The UFO Community Experiences, Activities, and Agendas
Eyes Only: A Selection of Leading Living UFOlogists (Part 1)
Although one may be a UFOlogist (either self-described or identified as such by others), the term does not imply belief. Many UFOlogists do believe, but others are cautiously skeptical. Still others are firmly skeptical. Some, particularly radio hosts, function mainly as disseminators of UFO theory and information.
Here, arranged alphabetically, are notes on particularly prominent members of today’s UFOlogical community. The list is not complete, partly because “complete” is meaningless and undefinable, and because judgments of importance are subjective.
Jan Aldrich (b. 1944)
Director of Connecticut-based Project 1947, which studies the early flush of interest in UFOs and the immediate pre-1947 period.
The organization is funded by MUFON, CUFOS, and FUFOR. Aldrich’s establishment of electronic UFO-research resources has been useful to scholars, buffs, and serious investigators.
Stephen Bassett: Founder of Paradigm Research Group and executive director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee. Bassett lobbies for increased U.S. government transparency about human-extraterrestrial interactions. Although tireless, Bassett generates controversy because of his tolerance for UFO charlatans, insisting that any discussion of UFOs prods the government closer to disclosure. World Disclosure Day is a signature Bassett initiative.
Notable book: UFOs and U.S. Presidents: The Secret History.
Timothy Green Beckley (b. circa 1945)
Founder of the UFO Investigators League (UFOIL) and a protégé of Fate magazine editor Raymond Palmer. A self-published UFO writer while in his early teens, Beckley went on to establish a publishing company, Inner Light Global Communications, which maintains an aggressive schedule of titles devoted to UFOs and the paranormal. He has written many books about various UFO-related subjects; recurring Beckley subjects are Men in Black and government conspiracies, alien visitation, hollow Earth, demons, and “soul suckers.” A bit of a nostalgist, Beckley (who modestly calls himself “Mr. UFO”) has been a faithful chronicler of the early years of the postwar UFO community.
Art Bell (b. 1945)
Libertarian radio personality who embraces an eclectic mix of conservative and liberal beliefs, and gained national (if cultish) fame as host of Coast to Coast AM, an eccentric syndicated show carried during overnights by five hundred stations reaching fifteen million listeners. Broadcasting from what he described as a trailer in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas, Bell interviewed UFO contactees, Roswell historians, time travelers, Bigfoot witnesses, professional racists (who inevitably pushed Bell into fury), Satanists, predictors of the end times, Wiccans, and a variety of other ostensibly fringe characters. Bell sold his program to Clear Channel Media in 2003, voluntarily cut back on his airtime, and retired in 2010. (Coast to Coast AM continues, with host George Noory.) Bell’s Coast to Coast AM maintains a solid core of admirers; vintage episodes can be heard in rebroadcast on stations around the country.
In 2008, Bell returned to broadcasting with Midnight in the Desert, heard on Internet radio’s Dark Matter Digital Network Although Bell has described himself as a reporter, he has also acknowledged his function as a traditional broadcaster, that is, a person looking for ratings. “Ratings equal money,” Bell said, “I should know.” Don Berliner: Former staff writer for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and now chairman of the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), Berliner is an experienced science writer specializing in space exploration and aviation history. Attuned to the power of words and terminology, Berliner suggests that “UFO” be abandoned, as the acronym is essentially synonymous with “flying saucer,” a concept taken seriously by neither the general public nor opinion makers. Berliner’s suggested alternative: UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena). Strict educational and training requirements of UAP investigators, as well as an insistence on quality photography and primary documents, also figure strongly in Berliner’s point of view, particularly if UFOlogy (another term he dislikes) is ever to be taken seriously.
Notable books: UFO Briefing Document (with Marie Galbraith and J. Antonio Huneeus; this is the public version of the study commissioned by Laurance Rockefeller); Crash at Corona: U.S. Military Retrieval and Coverup of a UFO (with Stanton T. Friedman).
Kim Carlsberg: UFO abductee and speaker. She talks freely of having been taken and physically examined many times. Notable quote: “Those tables are really cold.” Carlsberg claims seven alien grandchildren.
Bill Chalker (b. 1952)
Leading Australian UFO researcher educated in chemistry and mathematics, and with professional experience in industrial chemistry. In 1982, he became the first civilian researcher given access to UFO files held by the Royal Australian Air Force. He has written about events linking UFOs and Australian military activity.
Notable book: The OZ Files: The Australian UFO Story.
