626 lines
36 KiB
Plaintext
626 lines
36 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: WATCH THE SKIES FILE: UFO2792
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WATCH THE SKIES by David Dudley.
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(Baltimore) City Paper
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October 9-15, 1992
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Vol. 16 No. 41.
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"On a cold morning just before dawn in the winter of 1991, Steve
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Tobias saw a UFO. He wasn't impressed. It was over Baltimore-Washington
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International Airport, for one thing, where the airspace is typically
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abuzz with flying objects, identified and otherwise. But Tobias says he
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saw something. He was working maintenance for a major airline - he'd
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rather not say which one - cleaning the idle planes during the night
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shift, when he saw 'a hurtling object, almost perfectly circular,
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brilliant greenish-yellow, streaking across the lower blackened portion
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of the morning sky,' according to his own written account. The light
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skittered over the BWI control tower and disappeared into the distant
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clouds in a few brief seconds. 'It seemed to have been moving at great
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speed,' Tobias wrote, 'at which I could not begin to estimate.'
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But he didn't think a great deal of it at the time. This was before
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Tobias thought a lot about UFOs. He went in his office to get a cup of
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coffee and warm up a little. One of the guys from the morning shift was
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just showing up, and he was talking about the darndest things he had
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heard on his CB radio driving into work a few minutes earlier. A couple
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of truckers out on I-95 were saying they saw something up in the sky,
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some kind of UFO or something.
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'Don't tell me,' Tobias said, half-joking. 'It was green.'
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It was green, of course, according to the truckers.
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Tobias unwittingly had stumbled upon some independent corroborating
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evidence for his early-morning fireball. And with that, Steve Tobias
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decided that he had joined the ever-growing ranks of the human race
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that have seen, or think they have seen, an unidentified flying object.
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Since 1947, when a reporter named Bill Bequette added the term flying
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saucer to our increasingly scary postwar lexicon after a pilot named
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Kenneth Arnold spotted nine wingless craft scooting past Mt. Rainier,
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in Washington State, at what he thought was 1,700 mph, hundred of
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thousands of people from around the world claim to have seen them as
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well. Elvis Presley saw one in the desert outside of Vegas. More
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convincingly, my mom saw one in the skies over Adelphi, Greece, in
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1952. Maybe you have seen one too.
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If you have, welcome to the other side, that uncounted segment of the
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human populace that believes We Are Not Alone, and has the visual goods
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to prove it. You have plenty of company. Here in the U.S., in the land
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where atom bombs and flying saucers appeared at more or less the same
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time, the UFO has become a familiar tabloid totem, a hip 60's TV show,
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a kitschy symbol of American cold-war paranoia, a British heavy-metal
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band, and one of the most instantly recognizable government acronyms
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around. Jung thought UFOs were collective psychic manifestations --
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flying mandalas. The Air Force always seemed to think that they were
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weather balloons -- or 'swamp gas,' whatever that is.
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But through it all, or those of you who lost interest some time after
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"Chariots of the Gods" but before the "Weekly World News" space alien
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met with Ross Perot, the sightings never have stopped. By 1969, 22
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years and hundreds of unresolved cases after the Mt. Rainier sighting,
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the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, the government's only official
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UFO investigative unit, was under pressure to put up or shut up.
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Earlier that same year, the Condon Committee, an Air Force-sponsored
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civilian scientific study made by the University of Colorado and
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chaired by astrophysicist Dr. Edward Condon, issued its infamous
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report. This group - roughly equivalent to the Warren Commission in the
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eyes of indignant UFOlogists - stated that there was still no
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verifiable evidence that UFOs were either hostile or real, and
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recommended that the Air Force stop fooling around with Blue Book.
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Life in 1969 was deemed weird enough without flying saucers. On
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December 17, on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered
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flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Project Blue Book was official
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canceled. Nine years later, "Dragnet's" Jack Webb produced "Project
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U.F.O.", a short-lived television series based on Project Blue Book -
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it was also canceled.
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This Monday, on another, slightly more famous anniversary, the
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quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' discovery (or invasion,
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depending on which side of the ocean you were on) of the Americas, NASA
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will throw the switch on another project that will obliquely try to
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answer that same nagging, terrifying question: Are We Alone? Or to put
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in Age of Discovery terms, What's Over There?
