Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/sighting/sight29.txt

Text File | 1995-10-20 | 11KB | 210 lines

Steiger's Astronaut UFOs
x
xJust recently I was advised to trust the reliable UFO author Brad Steiger and
travel to some unknown byt regular UFO haunting ground. Now, in an irony which
I would have scripted had I the power, Steiger has demonstrated exactly how
"reliable" his UFO information really is. Let me give MANY SOLID EXAMPLES and
invite UFO-agnostics to verify for themselves whether they should believe what
Steiger writes, or should NOT believe it.
x
xI am referring to the "Summer 1994" issue of UFO UNIVERSE magazine, which just
hit the newstands. I bought my copy today in a local grocery store and it was
well worth the entertainment value. I refer to the article, "Alien Efforts to
Undermine Earth's Space Programs". by Sherry Hansen Steiger and Brad Steiger,
on pages 34-39. Now, I am assuming that the article does represent the real
opinions of the Steigers, but if not, I apologize in advance.
x
xI urge everyone who considers these claims possible to go out and buy a copy,
or two, or ten. It's only money, and as the proverb says, you are soon parted.
x
xAfter drafting this overview, I noticed that I had used semantically loaded
terms of mockery and abuse that have offended some readers and given the
pro-UFO camp an excuse to refuse to answer. So I have attempted to scrub the
text of ALL OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE (replaced with "*****") to see if we will now
get a constructive response from the pro-UFO champions of restrained rhetoric.
x
xEditor Timothy Beckley (who in my opinion well deserves every penny he
convinces UFO believers to spend on his products) wrote: "(Steiger) releases
classified information that shows that NASA has long ago been shaking in their
boots even if it's behind the scenes, and not for public consumption."
Regarding these kinds of stories, the only "shaking" I've ever observed among
my co-workers in the space program is from side-splitting fall-on-the-floor
laughter over the latest ****** UFO stories associated with space flights. But
wait, let's take a sober look at the claims from Steiger, Beckley, and their
associates.
x
xThese following ******* items are not merely an issue of "one opinion versus
another", or "secret unverified sources". They show how claims actually are
altered from one publishing phase to the next. Inbetween undecided observers
can verify these assertions for themselves.
x
x1. Glenn's fireflies (1962) have long been known to be water ice flakes off
his capsule's evaporative cooling system.
x
x2. Joe Walker's fictitious "admissions" (1962) of cylindrical or discoidal
UFOs accompanying his X-15 missions seem to be vastly exaggerated accounts of
ice flakes off the rocket planes cryogenic fuel tanks, which he did see and did
talk about. A tenth-hand rumor refers to "his assignment" to detect UFOs, but
as far as I have been able to determine, no first hand documentation of this
story exists, so we are justified in concluding it was a journalistic illusion.
x
x3. Robert White (1962) also saw objects outside his X-15 at the top of his
parabolic path, floating in the near-vacuum of the edge of outer space. No UFO
ever "shot out of sight", the small sheet-of-paper sized objects (his own
description) fell behind when he reentered the atmosphere.
x
x4. Gordon Cooper's UFO is a ******* fiction, all the more so because Cooper is
a serious "UFO believer" who wants more and better studies. But when asked
about the reports of his Mercury-9 UFO (1963), he heatedly denies any such
event and denounces fabricated stories by writers. John Keel also imagines and
reports as fact 200 persons rushing outside at Muchea, Australia, but when
people try to find the original news media documentation which Keel and other
claim to rely on, they can't. Did it ever exist at all? There's no proof it
did.


x5. Steiger refers to large UFOs which surrounded a 3-man Russian spacecraft in
October 1963. There were no 3-man Russian space vehicles until October 1964.
Steiger misread this or **** ********.
x
x6. Four UFOs paced an unmanned Gemini craft for one complete orbit? Radar
doesn't track spacecraft for one complete orbit, but during launch some ground
radars would lock onto engine shock waves downstream of the main booster plume.
x
x7. UFOs cut short a Soviet space mission in October 1964? It's clear from
Soviet space memoirs that the Voskhod had always been aimed at a 24-hour
flight, and any expectations of an extension were cut short by the political
upheaval surrounding Khrushchev's sudden overthrow, which Steiger doesn't
mention.
x
x8. "Aliens Harass First Human to Walk in Space" (1965). Contrary to almost
every factual assertion by Steiger, there was no sudden communications blackout
or any mysterious off course diversion (the failure of the autopilot required a
manual landing one orbit later). A satellite they saw passing nearby was
identified from tracking data as an earler Kosmos booster, no mystery. Nobody
"had to come down early to escape the UFO", or "got knocked out of orbit".
Those ********** suggestions are unworthy of a reputable UFO writer.
x
x9. McDivitt and White and the egg-shaped object (1965). This story, too, is
badly distorted from even from the first UFO literature accounts. Relying
unwisely on Keel's ********** *********, Steiger errs when he says both
astronauts saw it (White was asleep), he errs when he says they were over China
(they were near Hawaii), he errs when he says that millions of people heard
them describe it live (McDivitt talked about it over the following hour as he
passed near tracking sites). Steiger errs when he claims the astronauts (sic!)
described it as egg-shaped. McDivitt described it as beer-can-shaped (like his
own Titan-2 booster, which I think it was). A photo of an egg-shaped light
smear, widely thought to show "the UFO", does not, according to McDivitt
himself.
x
x10. Bormann (sic!) and Lovell and a massive spherical object (1965). There is
no original documentation that what they saw was either "massive" or
"spherical", so how did Steiger and Keel reach that conclusion? Probably just
their ***********. The small objects were spotted at the point in their orbit
where they were criss-crossing a spray of fuel from their booster, with which
they were deliberately flying formation. In those early days, all the unearthly
 implications of orbital mechanics hadn't been thought out, but now we
understand how out-of-plane motion (such as the frozen fuel snowstorm) sets up
a criss-crossing orbit which passes back and forth every 45 minutes. That's
exactly when they spotted "bogies".
x
x11. Young and Collins (1966), another garbled almost beyond recognition
ordinary spaceflight event. During a space walk, Collins noted a bright object
near the horizon which he took to be the Agena target satellite (the "second
stage"), but it turned out not to be since it was only Venus, as the astronauts
realized a few hours later (Collins told me about this). The "other UFO over
Australia" has no "paper trail", I can't find any reference to it in earlier
UFO literature or in the crew's flight report. Does this mean that Steiger made
it up? What's the other possibility?


