Bragalia - Famous at Last!!

The Mirror in the United Kingdom reported today on the Roswell slides fiasco, with the result that "slides" promoter Anthony Bragalia has now become the poster-boy for ufological incompetence in the mainstream media. An excerpt:

The UFO 'believer' community has been rocked by an admission that a photograph of an alien was actually the mummified remains of a dead child. An image taken from the so-called Roswell Slides was unveiled last week in front of a worldwide online audience at an event called Be Witness. Ahead of the big reveal, researchers said the picture was a "smoking gun" which proved aliens had crashlanded on Earth. But these claims are now in tatters after Tony Braglia, a "principal investigator" who analysed them, issued an astonishing public apology. He said the dead alien (pictured below) was actually a Native American child who lived in the abandoned ancient city of Mesa Verde.

For everyone he has threatened, insulted and harassed for the past three years (yours truly included), karmic Christmas has arrived!

Mr. Bragalia can always look at the bright side, I suppose - at least now he's referred to as a "world-famous researcher." Alas, it's fame for all the wrong reasons... and in a final well-deserved indignity, they didn't even spell his name right.

Paul Kimball

Roswell in Context

One of the most oft-repeated claims of the proponents of the Roswell Incident as a crash of an alien spacecraft is that highly trained personnel at the 509th Bombardment Group stationed in Roswell, such as Jesse Marcel, could not have possibly mistaken a balloon, even if it was part of a top secret project like Mogul, for a "flying saucer," by which the Roswell proponents mean "alien spacecraft." In doing so, the Roswell proponents have committed two of the most grievous mistakes that anyone can make when conducting historical research - they have projected their own interpretation on to events, and they have ignored the context surrounding those events.

I have written about that context before, as have others. The Kenneth Arnold sighting, which received major media coverage, was still fresh in everyone's minds. While memes did not spread quite as quickly in the late 1940s through old school media as they do today in the Internet age, they could still move pretty fast, and they could sweep up a populace in hysteria (and other emotional responses), responses which could quickly take root. Flying Saucers were everywhere in the media in late June and early July 1947, to the point that we should not be surprised if someone - even an intelligence officer like Jesse Marcel, or an information officer like Walter Haut, both of whom would have been inundated with the same media sensation reports as everyone else - made a mistake in the heat of the moment when confronted with something that was a bit anomalous to them, and identified it as one of the "flying discs / saucers" that they had been hearing so much about.

It wasn't just the United States, either. Here is a front-page piece from the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia from 8 July, 1947, talking about flying saucers, both in Australia and also Canada.

Jesse Marcel and Walter Haut were not superhuman beings with perfect powers of observation, and an immunity to the broader social dialogue that was taking place at the time. Neither was anyone else stationed at Roswell. Any reasonable person can see this - certainly any historian of repute can recognize what was at work, not just in Roswell but world-wide. Sightings begat reports which begat other sightings which begat more reports which... well, you get how it works. This isn't to say that some of the sightings may not have been real; but the vast majority, and perhaps even all of them, were the result of a frenzy of interest whipped up during that time period by media reports. As it turns out, people who knew what they were talking about at the time recognized what was going on, as can be seen from the following article in The Daily Illini in Illinois a few days after the Roswell incident was reported.

The Roswell incident fits that pattern to a "t", which is why it was so quickly forgotten. It was only decades later, when memories had gotten shorter and the tales had gotten taller, that the story resurfaced and was mythologized by a group of UFO proponents who ignored the context of the original story, and who placed an interpretation on events coloured by their own belief systems.

Paul Kimball

Kevin Randle

Kevin Randle and I have been sniping at each other since we fell out in the fall of 2013. I do it directly, and he tends to do it by allowing people like Anthony Bragalia to publish columns at Randle's blog bashing me. Two sides of the same coin.

Well, it ends here, at least for my part. I did what I did, and I said what I said. Would I change it now if I could? Probably, but only because none of this paranormal stuff is really important to me to the point where I want to get enmeshed in feuds. I have a happy life that has nothing to do with all of these interpersonal squabbles about and within a subject that only the tiniest fraction of the population care about.