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The project is - or was - called SETI, the Search for Extra-
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Terrestrial Intelligence, and if you get a chance to ask anyone in
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charge, they'll be quick to say that it has nothing to do with UFOs. It
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has so little to do with UFOs, in fact, that a few weeks ago they
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changed the name of the whole program, because "Extra-Terrestrial"
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tended to make people think about UFOs. It is now called the High
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Resolution Microwave Survey, or HRMS, a more technically descriptive
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but altogether less funky name. The ultimate goal and rationale behind
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the program remains the same, however - to listen for positive evidence
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of life beyond Earth.
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After a glitzy LIFE magazine cover story in August and a bitter
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funding fight in Congress, SETI (or HRMS) will be deployed (i.e.,
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turned on) on schedule this Columbus Day and begin its high-tech sweep
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of the cosmic radio dial, searching for a faint radio wave from the
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distant light years that could indicate, finally, whether intelligent
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life here is as lonely as it seems.
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Steve Tobias, for one, doesn't need to be told by any big PR
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government research study whether there's something out there or not.
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He saw one of the damn things. And since that cold morning in 1991, he
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has become convinced that not only is extraterrestrial life possible,
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or likely - even NASA says that now - but it is going to show up en
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masse any day now. And these discoverers are going to teach the third
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planet from the sun a lesson in interstellar imperialism that will put
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Columbus to shame.
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On the phone, Tobias sounds worried.
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'I haven't been in a good mood since I found out about these things,'
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he says.
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It sounds as if he means it. Even in the midst of a breathless bout
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of doom-laden alien speculation, his voice has the desperate edge of a
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man who has a very serious job to do, a man who must be heard, even if
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it frequently is difficult to follow the thread of what he's trying to
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say. Right now he is talking alternately about tidal waves, hurricane
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Andrew, AIDS, and a passage in Virgil's "Aeneid," all of which may be
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linked to extraterrestrial intervention. It may be a stretch for the
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layman, but Steve Tobias has been doing his homework.
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After his brief encounter at BWI, Tobias took a trip to his local
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library and perused a few books on UFOs. Even after doing that, he
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still wasn't all that convinced that they existed, but it seemed worth
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following up on. Previously, he says, he was a typical skeptic,
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uninterested in either the UFOs or even in the science-fiction
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literature and films in which they figure so prominently. But one of
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the books he picked up, David C. Knight's UFOs - A Pictorial History
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From Antiquity to the Present, mentioned reports of glowing 'fireballs'
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from the distant past - these sounded similar to what he had seen at
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BWI. Other books told of crashed saucers in the New Mexico desert,
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alien bodies in cold storage at Ohio's Wright-Patterson AFB, Air Force
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pilots killed chasing flying discs in 1948, massive government cover-
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ups, official disinformation campaigns, and scads of mysterious above-
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top-secret evidence that Uncle Sam knew what UFOs were and where they
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were coming from.
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'I was flabbergasted,' Tobias says. 'Why in the hell was the
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government sitting on this? Why wasn't this on MPT?' [Maryland Public
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TV.]
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The incidents that he stumbled upon are, of course, all familiar
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pieces of the vast body of popular UFOlogy, the subjects of numerous
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books and films and tabloid headlines. But for Tobias it was a
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revelation, a call to action. And it was only the beginning. 'I was
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shaken out of my dull-witted complacency and began to tie many other
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events and trends together,' he writes in his account of the fateful
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moment.
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Since then, Tobias has tied a lot together. He also has formed his
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own UFO investigation and research group, which he calls Citizens
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Investigation of Phenomena Psychic, Astral, and Celestial (CIPPAC).
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At this stage, he admits, CIPPAC is still pretty much just himself.
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But he has great ambitions and a deadly serious mission. 'I decided
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that the government made a grave mistake in trying to cover this up,'
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he says. 'There is a possibility that we are all in a lot of danger.'
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Before personally subjecting myself to CIPPAC's stockpile of alarming
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new evidence, I figured it was time to apprise myself of some of the
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latest in UFO literature. Since 1951, when Frank Scully's "Behind the
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Flying Saucers" - a clumsily hoaxed account of a saucer that crashed in
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New Mexico with its crew of 16 tiny, human-looking alien crewmen on
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board - was published, the UFO phenomenon has perpetuated itself,
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supported itself, and, arguably, scientifically crippled itself with a
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thriving industry of freelance investigations, pseudoacademic
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theorizing, and various starling firsthand accounts.
