$35.95 DVD
Check back here each week for more from UFO Hunter Bill Birnes!
January 29, 2009: UFO Storm
2008 can be considered the year of unprecedented UFO frenzy in Britain. It was the year that the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) opened their UFO files to the public. The press had dubbed them "Britain's X Files." The MoD files documented some of the most famous cases in Britain's UFO history, including the 1980 RAF Bentwaters case, Operation Mainbrace in 1952 and the 1956 dogfight between an alleged UFO and American pilot Milton Torrez over RAF Lakenheath.
A month after the release of the MoD files, another UFO frenzy occurred in the UK when reports of a police helicopter had allegedly encountered a UFO over the Bristol Channel. The police reported the UFO incident to the press although the incident had been denied officially by the MoD and recanted by the police who explained that the sighting was really a Chinese lantern launched at a wedding party. During that same time period, a man walking along a canal with his children, took a photo of what appeared to be a tornado funnel cloud. The photo appeared to have captured a strange UFO like object hovering outside of the funnel cloud. The UFO Hunters flew to the UK to investigate these incidents and find out more.
It was particularly gratifying to talk to former MoD official Nick Pope and ask him about opening the MoD UFO Files. Nick is considered to be one of Britain's men in black because of his links to the defense establishment in Britain. However, as we went through some of the great stories contained in the MoD files, it was clear that Nick was equally as perplexed as many of his colleagues in the MoD regarding UFOs. Should a worldwide secret government in charge of UFO secrets exist, as I suspect there is, then Nick Pope is certainly not part of it!
We also met with Pat Regan, the man who took the picture of the alleged UFO funnel cloud photo, and got his story. We also had an opportunity to speak with witnesses of the alleged police helicopter versus UFO encounter in Cardiff. A pilot who had claimed to have flown over that area had been warned off by air traffic controllers saying, "there was a UFO in the area," refused to speak to the UFO hunters citing professional reasons. Pilots are often reluctant to speak about possible UFO sightings for fear of ridicule and censure.
There seems to be some strange things going on in the UK.
January 13, 2009: Alien Fallout
What was it that flew over a lonely stretch of a Texas road near Houston on December 29, 1980? It appeared to be a flaming object surrounded by a formation of helicopters. Whatever it was, it caught the attention of Betty Cash, Vicky Landrum and her grandson Colby Landrum who were driving nearby. They believe that the mysterious object gave them each a dose of radiation poisoning. Betty allegedly suffered burns after getting out of the car to get a better look at the object, and ultimately died from radiation poisoning. Vicky and Colby sustained lesser injuries but also became sick. Betty and Vicky believed they saw military-style helicopters in control of the object that they believed poisoned them. The government however, has denied any responsibility and a lawsuit they filed against the Army was dismissed by the courts. Now, 28 years later, the UFO Hunters headed to Texas to find the answers. What was the object? Who was flying those helicopters and why did the government deny any responsibility?
This case was exciting for us, as solving it would help Colby Landrum solve the central mystery of his life: Who did this and why? We brought Colby together with retired Army Colonel George Sarran from the Inspector General's Office of the Pentagon. Col. Sarran wrote the report stating that no Army helicopters were in the air that night - essentially dismissing the Cash/Landrum case.
Once the case was thrown out, Cash and Landrum are left without any avenue of legal remedy to help pay for their medical expenses.
In our investigation, we asked Col. Sarran if it was possible that a top secret black ops military unit might have flown those helicopters. Col. Sarran gives us his answer on camera. We also find out what type of Army unit might have been operating that night, and why.
For me, this was a real detective story - if you can put seemingly disparate pieces together, you can discover the truth.
November 19, 2008: First Contact
The Aurora, Texas, airship mystery of 1897 is a case that has intrigued for me for years, and investigating it with the UFO Hunters gave me the chance to bring my good friend, the UFO researcher and 30-year Aurora investigator Jim Marrs, into the case.
