He was with his wife and son, and though he had first seen the light in 1955, he returned two or three times a year to look at it. This became a family outing.

James Wysong, the son, had also seen the light before, but his wife, from Arizona had not. She hadn’t even heard of the light until after she was married into the Wysong clan.

I asked her what she thought of it. She said, “I didn’t know what they were talking about. I really didn’t believe that I would see it but there it is. I don’t know what to make of it but I know there must be some kind of explanation for it.”

The younger Wysong said that he had tried to find out exactly what it was. One night he had tried to stalk it, but after only a few minutes had given up. He didn’t say it, but seemed to imply he didn’t really want to get too close to it. He didn’t know what he might discover and that had concerned him.

The older Mrs. Wysong leaned across the front seat of the van and said, “After studying it all these years, you would think that someone would be able to figure it out what it is. It’s a real mystery to me.”

Well, she was right. You would think that after all the studies someone would have a logical explanation for the Spooklight.

During the Second World War, the Army Corps of Engineers spent some time studying the Spooklight. Colonel Dennis E. McCunniff was interviewed in his headquarters at Camp Crowder and said, “I know that no one is going to like this, or even believe this, but we found a few interesting things about the Spooklight. We discovered that it is seen more frequently in the winter but I believe that is due to the lack of foliage. Leaves off the trees and that kind of thing. After looking at it, we’ve determined that it’s a refraction of light. An optical illusion.”

Well, maybe.

In 1960, William K. Underwood, a high school student from Carthage, Missouri, spent 400 hours studying the light for his high school science project. He claimed that the lights were from a section of highway going east out of Quapaw, Oklahoma, and directly west of the road where the Spooklight is seen. Underwood, with the help of his friends and family, designed a number of experiments to prove his theory. Using a spectroscopic photograph, Underwood discovered that the light was from an incandescent source. In other words, the light came from car headlights. This seems to corroborate the theory given by Colonel McCunniff.

He also had friends drive down the stretch of highway, some with colored filters on their headlights. He watched as they flashed signals at him that were reflected in the Spooklight, verifying, to some degree his theory.

Others, equipped with mirrors, binoculars and cameras made similar experiments. Given that the signals were flashed in random patterns so that those at the museum didn’t know exactly when they were coming or what the signals would be, it provided some dynamic evidence.

A Joplin resident, who didn’t want to be named, said that he believed the Spooklight to be some kind of magnetic aberration that caused an ionization of the atmosphere near it. That caused the gases to glow and could account for the reports that the light had been attracted to cars. The gases would have one electrical charge and the car would have the opposite. The problem was that the glow lasted for hours and that suggested it wasn’t an ionization. Besides, there was no real mechanism in the explanation to cause the glow. The air might be ionized, but that, in and of itself, does not cause it to glow.

Spooky Meadows, in 1969, told Bogue of the Globethat he had formed his own opinion of what, according to Bogue, “has baffled everyone from Army Engineers down to amateur scientists.” Meadows said, “It’s a light, of course. But the mystery is — what causes it?”

Most of those who live in Joplin will tell those who ask that there is no good explanation for the Spooklight. They will tell you that the Army studied it, as have scientists and investigators, but no one has explained it. They will tell you that it is probably some kind of a natural phenomenon, but they will refuse to identify exactly what that phenomenon is, preferring to sound somewhat skeptical while denying any and all explanations.

They will also mention, whenever an explanation is offered, that the light was there long before cars and electricity arrived on the scene. I could find no documentation to support that. The first of the newspaper articles and other documents are from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Those who live in Joplin are going to believe what they want to believe and they won’t listen to an outsider with an explanation. That attitude was typified on a call-in radio program originating in Joplin. One woman heard that we were there and wondered why we didn’t just stay home. The light wasn’t ours to study, but it was theirs. It belonged to Joplin. “If they want to study something, why don’t they do it at home and leave us alone,” she said.

