The 1980s - When Ufology went Screwball Crazy

The 1980s – a decade when the seeds of the 21st century were still being planted. Global politics, economics, technology and, yes, ufology changed rapidly. Not necessarily for the better either.

This is a look back with hindsight at how many things almost ‘taken as read’ today in ufology came to be.



The 1980s saw the emergence of the UFO lore with a much darker and conceivably, more sinister commentary than we’d seen in years before. The decade also opened the way for Roswell to become the number one ‘UFO and alien story’ on the planet.

There were also some major contemporary UFO cases to chew over. In Britain there was the strange abduction of policeman Alan Godfrey and the Zigmund Adamski UFO murder mystery. Soon after followed the ‘Rendlesham Forest Incident’. This was rapidly succeeded by the Cash- Landrum case and 1980 had not even ended. Other notable UFO events were the Hudson Valley sightings, the JAL 1628 case and the notorious Gulf Breeze sightings in the USA. Whilst the old Soviet Union had the 1986 supposed UFO crash in Dalnegorsk and the Voronezh UFO incident of 1989. The mysterious Belgian Triangles provided a final global UFO mystery for the decade as the Cold War came to an end in 1989.



There will be no analysis of those cases here. The main theme of this post is to explore how the ufological memes of the 1980s modelled and shaped those of today. Although this post will do little more than scratch the surface.

So let us begin in the New Mexico desert........

Roswell
Some of you may be unaware that for 31 years the Roswell case was considered to have been an embarrassing error by the Roswell Army Air Force. It was dismissed completely by the mainstream media as a premature issuing of a press release about capturing a flying disk that had to be recanted because their officers had failed to identify a weather balloon. Project Bluebook barely mentions it and the UFO community paid little attention. Of those who did no one mentioned aliens at all.

There are no photos of the debris field or of any recovery operation. The only pictures related to the event seem to be the ones taken by the press at Fort Worth Texas.

Then, in 1978 Stanton Friedman heard about Jesse Marcel telling stories about a military cover up of something not of this Earth that crashed in New Mexico. His story spread on the UFO grapevine, with Marcel being featured in some documentaries at the time (below are clips from “In Search Of” TV show both featuring Jesse Marcel)


In February 1980, the National Enquirer ran its own interview with Marcel, focusing national and international attention on what came to be known as the Roswell UFO incident. As the 1980s progressed additional ‘witnesses’ added significant new details, including claims of a large-scale military operation dedicated to recovering alien craft and aliens themselves, from multiple crash sites. There were even stories of alleged intimidation of civilians by military personnel. Jesse Marcel’s claims were becoming rather dull in comparison.

By 1989, former Roswell mortician, Glenn Dennis, had put forth a detailed personal account claiming a young nurse, Naomi Selff, that he was friendly with had told him alien autopsies were carried out at the Roswell base. Dennis’s story has since been discredited. The nurse never existed and other details of his story were shown to be fabrication.

At the end of the 1980s the TV show Unsolved Mysteries produced a recreation of the Roswell incident by absorbing all of the new themes and memes that had grown over the decade. It had a lasting impact and Roswell cemented its position as the number one UFO legend in large parts of the world during the 1990s. It even led to an alien autopsy (faked) video in the 1990s being produced.






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The ‘Doty’fication of Ufology
Richard Doty a former special agent for AFOSI (The United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations) and seemingly a maker of mischief on a grand scale in the world of ufology.

I did not wish to give this guy too much credit. But he seems to be behind an awful lot of the craziness that permeated itself in Ufology in the 1980s and is still peddled today.

Stories of UFO crashes, clandestine groups (MJ-12) , alien/human exchange programs (SERPO), and captured aliens (dubbed EBEns) living on Earth all seem to be attributed to Richard Doty. They form the subject matter for a huge amount of books, movies, video games, television shows, and websites. Doty even claimed he was a consultant for the X-Files. Who knows what is truth and lies in the world of Doty? It seems the majority of it, however, was lies.

