The 1977 Tehran UFO Sighting

An article from the front page of the Kingsport Post - News on 19 May, 1977 (Vol. 15, No. 20) in Kingsport, Tennessee, detailing the Tehran UFO sighting of 19 September, 1976, which was featured in my film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings.

Paul Kimball

Rating my UFO Documentaries

All of my UFO-related documentaries are now freely available on-line through various distributors (or you can pay to download them or buy DVDs if you want). An old friend and I were having a beer the other night and asked me how I would rate my own films. I thought about it, and originally posted at my Facebook page my ratings for all of my old docs, but I've winnowed them down to just the UFO ones here (as with allmusic.com's record ratings, out of 5 stars).

I still consider the Friedman film to be the best documentary I ever made on any subject, and I think Fields of Fear isn't bad, either (although it suffered from having a smaller budget and therefore less production value). Others may rate them higher, or they may rate them lower, but I've tried to be as objective as I can be, and this is where they fall for me.

Paul Kimball

Richard Hall - The University of Colorado Project, aka The Condon Committee

In this outtake from Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings, the late Richard Hall discusses the University of Colorado Project on UFOs, aka the Condon Committee. Hall was a good friend of mine, and a diligent and thoughtful researcher with a wide range of interests, although he was best known for his work on UFOs, particularly with NICAP.

Paul Kimball

Reflections on Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings

An old friend, with only a passing interest in UFOs (he's much more intrigued by ghosts), asked me the other day what I thought about the 10 cases featured in my 2007 film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings -  my own personal opinions of each case, as opposed to the narrative of the film, which was dictated by the choices made by the panel of ufologists I enlisted to determined the top cases (with one exception, noted below), including Kevin Randle, the late Karl Pflock, the late Richard Hall, the late Mac Tonnies, Stanton Friedman, Brad Sparks, Bruce Maccabee, and Nick Pope, among others.

I thought about it, and then broke it down for him as follows:

10. Nuremberg, 1561 - A sighting that I added (bumping out the case the panel had voted in as #10) to demonstrate the point that UFO sightings predated the modern era. It happened so long ago that it would be impossible now to determine the accuracy of the report, or whether it was something anomalous, but it's worth noting that reports like it were far from unique. I think it can be chalked up to superstition, literary licence, and a misreading of a natural event.

9. Skylab III, 1973 - I have no doubt that it was a combination of space debris and camera artifacts.

8. Yukon, 1996 - This case relies solely on eyewitness testimony, and while there are multiple independent witnesses at different locations, there also seems to be a reasonable explanation that I accept.

7. Malmstrom AFB, 1967 - This case has generated more publicity than any of the others within ufology, if not the general public (Rendlesham is much better known there), largely because of the feud between "UFOs at Missile Bases" proponent Robert Hastings and James Carlson, the son of one of the officers allegedly involved in it all. I think they deserve each other, because they are both bonkers in my book. Focusing on the case instead of the feud, I don't buy it. I like Bob Salas (the primary witness) as a person, and think he is an honest man, but I also think that while he's made a genuine effort to remember things as they happened, he's got it wrong. When I interviewed him in 2006, he told me that he underwent hypnosis to recover his memories of the incident, which always rings alarm bells with me. There are no other witnesses or documents which corroborate his story - and there should be. Where are any of the soldiers who were topside who reportedly saw the UFO? I admire Bob for his advocacy of a nuclear free world, but I can't buy Malmstrom as anything other than a missile failure due to prosaic reasons, and some tall tales that he has absorbed as a truthful narrative.

6. Shag Harbour, 1967 - This case has multiple independent witnesses, all of them of impeccable character, as well as an official government investigation that called it a UFO. There are other stories that go much further, of underwater objects monitored for days by the US and Canadian navies until they flew off, but those rest on anonymous sources, and there is no documentation (although the stories were told to my friends Don Ledger and Chris Styles, whom I trust to have related them accurately - still, the stories and the witnesses can't be verified by others). What that leaves us with, I think, is a genuine mystery, but one that may or may not be as otherworldly as ET proponents would claim. It remains unsolved in my books, and very interesting.

5. Santa Barbara Channel, 1953 - The famous sighting by Kelly Johnson and his wife at their home in Agoura, CA, at the same time as a crew of top Lockheed pilots and flight engineers saw the "object" whilst flying over Santa Barbara Channel. They all wrote reports that still exist, so we can read in their own words about what they saw. There are some inconsistencies, but a general common narrative is possible to glean from it all. My friend Lance Moody has suggested that they mistook lenticular clouds for a structured craft, which I just don't buy (and neither did Johnson et al, who considered that possibility at the time of the sighting and ruled it out), but that doesn't mean I think that it was space aliens. The quality of the witnesses mark this one out as a good case, and I think it's still unexplained.