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My favorite always has been "God Drives a Flying Saucer," an
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amazingly wacky 1973 paperback by one R.L. Dione, which insists that
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UFOs were merely the 'angels' of a distant supertechnological alien God
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who accomplished the various miracles of Biblical renown (i.e., Jesus'
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walking on the water, the revelation of Saul, the Immaculate
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Conception) through force fields, hypno-beams, antigravity devices, and
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other common saucer gizmos.
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Couldn't find that one at the Pratt [Enoch Pratt Library, Baltimore],
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but there were plenty of other new developments. The most dramatic and
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well-documented recent incident is definitely the series of sightings
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that occurred over a period of several months to a couple, Ed and
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Frances Walters, in Gulf Breeze, Florida, in 1987-88. Compared to the
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usual fuzzy black-and-white blurs that filled the UFO exposes of my
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youth, the Walters' slick, full-color account, "The Gulf Breeze
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Sightings," was almost absurdly well documented. These poor guys
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couldn't get rid of their UFOs. Ed Walters claimed 20 separate
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sightings and took 39 color photos, mostly Polaroids, of the various
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saucers that buzzed his house, spoke to him telepathically, shot
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immobilizing blue beams at him and his wife, deposited hostile little
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big-eyed aliens on his porch, and woke up his dog, Crystal. The
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pictures are amazing, almost too good. You can count the windows on the
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saucers, which look kind of like Chinese lanterns or Christmas
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ornaments. If it is a hoax, they certainly chose the corniest-looking
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flying saucers imaginable.
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I have yet to see a UFO of any kind, although I always have kept my
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eyes open for them. I'm certain that anyone who grew up watching enough
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television does too. Hollywood in the 70s painted a fairly sunny
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picture of our alien visitors, compared with the lurking paranoia that
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informed their 50's/atomic-age counterparts. (Ever seen the creepy 1953
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film "Invaders From Mars?) In the 70s, however, wondrous, childlike ETs
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descended from the heavens in glittering chandeliers to save petty,
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grumpy humanity from our own miserable selves and treat us to eye-
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popping special effects. Sounds good. Come on down. Sign me up.
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My mother now says that she and a friend observed what could only
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have been a UFO while on vacation in Greece in 1952, a huge year for
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sightings, incidentally, according to Project Blue Book: 1,500 reports,
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303 of them unexplained. Luckily, she did not volunteer this
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information during my childhood, lest my imagination suffer a permanent
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and debilitating overdose. And unlike Steve Tobias, my mom was not
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transformed by her encounter into a crusader for UFO truth and justice.
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She did, however, take it seriously enough to report the incident to
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the U.S. consulate in Athens, where it was no doubt chuckled at and
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thrown away.
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Nevertheless, it was a fairly dramatic experience. For one thing,
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Adelphi, Greece, is a fairly dramatic place to see a UFO. It was, after
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all, the location of the Oracle of Apollo, a place the ancients called
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'the navel of the world.' It was a stunningly clear day in pre-smog
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Greece, not a soul around, and 'the most awful quiet,' Mom says. She
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heard it before she saw it, 'a sort of whiny sound,' not a prop or a
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helicopter, and certainly not a jet, which would have been exceedingly
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rare in 1952 anyway. Then she and her friend saw it.
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'It was shaped like and upside-down clamshell,' she says, 'and it
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moved around jerkily. We must have watched it for ten minutes, but it
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never occurred to me to take a picture.'
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After hovering around and casing the place for a while, it 'shot
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straight up like a helicopter,' she says, then vanished into the
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cloudless sky at enormous speed. 'It was up and gone in about three
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seconds.'
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And that was Mom's UFO. It may not be quite as spectacular as Ed
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Walters' pesky talking UFOs, but it struck me as being more remarkable,
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for two reasons. One: even though '52 was a big UFO hysteria year, my
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mom knew nothing of the existing body of evidence regarding sightings.
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For that matter, she still doesn't. They're just not her thing. Yet her
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account is completely consistent with most of the accepted recurring
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elements in UFO behavior: the jerky hovering, the unearthly whine, the
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last-second zip straight up and out of sight.... This is classic UFO
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stuff. Ed's UFOs were doing that all the time.
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Two: my mom wouldn't make this up.
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'If you don't know what's going on,' Steve Tobias tells me, 'you're
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sheep going to the slaughter. And the cruel thing is, it doesn't have
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to be that way.'