Ted Philips and Big Amber

As many of you know, I was at the Illinois MUFON Symposium hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here) and held over the last weekend in May. One of the speakers there, Ted Phillips, was a man I had heard about for years but had never met. He was involved in investigating and documenting UFO landing trace cases. These would be cases in which the UFOs interacted with the environment and left some sort of physical evidence behind.

I was interested in what he had to say and was surprised when he didn’t begin telling us about some of the physical trace cases. Instead he talked of an ongoing investigation in which lights… nocturnal lights… are seen on a regular basis in a relatively confined geographic location.

My first thought was of the Joplin Spooklight (seen above). I’d spent time in Joplin investigating that. It was a phenomenon that appears nightly at a certain location outside of Joplin, Missouri. I’d photographed it, though people all told me you couldn’t take pictures of it. The solution for that case was as simple as atmospheric refraction and car headlights from a stretch of road several miles away. There is no doubt in my mind that the Joplin Spooklight has a mundane explanation. Many others have reached the same conclusion.

So I sat there listening to Phillips talk of his months long investigation, sure that some sort of mundane explanation would be offered. Lights in the night sky just didn’t do a thing for me.

But this wasn’t a repeat of the Spooklight that hung in the air in one location for hours on end. These were periodic lights that were seen in various locations doing various things. He called some of them amber lights.

Phillips said one thing that resonated with me. He said that he expected to see nothing when he got there because frequently these things do not show up for the investigators. But he had been told that they appeared irregularly, but they always, eventually appeared, if you were patient. And one night they did. He saw five of them and almost didn’t get any pictures of them.

Let me make a point here, and it is something that the non-believers always say. You had a camera right there and you didn’t use it. Phillips is an experienced investigator and he was standing right there with the video camera in his hand and thought nothing of it until the end of that sighting.

Had this been his only opportunity to photograph anything, we could make all sorts of snide comments.

But it wasn’t. He did take a short video at the end of the sighting. And during other the months he spent in the area, he, and his team including Adam Johnston, made several tapes and took many photographs. Phillips said that they had gathered 223 witnesses, and that the records and testimony suggest that the sightings go back into the 1930s. There are several locations in which the lights are seen. There are the amber lights that seem to be very large and very bright and they have seen as many as 35 at once. There are very bright white lights sitting on the ground that they have seen from various angles but have been unable to approach. They said that the lights have interfered with cars and other electrical devices, have knocked the branches out of trees and left circular patterns of debris on the ground. This suggests something more tangible than lights in the sky.

But, here’s the thing. They don’t know what they’re seeing and photographing. All they know is that one of the witnesses said he first saw the lights in 1937 and that there have been no displays in the last six months. They believe the lights will return because they always have, but Phillips and his team don’t know when.

I had hoped to talk to Phillips about this while at the conference but there never seemed to be a couple of moments when the two of us crossed paths with one short exception. I told him that it was my impression, from his presentation, that he wasn’t looking toward the extraterrestrial on this. He confirmed that he thought it was some kind of terrestrial manifestation but didn’t know what it might be.

So, unlike the Spooklight in Joplin, this one remains a mystery. Yes, I thought of the earthquake lights that some scientists have talked about, but those seem to be relatively short-lived lights, not like the displays that Phillips has witnessed and photographed. And, no, it doesn’t seem that swamp gas fits the bill because the luminescence from swamp gas is close to the ground and is usually faint. None of the mundane explanations work here.

Phillips said he is continuing his research. He said that they would be back at it soon. The story is fascinating, mysterious, and at the moment, unexplained.

UFO Hoaxed Photographs

The conventional wisdom is that there are very few hoaxes in the UFO field. Researchers suggest that 90 to 95 percent of all UFO sightings can be explained in the mundane as simple misidentifications of natural phenomena, misidentifications of aircraft or balloons, or as normal things seen under abnormal conditions. Of that 90 or 95 percent, some, maybe as few as two percent are hoaxes, according to the researchers. In fact, Project Blue Book officials suggested that there were so few hoaxes, they didn’t even deserve their own category.

