SUBJECT: MUFON SYMPOSIUM ! FILE: UFO2555 The following is a report from the 1992 Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 10-12, 1992. This report is intended primarily for the use of members of the NEWAGE, ISSUES and SPACE Forums of the CompuServe Information Service, and is copyright (c) 1992 Joseph T. Walters. This report may be distributed freely and without restriction as long as this header is retained intact. Thanks! Joe Walters, CompuServe 76702,1007 Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 12, 1992 ---------------------------------------------------- FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1992 Greetings from the MUFON Symposium! It was raining here in the desert as the Symposium began. This was the first night of the get-together, and there weren't any real scheduled events (except for the $5.00 reception), but we got to see who all was around. Looked like around 1000 or so people were gathered in the Doubletree for the pre-symposium festivities, and the promised ISSUES Forum table was set up in the lower part of the lobby (by the waterfall, near the guitar player). There were 10 or so members of ISSUES and NEWAGE around there, and after some intros and conversation, five of us adjourned to Baca's Restaurant for some New Mexican cuisine and paranormal tabletalk. A good time was had by all, and we returned to the hotel. Joe Balsamo, David Brune and I retreated to David's room... ah, SUITE... and had fun trying to tie in Joe's PowerBook to the phone system. Finally got online, proving it can be done, and that pretty much did it for the evening. Expect some more detailed reports from us tomorrow, probably late evening. The symposium has events scheduled from 9:00am to around 10:00pm, with meal breaks. Looks like this is going to be a real fun time! There are numerous dignitaries here (Joe and David thought they might have recognized Bob Lazar), and we'll have detailed info on that as stories develop. ---------------------------------------------------- SATURDAY, JULY 11, 1992 Hello again from the MUFON Symposium in Albuquerque! Much much much happened today, and I took notes. We'll see how much of it I can cram into this Forum before it bursts. I first went into the Dealers' Room and checked out the goodies; this was just a cursory overview, and I'll go into more detail later. I again ran into Joe Balsamo and David Brune, who were standing around Stanton Friedman's table awaiting autographs. Lost sight of them shortly thereafter, and didn't see them again until after lunch. There were 14 sessions scheduled for today, ranging in (scheduled) length from 30 minutes to 1 hour (I thought it interesting that the session titled "Fifty-six Aircraft Sightings Involving Electromagnetic Effects" was allocated 55 minutes). They got off to a late start, due to long lines at the registration tables. The 9:00am "Welcome" speech didn't start until almost 9:30, and everyone ran long anyway... After the welcome and intro, the first session started. This was one of the best of the day, titled "The UFO Jigsaw," and given by Linda Moulton Howe. Linda started with a quick overview of UFO history, from the 1947 Roswell crash to more recent sightings, various alien types, animal mutilations, and crop circles. She had an entertaining and enlightening slide show with some video mixed in. Many of the slides consisted of drawings by witnesses, and illustrated the surprising correlation between totally separate reports. Other slides covered animal mutilation shots (including some very recent ones) and other related material. She also showed a short video of Bob Lazar, a video about crop circles, and a real interesting video taken at the site of a crop circle, at which a small white object was observed apparently floating a few inches above the ground and moving about slowly, approaching the camera and moving about. Eerie! This was a particularly interesting session to me, as I had "heard" about much of this stuff on CompuServe, but had never seen the videos presented. The next session was the "Fifty-Six Aircraft Pilot Sightings..." session, given by Dr. Richard F. Haines. Though this contained some interesting data assembly, it was DRY. I faded out a few times during this one. Lots of reading of statistics and numbers. A few interesting graphs. Basically, Dr. Haines had correlated and analyzed data from several inflight UFO incidents, and found some interesting characteristics. For instance, most of the incidents occurred between 9:00 and 11:00pm (local) and shortly after midnight. However, there was no pattern of aircraft type or nationalities involved. Most such reports came from U.S. Military aircraft and foreign commercial planes. U.S. commercial planes, foreign military aircraft, and private aircraft accounted for relatively few sightings. All but one of the engine failure incidents