It was the typewritten press release that caught my attention, conjuring up images of a thick-spectacled sociopath in an ill-lit basement office -- walls covered with yellowing news clippings -- frantically pecking out communiqués on an old Underwood while watching nervously over his shoulder for aliens and government agents.
Hey, you've seen the movies; you know the clichés. But I'm not your typical hard-boiled, skeptical Hollywood noir reporter. I didn't snicker about "little green men" while wadding up the press release from the Blue Ridge UFO Research Society (BRUFORS) and lobbing it into the wastebasket. True, I've never seen an unidentified flying object myself; and even the dedicated ufologists at MUFON (the international Mutual UFO Network) acknowledge that more than 90 percent of all reported UFOs turn out to be IFOs: identified flying objects.
No, I'm a skeptic of a contrary sort: I've always found it a little hard to believe that we technology-come-lately barbarians on our backwater planet could be the only game going in this roughly 10-billion-year-old galaxy. And as a child of the Watergate generation, I can't help but raise a suspicious eyebrow at my government's unvarying denial that those unearthly craft seen, photographed and videotaped by millions of credible citizens both here and abroad over the last 50 years are anything but weather balloons, military flares or swamp gas -- especially since one of those witnesses is my wife, Dixie.
That's why she and I followed the press release to a meeting of the UFO Society, where we found ourselves sitting in the midst of a score of other Western North Carolinians who say they've seen objects in the sky that their government can't or won't explain. We stared in astonishment at a magazine photo we were handed of a huge V-shaped craft identical to the two she'd seen hovering, then docking together in a lonely Texas desert nearly 20 years ago -- except that this one had been videotaped by scores of people as it loomed over Phoenix in 1997.
As I plunged in curiously and began asking people at the meeting to tell me their stories, I was relieved to find that -- far from acting like cranks or black-Nike-clad cultists -- all these folks seemed to be intelligent, articulate, commonsensical men and women from every walk of life. Many of them were retired; some reported that, in their youth, they hadn't dared expose their careers to risk and their families to ridicule by talking openly about their strange experiences.
It isn't easy to carry around such a mind-blowing secret. "You feel so alone," says Dixie. "You've had this experience that sets you apart from everyone else. ... That's the hardest part -- that the government is denying this. It sets up this disenfranchisement, this psychic pressure. I think that's the worst thing of all."
The owner of the typewriter on which that initial press release was written -- an electric one, it turns out -- is Fred Chaffee, the club's membership secretary (he was one of the group's founders when it split off from the now-defunct North Carolina chapter of MUFON in 1994). And the hospitality with which he and his wife put us wary newcomers at ease didn't fit the paranoid clichés at all. Neither did the group itself.
BRUFORS, as Chaffee and society President Harold Eadie explained, is serious about the research aspect. Seven of its members have gone through an in-house training program for field investigation of UFO sightings, and the society has sent out cards to police dispatchers throughout WNC asking them to contact BRUFORS if they receive any reports of UFOs. (So far, none have.)
"Our little group here can't do very much but investigate sightings that people report," said Eadie. The group also takes down the accounts of people who say they've been contacted or abducted by UFOs -- without, Eadie noted, giving them a hard time about it.
"We can form an opinion, but it has to be a temporary opinion, because it's changing all the time," he explained. "We can't completely accept everything we hear, but we can accept it with an open-door reservation. No matter how outlandish the stories are that we hear, we'll listen to them."
That's good advice for skeptics and believers alike to bear in mind as you read the following accounts, gathered both from BRUFORS members and from various Asheville-area residents.
Retired journalist Arnold Proner is another BRUFORS charter member. He says his attempt to broadcast film footage of a UFO led to a close encounter with the real-life "men in black."
"I worked for NBC for 40 years," Proner told the group in his down-to-earth New York City accent. In the early days of the space program, he was sent to Cape Canaveral.
