Interview With Dr. Bruce Maccabee Part IV Of IV February 2010
Goto Part I Of IV
Goto Part II Of IV
Goto Part III Of IV
The above audio is copyrighted 2010 by About Facts Net and it licensors. All Rights Are Reserved. Ken: Are you up for three more questions? Dr. Maccabee: Sure. Ken: Ron Stewart, the well known imaging scientist, is said to have invented a process known as APEP, or the Advanced Photographic Extraction Process that can increase resolution by up to 10,000 percent, by increasing the average 150 dots per inch to 10,000 dots per inch, or DPI. Have you ever heard of this and is this reliable? Dr. Maccabee: I have seen stuff about that, that I don't believe. You were talking about increasing the resolution. I don't know if you have a digital picture to begin with and you have a certain number of images, a certain number of pixels and each pixel has a constant color and brightness across it, if you start taking that pixel apart it may increase the amount of pixels say by suddenly divided them into 10 parts, you're not going to know anything that you didn't know before. You're just taking a constant level of one pixel. You have to look very carefully at a digital photograph to see what I am talking about when you keep blowing up digital photographs more and more and more with computer programs until you see each individual pixel as a big square. That big square will have a constant level of intensity and the brightness and color across it. Things look blocky when you get that much magnification. So if you divide that pixel into a whole bunch of parts you haven't learned anything you didn't already know. Well anyway the bottom line is that I am skeptical and I don't know whether he is a well-known photo analyst in the first place, whatever terminology used in the first place when you introduced him. Ken: I said well known but I personally have no knowledge of him, but I have read about him. Dr. Maccabee: Sounds almost like a scam to me. Ken: When you helped to reanalyze the famous Project Blue Book report, what was the conclusion that you came to? Dr. Maccabee: Well wait a minute, the famous Project Blue Book report. There wasn't any overall report, I don't know what you mean? Ken: Maybe I am wrong here, but I was under the impression that after Project Blue Book came out that it was re-analyzed by you. Dr. Maccabee: Well Project Blue Book released a whole bunch of documents, sightings and analyses and so on, on 92 rolls of microfilm in 1975 or 1976. Now I don't know if that is what you mean? There was the Condon report which is an independent valuation supposedly, an independent evaluation of Project Blue Book results. The Condon report was done in 1967, 1968. Published in 1969. Ken: It might have been the Condon report, I am not sure now. Dr. Maccabee: I didn't do a report on the Condon report. Ken: Oh you didn't. Dr. Maccabee: And to do a report.... I didn't do any overall report on Project Blue Book itself. I have put in my UFO FBI Connection book, which unfortunately has gone out of print years ago, but it is still available for a buck, half a block, two bits, ten cents, or a nickel. Ken: Oh no, things can't be that bad. Dr. Maccabee: It is still available in secondhand versions at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, whatever. That does talk about the early history of Project Blue Book and the Air Force investigation, but I have not tried to write a report on the whole of Project Blue Book. Ken: Okay, I am wrong on that and I apologize. Dr. Maccabee: You are talking about August 6, 1997? Ken: Yes I believe that's it, the one that flew over the apartment building. Dr. Maccabee: Right. That really caused a big flap that came down the pike. It turned up in the mailbox of Jaime Maussan, in Mexico, unannounced as I recall. He didn't know where it was taken you know, who had taken it and it had a letter along with it where a guy said we saw this thing and videotaped it and because I think the implication was that he was not a native Mexican he was working illegally in Mexico, or something like that, so he didn't want to release his name. It was an anonymous video. I and another guy, Jeff Sainio a MUFON analyst, really spent a lot of time on this thing. I don't know, a few hundred hours maybe and he may have spent more time than I did, because the film starts off showing an object hovering, rotating, wobbling a little bit at the left of a big apartment building. Then it moves towards the apartment building and it's obviously on the other side of the apartment building. That looks real because it goes behind the apartment building and then comes up to the apartment building roof. Then it goes along roughly horizontal rotating, wobbling a bit, I can't remember exactly how it disappeared. It sort of goes behind something that is a higher level than the apartment building, I think in any event is no longer seen. Now it's 30 seconds, I forget how long the duration is, but it's plenty of time. There were a hands on frames to analyze. We spent plenty of time and I was thinking this might be real, this might be real. Just then, Jeff Sainio was doing an analysis of the dynamics of the object compared to using the buildings as a reference point. This was apparently a hand held camera, so you have jiggling of the image and giggling of the building image. Ideally you would have a stationary building, you would have no vibration at all. Jeff Sainio had written a program to effectively make the building standstill, then you could see the motion of the object relative to the building. When you did that he began to notice something strange. When the building moves in the image the hand is vibrating holding the camera. The motion of the building during the frame time, the time of the exposure one 1/30 of a second, if the building image moves it smears the edge of the image and he could look at the amount of edge smear of the building and could look at the amount of edge smear of the UFO image and they didn't correlate. The UFO image seemed to be a lot more steady than the building image, implying that the UFO image was not real and out there. Then I managed to find two frames where the motion was fast and large enough that you could clearly see in these two frames what I am talking about, what I call the fingerprints of a hoax. Namely that the building edges are smeared by camera motion and the UFO image isn't. When you think about it, if the UFO was out there in real space next to a building and you are photographing it and you tilt the camera let's say suddenly upwards, when you play it back the image will suddenly move downwards. If you go at it frame by frame, looking at the edge of the building, you will find that the edge of the building, the horizontal edge of the building is smeared by the sudden downward motion of the image. So you could say that the edge of the building was smeared, but guess what, the UFO was not. The only thing that I can think of that would explain that would be that if this was a CGI. Oh by the way when that thing came out in 1997, the fall of 1997, I was contacted by a number of CGI guys that said, hey I can do that and sure enough quite a few people came up with their own simulations of this video.
