Outline of Opening Remarks Prepared for Delivery at Purdue,
James Oberg           //             March 31, 1999

Subject: Are We Being visited -- a fascinating topic, whether it turns out to
be true or not. If true, greatest event in human civilization; if not, merely
the greatest popular delusion of the century.

CSETI's work -- which annoyed most of the established UFO organizations -- is
one direction, and I have encouraged it to this extent: all stories should come
out, regardless of fear of legal constraints. At OMNI magazine -- where I was
the main UFO writer for the entire history of the magazine, from the very first
issue in 1978 to the very last -- we did "Operation Open Book", promised to pay
legal expenses, sought people with stories. We came to believe that the fear of
punishment for disclosure was a mirage, that nobody has EVER been prosecuted or
even persecuted for "spilling gummint secrets" about UFOs. And if the idea
about the UFO coverup being a non-governmental group has any validity, the
threat of federal legal sanctions becomes irrelevant.

There is an enormous body of folklore and claims on this subject, far beyond
what can be discussed here. Ranging from millions of everyday perceptions by
witnesses, to the polymorphic legend of Roswell, to current abductions,
implants, and psychic contact -- overwhelming in its richness, breadth, and
fundamentally human themes. Ubiquitous in time and space, throughout history,
all around the world.

I've been fascinated from childhood -- read Keyhoe's books, tried to decode
Adamski's letters from Venus, watched the skies. Saw my first UFO when I was
14: a brilliant rosy light in the post-sunset Western sky. Solved my first UFO
case a few minutes later, when I called a friend in a neighboring town, asked
them to take a compass reading on it, and triangulated its position and
altitude, so when it faded out, I was able to calculate it was because of
sunset at the altitude the object -- clearly a high-altitude balloon -- was
hovering at.  

My own specialization, spaceflight operations and history, particularly Russian
aspects, has allowed me to probe farther on many famous cases. Whether it be
claims that astronauts have encountered UFOs, or Russian stories, or actually
sightings around the world that could be traced back to space activities, I've
discovered that an inadvertant but crucial experiment has been accidentally set
in motion: confront witnesses with a well-defined and startling visual
apparition, and see what they perceive, and see what they later remember, and
see how the story evolves in the folklore of our civilization. In particular,
notice how the self-proclaimed UFO experts, the "serious scientists" devoted to
unraveling the mysteries of the phenomenon, missed the boat, swallowed easily
detectable errors, failed to follow up obvious leads, failed to exploit lucky
breaks, jumped to and championed erroneous interpretations -- it's not a pretty
picture, not at all.

These stories -- the ones I've "solved" -- were sparked by government
activities in the US, in Russia, in China, and elsewhere, often activities
which the governments didn't want to talk about, wanted to keep secret. Few
cases were deliberate, it was a happy accident that the public was misled by
the UFO camouflage (I do know of one case where the camouflage was deliberate).
But it leads to a better understanding of the UFO phenomenon.

I've shown how Soviet space-to-ground warhead tests in the late 1960s were
reported as a wave of crescent-shaped UFOs and endorsed by top ufo experts all
over the world to this day (and the Academy of Sciences endorsed the sightings
as genuinely anaomalous). I've seen sunlit fuel clouds from Russian and
Japanese rocket stages cause wide-area panics in underlying regions, from South
America to China to Australia -- with classic reports of car chases, radar
confirmations, power failures, bizarre motion, telepathic contact, even in one
Brazilian case, sex with the female pilot. One Russian rocket launching in
1984, seen from two Soviet airliners, has become known as the best-ever Russian
UFO case, with visual, radar, and physical evidence (one pilot later died,
allegedly from radiation exposure to a death beam from the saucer) -- except
that the visual stimulus is unarguably identical to that of a rocket launching
from a secret base in northwest Russia. In 1977, another launching -- the spy
satellite Kosmos-955 -- created what Russian UFO experts consider the "smoking
gun" of Russian ufos, a giant glowing jellyfish which dangled tentacles over
cities, crashed computers, sprayed ozone, chased locomotives, drilled tiny
holes in paving stones and windows....  and which one official Soviet spokesmen
even suggested might have been something like swamp gas.

