First let me tell you about My Three UFOs. This all really happened to me...

First one was a silvery disk on the noonday horizon, in Los Angeles. It hovered; it didn't move; it was silver, it was a disk -- hell, what more do you want? It was a frickin' UFO, Mr Bigglesworth. I watched a while longer...Slowly it moved and got closer. I could scarcely breathe with excitement. And then...I saw its shape more clearly, resolving, becoming the wings, the tail, the shape of a 747. It was coming toward me at an angle, and that angle had made it look, briefly, as if it had been hovering. And the light, the haze from smog, the distance, and perhaps suggestion, had blurred its edges to make it seem a disk. It was a passenger jet, and soon flew over me, rumbling.

Second UFO was at sunset, over San Francisco. I'd been looking at the roseate light, and the way it transformed the iconographic skyline of San Francisco into a giant cluster of rose quartz, if you sort of squinted. I wasn't squinting though when I saw the UFO, a shimmering cigar-shaped object hovering over the Bay Bridge. It looked damned big. It was orange-gold, shining with an inner light, almost pulsing -- and it was moving in a way that seemed unnatural: it was hovering, but wobbling slowly in the sky, like the wavering edge of someone's hand when they gesture, "So-so. Maybe, maybe not." I watched a while longer, though I wanted to run and get a video camera. And I saw its edges begin to fuzz. And as the light shifted, shifting sun-ray emphasis brought out other such objects -- the rest of the condensation trail. I saw the military jet then, and I could trace the con trail back to the "object" I'd seen and past it to more of the same. The UFO was just a bit of con trail, blown into separation from the main con trail, shifted by wind and heat convection so that it wobbled. And it was the sunset light, now fading, that had made it seem to glow from within. And it wasn't over the bridge at all, it was much farther. And now it blew out of shape, and I saw clearly that it was a con trail cloud.

Third one was in the desert, at night. It had just gotten really dark out. The hot summer day had built up heat in the desert that was now being released in the coolness. The stars out in the Mojave, where I'd stopped the car in the middle of nowhere, were bright as sparks from arc welding, the welder had spilled them across the sky and they were slow to wink out. On the horizon was another light, but this one moved; it shimmered and quivered and moved up and down over the horizon in a rippling, falling-leaf motion. It looked vaguely oblong. It was a fierce light. I thought: At last, the real thing, a UFO! I watched a while longer, and as the desert cooled the heat ceased to rise so thickly, and so the rippling of the air diminished, and the star -- for that's what it was -- 96 stopped rippling, stopped its motion, but for starry twinkling, and I recognized it both for position and appearance. It was the planet Venus. Hot air rising had made it seem to be moving.

All three UFOs looked very "real"-- that is, very much like classic UFOs. Real anomalies. The common denominator in sorting out their underlying reality was my decision, in each case, to continue watching, to watch as objectively as I could, to not run and shout for friends to come and see. If I'd done that, at least two of these objects would have "vanished" by the time I got back with people or cameras. And I'd have assumed them spacecraft. I had, after all, been given as much suggestion on the subject as everyone else, from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, from childhood viewings of the old movie THIS ISLAND EARTH (lots of "abductions" resemble bits of THIS ISLAND EARTH) a thousand other media sources. I was primed just like everyone else.

An Adventure with a Hoaxer and a Skeptic

Recently Philip Klass wrote me a letter. "Ah ha! So Shirley is in with the famous UFO skeptic and no doubt is a disinfo agent like him!" But no, I didn't know the guy. He'd read my article in UFO MAGAZINE (the American one from Vicki Ecker and associates, quite a decent, non-hysterical magazine for Believers) in which I'd proven to my own satisfaction that the Masters of the Stars video was hoaxed (some images were digital, some were tricks with film making, some were "real" but mis-identified conventional objects, and the whole video was edited to be deceptive). I'd done this by consulting an expert on special effects with experience investigating UFO images, Scott Billups (now a movie director). When I went into the exercise with Billups I believed the video was real.

Klass said he was concerned for a chap he liked, Dr Bruce Maccabee, who was, he feared,. being "taken in" by Ed Walters, a notorious UFO film and photo hoaxer. Walters, of course, has collaborated on a book with Maccabee who appears to be, actually, an optics-scientist for the U.S. Navy (Klass says this checks out), despite the fact that many of his "explanations" of why an image has to be a UFO sound fetchingly like gibberish. They're probably not gibberish, they're probably prejudiced interpretations of the facts, or so I assume, since Walters' UFO films, which Macabbee defends, don't look, to me, even remotely convincing.

Klass was concerned for Dr M, and was hoping to get him out of this pernicious relationship with the notorious Walters, and he asked me if I could look at some UFO images for Macabee, with Billups to hand, and verify or disprove the hypothesis that they were hoaxed. Maccabee, to his credit, also emailed me and asked if I could do this and sent me two videotapes, one with a particular image, the other with numerous Walters images. The image in which Maccabee was most interested showed an apparent silvery, reasonably well-defined flying saucer zipping in from the side, then suddenly reversing direction, flying back the way it came in apparent indifference to the laws of gravitation and inertia. Maccabee said this thing cast a shadow on the estuary above which it appeared to be flying --and how could I explain that?

It was apparent from the film that Walters set up the camera in advance as if expecting this object...he, ah, knows when they're coming. My first impression was that the object moved left to right and back in a way that reminded me of an object moved consciously, deliberately, and rapidly by a human hand. It had that quality of motion to it. But that was proof of nothing, that's too vague, and there was that shadow. I thought perhaps it was all a variant of a trick Billups had found to've been used in Masters of the Stars: you film a plane so distant it looks like a blurry silver shape till it vanishes behind a cloud, then you project this image on a wall, then you film the projection and halfway through the screening of the projected object's movement you hit rewind and make the thing move backwards; then you hit play again. So it looks as if it goes behind a cloud, then moves back in the classic UFO style, defying inertia etc, then changes direction again in a second, as no Earthly craft should do. But I wasn't sure about this Walters image so I eventually got it to Billups.