The Amazing Randi Ken: That reminds me of, I don't know if you know who the Amazing Randi is? Randy the magician. Dr. Maccabee: Yes. Ken: He told me that he could duplicate anything that anybody did. I was thinking to myself at the time how would you ever know if something was real because he could duplicate it by doing it in a way that was a trick, do you know what I mean? I think that we have gotten to the point today where it is almost impossible, getting to be impossible to know if something is real anymore, unless there are a lot of witnesses to the event. What do you think? Dr. Maccabee: Even having lots of witnesses can be a problem too. Witnesses typically come up with different stories and with different points of view, it depends on how complex the event is. There is a video case from Griswold Germany. which I haven't seen for a couple of years. I think it occurred in the 80s or early 90s. That was with some strange appeared in the sky. That was where they were videotaped from hundreds or thousands of feet apart and maybe miles apart, I forget exactly. That is what you might call an ideal type of case to look at, witnesses unconnected to each other and videos with a time recording of what is going on. If Randy can generate anything. what the hell, we might as well go to bed and let him generate tomorrow. Ken: He was talking more about Uri Geller's trick with the spoons and different things like that. He was saying that there was nothing paranormal about it and he was telling me that “I could do any of that stuff”, and he said it wasn't fair because Uri Geller is still famous and Randy, who was offering $1 million if he can't duplicate the event, is not famous anymore. Dr. Maccabee: Do you know who J. R. Hynek was? Ken: Yes I do, later on he became a supporter of UFOs. He had to do with Blue Book Dr. Maccabee: In 1980 there was a UFO symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. I was there, Hynek was there, Glass was there, Robert Sheaffer was there. In the audience were such luminaries as Stanton Friedman and other people of course and the general population. At lunch time we went down to the basement and they were ready to serve the tables where people were sitting. I am trying to think of that name of the guy who wrote the Robertson panel report. I can't think of his name off hand. Maybe it will come to me, but anyway we will just say that his name is Guy for the moment. He was an old buddy of Hynek and had known Hynek for years. He was the head of the rocket Society in the 50s. He had worked for the CIA and had wrote the so-called famous Robinson report, which you can look up if you don't know what it is. Anyway Hynek is on my right and guy is on my left. I am sitting there and Hynek starts to talk about spoon bending. Ken: Really? Dr. Maccabee: Hynek was rather a straight laced guy but he was into some far out stuff. In fact I think at the end he was assigning UFOs to some sort of paranormal thing more than ET's. In any event he was explaining to Guy, talking across me as it were, explaining to Guy how he had met Geller, discussed the situation of mental capabilities and so on with Gellar and Hynek says Geller took one of my keys, held it in his hand and claimed it started to get soft and the key started to bend. At this point he put the key on the table and took his hands away from it. Hynek says he was looking at this key and there was no hands anywhere near it and it continued to bend. Hynek is being very forceful in this description and Guy is having nothing to do with that. He wouldn't believe it. Fred something or other is the name of the guy I trying to think of. Fred would have none of it but Hynek was saying that it continued to bend with nobody touching it. Now I would like to see that sort of thing happen with Randy. I suppose he could come up with a trick key that is capable of bending itself. This was a key that supposedly Hynek had in his pocket and pulled forth in order to have Gellar bend it. Ken: Randy is a very resourceful man. As far as I know he made one big major mistake in his life. He used to go into safes and claimed that he could get out of any safe, I don't know if you know this? Dr. Maccabee: No. Ken: To promote himself he went to one of the local newspapers and they had this model of a safe that he knew about and he said to them I could go into your safe and get out of it. They said if you can do that we will write a story about you. He gets into the safe the door is locked and then thinks, Oh my God, the safe had been remodeled. He didn't know how to open it. He almost died, they had to get a guy to open the safe and there was nobody there at the time and he had to come from his house. The safe was very hard to open and Randy almost expired from lack of oxygen. So that was his big mistake. Dr. Maccabee: He got himself into trouble as I recall. He was sued himself by Elden Byrd. Ken: He has been sued a couple of times I believe. Dr. Maccabee: Well I don't remember what we talked about in our last interview. Ken: About a year ago I think that was that we had our last interview. Dr. Maccabee: Of course there is all sorts of stuff coming along continuously, I don't know if we talked about the Serpo stuff back then? I haven't been reading it diligently, would you be familiar with Serpo? Ken: No. Dr. Maccabee: Well oh my goodness. This is a story of supposedly an exchange program. Ken: Oh that Serpo. You are talking about project Serpo. Dr. Maccabee: It started in the 70s. Ken: Yes I am familiar with it. Dr. Maccabee: A dozen of our guys went to planet Serpo and a dozen of their guys came here.