x12. Conrad and Gordon on Gemini-11 took pictures of a passing satellite over
the South Atlantic, moving at orbital speed across their nose. What Steiger
"forgets" to tell his readers is that tracking data and eyewitness details
positively identified the satellite as the decaying Proton-3 Soviet satellite.
End of story.
x
x13. Wallops Island (1966) launches a barium cloud, and suddenly, according to
Steiger, "the sky was full of UFOs". Of course, lots of people THOUGHT they saw
UFOs, but what they were seeing was the barium cloud. Incredibly, Steiger
suggests that the barium cloud attracted genuine UFOs for people to see (as
long as the people didn't see the barium cloud, too -- nobody seems to have
reported seeing a barium cloud AND a UFO).
x
x14. Lovell and Aldren (sic!) sight four objects lined up that "weren't stars".
The crew figured that out since they had just jettisoned four bags of trash an
hour before, but Steiger "forgot" to mention that too. Mere carelessness?
x
x15. The Apollo-11 UFO story from Azhazha et al. is reported by Steiger as
authentic. This is DELIGHTFUL, since as I explained in OMNI in the April issue,
Azhazha had given up an atomic bomb story on Apollo-13 to embrace this other
story. As I detailed in a complete chapter in my 1982 book "UFOs and Outer
Space Mysteries", the elaborate Apollo-11 UFO story is concocted from
photographic hoaxes and fabricated voice transcripts. At the time I did this
original research (about 1980), serious ufologists such as Hynek and Hendry
assured me I was wasting my time on overkill, since only "half-wits" (Hynek's
term) would ever fall for this clumsy hoax. Now, either Steiger has, or he
expects his readers to, so maybe I was right to try and debunk it back then.
x
x16. Chatelain's "strange object" seen on the third day of the Apollo-11
mission was the accompanying S4B booster, which had drifted several hundred
miles away from the command module during the long coasting climb up and out
from Earth. The crew took turns trying to discern details at the very limits of
eyeball/monocular resolution. But nobody thought it was something unusual.

x
xAnyhow, as I said, when I researched these kinds of cases back in the late
1970s, and published detailed explanations of the most famous claims in
magazines and books, I was teased by leading ufologists for wasting efforts on
"easy ones" which "nobody ever really believed anyway" (David Jacobs's words).
Perhaps in hindsight I had a better estimate of the infinite gullibility of the
"UFO buffs" than did Hynek and his coworkers.
x
xWell, is there any disagreement over this? Doesn't it look like Steiger is
trying to foist some rehashed and further garbled *** ***** ***** on a new
generation of UFO *****? Has he succeeded?
x
xx



 Magazine articles by James Oberg relating to "Astronauts and UFOs"

"Space World" magazine is on microfiche at many large libraries, it's probably
the best bet. Also, my book "UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries" (Donning, 1982)
had a full chapter on the Apollo-11 legends. The NOVA report on UFOs (1982)
showed some research results also.

Analog  Science Fiction / Science Fact
1976 Nov      Unidentified Fraudulent Objects
1980 Nov       Space Folklore

Fate
1980 Sep         Myths,Mysteries of the Moon

Ideal's UFO Magazine
1980 May      Apollo Sightings, Fact or Fiction?

Official UFO
1976 Oct          Astronauts and UFOs

Search (Palmer Publications)
1976 Winter      Space Folklore & Pseudo-Science
1977 Fall       Modern Myths and Mysteries of
1977 Winter    the Moon (part 1 and 2)

Skeptical Inquirer
1978 Fall            Astronaut "UFO" Sightings

Space World (Associate Editor, 1976-1980)
1977 Feb            Astronauts and UFOs :The Whole Story

True UFOs and Outer Space
1977 Summer      UFOs & Outer Space Mysteries
1978 Spring         Unsolved Moon Mysteries
1979 Spring           Astronauts and UFOs

UFO Report (Saga)
1981 Fall    The Gemini-4 UFO