The truth of the matter is that there have been major hoaxes in the UFO field from the very beginning in 1947. The reason so few of them have been discussed in the UFO literature is that it is very difficult to call someone a liar in print. When a case is labeled as a hoax, those who tell the story are being called, in essence, liars. Most researcher begin to look for other words and other labels to apply to the case. An alternative, if available, is often used instead of the word hoax.

In the UFO field there have been a large number of photographs offered as evidence that we have been visited. Unfortunately, the majority of them seem to have been taken by teenaged boys and most of those are hoaxes.

This is a fact that is easily verified by a quick examination of those photographs.

It must be noted, however, that many of the UFO researchers have missed those explanations so that pictures, exposed as hoaxes surface in UFO books, articles, and on television documentaries as if they are legitimate. It is an area that creates confusion in the general public and journalistic communities, and leads those who do not study UFOs, who have a passing interest in them, to believe that there is nothing to them. There is a belief that all of the UFO sighting reports are made by hoaxers, tricksters and pranksters.

The recent bestseller, The Day After Roswell,by retired Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso is a case in point. Corso claimed that during his long military career, he was exposed to the top-secret files of various governmental agencies dealing with UFOs. Corso claimed to have an intimate insider’s knowledge of what was happening with UFOs, that he had been told about and had seen personally the files about the Roswell UFO crash, and that he could answer the questions about the crash that had plagued researchers since 1947. Corso, however, demonstrated that he didn’t have access to everything and made a mistake that suggested he might not have access to anything. In the photo section of his book, he published a picture of a UFO over some hills in southern California. He noted that he was never able to confirm the veracity of the “UFO surveillance photos” which he had found in Army Intelligence files. If Corso was who he said he was, he should have recognized the picture as a hoax. It had been labeled a hoax in the public arena as early as 1966 and the Project Blue Book files had it listed as a fake.

That photograph (seen here), according to the editors of a special UFO edition of Look magazine was taken by Guy B. Marquard, Jr. on a mountain road near Riverside, California. Marquard said that it was a hoax, that he was sorry to disillusion people, but he was 21 years old at the time and was having some fun. Project Blue Book files suggested it was the hub cab to a 1930s Ford thrown into the air.

It would seem that if the vast majority of UFO researchers knew the photograph was a hoax, Corso would have known that as well, if he truly was the insider he claimed to be. Instead, as if to prove the point here, Corso reprinted the photograph as if it was something that had stumped the military investigators.

But Corso isn’t alone in his belief that certain photographs reveal the presence of extraterrestrial visitors which were later proven to be, admitted to be, or shown to be, hoaxes. In May 1952, professional photographer Ed Keffel was standing on a cliff near Barra Da Tijuca, Brazil when he saw, what he at first believed to be an airplane (seen here). The man standing next to him recognized that the craft was something extraordinary and yelled for him to “Shoot! Shoot!”

Keffel managed to take five photographs showing an object that was clearly disk shaped with a dome on the top in one of the pictures and a raised ring on the bottom in another. He was lucky that the maneuvers of the UFO revealed it to him from all angles. There was no doubt that what he photographed was not an airplane, balloon, or a natural phenomena.

The Brazilian Air Force investigated, tracked down an estimated forty witnesses to the sighting, tried to reproduce the pictures with trick photography, and made diagrams of the sighting on site and of the UFO itself. In the end, according to the report forwarded to the U.S. by Dr. Olavo Fontes of APRO, they found no evidence of a hoax. At APRO Headquarters, the pictures were studied again. APRO researchers found nothing that suggested hoax to them. The pictures, at this point, were termed to be authentic.

The APRO analysis wasn’t the last to be performed. During the University of Colorado study in the late 1960s, the pictures were again analyzed. According to the final report, there was a “glaring internal inconsistency.” In the fourth of the five pictures, the object was illuminated from one direction but the trees in the foreground, specifically a palm tree standing above the others, was illuminated from another direction. “This is evidence of a hoax unless there were two suns in the sky,” according to the University scientists.