Besides, my original criticism of Randle was for mistakes he was making and half-truths that he was telling. I believe I was right, and Randle disputes that... but here's the thing - I've done the exact same things. I've made plenty of mistakes (including an entire feature film that was an unmitigated disaster), and I've also been less than completely honest at times. Who hasn't? So time to bury the hatchet, at least from my end, in my own way - I'll give Kevin the last word, traveling back in time to an interview I did with him in 2005 wherein I asked him about the media, which is at least in part what I do for a living. Here is his answer.

Randle isn't the anti-Christ, and neither am I. We're no more or less than two flawed human beings, making our way through this life as best we can... just like everyone else.

Paul Kimball

Dr. John Mack - Alien Reality and Humanity

From my video vault - John Mack speaking at the 2001 MUFON Symposium press conference about the media and UFOs, and anthropocentric humanism and how an alien reality would change the way we view ourselves, and the society that we have created. Stan Friedman makes a cameo appearance at the end. 

 Paul Kimball

Stanton Friedman on his interactions with the media

In this never-before-seen outtake from a 2001 interview with Stan Friedman (for my 2002 film Stanton T. Friedman is Real), he discusses his interaction with the media over the course of his career, and why it's had both its positive aspects and its negative aspects.

Paul Kimball

The Time Tunnel, Vol. I

A new feature - a look back at bits of UFO-related history, in a series I'm calling The Time Tunnel, after one of my favourite sci-fi shows when I was a kid.

In this first instalment, the National Enquirer from 1968 - a time when enquiring minds really did want to know!

Sadly, the great Bobby Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan just over two months after this issue hit the newsstands.

Paul Kimball

Book of Thoth podcast interview

	Jeremy Vaeni - Book Of Thoth Ep. 2- Paul Kimball
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

An interview I did a couple of years ago for the Book of Thoth podcast.

Paul Kimball

Department 47 reviews Ghost Cases

A review of Ghost Cases, from an advance screener I sent to Joe Harvat at Department 47.

Paul was good enough to forward me an advance copy of Episode Two of Ghost Cases. I had the chance to watch it Friday night and I have to tell you I really enjoyed it.

Ghost Cases takes a little different approach from what you might be used to on Ghost Hunters. In this particular episode, Paul and Holly visited a rural farm house in which seemingly paranormal activity was making life pretty uncomfortable for its living occupants. I felt Paul and Holly took the time to tell you a little more about what these people were experiencing and how it affected their lives. Like in most UFO cases, the only concrete thing we usually have is the witnesses, and understanding them may give us our best clue to understanding the phenomenon. You also get to know a bit more about the hunters too. You understand that Paul and Holly are just normal people with normal fears and foibles who just happened to be engaged in an unusual activity.

Ghost Cases is not so technology-centric as Ghost Hunters. For example, they are assisted by a psychic in this case - something I believe that Ghost Hunters used to do but abandoned for a more science-based approach. I would certainly like to see a follow-up to the case to see whether the psychic's efforts had any real or lasting effect on the manifestations there.

As a former TV guy, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the production values and videography were quite good - at some points rather artistic. They kept a few miscues in it (people sometimes at a momentary loss for words and such). I liked that. It gave it more of a sense of reality - in stressful situations, sometimes you do struggle for words.

I hope they pick up the show down here. I think it would be a thoughtful counter-point to some of the overwrought shows we get in the States.

Thanks Joe - glad you like it!

Paul Kimball

David Cherniack's UFOs: The Secret History

I caught the world premiere of Canadian documentary filmmaker David Cherniack's new film UFOs: The Secret History, on The History Channel here in Canada tonight. The film is must-see viewing for anyone interested in UFOs, but at the same time its accessible to the general public whose only real exposure to the UFO phenomenon has been The X-Files. A compelling, and at times lyrical, examination of the history of the UFO phenomenon and our relationship to it as a species, UFOs: The Secret History is an example of a documentary that manages to convey information in a compelling and entertaining manner, and which raises more questions than it answers. In short, it is superior filmmaking.

