This past week, the field of ufology lost two of its well-known members – UFO investigator Robert Dean and whistleblower Karl Wolfe.

Robert Dean is best known for revealing that, while a member of the U.S. military stationed at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in the 1960s, he was able to read a document entitled “UFO Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Threat” because his security clearance allowed him access to documents labeled “Cosmic Top Secret.” While Dean could not obtain a copy, he remembered the contents of the papers and revealed them to the public after retiring from a 28-year career in the Army. Those contents, according to Dean, included detailed information on UFO sightings, ET encounters and alien autopsies. Dean claimed the research was approved by NATO and exposed (at least internally) that Earth was inhabited by four alien species that looked like humans and were secretly interacting with us.

Dean spoke often both within the ufology community and to the general public about what he saw in “The Assessment” and, while he was unable to offer proof, lived long enough to see the US government finally admit it has investigated UFOs and release videos of encounters. Robert Dean was 89.

Karl Wolfe was another former military officer (Air Force sergeant) who also claimed to have a special security clearance in the 1960s while working in the Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 2001 at the now-famous Disclosure Project event held at the National Press Club in Washington DC and organized by ufologist Steven Greer, Wolfe revealed that, while working as a technician processing photographic surveillance from the war in Vietnam, he was sent to a building filled, to his surprise and suspicion, with non-English-speaking civilians and interpreters. In a darkroom used for processing photos from the first lunar orbiter mission in 1966, another technician allegedly showed him pictures of structures on the far side of the moon. He descried it in his testimony:

“He pulled out one of these mosaics, and showed this base which had geometric shapes – there were towers, there were spherical buildings, there were very tall towers and things that looked somewhat like radar dishes, but they were very large structures.”

While he had no evidence, Wolfe spoke about his experience at subsequent ufology events. He died this week in a tragic traffic accident that is still under investigation. Karl Wolfe was 74.

As expected, some are trying to link the accident to Wolfe’s revelations about  }alleged secret moon base and others to the coincidental passing of two UFO whistleblowers with a week of each other. The circumstances of each man’s passing seem to suggest otherwise, but actual information about such a connection is as likely to be disclosed as is evidence of what both men claimed they saw and told to anyone who would listen.

“Space … the final frontier.”

That, of course, is the opening line from the first “Star Trek” series. No one (outside of China, as we will soon see) would watch if the line was, “Space, the next street light.” Yet that’s exactly what the Chinese space program is saying. In 2020, it plans to launch a satellite with a reflective coating that it claims will be capable of beaming sunlight at night on a 50 square mile area that apparently hasn’t yet heard of street lights. Or Las Vegas. Or what animals and humans do when they can’t sleep. What could possibly go wrong?

“The satellite light will be like a twilight glow.”

Kang Weimin – the director of the Institute of Optics at the Harbin Institute of Technology’s School of Aerospace – gave that very non-technical description after the announcement by Wu Chunfeng — chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co. – that Chengdu, a city 0f 14 million residents in southwestern China, will soon get a second moon “eight times brighter than the Moon” (please update your definition of “twilight” to ‘reflect’ this). At a technology conference in Chengdu, he told the audience that the beam from this satellite will be bright enough to entirely replace street lights.” (Better update “twilight” again.) Why? Chengdu Business Daily gives one answer:

“According to reports, in the civilian sector, the project can replace night street lighting, saving a lot of infrastructure electricity consumption. In view of the 50 square kilometers of Chengdu, providing radiation, for example, can save electricity costs of about 1.2 billion yuan ($173 million USD) per year.”

People’s Daily reports that Chengdu officials also expressed that the artificial moon would increase tourism (see Las Vegas and New York City) while Asia Times points out that the light can be directed to specific locations such as construction sites or disaster areas.

What could possibly go wrong? Ask the people who live in far northern or southern areas with summers filled with midnight suns. Or ask their psychologists who say perpetual sunlight affects internal clocks, creates a feeling of perpetual jet lag and contributes to insomnia and all of its associated serious problems (see Insomnia). The artificial moon will certainly upset astronomers who will be able to see it as its light blocks their view, and it will affect businesses that depend on night darkness. (Note to self: sell stock in nightlight company.)

Then there’s the animals. Kang Weimin says the all-night “twilight” won’t affect them, but that’s not the case in midnight sun areas, which report the animals are out hunting longer, birds are chirping and crowing at all hours, bears are cranky from not hibernating and those all-important nighttime insect-eating bats are eating less often. And those are just the obvious signs.

