UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The subject of unidentified flying objects has long been a confusing one. Since its inception in the late 1940s when reports of unusual aerial objects or vehicles began to appear in our skies, there was a lot of debate about what they might be, and where they might come from. Theories ranged from new Soviet surveillance technologies, perhaps being developed with the help of former German scientists that were divided among the world superpowers after the end of the war, to the more exotic possibility that some of these things might be from elsewhere, and of extraterrestrial origin.

Little about this debate has changed over the years, and even to this day, calls for renewed “official” interest in the phenomenon continue, on account of the potential security threats they might represent.

“What these UAPs were and who was flying them — whether friends, foes or unknown forces — remains a mystery,” wrote Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant Defense secretary for intelligence and one of the current stars of History’s UFO-themed television program Unidentified, in an op-ed published by The Hill in May. “Yet careful examination of the data inevitably leads to one possible, disturbing conclusion: A potential adversary of the United States has mastered technologies we do not yet understand to achieve capabilities we cannot yet match.”

Putting aside some of the controversies presently associated with the To the Stars Academy (of which Mellon is a member), these points are valid: the possibility that new technologies could be produced by another government, and that they could be used against American interests, must be taken seriously.

Returning again to the outset of the UFO enigma in the 40s and 50s, it became apparent that the term “flying saucers” had some issues. Having come into popular use after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of disc-like objects over Mount Rainier in the summer of 1947, the term did no justice to the discussion of alleged objects that ranged in appearance from spheres and discs, to elongated “cigar-shaped” vessels (more commonly referred to as “tic-tacs” in the parlance of today). For this reason, Edward Ruppelt, the first chief of what became the U.S.A.F.’s Project Blue Book, proposed a new and more ambiguous name for these mysteries of the sky: unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

The name stuck, although it didn’t become the exclusive phrase that Ruppelt had hoped it would. “All flying saucers are UFOs, but not all UFOs are flying saucers,” were the immortal words of the late Stanton Friedman, who had been among the many serious proponents of UFOs over the years who continued to use both terms, albeit under slightly different circumstances. Friedman’s argument, in other words, had been that any number of things could be an unidentified flying object, whereas if one were to say “flying saucer,” it is understood as being in reference to an exotic alien craft… whether or not it’s really saucer-shaped. There are good arguments that justify the use of either term, in other words.

Stanton Friedman

The debate over terminology hasn’t been confined simply to what these objects should be called; there has also been lasting confusion about the pronunciation and grammatical usage of “UFO”. This was recently brought to my attention again by a friend and colleague of mine, Charles Orton, who wrote to playfully scold me after hearing me refer to UFOs–the abbreviated form of unidentified flying objects–as an acronym. Charles wrote:

At the cost of sounding like my eighth grade English teacher Miss Thistlebottom, I should have thought you knew the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation (you recently referred to “UFO” as an acronym). An acronym is an abbreviation that can be, and often is, pronounced as if it were a word. An example is NASA. NASA is an acronym. NAFTA is an acronym. AATIP can be an acronym. But UFO and UAP are not acronyms. FBI and CIA and NSA and USA are not acronyms. They are abbreviations. Yet so many people in the u-fool-ogy realm today are always referring to UFO and UAP and other abbreviations as acronyms.

As my colleague correctly points out, UFO is not an acronym… if it is read as “You-Eff-Oh,” which is the common usage today. However, when Edward Ruppelt proposed the use of the term back in the early 1950s, he had also suggested that UFO be pronounced “You-Foe.”

Edward Ruppelt, first chief of the USAF’s Project Blue Book.

For whatever reason, this never quite caught on, although if it had, it certainly would have made “UFO” the acronym he had intended for it to be. Nonetheless, we could argue that the use of the term as he intended it was as an acronym, and should be pronounced as “Youfoe”… but good luck getting people on board with making that change!

Another brief side note, while we’re discussing all of this: another item of debate I’ve seen over the years has to do with whether the plural form of UFO should be written as UFOs (with no apostrophe), or as UFO’s. Checking this with Ashford University’s online Grammatical Resource Page, they state explicitly that either form is acceptable: “For numbers, abbreviations without periods, and symbols used as words, the apostrophe before the –s is optional if the plural is clear.” To further illustrate the point, one of the examples they provide is “UFOs OR UFO’s.”

Today, the matter remains as complex as ever. Since the terms unidentified flying object (as well as its abbreviated form, UFO, which as we’ve seen, was originally intended to be an acronym) and flying saucer were both popular terms for use in the discussion of alleged extraterrestrial aircraft, many today would argue against the use of either term, instead calling for the use of unexplained aerial phenomenon or UAP. It’s a nice way of taking an expression that was intended to be ambiguous, and replacing it with something even more ambiguous… and paradoxically, in an effort toward making sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we’re talking about!

As far as this subject is concerned, it looks like there’s still an awful lot that gets lost in translation… even when we’re all speaking the same language. But one thing we can (hopefully) agree on would be that, in the event that “UAP” does ever become the new norm when discussing aerial mysteries of this sort, it’s definitely an abbreviation and not an acronym… at least until some wise-ass comes along and starts saying, “it’s pronounced Ooh-app!”

