Interview With Dr. Bruce Maccabee Part III Of IV February 2010
Goto Part I Of IV
Goto Part II Of IV
Goto Part IV of IV
Great Britain has released quite a few of their UFO reports. Have you had a chance to look at any of them and if so, was there anything that caught your eye? Dr. Maccabee: I have not really had time to go through, I read part of the Condign report that came out a few years ago, I don't know if you're familiar with that? Ken: No I am not.
Nick Pope Dr. Maccabee: It was formally a secret, or top secret report, even Nick Pope knew that there was something going on, but he wasn't familiar with that report, until it was admitted that yes, they had done an official study on flying saucer sightings and they released it. I believe that was four or five years ago, I forget exactly. I did read through it and it was a quite interesting basic conclusion, that there was really something going on, but that it might be more related to plasmas and stuff then ETs. They used a number of the cases that ufologists use for ETs. Ken: Nick Pope told me that, well he didn't tell me, he mentioned in an interview, that if certain types of cases came up, they that actually made sure that there was no paper trail left on them, so there was nothing to be released by the British government. Did you know that? Dr. Maccabee: No I didn't, but I wouldn't be surprised. Ken: It sort of defeats the whole thing doesn't it? Dr. Maccabee: The ultimate sweeping under the rug. Ken: Yeah I mean if the're going to release everything, but then they are going to be picky about what they save, what good is it? Dr. Maccabee: The really good stuff doesn't have any records to begin with. Ken: That's what I mean Dr. Maccabee: Well the US actually took the lead in releasing stuff. Starting way back in the 60s, I'm not sure that you're familiar with the organization NICAP, reports that were done by the Project Bluebook staff in the 1950s, then in the 1970s and 1975 time frames, the government made available the complete file of Project Blue Book plus the files on the Air Force Department of Special Investigations. These were all files that were classified up to the secret level, there weren't any top-secret files. In the latter 1980s there was a monster file with all sorts of documents that was generated by Air Force intelligence. They were Air Force intelligence documents for every group, or whatever it was called. There were hundreds of feet of boxes of documents which were searched and turned up documents related to UFOs amongst other things. The Coast Guard had some stuff and the NSA was forced under the Freedom of Information Act to cough up some 900+ pages in December 1978. the FBI released 1600 pages in 1977. the State Department released some documents and a few other organizations. The National Security Administration was beaten on until they released some stuff. The US has really taken the lead, it's just that the news media and a lot of ufologists, the young guys in ufology, don't know what happened 30 or 40 years ago and the media doesn't have that sort of a recollection, so what they hear is that all France is releasing stuff and Brazil is releasing stuff and the British are releasing stuff and Chile and so on, and its all-new information so then they say why isn't the United States releasing stuff and the answer is, I suppose, that the United States has released everything that its going to release over the last 30 years, starting back in the 60s. Whatever the United States has that it hasn't released, it is not going to release. It probably won't until UFOs are proven real and everybody knows it, at which point it will say oh yeah, we knew it all along, but we just didn't tell you. Ken: It seems that odd photos are slipping through from NASA and other sources. Lately some have been spotted on Google Earth and Google Moon. Dr. Maccabee: What photos? Ken: Odd photos. By this I mean photos that may show evidence of past civilizations and UFOs. Dr. Maccabee: Art, a r t ? Ken: No, odd. Dr. Maccabee: Odd photos, is that what you are talking about? Ken: Yes. Dr. Maccabee: Unusual? Ken: Unusual photos that could show evidence of past civilizations and UFOs. Do you think that this could be on purpose to alert us to the existence of UFOs? Dr. Maccabee: Are you talking about NASA photos? Ken: NASA and other sources, yes. Maybe I should rephrase this. What I am saying is that controversial photos have been appearing in the last few years. Some of them seem to indicate, like the ones that are of the moon, that there are structures on the moon and UFOs. Do you think that this could be on purpose to sort of condition us to the fact that UFOs exist? Dr. Maccabee: Well, I think that sort of conditioning is taking place regardless of the odd photos from Mars and the Moon and whatever it is that you are talking about. I am not sure what type of odd photos. I have seen claims that certain areas of Mars prove that there was cities there, because you can see a matrix type array of lines that make it look like there were streets and buildings and so on, something which I am sure is an artifact from the way the pictures were taken and pasted together. There are claims of structures on the moon. I am yet