Richard Doty first comes to light in the early 1980s when businessman Paul Bennewitz (pictured) reported receiving strange signals and seeing UFOs above the Manzano nuclear weapons storage site and Kirtland Air Force Base. Bennewitz’s home was in direct view of the base so he was in an ideal location.

The Air Force was extremely concerned that a civilian had observed what were actually ‘secret projects’ (one involved tracking Soviet satellites, reading their data and reprogramming their orbits via laser pulses). If the information had got out it could compromise the whole project including Western agents operating behind the Iron Curtain.

Enter Richard Doty, who began by breaking into Bennewitz’s home while he was out. Learning the basis of Bennewitz’s theories, by checking his files and research notes, Doty discovered that Bennewitz believed aliens were mutilating cattle, abducting humans and implanting them with small devices for what he (Bennewitz) suspected were nefarious purposes. He also had made notes that these aliens were living deep underground in a base they’d constructed at Dulce, New Mexico and believed humanity was in deep trouble and there was a real intergalactic threat.

Doty then worked on fuelling Bennewitz’s beliefs. He provided Bennewitz with a rigged computer and faked documents confirming an alien presence. Their real objective was to steer Bennewitz away from finding out what was really going on at Kirtland AF base. Bennewitz believed he was assisting the military while never seeming to question why he was given such a hands on role.

Bennewitz was told that in 1947 a UFO crashed near Roswell. Then not long after a secret treaty was negotiated between the US government and the aliens. In return for alien technology, the government would let the aliens conduct abductions (surely they could do this in less advanced nations with absolute impunity????) . He was also informed there was also an underground base occupied by the aliens at Dulce, New Mexico. Bennewitz was fed the story that aliens had reneged on the treaty and that US Special Forces tried to retake Dulce from the aliens, resulting in an underground battle with the aliens.

The Air Force even went out to the mountains outside of Dulce, put some old storage tanks and shacks there, and stuck some fake air vents into the ground. Then Doty flew Bennewitz over in a helicopter to show him where the underground base supposedly was located. Eventually Bennewitz became totally paranoid, had a mental breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in August of 1988. The US Air Force intelligence services through Doty acted totally unscrupulously in their desperation to conceal their secret technology by destroying the mental state of a citizen they were paid to protect.

Despite leaving the Air Force Doty’s days in ufology were far from over.


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Bill Moore and the UFO Cover Up

William Leonard Moore was a teacher of French and Russian in Pennsylvania public schools during the mid 1960s into the 1970s. He was also a leading ufologist. He had co-authored the ‘Roswell Incident ‘ (1980) alongside Charles Berlitz with some limited success. While promoting the book he was contacted by a Sgt. Richard Doty.
He was offered secret information about UFOs but in exchange, Moore would be required to pass on information regarding various individuals in the UFO community. First on the list was Paul Bennewitz.

Perhaps because of inquisitiveness, but mainly his massive ego, Moore jumped at the opportunity. Did Doty set up Moore to fail and ruin him? Or was Moore part of this disinformation scheme? Anyway Moore also played his part in the mental destruction of Paul Bennewitz by feeding him disinformation like Doty.

Moore also seems to have played a part in the attempted dissemination of the MJ-12 documents. In 1982 he teamed up with TV producer Jaime Shandera. Both were involved in secret meetings with intelligence agents promoting certain insight into the UFO subject and release of this information into the public domain. The group were dubbed “The Aviary” and its members given nicknames like “Sparrow”, “Hawk” etc. One of these members was Richard Doty!

In late 1984 a 35mm black & white roll of film arrived in Jaime Shandera’s mailbox. The developed film contained what is now known to be the “MJ-12” documents. The prime document being called the “Eisenhower Briefing”. The documents include such matters as the conduct to be used when meeting an alien, diagrams and records of tests on UFOs, memos on assorted cover-ups, and descriptions of the President's statements about UFO-related issues. They were first made public in 1987 after, British ufologist Timothy Good, took the bait and leaked them to the media.