ARPO responded to the analysis by insisting that they had known about the problem. According to them, blow-ups of the photograph showed that one of the palm branches was broken so that it appeared that the tree’s trunk was in the shade indicating the two suns. If not for the broken branch, the trunk would be in the sun. Everything in the picture would then be consistent and the evidence of a hoax was lost.

Even that wasn’t the end of it. People who lived in the area claimed they had seen men with models taking pictures. The Brazilian Air Force suggested that the people had seen Air Force officers attempting to duplicate the pictures. They had not seen Keffel and his companion trying to fake it.

As it stands today, it seems that these photographs, once considered among the best ever taken are, in fact, fakes. It is this sort of thing that has plagued UFO researchers from the very beginning of the modern era in 1947. Keffel wasn’t the only man to engage in such a hoax. Paul Villa, Jr. of Albuquerque released a number of photographs that he had taken on June 16, 1963. He provided copies of his photographs to the Air Force for analysis. Not surprisingly, the Air Force concluded that the pictures were of a small model.

Captain William L. Turner, Chief of the Air Force Photo Analysis Division wrote in his official report to Project Blue Book, “All photographs have a sky background with an unobstructed view of the object. It seems unlikely that anyone photographing a UFO from several angles would have all good, clear unobstructed photographs of the object.”

While that might be true, it is also true that Villa (one of his pictures seen here) might just have been very lucky or even a very good photographer. That, however, doesn’t seem to be the case. Turner wrote, “Photograph #7 shows the UFO at close range with a leafless branch on the left side of the print, passing behind the object. Two twigs from this branch are readily visible on the right side of the object and in good alignment with the main branch. It does not seem possible that these twigs are from the tree on the right which is further away. Therefore, the object is between the branch and the camera. The object is estimated to be 20 inches in diameter and seven inches high.”

Turner also noticed one other important fact. He wrote, “In photographs #1 and #2 the object appears to be a sharper image than the near and far trees. This indicates the UFO is between the near trees and the camera.”

Given all that information, it would seem that the Air Force had thoroughly destroyed the credibility of the pictures. The question that has been asked by many is why accept the Air Force conclusions here but reject them in other cases. The answer is simply “Duplication.” The Air Force results have been duplicated by UFO researchers and civilian photographic experts. It wasn’t that the Air Force presented a complete analysis but that others, when examining the photographs were able to see the same things Turner saw. The explanation was fair and that is why the Air Force explanation is accepted.

There are many other pictures that have been published that we now know to be hoaxes. In 1957, for example, Radio Officer T. Fogel claimed to have photographed a UFO near San Pedro, California. He admitted that he had built the object from a model airplane kit (picture seen on next page). ARPO published a photograph taken in 1963 that showed an object flying beneath an airplane. The shadows of both could be seen on the ground but it turned out to be a hoax. Two teenagers from Lake St. Clair, Michigan created a stir with their photographs of a UFO with an antenna on the rear, but later admitted the pictures to be a hoax. One of the very first of the UFO pictures, taken at a steel mill in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947 is now an admitted hoax.

The list could continue until it was pages long. Today, the problem is getting even worse. Before the advent of computers and various software programs that allowed for the manipulation of photographs, it was difficult, but not impossible, to fake good UFO pictures. Something tossed into the air, small models suspended above the ground, objects cut from paper and pasted on the window all contributed to the problem. Analysis by experts could sometimes detect the problems or inconsistencies. It allowed investigators to label a case. If no such inconsistencies were found, it didn’t mean that the photographs showed an extraterrestrial craft, only that it couldn’t be proven to be a hoax.

What this meant, simply, was that in the good old days, researchers had a fighting chance. The pictures had to be created physically and mechanically and if they were created in that fashion, there could be something left behind for researchers to find. In today’s environment, such is not the case. Any computer and software program can allow the hoaxer to create a negative that can be examined and on which there will be no evidence of that manipulation. The job just became that much more difficult.