Jerome Clark (b. 1946)
Writer, researcher, and editor once associated with Fate magazine, Clark may be UFOlogy’s most thorough and fair-minded researcher. His two-volume, 1,178-page The UFO Encyclopedia is a carefully documented resource that covers a wealth of topics and issues, major and esoteric, related to the UFO phenomenon. (A single-volume abridgment, The UFO Book, is hardly less useful.) Clark impresses with a reasoned belief in extraterrestrial visitation and his objective reporting of views that are at odds with his own. Other books by Clark cover such topics as hidden civilizations, cryptozoology, goblins, and freakish behavior of nature. Clark is a board member of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS).
Erich von Däniken (b. 1935): Swiss writer, ancient (alien) astronaut theorist, and founder of a pseudoscientific organization, the Archaeology, Astronautics, and SETI Research Association.
Däniken had professional experience as a hotel manager, and amateur interests in astronomy and UFOs when he began to research his first book around 1956.
Following a ghosted rewrite, the book was published in 1968 as Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. Although his notions about ancient astronauts that seeded Earth centuries ago with alien technology and cultural influences was not wholly original, Däniken’s version became a publishing phenomenon, particularly after mass-market-paperback publication of Chariots in the United States.
Däniken essentially gave voice to people unable to reconcile that human beings created, without help, the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, the majestic sculpted heads of Easter Island, and other “mysterious” artifacts. According to Däniken, assistance was provided by extraterrestrials—long-ago visitors to various spots on Earth who, over a course of many centuries, shared construction technology, as well as scientific knowledge that imbues the artifacts with extra- planetary significance.
Erich von Däniken’s tussles with the law go back to his teen years. Things grew serious in 1968, when he was accused of cooking his hotel’s books in order to give himself more than $125,000 in loans needed to fund his research travels.
He served a year of a three-year sentence; while imprisoned, Däniken wrote his second book, Return to the Stars (later republished as Gods from Outer Space).
Not surprisingly, established archaeologists, historians, and scientists take a dim view of Däniken’s ideas, ripping him for inadequate, poorly documented research; numerous misapprehensions about history; and a tendency to play fast and loose with scientific fact. During a 1974 interview with Playboy magazine, Däniken complained that archaeologists appreciate neither “fantasy” nor “speculation,” and that they are concerned only with facts. “Who cares about that?” he asked.
In 1968, he implicitly admitted to having borrowed from Robert Joseph Grugeau’s 1963 book One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History. Grugeau was a postal employee, comic strip writer, and amateur archaeologist whose book (published under the pseudonym Robert Charroux) claimed to reveal the secrets of the pyramids, the flying men of Zimbabwe, giants, magic, and the end of the world—most of it tied in with flying saucers, and the extraterrestrial pilots of long ago that visited Earth and left their influences. Grugeau’s publisher objected to similarities discerned in portions of Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and threatened a suit. Subsequent editions of Chariots, as well as Däniken’s Return to the Stars, include token acknowledgment of Grugeau’s work.
Notable books: Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past; In Search on Ancient Gods: My Pictorial Evidence for the Impossible; Signs of the Gods; The Gods Were Astronauts; Odyssey of the Gods: An Alien History of Ancient Greece.
Peter Davenport (b. 1948)
Director of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) since 1994, Davenport has professional experience as a college instructor, translator (Russian), and biotech businessman. Although quick to note that many UFO sightings are of satellites and other mundane objects, he works to increase mainstream media interest in unidentified flying objects, and raise awareness of government efforts to limit information about the phenomenon.
NUFORC, he says, takes some twenty thousand calls about UFOs every year.
In 2006, Davenport paid $100,000 to purchase Atlas Missile Site No. 6, part of a decommissioned and abandoned underground nuclear missile complex located near Harrington, Washington, fifty miles west of Spokane. The damp space is windowless and claustrophobic, and struck Davenport as ideal for the undisturbed pursuit of NUFORC business.
Lisa Davis: San Diego-based researcher who established the Foundation for Abduction Research and Support in 2003, and later became executive director of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). Davis has looked into hundreds of abduction cases, and the ways in which Christian faith—specifically, “redemption through Christ”—can help victims recover from their experiences.
Davis doubts extraterrestrial-origin UFO theories, holding instead that the craft’s origins and purposes are clearly described in the Bible as vessels for fallen angels controlled by Satan. She is concerned also with human-alien hybrids, creatures that are dangerous because they have no souls. Davis herself is not an abductee. Her professional background is in children’s health and disability.
Richard Dolan (b. 1962)
Author, lecturer, and radio host with a strong interest in the U.S. government’s decades-long cover-up of incidents of alien contact. He is among the more effective UFO generalists—a researcher keen on all aspects of the phenomenon. His insights into social media’s effect on UFO research and discussion are particularly useful. Dolan owns Richard Dolan Press, a publisher of books about UFOs, romantic love and the supernatural, secret military bases dug beneath the ocean floor, and alien virology.