4. McMinnville, 1950 - I have always been convinced that it was a hoax. Not much more that I can say.

3. Rendlesham, 1980 - Another controversial case. There's no question that multiple witnesses saw something on two nights in late December, 1980. That's something everyone can agree on... and it's about the only thing! Skeptics like Ian Ridpath say that the US military men under Charles Halt misidentified a local lighthouse, and others suggest that the military police officers on the first night misidentified local police cars. But I'm not sure either of those jibe with the reports of the witnesses, particularly Halt, who was the deputy base commander and recorded the second incident on a tape recorder. The far out claims that have lately surfaced from Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, two key witnesses from the first incident, have further muddied the waters. Skeptics think that it just shows they're liars trying to cash in on the New Age element within ufology; believers look at their claims of telepathic communication and say that it absolutely fits with coming into contact with some advanced intelligence from another planet. This case is often called Britain's Roswell, and I think that's accurate, but not for the reason most people use the term. Like Roswell, I think it's a Rorschach test on what people think about the ETH. Either way, you'll see what you want to see. Sitting in the middle as an agnostic, I see a case that has already become so encrusted by mythologizing from both sides that it will never be solved. My gut tells me that the witnesses might have seen something weird, but they might also have been mistaken - and that's as far as I would ever go.

2. Tehran, 1976 - Still stands the test of time as an unsolved case. Genuinely mysterious.

1. RB47, 1957 - Since my film came out this long-overlooked case has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, with skeptics trying on a number of occasions to offer a plausible explanation (which was one of these point of the film - to encourage people to examine these cases and try to come up with answers). Tim Printy tried the hardest in his SunLite publication, but it didn't ring true to me any more than the original USAF answer that it was all a misidentified commercial flight, hundreds of miles away. I showed Printy's explanation, and others, to surviving RB47 crew members I know, including Bruce Bailey who appears in the film and had his own encounter with a UFO a couple of years later, and they all thought it just didn't wash. I still consider this a truly mysterious case that remains unsolved, despite the best efforts of honest skeptics. 

So there it is. The only cases in the film that I find genuinely interesting and still unsolved are #6, #5, #2, and #1. Rendlesham is just too Roswellized for me to either credit or dismiss. The others I consider either solved, or too tenuous to merit any further consideration.

Paul Kimball

Unified Field Radio appearance

My recent appearance on the Unified Field Radio program with Justin Brown is now available - you can listen in to the episode here. We chatted about Beyond Best Evidence, Best Evidence, ghosts, UFOs, Stan Friedman and the ETH, Mac Tonnies and the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, and all sorts of other stuff.

The program airs on 88.1 FM (CKDU) in Halifax, Nova Scotia - well worth checking out.

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence & The Ability To Think For Ourselves

There is now less than a month left in the fundraising campaign for Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma, and the response has been very disappointing, I'm afraid. I remain hopeful that this home stretch will see a jump that moves us further towards our goal, if perhaps not all the way there, but despite myriad radio appearances to talk about the project (and over 8,000 visitors to this site since the campaign started), and nice write-ups from folks like Greg Taylor at The Daily Grail and Greg Bishop at UFO Mystic, the support hasn't happened (note: many thanks to the hardy "band of brothers" who have contributed so far).

Crowd fundraising developed as a way for filmmakers (and other artists) to maintain an independent voice in a world where media consolidation has diminished the ability to make those voices heard. As I've said before, a film like Beyond Best Evidence, with a thoughtful and intelligent discussion about the UFO phenomenon and all of its possible facets / explanations, simply isn't going to get made in the mainstream media system these days (note: if someone can do a similar film in the same way, I'll happily admit I was wrong). Networks don't try to enlighten these days - they are solely concerned with selling advertising, and sadly, in our consumerist society run amok, that imperative has trumped any other considerations when it comes to documentary filmmaking in particular, especially where it concerns a subject like the UFO phenomenon, which has been tabloidized and commercialized virtually to the point of no return. As a result, we get "reality TV" and what the networks call "factual programming", which is about as close to Orwellian "doublespeak" as you can get.

But maybe that's the world we live in these days. Maybe people are happy to sit back, not get involved, and just digest the grey glop that the multimedia conglomerates feed them. Maybe they don't want to be challenged. Maybe they don't want to think, or confront uncomfortable subjects. Maybe they've forgotten how.