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He's running through his visual evidence, some of which is just clips
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from infotainment shows such as Hard Copy and this season's new
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Sightings. But he's also got NASA footage from some of the Apollo
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flights - scenes of an astronaut's jerky spacewalk that Tobias believed
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was closely monitored by small UFOs whizzing by periodically. He runs
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the VCR back and forth in slow motion.
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'There it is! Did you see it? I'll run it by again. If you're not
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looking for something, you're not gonna see it.'
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Sure enough, something - little more than a bright speck - keeps
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flitting across the screen behind the astronaut's shoulder. Tobias says
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that he has watched the scene countless times, has analyzed the
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object's trajectory and the way the sunlight reflects off of it, and he
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is convinced that the speck is a small round craft of some kind, under
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intelligent control.
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'They are out there and they have been seen,' he says. '[The
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astronauts] notified mission control and it was covered up.'
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Tobias is not the first to claim that the Apollo astronauts were
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continually dogged by UFOs and that NASA scrupulously covered up the
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reports. That has been a mainstay of UFO conspiracy literature for
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decades. But he thinks that he may be the first to have picked them out
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of NASA's own file footage.
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This kind of low-budget home investigation now has become the guiding
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passion of Tobias' life. Since an on-the-job injury put him out of work
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in April 1991 (not long after his UFO sighting), he has used his free
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time to immerse himself in the collective evidence of UFOlogy, filing
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his Dundalk rowhome with dog-eared copies of 70s paperbacks such as
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Timothy Goode's conspiracy tome "Above Top Secret", videos, xeroxed
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documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, weird
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newsletters from fringe UFO groups, and his own notebooks.
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Now 40 years old, Tobias was a member of the Maryland Air National
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Guard from 1972 to 1988, where he rose to the rank of technical
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sergeant. It was his military experience, he says, that led him to take
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on the thankless task of spreading the word.
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'This whole thing points to a threat to the public,' he says. 'I'm
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working on the assumption of imminent conflict. But not conflict as we
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know it.'
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Tobias has taken the old axiom of cosmologist Martin Rees and turned
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it into a sort of manifesto of sorts. Rees said, in reference to
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extraterrestrial life, that 'absence of evidence if not evidence of
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absence.' For Tobias, absence of evidence is evidence of hostility.
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'There's no reason to assume that the aliens have friendly
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intentions,' he says. 'In the military, if you're using stealth, you
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are in an aggressive posture.' He figures the reasons that UFOs, having
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journeyed here for hundreds of thousands of light- years from a distant
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galaxy, are being so coy with us is that they're scouting out the
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battlefield. 'Reconnaissance is the staging for the final onslaught,'
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he explains. For Tobias, this sneakiness is tantamount to an act of
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war, and if the government refuses to fess up and tell the people what
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the hell is going on, he will do it himself.
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'I guess it's akin to Paul Revere saying the Redcoats are coming,' he
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tells me.
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Sipping iced tea in his living room, Tobias speculates grimly on the
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final onslaught as his two young kids tromp in and out on a hot late-
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summer afternoon. A kitten periodically clambers around and falls off
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the sofa.
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'This would not be a war of conquest,' he says. 'This would be
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obliteration. This would be ... special genocide.'
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Things are falling into frightening patterns here in Dundalk. Tobias
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connects chains of seemingly random events and links them back to an
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unseen alien hand. He sees world events and phenomena as diverse as the
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fall of communism and the weather as sinister manifestations of an
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intricate master plan to unbalance this hapless planet. Such as: Why
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did hurricanes Andrew and Iniki lay waste only to American territory?
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And finally: What was that seven-foot-tall reptilian creature those two
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guys in South Carolina saw?
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'What does that look like to you?'
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Tobias shows me one of his CIPPAC documents, a Xerox of a strange
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black silhouette, supposedly an infrared computer scan beamed to Earth
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from the Soviet Phobos II satellite in 1989. He says that it is a vast
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cylindrical object 15.5 miles long, lurking undetected in space behind
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the Martian moon Phobos. With a bit of imagination, it looks sort of
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like the ship in "Battlestar Galactica."
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'I don't know,' I say. 'It's hard to tell.'
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According to NASA (according to Tobias), it is a computer flaw. he
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thinks it might be the invasion vessel itself, all 15 miles of it.
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'I'm assuming the worst,' he says. 'There could be a thousand ships
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behind that moon.... It's nice to see a movie called "Star Wars," but
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from a military perspective, it boggles the mind.'
