Last Friday night, just before 11pm ,
a cluster of about 20 bright lights were seen crossing the sky over Great
Britain Ireland Scotland North Sea . It's likely that
this spectacle might generate a few UFO reports too. If you want to make a UFO
report for the first time, with no experience of the subject, and you go to
Google and put in "UFO", one of the first hits you'll get is the
website of BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association, see: http://www.bufora.org.uk/content/
For a long time now, I've been a believer in synchronicity and used the word
"coincidence" less and less to explain the way separate events can be
very apt in their timing. You see, the day after this celestial fireworks
display, the BUFORA Conference began and I attended.
As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I'm financially much
worse off than I used to be; I've not been able to do my usual tour of the
conspiracy/paranormal conference circuit this year, however I remain in good
spirits. Compared to others who have shared my fate, like Tony Farrell and
Kevin Annett (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-ldidg.html),
I've been very fortunate. I have a roof over my head and food on my table;
what's more I've managed to break my addiction to materialism and consumerism
that we're all conditioned to get hooked on, and I've realized that there's a
spiritual dimension to life that you can't get sacked from! I also believe that
the universe helps you along if you can keep a positive frame of mind, and as
"luck" would have it several conferences have been organized this
year that are cheap and easy to get too, so I've been able to join the other
delegates there. One of these was the BUFORA Conference which took place in London London Oxford
The hotel itself is modern and very grand, a bit too grand perhaps. There was nowhere we
could purchase refreshments over the counter and when I asked if there was
somewhere I could buy a cup of tea the receptionist said: "Go and sit in
the bar and I'll send the waiter in to serve you." I did so and about five
minutes later a very dapper man in a suit came in and said: "What would
you like, Sir?" This 5-star service arrangement is all well and good if
you enjoy that kind of thing, but when you've got a 15 minute break between
speakers you just long to be able to just flip somebody 50 pence and have them
hand you over a mug of tea straight away. I apologized to the waiter and told
him I didn't have time. Then I did what I should have done to begin with:
nipped out of the hotel to the greasy spoon across the road. This became the
generally-accepted social gathering place for many of the delegates over the
weekend.
The three letters "UFO" are a very good root for
acronyms because they have two vowels with a consonant in the middle, hence the
ease with which names like MUFON, BUFOG, CUFOS etc roll off the tongue. BUFORA
is another, although it was originally BUFOA, the British UFO Association; the
R for "research" was added in 1964 when the original group merged
with another. The tall and learned-looking founder-president Lionel Beer (BUFORA link) opened the
conference with a brief history of the organization. It began in September 1962
at a meeting in Kensington Central Library; this was exactly 50 years ago, so
this one was a very special anniversary conference: the half-centenary, as you
can see in the banner (Thanks to Matt Lyons, the BUFORA chairman for allowing
HPANWO to illustrate this article with these official graphics). Their first
Chairman was Nick Stephenson whose photo is below. As another speaker quipped:
"It's 65 years since 1947 so modern UFOlogy is at a pensionable age."
BUFORA immediately recruited a network of investigators and got stuck in to all
the biggest and most promising British cases, the "Warminster Thing",
the Lakenheath Incident, the famous 1979 House of Lords UFO debate and many
others. BUFORA has a reputation for being a "pure" UFOlogical group,
an aspect which I'll expand on more later, but it's had its fair share of
sinister and underhand attention over the years, including an attempted
infiltration by the Church of Scientology and the Aetherius Society. The latter
are bat-excrement crazy, but pretty harmless; however the former are well-known
to have a dark and violent side to them. When Lionel received threats he was understandably
worried. In the early years he also had to contend with the rise of the far right
and their own involvement with UFO's. BUFORA members were harassed by the
sinister and mysterious people calling themselves "APEN- the Aerial
Phenomenon Enquiry Network". This is believed by many to be a
cover-organization for the National Front or one of the other BNP-like parties
that were popular at the time. The Government were investigating those parties
at the time and people showed up at BUFORA meetings whom Lionel swears were MI5
or Special Branch. I'm not sure, but I suspect that APEN was actually run by
the Government itself, however they'd be foolish to let every department of MI5
and Special Branch in on that secret so I don't doubt that real agents from
those outfits did attend Lionel's meetings as he said they did. I met a man
from Germany
BUFORA also found itself hurled into Cold War politics,
which, sadly, few people managed to escape in the 60's and 70's. A staffer from
the Soviet Embassy joined and although Lionel approved his membership it lost
the organization a part of its security certificate. More infiltrators turned
up at meetings and asked political questions. Lionel thinks that these people
were testing BUFORA to see where its political loyalties lay. He was also
tested to see if he would swallow disinformation. Luckily the Association has a
policy of being non-political which was a wise move in those days; and it still
is, up to a point. BUFORA has long been affiliated with the magazine Flying Saucer Review, and since Gordon
Creighton sadly went, as Lionel puts it, "to that great saucer in the
sky" BUFORA has been given the substantial research archives of that
oldest of UFO journals. Lionel has had his house raided by the police, has been
arrested for photographing Bentwaters Base (This was before the Rendlesham
Forest Incident), sat for five hours in the House of Lords public gallery, been
thrown out of Morely College and had L Ron Hubbard threaten to drown him in the
sea! The life of a UFO investigator is not without its hazards.