were propeller/reciprocating engine craft; only one jet aircraft reported such. The next session started up, "The Role of the Mutual UFO Network in UFO Research," given by MUFON International Director Walter H. Andrus. This was almost entirely a slide show depicting buildings and personnel of MUFON and a few other UFO research groups. Mr. Andrus had some difficulty with the slide projector controller, and almost every time he tried to change to the next slide, he jumped ahead two slides and had to back up one. This was mildly amusing at first, but after a half hour and no improvement, it began to resemble the Chinese Water Torture. Mr. Andrus broke off halfway thru his presentation to allow the lunch break on schedule. I went foraging with ISSUES Forum members Jan Murdoch and Terry Rodemerk; we found that most of the food establishments around the Convention Center (which is in Albuquerque's downtown area) were closed on weekends, but we found a little sandwich & burger place that wasn't too bad. After lunch, I went in to scope out the Dealer Room in more detail. First impression: BOOKS. Lots of books. Literally hundreds of titles, mostly UFO-based (natch). These and other titles ranged from the serious to the absurd; topics covered included Mu, Abominable Snowmen, Future Sex, Flying Serpents and Dragons, Kohoutek (Really! Kohoutek!), Nostradamus (but not Nostra-Dennis), Uri Geller and more and more. Besides the books were some other items, including cute little stuffed Greys, bumper stickers ("MJ-12 Staff Car", "This car stalls for UFOs", etc.), T-shirts (serious and humorous; my favorites were the ones with the "cattle crossing" sign, with UFOs or Greys depicted--another touted "The University of Pleiades"), some jewelry (both Native American silver-and-turquoise Albuquerque tourist stuff and UFO-related; my fave here was a bolo tie with the head of a Grey as the clasp), little UFO spinning tops, and several MUFON items (mugs, license plate covers, bumper stickers, etc.). Back to the seminar room! First, Mr. Andrus finished off his "faces & names" slide show. Next up was Mr. Montague Keen of Suffolk, England, to enlighten us on what's up with crop circles. He was a fascinating fellow, and gave an excellent presentation filled with that famous dry British humor (or humour, I guess I should say!). He described several theories floating around trying to explain these things, but it was clear that there is still no definitive explanation for them. He did mention that they've started up again this year, and that there have been more than 70 of these things that have cropped up (sorry) in England alone since April. He brought up the two guys who confessed to being the cause of all the circles last year, and pointed out that the paper that reported them in the first place basically retracted the story the next day, but the international press somehow missed that aspect of the story. The next session was "Photo Analysis: A Pictorial Primer," given by Jeffrey W. Sainio, a photo analyst from Wisconsin who has done much analysis of UFO pics. This was a most interesting presentation, pretty much all slides, with discussion of how hoax pictures are often identified. He didn't seem to want to commit himself as far as any given pictures being outright fake or genuine, but (interestingly) spent a lot of time on some of the Ed Walters photos (no relation, though my father's name WAS Ed), and apparently was unable to find any indication of fakery within. He showed a couple of the Meier photos, and showed some questionable discrepancies there. Good demo of simple visual cues as well as some more sophisticated photo computer enhancement and analysis. Next was "Ufology in the Commonwealth of Independent States," given by Vladimir Ajaja, President of the Soviet UFO Center in Moscow. Dr. Ajaja spoke in Russian, and his translator was heavily accented and hard to understand. I had again run into NEWAGE's Joe Balsamo and David Brune, and we left at the beginning of this session for a dinner and... a little field trip. ---------------------------------------------------- FIELD TRIP: MONZANO BASE Joe & Joe & Dave left the Convention Center, only to discover that for the second day in a row it was raining in the desert land. We headed across Albuquerque to the eastern edge of town, south of Interstate 40, to the area nearest to that part of Kirtland AFB called Monzano Base. The mountain range north of I40 is called the Sandias; the Monzanos start on the south side of the highway. In recent years, the city has developed right up to the fence marking the boundary at Monzano, so we were able to drive right up to the edge of the base. We took some pictures (and will scan & upload before long) and saw some interesting things. The area in question consists of a joined series of four hills, arranged north-south. Inevitably, this area