It is not a controversial statement that BUFORA is a spent 'force'. As an organisation in the 1970s it was certain individuals doing all the work and BUFORA getting the credit. They were pretty useless and it was not only my UFO reports that went 'missing'.
Now it is just a debunkers club going by what they post on their site and as for investigations..."fizzle" seems to sum it all up.
Apparently, it has been "known" in the US for years that two of the Ufologists William Moore never identified as working with Richard Doty were Hopkins and Jacobs.
Here is something in the way of an explanation as to why the AOP Bureau totally side stepped "Roswell" but looked at other UCOs (Unidentified Crashed Objects).
To make it easier let's look at what Wikipedia has to say.
"The 'Aztec, New Mexico UFO (sometimes known as the "other Roswell") was a flying saucer crash alleged to have happened in 1948 in Aztec, New Mexico. The story was first published in 1949 by author Frank Scully in his Variety magazine columns, and later in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. In the mid-1950s, the story was exposed as a hoax fabricated by two confidence men, Silas M. Newton and Leo A. Gebauer as part of a fraudulent scheme to sell supposed alien technology. Beginning in the 1970s, some Ufologists resurrected the story in books claiming the purported crash was real. In 2013, an FBI memo claimed by some Ufologists to substantiate the crash story was dismissed by the bureau as "a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated".
There was always a rumour that Newton and Gebauer were having their strings pulled by a mysterious third party. Just who that was has never been revealed because...no one dug in.
"According to Scully, in March 1948 an unidentified aerial craft containing sixteen humanoid bodies was recovered by the military in New Mexico after making a controlled landing in Hart Canyon 12 miles northeast of the city of Aztec. The craft was said to be 99 feet (30 m) in diameter, the largest UFO to date. Scully named as his sources two men identified as Newton and Gebauer, who reportedly told him the incident had been covered up and "the military had taken the craft for secret research".
Scully wrote that the crashed UFO along with other flying saucers captured by the government came from Venus and worked on "magnetic principles". According to Scully, the inhabitants stocked concentrated food wafers and "heavy water" for drinking purposes, and every dimension of the craft was "divisible by nine". Science writer Martin Gardner criticized Scully's story as full of "wild imaginings" and "scientific howlers".
Gardner, of course, was correct. I read Scully's 1950 book, Behind The Flying Saucers, in the mid 1970s and ranked it alongside The Scoriton Mystery -a British contactee story. My first thought was that no one would take this seriously, especially scientists. And that seems to have been the point.
"During the late 1940s and early 50s, Silas Newton and Leo A. Gebauer traveled through Aztec, attempting to sell devices known in the oil business as "doodlebugs." They claimed that these devices could find oil, gas and gold, and that they could do so because they were based on "alien technology" recovered from the supposed crash of a flying saucer. When J. P. Cahn of the San Francisco Chronicle asked the con-men for a piece of metal from the supposed alien devices, they provided him with a sample that turned out to be ordinary aluminium.
"In 1949, author Frank Scully published a series of columns in Variety magazine retelling the crash story told to him by Newton and Gebauer. He later expanded these columns to create "Behind the Flying Saucers", a best selling book that influenced public perceptions about UFOs. Four years later the hoax was exposed in True magazine. After the article was published, many victims of the pair came forward. One of the victims was the millionaire Herman Flader, who pressed charges. The two were convicted of fraud in 1953."
The public and flying saucer enthusiasts (who really bought the whole story and shouted down detractors of the story...sound familiar?).
"Through the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, most Ufologists considered the subject thoroughly discredited and therefore avoided it. However, in the late 70s, author Leonard Stringfield purported that not only was the incident real, but that the craft involved was one of many captured and stored by the U.S. military. In later years, many alleged 'first hand' accounts of the Roswell crash contained the Aztec crash story, with some claiming the craft was made of a material impervious to all heat, while others claiming the craft was damaged by the crash. The supposed humanoid bodies were said to measure between 36 inches (91 cm) and 42 inches (110 cm) in height, and weigh around 40 pounds (18 kg). Ufologists claim that shortly after the craft was downed, the military cleared the area of evidence, including the bodies—subsequently taking it to Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base."
Stringfield was a well known Ufologist from the 1950s on and had a UFO sighting along with others while in a military transport so his credentials were impeccable -even though his interview techniques were questionable: during the interviews with the three women involved in the Liberty, Kentucky abduction, Stringfield threw down drawings of various claimed aliens seen in sightings to see if any matched what the women saw this before any hypnosis was carried out.
My late colleague, Franklyn Davin-Wilson talked to Stringfield at a BUFORA conference in the 1970s and was told that "I can't name some sources; one is in air force intelligence" and later when William Moore confessed to have been spying on Ufology along with other Ufologists (who, to his shame as it meant that much of the material at the time could not be trusted) as well as feeding disinformation. At that point the name Richard Doty cropped up in conversations as to who the USAF intelligence source could have been. Franklyn found Stringfield to be pleasant but holding back.