Many ufologists and the FBI have declared them as fake and all roads lead back to the source of these documents as being Bill Moore and perhaps Richard Doty.

On October 14th 1988 the TV special ‘UFO Cover-Up Live!‘ was broadcast in both the United States and, strangely, the USSR. Mike Farrell from the TV series ‘M*A*S*H’ hosted the show. It was heavily and at times badly scripted. However Moore and Shandera introduced two members of the shadowy Aviary, “Falcon” and “Condor.” Presented as intelligence agents in silhouette with electronically altered voices these were actually Richard Doty and Robert Collins. Among some of the unbelievable claims the two “agents” made were that America was hosting alien visitors who liked strawberry ice cream and ancient Tibetan music. The disinformation campaign continued.



In July of 1989 Moore was a guest speaker at the MUFON symposium in Las Vegas. It was to become his swan song in ufology.


Moore told to the audience that they had been “…had by elements of United States counterintelligence.” The audience’s reaction was that they had been “had” by Moore. Moore had destroyed himself completely in a very public way.

Many have suspected he was actually a government agent used to spy on the UFO community and more importantly spread disinformation about UFOs to the media. Either way Moore's reputation was shredded into pieces. Along with Shandera and Doty he had alienated the entire UFO community in the USA.


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Lear, Lazar and Dreamland


John Lear is a former pilot who allegedly flew secret missions for the CIA between 1966 and 1983. In 1989 he was Nevada MUFON state director hosting the very same conference where Bill Moore went into meltdown.

His interest in ufology was piqued after speaking to witnesses about the Rendlesham Forest case of 1980. Lear then supposedly tapped into his contacts in the intelligence world. In late 1987 he requested that his conclusions from speaking to them were posted onto Paranet bulletin board.(Paranet was a forerunner of the internet.)

There isn’t the room to post everything here. This pdf should satisfy those with a deeper curiosity.However some of the major statements Lear made were:

..In its effort to 'protect democracy', our government sold us to the aliens. And here is how it happened. But before I begin, I'd like to offer a word in defense of those who bargained us away. They had the best of intentions....

Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939

The 'horrible truth' was known by only a very few persons: They were indeed ugly little creatures, shaped like praying mantises... Of the original group that were the first to learn the 'horrible truth', SEVERAL COMMITTED SUICIDE, the most prominent of which was Defense Secretary [and Secretary of the NAVY] James V. Forrestal....

President Truman put a lid on the secret and turned the screws so tight that the general public still thinks that flying saucers are a joke....
In 1947, President Truman established a group of 12 of the top military scientific personnel of their time. They were known as MJ-12. Although the group exists today, none of the ORIGINAL members are still alive....

There were several more saucer crashes in the late 1940's, one in Roswell, New Mexico; one in Aztec, New Mexico; and one near Laredo, Texas...

In July 1952, a panicked government watched helplessly as a squadron of 'flying saucers' flew over Washington, D.C
One saucer was so enormous and the logistic problems in transportation so enormous that it was buried at the crash site and remains there today...

On April 30, 1964, the first communication [occurred] between these aliens and the 'U.S. Government'.

During the period of 1969-1971, MJ-12 representing the U.S. Government made a deal with these creatures, called EBE's [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities... The 'deal' was that in exchange for 'technology' that they would provide to us, we agreed to 'ignore' the abductions that were going on and suppress information on the cattle mutilations.

In fact, the purposes for the abductions turned out to be:

(1)The insertion of a 3mm spherical device ...for the biological monitoring, tracking, and control of the abductee.

(2) Implementation of Posthypnotic Suggestion to carry out a specific activity during a specific time period..

(3) Termination of some people so that they could function as living sources for biological material and substances.

(4) TERMINATION OF INDIVIDUALS WHO REPRESENT A THREAT TO THE CONTINUATION OF THEIR ACTIVITY.