In 1962, Proner was helping to modify a telescope at nearby Patrick Air Force Base that the network planned to use to film a rocket-booster separation. He and his colleagues were testing the telescope by observing NASA's Pegasus satellite, which circled the earth 200 miles up to measure radiation in the Van Allen belts. If the radiation was too heavy, NASA wouldn't launch the astronauts. On the third night of the test, they were observing the satellite as it passed from horizon to horizon.
"On one of the passes, the radar operator called and said, 'There's a UFO following the radiation sensor. Can you get us a picture?'" The telescope was connected to a video feed, which was recorded onto tape. "Sure enough, there's a spaceship. This was in 1962; the U.S. and Russians didn't have [anything like this].
"It looked like a ship with portholes and things moving around inside it, lit, with a superstructure and what looked like landing gear. We couldn't believe what we saw. I had two tape recorders, so I taped a lot of this. It was over about 2 or 3 a.m. I used to work on the Today Show, which started rehearsing about 3 a.m. So I called New York and said, 'I've got a great opening tape for you if you want to use it on the air. It's a UFO following this radiation-sensing missile.' So they said sure, they wanted it."
Proner prepared the tape for sending, then started to leave for his hotel. "As I got out of the trailer I was working in, a couple of men grabbed ahold of me and said, 'We'll take your tape.' I said, 'Why do you want my tape?' 'You were taping a Marine plane that came in yesterday with its wheels up landing and it crashed. We don't want the public [to know].' ... These guys had no identification. Anybody that was moving around at Patrick AFB had to have a lot of IDs; me, too. Around your neck, you had these things jangling. So anyway, I knew who they were -- they were Secret Service agents. They all carried .357s in the shoulder holster. And they'd call you 'sir,' and they're perfect gentlemen -- do something they don't like, and they'll break your arm. That's where our taxes are going," Proner said with a chuckle.
"Anyway, I gave them the tape. After that, the NASA press office [would tell us], 'When these astronauts come back here, and we have a press conference, if any of you reporters ask them about UFOs, you'll never come back here again.' So that's how the government treated us. Also, after almost every launch ... they'd ask you not to talk about UFOs following [the rockets]. NASA would take [the astronauts] off the channel and put them on some secret frequency we couldn't hear, because they didn't want the press to hear about it."
A recurring theme I've found in accounts of sightings here in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a strangely maneuvering triangle of lights.
"Things happen in the sky around here," noted a veteran Asheville police officer who requested anonymity. About 10 or 12 years ago, he told me, he was patrolling the north end of town, over by Riverside Cemetery, when he saw a swiftly moving triangle of strange lights "go real fast" behind a nearby mountain. Thinking it might have been Memorial Mission Hospital's air ambulance, he called his dispatcher, who checked with the authorities but learned that the ambulance wasn't in the air. Another report of the UFO had come in, however, from the other side of Merrimon Avenue.
It could have been just a military overflight, the officer speculated. But what he found more remarkable was the human reaction.
"I no sooner said that [over the radio] -- and this was about 2 or 3 in the morning -- when the roads were covered with people watching the sky. Apparently all these people had nothing better to do all night than sit up listening to police scanners!"
What appeared to be a triangular UFO formation paid Asheville a visit as recently as last spring, according to the members of local band Scrappy Hamilton and their friends. Katie Crawford describes what she and about 20 other people saw as they were sitting around a campfire at the Rising Star Farm on Beaverdam Road.
"It looked like three stars at angles to each other, in a triangle. They started moving around, changing their routes, fading in and out. It seemed like they were linked to each other, but definitely three separate things. ... You'll look at a satellite, and it'll just be on one path. It wasn't like that. ... At first they were all moving in formation. Then one did a circle around another one, while they were still moving at the same time. They did some pretty fancy stuff for a while."
The objects seemed far away, to the southwest. Crawford and the others watched until they disappeared.