On the surface, it seemed straightforward: According to area legend, a mysterious airship crashed into a windmill on property belonging to a Judge Proctor in Aurora over 100 years ago. The windmill was actually a wind-driven pump, drawing water out of the judge's well. The crash supposedly resulted in an explosion that spewed debris all over the judge's property and caused the death of the craft's pilot, whom newspaper reports called a "Martian." We went to Aurora to separate fact from myth and fiction, and to determine what may have actually happened that morning in April over a century ago.
What we found was mystery upon mystery, and lots of great local history about the people and the town. I believe we found the missing windmill and well. We also found metal debris inside the well as well as embedded in a tree that may be related to the case. Ted and Garth Baldwin, following Jim Marrs' directions, then found what may be the mysterious missing grave and used ground-penetrating radar to establish that it actually contained a coffin.
But questions still linger. What kind of craft or machine may have flown into Judge Proctor's windmill and exploded all over his property? Who is the person buried in the grave that we discovered? And why did the craft crash into the windmill in the first place? Somewhere there is an answer to the mystery of that craft and the person who piloted it. Was he on a clandestine mission to fly what I believe was his lighter-than-air craft to Cuba to involve himself in the Spanish American War? Was this pilot a German spy experimenting with American dirigible technology with an eye to stealing any secrets he could? Despite what I think was a really successful investigation, I'm still frustrated that we couldn't get permission to exhume the body in that mysterious grave. Wouldn't it have been great to put a name to the unidentified person in that grave? I still want to do that, to not only close the books on a UFO case but to bring closure to the mystery of the unidentified missing person who disappeared over a hundred years ago.
November 10, 2008: Heartland Explosion
People sitting in their houses in Kokomo, Indiana, on the night of April 16, 2008, were shaken out of their chairs by an ear-piercing high-decibel boom. Windows and roofs shook, houses were rocked on their foundations and people ran into the street to look for what might have caused the huge explosion. Panicked citizens called 911, lighting up local dispatch boards across two counties and sending scores of police, sheriff,and fire units across the country roads to investigate and look for the site of what might have been a plane crash. Even officials from the Department of Homeland Security were sent out to investigate. Many witnesses, who scanned the skies that night after they heard the big boom, reported having observed one of the strangest light shows they had seen: a large orange glowing ball in the sky and a string of lights floating next to it. I brought the team of UFO Hunters to Kokomo to investigate this case and find out what happened.
The fun of this case was not just getting into the details of the case with witnesses and analyzing the videos, but discovering that the Kokomo lights and the Kokomo boom had much the same effects on witnesses that the Phoenix lights from 1997 had on its witnesses. I call this the "Paradigm Effect," a disorientation that people experience when they see or feel something so strange that it challenges their belief systems. Imagine that you're riding along a country road when you see a huge disk or triangle descend towards your car and hover over it. It happened to a friend of mind out in the Nevada desert near Area 51. He was so freaked out that he called his father, a black ops helicopter pilot. His father told him to confront the object, challenge it and get a good look at it. And that's much the same advice I would give to witnesses. After all, whatever these things are, they represent a paradigm shift in your reality. You might as well get a good luck at what's challenging all of your previous experiences. That's also what the folks in Kokomo did, and they are still talking about it to this day.
Find out how UFOs might be able to knock out radio communication.
November 4, 2008: UFO Emergency
In 1994, in Ohio and Michigan, police and emergency units were in hot pursuit of UFOs that flew over townships from Michigan to Trumbull County, Ohio. 911 dispatchers tracked the movements of the UFOs as they crossed municipal boundaries and police handed off the pursuit to first responders in neighboring townships. Police reported that their cars stalled when UFOs flew over, and other residents marveled at the size of the craft and their ability to float through the air without making a sound. But all of this was a prelude to what happened in the same areas six years later.
Something we didn't talk about in the episode, but which I think was very important, was Liberty Township Police Sergeant Toby Meloro's experience when the object glided over his car. Meloro's car engine simply shut down. When the object had passed, it started up again. I asked Ted Acworth how that could happen. Why didn't Meloro have to restart his engine? Ted had no explanation.