The next speaker was Heather Dixon (BUFORA link) She spoke clearly and professionally during her hour on stage, obviously she has experience of doing lectures. She is striking in appearance, disarmingly pretty and smartly-dressed with a head of well-groomed, lush blonde hair. She began by lamenting about how much of the information available to UFOlogists nowadays is false and misleading; I agree completely with that and have said as much myself, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/fake-alien-videos.html She then went on to explain how it is that people can make mistakes about what they see in the sky, how they might see something that they don't recognize and assume wrongly that it's inexplicable. Several times during her lecture she repeated: "More than 98% of all reported sightings have a mundane explanation" and this was a point reiterated by several other speakers. The list of things that can confuse the witness is enormous; 60% of reports can be explained as Chinese lanterns. I'm ashamed to say that I was taken in by them too; once but never again! There are other things such as laser light shining into the sky; although I think they've been banned because they can dazzle aircraft pilots and could even cause a plane crash. Astronomical objects are major culprits, like the planet Venus. I find it hard to believe that large numbers of people could be fooled that way, especially professional observers like pilots and policemen, but Heather says these do account for a large proportion of the reports received. She presented statistics of sightings and their analysis in the same way other speakers did. The International Space Station, birds, kites, balloons and satellites in space also cause people to pick up the phone and call. She also echoes Mark Pilkington, Nick Cook and others by claiming that the Government is quite pleased when people think they've seen spacecraft from another planet when they accidentally intrude on a top secret test of some new spy-plane. This may true in some cases, but it in no way accounts for the entire UFO phenomenon. And I also suspect that some kind of double-bluff may be in operation; the Government could be using aviation projects to launder their secret UFO research programmes, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/roswell-no-aliens-just-sound-waves.html She then went on to discuss what she calls "high strangeness". This is of course the title of a famous book by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, but Heather uses the term to mean close encounters and the abduction phenomenon. She made a lot of the same points Richard Wiseman does in his book Paranormality, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/paranormality-by-prof-richard-wiseman.html: hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of mind, sleep paralysis etc. During the Question and Answer session at the end I asked Heather: "Leaving aside the whole UFO subject and just concentrating on the 'high strangeness', can the explanations you've just given account for every single case you've ever investigated?" To her credit, Heather immediately replied: "No." She then told me about a man she knows in Northumberland whom she gives the pseudonym "Steve Robinson". She thinks he could be experiencing real alien contact. I enjoyed listening to Heather's address and she's quite right to make people aware that it's essential to eliminate all mundane explanations for UFO sightings before postulating the possibility of ET involvement, but I would have liked to have heard more about "Steve Robinson" and any other real cases she'd encountered. She only had a limited time to speak, I know, but I hope she'll maybe do a new speech next time where she squeezes the explicables down to 20 or 30 minutes and leaves the rest for the real ET research she's done. I'd make a similar observation about two other speakers, Jenny Randles and Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos (See: http://www.nicap.org/bios/ballester-olmos.htm) Vicente Juan's statistics showed that on one occasion the number of unexplained sightings rose from its comfortable average of 2 or 5% to 40%; but he blames that on less cases being examined; and "unexplained" being the default category for a case not yet investigated. However, bear in mind that investigators have different viewpoints. One of the cases he quoted as "solved" was the Solway Firth Spaceman; however I think that there is need for a second opinion on his diagnosis, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/solway-firth-spaceman.html
Heather Dixon supports the policy BUFORA have towards the
use of hypnosis to retrieve information from a witness. They're against it. She
says hypnosis simply fuels and solidifies fantasy and can construct false
memories. This is highly disputed and there are many other groups who endorse
the use of hypnosis and rebut the misgivings Heather described. I recently
interviewed Mary Rodwell on HPANWO Radio, see from 0.46.40: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-11-podcast-mary-rodwell.html.