has become known as the "four hills" area. The northernmost hill (the largest, several hundred feet high) was the closest, and apparently the most interesting. There was some sort of structure on the top of this hill (might be a couple of trailers or small white buildings; two antennas are visible as well); it was the only man-made thing visible on any of the four hills themselves. Around the base of the hills are several smaller structures; a few house-sized buildings, some groups of buildings among some trees, and several trapezoidal-shaped concrete walls with doors (identical to the entrances to bunkers you see at nuclear weapons storage facilities) leading into the hills. It is well known that these hills are riddled with caves and tunnels (man-made), and that nuclear warheads have been stored here. Every year or so, a local camera crew gets to go inside and shoot some footage. This usually consists of long empty hallways with a few people walking about. We never get to see what, if anything, is stored in there. However, a TV news report here just last week showed that a new nuke storage facility underground on the southern part of Kirtland had been opened, all the nukes from Monzano had been moved to this new facility, and that the Air Force had given over the Monzano facility to the Department of Energy. They had no idea what was in there. This is the place often rumored as the final storage site for the 1947 Roswell saucer, among other related relics. I don't know; could be anything. Circling (I use the word "circling" here loosely) the entire facility is a wide strip (about 100 meters wide) of clean-scraped earth, on which rest 4 concentric rings of fence. Within the fence is a circular set of power lines, with power poles alternating with light fixtures (the area is not visibly lighted at night; they may be UV or some such). Not an easy area to sneak into! We could see that there were signs at intervals along the internal fences, but we could not get close enough to see them. We speculated that they might be "Deadly Force" warning signs, but could not tell. Perhaps another time... The fence we were actually up against was a couple of hundred yards away from the high-security fence, and was topped with barbed wire. Signs warned us that entry was forbidden without the Base Commander's permission; this was the true boundary of Kirtland Air Force Base. I expected it would be safe enough to cross that fence, and that we could probably make it up to near the security fence, but would probably make some new acquaintances at that point. Local housing developments literally reach right up to this fence. In the four years I've lived here, I've never seen a sign of life in or near the Monzano base. As far as I could tell by sight, the thing could have been abandoned. Imagine our surprise when a tan Suburban truck suddenly appeared, driving slowly around the perimeter on obvious patrol. This was inside the high-security fence, too far away for us to read any markings on the truck. Whatever is in there, whatever, it is clearly considered important enough to someone to warrant nuclear-level security and constant patrols (in vehicles, not just on foot!). During my own time in Strategic Air Command in the Air Force, as a KC-135 pilot, I saw many of the typical nuclear weapons storage facilities at SAC bases with bomber wings; this looked far more secure. Rumors abound locally of dog patrols, ground-based motion sensors, mines between some rows of the fences, electrified fences and more. Just rumors. Who knows? ---------------------------------------------------- DINNER & BACK TO THE SHOW Following the Field Trip, the three of us adjourned to Garduno's (put a squiggle over that "n") for the best available meal experience in Albuquerque. Amidst the live mariachi music, we stuffed ourselves full of chips & salsa, some terrific New Mexican entrees, sopapillas, and a couple of large margueritas (except for the designated driver), and we conversed over the events of the day. All this took a little longer than planned, so we missed the next scheduled session, "Forbidden Science: The UFO Phenomenon and the Research Community" by Dr. Jacques Vallee. We arrived just as that had ended, and there was a small crowd around Dr. Vallee, including a TV crew with the attendant bright lights. The last session of the night was the eagerly-awaited "Abduction Observed by Independent Witnesses" by Bud Hopkins. Just before this started, I realized I had left my name tag in my car, so I had to go back and get it so the Men In Badges would let me back in to the conference room. I made it back just in time, and as I reentered the Convention Center, I had to hold the elevator door for three folks hurrying to get on board. I didn't realize until they were up on the stage that these three folks were Hopkins, "Linda" (more about whom later), and