(5) Effect genetic engineering experiments.

(6) Impregnation of human females and early termination of pregnancies to secure the crossbreed infant.

EBE's have a genetic disorder in that their digestive system is atrophied and not functional... In order to sustain themselves they use enzyme or hormonal secretions obtained from the tissues that they extract from humans and animals..

THE VARIOUS PARTS OF THE BODY ARE TAKEN TO VARIOUS UNDERGROUND LABORATORIES, ONE OF WHICH IS KNOWN TO BE NEAR THE SMALL NEW MEXICO TOWN OF DULCE...

IN 1979 THERE WAS AN ALTERCATION OF SORTS AT THE DULCE LABORATORY. A SPECIAL ARMED FORCES UNIT WAS CALLED IN TO TRY AND FREE A NUMBER OF OUR PEOPLE TRAPPED IN THE FACILITY, WHO HAD BECOME AWARE OF WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON. ACCORDING TO ONE SOURCE 66 OF THE SOLDIERS WERE KILLED AND OUR PEOPLE WERE NOT FREED....

By 1984, MJ-12 must have been in stark terror at the mistake they had made in dealing with the EBE's. They had subtly promoted 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.' to get the public used to 'odd looking' aliens that were compassionate, benevolent and very much our 'space brothers'. MJ-12 'sold' the EBE's to the public, and were now faced with the fact THAT QUITE THE OPPOSITE WAS TRUE...

PART OF MJ-12 WANTED TO CONFESS THE WHOLE SCHEME AND SHAMBLES IT HAD BECOME TO THE PUBLIC, BEG THEIR FORGIVENESS AND ASK FOR THEIR SUPPORT. The other part [the majority] of MJ-12 argued that there was no way they could do that, that the situation was untenable and there was no use in exciting the public with the 'horrible truth' and that the best plan was to continue the development of a weapon that could be used against the EBE's under the guise of 'SDI', the Strategic Defense Initiative, which had nothing whatsoever to do with a defense for inbound Russian nuclear missiles....

Area 51... and a similar setup near Dulce, New Mexico, may now belong to forces not loyal to the U.S. Government, or even the human race. 'It's horrifying to think that all the scientists we think are working for us [in the joint-interaction bases] are actually controlled by aliens....

Also see :

The John Lear Files

John Lear Letter

In 1988 John Lear was to meet up with one Robert Lazar. Here’s how Lear himself describes their liaison.

In the summer of 1988, I had given a lecture at the Spring Valley library. I was getting hundreds of calls. My wife changed my number and took all my UFO stuff because she tired of it disrupting our family life....

A guy named Gene Huff called and asked if would send him all my tapes, videos and information. I told him I was out of it now but if I ever got back into it I would give him a call. He told me that he was an appraiser and said if I ever needed an appraisal for my house that he would trade me an appraisal for all my information. I happened to need an appraisal for my house right then so I told him, "let's make a deal". He came over to the house and brought a guy with him who was holding the measuring tape and that was Bob Lazar.

Bob had brought with him his resume which contained his degrees at MIT and Cal Tech University of Technology. He didn't believe anything that Gene and I were talking about. He was rolling his eyes and said, "Look guys, I had a top secret clearance at Los Alamos National Laboratories where I worked and this couldn't have gotten by me. I would've known about it".

So during the next four months, that would've been July through October or so, we tried to convince Bob that there was something going on up at Area 51. We got to the point where he thought that maybe there was something so he called Dr. Keller and got a job up at Groom Lake and the rest is history.

Source : AP Magazine

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Indeed the rest is history. For those of you reading who don’t know the Lazar story. Here is a very brief synopsis.

In order to take up a position working at Area 51 Lazar claims to have had to sign a secrecy agreement and an agreement to waive his constitutional rights. This clearance meant perpetual monitoring of his activities. Lazar began work at a base near Papoose dry lake bed known as S4.