The film is not without flaws. Dr. Jacques Vallee and others like him are dismissed in a minute or so - Jerry Clark refers to Vallee's approach to the UFO phenomenon as "debunking with a more pretentious name", and Cherniack in his narration largely dismisses it as a result of the fascination with Eastern mysticism that arose in the counter-culture of the late 1960s. Cherniack makes a few factual errors as well - he refers to Dr. Edward Condon, for example, for example, as an astronomer, when in fact Condon was a physicist and a pioneer in quantum mechanics. I also dispute Cherniack's contention that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the first great UFO film, and a turning point where UFOs left the scientific realm and became firmly ensconced in pop culture, a conclusion that ignores a long and rich history of UFOs as part of pop culture, from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds to The Day the Earth Stood Still to Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are relatively small things, however, when compared with what the film gets right. It details the history of the UFO phenomenon from the late 1940s to the present day in just an hour, and manages to hit most of the high and low points along the way, from the founding of NICAP and the work of Dr. Jim McDonald on the one hand to the "swamp gas" and alien autopsy fiascos on the other. Cherniack shows how the United States Air Force and other government agencies, notably the CIA, have not been completely forthcoming about the UFO phenomenon, but he does so without the kind of rampant conspiracy theorizing that seriously marred Richard Dolan's otherwise useful book UFOs and the National Security State. Indeed, in the second half of the film, Cherniack shows how the descent of ufology into the fringe world of crashed flying saucer stories, conspiracy theorism, and the abduction phenomenon, has obscured the reality of the UFO phenomenon in the past thirty years, with the result that there is no real hope for a serious scientific inquiry into UFOs, and the UFO story gets ignored by the mainstream media now as being inherently silly.

Cherniack spends very little time on Roswell, for example (Stan Friedman gets less screen time here than he did in the ABC News documentary Seeing is Believing a couple of years ago), because at best it is inconclusive, and at worst it has proven to be a huge distraction from the search for the truth. Cherniack devotes more time to showing how Roswell led inevitably to the fraudulent MJ-12 documents than he does to the case itself, and we get to see rare clips from the legendary UFO Cover-Up Live program that featured Jaime Shandera and Bill Moore, as well as "Falcon", and stories that the aliens like Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. That is where crashed saucer tales and things like MJ-12 have led ufology, and Cherniack wonders whether the UFO phenomenon has been deliberately manipulated to cover up what was really going on, whether extraterrestrial visitation or top secret US government testing programs.

But Cherniack is no debunker - he shows the absurdity of the US Air Force's Project Mogul explanation, for example. In one of the better segments, he also demonstrates what a pivotal moment the Colorado Project was for the serious study of the UFO phenomenon, and how it was a complete and utter scientific fraud foisted on the general public by the US Air Force and Edward Condon - much to the chagrin of many of the people who actually investigated the cases for Condon, including Dr. William Hartmann, who found the 1950 Trent photos case compelling (Hartmann appears briefly in the film).

At its core, however, UFOs: The Secret History is as much about us as it is about the UFO phenomenon. Whether UFOs are real or not isn't really the issue, he seems to be saying. It's our need to mythologize the phenomenon that's truly fascinating, and he delves into that aspect of the story with an expert hand, as he notes, for example, that whether abductions are real or not, "they were touching upon something deeply mythic". But Cherniack is not just about this angle either - like me, he is clearly convinced that there is an objective reality to the UFO phenomenon. Although he isn't quite sure what UFOs are, the hundreds of excellent cases that remain unexplained, and which feature multiple witness accounts and hard data like radar hits and other physical evidence, are impossible to ignore.

Like a great figure skater or gymnast, Cherniack completes his "routine" with a perfect ending. The version of contact that we have imagined, he says, is a myth that we have created to shield us from a reality that we have little hope of understanding, given that we may well be dealing with civilizations or intelligences millions or even billions of years more advanced than we are. As long as we are focused on crashed flying saucers, and conspiracies, and other fringe elements with no real evidence, we are truly missing what could be a very important story.

Cherniack's film demonstrates how we have held ourselves back in terms of our understanding of the UFO phenomenon through our own self-imposed perceptual limitations, and the "noise" we have ourselves created. At the same time, however, Cherniack shows us that there is still a "signal" out there worth looking for, if only we have the courage and the intellectual open-mindeness to try.

UFOs: The Secret History, is a profoundly rich and thought-provoking film, well worth repeated viewings. Here's hoping that it gets the attention that it deserves, and that people embrace a nuanced film that refuses to fall into either fundamentalist debunkery or died-in-the-wool believerism.

Paul Kimball