another woman with them. Dang! Had them all alone and didn't know it! Hopkins wasted no time getting into the details of an interesting case, one that has been discussed online to some extent recently. This event occurred in New York City in November of 1989. He had received a letter from this "Linda" (we didn't yet know she was present) detailing an abduction event; he had interviewed her and basically filed the info away with other reports. Some time later, he got a letter from two policemen who had witnessed an abduction and wanted to come forward; turns out they had seen Linda's abduction. Drawings made independently by the cops and another witness who later came forward matched astoundingly well, and corroborated Linda's story. As time went on, the story began to take strange turns. The cops had a hard time dealing with what they had seen, and took on some strange behavioral patterns (including watching Linda in her apartment without her knowledge, sleeping with weapons ready against the possibility of the aliens coming after them, and more). Then it turned out they weren't cops, but were intelligence agents for an unnamed organization; they had been escorting an unnamed government VIP, who had also witnessed the event, and were trying to determine the correct actions to take. Hopkins made it clear that he had determined what agency these two worked for, and who the "third man" was, but wouldn't reveal these sources, a condition of their coming forward. He indicated that he felt that they would reveal themselves before long. Well, it wasn't over yet. Linda had long complained to her doctor about a sensitive spot in her nose; he finally convinced her to allow him to X-ray her. Hopkins showed a slide of the X-ray, which showed a spiral-shaped implant clearly visible within the nose. He said that the night after the X-ray was taken, Linda awoke suddenly with blood on her lower face and hand and no idea of what had happened. She hadn't received the developed X-rays yet, but after they arrived and she saw the implant, she had another X-ray taken and the implant was gone. Hopkins speculated that bombarding the thing with X-rays may have set off some alarm somewhere, and they may have come back to retrieve it. In a later conversation with her young son, Linda was horrified to learn that he had been abducted some months before her event; he asked why she didn't wake up and help him while he was screaming and crying at being taken by these little grey characters. She took her son to see Hopkins, who had him draw a picture, which he showed us on the slide screen. A typical child's drawing, it nonetheless clearly depicts exactly the same type of scene witnessed at her abduction. But wait, there's more! The two cops/intel guys showed up at her place unannounced one day and demanded to talk to her alone; she offered to have them come in, call Bud Hopkins over, and they could talk. They didn't like that, and after further refusal, bodily carried her out to their car and drove off with her. They interrogated her for some time, asking if she was trying to trick or hoax them, if she was trying to mess with their lives. They had her take her shoes off so they could examine her feet--they said that they thought she might be one of "them," and that they knew what their feet looked like: they had no toes. They discussed National Security with her and took her home. Some time later, she awakened at night choking on something; turns out she had a nosebleed on the right side. Her husband awoke too, also with a nosebleed on the right side. Her son and a friend sleeping over also awoke with nosebleeds on the right side. This was apparently very recent, as they haven't followed up on it yet; Hopkins said they would be X-raying them all, but hadn't yet. He said there was still more to this story, but as time was running out, he brought Linda up on stage, and she answered a few questions from the audience. Well, this was a pretty spooky session, and the last item on the agenda was a Q&A session with all the day's speakers on the panel. Not much new came up here, and this was cut short by the fire alarm going off. False alarm, but it did clear the building. There was much joking speculation as to who set it off... That's it for today (and that's ENOUGH!). Tomorrow is the last day of the Symposium, and features five sessions and a few other events. ---------------------------------------------------- SUNDAY, JULY 12, 1992 The 1992 MUFON Symposium is over, and, though I can't speak for the others, I'm about UFO-ed out! And it was the third consecutive day of rain here in the desert. Well, apparently I was up too late last night typing something (can't imagine what), as I overslept about an hour today. I made it to the Convention Center today during the last part of the first session. Sorry! Sue me. Hopefully, someone else will