to be convinced that there are structures on the moon, some big high glass tower that was broken or something. Ken: Right, right. Dr. Maccabee: Stuff like that. A lot of this is pulled out from imagery where you bloat up to the point where you're looking at the..... you have to be careful at the noise level of what you're looking at and the light and dark areas when they are blown up sufficiently can appear to be structures on their own. I call this a sort of Rorschach test for the investigator where you are told to look at a series of inkblots and make a picture of it and you've got to decide what it looks like, and decide if that looks like a man, or that looks like a car, a horse. The difference is that people do this sort of thing with photos of the moon and photos of Mars and if they blow it up to a certain extent they find some image that looks like a car, looks like a boat, looks like a building, looks like a rocket, looks like whatever. Then they publish that they have evidence of what looks like a boat, a building, or a city on Mars. In fact all that they have is really just a noise level effect that made it look like something or other, but it really wasn't. I have been confronted with pictures like that quite often, including one guy who was sending me pictures of “Bigfoot ”, hidden in the bushes. He would take a picture of an ordinary scene that has trees and bushes and things like that and he would blow it up to the point where just looking at the shadows, at the dock areas of the shadows between leaves and stuff and he would say look here is the eyeball, a nose and here is the mouth. It wasn't very convincing.
Weather Balloon Ken: Over the years there have been many reports of crashed UFOs. What is your personal opinion as to whether we have found any alien bodies or live beings on crashed UFOs? Dr. Maccabee: First of all at me say that I do not believe the Mogul balloon theory. I guess when you say that you do not believe in the Mogul balloon theory now days, that says a lot. Ken: I don't believe it either. Dr. Maccabee: It says that there really is some hardware somewhere that somebody's got. The frustrating thing about Roswell is you know there is a definitive answer to all the questions, but in practice you can't get to the material and stuff that would tell you what that answer is. That is one of the reasons why I've sort of stayed away from the Roswell investigation. I have read about it, you know at times and paid attention to what was going on. I have not been in the forefront of Roswell research, because I know that in principle until someone coughs this stuff up there is always that last giant leap for mankind, where you jump over the barrier and land right next to the Roswell crash object and bodies, whatever. When everybody believes that UFOs are real and it's basically been proven, the government will say that they knew it all along and at that point they may say, oh well here are the bodies we were in communication with these guys and we got all the things you hear about, like agreements between us and them as to whether we should leave them alone and let them do whatever they want to do, whatever. All that may be true, but the government won't admit it till the very end, so as far as crashes are concerned, I don't know how many there are. I know that Ryan Wood has compiled a book and other people have put together books, Randle's on all the crashes, that supposedly have occurred. I am not convinced that there are that many crashes, but all you need is one. Ken: The story that I heard was that once there was one or two crashes, that we determined that our radar was interfering with the propulsion system on UFOs, we started aiming some of our high-powered radar at them. I don't know if you have heard that or not? Dr. Maccabee: I have heard about the suggestion that high-powered radar might have affected their navigation equipment, I don't recall hearing that we may have intentionally tried to shoot them down as it were using radar, or electromagnetic pulses. Ken: The Disclosure Project has many different witness from all walks of life testifying that UFOs are extraterrestrial and that the government is hiding the fact. Some of these witnesses are former government employees. Do you think that these witnesses are credible? Dr. Maccabee: I know that some of them are. I am not familiar with all their stories first of all and there are a number of them which I think are not quite credible, what is important of course is the ones that are credible. Now you said the Disclosure Project? Ken: Right. Dr. Maccabee: That is the term used by Greer and the boys. Ken: That's correct. Dr. Maccabee: The Coalition for Freedom of Information by Leslie Kean, the press conference that they held in November of 2007 was it? At the national press club where they had pilots, and military people, and John Callahan, from the FAA and Col. Halt was there from the Rendlesham case along with Penniston, that was his name. All those guys you might say were hand-picked to be highly credible. The guy from Chile who actually chased a flying saucer, Parviz Jafari. the guy that in 1976 in the Iran jet case... Ken: Yeah I think he had a phantom. Dr. Maccabee: Right an F4 