UFO Phenomena and the
Self-Censorship of Science
by George C. Andrews
In the field of UFO research, there is a constant tug-of-war between
zealot skeptics and zealot true believers, which like a
Punch-and-Judy show distracts public attention from open-minded
attempts to address the real issues, since both of these groups have
their minds made up in advance.
It is unfortunate that a large proportion of the academic community
falls into the category of zealot skeptics, insofar as UFO phenomena
are concerned. Although regrettable, this is understandable, since
any other attitude endangers the grants on which their livelihood
depends, as well as their prestige in the hierarchy's pecking order.
The treatment Dr. John Mack received from his colleagues and the
trustees at Harvard after his book on UFO abductions was published
amply illustrates what happens when a previously respected professor
investigates a taboo subject and comes up with unconventional
conclusions. However, Dr. Mack emerged from the controversy
relatively unscathed, when one compares what happened to him with
what happened to Dr. James E. McDonald about a quarter of a century
earlier.
Dr. James E. McDonald was Senior Physicist of the Institute of
Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. He thought that
the Federal Power Commission was evading the evidence concerning UFO
involvement in the total power failure that paralyzed New York on
July 13th, 1965, and dared to say so in front of a Congressional
committee. His courageous statements on this and other occasions
triggered a torrent of derision and abuse, and he was ostentatiously
ostracized by his colleagues, in ways reminiscent of the treatment
Dr. Mack recently received from his colleagues at Harvard. However,
unlike Dr. Mack, Dr. McDonald was shortly thereafter found dead
under suspicious circumstances, which to this day have not been
satisfactorily elucidated.
Arbitrary denial of the reality of UFO phenomena by the academic
community, in spite of the substantial evidence to the contrary
which has been surfacing persistently at irregular intervals for the
last fifty years, demonstrates a self-censorship that amounts to an
abdication of responsibility and is incompatible with the principles
on which their work is supposed to be based.
No matter what the subject matter, scientific
research is supposed to be carried out impartially, following the
trail of truth wherever it may lead, without skewing the results one
way or another to make them fit preconceived biases. It should make
no difference if the results are unpopular or subject to ridicule by
the ignorant who have not bothered to examine the evidence
themselves, even if some of the ignorant happen to be in positions
of authority that control research grants and advancement in the
academic hierarchy.
It is the academic research community which sets the tone for
so-called serious media coverage, as well as statements made by
government representatives. Because it has systematically
deprecated, minimized or denied evidence out of fear of ridicule,
for a full half-century adopting an attitude of zealous skepticism,
the academic community now bears a large part of the responsibility
for the catastrophic present situation, in which the population as a
whole must adjust to the shock of acknowledging the reality of the
alien presence on this planet, although deeply conditioned for fifty
years to dismiss it as a laughing matter, as easily controlled as a
television set.
Of course, the decision made in 1953 by
the CIA's
Robertson Panel to pursue a policy of systematic ridicule towards
civilian UFO reports is also a major factor in the equation. This
decision illustrates the extent to which contemporary science is
influenced by the military/industrial complex, since that disastrous
policy is still being implemented to the present day.
What is the evidence I claim is being arbitrarily denied?
An
incident witnessed by a single person is always open to question,
and an eyewitness report on its own does not constitute substantial
evidence. However, in the investigation of a traffic accident or a
crime, if there are multiple witnesses who independently give
similar descriptions of the event, their cumulative testimony tends
to be taken seriously in a court of law.
If there are literally hundreds or even thousands of
witnesses independently giving similar descriptions of an event, the
cumulative weight of their testimony becomes overwhelming. Long-term
patterns over periods of sever-al decades that include entire
populations of towns and cities making similar reports should be
considered scientifically as even more decisively significant, no
matter what the subject matter.
The exception is the taboo topic of UFO phenomena. There are
literally hundreds of examples I could point to, but one incident
illustrates particularly well how this taboo operates.
