Featured Blog: Lights in the Night, Crop Circles and Deeply Held Beliefs

I spent my formative years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, with Sputnik beeping overhead, "duck and cover" air raid drills at school and periodic "flying saucer" scares dominating the headlines. My father was a career Air Force officer in the early astronaut program, so my life was dominated by aircraft, aviation culture and space exploration.

I began studying UFO sightings in the late 50s, collecting UFO pulp magazines, glossy color photographs from Life and Look magazines and classic UFO stories. In junior high and high school I gave presentations to local social groups, using a noisy black opaque projector to display lurid photos of unknown things flitting about the sky.

In the 1970s, I worked at the University of Wyoming as a photographer and film producer. I assisted Dr. Leo Sprinkle in his investigations of UFO sightings and the people who reported them. I analyzed photographs, films and videotapes of unidentified objects in the sky submitted to Dr. Sprinkle. I filmed and videotaped Dr. Sprinkle's hypnosis sessions with people who claimed to have been abducted by UFO aliens and subjected to physical examinations. I helped organize international conferences on UFO abductees and served for 15 years as a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

In over 25 years of active investigation, I found no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Earth is being visited by creatures from another planet. Every photograph, film and videotape I analyzed was of normal terrestrial or aerial craft or meteorological phenomena, often in unusual lighting conditions, but usually merely out of focus Earthly aircraft, unidentifiable lights in the night or clumsy attempts at fraud. The people I interviewed were most often normal, seemingly sincere in their belief in extraterrestrial intervention, yet possessing no physical evidence to back up their claims. 

I met a large group of people seeking meaning in a rapidly changing, often confusing world, who had adopted the promise of UFOs as a deeply held belief, similar to a religious conversion. The total lack of any physical evidence was immaterial. Their belief was firm and unshakeable.

I stopped investigating UFOs, crop circles, millennialists, cattle mutilations and associated reports in 1980, resigned from MUFON and went on with my life, satisfied that UFOs are an interesting social phenomenon with no basis in physical reality. I've seen no evidence since then to change that conclusion.