Pilots, not surprisingly, frequently report seeing what could be UFOs. Eadie, for example, says he first got interested in UFOS back when they were called "foo foos."
"I spent the last nine months of Word War II in the Pentagon, with the Army Air Force," he explained. "There was scuttlebutt going on around the Pentagon about these bombers that went into action at night and they'd see all these little lights that were dashing around all over the place, doing right turns and things that normal airplanes couldn't do. They were too much involved in their mission of bombing to go and investigate them, so all they did was call them foo foos."
But Frank Henry, president of the WNC Pilots Association, was on the ground when he saw what appeared to be a triangle-shaped UFO, back in the early 1960s. He was sitting on a friend's back porch in West Asheville before dawn, waiting to catch a ride to work and looking up at the stars.
"I saw this thing blinking, really high up in the stars," remembers Henry. "I thought it was just a big star, really. Then I saw three other objects coming toward it. I said, 'Boy, that's strange-looking.' And they actually joined that one central light. They stayed that way for ... must have been a half hour." Just as he got up to go into the house and call his friend out to see them, they split up and departed in different directions. "It was just like a blink of light and they were gone."
Like most of those I spoke with, Henry is no credulous true believer. He reminded me that hot-air balloons flying at night, with their gas flames and fearful roaring, can be mistaken for UFOs. If he saw the triangle formation now, he says, he would assume it was a human-made space station being worked on. But back then, there weren't any.
BRUFORS Treasurer Tom Miller says he once saw a flying triangle in the daytime. As a teenager in the late 1940s or early '50s, he was lying in a lounge chair at Buckeye Lake in Columbus, Ohio, looking up at the sky, when he saw a triangle of three bright, silvery objects "higher than anything [human-made] could fly" at that time -- maybe 40,000 or 50,000 feet. Unlike an airplane, they didn't move at all. He looked away and back several times to be sure he was seeing them, and then they were suddenly gone. Not long after, his mother saw three similar objects in the same area, this time after dark. They remained motionless for a while, then took off one by one.
Miller also notes that six or seven years ago, the Watauga Lake area of Johnson County, in east Tennessee, was reputedly a real "hot spot" for UFOs. Many local people reported sightings to the local paper, according to Miller. "A couple of teenage boys made drawings of the V-shaped objects they'd seen -- they could almost be mistaken for stealth bombers," he said.
Perhaps that's what they were -- or perhaps they were the same things my wife and the people of Phoenix saw.
All of the BRUFORS ufologists I spoke to say they're more worried about our own government's objectives than about those of any aliens that might exist, which they say have shown no evidence of hostile intentions toward humans. Specifically, they're concerned about the black-budget-funded "military-industrial complex" that President Eisenhower warned the nation about when he left office in 1961. BRUFORS members referred me to the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (founded in Asheville by physician Steven Greer in 1990) and to the Disclosure Project, a campaign to end UFO cover-ups that Greer (who now lives in Virginia) launched on May 9, 2001, at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Asheville-area environmental activist Steve Torma showed me a videotape of this conference in June.
At the conference, 20 former military, government and industry witnesses -- the cream of hundreds Greer has interviewed -- described their involvement in government and industry cover-ups of human/extraterrestrial contact over the last 20 years and stated their willingness to testify before Congress. They described non-polluting technology taken or reverse-engineered from captured UFOs that would eliminate the need for fossil fuels -- and kept hidden because it would decimate the profits of oil companies. They spoke of seeing UFOs purposefully neutralize American nuclear missiles and space-based weaponry --which they said this military-industrial complex is developing, not to protect us from hypothetical missiles from Iraq, but to extend U.S. political domination into space, and to attack the extraterrestrial saboteurs.
