The UFO Community Experiences, Activities, and Agendas
Eyes Only: Some Notable UFOlogists of the Past (Part 1)
Persons noted below engaged in various aspects of UFO study in the postwar era. A varied group, these UFOlogists came from many worlds: finance, science, journalism, philosophy, aviation, and the military. A few were contactees; others told personal tales of extraterrestrial sightings or abduction.
A few were deeply skeptical of the ET theory of UFOs.
Each person is deceased, which is of no significance other than that particularly paranoid conspiracy theorists propose that many dead UFOlogists died too young, or too coincidentally, or too conveniently.
George Adamski (1891–1965)
The most celebrated and persuasive of all UFO contactees, Adamski enjoyed modest success in the 1930s as leader of a California religious cult that melded benevolent Christianity and mysticism. He took up UFOlogy in the late 1940s (coincident with Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 saucer sighting), after witnessing flying saucers and subsequently meeting their beatific, human-appearing pilots. Adamski opened a small restaurant on land he owned near Mount Palomar, California, selling saucer snapshots and other souvenirs, and speaking about his alien friends and extraterrestrial travels. He became a minor celebrity after attracting the attention of mainstream book publishers, and turned up as a speaker at UFO gatherings and occasionally on television. By osmosis, or just the generosity of his followers, Adamski became “Professor” Adamski in the late 1950s. He continued to profitably lecture and write until his death.
To some in the UFO community, Adamski (eager to share his impressions of Jesus-like aliens and spaceships bristling with glowing glass bricks and clunky coils) is an old-school eccentric. To others, however, the professor represents the best, first flush of alien contact.
Whatever one’s opinion, and despite the fact that popular thought about ETs is now dark rather than hopeful, Adamski is the undisputed farther of the contactee movement. For more on George Adamski, see chapter twelve.
Notable books: Flying Saucers Have Landed (with Desmond Leslie); Inside the Space Ships; Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus; Flying Saucers Farewell.
Orfeo Angelucci (1912–93)
Lockheed metal fabricator and amateur botanist who, like George Adamski, greeted benign extraterrestrials. Angelucci made his first sighting of a saucer in 1946, little knowing that (as he described things) he would be under alien observation for the next five years. During a 1952 saucer sighting, Angelucci drank from a “crystal cup” that materialized on the fender of his car. A “golden voice” explained that “for our first contact with the people of Earth, Orfeo, we have chosen you.” Angelucci later inhabited the body of a resident of Neptune, an experience that Angelucci experienced as a “missing time” episode. For more on Angelucci, see chapter twelve.
Notable book: The Secret of the Saucers.
Gray Barker (1925–84)
American film booker and distributor of educational materials who parlayed early articles about UFOs—notably a 1953 piece about an alien monster doing mischief near Flatwoods, West Virginia—into a prolific career as an author and lecturer. Barker’s ostensibly factual 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers introduced the “Men in Black”— intimidating government operatives that monitor UFO investigators and contactees, so that UFO information best kept secret is not released to the general public. The book’s central figure is Albert K. Bender, a real-life saucer witness who claimed to have been intimidated afterwards by creepy strangers wearing dark suits and sunglasses. The MiB concept played well with paranoid readers during the Cold War, and went on to secure a firm grip on the national consciousness. A big-budget Hollywood film, Men in Black, prospered at the box office in 1997, and inspired two sequels.
In a 1998 article for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, journalist and onetime Barker protégé John Sherwood revealed that Barker regarded UFO investigation and other paranormal studies as a lark, even as Barker claimed to believe in order to exploit public interest and make a living. In a 1968 letter to Sherwood, Barker described UFO enthusiasts as obsessed neurotics.
In the late 1960s, Barker encouraged the teenaged Sherwood to present a fictional account of flying saucer time machines as fact. The young Sherwood did so, and the “article” was printed in Barker’s magazine, Saucer News. Barker informed Sherwood, with evident satisfaction, that “the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.” In the end, Barker’s legacy as a UFOlogist may come down to something he told his sister Blanch: “There’s good money in it.”
Notable books: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers; Flying Saucers and the Three Men (with Albert K. Bender); The Silver Bridge.
Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. (1927–2004)
Original “Mercury Seven” astronaut, USAF test pilot, and aerospace engineer. The youngest of the Mercury astronauts, he also was the last of that group to go into space. During his May 1963 mission, the final Mercury flight, Cooper spent more than thirty-four hours in space and orbited Earth twenty-two times. A potentially disastrous power failure near the scheduled end of the flight forced Cooper to take manual control of the capsule and perform quick calculations to adjust his re-entry, preserve the capsule, and save his life.