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The kids are playing upstairs, too loudly. Tobias' wife marches
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upstairs to settle them down. Tobias admits his wife would 'rather not
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get dragged into this' and that most friends and family have been less
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than receptive to his campaign.
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'Most of them don't believe in UFOs,' he says. 'They're like
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everybody else. They see the whole subject as entertainment.'
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The fault for this, he believes, lies with the media. Because the
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government is keeping all the hard evidence bottled up, no one can take
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these things seriously anymore. 'Television and the movies trivialize
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UFO phenomena,' he rails. 'It has made the public completely culturally
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desensitized. It's lobotomizing the public consciousness. It's taking
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away the right to wonder.'
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One wonders, then, what to make of NASA's SETI program, the high-tech
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search for just the kind of alien civilizations that the UFO community
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has been insisting are visiting us regularly. The official NASA party
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line, of course, has always been that UFOs are impossible, for all
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practical purposes, because of the vast distances involved between star
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systems and the colossal time and energy required to attempt a
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crossing. The best hope for detection lies not in a physical visit from
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a neighboring life form but rather in the radio waves that such a
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civilization might conceivably be beaming our way.
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For Steve Tobias, as well for many other freelance UFOlogists who
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make a point not to trust NASA or any other arm of the government, the
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hope and hype of the impending SETI program is an empty diversion.
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'It's still the Big Lie,' Tobias says, 'but it's a different part of
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the Big Lie.'
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Tobias' theory is that SETI is just an elaborate gimmick, a PR trick
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to further desensitize the public.
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'NASA is trying to save their own integrity [with the SETI program],'
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he says. 'It's an excuse. It would just tell us what has been slowly
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massaged into the American consciousness.'
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Similar rumbles are being heard throughout the UFO community,
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according to the folks at the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, or
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CUFOS, as it's known, in Chicago. CUFOS is probably the closest thing
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UFOlogists have to a serious scientific research center. It was founded
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in 1973 by the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the chairman of the astronomy
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department at Northwestern University, an Air Force consultant
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throughout the Blue Book era and a sort of scientific guru to the UFO
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community. CUFOS is basically an information clearinghouse and archive,
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supported by subscriptions to its monthly "International UFO Reporter"
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and its biannual "Journal of UFO Studies," an academic journal.
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CUFOS also tried to crank out two books a year, with much of the
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recent material focused on the Roswell Case -- the 1947 New Mexico
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saucer crash and cover-up of Hangar 18 fame. David Boras, the assistant
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to CUFOS director Mark Rodeghier, says that he's heard plenty of rumors
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about the SETI program.
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|
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|
'For the most part,' he says, 'people in SETI have a negative or
|
|
indifferent attitude towards UFOs.... They honestly don't believe in
|
|
the phenomenon. But there is that rumor in the UFO community that the
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|
SETI people are going to release information [about a contact] as a way
|
|
to condition people into accepting the existence of UFOs.'
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|
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|
Boras stresses, however that there is 'no real evidence for this,'
|
|
adding it's just part of the fringe group of UFOlogy. Some people
|
|
believe that [the government] knows everything, that they have been in
|
|
contact for years... there have been treaties... all sorts of stuff.
|
|
And everyone believes that this year they're gonna tell.'
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|
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|
Boras sounds vaguely sad. Disheartened. As if maybe he's given up
|
|
hope. As if maybe the government is never going to tell.
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|
|
|
'It just sorta messes things up, dealing with the fringe groups,' he
|
|
intones, sadly. 'It's keeping the brains in the scientific community
|
|
from wanting to pursue the field. It's certainly keeping the funding
|
|
away...' he says, trailing off. It sounds as if maybe he's had enough
|
|
of life on the UFO trail.
|
|
|
|
'It just gets kinda irritating.'
|
|
|
|
Michael Mewhinney, who's handling public relations for NASA's SETI
|
|
program from his office at Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field,
|
|
California, not far from San Francisco, is kind of irritated too. First
|
|
of all, the powers that be just changed the name of his project last
|
|
week, long after all the press material and general hoopla were sent
|
|
out, so now he has to make sure all reporters who call use 'HRMS' in
|
|
their stories instead of 'SETI.' Second of all, I just mentioned UFOs.
|
|
|
|
'NASA has nothing to do with UFOs!' he says, bristling. 'We are not
|
|
wasting taxpayer money.'
|
|
|
|
It sounds as if he's been through this before.
