Eggs on the Comet My visit to a popular “alternate news” Web site just days after the dramatic November 2014 landing of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) comet probe on the surface of Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko gave me access to a three- part video in which a person unfamiliar with astronomy and space science expounded … Read more
Battle in the Stars Napa County, California, UFOlogist Ed Grimsley maintains an eponymous Web site devoted to UFO battles in our night skies. Grimsley reports that, since his teen years, he has used night-vision technology to observe dogfights among UFOs, as well as aerial battles between UFOs and Earth aircraft. He is stunned by the … Read more
CGI Magic In 2007, a pair of short videos made waves after being quietly posted to YouTube’s “News and Politics” section. Crystal clear yet showing the slight shakiness typical of tourist videos, the pieces quickly became YouTube sensations. “UFO Haiti” and “UFO Dominican Republic” were uploaded from two discrete YouTube accounts; “UFO Haiti” runs twenty-two … Read more
Red Flags People familiar with postmortems pronounced the film a hoax almost immediately. They were bothered that although a wall clock suggests a two-hour procedure, the film runs just seventeen minutes. If the footage were genuine, what was going on during the other 103 minutes? Only two walls are visible, which suggests a set rather … Read more
What We Saw The autopsy subject is a humanoid biped, hairless from head to toe, lying prone on its back on a table. No external genitalia are visible, but a vertical crease below the pubis suggests a vulva. (On television, digital manipulation blurred the creature’s pubic area.) There is no visible navel. The corpse appears … Read more
The “Alien Autopsy” Film Buzz about film footage of a lifeless Roswell extraterrestrial under the knife (and bone saw) of human pathologists began in 1993, when the film’s existence leaked—or was leaked—to the UFO community. The prospect was frankly exciting: official military footage of the 1947 postmortem examination of a Roswell alien. The 16mm film … Read more
Oh, That Myron In the history of American magazines, few publishers exceed the late Myron Fass for sheer industriousness, cynicism, and bald-faced deception. A horror- comics artist in the early 1950s, Fass founded New York-based Countrywide Publications in 1956. His little magazine empire peaked in the 1960s and ’70s with one-offs designed to exploit Jaws, … Read more
What’s the Alternative? In the late 1970s, UFOs enjoyed one of their periodic bursts of mass popularity. Believers and skeptics in Britain had plenty to discuss following Anglia TV’s April 1, 1977, broadcast of a documentary called Alternative 3. The film “revealed” that Washington and Moscow had for many years conducted joint space-travel research, with … Read more
A Perfect Line Perhaps something was in the atmosphere in 1967, something that, once breathed in, inspired young men to do UFO trickery. Take Chris Southall, David Harrison, and other students at Farnborough, England’s Royal Aircraft Establishment, and Farnborough Technical College. The group fabricated six fiberglass discs and placed them in a line stretching 155 … Read more
Youth Will Have Its Day Adult hoaxers often anticipate monetary reward, or the perquisites of fame. Younger hoaxers, want notoriety, too, but their ability to put one over on adults brings special fun. In 1967, fourteen-year-old Ronnie Hill of Oriental, North Carolina, had a clever idea. On July 21, he snapped a blurry photograph of … Read more