Billups looked at the Walters reverse-motion UFO many times and concluded (tentatively, as he did not have the original, just a copy of a blurry video) that it was "the old pane of glass trick". This "hack" (to use the term he said UFO hoaxers use), he said, was as simple as painting an "alien craft" on a pane of glass, moving the glass -- in this case quickly forward and bac -- in front of the camera. The shadow also was painted on the glass. The other Walters images he took to be flares hoisted by balloons (something, I'm told, Walters has been caught at before), and aircraft lights.

And, in one case (this is my own opinion): the Walters photo of a UFO at night with the famous blue ray angling down from it, is a model or lamp-shade shaped like a flying saucer. The blue ray is actually a blue metal shaft, maybe a lamp pole, holding the thing up at a fishing-pole-angle, dangling the model or lampshade from a wire coming from the top of the pole.

It should also be noted that there's a military base in the Gulf Breeze area which has a Web site mentioning (I think it was Tim Brigham who turned this up) that, among other things. the base specializes in Psychological Operations and, correct me if I'm wrong, Tim, in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Put those two together and you could have some of your Gulf Breeze UFOs right there. [Ed. note: Also see, Hurlburt Field].

And so what if Shirley and Karl Pflock lost the Faith, Don't Mean I Did...Shirley Hasn't Been At This Long Enough to Know What I Know...

It wasn't particularly experiences like those above that have made me feel there's "less than meets the eye" to the UFO phenomenon. After all, there could be a great many hoaxes and misunderstandings and mis-identifications and, still, some few others could be real. Indeed, in his reply to the recent report from a committee of scientists looking at the UFO phenomenon, a report that concluded that UFOs are worth more scientific study, Klass admitted that there are some notable unexplained cases. (But, he went on to say, there's not enough there to justify allocating significant research dollars to the study, dollars which could be used in more scientifically primary areas). No it wasn't all that...it was...it was...

Ok. Take a deep breath. I'm almost convinced, I'm afraid, that UFOs started centuries ago with comets, Ezekiel type visions (which were visions and not misunderstandings of spacecraft), boloid meteors which can look like craft in the air. Vague memories and blurred accounts of these sorts of things combined with even vaguer notions having to do with gods and spirits and fairies; this in turn combining with ideas about technology coming about in the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment: Da Vinci was thinking about flying machines, etc. People began thinking about machines in the sky; projecting anxieties about the new society -- the science-oriented society, the materialistic society -- on the sky. Some were also thinking about creatures on other planets -- e.g., de Bergerac's fictions of visits to the moon and sun, the creatures living there. In the early 19th century when people were still in the early stages of experimenting with balloons, there were strange machines in the sky. People were startled by these "airships", the hot air and helium balloons. And seeing these things brought to mind other possibilities. Vague balloon/dirigible shapes in the sky conflated with odd cloud formations and comets and so forth -- all of this enhanced by the ubiquitous tall tale tellers -- to become the "unexplained airships" of Fortean accounts, the airships pointed up by UFO historians (which always had the form of recognizable 19th century design) and, along with increasing speculation in the 19th century about the possibility of space travel (e.g., Jules Verne, Poe's brick moon and others) gave birth to Wells', The War of the Worlds, which led to the notorious Orson Welles radio show, and which led (along with the industrial revolution) to mounds of pulp science fiction and science fiction in films, introducing the imagery into the popular mind...

And this in turn led to Kenneth Arnold's misidentification of a probably boloid meteoric phenomenon (complete with a normal confusion over the timespan of the observation: time distorted by excitement), as spacecraft, which led, shortly after, to Jessie Marcel's self aggrandizing fit of hysteria in Roswell, and all the urban legends that expanded from there. Interject into that flow the probable military hoax -- an attempt to create an American grassroots-willingness to battle the Japanese --of the so-called "Battle of LA" which likely was actually supposed to make people worry about Japanese aircraft. Then CIA/MIA began using UFOs as a cover story, sometimes spreading rumors themselves, which were enhanced by various mis-identifications in the skies, encounters with electromagnetic and meteoric phenomena, possible sightings of experimental aircraft; a sheriff in the SW USA encountering a secret experimental aircraft on the ground (with the company's symbol on the side), hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation in pilots; all this accelerated by more and more movies and television on the subject, which colored the interpretation of sleep paralysis experiences; misunderstandings as for example the Catalina film which, enhanced, turns out to be a piper cub; then contactee mythos, and our modern UFO era with its massive influx of hoaxes, fake scholars like Von Daniken and Sitchen, the misidentification of RPVs and UAVs and other experimental unmanned and manned aircraft, the probable use of such by intelligence services, possibly MK Ultra type divisions etc, and of laser devices, images projected on fog (as possibly at a certain US military base in Britain), for the purposes of "psy ops" as per the 1952 memo by the then-CIA-director. Then more homegrown hoaxes, mistaken Ids in home movies, hoaxed videos (the one that showed a small UFO flying over a field to create a crop formation was proven a hoax, made digitally in a video studio), video misidentification, UFO opportunism eg Travis Walton and Streiber and Ed Walters and Billy Meier and Bob Lazar and Jaime Maussan.

And here we are. Take a breath.

Maybe that's the way it is, and was. Maybe not. But in my worst moments, contemplating a UFO field that has lost all objectivity, that will listen to anyone with any fantastic story and any sort of discreditable background, I think that is where we are, and were we have been.

And I'm not going along for the ride anymore. Not on a flying saucer.

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