Over at his blog, Jason Colavito has a new article titled “Ex-CIA ‘Weird Desk’ Official Kit Green Claims ‘Alien Autopsy’ Emails from the Future ‘To the Stars’ Crew Are Authentic.” In part, the article states: “Earlier this summer, an anonymous poster released online documents claiming to be emails produced in 2001 by Eric Davis and others for Robert Bigelow, and in the emails, we saw the various Legion of Doom members associated with Bigelow, many of whom are now affiliated with or orbit To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, speculate about the infamous Alien Autopsy video (also called the ‘Santilli film’ after its creator, Ray Santilli) that aired on Fox-TV in 1995, with several expressing credulous views that the infamous hoax was either real footage or a recreation of real footage.” Check out the article, as it contains a lot of intriguing information.

Although most people accept that the Santilli footage is bogus, there are still a few figures in Ufology who cling onto the possibility that the film just might be the real deal. I’m convinced that the footage shows a dummy, but I have to confess that there was a time some years back when I felt it could at least possibly be genuine (but of a very deformed person, rather than an alien). Or, more likely, that we had not been told the full story. Now, with all of that in mind, I thought I would share with you today the strange stories of the otheralien autopsy films. And photographs too.

The late Leonard Stringfield – who died in 1994 – was not so much an investigator of crashed UFO tales and of alien bodies. Rather, he was a collector and a disseminator of such tales – primarily via what he called his series of “status reports.” Over the years, Stringfield came across a number of accounts of footage that sounded somewhat like the notorious Santilli film. It didn’t help that most of Stringfield’s cases came from unknown sources; but, at least the material was there to be seen. One such case came from “T.E.” Yep, just two initials and nothing else, which doesn’t exactly give us much to go on, to say the least. According to T.E., who shared the story with Stringfield in 1980, in the early 1950s he – T.E. – worked at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. So the story continued, on one particular day, T.E. was taken to a room on the base and exposed to a highly controversial piece of film. Stringfield wrote:

“Without any briefing, the 16mm movie projector was flicked on and the film began to roll on the screen…the film showed a desert scene dominated by a silver disc-shaped object embedded in the sand…T.E. said the bodies appeared little by human standards and most notable were the heads, all looking alike, and all being large compared to their body sizes…They looked Mongoloid.” It wasn’t long before T.E. and his colleagues at Fort Monmouth were told that the film was nothing but a hoax. Stringfield wrote: “The 5-minute long movie certainly was not a Walt Disney production. It was probably shot by an inexperienced cameraman because it was full of scratches, and had poor coloring and texture,” which, admittedly, reflects the crappy filming on the Santilli footage. UFO investigator/Bigfoot researcher Joan Jeffers told Stringfield she had a source who had seen what was probably the same film, but in 1956 at a military base in Maine.

In 1982, Stringfield had more to say on the matter of alien autopsy films: “On a tip from Bill Hamilton of Phoenix, Arizona, at the MUFON Symposium in Houston, June, 1980, I was soon in communication with Ms. C.M. of Los Angeles, a successful freelance writer who knew about a secret movie allegedly showing a freshly recovered alien craft with occupants, filmed inside an Air Force hangar. The movie, in color with sound, and of 17 minutes duration, said C.M., was in the possession of a person formerly in government service, whom she did not identify…one scene showed the removal of five alien dead bodies.”

Stringfield also wrote that the late NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka (who tragically died on the Challenger Space Shuttle in January 1986) had seen a B&W film of “alien bodies on a slab” at McClelland Air Force Base in 1973. Stringfield said that his source for the story was Chris Coffey, a figure in Ohio UFO research. Moving on: U.K. UFO researcher Jenny Randles had a similar story to tell, too. In 1986, Randles met with a former U.K. military man who she referred to as “Robert” and who claimed to have seen photos of a dead alien under somewhat conspiratorial circumstances. Robert had also seen what were claimed to have been highly classified U.S. military files on UFOs, dead aliens and the usual baggage. I interviewed Randles about all of this back in March 1997. She shared with me what Robert told her:

“There was a very detailed account that was mostly filled with medical jargon about the autopsy which he didn’t understand, and there was a photograph of this entity with a slit right down the middle from the neck to the navel. One of the things Robert said was that the aliens were very human-looking. He said that the head was completely bald, but the most unusual feature of the face was the nose, which was almost flush into the face – almost unnoticeable. He couldn’t tell from the photographs, but the autopsy report made it clear that the beings were slightly smaller than average human size – about five feet in height.”

Randles also told me: “Bearing in mind, 1986 was years before the autopsy film [from Ray Santilli] surfaced. In fact, the connections with the autopsy film and with what Robert told me are chillingly similar. One of the impressions that you get from the alien autopsy footage is that the body is very human-like; and is around five foot in height. I have to say it struck me as soon as I saw the footage that this was very similar to what Robert had described.”

I would not be surprised if at least some alien autopsy-based films and photos – such as those referred to above – were crafted by military agencies. Probably to try and convince the Soviets, at the height of the Cold War, that we had high-tech alien technology in our hands, when we almost certainly did not. History has shown that in the 1950s and 1960s both the Russians and the Americans circulated completely bogus UFO stories – all in the name of psychological warfare, counterintelligence, and disinformation. As I said, I don’t believe the Santilli film is the real deal. I do think, however, that the matter of the infamous film (as well as the other films and photos referred to above) will continue to be debated – and, in some quarters, still believed in. Maybe, for obscure and not presently fully understood reasons, there are those in government who want us to believe in the existence of such films. But, that last bit is for another, looming article.