The tape presents a dramatic lineup. Daniel Sheehan of Pentagon Papers, Karen Silkwood and Iran-Contra fame says he secretly copied heavily guarded photos in the National Archives of writing on the side of a downed alien craft while he was participating in an investigation into the classified portion of Project Blue Book (the U.S. Air Force's official investigation into UFOs). President Jimmy Carter ordered the probe in January 1977, after the newly inaugurated president demanded that then-Director of Central Intelligence George Bush, Sr., turn over to him the CIA's information on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Bush refused, Sheehan says he was told by the head of the investigation, because Bush suspected Carter was preparing to reveal the information to the public.
Former Air Force intelligence officer Maj. George Filer III says he was stationed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey in the 1970s when an extraterrestrial entity was shot by military police after landing at adjacent Fort Dix. The ET fled to McGuire, where it died on the tarmac. (Filer now heads the East Coast branch of MUFON.) Other cover-up witnesses -- many of whom say they've had their lives or careers threatened by members of this alleged shadow government if they talked about what they'd seen -- include astronaut Edgar Mitchell and John Callahan, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration's Accidents and Investigations section.
"If people think this is about little green men, they're sadly mistaken," Greer told me in an interview. "This is really about the way the world runs -- and the secrecy is specifically related to maintaining the current economic and geopolitical world order."
I'm planning to write more about Greer and the Disclosure Project's assertions before his upcoming visit to Asheville (see below). But don't be too surprised if the article reads like a hurriedly typed communiqué pecked out on an old manual typewriter in a clipping-lined basement cubbyhole between fearful glances over my shoulder ...
BRUFORS will show the two-hour Disclosure Project video at its meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 15 at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Kanuga Road in Hendersonville (starting at 7:30 p.m.). And on Nov. 5, Greer plans to return to Asheville as part of a nationwide, city-by-city tour he's conducting to build support for holding Congressional hearings into alleged UFO cover-ups. To find out more, call BRUFORS at 692-8937 or visit www.disclosureproject.org.
Pullquote:"If people think this is about little green men, they're sadly mistaken. This is really about the way the world runs."
-- Disclosure Project founder Dr. Steven Greer.
Kudos to Steve Rasmussen, one of your staff reporters who wrote the feature article, "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... ?" in the Aug. 8 edition of Mountain Xpress.
[The article did] a great job of covering a most controversial subject, and to be sure a highly charged one at that, involving the cover-up of the UFO phenomenon by our Federal Government.
However, a few minor discrepancies in the otherwise splendid report should be corrected, just to set the record straight. First of all, when I first submitted the initial press release announcing the Blue Ridge UFO Research Society meetings over a year ago, I wrote all my notices on a manual typewriter, not on an electric one as Steve credited me with operating. Being a reluctant senior citizen, I still am wedded to an obsolete machine of a very old vintage. Thank you, Steve, for the compliment, though it is hardly deserved.
Incidentally, I've been serving BRUFORS as corresponding secretary, publicist and program director now for the past year, and I suppose you could call me the club's membership secretary.
The statement that BRUFORS split off from the now-defunct North Carolina chapter of MUFON in 1994 is partially correct, but not entirely, since the chapter is still very much alive and functioning under the able leadership of its State Director, George Lund II of Charlotte (another former Massachusetts resident like myself).
BRUFORS only wanted to be an independent group, not associated with the national organization, the Mutual UFO Network -- then headquartered in Seguin, Texas. We wished to be "free" of the bureaucratic policies of MUFON, although I and a few other BRUFORS members continue to hold membership in MUFON. In fact, I've been a member of MUFON since 1981.
Concerning the excellent report on the sightings of one of our charter members, Arnold Proner, I should simply clarify his job status with commercial television back in 1962. He was an official cameraman covering stories for NBC for 40 years, not actually a journalist in the true sense of the word.
Again, thank you, Steve, for attending a number of our meetings in Hendersonville and being an objective journalist. As a former newspaper reporter myself, I can understand how easy it is to make inadvertent mistakes in coverage from time to time. You are forgiven, "old buddy."
- Fred R. Chaffee
Hendersonville