Alien Invasion!

Or if you prefer a more down-to-earth explanation ...

by John Sweatman and Martin Hadley

On Saturday May 6, The UFO Society of Western Sydney hosted the 2006 National UFO Conference. Following a tipoff from Skeptic and astrophysicist, Andre Phillips, NSW Committee members Martin Hadley, Phillip Peters and John Sweatman joined about 200 true believers at Campbelltown. Martin thought that the title “UFO Society” implied objectivity, as did the references on the website to “investigations”. His optimism turned out to be misplaced, whereas John’s lower expectations did not prevent disappointment at the quality of most of the content.

Military cover-ups?

The event was opened by the conference coordinator, Attila Kaldy, who proceeded to describe his adventures in the Blue Mountains hunting UFO’s and aliens. He recounted many heroic tales like fighting off bird-eating spiders, although how they got to the Blue Mountains from their native South America was not explained. SAS troops were apparently monitoring their every move, which indicated to Attila that the government was trying to suppress their activities and cover up UFO reports. A military training exercise was obviously too simple an explanation for the UFO believers. The best story had him chasing an alien along a bush track in the middle of the night (definitely not a wallaby, we were assured). Eventually E.T. stopped and crouched behind a bush (it must have gotten puffed) at which point Attila turned and ran off in terror without managing to get a photo. What a shame!

Right from the outset, Attila used the terms “UFO” and “Alien Craft” interchangeably, indicating that his mind was already made up about what these Unidentified Flying Objects actually were. A later speaker, Frankh Wilks, was not so subtle and objected strongly to the use of the term “UFO” on the grounds that everyone knew that these were identified extra-terrestrial craft.

Next to speak was well known UFO investigator Bill Chalker. We found his to be one of the more interesting talks, as Bill used proper scientific methodology to test the authenticity of alleged alien artifacts. He described a number of ‘alien’ objects which, after testing, were found to be very much terrestrial and mundane. One exception was a hair sample which was alleged to have come from an alien-human hybrid and which was the subject of Bill’s recent book Hair of the Alien. His DNA testing on this revealed interesting results that he claimed would not have been obtained from a normal human hair sample. There might be something in this, but until the results are repeated by other independent scientists and subjected to proper peer review, we won’t consider it anything more than an interesting oddity.

Next, Dominic McNamara spoke on the Disclosure Project with which he is involved. He described the painstaking process of trawling through government archives to uncover military and police records of UFO reports. He came across a few interesting items, the best of which was an incident involving a female camera operator at the Woomera missile testing range in the 1950’s.

He managed to track down this lady and recorded an interview with her on camera, which he screened during his talk. She told of how a strange light appeared in the viewfinder when she was filming a missile test. She reported it to her superiors who promptly took the film away and ordered her not to tell anyone about what she saw. Dominic seemed to infer that this was evidence of a government conspiracy to cover up UFO reports. What he failed to consider, however, was that Woomera was a place for testing new top secret military technology and that the unexplained lights could have been a result of this, rather than an alien craft. If this were the case, it would make sense that the military would not want information about these weapons leaking out.

This raises an interesting question though: if aliens are indeed paying us visits, why on earth would the government try to cover it up for decade after decade? Some claim that the government has used recent terrorist incidents to frighten the citizenry and erode their civil liberties. Wouldn’t the threat of an alien invasion provide much better excuse to do these things? Surely they would play up the threat rather than cover it up!

Keynote?

After an enjoyable lunch in the club cafeteria, we returned to hear the much lauded keynote speaker: Jaime Maussan. Jaime was flown out from Mexico by the conference organisers at what must have been a considerable expense. Despite this, the ‘evidence’ that he presented for UFOs visiting Mexico was embarrassingly poor with many pieces of video or stills being obvious hoaxes.

Jaime’s qualifications are in entertainment not science. He broadcasts material sent in by his audience. He needs content and for him it is a sufficient guarantee of authenticity that a person does not ask for a fee when they provide him with stuff. Most of what he showed was jiggly handheld footage shot through cheap cameras at the extreme of their digital zoom with the distortions so caused, including false shadows as the software struggles to create a distinct image.

Many of Jaime’s videos of alien activity have been explained through mainstream media including the Discovery Science channel. A fair dinkum investigator would have mentioned this and given the audience an opportunity to decide for themselves. Jaime’s tactic was to accumulate an implication that science had no answer to what he was showing. This persisted through some really lame stuff including high flying aircraft creating contrails and even the setting sun catching the edge of a layer of cloud.

He began by extracting a few frames from a video to show a white object flying into a volcano and thereby triggering an eruption. Apart from the fact that smoke was already thousands of metres into the air, indicating that the eruption was well underway, the full video shown on Foxtel was obviously a bird flying relatively close to the camera. It descended from left to right and kept flying after the last frame that Jaime had selected. It was nowhere near the crater and clearly did not fly into it.

It was a little irritating to hear most of the uninformed audience lapping this up. One sincere lad stood at the end to say that the presentation had been the most significant moment of his life. Jaime got the most ooohs! and aaaaahs! from his ‘flotillas’ which he said were controlled formations of alien ‘spheres’ or ‘lights’ trying to communicate something to us, possibly as foretold by Mayan astronomers. We have to stop being horrible to each other and follow the messages.

He got the sphere idea from footage of what were obviously two helium filled party balloons tied together and being blown along. The effects of wind turbulence were to Jaime, intelligently controlled ‘magnetic’ movement. But from this point in the talk, any video of an indistinct spot was of ‘a sphere’. The flotillas were tiny white specks. Jaime insisted they were at least 5,000m up and 5m across, figures he plucked from the air. The first flotilla was six points making a rectangle and then there were three kind of making an equilateral triangle. Geometric arrangements!