This also explains the problem with video tape. It is why we have ignored video taped evidence here. It is just too easy to fake a credible video tape with a good computer and very little in the way of video equipment or even expertise. To prove the point we have created just such a tape, but we made the UFO look more like a worm with windows than anything extraterrestrial. We did it so that there could be no confusion about the origin of this tape.

If, however, we submitted it to any of those specializing in the analysis of video tape, they could digitize it, pixelize it, and analyze it any way they wanted, but they would not be able to tell that we had artificially created that tape. We put the appropriate dialogue on it, making it sound as if we were in awe of what we were seeing. We manipulated the object so that it swooped in, passed behind a tree and then disappeared in the distance.

The equipment used is not all that expensive, nor is it all that unavailable to the tricksters and the pranksters. Add in the computer software to clean up any problems and then claim tape is the original. No one would be able to tell the difference. The analysis is right back to the credibility of the witness or witnesses. And if they sound sincere, if they have no history of playing jokes and tricks, then there is very little the UFO researcher can do.

So, when studying the photographic evidence of visitor spacecraft, we return to those earlier pictures. Could the witnesses have faked them thirty, forty, or fifty years ago? Certainly. But in that time frame the task was more difficult and the evidence for it often showed on the original negatives. That is why, that long ago, investigators, whether Air Force officers or civilian researchers, wanted to see the original negatives.

The ideal photographic case would involve multiple witnesses at multiple locations producing both video tape and still pictures. We have often recommended that those with a still camera take a photograph and then move right or left fifty or sixty feet and take a second picture. If possible, the two points from which the pictures were taken should be marked so that precise measurements can be made later by researchers.

What this does is allow investigators to make a stereoscopic view of the object which would provide, on the film, important evidence. The altitude, distance from the camera and size of the object could all be deduced from a set of photographs made that way.

Now, if there were video tapes of the object, taking by other witnesses in widely separated locations, then corroborative evidence could be collected. It would provide other views of the craft and possibly give additional information about height and speed. It would be a case that would be nearly impossible for the debunkers to destroy because of the physical evidence in the forms of video tapes and stereoscopic pictures. It would end the debate and allow us to move to the next level of investigation.

It would seem, given all the cameras in this country, and now all the video tape cameras available that we should have something like this. Since we don’t, it suggests to some that there are no UFOs and spaceships of the visitors.

The answer, if we think about it is that real UFO sightings are extremely rare. They are usually close to the ground, no more than at a thousand feet or so. That means that only a limited number of people will see them, if they happen to be looking up. It limits the number of available witnesses and the number of cameras.

To argue that meteorites, especially bright ones, are seen by thousands, and they are not only short lived, but also rare, misses the point. The meteorites are usually thirty to forty miles in the air. They can be seen over a wide area. The especially bright ones light the sky drawing attention to themselves. Often there is a roar associated with the bolides that also draws attention to them. The UFOs are most often lower, darker and quieter. Yes, there are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of the cases reflect the lower and quieter component.

So, we are left with a rare and low flying phenomena. We are left with photographs, some of which are extremely interesting, but none of which can prove the case. The University of Colorado scientists, when studying the McMinneville, Oregon pictures noted they found no evidence of a hoax, but they also found that the pictures, by themselves, were insufficient to prove that some UFOs were extraterrestrial craft.

To us, that seems to be a reasonable conclusion because there could be other explanations that do not require interstellar travel. The fact that we don’t have those explanations doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There might be a natural phenomenon that could account for the pictures. There could be some kind of experimental craft, that never reached production that could account for them. We just don’t know.

What we do know, however, is that hoaxes, those admitted by the perpetrators and those discovered by analysis by investigators, have plagued the study of UFOs from the very beginning and beyond. The Great Airship of 1897 seems to have been little more than a fleet of hoaxes launched by those tricksters and liars interested in a good story and a good laugh.

Photographic evidence, unless there is a great deal of it from independent witnesses, is never going to provide us with the final solution to the UFO mystery. All they can do is muddy the waters as we learn how many of those photographs were faked by teenagers with too much time on their hands and access to a camera. It seems that nothing has changed since 1897. The people still enjoy a good joke.