S4 was a combination of buildings and hangars built into the side of a mountain. After this he was taken to a briefing room and left alone to read some booklets as part of his induction. Bob opened a folder showing various types of flying saucers. It seems that his job would be to work on reverse engineering these craft.

During the evening of 21st March 1989 Bob Lazar, John Lear and Gene Huff drove out into the desert where Lazar insisted they would observe a test flight of such a craft. John Lear was amazed when a disc appeared from behind a mountain ridge making seemingly impossible manoeuvres. However a subsequent visit to the area resulted in interception by a police patrol and they were reported to the base.

Lazar was ordered to report to Indian Springs Air Field 30 miles north of Las Vegas the next day. He was threatened by a government agent about violating security. Lazar was deeply worried. John Lear persuaded Lazar to go public as a form of "life insurance”.

So Lazar was interviewed by journalist George Knapp for broadcast on KLAS TV. Area 51 had now entered the UFO lore as the place where flying saucers were being back engineered and tested and the craziness would continue into the 1990s.




Ufology’s 1980s Hangover

We haven’t even touched the Bill Cooper story nor mentioned people like Budd Hopkins and Whitley Streiber and many more personalities. All of who had an influence on the way the UFO narrative was morphing during the penultimate decade of the 20th century.

But the dark overtones that were allowed to fester in the 1980s have remained. In the 21st century there still exists more than just a residue of the history of UFO crashes, alien interventions and a dark government within a government. Rumours persist of faceless power brokers who deal with nefarious aliens. The same aliens who have supposedly been abducting humans and animals since at least the late 1940s.

The CIA has continued to deny it paid much attention at all to the UFO phenomenon during the
1980s.

Even though many of the agency’s former and existing employees were poking around then and are still poking around now in the topic.

It cannot be refuted that what happened was the injection of a continuous stream of pollutants into the already murky world of Ufology some 3 decades ago. The like of Lear, Doty and Moore being merely public faces for this massive output of disinformation. We are still to detoxify much of it today. Some of it is so ingrained that it has been accepted as the truth by many.

Yet - if there really is nothing at all to the UFO topic then it begs the question; why so much interest, and interference, from the intelligence communities down the years?







References and Further Reading

John Lear & Area 51

The Lazar Timeline

CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs

A History of Government Management of UFO Perceptions through Film and Television

MUFON 2007 Symposium Revelations

Roswell Anatomy of a Myth

Spooks Infiltrating UFO Community?

Tainted Well of UFO land

WOW!
Color me "schooled"!!!!

The way you have this outlined, and I'm not disputing it, only a handful of people were responsible for dragging the whole UFO field way off course and leaving us to pick up the pieces. Kind of a crappy thing to do.

For myself I'll admit to being so utterly sick of the redacted papers, old white guys in suits who may or may not be disinfo agents, public infighting , that I gave up long ago on that avenue and decided it wasn't going to ever lead anywhere. Tossing the baby out with the bathwater seemed the logical course.

Then it was for me, onto reports that "may" hold some promise but not like Rendlesham or Roswell because they were too tainted. I just poured thru Chris Rutkowski's stuff, CUFO's when I found it and Mufon reports that "might" be genuinely unexplainable.Plus some self education on what our aircraft looks like and satellites as well, even went to some Star Parties held by our local astronomy club.

What you've outlined is exactly why so many people just give up and walk away.

a reply to: mirageman

I'll dig through all this more tonight but for now I wanted to say good post and you put it together like a boss. S&F.

Great post Mirageman. I think you summed up the 1980s UFO explosion pretty well.

It really was/is a crazy decade for that genre and continued into the 90s with all the "UFO" tv specials of that era too, not to mention X files, Sightings etc etc....

Im starting to wonder if all Baby Boomers are UFO crazy, and are actually behind the whole subject.