Wright-Patterson AFB was, of course, the home of Project Blue Book and so that fed into the thinking of Ufology that wreckage and bodies collected would naturally go to the USAF UFO project HQ and was a nuisance even after the Condon Committee and the closing of Blue Book. A very big distraction.
William L. Moore, those of you with a long memory may recall, was an the author and former UFO researcher, prominent from the late 1970s to the late 1980s who co-authored two books with Charles Berlitz, including The Roswell Incident. Moore the self confessed pawn of Richard Doty in disrupting Ufology along with other (unnamed) Ufologists. For a few years everything was "crashed UFOs" and alien bodies to such an extent that looking at the 'credible' accounts being pushed UFOs were not interplanetary space craft but interplanetary kamikaze craft!
Ufology got bored because after 40 years not a scrap of physical evidence of crashed UFOs has appeared other than some very faked stuff and the US National Archive actually has some Roswell fragments and it conforms to the wood and silver material described in the original report not the later added to rumours. Ufology had crashed UFO fatigue. Then came digital cameras and everyone went crazy on "Rods" then "Orbs" and the paranormal and Ufological scenes all claimed these. Another distraction as the "Greys" and their agenda got pushed more and more and consumed Ufology until only just after Budd Hopkins' death and all the revelations....followed by the dethroning of the new King of Abduction Research David Jacobs.
Things began to calm down although MUFON then became embroiled in faking reports, selling data to Robert Bigelow, misogynistic and even child abuse scandals -even a "life long abductee" pushed by Ufology for TV , etc. was arrested on child abuse charges.
All of this is online and you can check for yourselves.
But Ufology seemed to be lost while real "truth seekers" actually used the Freedom of Information Act to get at documents and totally books publishing totally fake accounts of happenings on "Skinwalker Ranch" diverted everyone. Lectures, documentaries, You Tube seemed to have a tsunami of Skinwalker Ranch videos promoting every snapping twig as paranormal while post production added "phenomenon". Now the ranch is the setting for one of the most unscientific UFO shows ever -and I watched UFO Hunters!
The same old same old names crop up in all of this from the 1980s on and now we have the "UFO disclosure" where UFO secrecy is tightening and the "whistle blower" turns out not to have resigned his job while receiving world attention with a very bad stage act -just watch the interviews. nothing has been revealed (apart from a few very dodgy images and video clips) and these 'former' counter intelligence people are now the heroes with a chunk of Ufology praising them and acting almost like a cult. Anyone questioning or casting doubt on the new 'heroes' is shut down -trolled, harassed and made the 'enemies'.
This because the people who lied and deceived Ufology and hid all of the reports say they are not lying. Assess what has been released. Assess how the crashed UFO story was a good distraction to throw Ufology and how people like Doty are now UFO 'celebrities' and not challenged at events.
.jpg)
I studied, for a few years, how intelligence/counter intelligence works. The double crosses throughout history and triple crosses as well as short term and long term 'projects'. Go read online or buy a book on how counter intelligence works. It is working now and has worked with Ufology since the 1940s and even those at Blue Book believed something was going on "behind closed doors".
Do not be fooled.
.jpg)
McGill University used to have a good reputation for research. Sadly, the years have not been good to it or so it seems. A well known university with access to all the research you can find online and all the books it must hold...
Have you heard of its Office for Science and Society -"separating Sense from Nonsense"? Well, I do know one thing: Joe Schwarcz, Phd writes a lot for its website. Basically, its like a social studies department but giving itself a grander title.
Sadly, as I have already pointed out, Schwarcz's articles on various subjects cannot be taken seriously. That is not an accusation I make lightly. There were some articles I was interested in ...until I found one titled Alien Encounters.
In this post Schwarcz refers to the encounter at Kelly and the Sutton family. It's a complex case that he skirts over details on (but, hey -"UAP" are big at the moment so he probably wants some of that attention) and is "inaccurate" but does end with: "What actually happened that night remains a mystery but no trace of an alien encounter has ever been found". In other words he dare not actually look at the details of the case and give an honest opinion based on that.
When he comes to the Betty and Barney Hill case which I have, as everyone knows, tried three times to shake the authenticity of and failed, Schwarcz writes:
"While the veracity of the Hills’ close encounter of the third kind is suspect, there is no question that the publicity the supposed event eventually received spawned a host of alien abduction reports".
So they were making it all up? Lying? And what of all the extra independent evidence surrounding the case? No matter it seems as Schwarcz appears to base his version of the Hills encounter on a badly researched internet site.
This piece was throwing out integrity to get the "pop hits" because it was almost reminiscent of the debunking pieces published in the 1950s and 1960s. "Sorting the Sense from Nonsense" in this case ought to be replaced with "Talking Nonsense and Ignoring Research".
Then I saw Schwarcz's chosen image for the piece. "A pictures speaks a thousand words".