In the New York Times yesterday there was a great opinion column by Charles Blow. In "A Summer to Simmer" Blow wrote:

At a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee about oil subsidies, John Watson, C.E.O. of Chevron — which reported last month that first-quarter net income rose 36 percent from the same period last year to $6.21 billion — said that “I don’t think American people want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity.” The problem is, Mr. Money Bags, that you and other corporate interests are the only ones sharing in the prosperity. For Americans on the lower end of the income spectrum, it’s all sacrifice. 

The people who run these massive corporations - like the health insurance  companies that want to raise health insurance premiums while reporting record profits for a third straight year, even as people forgo critical care - don't want an informed populace. They want slaves to the system.

But what does this have to do with the UFO phenomenon?

On the surface, nothing. But underneath, where free thought exists even in the worst of times, it has everything to do with the UFO phenomenon, because UFOs are something that can't be controlled by those giant monopolistic corporations, and the politicians who have sold their souls to those corporations. UFOS represent something subversive - possibilities that they would prefer we not think about, because if we do, then just maybe we'll start to take a different view of our world, and our lives. In short, we'll start to think for ourselves again.  

Whatever UFOs might be (including the possibility that they can all be explained in prosaic terms), just considering them in a serious and thoughtful way is dangerous to the existing order... and we live in a world where we need a lot more dangerous thinking, because we've been placed in an existential trap, and it's time we tried to find a way out.

Is Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma going to get us out of that trap? Of course not.  No film can do that, regardless of the subject matter. But it will be a small step in the right direction of reclaiming our ability to imagine a world other than the one that we've been told is the right one, and that's what I've always tried to do as a filmmaker. I don't try to encourage people to agree with me, or anyone else; rather, I encourage them to think for themselves about the world in which we live, even when their conclusions might be different than my own.


Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings from Paul Kimball on Vimeo.

I wrote at the beginning that I'm very disappointed by the response this campaign has received. The reason isn't because it will take profit away from my company (all profits from the sale of iflm will go to charity), or because I particularly want to spend months traveling and conducting interviews and then editing the film (not exactly the most profitable use of my time and talents), but because I think the film would be important, on a number of levels not just related to the specific question of "what are UFOs?"

Those are the kinds of films that I think should be made. The disappointment stems from the fact that not very many people seem to agree with me...yet. I'm asking for your help over the remaining 27 days to change that, so that we can move forward together,  to raise a little hell.



Words of wisdom from some fellow Canadians!

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence on the X-Zone

Podcast Powered By Podbean

This is an excerpt from my appearance on the X-Zone radio show with host Rob McConnell on Friday, May 6, 2011, wherein I discuss the documentary for which we're currently running a fundraising campaign, Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma. The conversation goes on from there to cover UFOs in general, and how they might relate to art in particular.

Paul Kimball

Paranormal Cafe appearance

My recent appearance on the Paranormal Cafe radio show, with host Rob Simcox.

Paul Kimball

Paul Kimball on UFO Encounters with Jim Harold

UFO Encounters, hosted by Jim Harold, is a subscriber-based podcast that I appeared on last week, but Jim has been kind enough to send me the link to the MP3 of the episode for posting. It was a good chat, as we discussed Best Evidence, Beyond Best Evidence, Roswell, the RB47 case, extraterrestrial life, and other subjects. Check out all of Jim's shows at his Paranormal Podcast Network.

Listen to the episode here.

Paul Kimball

Mac Tonnies in Beyond Best Evidence

In many ways, Mac Tonnies was the inspiration for Beyond Best Evidence. One of the things that we used to discuss frequently was the prospect of a sequel to Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings, and how it would be structured. My original idea for a sequel was to put together another top 10 list, with the best cases that didn't make the first one, including some of the more "high strangeness" cases. This would have taken it into different territory, but Mac was of the opinion that it didn't go far enough - that it had to leave the cases behind, and talk more about the theories and possible explanations.

While I agreed in principle, I explained to him that it would be a tougher sell to get that kind of film made by a television network, but he didn't relent - he said that I should make the right film, rather han the film that fit what some network might want "right now". I agreed, and put the project on the back-burner, always with the intent that if the time and circumstances were right, I would move forward with it as an independent documentary, with Mac involved from the beginning. He was going to be the narrator, bridging from his appearance at the end of Best Evidence, into the more theoretical realm that he preferred. It was one of the many projects we were working on prior to his tragic death in October, 2009.