It seems the younger generation, the "Xers and Milennials", dont care much for the subject....or at least dont look up to the sky, they are too busy playing computer games and watching their phones.

Maybe WE are to blame for all the craziness?

My UFO interest started as a child of the 60s.....reruns of "The Day The Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Earth vs Flying Saucers, and 100s of other Si Fi 50/60s movies, not to mention Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, then in the 70s Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, then More Movies, Star Wars etc etc etc.......

No Wonder we are UFO crazy??

Not to mention I bought my first paperback in 1972......."Chariots of the Gods" !!!


Perhaps its all a figment of our Baby Boomer extreme imagination, caused by the older generations movie and tv creations.

Oh Well......

So you're a Country Member, hey?......
Well I'll remember...

I think I see Uranus on the Scanner.
Oh, you're so Bold!!!

Growing up during the 80,s the UFO lore back then it all seemed mystical and about finding the answers..Now it seems a lot of the stories now are through decisive detective work being truthfully not what they seem.I hope all the sightings throughout that period and today can be given the same treatment.

a reply to: mirageman

Yet - if there really is nothing at all to the UFO topic then it begs the question; why so much interest, and interference, from the intelligence communities down the years?

Yes, one has to wonder. The only reason I wonder at all and do not just discount the whole question of aliens is because of these.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Whatever I saw dramatically piqued my curiosity. From early on I expected to see over the years more and more reported incidents which of course there have been, reported incidents. However I also expected that those incidents would not be able to be covered up or interpreted. That they would be mass sightings as clear as mine were to me at the time.

I watched these reported events and took them with a grain of salt as hardly more than second hand information, information that either was true or concocted. And who needs that kind of proof, proof that was not proof.

And here we are now over 60 years since I saw that light in a night sky completely clear of clouds with noting but other stars visible.

Any way Mirage, excellent thread. It demonstrates that there really is very very little meat on the ufo bones.

This is why i joined ATS. My entire teen years comprised the 80s and was always considered passingly strange in most circles because of my interest in UFOs (and of course for many other reasons) heee!
The only thing missing was all the fun in Gulf Breeze.
That PDF was a great read! Was familar with all of it, but it was interesting to see how the narrative has changed over the years.
Thanks for the post!

a reply to: gort51

Me da is a baby boomer and he's defo UFO mad. He saw two back in the 70s, one hovering over powerlines in the city and another above the local burn (like a creek/brook). He's mad keen on the old sci-fis, like The Outer Limits and Lost In Space.

It's because of him, and his fascination with the sky, that I've got the interest as well. As a child of the 80s, I guess I didn't question the idea of extraterrestrials or UFOs, I just believe. What I do question is the disinfo. And we see that even today with this whole host of people blindly following so called Pleidians or Galactic Federation of Light. Man, RA makes more sense that any of that.

To the OP: Cheers for this post! S & F for further reading when my tea is hot!

a reply to: mirageman

The 1980s - When Ufology went Screwball Crazy

It still is.

Did you catch the panel line up for this year's MUFON symposium? That was an embarrassment for anyone in the community who wants to steer just a little bit clear of bat# crazy. They even had Corey Goode on the panel!

I am not particularly fond of Dolan, but, man, I feel sorry for him having to partake in this. (and, man, was he embarrassed about it!)

Super neat thread by the way - that is the sort of ATS content the draw me in back in the day!
Thanks for posting!

a reply to: gort51

I remember reading on UFO's around 58,which would be baby boomers,the 80's would be the offspring,kind of like saying the baby boomers are less intelligent,and from what I have seen you "progessives" are hardly progressive,when you remove all fact to make a point

Great thread, thanks. Nice recap and some new stuff for me. Screwball though, eh, I think it was one of the more interesting times of Ufology.
I want to bookmark this for later.

a reply to: mirageman

If the 80's was a crazy time for ufology then the 60's were certifiable.

