Who Wants to Talk About UFOs?

The Danish photographers Peter Helles Eriksen, Sara Galbiati, and Tobias Selnaes Markussen recently published a book about people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs (or Unidentified Flying Objects, for the uninitiated). The assumption in these cases is that the UFOs did not originate on Earth but traveled here from some alternate solar system elsewhere in the Universe.

The premise of such folks is that extraterrestrials journeyed to Earth from other planets circling other stars, curious to get their hands on Earthlings and subject them to a variety of tests intended to explore and understand their earthly composition and behavior.

The Danish book Phenomena featured a seminal character in the saga of purported abductees, one Travis Walton, who claimed to have been kidnapped in Arizona for five days in 1975 by aliens.

And I don’t mean E.T. on a bicycle riding across the face of the moon.

“In Denmark or in Europe, it’s kind of taboo,” said one of the Danish photographers.

“If you believe in UFOs, you keep it to yourself. It’s not something you go around talking about, because the majority will think that you're kind of mad. But in America, especially, of course, the places we went [Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada], it was more like an understanding—‘If you believe in this, I’m not going to question you.’ It’s almost like a religion—‘I won’t judge you, everybody has their right to believe in what they want.’”

In America people who believe in such fantasies are less likely to be considered daft than in more rigorously scientific societies that flourish in most of the rest of the western world, especially during Trump Times.

Yeah, I’ve had that feeling for a while—that purported alien abductees are indeed “kind of mad.”

Actually, one can look back a bit earlier in American history to uncover the first alleged alien abduction on Earth, in the U.S.—which appears to be the landing site of choice for purported space cadets.

In this regard I admit to a conflict of interest in that the noted UFO “debunker” Philip J. Klass was my first cousin twice removed, and I held him in the highest regard. Cousin Philip, “a founding Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and for 35 years the senior avionics editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, [was] the leading debunker of claims that UFOs are space vehicles.”

When Philip published his fourth book on the subject, UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, in 1989,

“he trace[d] the checkered history of UFO abduction reports to the third week of September, 1966, when Look magazine broke the story of Betty Hill and her husband, Barney, who claimed they had been abducted by a UFO five years earlier and subjected to a superficial physical examination by curious but friendly UFOnauts.”

“Thus,” said book reviewer Clarence Petersen writing in the Chicago Tribune,

“was born a veritable UFO abduction industry. Others said young children had been kidnapped by aliens and returned after flesh samples had been removed; still others have alleged that women have been kidnapped and impregnated.”

Cousin Philip, who actually ate dinner at my home when I was a small child according to my brother—whose interest in things aeronautical was always more intense than mine—had no faith in alien abduction theories or, indeed, in UFOs per se.

“‘Would you like to know the truth?’” cousin Philip asks in his book,

“before proceeding to show that there are no credible UFO abduction cases, including the most celebrated, most ‘persuasive’ reports. [Klass] turns up one lie after another, one coverup after another, a grand irony in that the UFO crowd itself has been hollering coverup—by the Air Force, by the scientific community and by ‘world leaders.’”

Cousin Philip died in 2005, and in his New York Times obituary was described as follows:

“Philip J. Klass belonged to the small and somewhat peculiar class of individuals known as debunkers. The part of that word to focus on is bunk, short for bunkum, which is what these types attack with vigor and all the obsessiveness of the bunkum spreaders themselves. . . .

“[Klass’s] real argument, like all debunkers’, was not with the people who believed they had witnessed or experienced some paranormal event but with those who made an industry of igniting their imaginations. Klass dedicated one book to ‘those who will needlessly bear mental scars for the rest of their lives because of the foolish fantasies of a few.’”

With Cousin Philip looking over my shoulder from the Great Beyond, most assuredly not from an alternate universe, I read with some interest about a $22 million Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program that was run out of the Pentagon from 2007 to 2012 by former DOD intelligence officer Luis Elizondo. Funding for the program was obtained by former Democratic Senator Harry Reid beginning in 2009 (with assistance from the late Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye and the late Republican Senator Ted Stevens).

(I can’t imagine the commencement of such a program during Philip’s lifetime. He would have raised holy hell.)

Not only did the study attempt to confirm the existence of potential threats by extraterrestrials, but it also was concerned with advanced aircraft programs that might have been developed by China or Russia.

The existence of this program has just been made public, and it came to the conclusion, with the blessing of Senator Reid, that it “really couldn’t find anything of substance. . . . It all pretty much dissolved from that reason alone—and the interest level was losing steam.”

Not one to take no for an answer, Mr. Elizondo indicated upon his resignation from the program that:

“Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels, certain individuals in the [Defense] Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security.”

Throughout the duration of the program, Cousin Philip must have been turning over in his grave. At its conclusion, he must have given at least a chuckle—or even a chortle—of glee, so firm was he in his convictions that UFOs were utter nonsense:

“To disprove claims of U.F.O. sightings and stories of ‘alien abductions,’ Klass combined gumshoe investigative work—witness interviews; close examination of documents, many of which he found to be doctored; inspections of ‘landing’ sites—with scientific knowledge and the information he was able to extract from industry sources. His explanations for what prompted reports of U.F.O.’s were sometimes prosaic: people had been deceived by meteor showers, by planets giving off eerie glows, by giant weather balloons launched by the government or by smaller prank balloons sent up by teenagers. He attributed a series of U.F.O. sightings in New Zealand to bright lights cast by Japanese squid boats.

“Some of his investigations produced findings that were spooky in a Cold War kind of way. U.F.O.’s cavorting over Michigan in 1967 were determined by Klass to be fixed-wing aircraft secretly sent up by the military contractor Raytheon to test an experimental radar system. Several years later, Klass showed that a ‘saucer’ casting vast amounts of light downward near Lake Zurich, Ill., had been, in fact, a plane with an ‘intense flash lamp’ mounted in its belly—which bathed the ground in light at five-second intervals to test a new system for night photography. . . .”

The evening news this week has played and replayed a tape purporting to show a UFO that flew high and fast in unexplained ways, speculating that it may well have been a genuine extraterrestrial vehicle investigating the Earth’s stratosphere which appeared to “defy the laws of physics.”

However, as Michael Sokolove indicated when Cousin Philip died, “Klass was the voice of cool reason, seeking to demonstrate that a temporary inability to fill in the whole story should not open the door to wild speculation.”

Rest in peace, Cousin Philip. The speculators and charlatans who live by fooling the gullible could not deliver the goods to the satisfaction of the U.S. Department of Defense, and hence your well-earned reputation as the Great Debunker is safe. With any luck, eternally safe.