It’s a funny business, this UFO research. It’s been plagued over the years by mistakes, lies and cover-ups as well as hoaxes. It’s one of my key interests to try to understand what is behind the inaccuracies in many reports, why people would fabricate UFO hoaxes etc. Some people claim that hoaxers are just looking for attention or fame, or it could be that they think it’s a ‘fun’ thing to do , to make up a story and see how gullible the researchers might be in their critical analysis of the fabricated story.

One good example would be that of a man, considered one of Australia’s smartest people, an academic, a scientist, a politician, renowned as the bloke who blitzed everyone in the TV game show ‘Pick a Box’ in the sixties. My admiration of this intelligent man plummeted when he admitted on air that he had hoaxed a UFO sighting many years ago as a harmless ‘prank’. When pushed for more details he explained that he reported seeing a ‘flying train’ go past him in the air at high speed.

Apparently he had wanted to find out if anyone would believe him.

The problem with this is that because of his fame as an incredibly clever person many people would accept his report without question. Just because someone has a high IQ it’s no guarantee that they are not playing the fool, or as in this case, outright lying.

Then we have the sceptics. Where does one begin with that subject?

The problem I see with them is that they are just as bad as the “believers” in that they passionately and defensively resist anything that goes above or beyond their cherished belief that “there’s nothing in it” ( the UFO subject, or whatever subject they want to discredit).

I have recently come to the conclusion that the sceptics are in fact incredibly and willingly gullible because they accept without question whatever is the ‘status quo’, the accepted scientific view of the day.

The editor of Nexus Magazine, Duncan Roads, puts it this way, that UFO researchers are the real sceptics because they are sceptical about all of the excuses and explanations that the authorities and debunkers produce to explain away UFO cases. He has enjoyed upsetting quite a few sceptics with this viewpoint.

Budd Hopkins made the point of going one step further by saying that sceptics belonged to the class of people “who choose to practise the art of Debunkery”.

The last two editions of the UFOlogist published an article by Malcolm Nicholson titled “What really Crashed at Roswell …Parts 1 and 2”. It’s a brilliant article, but it is flawed.

It’s easy to see where he’s coming from, but unfortunately he leaps to conclusions that have no basis in fact.

The first page of his article deals with how the Roswell story has changed and been apparently altered over time, with no appreciation that we are talking about a case that happened 60 years ago! Wouldn’t any reasonable person expect that such an old case would be characterised by fragmented memories and apparent contradictions? I think it’s not only understood but also expected that given the age of the case, and the nature of it, with the fear tactics applied by the military authorities at the time , and people fearing retribution if they speak out etc, that this story will have huge gaps in it.

This does not mean that ‘nothing happened’. The “official” air force explanations make no sense, and never did from the 9 July 1947 onwards.

Nicholson then claims that it makes no sense that UFOs could travel interstellar distances in the blink of an eye and then go crashing all over the place. We send probes to Mars which often just completely disappear. Sure they are unmanned, but you can see what I’m getting at. If these interstellar travellers have arrived from another solar system there’s no telling what problems they might have not foreseen in their planning. Just because they might be able to hop over light years of space ( which is in reality made up of nothing but a vacuum) does not guarantee that they can get around our atmosphere trouble free. The military leaders and leading scientists in the late 1940s figured out that our powerful radar systems created huge problems for the visiting crafts from elsewhere.

If you do some research, you will find that most of the major newspapers in Australia on July 8^th 1947 reported a flotilla of “Saucers” travelling over our skies, and that hundreds of people reported watching them going over. Reports came from England, Europe, New Zealand and Scandanavia as well as all over the USA.

Nicholson would conclude that there was no UFO crash at Roswell or anywhere else , and that all of the reports of UFO sightings were false or misidentified weather balloons. The newspaper reports from worldwide sources contradict that notion.

Nicholson then points out a couple of dodgey witnesses who were found out to be untruthful with their reports. Gerald Anderson was a witness who was found out to have fabricated much of his story. This is so, but it is no proof that there is something wrong with the Roswell case other than the fact that people are involved, and that you do get a percentage of B.S. artists whenever people are involved.

Sadly , the entire testimony of the Roswell Mortician, Glen Dennis is now considered almost useless because he is now known to have fabricated false information pertaining to the identity of the nurse he claims to have known who was stationed at the Roswell base. He lied , and gave a few false names to researchers who were trying to verify his story. Nicholson concludes that there is “A much more likely explanation why there is no record of this nurse….is that she simply never existed”.

Sceptics love to do this, just completely dismiss the existence of someone who has a story they don’t want to know about.

Lawyers sometimes do this also, I remember a famous case in Australia’s history where a mother claimed her baby was killed by a Dingo. She claimed that the baby was wearing a “Matinee Jacket” at the time of her disappearance. Lawyers declared that the said ‘Matinee Jacket’ had never existed, and she went to jail for murder… They were later proven wrong when it was found, complete with bloodstains and tearing consistent with dingo fangs.

What I said earlier about people and their behaviour covers it all. Glen Dennis did knowingly fabricate names rather than tell researchers the nurses’ real name.

When he was a young man he had fallen in love with this nurse at the Roswell base, she subsequently vanished just days after she told him of her involvement in the autopsy of an alien body at the base.

He has probably never gotten over the shock of the story, it’s implications , or the loss of that friend of his in 1947. So he made up a false name to protect her and her relatives, who you can be sure he has kept in contact with over the years. From our point of view, he stuffed up badly. He should have simply explained that he was protecting her family members and refused to give the real name.

Sometimes people do stupid things, really stupid things, but it’s equally stupid or worse to conclude that the nurse never existed!

The reason there is no record of this particular nurse is obvious and simple, we can’t look her up because we don’t know her actual name.

The researchers have continued to locate more people who were involved in the entire incident, and more detail continues to emerge.

The biggest problem I see with the case is that the authorities at the time did such a thorough job of hiding the evidence and dismissing witnesses. They threatened people both civilian and military with dire consequences, and as a result the hard evidence so sought after by everyone wanting to ‘solve’ the case is never going to be available, so nothing will change.

The sceptics are very dismissive of the idea that there was a cover up regarding Roswell, even though it is as plain as day for all to see. This has nothing to do with any ‘conspiracy theory’. There is no theory involved here, just the authorities doing what they thought at the time to be absolutely necessary, and doing it very thoroughly. The public has always been kept out of the ‘loop’.

This really upsets the sceptics because they just hate being left out, and I think this is the reason they fight so tenaciously to discredit the entire subject, and continue to attack and discredit the witnesses.

Roswell will not go away, and neither will all the lies and mistakes that have been added by authors, researchers and the detractors.

Where there’s smoke, there is fire, and the Roswell smoke is not going away. There is some truth behind the lies and cover ups if you look into it.

I will continue to accept the testimonies of the people who were there, such a Walter Haut, and the two Jessie’s Marcel, both father and son, as well as the hundreds of others who have testified to their involvement in the case. This makes more sense to me than to declare that someone never existed, or that an event witnessed by dozens of trained military people didn’t happen.

To me it’s difficult to understand why seemingly intelligent people do such stupid things, for instance, some doctors actually smoke. Some sceptics write apparently intelligent articles, but they manage to conveniently ignore plain facts, like that a nurse existed in 1947 and spoke to Glen Dennis.

Sometimes, extremely unusual things happen, things that sound more like ‘science fiction’, like Roswell, or Aurora, or Kingman, or Spitzburgen, or Kecksburg, or the Hill case, or the Walton case, or the Valentich disappearence, or the Westall event, etc etc.

They all happened.

Cheers…