And it's the basis for why I don't "believe" in UFOs, don't believe that the
phenomenon MUST require an extraordinary, extraterrestrial, unknown-to-science
stimuli. My experience has been that contemporary civilization is entirely
capable of producing and misinterpreting more than enough visual apparitions,
scrap metal, dreams, and tall tales to feed the folklore. Nothing more is
needed.

Doesn't prove it ISN'T there -- they could be, and are more baffled than us
about who it is we're seeing, since they've been cautious not to be visible.
There's no A PRIORI reason why there couldn't be visitors, in the past or now.

In fact, that's another benefit of studying this topic: we sharpen our skills,
refine our criteria to be applied NEXT time, prepare ourselves to search and
recognize evidence of ETI. We stretch our minds and exercise our imaginations
-- but the danger is always that some people may open their minds so far their
brains fall out. I'll give examples.

How do we evaluate an event based on oral testimony? How do we assess the level
of reliability of witness testimony? These are fundamental historiographical
questions, and the sound techniques of professional historians and researchers
might prove helpful to people now trying to reconstruct long-ago events through
stories people tell.

And do people ever tell stories! Remember the famous picture of the sailor
kissing the girl in Times Square on VJ Day? Would it surprise you that there
are a DOZEN different men who each SWEARS he was the guy in the picture? And
when a biographer researching LBJ's early life came to the incident where he
sent a friend down the street to pick up the engagement ring for Lady Bird that
he's forgotten at his office, he discovered FOUR different men who each SWORE
they had been the guy running the errand -- down to precise details, to
memories of their feelings and thoughts, everything.

Events don't even have to happen for people to remember taking part in them. My
earliest research on Soviet space mysteries was in assessing -- and eventually
rejecting -- the claims that many Russian space pilots had been killed on
secret space missions back at the dawn of the Space Age. With better hindsight
and full access to the records and personnel over there, that conclusion has
been validated as strongly as any historical fact can be. Yet I have letters
from military veterans, or from their families, full of sincere narratives of
being involved with monitoring dying cosmonauts, of searching for their crashed
capsules, of seeing the reports and the hearing the tapes of events which we
can be sure never happened.

Fortunately, narratives often contain 'tracers', clues to their validity,
usually in the form of extraneous details which while insignificant to the
teller may accidentally provide crucial validation of their memories. And
similarly, narratives also contain 'trojan horses', known fictions which the
teller has integrated into the story as it improves with age, expands with
retelling, as the narrator moves from being a peripheral character to one more
and more central to the action -- a very common effect recognized by
experienced researchers.

When recreating the 1957 Urals "nuclear waste disaster" for my 1988 book,
"Uncovering Soviet Disasters", I was confronted with a mass of documentation
and transcripts, often confused, contradictory, and always incomplete. Yet once
and awhile, something reliable showed up.

Yakov Menaker -- now in Israel -- had been a young man living near Chelyabinsk,
had seen many post-disaster actions with his own eyes, had watched his mother
and then his wife die of radiation poisoning -- or so he said. In one of his
letters, describing how the animals and plants in the fenced off regions had
changed, he mentioned in passing how the birch trees were still flourishing but
all the pine trees nearby had died. He didn't know it, but studies at Oak Ridge
confirmed that coniferous trees are more vulnerable to low-level persistent
radiation than are deciduous trees. His throw-away observation was in fact
powerful verification that he really had seen what he claimed to have seen --
and a decade later, newly released official Soviet-era reports backed him up
even further.

Another example of what I call "narrative drift" comes in the stories told by
astronaut Gordon Cooper, by all accounts a man of intelligence and integrity.
He always has been willing to discuss the UFO incident that occurred while he
was stationed at Edwards AFB in California, prior to becoming a Mercury
astronaut. His first recorded narratives, to OMNI magazine in the late 1970s,
described a white object photographed by a camera crew, which drifted by their
tower. He was careful to say that he had only heard the story, that he was not
a direct witness.

