MEET KAL KORFF, COMPUTER GUMSHOE

Mon, 21 Oct 1996 02:49:20 -0400
Source: http://www.msnbc.com/news/35568.asp
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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