As she details in the interview, she think hypnosis is a good method of recovering
lost recollections and explains why she refutes the theory that it generates
falsified memory. The same goes for AMMACH, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/ammach-conference-2012.html.
Jenny Randles
(See: http://www.ufoevidence.org/researchers/detail40.htm)
is a living legend in the UFO community. She is one of the "Four
Horsewomen" of Rendlesham Forest Four, Dot Street North Wales
via a live Skype link (A lot of UFO enthusiasts seem to live in North
Wales for some reason). Like several of the other speakers she
once again reminded us that over 95% of all reported sightings are explicable
in mundane terms, what she called "IFO's- Identified Flying Objects";
it began to sound a bit like a mantra to me. She thinks it's important to focus
on IFO's for the same reason Heather Dixon does, however I once again found
myself wondering if they're focusing on that a bit too much. Jenny plans to
write a book on IFO's... a book!? Normally it's only Skeptics who write books
like that (I analyze exactly what I mean by "Skeptics" as opposed to
"sceptics" in this episode of HPANWO Radio, from 1.07.23: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-5-podcast-skeptics.html)
But Jenny is not a Skeptic, she has not completely rejected the
Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Perhaps we could call her and people like her an
"IFOlogist". As a writer myself I know how much effort is required to
write a book; it means giving up a year or more of your life to write, rewrite,
revise, edit, submit, negotiate with publishers etc. Jenny is taking the line
Heather did, the perceived necessity of constantly looking over your shoulder,
to an even greater degree. Another observation Jenny made was that when people
experience a UFO sighting, like in the case of the meteor shower the night
before, you'll often find that they embellish the details of the sighting. For
example if they see a few balls of fire trailing across the sky they'll then
later on claim that they saw a structured craft with lights running along it,
or that they heard a buzzing alien-like sound coming from it etc. This may sometimes
be the case, but there are other incidents which indicate the exact opposite.
The strange case of the "Avebury Carlos" is one. A few years ago,
some engineers built a fake UFO out of a model plane and flew it over Avebury,
an ancient sacred site and a gathering place for mystics, hippies and pagans.
The intention was to fool them and therefore show them up for being dupes.
People did indeed report a UFO, but in a way the plan backfired because they reported pretty much what they
saw. There were none of the embellishments and exaggerations that the
hoaxers were banking on. It showed that even the so-called “most gullible
members of society” have turned out to be much better witnesses than previously
thought. Jenny Randles has recently been a focus of controversy because of her
views on one of the most significant events in British UFOlogical history, the
Berwyn Mountains Incident of 1974, the "Welsh Roswell" (This is an
inaccurate nickname, in my view, because it does not involve a crash-retrieval.
See here for my review of the book on the subject UFO Down by Andy Roberts: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/ufo-down-by-andy-roberts.html)
This case has been massively played down by the mainstream media with facetious
newspaper reports like this one: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3380291/The-RosWelsh-incident.html
This article is not only making a mockery of the entire event in true tabloid
style, with its comic-book illustration and the clumsy, Murdochian forced pun
in the title; it contains errors that could so easily have been avoided that I
can only conclude that they were "deliberately not avoided"; for example, the police searched the wrong mountain! However the dismissal of
the magnitude of the Berwyn Mountains case comes from inside the UFO community
too. To this day many UFOlogists maintain that this was the coinciding of an
earthquake and bolide meteor, together with the "earthlights" phenomenon
written about by Paul Devereux. Unfortunately Jenny is one of them; in fact she
even claims to have seen an earthlight herself during a field trip to the Berwyn Berwyn Berwyn
During our Saturday lunch break I was walking though the
merchandise area when I saw an elderly man wearing a neatly-pressed suit. He
looked well built and his head was shaved, though he had a sparse beard, like a
retired bouncer; but he also had an intensely jolly smile and bright eyes that
looked youthful and full of joie-de-vivre.