Cooper went into space a second time, as part of the Gemini project, in 1965.
Although folklore holds that “Gordo” Cooper witnessed a UFO during a flight in space, he confirmed that that was not the case. However, he (and other pilots) witnessed multiple UFOs during a flight over Germany in 1951. Six years later, Cooper made another in-flight sighting.
For more on Gordon Cooper’s UFO experiences, see chapter ten.
Notable book: Leap of Faith: An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown (with Bruce Henderson).
Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943–2001)
American self-published author, on-air personality with the World Wide Christian Radio shortwave network, lecturer, gun-rights advocate, and antigovernment tax scofflaw who investigated and exposed conspiracy theories.
UFOs were not Cooper’s primary area of interest, but he wrote and spoke about them colorfully. Project Luna, he said, was a secret alien base on the dark side of the Moon. Further, the United States had established a Moon base in the mid-1950s (Cooper was vague about the precise year), and a base on Mars not long after the first manned landing there (a joint United States–Russia endeavor) in 1962.
Cooper expressed concern for victims of alien abduction, who were, Cooper said, being rounded up by the government and illegally interned. During a 1989 lecture at a UFO conference in Modesto, California, Cooper insisted that the aliens seen on the Alien Nation fictional television series were real extraterrestrials. Although Christian, Cooper believed that much of the Bible “is the result of alien manipulation.” Cooper viewed the world’s political, economic, and scientific establishments as corrupted components of a new world order—an immensely powerful cabal of Illuminati that worked in collusion with extraterrestrials to dominate the planet’s affairs. Cooper claimed that President Eisenhower met with an alien ambassador in 1954, and that JFK was assassinated by a “gas pressure device” given to the driver of the presidential limousine by aliens linked to the Trilateral Commission. Kennedy had to die because he planned to expose Washington- alien collusion.
With his self-published 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper elaborated on his theories, ranging sufficiently wide to encompass the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an alleged scheme to establish FEMA concentration camps, the international plot that created and spread the AIDS virus, Jewish-Illuminati links, Satanic Church collusion with U.S. Army Intelligence, alien implants, and alien theft of human fetuses.
Although Cooper served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era, he probably was not, as he claimed, an intelligence officer. Nor did he have a “license to kill” or authorization to move freely between branches of the service, changing uniforms as he went.
Cooper was a founding member of a militia group called the Second Continental Army of the Republic, and coordinator of that group’s Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence.
When a pair of Apache County (Arizona) deputies (backed by some fifteen other officers) arrived at Cooper’s home in Eagar, Arizona, to serve a warrant for aggravated assault, Cooper fired on them. One of the deputies suffered two shots to the head; the other returned fire and killed Cooper. Not unexpectedly, some conspiracy theorists with tenuous links to the UFO community claim that Cooper was “murdered” so that his alleged truth-telling would be silenced. But in the world of UFO studies, Cooper has become a footnote in just fifteen years, and UFOlogists now have little patience with his ideas.
Notable book: Behold a Pale Horse.
Philip J. Corso (1915–98)
Distinguished U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who made waves in the mid-1950s with allegations of U.S. abandonment of American POWs following the Korean War, and later claims of having seen artifacts from the 1947 crash at Roswell.
In Corso’s Dawn of a New Age, a manuscript unpublished at the time of his death, he wrote of his 1957 sighting, near the White Sands, New Mexico, test grounds, of a “shiny, saucer shaped object on the ground,” and his subsequent encounter with a humanoid alien. Corso claimed that he and the alien established a telepathic link. (Very much in the manner of the 1953 movie It Came from Outer Space, the alien simply wished to lift off unmolested.) The alien ship, Corso wrote, was the counterpart of the one discovered at Roswell ten years earlier. The ships crashed into each other in 1947, but because they traveled through time (in order to negotiate the vast distances between stars), ten years passed before the one seen by Corso “entered” Earth’s space a second time.
An intelligence staff officer and battalion commander of European Air Defense, Corso is best-recalled for his stance on Roswell, though his complaints about Washington’s treatment of POWs probably were the central event of his career, and a reason why his career stalled short of full colonel.
See chapter eight for more on Philip Corso and Roswell.
Notable books: The Day After Roswell (with William J. Birnes); L’Alba di una Nuova Era (Italian publication of Dawn of a New Age).