Phantom jet chasing (a UFO and) having the communications and avionics suddenly go out when he got within 25 miles away. This is a high-powered group of people. Much better selected then I would say Greer's 400. The disappointing thing was that it went over like a lead balloon as far as the Washington press is concerned. There was a lot of people there, but it didn't produce anything as far as I could tell. It cost a lot to bring those people together, I guess James Fox paid for most of that. Anyway that type of disclosure, that type of attempt at forcing the government, if you keep that up, if there was funding to sort of keep that thing up, I think you would turn the situation around. Bowyer was there the guy from the Channel Island's thing, I met him at that press conference. That was November 2007 wasn't it? Ken: You know I am not sure of the date, I know it was only a few years ago. I don't know the exact year. Dr. Maccabee: You can look it up on the Internet and you can see that each person had a short paragraph type of testimony that he read and then he was available for interviews by interested people afterwards. So each one of them had a long story to tell. They had to be available I am sure of that and during a press conference itself, the press conference statements are all available on the Internet. Ken: Are videos easier or harder to analyze than still photos? Dr. Maccabee: Well of course videos can take a lot more time because there were a lot more images. Like for example in the New Zealand case it wasn't in a video, it was a color movie film. It was literally thousands of frames of pictures that I looked at before I could arrive at any conclusions of what was going on. If you have a few photos you don't have as much data to work with, that can be both bad and good and it certainly means that you don't have as much to do. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time on the photos from the McMinnville case, McMinnville, Oregon. Farmer Paul Trent and his wife. This stuff is on my website, probably the largest report on the McMinnville case of these two photos, I don't know if you're familiar with them or not? Ken: I am, yes. Dr. Maccabee: They are really clear, it's either the real thing or a hoax there is no halfway point. So that in the government and the contract research it is known as high risk, high payoff. Like I said there's no halfway point of misidentification. If this thing flew by the type of shape that it's got, it wasn't ours. That was only two pictures and what did I do, I spent several years of part-time work analyzing the photos, and of course I also went into everything else, the history of the sighting and the character of the Trents. Would they be likely to try and pull off a hoax in any form at all, not just a UFO hoax? The answer that I arrived at was no. You asked which was more difficult photos or video? I spent more time on digital photos that I spent on many videos. Lots of videos that I look at, when told how they are taken, turn out to be something like well the guy who videotaped Venus for half an hour. I remember one man who sent me videos of lighted objects going over his house. He said they're always going over my house and they would disappear on a mountain that was across a small valley. They would disappear over there and he felt that they landed on the other side of the hill. He made a video that I've remember of his “sightings”. When I played this thing back and turned the volume up, I could see the lights up there all right, but could also hear the noise of a jet engine and sure enough it went over towards where that mountain was and disappeared, but it was basically just continuing its path. He wanted me to come up to New Hampshire and verify that these were real UFOs and we would go public with it and make lots of money. Ken: Do you think that using today's technology that a movie studio, or someone with sophisticated equipment could create a UFO photo that could fool the experts? Dr. Maccabee: Yeah, you have to create not just the photo but the story behind. There is no doubt that somebody that is intent on doing a sophisticated hoax could do it. If you do it totally by CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, there are super experts who could at least comment on how good a hoax has to be to do that. The more sophisticated you get, the more you have to have knowledge. The investigator would say first of all Joe Smith brings to me a photograph, says it is a UFO, and he saw it in his backyard and it was hovering over his neighbor's house and he ran and got his camera and came back outside, took one photograph, and the thing just zipped away, so it's a pretty simple straightforward UFO sighting. And oh by the way, Joe happens to work for Spielberg Inc. WELL YOU KNOW... it would be like the fox being in the hen house I guess. If the guy has time, money, desire and capability and equipment, access to equip. When we went down to Gulf Breeze, one of the first things I spent time looking at was Ed Walters' photos, back in 1987. when I got involved in February 1988. The first question was, was Ed Walters an inveterate hoaxer? Could he have created these things with his camera? We investigated