Fortunately, Mac will still be an integral part of the film, and not just in the spirit behind it. I'll be digging into the archives of conversations I had with Mac about the UFO phenomenon over the years, and using them as narrative framing segments within the film. Mac was one of the few truly original and open-minded thinkers when it comes to the UFO phenomenon, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to place those views in front of the widest possible audience one more time.

Paul Kimball

The UFO Dialectic

The whole idea behind Beyond Best Evidence is to examine the primary hypotheses for the UFO phenomenon (ETH, PSH, EDH, time travel, perhaps a couple others), and see which ones might work.

So, here's your chance. Anyone reading this probably has a preferred hypothesis. It's time for you to test it against a particular case, one that is well documented and still unexplained.

Take the 1957 RB47 case, for example.

Here are some resources to get started:

1. The synopsis of the case as contained in Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings

2. The case report by Dr. James McDonald, from pp. 4 to 9 in his 1971 paper "Science in Default"

3. 2008 update by researcher Brad Sparks

4. The Condon Report case study by Dr. Roy Craig

Feel free to use other resources as you see fit.

Post your thoughts here in the "comments", or on your own blog or website (although a link in the comments here would be great, so everyone can follow along). But I  encourage everyone not to simply say: "this is what it is". Rather, look at all of the possibilities, and measure them against each other.

In short, leave the "belief / disbelief" debate behind, and engage in a dialectical conversation, with yourself, and with each other. Challenge yourselves to look for the truth, even if at the end of the day that truth is a simple "I'm not sure" or "I don't know". The point is to embrace the possibilities.

And most of all, have fun with it!

Allons-y!

Paul Kimball

Kevin Smith Show - tonight!

Just a reminder - I'm on the Kevin Smith Show tonight, 10 pm to Midnight EST.

Paul Kimball

Kevin Smith Show - April 13th

A programming note - I'll be on The Kevin Smith Show tomorrow night, April 13th, from 10 pm to Midnight EST, to discuss Best Evidence, Top 10 UFO Sightings, Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma, Ghost Cases... and anything else that pops up. Feel free to call in!

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence - IndieGoGo campaign video

The fundraising campaign video for Beyond Best Evidence. The IndieGoGo campaign goes live, this Saturday.

Paul Kimball

Beyond Best Evidence

UPDATE, 30 MARCH 2011

The IndieGoGo campaign will go Live this Saturday, April 2.

Sometime next week, Redstar Films will be launching the IndieGoGo community fundraising campaign for the sequel to Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings. I'll post the notice and links here, and I hope everyone who has enjoyed either Best Evidence or my work elsewhere will join the "team" and support this new venture, that is being co-produced by myself and Tim Binnall.

For the moment, here is the write-up that will appear at IndieGoGo.

Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma

In 2007, we made Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO sightings, a 48 minute documentary for television in Canada and New Zealand that provided a look at 10 of the “best evidence” UFO cases in history, as chosen by some of the world’s leading UFO researchers, including Stanton Friedman, Kevin Randle, Brad Sparks, Don Ledger, Nick Pope, Nick Redfern, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Chris Styles, Chris Rutkowski, Joel Carpenter, the late Richard Hall, the late Mac Tonnies, the late Karl Pflock, and many others. Each researcher had submitted their top ten list, which were then averaged together to come up with the top 10 cases.

This was just the tip of the iceberg, however – there were over 50 other top cases that received votes. Taking all of these cases together, one is left with an irrefutable case for the objective reality of the UFO phenomenon, and that was the purpose of Best Evidence – not to provide answers, but to show, once and for all and beyond any reasonable doubt, that something still unexplained has been happening in the skies above us for a very long time.

Best Evidence, however, was just the first part of a two part series. It was meant to establish the foundation from which one could ask the most important question. As my old friend, the late Mac Tonnies, stated at the end of Best Evidence: "what does it all mean?"

Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma is a one hour documentary that will take the cases shown in Best Evidence, as well as a couple of new ones that highlight what appear to be some of the more "high strangeness" aspects of the phenomenon, and explore with the three key possible explanations with world's leading experts on the subject, as follows:

1. Extraterrestrial Hypothesis - This explanation maintains that UFO sightings represent proof of visitation to Earth by advanced extraterrestrials from another world, most likely within what proponents term of "local galactic neighbourhood."

2. Interdimensional Hypothesis - This explanation maintains that UFO sightings involve visitations from other "realities" or "dimensions" that co-exist alongside our own. It also holds that UFOs are a modern manifestation of a phenomenon that has occurred throughout recorded human history, which in prior ages were ascribed to mythological or supernatural forces and creatures.