give a comprehensive report of that session. The first session was "UFOs and Ufology in Brazil," by Phillippe Piet van Putten, listed as MUFON National Director for Brazil. He spoke decent enough English that we could understand him very well. As I arrived, he was just showing a slide of some runners in a footrace, with an amorphous blob visible in the sky in the background. Missed what that was about. He then showed a video that appeared to me to be taken from a Brazilian TV show (or several shows and news reports). The sound was off, as the soundtrack was in Portuguese anyway; van Putten narrated. The video showed several Brazilian military and air traffic control officials, talking about live and on-radar sightings of UFOs; there were also shots of some of the 150 passengers on a Brazilian jetliner that witnessed a UFO flying near their plane. Officials included the Minister of Aeronautics, who stated outright that "we have secret UFO files in the Air Force." There was a description of a sighting (on radar) of a group of 21 objects, and fighters (F-5s and Mirages) were scrambled. We saw some of the pilots, and the video had an animated recreation of what they were describing (similar look to the animations we see on US network news shows). These UFOs appeared to be spherical in shape, slightly smaller than the planes, and changing colors rapidly. The planes and UFOs were depicted as moving at the same speed, with the spheres moving around the planes in flight. There was a long shot of what appeared to be a sphere of indeterminate size floating above Sao Paolo and changing color and perhaps spinning (hard to tell). In addition, there were many shots of blurry objects in the sky and witnesses on-camera. He also showed some slides of toy balloons, which he said are often launched into the air at night in Brazil with fireworks attached; the resulting light show (a) is entertaining, and (b) tends to generate lots of UFO reports. He described several incidents and eyewitness accounts, including some with numerous witnesses. He concluded by mentioning that these reports came from military officers, government Ministers, air traffic controllers, professional people and others. He said, "These people... are... not... idiots." This clearly heartfelt line, delivered with much emphasis and emotion, drew lengthy applause. Either he started late or ran long (or both), as I was still able to get so much from this presentation. van Putten was a most entertaining speaker. The second session was "Operation Blue Fly" by Clifford Stone, UFO researcher from Roswell, New Mexico. He began with the basic history of the Roswell crash of 1947 (I won't duplicate it here, as there are at least three good books out on the subject!), and mentioned two military programs, called Project Moondust and Project Blue Fly; Moondust was ostensibly designed for recovery of space debris from US sources, but according to a mission document Stone showed, its true purpose was the recovery of "Soviet and unknown space debris." He had received a copy of the mission document in (I think) 1952, which was at the time mostly uncensored; he then showed a later copy of it he had petitioned for via Freedom of Information (hoping to get the few parts of the doc that had been blanked out on his original), and what he got was a document composed entirely out of blank pages. It had been classified after the fact, and when he wrote back with some sample text from his copy, he was accused of violating national security. Stone then went into the Blue Fly project, which he said was formed for the purpose of rapid deployment, quick response for recovery of Soviet equipment. He learned of 38 documents relating to this project, and sent for them; all were unreleasable. From there, he detailed attempts by New Mexico Senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici to acquire information on the Roswell incident, and went into long detail as to the stonewalling they encountered. Stone had some interesting info, but was highly disorganized, often stopping in mid-sentence to page thru his notes looking for something. Still, it was a decent presentation. And if the two Senators are still interested in trying to get some of this data out, perhaps something will come of it eventually. Next was "The Missing Embryo/Fetus Syndrome" by Richard M. Neal, M.D., a gynecologist and MUFON consultant. This was rather clinical, and a bit hard to follow for us non-medical types; basically, he noted that many of the reported abductions by women include mention of examinations and/or interference of this type, some of these turn up apparently pregnant sometime after the incidents, only to find that there is no fetus present. If there were any conclusions from this, they were probably summed up in a slide which stated that there was no indication of missing pregnancy (i.e. feti