I'll begin by specifying my sources, which are articles in the
following newspapers:
-
Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock, AR, January
23, 1988
-
Arkansas Democrat, Little Rock, AR, January
23, 1988
-
Gazette, Texarkana, TX, January 23 & 24,
1988
-
BEE, Dequeen, AR, January 28, 1988
-
Northwest Arkansas Times, Fayetteville, AR,
February 4—8 and March 27, 1988
-
McCurtain County Gazette, Idabel, OK, April
10, 1988
The magnitude and extent of the incidents that began
to be reported on January 19, 1988, from Little River County in
Arkansas were on a scale that went beyond any other UFO phenomena
that occurred in 1988. The incidents clustered around the towns of
Foreman and Ashdown in south-west Arkansas, near the Texas border. A
few sporadic sightings had occurred in previous months, including a
low-altitude sighting of a UFO as large as a football field in
November, 1987, but the witnesses did not dare speak out for fear of
ridicule.
The local population tends to be quite conservative,
and the first witnesses to go public after a UFO chased three women
in a car at terrifyingly close range on January 19, 1988, were
subjected to persistent harassment and ostracism, until hundreds of
citizens began seeing the phenomena simultaneously and its reality
became undeniable.
A typical report described
... a ball of light that was as big as a hay
wagon at first, but which got smaller when as many as 100 people
gathered to look at it. The object changed color from red to
green to blue. It was first seen near ground level, then flew
high into the sky. It got under the moon and it looked just like
a star up there until everyone went away, then it came back
down. When it was up off the ground, lights were flashing, and
you had to see it to believe it.
Witnesses included a professional astronomer, an Air
Force veteran with 1,800 hours of flying time who had been a
navigator on a B-52, a science teacher who had been selected as a
finalist for the NASA "teacher in space" program, and a design
engineer familiar with propulsion systems. Photos were taken that
neither the Arkansas Sky Observatory, NORAD [North American Air
Defense Command] or NASA were able to give plausible explanations
for.
However, Clay Sherrod, the Director of the Arkansas
Sky Observatory, succeeded in insulting everyone's intelligence by
maintaining that the extremely mobile metallic objects with
multicolored flashing lights being perceived simultaneously by whole
crowds of people, hovering at low altitude then suddenly rising
straight up at incredible speed, performing maneuvers such as no
known aircraft can perform, were either misidentifications of the
planet Venus or moonlight reflecting off the bellies of white snow
geese flying overhead.
Although newspaper coverage of the incidents ceased on March 27, the
incidents continued to occur for approximately one full year well
into 1989, without even being mentioned in the local press. They
were considered no longer newsworthy, having been persistently
disparaged by the authorities and the national news media, which
parroted the "planet Venus" and "moonlight reflecting off the
bellies of snow geese" explanations made by the Director of the
Arkansas Sky Observatory, who was hundreds of miles away from the
scene of the action in his office in Little Rock.
Besides the many eyewitness reports of UFO sightings, there have
been many cases that involve craft landings, sometimes with physical
evidence of landing traces left behind after the craft's departure.
These traces of physical evidence have often been carefully
investigated, and once again there are literally hundreds of
examples I could point to. However, one specific case is outstanding
because of the remarkable way these details were supported by the
meticulously conducted research of high-level scientists, which
backed up the anecdotal eyewitness reports with hard physical
evidence.
Trans-en-Provence is a little village near Avignon in France. The
incident took place there at 5:10 P.M. on January 8, 1981. Renato
Nicolai, aged 55, a retired mason who had become a farmer, saw a
strange aircraft land in his garden, where it remained for about one
minute. It then took off and disappeared over the horizon.
Mr. Nicolai thought that it was probably some sort of experimental
craft being tried out by the French Air Force. He did not believe in
flying saucers. That evening when his wife came home from work, he
described to her what he had seen. The next morning she went with
him to look at the markings on the ground, then told a neighbor
about the incident. The neighbor was frightened and informed the
police.
A contingent of the Draguignan police came to Mr. Nicolai's farm. He
described the craft to them as approximately 6 feet in length and 7
1/2 feet in diameter. The color was a dull gray, like that of lead.
The shape was flat and circular, bulging slightly above and below.