|
|
|
|
'This is not a frivolous enterprise -- this is serious science!'
|
|
|
|
Traditionally, folks at NASA are touchy about the UFO thing,
|
|
especially with all the trouble they have had trying to convince
|
|
Congress to fund a search for distant alien civilizations in the middle
|
|
of a recession. Dr. Gary Coulter, the program manager for the newly
|
|
titled HRMS, knows all about that. Coulter has been at NASA
|
|
headquarters, in Washington, D.C., throughout the funding fray, setting
|
|
records straight and nudging the $10-million-per-year program past
|
|
Congressional critics. He says that the new moniker has been in the
|
|
works for a while.
|
|
|
|
'It's a matter of semantics,' he says. 'It's been obvious that when
|
|
we've been criticized, it's not for the science. Most of what draws
|
|
criticism is the connotation that if you are searching for ETI
|
|
[extraterrestrial intelligence], it must be frivolous.'
|
|
|
|
According to Coulter, there's an official NASA name for this
|
|
phenomenon: 'SETI has what we call a Giggle Factor.'
|
|
|
|
The Giggle Factor apparently was the final straw for the project
|
|
acronym. 'The name had this lightning rod stuck in the middle of it,'
|
|
he says.
|
|
|
|
Mike Mewhinney back at Ames agrees. 'We're looking for intelligent
|
|
life, not ETs,' he complains indignantly. 'ET is that cute little guy
|
|
in the movies.'
|
|
|
|
In NASAspeak, ETI tends to lead inexorably to LGM (Little Green Men)
|
|
in the minds of the public. 'It's like putting a red flag in front of a
|
|
charging bull,' Coulter says.
|
|
|
|
Whenever NASA functionaries are faced with UFO-related questions,
|
|
these Little Green Men always show up somehow. They even have their own
|
|
acronym now. It is the ultimate shorthand put-down for nosy reporters,
|
|
instantly defusing the most loaded of questions and making the
|
|
unfortunate inquirer look and feel like a four-year-old in the process.
|
|
'Oh! You're talking about the Little Green Men,' they always say. It's
|
|
very effective.
|
|
|
|
Coulter manages to invoke the LGM only once, but he throws in a few
|
|
popular film allusions for good measure.
|
|
|
|
'This is not a Bug Hunt,' he says, recalling a line from the film
|
|
"Aliens." 'We are not a search-and-rescue team for UFOs. And I've never
|
|
felt a burning desire to climb the Devil's Tower, either.'
|
|
|
|
And as for those rumors about SETI/HRMS being a cover for an eventual
|
|
UFO disinformation campaign? Or a PR stunt?
|
|
|
|
'Well, I've never heard that one before,' he says in a tone of voice
|
|
that indicates he has heard plenty of others. 'Look, I've been program
|
|
manager for four years. There is not one shred of truth to that. I have
|
|
never heard, felt, seen, smelled, tasted, or used any other organs to
|
|
sense anything to that effect.'
|
|
|
|
Seemed convincing enough to me. But despite all the breathless
|
|
denials, SETI remains a ripe target for conspiracy theorists simply
|
|
because many just don't trust the government to tell the word if and
|
|
when the massive radio telescopes manage to pick up and verify and ETI
|
|
signal. To rectify this perception, NASA's SETI Institute called on the
|
|
International Academy of Astronautics, one of several international
|
|
space organizations composed of astronomers and scientific
|
|
professionals from around the world that had expressed support for the
|
|
project, to define the specific terms of this theoretical announcement.
|
|
They put their heads together and came up with a singularly remarkable
|
|
document.
|
|
|
|
It is called the Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities
|
|
Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and it
|
|
states, in brief, that any verified ETI signal picked out of the
|
|
heavens by SETI/HRMS is the property of all the people of the planet,
|
|
not just the U.S. or NASA. In two pages of densely worded legalese, it
|
|
calls for the swift dissemination ('promptly, openly, and widely') of
|
|
the discovery to the United Nations, various academic institutions and
|
|
scientific channels, and then to the world media. 'The discoverer
|
|
should have the privilege of making the first public announcement,'
|
|
Article 4 of the declaration states.
|
|
|
|
'It's the ultimate freedom of information act,' Coulter says proudly.
|
|
|
|
But the declaration doesn't make any provisions for a potential
|
|
response to the signal, except to say that no response should be sent
|
|
'until appropriate international consultations have taken place.' This,
|
|
of course, would require another declaration.