Dennis Balthaser Ken: As a matter of fact, I mentioned that in my last interview with Dennis Balthaser We were talking about that. Dr. Maccabee: What did Dennis have to say about it? Dr. Maccabee: He doesn't put much faith in it. Dr. Maccabee:
Well neither do I. In the first, second or third communication from whoever it is, the anonymous person who is leaking all this information, described how planet Serpo goes around one of the Zeta Reticuli stars. He was studying up on the Betty and Barney Hill case I guess and he provided certain astronomical data on planet Serpo. The rotation time, the time of the year, the rotation of the planet, how long a year was in terms of our years and so on. I don't know who made up the numbers, but they didn't fit the so-called law of Kepler, which describes the time period of planets. If you get a certain distance from the sun, then you are going to have ta certain period of time to go around the Sun. When you are up close, the period is shorter and if you are a farther distance away the period is longer. There is a mathematical formula worked out first by Kepler. It tells you how long a year is as a function of rotation. In the Serpo situation you have two stars, so you have a more complex orbit maybe. The bottom line was that the supposed astronomical data that they came up with didn't make any sense. Either it was completely fabricated, or else astronomical laws don't hold for other star systems. Nobody is going to buy that. Ken: The project didn't make much sense to start with. Dr. Maccabee: All the other stuff, I haven't really kept up with it, but I understand there is supposedly a lot of other stuff about how these people..... our guys went there for 10 years, I forget how long it was and not all of them came back. One of them died there, a couple of them decided to stay and so on. Ken: There is so much of that stuff like the Dulce invasion, where we supposedly invaded the underground base and … Dr. Maccabee: That is another thing that has been researched, the Dulce base. UFO Hunters did that. They had to do it I guess last winter, because there was snow around. Have you've seen the show? Ken: Yes I have and I saw that particular one too. Dr. Maccabee: Right. they are not the first people to investigate the Dulce stuff. That goes back to, way back into the 80s . It goes back to Bennewitz. Bennewitz and what was the name of the abductee that he was working with? He claimed that there was underground base at Dulce where humans and aliens worked and there were big vats of human parts. I don't remember all the stuff that went along with that story. Ken: The aliens was supposed to make a list of all the humans that they abducted and they weren't supposed to hurt them or anything. They were taking away more than they were supposed to, they weren't making any lists and they were hurting humans. Then supposedly we invaded the base and most of our people got killed. Dr. Maccabee: Yeah Right. Well way back in the middle 80s, as soon as that came out, Bill Moore and all the people, James McCampbell, who was a scientist interested in UFOs... McCampbell had me analyze a photo that Bennewitz had taken. Bennewitz had taken a photo from the air looking down on the Mesa and there was stones and rocks and stuff. Bennewitz identified in this picture things like a laser ray weapon or something like that, crashed saucers and military vehicles and all sorts of stuff supposedly on the top of this Mesa. This was like the Rorschach test I was talking to you earlier about, looking at blow up pictures of the moon or Mars, more trees and grass looking for Bigfoot. If you blow it up big enough you can see all sorts of stuff and that's what Bennewitz did. Anyway people went down there in the middle 80s and nobody could find anything. No entrances to underground bases. The UFO Hunters did the same thing last year and they didn't find anything either, so nobody has found anything and a lot of people have looked. Ken: Well that's an interesting story anyway. Dr. Maccabee: It's an interesting story, would probably should be done away with. Ken: Well listen, I really want to thank you this was an interesting interview. To tell you the truth I enjoyed myself. Dr. Maccabee: Thank you for inviting me. |
