Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Another set of UFO films was taken late in December 1978 off New Zealand. This was during a flap of UFO sightings in New Zealand in late 1978 and early 1979. The films are unclear; one sees bright blobs of light jumping about with seemingly random jumps and bounces. They were shot at night from an aircraft with no background available to provide a frame of reference for the objects. Sheaffer (1998, chap. 20) has discussed these films and the New Zealand flap in detail. The sightings can best be attributed to squid-fishing fleets, which use extremely bright lights at night to attract squid to their nets. These lights are visible from great altitudes. Venus also played a role in the sightings, and one film shows nothing more than that planet. The several films were sold at high prices to CBS, for the CBS Evening News ; ABC, for Good Morning America ; and the BBC. The films that are not of Venus simply show a jumpy, fuzzy image of the reflection of the lights of the squid-fishing fleet over which the aircraft was flying. Sheaffer (1998, chap. 2) and Klass (1983, chaps. 25–27) have provided detailed analyses of the New Zealand sightings and films. The reader is referred to these sources for further information.

It is difficult to think of a more highly trained and credible potential UFO witness than an astronaut. UFOs seen in space would be even more impressive than ground sightings, since several possible sources of misidentification are not found in space (i.e., aircraft and weather balloons). The UFO literature is replete with alleged astronaut UFO sightings and alleged pictures of UFOs taken by astronauts. Nowhere else in the UFO literature, however, does one find such a high level of outright fraud and deception, not on the astronauts’ part, but on the part of those who have knowingly distorted astronauts’ reports and doctored official pictures. Oberg (1977b, 1978–79a, 1982) conducted extensive research on the astronaut UFO sightings and pictures and concluded that “… the compelling conclusion of the first serious analysis of all the astronaut UFO reports is that every one of them is false. Those that originated from the astronauts themselves were distorted in the UFO press, even as ordinary explanations became obvious” (Oberg 1977a, p. 7). Several representative astronaut sightings and photos will be described here. The interested reader should consult Oberg’s work for further details and explanations for the other sightings.

Hynek and Vallee (1975, p. 64) reprint a list of astronaut UFO sightings compiled by UFO researcher Jim Fawcett. The following report is of a sighting said to have taken place during the Gemini 12 mission in November 1966. “Jim Lovell and Edwin Aldrin saw four UFOs linked in a row. Both spacemen said the objects were not stars.” The objects certainly weren’t stars, but that doesn’t mean they were UFOs or flying saucers. Oberg (1977a) has traced this alleged sighting and found the original debriefing document that gives the entire report of this event. The following quotation is from the document titled GT-12 Astronaut Debriefing and occurs on pages K/3, 4: “During the last EVA we discarded, in addition to the ELSE [life support system], three bags. About 2, maybe 3 or possibly 4 orbits later at sunrise condition, we looked out again and saw 4 objects lined up in a row and they weren’t stars I know. They must have been these same things we tossed overboard.” By selectively eliminating the astronauts’ own explanation for what they saw, Fawcett, as well as Hynek and Vallee, misled their readers into thinking that the sighting is more mysterious than it was.

Oberg (1977a) gave another example of Fawcett’s unreliability and therefore of the general unreliability of those who manufacture astronaut UFO sightings. This sighting is said to have taken place during the Mercury 7 mission of May 1962 and to have resulted in a photograph. “Scott Carpenter reported that he had what looked like a good shot of a saucer,” we are told, and the photograph was “of a classical saucer-shaped UFO with a dome that followed his capsule” (p. 23). Oberg comments, “In fact, the photographs show an entirely ordinary object: a space balloon ejected from the capsule for tracking practice. The balloon did not inflate but spun in a limp oblong sack. The flight schedule and the voice transmissions confirm this unexciting explanation” (p. 23). Again, the sensational reports of astronaut UFO sightings and photos turn out to be the product of deliberate deceit on the part of some UFO proponents.

Usually such deceit is limited to small-circulation UFO magazines and books published by UFO enthusiasts who don’t bother to check their facts. However, one forged astronaut UFO photo made its way into a major American science magazine. The magazine was Science Digest , now defunct, published by the Hearst Corporation. The phony photograph appeared in an article alleging a massive UFO cover-up by the government (Berliner 1977). As a photograph, it doesn’t show much—just a view of the northern hemisphere taken from Apollo 11 during its July 1969 mission. At the top of the picture, above the planet, is a small white blob that is described as an “unidentified object.” The picture is said to have been obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The object is said to be evidence of an official UFO cover-up because current prints of the same shot obtained from NASA do not show the white blob. They do show a piece of insulation debris in another location, but this piece of insulation does not appear in the Science Digest photo. Science Digest editor Daniel Button believed the article caused NASA to retouch the photos. He said, “My suspicion is right now that NASA has changed its story and altered its negatives and prints” (Oberg and Sheaffer 1977–78, p. 44). There is one major problem with this theory: NASA prints of this shot obtained well before the Science Digest article don’t show the white blob, either. They do show the piece of debris. Has NASA somehow been able to locate and change every print of this shot ever released? What an effective cover-up!

Even better than photographs as evidence for the reality of UFOs as spacecraft would be a chunk of metal from one, preferably inscribed in some unknown writing, “Planet #5, Alpha Centauri.” As the reader might expect by now, claims have been made that pieces of UFOs have been found. The reader will not be surprised to learn that these claims are unfounded. Sheaffer (1981, pp. 25–26) describes a piece of magnesium that was said to come from a UFO seen in Brazil in 1957. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) had the metal tested and stated it was so pure that it could not possibly have been of human or earthly manufacture. The Condon Committee tested the metal later and found that, in fact, it was much less pure than magnesium that could be produced by technology available in 1940. This fact has not prevented UFO proponents from continuing to claim the metal as evidence for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Sheaffer reports that APRO’s research director claims that “we can say it is an authentic fragment, beyond any reasonable doubt, of a UFO” because the sample contains no mercury and a 1940 sample of industrial magnesium did (p. 26). Where did the sample come from in the first place? It was sent anonymously to the society columnist of a Rio de Janeiro newspaper with a note describing the explosion of a UFO over a nearby beach.

Other physical evidence is sometimes said to accompany UFO sightings. “Angel hair,” a soft, wispy, diaphanous material made up of extremely fine strands, is one such piece of evidence that is reported from time to time. It turns out to be masses of spiderweb used by some species of spider to allow their eggs to travel on the wind over great distances (Menzel 1972). The size of these webs can often be quite large—so the webs themselves are responsible for both a UFO sighting and the so-called physical evidence (Menzel 1972).