Notable books: UFOs and the National Security State, 1941–1973, 1973–1991 (two volumes); UFOs for the 21st Century Mind.
Vicki and Don Ecker
Editors and directors of research for the American edition of UFO magazine. Don Ecker frequently takes issue with numerous hoaxers, “frauds and clowns,” and other charlatans. His crusade against poor research and outright nonsense received enough blowback that he and Vicki exited UFOlogy in 2007, via an open letter penned by Don. George A. Filer III: Retired USAF major and intelligence officer associated with MUFON and NUFOC (National UFO Conference). His popular “Filer’s Files” feature on the NUFOC Web site keeps readers abreast of the latest UFO and astronomy-related news. While aboard a converted B-50 bomber above the North Sea in 1962, Filer was a passive participant in the plane’s unsuccessful chase of an unidentified flying disc. Attached to McGuire AFB (New Jersey) in 1978, Filer contributed to briefings about a disc-shaped craft that landed at nearby Fort Dix, and that disgorged an apparently extraterrestrial pilot shot by USAF ground personnel.
Notable book: Filer’s Files: Worldwide Reports of UFO Sightings (with David E. Twichell).
Salvador Freixedo (b. 1923)
Former Catholic clergyman who has been a powerful voice in UFO/paranormal studies in Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico since 1970. Freixedo subscribes to an ornate variant of the ancient astronaut theme, asserting that UFOs are one manifestation of interdimensional beings— some helpful, others influentially malevolent—with discomfiting Lovecraftian qualities. The entities have been controlling us, invisibly, for many centuries, out of motives that are beyond our ken. The creatures represent a variety of species and forms, and not all of them get along with the others. Some can disguise themselves as human, and walk among us. What we identify as religious miracles are the work of the visitors—a provocative notion because it implies that larger notions of morality are not entirely our own, and that the creatures may fill the role usually assumed to be filled by God. Though interdimensional, the creatures travel the physical cosmos, employing methods of propulsion that defy what we presume to know about physics. SETI and other government- funded scientific projects are, according to Freixedo, “deceits” intended to distract us from the truth.
Notable book: Teovnilogia: El origen del mal en el mundo.
Stanton T. Friedman (b. 1934)
Retired nuclear physicist who is arguably the world’s preeminent, and most respected, UFOlogist. Friedman’s UFO credentials are deep, going back to 1958. A decade later, he was the first civilian to investigate the Roswell incident on-site. He concluded that the crashed craft was extraterrestrial and, further, that the U.S. government involved itself in a cover-up. (Contrary to many in the UFO community, Friedman is convinced that many—but not all—of the post-Roswell Majestic 12 documents that surfaced in the 1980s are genuine, and confirm the cover-up. For more on MJ-12, see chapter eight.) A close investigator of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case (see chapter thirteen), Friedman gives credence to Betty Hill’s intriguing “star sketch,” and concludes that UFOs come from star systems relatively close to our own. Friedman also is convinced, by evidence, that the U.S. government retrieved a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. (For details of this case, see chapter fifteen.) A tireless writer and lecturer since devoting his full time to UFO study in the 1970s, Friedman expresses great impatience with UFO debunkers who 1) are unfamiliar with science and/or 2) misinterpret or ignore scientific evidence.
Notable books: Crash at Corona: U.S. Military Retrieval and Coverup of a UFO (with Don Berliner); Captured! The Barney and Betty Hill UFO Experience (with Kathleen Marden); Top Secret/Majic; Flying Saucers and Science.
John Greenewald Jr. (b. 1981)
Government-transparency citizen-activist whose determined campaign to force release of classified U.S.-government UFO documents (and docs on many other subjects, as well) culminated in Greenewald’s important Web site, the Black Vault. He began to leverage the Freedom of Information Act while in high school and wrote his first book at twenty. By 2013, documents unsealed at Greenewald’s request gave the name “Area 51” to the government’s top-secret research center in southern Nevada.
The site now hosts an astonishing 1.4 million pages of previously classified documents. Among Greenewald’s better insights is that the government stonewalls researchers because too many people making requests for information give up after the first negative response, or lack of response. In other words, stonewalling is the government’s easiest and most fruitful course. But researchers’ perseverance will pay. In addition to operating the Black Vault, Greenewald has produced television documentaries and pseudo-documentaries about the Freemasons, underground alien bases, Hitler and the occult, and end- of-the-world scenarios.
Notable book: Beyond UFO Secrecy.