The audience was hooked and became increasingly amazed at flotillas with more and more spheres, forgetting that they were certainly not geometric any more. There was a gasp as he showed a flotilla moving in formation. We had to take his word for the movement because there was no reference point at the edge of the frame, only sky.

It did not trouble the audience that the ‘lights’ did not keep formation in most of the shots that followed. But this was because the movement was intended to communicate something. Of course we must strive to decode the messages and keep watching Jaime’s show. In his world of selected conclusions there will always be more work for him to do.

Then there was the footage of the Mayor being filmed at an official engagement, surrounded by smartly turned out police. Look up in the sky - lights! He looks up, counts them, shrugs, and then continues with the visit. He is obviously trying to pretend they are not there, suggests Jaime and the audience hurrumphs at another shabby cover-up. To us, the Mayor’s nonchalance was exactly what you would expect from a man looking at a flock of high flying birds, gliding like storks or pelicans. We like birds and the flotillas were pretty to see, but it was not the most significant event of our lives.

Jaime had some rare close up footage shot through a phone camera. We see two lads who are keen to improve their soccer technique and are therefore practicing at night in an alley (as you do). The ball is headed back and forth and then as one retreats to take the ball he passes beside a telegraph pole. Sproing! Out leaps an alien and tugs at his t-shirt. The player recoils in surprise and within two seconds the attempted abduction is over. That seemed a rather feeble effort for a being who had taken the trouble to travel so far to get here; and with all the special powers that suggests. But Jaime revealed that it was not so much trouble after all. His investigation of the scene confirmed his suspicion that behind the pole there must be a space portal; so the alien could pop out, as and when required. [The audience being what it was, I was trying really hard not to laugh, but at this point my stoicism deserted me - Martin]

The worst bit, though, was footage of a captured alien sitting at a table in a darkened room fighting for life after being infected with some disease. It was embarrassingly obvious that this was a small guy in a costume or a dummy being manipulated by a couple of pranksters who also had very poor actors playing the paramedics.

A member of the audience stated that he works in special effects and much of what Jaime had shown were obviously hoaxes. Jaime’s response was very telling; his reply to this guy was very defensive, even angry. This got us wondering whether Jaime knows a lot of his stuff is bunk but presents it as proof anyway, unlike some of the others who are genuine, albeit deluded, believers. A supporter stood up and said in a very heavy Spanish accent, that Jaime was a WONDERFUL MAN. She got a round of applause (while John smiled politely and Martin’s eyes rolled back into his head).

Media bias?

Next speaker was George Simpson, who focussed on UFO sightings in Victoria. Of particular interest to him was an alleged landing of an alien craft near a school in the 1960’s, which he told us was witnessed by a number of the students. The evidence he presented was very flimsy and unconvincing and included lots of anecdotes and hearsay.

However, he did make an interesting point about how Ufologists are treated by the media. He gave an example of how Channel Nine showed Victorian skeptic Steve Roberts some very flimsy UFO footage and asked him to comment on camera. Steve correctly dismissed the footage as mundane phenomena that had been misinterpreted as UFO’s by some. Channel Nine than interviewed George and had him make general comments about UFO sightings but without showing him the footage Steve had seen. The result was edited to have George appear to endorse the flimsy footage as genuine UFO evidence when in fact he had never seen it. He explained that had he been allowed to view the footage, his conclusion would have been the same as Steve’s. This is typical behaviour of commercial current affairs programs and there have been many other occasions where the tables were turned and the Skeptics were made to look like dills instead.

Diane Harrison from the ironically named >Hard Evidence magazine, was the next to come forward and deliver a talk on “UFO Abduction and the Dream Time Connection”. She explained that many ancient rock paintings by indigenous people depict creatures that look very similar to what modern alien abductees have described. We weren’t convinced. This suggests that people 10,000 years ago had just as good imaginations as people living today.

Conspiracies

The final speaker for the formal part of the conference was Frankh Wilks. Frankh was introduced as a “Humanistic Psycho Therapist, Hypnotherapist, Herbalist, Homeopath and Naturopath”. Tally ho, we thought but after giving a brief introduction, he put on an hour long documentary which tried to prove that the 9/11 attacks were all the result of a big CIA conspiracy. (This was the same program that was shown on Channel Ten a few months prior, and has been shown by others to be complete conspiratorial nonsense).

This was rather self-indulgent of Frankh. He was invited to the conference to speak on hypnotherapy and how it can be used to recover memories of people abducted by aliens. But he instead decided to use his timeslot to push a pet conspiracy theory unrelated to the subject matter of the conference.

The dinner was pleasant and included a talk by Larraine Cilia on the “Rendlesham Forest Mysteries”. She didn’t deal much with the famous event itself, but instead focused on weird and spooky happenings that are observed by tour groups visiting the site now. Lots of photos with weird light effects were shown and explained as alien phenomena, but they were obvious tricks requiring no more than a cable release, a torch and a flashgun. Larraine was adamant that torches were not allowed into the forest during these research trips, but she was not there when most of the shots were taken. Swirls of mist were shown to be examples of the presence of aliens. What’s really funny though, is that there are other people who are convinced that such swirls indicate the presence of ghosts, not aliens.

Being in the prime of our lives, we did not set aside a beautiful autumn Saturday to acquire snipers’ ammunition. We wrote to the conference organisers the day after the event with constructive criticism and the dialogue will continue. Any discerning Skeptic should believe in UFOs; it’s whether they are alien controlled that is a slightly bigger ask.