Frank Edwards (1908–67)
American radio broadcaster turned author who wrote two of the most widely read of all UFO books, Flying Saucers—Serious Business! (1966) and Flying Saucers—Here and Now! (1967).
Edwards began his radio career in the 1930s. His curiosity about flying saucers grew from the Roswell story, and became so intense that in a 1949 broadcast on the Mutual network, Edwards declared that flying saucers “actually exist,” adding that “they are not of this world.” He later became intrigued by Washington’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, and by all manner of hard- to-explain phenomena. Edwards’s syndicated radio show of the 1950s, Stranger than Science, found success, and led to his 1959 book of the same name.
Edwards joined the board of NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena), and segued into television in the mid-1950s, discussing flying saucers and other phenomena.
Late in 1966, the King Features syndicate picked up Flying Saucers—Serious Business! for ten-part serialization in newspapers across the country. Besides burnishing Edwards’s celebrity, the syndication deal greatly increased general American interest in UFOs.
During the final decade of his life, Edwards was a vocal critic of government censorship of UFO documents and other information.
Notable books: Stranger than Science; Flying Saucers—Serious Business!; Flying Saucers—Here and Now!
Arthur Ernest Exon (1916–2005)
Heavily decorated USAF brigadier general in active service during 1942-69. In World War II, Exon amassed 325 combat hours as a flyer on missions over Sicily, Italy, Corsica, Africa, and Southern France. Over Italy in the spring of 1944, Exon’s aircraft took damage from an exploding ammunition depot; Exon had to bail out, and was held by the Germans as a prisoner of war until June 1945.
Exon involved himself in high-level maintenance and logistics during 1948– 54, before assignment to the Pentagon and responsibility for ballistic missiles in Turkey and across Europe. Later, while a lieutenant colonel, Exon assumed command of Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio.
Exon’s official Air Force capsule biography makes no mention of the claims that make him a person of great interest to UFOlogists: his insistence (inspired by the accounts of others) that Wright-Patterson became a repository for Roswell crash debris and corpses retrieved from the crash site. Perhaps the most intriguing of Exon’s assertions is the existence of a secret USAF supervisory committee at Wright-Patterson, comprised of top military officers and people from the intelligence community. Exon labeled this group “The Unholy Thirteen,” and claimed that it controlled the flow of UFO information that fell outside the purview of Project Blue Book and established military intelligence.
In the course of a 1990 phone interview with UFOlogist Kevin Randle, Exon firmly stated that President Truman, USAF chief of staff Gen. Carl Spaatz, and their subordinates kept a lid on Roswell evidence for fear of a public panic if the information were leaked.
Richard H. Hall (1930–2009)
American technical writer, Civil War historian, and UFOlogist active in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), a private UFO-investigations group established in Washington, D.C., in 1964. Hall eventually became the organization’s assistant director, sharing that role with Gordon Lore and answering to NICAP co- founder Donald Keyhoe.
In 1964, Hall assembled an important collection of UFO-sighting reports that had come into the main NICAP office in D.C. and satellites offices in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, and Hartford. He called the book- length collection The UFO Evidence; it remains one of the earliest and most credible studies of UFO activity reported during 1947–62. That NICAP had been put together by scientists, military people, businesspersons, and people with links to the nation’s intelligence community caused The UFO Evidence to earn serious attention—even from Congress (NICAP saw that every member of the House and Senate received a copy). Further, because Hall concentrated on reports made by pilots, military officers, and scientists, witness credibility was high.
Notable book: The UFO Evidence (ed.).
Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter (1897–1982)
American naval vice admiral (combat veteran of World War II and Korea) and Director of Central Intelligence (predecessor to the CIA) during 1947–50. As director, Hillenkoetter oversaw American intelligence efforts to block Communist political activity in Italy and counter Soviet propaganda around the world. Hillenkoetter also was a principal of the Majestic 12 (MJ-12) Roswell-investigations group authorized by President Truman in September 1947.
In the course of a 1960 interview with an unnamed UPI reporter, Hillenkoetter said that “behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Hillenkoetter added that “to hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel.” As a creature of the military and intelligence establishments, Hillenkoetter had concern about UFOs and “unidentified flying objects” that presented potential threats to U.S. security. Although he did remark that the craft appeared to be “under intelligent control,” he did not assume the craft were of extraterrestrial origin.
