You want to talk about UFOs? We can talk about UFOs. But you want to talk about CHANNELING UFOs? For a minute or two, sure.

I can't make a whole lot of time for horseshit.

Here's what I want to know: why can't ufology eliminate, at least, the obviously silly? The stuff that makes rational people turn away from ufology muttering, "Get a clue!" Stuff like channeling, and people who tell stories about visits aboard UFOs in which the aliens act just like the ones the experiencer saw in movies when they were little; abduction experiences that are silly in their resemblance to bad science fiction movies. Billy Meier videos of "dinosaurs" and his photos of the pretty alien lady "Asket". Or videos of airplanes and helicopter lights, of really, really obvious stunt kites. I mean, stuff that doesn't even fool my kids -- who laughed at an Ed Walters' "UFO" video I was screening; howled at its silliness without any prompting from me. Why can't we, at least, turn away from sheer silliness?

Sure, lots of ufologists ridicule Meier, for example, now, but some take him seriously and for a long time many more did. The German UFO magazine UFO-Kurier reports that a Meier photo of Asket, a pretty lady from "the Pleides", was actually taken from a videotape of The Dean Martin Show! "Asket" was some woman dancing or singing on The Dean Martin Show -- and she had an exotic face so Billy Hubcaps took a picture of the screen and said it was a blurry photo taken aboard a spaceship. UFO-Kurier shows both pictures for comparison. It's her all right. But why did we have to go that far to prove anything? Show me a picture of a pretty lady with straight flaxen hair and a 70s look, a blurry background, tell me it was taken on a spaceship, and I'll laugh, and I'll say, "That's silly." I didn't need the Kurier's proof. (Maybe they're just providing it for amusement). Meier was patently silly from the start.

I was briefly a member of MUFON. I my membership lapse because they would insist on booking charlatans who projected slides of Sumerian gods they passed off as "ancient astronauts," and CHANNELERS who were in "contact" with "aliens," for the MUFON lecture series. Listen to a channeler do his or her thing -- just be a little objective, put aside the desire to believe-in-advance -- and you shrivel from embarrassment, or you laugh...because it's SILLY. These people are living, breathing Saturday Night Live sketches.

Channeling as a concept, even...Just give me one solid reason, just one, just one little tiny reason, a microscopically tiny reason, to believe in channelers. No channeler has ever obtained from their alien correspondents any scientifically testable information; no asteroids or comets they know about that we don't, that they could point out; and certainly no landing sites to visit where they'll be waiting (occasionally some were offered - but the aliens invariably failed to show up). Judging from the disparity between types of aliens described by the various channelers, there are apparently many, many races swarming round our planet. These aliens, we're told, are REALLY CONCERNED for our well being, but they all uniformly refuse, evidently, to give us any really useful information -- like the FUCKING CURE FOR CANCER for God's sake. YES: How about a cure for cancer, you bandy legged eggheaded , greyblue, noseless little bastards? How about an antigravity formula? How about ONE SINGLE PIECE OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION, confirmable, that we don't have? Nothing's forthcoming. Hey, they don't want to spoil us, right?

I'm a pretty good performer; been on stage as singer, put across many other media, and I know I could channel like a motherfucker. Just set me up at a MUFON meeting, I'll go into a very believable looking trance, I'll come up with a very believable alien-voice, which will spout comfortingly exotic platitudes. I could be cleaning up on this shit. All you need is imagination and some acting ability. And you need to be reasonably articulate...Um, come to think of it, slightly articulate will do.

It's a self-starter's industry, man. No overhead.

I'm ranting about this because there are a surprising number of people who still take saucer-channelers seriously -- otherwise intelligent people like Michael Lindenmann who does the quite valuable CNI newsletter. The people at LA MUFON. The CSETI people...

No one seems to have learned anything from Heaven's Gate.

And I put so-called "vectoring" and "remote sensing" in the same category. There do seem to have been some military intelligence experiments with "remote sensing." Jimmy Carter says there was, and he's almost the only politician I trust. (Hey, this guy has done more good in the world since being president than all of the presidents who've presided since then.) And in fact I happen to know that some psychic phenomena is real. It's almost as rare as hen's teeth; and if there are 1,000,000 psychics, 999,999 of them are liars or self-deluded -- but it exists. And maybe there have been some more-than-lucky remote sensing hits in the military intelligence context. I doubt if any of the self-promoting remote sensors claiming to have been working for the government really did; and if they did I doubt they had any success. But they don't have to have been successful; with the UFO field in its current state, they only have to SAY they were successful. That's the wonderful thing about remote sensing -- since it has a technical sound to it (like the even-more-questionable "reverse speech analysis"), and the apparent, hearsay validation of military intelligence involvement...man, that's good enough for ufology. I have never seen one clear-cut piece of evidence (something that appears on a Web site is not a piece of evidence, it's something that appears on a Web site) that any of the field's notorious remote sensors participated in any kind of successful remote sensing program. I can't count how many flying saucer experts and witnesses supposedly used to work for the CIA or Naval Intelligence -- or something similar, so long as it confers spurious credibility. (Derrel Sims, for example. I can prove that I worked for the CIA -- as much as Derrel Sims did. I didn't -- and neither did he.)