generated and removed) in abductees. There were slides of examinations of some patients, mostly ultrasound and a few internal fiber-optic camera fetus shots. There were also a few external exam photos explicit enough to make me wonder if the patients in question knew their more personal areas were being displayed openly on a big screen to an audience of thousands... These latter shots were shown primarily to show some scars and incisions that apparently occurred during the abduction events; they were horrifyingly mindful of some of the scenes in cattle mutilation shots, but on a smaller scale. What a great session to put just before lunch! David Brune and I, along with Cherry Kilgore (a telecommunications user from a GEneric non-CIS online service), went exploring for lunch sites, and happened into a what turned out to be a horrible greasy-spoon place called Lindy's. Worst chicken fried steak I've ever eaten in 30+ years of CFS connoisseur-ship. At first, I thought they had put brown gravy on the thing (Horrors! A sure sign of yankee influence!), but it turned out not to be gravy--rather, it was a brownish substance roughly the consistency of water, which quickly made the Fries inedibly soggy. Well, sometimes life gives you fish cookies. We took our time on the lunch break, and returned during the next session, "Global Ufology: Worldwide Cases, Official Policies, and Ufological Attitudes" by J. Antonio Huneeus, MUFON International Coordinator from New York City. He covered a lot of international incidents, and was into the Belgian flap when we came in. He showed slides, almost all of which were "artists' conceptions," depicting the incidents that have occurred recently in that part of the world. He showed a video of a production shown in Russia, with a few very blurry shots of glowing lights in the night sky. Some indistinct photos appeared here. He also showed some shots from various other European countries and Japan, including some Japanese crop circles. He said there had been over 100 crop circles in Hokkaido alone in 1991. The pictures from Japan were a pleasant sight, after the fuzzy blurry European shots. Huneeus mentioned this point, and said that there were more good UFO pics coming out of Japan than anywhere else. He didn't think that there were more UFOs there, but that there were more cameras! He has a point. He told us to compare with what's coming out of Russia: lots of text reports, few pictures. Walter Andrus (MUFON Director--see yesterday's report) came up at this point to present an annual MUFON award (sorry I missed its name!), and there was much applause. The final session was Stanton T. Friedman's presentation on "Crashed Saucers, Majestic-12, and the Debunkers." Much of this was description of the Roswell incident, which is covered in detail in several books; Friedman himself has a new book on the subject, called "Crash at Corona." (Corona is a little town northwest of Roswell, near the ranch where the crash occurred.) He spent some time discussing this and debunkers (I gather he doesn't like debunkers; he gave this subject a lot of time, and put them down throughout the talk). Lastly he went into Majestic-12, describing the events around the revelation of the documents describing this organization. He talked of attempts to debunk the MJ12 papers, and went into some detail as to why he believed them genuine. Friedman was a very dynamic speaker, and gave a terrific presentation, including some slides. Good conclusion to a good show! After this, David Brune and I went thru the Dealer Room for one last time, just to see if there was anything left to tempt us. David bought a T-shirt, and we both almost collapsed on the floor laughing when we picked up a book and looked thru it. The book was "Galactic Gourmet." That's right, a gen-u-ine UFO cookbook. Recipes included the ever-popular Alpha Centauri Meat Loaf, Andromeda Chicken and Rice, Martian Tacos (they have tacos on Mars now? What do they call it, Mars-Mex??), the dreaded Neptune Frankfurter Lima Bean Bake, a frightening concoction called Asteroids Zucchini Loaf, Flying Saucer Pancakes, UFO Apple Crunch Residue, and, for dessert, Unidentified Frozen Object. Jeez!!! We noted that most--if not all--of the recipes, interestingly enough, consisted of only Terrestrial ingredients. David and I ran into Joe Balsamo, and we decided to skip the final Q&A session. I left for home. Great show! It's a real advantage to have a national show come to your home town, but most of the crowd was nonetheless from out of town. Pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the presentations left much to think about. It was also fun to meet Joe Balsamo, David Brune, Terry Eckert, Terry Rodemerk, Jan Murdoch, and a few others from NEWAGE and ISSUES Forums. Keep watching the skies! -JTW ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************