|
|
|
|
Coulter thinks we may be getting a bit ahead of things. For one
|
|
things, he says 'we do not presume that the message is answerable
|
|
necessarily.'
|
|
|
|
Though numerous forward-thinking astrophysicists such as Carl Sagan
|
|
have speculated on coded beams of radio waves carrying the secrets of a
|
|
distant advanced technology through the stars for the benefit of less-
|
|
adept neighboring civilizations, the message may merely be 'Hello.' Or,
|
|
for that matter, 'Why did you cancel F Troop?'
|
|
|
|
Or as Coulter says, it may be just like a lighthouse beacon. 'No
|
|
matter how closely you analyze a lighthouse beacon, you're not gonna
|
|
get the Encyclopedia Britannica,' he says. 'Besides, those things are
|
|
so far off, it's not worth thinking about.'
|
|
|
|
And for those people working on the project, the detection alone, of
|
|
anything, would be plenty earthshaking in itself. Occasionally, Coulter
|
|
gets so caught up in trying to define what SETI is and isn't that he
|
|
loses the true magnitude of its stated goal. 'It's an attempt to answer
|
|
one of the most profound questions facing the human race,' he says,
|
|
sounding a bit stunned himself. 'It would be the most important non-
|
|
religious event in the history of the world, I guess.'
|
|
|
|
At this point even the canniest of NASA project managers must
|
|
struggle with the poetry of the moment. For some things there are yet
|
|
no acronyms.
|
|
|
|
'Philosophically, I see old Mother Earth spinning around as she has
|
|
for millions of years,' Coulter says slowly, silently constructing the
|
|
image in his mind. 'And I almost see old Mother Earth pausing for a
|
|
moment. And when she spins again, everything will be different.'
|
|
|
|
Meanwhile, back in Dundalk, Steve Tobias keeps up his lonely vigil,
|
|
playing old NASA footage over and over again on his beatup VCR, which
|
|
keeps breaking down, in search of those elusive white specks.
|
|
|
|
'I'd be making a fool of myself if I was pursuing something that
|
|
wasn't provable,' he says from beneath the brim of his Maryland Air
|
|
National Guard cap. 'I know that people with different forms of mental
|
|
delusions or dementia will grasp onto things. But that doesn't take
|
|
anything away from the phenomena.'
|
|
|
|
'This is a struggle between perceptions of what is and what could
|
|
be,' he says firmly. 'And I am going all the way.'
|
|
|
|
He keeps hearing rumors of mysterious 'government' operatives who
|
|
periodically appear on the doorsteps of intrepid investigators such as
|
|
himself to silence them forever - the 'Men in Black,' they are called.
|
|
Tobias is ready for them, whoever or whatever they are. 'No one can
|
|
intimidate me,' he says. 'If they showed up at my door, they would be
|
|
apprehended. One of us would die.'
|
|
|
|
Until then, he will keep compiling his odd fragments of information
|
|
and scraps of evidence, keep typing his densely worded, single-spaced
|
|
CIPPAC reports. 'Make copies,' he writes on the back of one in an
|
|
urgent red pen. 'Spread the word!'
|
|
|
|
But it's getting on toward evening now. Tobias has more evidence.
|
|
More books. A radio interview. A sketch of a possible alien footprint
|
|
in his notebook. And, before I go, that passage from Virgil's "Aeneid."
|
|
|
|
A sudden crash of thunder, and a shooting star slid down.
|
|
|
|
The sky's dark face, drawing a trail of light behind it.
|
|
|
|
He leaves me with a copy of his group's logo -- a picture of the
|
|
Greek discus thrower hurling an outsized flying saucer - and its motto:
|
|
|
|
'Seek after the truth.'
|
|
|
|
'I fear Tomorrow these days,' he writes in the first lines of his
|
|
first CIPPAC report. 'I fear for Your Tomorrows as well. All of you,
|
|
Humanity.'
|
|
|
|
For all his wild speculation and conspiracy bluster, Tobias really
|
|
means it. And if the world chooses not to stop to listen to his one-man
|
|
call to arms, it will not be for lack of his trying or for the weakness
|
|
of his convictions. Right or wrong, Steve Tobias has discovered
|
|
something.
|
|
|
|
'I don't consider myself a social martyr,' he says. 'I really wish I
|
|
had never found this out. I wish I could be like everyone else.'
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
**********************************************
|
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
|
********************************************** |