the camera and we found out, yup he could do double exposures with the camera. Upon further investigation I found some things about the photos, why they could not have been created using a double exposure from the camera. This could have been done using a Hollywood level technique with a masked double exposure, but not a simple double exposure, like Ed could do with his camera. So basically the capability of the witness in that case indicated that the photo was probably real. That is where the person could have the desire to do it, could have the money to do it, could even have the information to do it, but didn't have the equipment to do it. Of course you never know when someone comes to you with a photograph a priori whether that person is hoaxing or telling the truth, so you have to judge all of these other things like I said. So a guy brings me a photograph and he works for one of the major Hollywood studios and does computer-generated imagery. I would be the first to say that I am very skeptical about this picture. On the Internet there have been over the last several years of what appear to be intentional photo hoaxes. The Chad drone are you familiar with that? Ken: No I don't think so. Oh wait a minute is that the ring like thing with the rods sticking out of it over a power line? Dr. Maccabee: Yeah. The case began with a guy telling us a story that he was visiting his friends and all of a sudden this thing appeared and he decided to take some pictures of it. One of the things that struck me was the guy says my friend, he actually used the name I don't know what the name was, was very brave and ran right underneath it to take a picture straight up. I'm thinking to myself yeah, right. If there is a real UFO up there are you really going to be likely to run underneath to take a picture. But anyway that was kicked around for a number of months and, actually for a couple years and ultimately ended up that was a proven CGI. Other people came along and made their own versions of it, that is demonstrating. Guys that did not believe that this thing was real contacted me and said I am a CGI guy and I can do it myself, so there are number of what you might call fakes squared. Or if the original was a fake, these people were making something look like the fake, so I guess that is a fake fake. Ken: Yeah I guess so.
Edward Condon
Dr. Maccabee: Anyway it makes it difficult now days to say just from the pictures what's going on. You take a picture with a digital camera, you can easily suck it into a computer and grab it with a Photoshop, or some sophisticated image processing software, take a picture of a daylight scene and insert into it a CGI UFO, computer generated imagery ovf a UFO. If you are good enough at inserting it I guess it would be impossible to tell if it was real or fake. You have to get all the lighting right, you have to have all the bindings between the CGI pixels and real pixels have to be just right. If you could get all that stuff right nobody could argue against it. The argument would be that we can't use the picture to prove that it is a hoax. The same thing with the Trent case, you can't use the pictures to prove it's a hoax. What you fall back on is the character of the people involved. In the Trent case, in McMinnville, Oregon 1950 pictures, there was no way, as far as I could tell, hoaxing was completely out of their life style. Yeah they could've hung a model from a string from some wires overhead and they could've been lucky about the model, obeyed certain photometric conditions that were tested by William Hartmann in the Condon study, this is one of the few photographs actually studied by the Condon people in the 1960s. The bottom line is that you can't use the photos to prove that it is a hoax and the photos don't prove that it's real either, because it could be a fake that is so good that you can't detect it. That applies to modern CGI imagery, modern digital camera imagery, as well as to old-fashioned photos. The best a photo can do is act as an aid to the witness, the worst a photo can do is contain information that absolutely proves it is a hoax. For example I remember watching a movie one time where some guys from West Virginia claimed they had a UFO sighting near an airport and when you look at the movie and you are looking through one of these wire fences at an airport and you see an airplane land and no sooner than the airplane disappears out of the picture comes, I hate to use the term, swinging into the picture comes the UFO. The old fishing rod UFO model and you can see the string and you can see the rod and all sorts of sh.., they try to pass this off, and for 10 bucks they will sell you a UFO movie. Ken: I am surprised that they didn't take the picture near their still. Dr. Maccabee: In any case the bottom line is the film could have evidence that proves it's a hoax, it has to be really unique to prove that it's real without having to look at the character and everything and the background of the witness. If you are just presented with a photograph, especially nowadays, you better know the capabilities, the desires, and so on of the witness, before you try and make any positive statement about it. Continued on Part IV |