3. Psychosocial hypothesis - This explanation maintains that UFO Sightings can be explained by psychological or social means, examples of which include wishful thinking, hallucinations, hoaxes, and misidentification of prosaic objects, such as satellites, aircraft, or natural phenomena.

What We Need &What You Get

Beyond Best Evidence is a one hour long documentary that is being made independent of the mainstream broadcast system, so that we'll have the editorial freedom to explore any and possibilities about the UFO phenomenon without having to conform to network requirements to create "reality-based TV", which never has anything to do with actual reality.

The film is being financed using a combination of funding sources - community fundraising, Redstar Film's own production and post-production resources, federal and provincial film tax credits here in Canada, and private investment. Every dollar raised will be going directly into the production of the film.

Once the film is completed, it will be submitted to film festivals around the world, and will be immediately available on DVD and through various on-line distribution outlets. Television sales will follow.

There are two ways to become involved in the making of Beyond Best Evidence.

The first way is to join the team by making a donation, at one of the levels we've created, each of which includes various perks that we're making available. The perks start with discounts on the purchase of the DVD, and go from there to include all sorts of other cool stuff.

The second way to join the team is to invest in the film. For more information on investing, contact Paul Kimball directly at: paulkimball@redstarfilmtv.com.  

Other Ways You Can Help

If you can't donate to the financing of Beyond Best Evidence but believe the project is important, we would really appreciate it if you could spread the word to your friends through Twitter, Facebook, message forums you may participate in, and any other social media that you might use and think appropriate.

The more people to share Beyond Best Evidence: The UFO Enigma with the better. We've taken the first step in this journey of discovery about the UFO phenomenon, and what it might mean for all of us, with Best Evidence, and now we're eager to build upon that foundation with an entire community of supporters who share our vision, and our commitment to making a truly independent and thought-provoking documentary about what the UFO phenomenon might actually represent.

On-line community-based fundraising is all the rage these days in my industry. It will be interesting to see if it works for a film about the UFO phenomenon.

Paul Kimball

Mind Cemetery radio appearance - 28 March, 2011

A programming note: I'll be appearing on the Mind Cemetery radio program next Monday, March 28th, from 11 pm to 1 am EST, to chat about UFOs in general, Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings in particular, ghosts and Ghost Cases... and whatever else pops up, as usual!

Paul Kimball

Programming Note: Future Theater on the 19th

A programming note - I'll be appearing on Future Theater with Bill and Nancy Birnes this Saturday, the 19th of March, from 6:30 to 8:00 pm EST (Bill and Nancy do a half an hour of chat beforehand, starting at 6:00 pm).

I actually met Bill once, briefly in 2008, when I was flown out to Los Angeles to be interviewed for UFO Hunters, and we both wound up in Topanga Canyon - he was part of a recreation of the Rex Heflin photos, and I was interviewed about Dr. James McDonald and the RB47 case. We didn't really chat - time was short, and it was a busy afternoon (and a really hot day, too), as is any film or television shoot. It will be nice to finally have an opportunity to talk to him at much greater length.

Update:

The show is now available to listen to or download at the Future Theatre site.

The show description from Bill & Nancy:

A free-range conversation about ufology, documentation, and some of the classic cases that keep researchers like filmmaker Paul Kimball interested in what this mystery is all about. It's more than the sum of its strongest cases, such as the one involving an RB-47 reconnaissance plane like the one, above. I know you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we enjoyed it!

It was great fun. Always nice to talk about the RB47 case. We went into some depth about the 1953 Santa Barbara Channel case too, and I corrected some misconceptions about its portrayal in the film that have been floating around out in the Internet ether, because facts matter. I also managed to slip in some chat about science fiction and Mac Tonnies as well, which was nice.

Paul Kimball

Best Evidence on the X-Zone

A programming note: I'll be on the X-Zone Radio show this evening with host Rob McConnell talking about Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings.

Midnight AST / 11 pm EST.

Paul Kimball

Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings

Here is the original film, complete in one place.



Keep an eye out for the enhanced and revised DVD version, coming later this year!

Paul Kimball

Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings - complete

As I have now posted all of Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings on YouTube, I figured I might as well post them all here in order, from beginning to end.

An enhanced and revised version is in the works, and will be available in Brazil in Portuguese soon, and then in English from Redstar Films, but here is the original, from 2007, originally broadcast in Canada, and then in New Zealand.

Paul Kimball