What could possibly go wrong? Plenty. Enough to offset the profits of a billionaire space entrepreneur, his rich business friends and money-hungry government officials? What do you think?

“Space … the final profit center.”

Hollywood’s alien movies have been drawing inspiration from UFO stories since the dawn of the modern UFO era over seventy years ago, but only a handful have been based directly on real-life UFO incidents. Here are 5 of the best…

Left: the real Betty and Barney Hill. Right: the Hills as portrayed onscreen by Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones.

1. The UFO Incident (1975)

One of the first cases of alien abduction on record — and arguably the most famous — is that of Betty and Barney Hill, a middle-aged couple who encountered a UFO on the night of 19 September 1961 while driving late at night in New Hampshire. The couple claimed to have witnessed a disc-shaped craft low above the road directly ahead of them. Barney even described seeing a number of humanoid figures staring back at him through its windows. Little else was recalled consciously. The rest of their account would surface later through dramatic hypnosis sessions with respected Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, who published a popular book about the incident in 1966.

In 1975, the Hill abduction story became even more famous when it was adapted for television as a feature-length movie starring Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones as Betty and Barney. With a teleplay based directly on Dr. Simon’s taped hypnosis sessions with the couple, The UFO Incident was remarkably faithful to the Hill’s actual account of capture by grey-skinned saucer occupants in September of 1961.

Another film, the little-known Italian production Eyes Behind the Stars, had touched on the theme of abduction three years prior in 1972, but The UFO Incident was the first direct treatment of a real-life case and the first to bring together many of the now-common themes and motifs of abduction experiences, including medical examination, missing time, and hypnosis. The movie’s aliens, although smallish with large eyes and bald heads, are of normal proportions, and are quite different to Greys as they would later be realized onscreen in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as decidedly smaller, more spindly beings with significantly larger heads and larger, blacker eyes.

The UFO Incident remains one of Hollywood’s best treatments of a true life abduction experience. It works first and foremost as a powerful human drama, propelled by the obvious commitment of Parsons and Jones in excellent central performances as the Hills. Despite its fantastical subject matter, the film remains sober throughout.

2. Communion (1989)

Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book about his claimed encounters with non-human entities was an instant bestseller, and, to date, has sold more than two million copies worldwide. The 1989 movie adaptation starred Christopher Walken in a compellingly manic performance as Strieber, and Lindsay Crouse as his late wife, Anne.

Both book and movie are primarily focused on an experience which occurred 26 December 1985, when Strieber believes he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York while on a short break with his family and some close friends. Strieber had almost no conscious recollection of what had happened to him, but in the months that followed he began to suffer an untraceable emotional and psychological toll.

In the movie, we follow Strieber as he reluctantly agrees to be hypnotically regressed by psychiatrist Janet Duffey (played by Frances Sternhagen). It is through these sessions that the bizarre events of that night come back to confront him – events involving small, spindly, beings with oversized oval heads and large hypnotic black eyes.

Communion was the first Hollywood entertainment product to engage thoughtfully with the more surreal aspects of the abduction phenomenon. With a screenplay penned by Strieber himself, the movie captures the tonal essence of his book, if not its deeply layered psychological and metaphysical complexity. It’s a flawed film, but it dares to show abduction for the baffling, hallucinatory, deeply troubling, intellectually challenging, and spiritually transformative phenomenon it is reported to be. This is a film, which, for the most part, is rooted firmly in our own mundane world. The thought of non-human intelligences breaking through into this reality from a strange realm is psychologically jarring, both for Strieber and for the viewer.

Despite its flaws, Communion remains a deeply creepy movie. It’s an important one too, not only for its ambition, but for further popularizing the image of the now iconic Grey alien—an image which first came to prominence on the cover of Strieber’s own bestselling book and would later feature on the movie’s VHS cover, staring hypnotically into the eyes of millions of freaked-out customers in video rental stores worldwide.

3. Intruders (1992)

1987 saw the publication of Budd Hopkins’ Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods. The book investigated the claims of a number of alleged alien abductees, but was more specifically concerned with the case of Debbie Jordan-Kauble (known in the book as “Kathie Davis”). Jordan-Kauble described having been abducted from her parents’ home in June of 1983 and being taken aboard an egg-shaped craft which had landed outside. She claimed to have been impregnated by her alien captors, who later removed the fetus and eventually introduced her to her human-alien hybrid child.

