2017 East Coast Paraconference - August 11, 12, 13

If you're looking for a good time with some fascinating speakers talking about the paranormal and some down-home Maritime hospitality, then I hope you'll join me, Greg Bishop, Micah Hanks, Ryan Sprague, Chris Styles, and all the other great speakers next weekend at the 3rd annual East Coast Paraconference in historic Liverpool, Nova Scotia. The irrepressible Tim Binnall will also be popping by for the third year in a row, so it's kind of like a "New Cabal" gathering..

My good friend Greg returns for the second straight year, and will be speaking, in the loosest of ways, about Roswell's 70th anniversary, and what it means for the study of UFOs (which he tells me will get into his intriguing co-creation hypothesis). Ryan is best known for his interest in and work on the subject of UFOs, and he will no doubt work the subject into his talk "Beyond the Bermuda Triangle: Visiting Other Mysterious Triangles Around the Globe." Micah will be wading into some truly thought-provoking ideas with his presentation on "Magic, Mysticism, and the Molecule." Chris will, of course, be offering an extensive presentation on the Shag Harbour UFO incident, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this October.

Historic Liverpool, Nova Scotia, home of privateers, rum-runners, and plenty of ghosts!

Other speakers will be tackling subjects such as the Oak Island mystery, consciousness and remote viewing, and psychic mediums. The local Crossed Over Paranormal Society, who conduct investigations along Nova Scotia's very haunted South Shore, will also be there, presenting some of the things they have discovered and experienced over the years. They will also be running the evening ghost walks and paranormal investigations, which are always great fun.

I'll be kicking things off with the keynote presentation on Friday evening, where I'll be talking about my experiences over the past few months shooting the first season of our television series Haunted. I'll also be giving folks an exclusive preview of some of the most interesting evidence we collected, as well as some of our scariest moments when we were filming.

You can find out more about this year's festivities here. Hope to see you there!

Paul Kimball

The Shag Harbour UFO case - What the people involved thought it was

Most people within ufology have seen the headline in the Halifax Chronicle Herald from Saturday, 7 October 1967, which read: "Could Be Something Concrete in Shag Harbour UFO - RCAF," largely because it is the more sensational one. But here is the follow-up reportage a few days later - still rife with speculation and uncertainty (understandable all things considered), but also showing that an ET spacecraft was the furthest thing from anyone's mind. The explanation that most people credited was a secret American craft of some sort... which is what Laurie Wickens, the first person to see the UFO and report it, still thinks it was, all these years later - and I agree.

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

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

The Shag Harbour UFO Incident - Sui generis?

As I was putting together the segment on Shag Harbour for the Best Evidence film (yes, there's another case that made the cut), this statement by Don Ledger really made me think:

What’s different about the Shag Harbour incident, the UFO incident, is that the witnesses, the laypeople, claimed they saw an airplane crashing into the harbour. They thought it was an airplane. And it was the military who classified it as a UFO. Usually it’s the other way around, the laypeople call it in and say they saw a UFO, and the military will say, “well, it’s just a misinterpretation of a prosaic object in the sky. It could be an airplane, or a planet, or a star, or something like that.” So this was different – it was completely switched around from the usual concept.

Unlike most, if not all, other so-called crashed UFO cases, Shag Harbour has a multitude of credible witnesses, and an investigation by two governments (Canadian and American) that is officially documented in the public record, and freely available.

And, as Don said, it wasn't the witnesses who said it was a UFO - it was the military, after investigation ruled out (as the CAF memo above shows) the more prosaic explanations on offer.

If Shag isn't quite sui generis in the annals of UFO cases, it's pretty darn close.

Paul Kimball