The craft rested on small telescopic legs. There was no light, and
no smoke or flames. There was no sound except for a faint whistling.
It first appeared at an altitude of about 150 feet, like a mass of
stone falling. However, it came down lightly on the ground. He
approached it and could see the craft clearly. He had advanced about
thirty paces toward it, when it took off at very high speed. When he
saw the object from beneath, it was round, and had four port-holes.
The police reported that there was a circular outline about half to
three-quarters of an inch deep and 7 1/4 feet in diameter, with skid
marks at two places. The site had the appearance of a circular
stain, being darker in color than its surroundings. The police
collected samples of soil and vegetation along a straight line
through the impact site, writing on each sample taken its distance
from the impact site.
Upon their return to Draguignan, they transmitted
their report and the samples to GEPAN (Group for the Study of
Unidentified Aerial and Space Phenomena), which is a branch of
CNRS
(National Center of Space Research, the French equivalent of NASA).
GEPAN passed the samples on to INRA (National
Institute of Agricultural Research) and several other government
research institutes for analysis. GEPAN personnel visited the site
to take further samples on two other occasions. On June 7, 1983,
after two and a half years of analyses, a bulky preliminary report
which assembled data from the different laboratories was turned in.
The government scientists attributed the circular
outline to a soil fracture caused by the combined action of strong
mechanical pressure and a heat of about 600°C, which is about
1100°F. Dr. Bounias, who was the Director of the Biochemical
Laboratory at INRA, had personally taken charge of the examination
of the plant specimens. He carried out the analyses in the most
rigorous fashion possible. First he established samples from plants
of the same species (alfalfa), taken at different distances from the
point of impact. Then he and his assistants meticulously analyzed
the photosynthetic pigments (such as carotene, chlorophyll, and
xantophyle), the glucides, the amino acids and other constituents.
He found differences sufficiently important that the
statistical significance of the results is irrefutable. Certain
substances that were present in the close-range samples were not
present in those taken further away, and vice versa. The
bio-chemical trauma revealed by examination of the leaves diminished
as the distance from the UFO impact site increased. Some of the
plants had been dehydrated, but were not burned or carbonized.
The following year control samples were taken from
the site, which confirmed the changes made in the vegetation. After
completing the analyses, Dr. Bounias made the following formal
statement:
"We worked on very young leaves. They all had the
anatomic and physiologic characteristics of their age. However, they
had the biochemical characteristics of advanced senescence, or old
age! This bears no resemblance to anything known to exist on our
planet."
Dr. Bounias refused to speculate about the cause of the strange
facts he had established, or to propose any explanation at all for
them.
Although neither Dr. Bounias nor the French government have followed
through on the implications of this evidence, or proceeded any
further with it, at least as far as the general public is concerned,
the Trans-en-Provence case remains one of the most strongly
substantiated investigations of landing traces in the history of UFO
research.
Another aspect of UFO research which involves physical evidence is
the crop circles, though there has been much dispute over whether
they are caused by UFOs or by human hoaxers. I believe that some are
made by UFOs, and some are made by human hoaxers. Other theories
have been proposed, but at present these are the only ones that have
retained their
plausibility, since freak whirlwinds and hypothetical plasma
vortices cannot by any stretch of the imagination explain
geometrically precise pictograms and other complex symbolic
formations.
From 1978 to 1989, the shapes were for the most part
simple circles. However, since 1989, the patterns have become more
and more intricate, eliminating the possibility that they could be
caused by unusual meteorological conditions.
The summer of 1991 was a quantum leap as patterns of rings and
circles became true complex pictograms. Straight bars, or boxes, and
arcs, both inside and outside of circles, were combined with circles
and rings to form complex pictograms. Some pictograms combined more
than thirty elements.
Crop circle developments during the summer of 1991 were well
described by Michael Chorost in the October 1991 issue of the MUFON
[Mutual UFO Network] UFO Journal:
One of the most interesting formations was a
representation of the Mandelbrot set, a two-dimensional graph
made famous by chaos theory . . . the last two seasons of crop
circles have clustered densely in a tiny area containing
Europe's most remarkable ancient constructions: Avebury, Silbury
Hill, Windmill Hill, Barbury Castle, Adam's Grave, the White
Horses, and the East and West Kennet Long Barrows. . . . I
invite my readers to consider that the mystery of the crop
circles is very much like the mystery of the megaliths.
