Sleuth has spent his life
exposing various frauds
Meet Kal Korff, computer gumshoe
By Art Levine
SPECIAL TO MSNBC
Like the FBI sleuths in the “X-Files,” Kal Korff
believes that the truth is out there.
But, unlike his fictional counterparts, the 34-year-old
computer gumshoe who exposed the alien autopsy hoax
often solves mysterious events in ways that displease true
believers in conspiracy theories or alien spacecraft.
“I’m not a skeptic or a believer, I’m just a researcher,”
he says. “I think something’s out there, but we haven’t yet
found hard scientific evidence for it.”
A UFO researcher since he was a teen-ager — he
was writing a column analyzing UFO photos at 17 — Korff
has spent much of his career debunking UFO hoaxes.
“The public has a right to know the truth behind a
purported UFO claim,” he says.
A former computer systems analyst at the
government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
Korff has in recent years headed TotalResearch, a small
research organization that does comprehensive
computer-based investigations on life’s enduring mysteries.
They range from the JFK assassination to the most
highly touted UFO claims, including Roswell and the
enormous number of UFO photographs and films produced
by Swiss UFO cultist, Eduard “Billy” Meier.
“I’ve always been bothered by man-made mysteries,”
Korff says. The solutions, he believes, can be found.
Prior to debunking Roswell and the autopsy, his
previous project — the subject of a recent book,
“Spaceships of the Pleiades” — involved going undercover
to expose as a fraud the Meier photographs and film, which
prior to Korff’s work was considered “the hands-down
greatest UFO case of all time.”
Meier was widely portrayed as a humble Swiss farmer
who, starting in the mid-1970s, had more than 700 direct
contacts with aliens from the Pleiades star system. Meier
took more than 1,000 photos and numerous 8 mm films.
Silly as it may seem, the messages from his “alien contacts”
and his photos were studied around the world, and the
pictures were verified as authentic by expert image analysts.
But Korff, who first critiqued the photos when he was
18 years old, decided after reading a mainstream book that
hailed Meier as genuine to settle the issue once and for all.
“Whenever I study anything, I want the truth, no
matter how it comes out,” he says.
He found the truth by going undercover in Meier’s
UFO cult in 1991, pretending, with a new beard and an
assumed name, to be a Meier loyalist seeking evidence that
could help discredit Meier’s leading critic ... Kal Korff. In
doing so, he found inescapable proof of Meier’s fakery.
While visiting Meier’s farm, he bought hundreds of
photos from devotees and obtained a pristine set of
first-generation prints of Meier’s most famous and bizarre
photos from a disgruntled ex-follower. These pictures and
films seemed to show flying saucers circling a tree, flying
above a lake, hovering above trees and landing in a forest
— and dinosaurs and cavemen Meier snapped when
“time-traveling” in a space-ship.
When Korff analyzed the UFO pictures with
sophisticated computer programs and careful analysis of
Meier’s camera and photo specs, he discovered how they
were faked.
The UFOs, he showed, were models in crisp focus
close to the camera while the outdoor scenery was usually
out of focus. These UFOs were often made of dinner plates
and soup bowls, suspended by strings from helium balloons,
and, in some cases, the so-called aliens and UFOs were
just photographed from TV shows — the prints even
showed the curve of the monitor. “The photos were easy to
fake,” he says.
Meier still has a few champions left, including Michael
Hesseman, the autopsy film devotee.
Korff’s research into this case left him with a strong
message for fellow UFO seekers: “Don’t be so gullible!
Whenever anyone makes such sweeping claims, feel free to
demand hard, objective proof.”
Korff showed the same zeal for evidence when he
decided as a teen-ager to begin studying the JFK
assassination. Over the years, he’s scanned into computers
virtually every major film, photo and document on the
assassination, and in 1993, on the assassination’s 30th
anniversary, issued a report summarizing his findings:
Oswald acted alone. In part, his research offered fresh
analysis, he says, because he re-analyzed the Zapruder film
and found that the time frame for the shooting was longer
than anyone — from the Warren Commission to the
harshest skeptics — had ever noticed, allowing time for
three shots. His work landed him on the “Larry King
Show,” and he plans to issue a book on the topic, “Final
Verdict — JFK’s Murder SOLVED!” All the 22 gigabytes
of data he’s digitized will ultimately be released to the public
in condensed form.
In the meantime, he’s also been checking out the Loch
Ness Monster for the British Natural History Museum. So
far, the photo he’s been shown has been exposed as, yes, a
hoax.
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