Hopkins’ Intruders book would later be very loosely adapted for television by screenwriter Tracy Tormé—son of legendary jazz singer and musician Mel Tormé. The 1992 mini-series (later broadcast back-to-back as a movie) was concerned less with the Jordan-Kauble story and more with the broader abduction phenomenon as it was then understood by the leading researchers in the field, namely Hopkins and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, both of whom served as consultants on the production.

Intruders was broadcast by CBS through 17–19 May 1992 and was generally well received by critics. It remains significant for its thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of the abduction phenomenon, and for grounding itself convincingly in a normal world occasionally intruded upon by a profound and sometimes terrifying non-human intelligence. It explored many themes and motifs common to abduction accounts, including intrusive examinations, alien impregnation, hybrid children, screen memories, and hypnotic regression. Tormé is convinced that his show had considerable cultural impact, bringing a previously obscure UFOlogical facet to the masses. He told me of Intruders: “I really believe this project was part of the process of people becoming aware of how these things [abductions] allegedly work.”

4. Fire in the Sky (1993)

In 1975, Travis Walton, a logger from Snowflake, Arizona, famously claimed to have been taken aboard a flying saucer and to have interacted with two different species of aliens. What distinguishes Walton’s story from innumerable other accounts of cosmic kidnapping is that his apparent abduction was witnessed, in part, by the six other men on his logging crew. They sped back into town that night to inform bemused authorities of how a UFO had zapped Travis in front of their very eyes. Assuming he was dead, the terrified loggers had left their colleague where he lay, the saucer looming above his lifeless body.

A swirling storm of confusion, anger, and allegations was soon to descend on the sleepy town of Snowflake. The loggers, having reported to police that their friend had been taken by a UFO, immediately were considered suspects in Walton’s disappearance and possible murder. After no less than five days, Walton returned. He was found in a telephone box some three miles outside of Snowflake, huddled and shivering. As he was taken back into town he began babbling about strange creatures with large eyes. He assumed he’d been gone just a couple of hours and was stunned into prolonged silence when he was told almost a week had passed.

Featuring solid performances from D.B. Sweeney as Travis, and Robert Patrick as logging-crew-leader Mike Rogers, the Fire in the Sky movie was a reasonably faithful accounting of the Walton experience—that is until its final act, which notoriously pummeled the meat of Walton’s encounter out of all recognition. The human-looking beings described by Travis and their walkabout with him in a spaceport were nowhere to be seen in the movie. Walton’s skittish Grays were replaced with frightful goblin-like beings who literally drag the logger like a sack of spuds through their pestilent, rotting spaceship—all dank tunnels and dripping embryonic sacks—before gluing him to a table with a suffocating membrane and subjecting him to graphic torture with a thick needle to the eyeball.

The movie divided opinion upon its release. It made back its budget, but little more. The legendary Roger Ebert praised the film’s final sequence for its believably, writing: “The scenes inside the craft are really very good. They convincingly depict a reality I haven’t seen in the movies before, and for once I did believe that I was seeing something truly alien, and not just a set decorator’s daydreams.” However, Ebert was left deflated as the credits rolled, adding: “The movie ends on an inconclusive and frustrating note.”

5. Roswell (1994)

This 1994 TV movie was the first in-depth Hollywood treatment of the infamous Roswell Incident of July 1947, in which an alien spacecraft and bodies are alleged to have crashed in the New Mexico desert and been recovered by the US military. For writer/producer Paul Davids, the purpose of his movie was not just to entertain, but to educate—to bring what many regard as the ultimate UFO cover-up to wider public attention as a powerful and comprehensible narrative.

Roswell was also one of the first movies to feature a direct reference to Area 51. The secret base shows up fleetingly in a sequence in which a mysterious government insider (played by Martin Sheen) describes to Roswell whistle-blower Jesse Marcel (Kyle MacLachlan) the events that unfolded in the months and years following the saucer crash.

In a 2014 interview, I asked Davids if the word “Roswell” would be so culturally resonant today had he not so memorably contextualized it in his 1994 movie. “Not as much,” he replied, although he acknowledged that The X-Files, which premiered a year before his movie, also played a major role. “But The X-Files wasn’t just about Roswell,” he stressed, “it was all over the place dealing with a lot of different things. Roswell was just a little part of it.”

Today, Davids considers the Roswell Incident to be a “national institution… massively ingrained into the public consciousness, as much as any other story from the history of our country.” It is hard to argue with that statement, and it is harder still to underestimate the seminal role Davids’ movie played in that ingraining process.