Each consists of compelling geometric forms. No
one knows why they were made, nor why they are where they are.
Nor do we know how either were made. Perhaps the two mysteries
are deeply intertwined. Not that either one "caused" or
"inspired" the other, but that the two phenomena somehow "talk"
about the same thing, a thing still unknown to us, or "do" a
single thing, taken together as a total system. It could be that
solving one mystery will automatically solve the other.
Chorost goes on to describe the research results of
Marshall Dudley, a systems engineer for Tennelec/Nucleus of Oak
Ridge, Tennessee, as well as those of Michigan biophysicist Dr. W.
C. Levengood.
Dudley detected significant isotope changes in the
soil samples from crop circles he had been provided with, and Levengood found that cell pits in plant cells in the affected
formations had been subjected to rapid heating that had separated
the cell pits. He found this to be true in samples from England, the
United States and Canada.
Another major breakthrough was made by Gerald Hawkins, the author of
Stonehenge Decoded, who discovered that in eighteen photographs of
crop circle formations, there was a repeated pattern of frequency
ratios that are equivalent to the diatonic scale (the white keys on
a piano). In addition to that finding, he has outlined four new
theorems about relationships of triangles to circles to squares that
he finds in the crop circle formations, and these theorems do not
exist in any known academic text.
That is a very brief condensation of a large amount of highly
complex technical research. In light of the fact that there is
strong and abundant evidence in support of these results, one would
think that the news media would eagerly leap upon so thoroughly
substantiated a sensational story, and proclaim it to the world in
banner headlines and TV special features.
What actually happened?
The world news media instead leaped eagerly on a flimsy story full
of holes: that two British senior citizens had "confessed" to
hoaxing the circles with no equipment except some planks. This was
triumphantly pro-claimed to the world as the final and definitive
solution to the mystery of the crop circles, in spite of the obvious
fact that two men with planks can-not produce significant isotope
changes in the soil, nor heating so rapid that it separates the cell
pits without leaving burn marks on the outside of the plants.
Other obvious impossibilities deliberately ignored
were how these two senior citizens had managed to make so many
hundreds of circles without having once been detected, or how they
managed to make patterns of such precision and size and complexity
with planks while working in the dark. All the factual evidence was
deliberately ignored in order to convince the public that the
mystery of the crop circles had now been at least definitely solved:
Doug and Dave did it.
The public was bombarded with ten-second TV shots of
Doug and Dave flattening some wheat with some planks, until finally
the vast majority was conditioned into accepting this absurdity as
the proven explanation. The minority of those who persisted in
trying to point out flaws in this explanation was then subjected to
scathing ridicule and social ostracism.
Vast numbers of copy-cat imitators followed the
example set by Doug and Dave, and have ever since devoted themselves
to muddying the water and confusing the research picture, egged on
with the full collaboration of the news media, intent on
trivializing the subject.
In spite of the sabotage and harassment, the research haltingly
continues. An intriguing development that occurred recently in
England is that a group of hoaxers busily at work making yet another
faked crop formation noticed several balls of light hovering above
them, which seemed to be under intelligent control. This frightened
them to the point that they abandoned their work and fled from the
field. There are now quite a few eye-witness reports of small white
discs and grapefruit-sized balls of light seen in the vicinity of
the crop formations, and the small white discs have been captured
twice on videotape.
Some of the crop formation patterns resemble traditional geometric
artwork of indigenous tribal cultures from all over the world so
closely as to be identical. Without exception the religious
traditions of these indigenous cultures describe contacts with
celestial beings in deep antiquity at the time of their tribal
origins.
According to researcher Colin Andrews, all but a few
of the symbols on the panels from the wreckage in the so-called
Roswell film have been clearly and precisely reproduced in the crop
circle glyphs.
Back to Contents
or
Continue
Back to The Saga of Flying Objects
|