Steven M. Greer (b. 1955)
Retired North Carolina medical doctor and proponent of government truthfulness via-à-vis UFOs. He has founded two organizations dedicated to expanded knowledge about UFOs and their inhabitants: The Center for Study of ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (CSETI; 1990) and The Disclosure Project. As the latter organization’s name suggests, Greer pushes government agencies and officials to come clean on what they know about UFOs, particularly as the knowledge relates to national and world security.
Some UFOlogists accuse Greer of presenting the research of other people as his own, and propounding theories—for instance, that alien spacecraft surrounded Neil Armstrong when the American astronaut walked on the Moon in 1969—that don’t bear up well to scrutiny.
Another Greer project, the Advanced Energy Research Organization (AERO), extols Greer’s fist-sized “zero energy” device, which, he says, can power a small city.
Notable books: Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and Implications; Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge.
Robert J. Gribble (b. 1926)
Retired American firefighter who founded the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) in Seattle in 1974. Gribble provided the organization’s financing, while fielding six to ten calls daily about UFO sightings, and cataloguing them. Gribble routinely recorded calls made to the center, and he conducted many follow-up interviews. His activity yielded more than forty hours of first-person audio recordings, which he donated to UFOlogist Wendy Connors in 2004, and which became available for Web downloads in 2013.
Gribble’s interest was sparked in 1954, when he read Harold T. Wilkins’s Flying Saucers on the Attack. Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real further excited Gribble, and inspired him to establish the Space Observers League (later called Civilian Flying Saucer Intelligence) and begin publication of a UFO newsletter, Flying Saucer Review, in 1955. Gribble also began to compile an archive of UFO news reports, which eventually stretched back to the year 1800. He also worked as a MUFON investigator.
Although not a UFO witness, Gribble wants others to have a place to log reports of their sightings. Twenty years of fielding calls and networking took its toll; Gribble handed stewardship of NUFORC to biotech entrepreneur Peter Davenport in 1994. Davenport later moved the headquarters from Seattle to a refurbished missile silo outside of Spokane.
By the millennium, Gribble had shifted his energy to a fervent campaign against illegal immigration from Mexico (whose leaders, he claimed, had designs on control of the U.S. government).
Richard Haines (b. circa 1939)
Former NASA scientist at Ames Research Center, 1967–88 (plus later contract work), with a PhD in experimental psychology. Haines did landing simulation research at NASA, and worked on Head-up Display design, the EVA (Extravehicular Activity) spacesuit and other astronaut habitability challenges, astronaut ergonomics, improvements to long- distance image transmission, and various issue of vision and optics. Later a psychology professor at San Jose State, Haines has a strong scientific orientation that encourages him to be an open-minded but cautious UFOlogist. He has made careful study of more than thirty-four hundred UFO accounts given by pilots, as well as reports made by astronauts.
Haines is now chief scientist for the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP). In a 1995 interview with CUFON, Dr. Haines lamented UFOlogy’s “drift into entertainment media,” and urged neophytes to avoid TV and “read only the highest-quality books.” Notable books: UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (editor); Observing UFOs; CE-5: Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind.
Larry Hatch: Forced by ill health to assume a lower profile in 2006, UFO researcher-compiler Hatch devoted twenty years to the creation of the “ U ” UFO Database, an exhaustive, single-source DOS-based UFO case-study compilation of more than eighteen thousand incidents spanning most of humankind’s recorded history. Persons close to Hatch enjoyed access to the database while it was a work in progress. Unfortunately, Hatch’s outmoded technology meant that his completed database was accessible only to sophisticated and dedicated computer-tech experts. Things improved in 2011, when Hatch announced that his database was not as “lost” as some had assumed.
The best, latest retrieval method, for use by people running Windows XP and Windows Vista Business, is available on ufoupdateslist.com.
Paul Hellyer (b. 1923)
Since 2005, this former Canadian defence minister (1963–67) and transport minister (1967–69) has advocated sharply for the release of UFO-related documents held by governments around the world.
Trained as an aeronautical engineer and well versed in reform-style economics, Hellyer claims that four discrete alien species have visited Earth for centuries, sharing technology that culminated in LEDs, Kevlar, and microchips. The aliens also observe that the world’s poor are not well served. At least another dozen alien species are aware of our existence; most, Hellyer says, hold good intentions for us, and are loath to directly intercede in our affairs. One species though, whom Hellyer calls the “Tall Whites,” works with the U.S. Air Force in Nevada.
Every alien race that is aware of us is concerned about man-made ecological damage to the planet, and our loose controls on atomic weaponry. To date, Hellyer is the world’s highest-ranking government figure to reveal alien activity, and lobby for government disclosure.
Notable relevant book: Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Survival Plan for the Human Species.
Eyes Only: A Selection of Leading Living UFOlogists (Part 2)
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/eyes-only-a-selection-of-leading-living-ufologists-part-3/