I went up and spoke to him. He had a calm, mellow and intelligent voice. It
wasn't long before I recognized him as the Revd
Lionel Fanthorpe (See: http://www.lionel-fanthorpe.com/)
He has one of the most impressive CV's you could ever wish to see, in fact it's
easier to think of something he hasn't
done than something he has. He's a school teacher, a vicar, a motorbike expert,
a journalist, a martial arts expert, a weightlifter, a wrestler, he's a member
of MENSA, the society for people with high IQ's, and on top of all that he is
president of ASSAP (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/assap-seriously-strange-conference.html)
I first heard of him many years ago when he presented the brilliant programme Fortean TV, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tec6O83LHWM
Now aged 77 he's still going strong and has lost none of his charisma; in fact
I've often described him as Britain's answer to Robert Anton Wilson. He did a
presentation entitled Behind all
Anomalous Reports. He made a list of all possible things UFO's are, and
aliens from space was just one of them; the list was similar to what you'll
find in Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel's AD
book, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/exopolitics-leeds-2011.html
1: ET's, 2: interdimensional objects, 3: time travellers 4: ghosts 5: angels
and demons 6: denizens of Atlantis or another unknown prehistoric Earth
civilization; I'm sure we can think of more. There are two other possibilities
that spring to my mind, 7: All of the above, 8: None of the above; something nobody has yet thought of! His speech
was light-hearted yet informative, and I was enthralled by his story about how
a man experienced an interdimensional slip while in the public toilets outside
Norwich Cathedral! Another entertaining performance took place at the end of
the Conference on Sunday and was carried out by my old friend Ross Hemsworth (See: http://www.rosshemsworth.com/) whom I
was delighted to see again. Ross organized one of the best conferences I've
ever been to in Glastonbury Rendlesham Forest Britain
The history of UFO's and their impact on human society is a
theme picked up by several of the speakers John
Spencer (See: http://www.amazon.co.uk/UFO-Encyclopedia-John-Spencer/dp/0747234949/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348524444&sr=1-1)
made a speech entitled "A History of UFO's" in which he described how
the UFO phenomenon has evolved alongside human society, set against the backdrops
of World War II, the Cold War and the advent of the Space Age. It is clear that
in fact UFO and alien encounters have not changed at all; it is our attitude towards them that has
changed and it's changed because our world has changed. This leads to the question
that often gets knocked back with curious frowns: Why do we call them
"extraterrestrial"? The answer will often be seen as obvious:
"Because they come from outer space of course!" But do they? How do
we know that? Dave Newton and several other speakers echoed the thoughts of
some other people I know, like Brian Allan, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-10-podcast-brian-allan.html
The classic Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is the one which states that UFO's and
aliens are flesh and blood creatures from some unknown Earth-like planet a long
way out in space, which we could see with a telescope if we looked hard enough,
and that they fly here in nuts and bolts spacecraft that are simply more
sophisticated versions of our own rockets; this is really an assumption.
There's little hard evidence that indicates that that is the case. If they're
not little green men from Mars then what are they? I refer you to Lionel
Fanthorpe's list.
Tony Eccles (See:
http://anthonyeccles.wordpress.com/author/mistereetony/)
has discovered that there are many similarities between alien encounters and
religion, like Shamanism. This is a point not lost on people like Rick
Strassman and Graham Hancock (See HPANWO Links column). Contactees have a lot
in common with Spiritualist mediums and indigenous shamans of the Amazon who
take psychoactive drugs to commune with their gods. Despite this Tony doesn't
think that UFO's are a religion. There is no "UFO God" as such
(although Steven Greer thinks there is, and it's him!). On the question of what UFO's are Clas Svahn (See: http://www.ufo.se/)
has been studying a particular type of UFO: "ghost rockets". These
date back to the 1930's and the first ever recorded aerial interception was
deployed by the Swedish Army Air Corps in 1931 to try and examine them (Good
2009). They continue to be reported to this day. Unlike most UFO's these do
bear a moderate resemblance to man-made aircraft or projectiles; they tend to
be streamlined and have wings, fins and propulsion nozzles. They're also unique
in being almost exclusively confined to a specific region of the world: Scandinavia .