(Elliott) Budd Hopkins (1931–2011): Important American abstract expressionist painter and sculptor (1976 Guggenheim Fellowship for painting) who cultivated a deep interest in UFOs and became a seminal figure in alien abduction studies.
Hopkins witnessed a silvery disc above Cape Cod in 1964, and although he never was abducted, he became an empathetic compiler of abductee accounts.
He published an abduction article with the Village Voice in 1976, and thereafter devoted a great deal of his time to UFOlogy. He founded the Intruders Foundation in 1989 and conducted interviews (some aided by hypnotic regression) with victims of abduction. He concluded that alien species pursued an aggressive program of crossbreeding with humans. Tangled or partial memories of alien abductions are familiar elements of abductee accounts, and Hopkins startled many people by claiming that one in fifty Americans has been abducted, and that most do not know it.
Although Hopkins’s university degree was in art history, he conducted New York group therapy sessions for abductees.
Notable books: Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods; Art, Life, and UFOs.
J. Allen Hynek (1910–86)
American astronomer associated with Ohio State and Northwestern universities, and a leading proponent of UFO study. Hynek is probably best recalled for his groundbreaking 1972 classification table of UFO contacts—which Hynek called “close encounters”—by degrees of witness proximity.
In the mid-1950s, when Project Blue Book requested his expertise as a consultant, Hynek had been a professor and working astronomer for nearly twenty years. Research at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during World War II involved Hynek in classified weapons work. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yerkes Observatory, he was wedded to the tenets of objectivity and the scientific method. Although skeptical of many UFO reports, Hynek had the flexibility of mind—and innate curiosity—to agree to Blue Book’s request.
In 1966, following a weeklong series of dramatic, multiple-witness UFO sightings in Michigan, Hynek, under pressure from the Air Force, offered that some of the Michigan witnesses may have seen “swamp gas.” As a partial explanation, Hynek’s sincere invocation of swamp gas was not unreasonable.
Regardless, the two words became instantly notorious, and Hynek felt the sting of ridicule—a kind of ridicule similar to that suffered by many past witnesses to UFOs.
As Hynek developed an open mind about UFOs, he understood that among “serious” scientists, he represented a minority point of view. In a 1966 Newsweek article he said that scientists are eager to explore the phenomenon, but are “so vastly afraid of ridicule” that they do nothing. As a partial response to that unfortunate attitude, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), near Chicago in 1973. (The organization became popularly known as the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.) The research center depended on private funding, and when that grew inadequate in 1981, Hynek moved the center to his home.
For more about Hynek and close encounters, see chapter ten.
Notable books: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry; The Hynek UFO Report.
Carl Jung (1875–1961)
Swiss psychiatrist whose conception of the collective unconscious, cultural archetypes, and the soul revolutionized not just analytical psychiatry but notions about theology, folklore, art, literature, and popular culture. Jung explored two equal and (ideally) congruent forces at work in all people: the urge to learn and understand the outside world in relation to oneself (differentiation); and the drive to achieve a congenial personal “whole” from innate personality traits, and useful understanding of immature and mature experiences (integration).
Part of Jung’s drive to study and learn came from the paranormal. A head injury he suffered as a boy negatively affected his ability to concentrate, but one day, when Jung was twelve, he felt an almost physical lifting of a mental fog.
The boy viewed himself with fresh clarity—and also intuited that another person was present with and in him: a wise old man who had lived a century before.
The experience marked Jung’s fascination with human archetypes; the “wise old man”—who recurs in numberless myths, folk tales, artworks, and motion pictures—is just one of those archetypes. Among the others are the mother, the father, and the healer.
Although not a “believer” in UFOs, Jung accepted the sincerity of people that had witnessed such craft. He was struck by a consistency of similarity among the reports and descriptions, particularly the disc; to Jung, the shape implied a circle, an ancient human symbol suggestive of the circle of life—a circle that, to Jung, never completed itself, but simply led to new existence after physical death.
Jung’s interest in parapsychology and mysticism predisposed him to be nonjudgmental about UFO accounts. He acknowledged (as in a famous 1957 letter to New Republic editor Gilbert A. Harrison) that UFOs had shown up clearly on radar, and that many had physical, real-world characteristics. Jung’s true interest, though, was the mind, and it was in this regard that UFOs most intrigued him. It was with no small pleasure that he described UFOs as humanity’s challenge to so-called proper science, and to what we presumed to be the limits of knowledge.
Notable relevant book: Flying Saucers.
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