Hallucinogens must've played a minor part methinks, not to mention the George Adamski's out there that were striking while the iron was hot just to make some moolah. Nordics from Venus? we now know Venus is inhospitable so Adamski's claims are now laughable, let alone the fake photography.

It's a shame how the field has sunk so low as these many liars divert attention from the real researchers who spend hours searching through microfiche, gathering newspaper clippings etc.

And it all added up to exactly diddly squat.

The 80s are a big reason I remain highly cynical of any "alien" UFO report and why my requirements for proof are so high. At least for me personally. I know it only fed the imaginations of other people and solidified their mythology. Never mind that it was all for nothing.

a reply to: gort51

It really was/is a crazy decade for that genre and continued into the 90s with all the "UFO" tv specials of that era too, not to mention X files, Sightings etc etc.... I'm starting to wonder if all Baby Boomers are UFO crazy, and are actually behind the whole subject. It seems the younger generation, the "Xers and Milennials", dont care much for the subject...

I think with the generational thing that there was certainly more mystery back in the 1950s as we hadn't even been into space at the start of that decade.

I've said it before but I think the end of the Cold War and the birth of the mass market satellite TV, the internet and other technologies meant two things. First of all there was no longer as much need for Special Projects to be hidden behind the UFO phenomenon. Secondly certain events that would have lingered as classic UFO stories had they happened (even in the 80s) are now resolved a lot more quickly.

As examples the Norway spiral in 2009 was fairly quickly resolved as a missile test gone wrong.



and the Russian meteor explosion from 2013 caught on dashcams.



In days gone by the Soviets would almost certainly have not admitted to a missile test. And there would be plenty of witnesses to the meteor but possibly very little if any footage. Leaving them both as UFO stories. Possibly even a crash!

a reply to: DupontDeux

Did you catch the panel line up for this year's MUFON symposium? That was an embarrassment for anyone in the community who wants to steer just a little bit clear of bat# crazy. They even had Corey Goode on the panel!

I am not particularly fond of Dolan, but, man, I feel sorry for him having to partake in this. (and, man, was he embarrassed about it!)

I heard about it and I've found this. I haven't seen it and I haven't time to watch it at present.



What I would say is that unfortunately Ufology has morphed into an entertainment industry with sci-fi story tellers. Mainly in the United States but because of shows like Ancient Aliens and others it's spreading across the world. MUFON has embraced this UFOtainment policy completely now. There are many fine ufologists and commentators on the subject in America but sadly people don't want to hear their more measured and rational comments or the painstaking research they've made to uncover a small piece of the puzzle. They want the fantastic stories.

Richard Dolan is also locked into the UFOtainment industry himself. But he can at least be respected for his work as a UFO historian.

To everyone else who has posted in the thread....thanks for your stories and views. If anyone wants to bring up anything else about the topic please feel free.

originally posted by: mirageman
a reply to: DupontDeux

Did you catch the panel line up for this year's MUFON symposium? That was an embarrassment for anyone in the community who wants to steer just a little bit clear of bat# crazy. They even had Corey Goode on the panel!

I am not particularly fond of Dolan, but, man, I feel sorry for him having to partake in this. (and, man, was he embarrassed about it!)

I heard about it and I've found this. I haven't seen it and I haven't time to watch it at present.

What I would say is that unfortunately Ufology has morphed into an entertainment industry with sci-fi story tellers. Mainly in the United States but because of shows like Ancient Aliens and others it's spreading across the world. MUFON has embraced this UFOtainment policy completely now. There are many fine ufologists and commentators on the subject in America but sadly people don't want to hear their more measured and rational comments or the painstaking research they've made to uncover a small piece of the puzzle. They want the fantastic stories.

Richard Dolan is also locked into the UFOtainment industry himself. But he can at least be respected for his work as a UFO historian.

To everyone else who has posted in the thread....thanks for your stories and views. If anyone wants to bring up anything else about the topic please feel free.

Is richard dolan losing credibility now? I have always seen him as one of the more genuine and realistic ufo researchers.