They often end their flights by dropping into lakes and Clas has even organized
a diving expedition to one of the lakes where a ghost rocket has been reported
to have landed. So far they haven't found anything, but the lake bed is covered
in thick, deep mud so they'll need to go back with better scanning equipment. I
hope he'll succeed because he's been chasing these stories since he was 16
years old. Geoff Falla (See: BUFORA
link) has studied incidents in which people experience close encounters while
driving along in their cars. These often start with the vehicle suddenly
malfunctioning; the engine stops, the electrics cut out, the radio experiences
interference etc. This is a very common feature of UFO incidents on the road
and was what befell Richard Dreyfus' character in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The director of that movie,
Stephen Spielberg, approached real UFOlogists to act as consultants. Geoff has
gathered some interesting statistics that seem to indicate that certain regions
of the globe are more afflicted by these kinds of events than others, and it's
all to do with latitude and longitude.
Richard Conway
(See BUFORA link) Did a presentation together with his father Stan Conway (Not billed) that was
definitely one of my favourites of the Conference. Richard is the science
adviser of BUFORA and shares a passionate interest of mine: Free Energy. I got
the impression from the blurb that he was going to debunk the concept, but in
fact he didn't. He is dubious only about those people who claim to have
received the knowledge to build advanced scientific technology from "alien
epiphanies". He met a lady in Turkey University
of Minnesota
I'm very glad I went to the BUFORA 2012 50th Anniversary
Conference. I met some lovely people, caught up with some old friends and made some
new ones. I had some great conversations with Matt Lyons, the chairman, the
German man I mentioned and another man called Bill. I also met up with some old
buddies, like Colin and Dave from Probe, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/uk-probe-conference-2010.html
I also saw Mike Rutter whom I interviewed at a recent Probe conference, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbKiDPHpvbU
Many thanks to all the organizers and speakers for their hard work in putting
together this conference and for giving us this information on stage. I must
confess it was not what I expected. I said at the beginning of this report that
BUFORA was "pure"; I meant that it is purely for the scientific study
of the phenomenon and doesn't embrace any of the conspiracy theories related to
the subject. The Exopolitics movement, on the other hand, takes a diametrically
opposed position on UFO's. For them, UFO science has already done its job and
generated a conclusion: UFO's exist; now what do we do about that? One thing's
for certain if you're campaigning for Disclosure: There is, by definition, a
conspiracy involved. My own opinion, as regular HPANWO-readers know, is that
the Exopolitics movement is correct. This doesn't mean that UFOlogy has no
further purpose; it does. Just because I'm certain that UFO's exist doesn't
mean that the scientific investigation of them should stop; on the contrary, it
is an even more urgent mission now. Therefore there is still a role for
organizations like BUFORA. My concern is that the denial that a conspiracy
exists could lead to them easily falling foul of one, and, as I've detailed
above, the Berwyn Mountains
If I met somebody right now with an emerging interest in
UFO's who was thinking of going to a BUFORA event or joining BUFORA I would
definitely say: "go ahead", however I would also advise them to also
look into the other side of the story; go to Exopolitics events too, read UFO
conspiratorial books. I know several people who feel very disillusioned by
BUFORA; some have said so publicly like Richard D Hall and Simon Parkes. My own
experience along with this conference comes from my submission of two sightings
reports, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/my-ufo-sighting-281208.html
I have no serious criticism of how they handled my reports other than it is
slightly tinged with the "looking back over their shoulder" tendency
that I went into above. The email I received in reply to my Chinese lantern
sighting was longer than the one about the December 2008 sighting, even though
the one in 2008 was far harder to explain. I'd be more interested in that one than the Chinese lanterns and
want to write more about it! I get the feeling that BUFORA, like ASSAP, quite
enjoys having one foot in the Skeptic movement and rather apes them. A major
hero for the speakers who was repeatedly quoted was Carl Sagan; this was man
who may have started out as amenable to the prospect, but did not take the idea
of UFO's seriously in his mature career. He developed a reputation as a debunker
and has won several posthumous Skeptic awards. BUFORA, and also ASSAP and the
CFZ (See HPANWO Links column), occupy that strange demi-monde between the two
worlds; on the bridge, being shot at from both sides. On the Skeptic-believer
scale this conference was one notch up from the specialist Skeptic ones like
James Randi's TAM or QED. I've actually been to TAM London
There will be no BUFORA Conference next year, but in 2014
they plan to hold an event in Glastonbury
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