After the recent passing of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, there was much coverage of the billionaire’s many notable accomplishments and activities – inventor, investor, philanthropist, private rocket builder, shipwreck hunter, brain researcher and owner of sports teams, yachts and an island. However, one major achievement that didn’t get much press was his early and substantial financial contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). That’s right – the other half of the IBM side of the personal computer revolution was also a key member of the SETI revolution … and the evidence starts with the Allen Telescope Array, located in the Cascade Mountains in California.

“The chance that we are going to pick up the phone and an alien is going to be on the other end is small, but it is certainly worth—on a modest scale, for me—seeing if we can enable some of that research.”

Paul Allen

In a 2007 interview with Discover magazine, Paul Allen describes how his interest in space and extraterrestrials began with the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, a little thing called software got in the way of that interest and Allen didn’t give it much thought until he had had made some of his billions and one day received a call from a fellow computer industry pioneer. According to Motherboard, Allen, along with Hewlett-Packard founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard and Intel founder Gordon Moore, received a call from Hewlett Packard laboratories founder Barney Oliver asking each to invest $5 million in Project Phoenix, which scanned for signals from 800 stars within 200-light years of Earth.

Allen Telescope Array

When Project Phoenix ended, astronomers interested in SETI designed a large array of radio telescopes and convinced Allen to contribute the $25 million (he later invested $5 million more) needed to build what became the Allen Telescope Array – the first array in the U.S. built specifically for SETI. While it has received 200 million signals from thousands of stars and recently scanned the Oumuamua intergalactic space rock, a definitive ET message hasn’t been identified yet. Despite that, Allen never lost his excitement for the search.

“That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago.”

While Paul Allen had many other successes, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence wasn’t one of them. However, his quest lives on in the Allen Telescope Array. While we wait for a message, perhaps Allen has finally received it.

A couple of common aspects in discussions about a Planet X or Planet Nine or Nibiru are that it’s a danger to Earth and it’s coming back. A new study suggests that while a giant ninth planet may have once existed in the solar system, it’s not coming back and it may actually have been good to Earth. Why? Because it saved our planet from Jupiter’s gravitational power by making that giant planet use it instead to fling this Planet X out of the solar system and turn it into a rogue wandering the galaxy aimlessly. Is it true? Should we feel guilty?

“We shouldn’t fall into the trap of looking at the outer solar system and thinking it was always like that.”

In Dynamical Evolution of the Early Solar System, a study published in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysicsand reviewed recently by Knowable Magazine, David Nesvorný of the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado describes how computer simulations of how the solar system was formed seem to always end up with Uranus or Neptune getting flung out of the array by Jupiter’s massive gravitational force. There’s a pretty big hole – two of them, actually – in those simulations. Some astronomers added a planet that disappeared 4 billion years ago to the simulations – a change that led them to create our current solar system but pointed to no evidence left behind of the one-time existence of such a planet.

Except for the orbit of Jupiter. The simulations indicate that at one time Jupiter was farther away from the sun and closer to Saturn. The combined gravitational pulls of the two ice giants could have been a threat to the inner planets, including Earth. However, during a million-year dynamical instability in the early life of the solar system, something happened to move Jupiter away from Saturn, reducing the danger to the inner planets … something that looked like it was caused by the blowback from Jupiter flinging a huge planet out of the system. That fixes the simulations, except for the fact that an exiting giant would have had some visible effect on the Kuiper belt of space rocks outside of Neptune.

Kuiper belt in relation to the ice giants

Nesvorný thinks he found the hole in the Kuiper belt. The belt is generally in sync with Neptune’s orbit … except for an area called the ‘kernel’ which has a different orbit and may even have a different composition of space rocks. The simulations show that as Neptune moved into its final orbit, it suffered a bump that could have created a gravitational push that created the kernel. And – you guessed it – that bump could have been caused by the force of the gravitational effort needed by Jupiter to knock out Planet X.

“You end up with something like the kernel. It’s circumstantial evidence … but it’s not conclusive.”

Nesvorný admits that while this addition of an exiting Planet X makes the simulations work, he needs more proof. One piece of evidence he proposes is the fact that astronomers are constantly finding Jupiter-sized rogue planets floating between the stars and most were likely deported by similar cataclysmic events in their own solar systems. And it’s not just a few … some estimates put the number in the billions. That means that while we may never again see the Planet X that saved us from Jupiter, there’s a good chance we’ll be visited by a different rogue. Nesvorný has this warning that it may only be a matter of time:

“I bet there will be many. It’s surprising how organized the solar system has remained.”

Which planet will save Earth and the inner planets the next time … or is it our turn?