Then there was Toby Meloro's brief missing time experience, which he describes in his interview. It was only about four minutes, but how can you account for that? And does it have anything to do with the way his engine shut down and then restarted? John Lear, whom folks will meet in our Area 51 episode, does have a theory. He says that because these spacecraft actually draw time and space through them, there is an actual envelope of spatial/temporal distortion around these objects. In other words, Meloro's car engine--just like the controls in Parvis Jafari's F-4 Phantom fighter--were caught in a kind of space/time warp in which they were literally frozen in time. Might that account for Meloro's brief missing time? Might that also account for the many stories of temporal distortion we heard from our Phoenix Lights witnesses in Arizona? These are questions we have to explore.
October 29, 2008: Invasion Illinois
On August 21, 2004, members of the audience at an Ozzy Osbourne concert in the Tinley Park suburb of Chicago reporting seeing formations of bright lights in a triangular formation in the night skies. These lights hovered over the highway and were observed, and even videotaped, by people in their backyards. Two months later on Halloween, the lights or "flying triangles" returned.
Graphical Recreation
Investigators began collecting information, and by the time the lights returned in 2005, a full-scale investigation was underway. Yet, even after two years, they could arrive at no conclusions. Were these lights part of a military exercise? Were they conventional aircraft, military super weapons, flares or simply candles borne aloft by balloons?
The UFO Hunters arrived in Tinley Park in June 2008 to join with MUFON's (Mutual UFO Network) chief investigator Sam Maranto to assess the collected information, interview witnesses and conduct their own scientific evaluation of the data. The team--Pat Uskert, MIT's Dr. Ted Acworth and I--visited key witnesses and took measurements from the locations where the lights were observed. We also took witness statements and triangulated the witness locations, compared the lines of sight to known air traffic patterns, and subjected the videos to a rigorous photo analysis. In addition, Pat and I, along with many of the key witnesses, conducted our own balloon and flare test and compared the video footage of that test to the videos of the lights taken by the witnesses themselves.
Our findings showed that whatever these lights were, they were not flares or Chinese lanterns, nor were they from conventional aircraft. They were, in Dr. Ted Acworth's opinion, a phenomenon that deserves much further scrutiny because they did not fit any pattern of known activity.
December 30, 2008: Lost UFO Files
James McDonald was a senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson and was one of the very early scientific UFO researchers. He put his research skills to use on some of the most important and compelling UFO cases of the 1950s and 60s, so when the University of Arizona gave the UFO Hunters the green light to check out McDonald's files at the university's Special Collections Division, we jumped at the chance.
We chose three cases to review: a Socorro, New Mexico UFO sighting by Lonnie Zamora--a very close encounter; the RB47 close encounter; and the famous Rex Heflin photos, perhaps some of the best close-up still photographs of a flying saucer that were ever taken. We sent Pat off to Socorro to interview Lonnie Zamora; Ted to talk to our aviation and military advisor Bill Scott to go over the RB47 case; and I spoke to an expert from the Polaroid camera company to analyze the Heflin photos.
We learned quite a lot from these investigations, but in my opinion, the most significant insight was into James McDonald himself: the ufologist, the academician-cum-social activist, and the alleged target of an FBI counter-intelligence campaign. Yes, McDonald was a social activist, but is it possible that he was also too close to information about UFOs the government wanted to keep secret? From his files, we discovered that McDonald eventually became convinced that his questions about UFOs couldn't be answered by people in just one country, and that other countries where there had been UFO sightings would have to be involved. This is most likely why McDonald sought to share his information with Soviet scientists by contacting Soviet officials at the United Nations--a dangerous thing to do near the height of the Cold War.
Suddenly, McDonald, who might already have been on an FBI watch list because of his social activism, was trying to establish contacts within the Soviet Union, which could easily have set off alarm bells with the FBI. They allegedly questioned his colleagues at the university, among whom there was already significant wariness--and even anger--over his public advocacy of UFO research. This made McDonald's work tougher, and, I believe, helped push him toward suicide years later.
I believe McDonald's personal story about how he came to believe that UFOs were real and what kind of threat or promise they may have held out for society is an important chronicle of one person's scientific search for the truth.
Buy Now