Ten years later, after many retellings, the object was said to have landed --
and Cooper now claimed that HE had been the officer in charge of the camera
crew and had seen the films before sending them to Washington where they
vanished.

By some lucky breaks, I was able to locate the cameramen, the officer who did
the interviews for Project Blue Book, and the base historian, who confirmed
that the landing of the object was a wide rumor at the time. But the films --
which are still in the Blue Book files and can be found by any investigator --
only show the object drifting slowly, right along with the wind, and leading
directly away from the site where it had been inflated and released by a
weather station a few minutes earlier. And the cameramen, still believing it
was unexplainable, were astonished to hear from me that Gordon Cooper had even
been on the base at the time -- they hadn't known it, and they were sure he
hadn't been their boss.

In another story, Cooper describes encounters with fleets of airborne UFOs over
Germany in 1951. I managed to contact more than a dozen of his colleagues at
the base, and had friends comb the newspaper and UFO club files from Munich --
near the base. There was nothing -- no other memory or record of the event. But
when an old NASA buddy told me of an earlier version of the same story Cooper
had been telling, where it had happened in the US, he mentioned the official AF
explanation, which Cooper had scoffed at. In an attempt to spark a reaction --
and more details  -- from Cooper, my editor at Columbia University Press sent
him a draft chapter of my report. Cooper never answered, but long afterwards,
there WAS a measurable response. In my review manuscript I had substituted one
'explanation' for the actual detail I had been told, hoping that Cooper would
be provoked to correct it. He never did -- and ten years later, when retelling
the story in greater and greater detail, he mentioned on television that the
Air Force had tried to tell him the UFOs were "seed pods", a laughable excuse
in his opinion. It was indeed "laughable", because the phrase "seed pods" was
the 'trojan horse' I had inserted in the manuscript sent to him for his review.
It had not been meant to decieve him, it was an attempt to elicit further
details which failed -- and which succeeded in showing how somebody may
honestly and sincerely confabulate external details into a narrative.

We have any number of far more obvious confabulations -- narratives which have
drifted far, far from the original perceptions, often incorporating outside
themes and events -- in looking at claims about space activities and UFO
secrets associated with them. There's a guy who claimed to have been let into
the secret "zero gravity" room at NASA which had been built from UFO technology
to allow people to float in the air -- a claim repeated credulously in leading
UFO books all over the world. There's the guy who gave detailed accounts of his
visits to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston where he was able to
sneak through a partially open door and see the archives of secret UFO photos,
stored in the basement of the building next to the secret underground tunnels
connecting it to other NASA facilities (when I later visited the site with the
magazine editor who had published the stories, it was almost too painful to
watch her face as we explored the building and found there was no basement, no
secret tunnel).

Now, why would I be unwilling to believe the stories that Dr. Greer has
presented from one of his star witnesses, Donna Hare? Again, without any reason
to impugn her intelligence, sincerity, or integrity, let me explain why I find
it impossible to believe her claims about secret UFO information covered up at
NASA.

Ms. Hare worked at the NASA center in Houston for a number of years between the
Apollo and the beginning of the Shuttle program. She has testified that:

1. She saw a space photograph with a UFO on it, and a technician was
airbrushing it out prior to public release.
2. She was told (and clearly believed) that all space flights were followed by
UFOs but astronauts were sworn to secrecy and threatened with grave punishments
if they revealed it.
3. She was told (and clearly believed) that there were space photographs
showing a cattle mutilation in progress by a UFO, with cattle in the field
standing with their tails straight up in alarm.
4. She was told (and clearly believed) that UFOs had been responsible for
crippling the Apollo-13 spacecraft, so as to prevent it from reaching its
intended landing area on the back side of the Moon -- but then, the UFOs had
further interfered by aiding the doomed spaceship and making it possible for it
to return safely to Earth.