Documentation apparently isn't necessary in the UFO field; not real documentation. We'll believe anything as long as they tell a good story, the way Stephen Greer used to. But Greer's losing it: Recently he "remotely sensed" that U.S. military forces attacked an "underground alien base"; nerve gas was involved; many casualties. All hushed up of course. Well, he used to tell a good story. But give it time and the best liar will start leaking at the seams. Underground alien bases...Lord...

Greer has failed to "remotely vector in" (psychically summon) any UFOs where anyone outside his cronies in CSETI can see them. He has failed to give us any videotaped evidence of the saucer visits he's reported (there are a couple of ludicrous videos of small, fuzzy, distant lights moving about -- airplanes, stars taped with wobbling cameras, etc.)...But of course, as in all such encounters, the saucers, I assume, reach out and blot out the cameras...or make the cameramen forget them. Greer, in his lectures, shows us photos of spacecraft in the sky, the familiar photos you can see in the usual UFO books -- including some proven hoaxes; but we are to believe that cameras which evidently work for the people who took the pictures in his slide-show, won't work for him, for some reason. Why don't cameras work for Greer, in filming UFOs. when they supposedly work for others? What -- don't the aliens like the guy?

The lady who sees the Grey Dudes regularly appear in her bathroom -- the lady with a book to sell -- can't, of course, set up a video cam to catch the little guy and his various weird alien pals who show up with him at times, because, naturally, the aliens emanate a field, or something, which blots those cameras, too. People all over the world have video cameras; people all over the world have face to face encounters with aliens and chupacabras and yet those particular people are always without their video cameras and their Nikons. Every damn time.

When UFOs are videotaped, it's always in the far distance -- though there are many reports of people seeing them up close. Somehow the people who see them up close never have video cameras or even Polaroid cameras with them (or it just happens to be a dark night). The UFOs only appear to people who have no video cameras, or are far away. But of course, naturally, the greys are psychically arranging all this. That particular Sheer Silliness -- The Silly Excuse -- is fundamental to Ufology Today.

There's that new video from Mexico City -- the one they showed on UPN in April. How about that? It comes to us via Jaime Maussan, the guy who gave us the Masters of the Stars video, along with the Elders, the people who used to tout Billy Meier, and it's been clearly demonstrated that key saucer footage in Masters of the Stars is hoaxed. But giving the guy the benefit of the doubt anyway, we look at the new video, and it looks damned good, just like a special effect should. It's so very obviously digital. Computer animation.

No, you can't trust images of things flying about in the sky, not in 1998, if you ever could. Too easy to fake. But a close up of an alien, that might be a little more convincing...walking, talking, breathing. Not that shitty, fake looking one supposedly smuggled out of Area 51, that one doesn't make it. Not the rubbery bodies repudiated by special effects experts in the alien autopsy film; the ones with the guts I recognize from cleaning fish. Not that photo of the little kid in the grey alien mask that was anonymously sent to Whitley Streiber. I mean something that isn't obvious bullshit. Show me that.

Show me something. But don't parade channelers and remote viewers and ludicrous cult leaders like Rael and blurry messages from Grey Dudes, and bad science fiction scenes -- farcical material from people who ask us for more faith than Billy Graham does...Turn away from the silly, as a reflex. Eliminate it out of hand. Get serious.

You want to do some serious research? Recently, Sightings on the Radio's Web site had a wonderful UFO report from a Canadian naval officer. During the Korean War, the guy -- and some others on his naval ship -- saw a flying saucer up pretty damn close, hovering nearby. He's just coming out with the story now. He gives definite information about himself. So how about finding this guy, how about confirming his military rank and record, how about confirming he was on that ship, how about tracking down the other witnesses, how about getting affidavits from a group of strongly reputable military men who saw something alien up close? Or how about really doggedly pursuing that tantalizing 1942 Battle of L.A. case? Then you might have something.

The point is, those cases, the ones with real evidence to them, are out there. But just reporting them as hearsay doesn't make it. We're told about the "Russian Roswell" at "Gj coordinates -- between 42 degrees 10 minutes-42 degrees 2 minutes of northern latitude, and between 70 degrees 40 minutes-79 degrees 42 minutes of east longitude. Kirghizia, to the east of lake Isyk-Kul, 100 km. exact on east from Przehalks town..." Those are pretty exact coordinates. How about if one of those Interested millionaires giving grants to ufological investigators sends an expedition there, to that exact spot, where supposedly physical evidence resides, instead of just talking about it?

How about if we get serious?

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