I cannot believe the first item, the only one of the four to which she was a
direct witness, because she described the photograph as showing trees and their
shadows, which allowed her to determine the low altitude of the white circle
she saw (and which she described as "a metallic disk")  from its shadow on the
ground. From what I know of NASA space photography, I believe it was impossible
then or now for NASA to produce Earth surface images with sufficient detail to
show a tree and its shadow. A vigorous search by several ufo buffs recently for
such pictures in NASA's archives (the photo was described as being prepared for
public sale) failed to locate any. Ms. Hare recently retorted that of course
NASA had such pictures: "We not only had the technology to see a number on a
golf ball back then, we used it in the Bay of Pigs -- remember? -- to see
Cuban/Russian missiles aimed at our country." Aside from a confusion of the Bay
of Pigs with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the use at that time of U-2 spy
planes, not satellites, the additional confusion of what super-secret military
spy satellites could see and what NASA was interested in and had in its
possession, gives me additional confidence that my disbelief in this story is
logical.

Nor can I believe the claim about all astronauts seeing UFOs and being ordered
to cover it up. Aside from my personal research into these bogus and confused
stories -- see my home page for links -- there is the testimony of Apollo-14
astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a great supporter of Dr. Greer's efforts to dig into
this mystery. Mitchell has said that these astronaut UFO stories are fiction,
are untrue. Dr. Greer cannot expect us to believe both Ms. Hare's claims and
Dr. Mitchell's utterly contrary assurances simultaneously. By the way,
Apollo-13 wasn't headed for the back side of the Moon after all -- somebody
with a good grounding in the reality of space flight would have known that and
might have been embarrassed to repeat it.

Sticking to this topic, I want to get into two more claims from Dr. Greer which
give me more reason for me not to believe that his material is reliable,
trustworthy, and helpful. It deals with sightings by men on space missions.

CSETI's home page presents the story of cosmonaut Viktor Afanasyev, who
describes a structured UFO pacing his space capsule. Here's why I find this
claim impossible to believe.

The text claims that Afanasyev blasted off from Star City, Russia, in April
1979. Aside from misspelling the Salyut space station as "Solyut", there are
worse problems. Nobody blasts off from Star City, it's the training base near
Moscow, and there are no launch pads -- not a one. And in April 1979, Afanasyev
wasn't even a cosmonaut -- he didn't fly into space until December 1990, more
than a decade later. He never flew to the Salyut space station, he flew to Mir,
three times (and is there now, by the way). Nobody else docked with Salyut or
any other space station in April 1979 either. So whoever created this text knew
NOTHING but gibberish about the Russian space program -- the same goes for the
people who put this on their home page hoping you would believe it -- and it's
a good bet that Afanasyev, who DOES know when he blasted off, from where, and
what his destination was, had nothing to do with the creation of the story.

The other story I want to spend a great deal of time on involves the video from
STS-48 which shows a zig-zag dot -- widely interpreted as evidence of UFO
attacks and secret Star Wars technologies. NASA experts looked at the tape, at
the request of a congressman who had been pinged by a ufo buff constituent, and
they concluded it was a small piece of sunlit debris hit by exhaust from a
steering thruster.

For the past five years, that case has surged to become one of the most famous
-- and widely endorsed -- UFO events in history. Scientists have written
technical studies, TV shows have highlighted it -- from the tabloid TV exposés
to Larry King to even a major network, NBC -- and every new book has to spend
deveral pages bragging about it.

I will show in a separate set of briefing charts why I believe the NASA
explanation is correct and why the UFO versions are evidence for inadequate
research, poor standards of analysis, faulty logic, and overall lack of
adequate technical competence. If I can demonstrate this, it becomes one more
reason -- and a powerful one -- for not trusting any similar claims from the
same sources.

At the CSETI home page, the STS-48 event is described as "some kind of
directed-energy beam attack". Various factual assertions are made, some merely
based on lack of knowledge (the "attitude of the horizon does not change" --
misusing the technical term "attitude", along the way) and others on an
apparent intent to promulgate misinformation ("All live feed from NASA shuttles
was discontinued" -- a claim that clearly is untrue since on later flights even
more videos of moving dots have been hailed as UFOs). Behind the blizzard of
techno-gibberish, I've concluded there's nothing but bluff and bluster.

Now, let me try to prove this.....