Where have you gone, commander quasqaa? - Psychic Vibrations

UFOlogist Karl Pflock has done what is seemingly impossible these days--he has come up with a pro-UFO theory that is actually new. More than a few veteran UFOlogists are unhappy with the sensationalism and low quality of UFO cases in recent years (although the majority seem not to notice or to care). They long for the Good Old Days back in the 1950s and 1960s, when UFOs and their occupants behaved like nuts-and-bolts spacecraft and living spacemen were supposed to behave (instead of today's typical report of aliens floating in through bedroom walls and "beaming" a sleeping victim up to a distant craft for dreamlike sexual activities). Why have the type and kind of reports changed? Skeptics of various stripes have tended to put forth socio-psychological explanations: the reports do not describe real events, and the reports have changed because society has changed. But Pflock sees it a different way: He suggests that the aliens were here during UFOlogy's Golden Age, but they've since left.

Pflock is the author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will To Believe (Prometheus Books, 2001--see www. prometheusbooks.com/site/catalog/book_ 962.html), a skeptical look at the alleged Roswell saucer crash. Pflock would say that the aliens probably were indeed here at the time of the supposed crash in 1947, but based on the evidence he lets them off the hook for this incident. He also writes a "fifth column" for James Moseley's UFO gossip sheet, Saucer Smear (see www.martiansgohome.com/smear/).

Pflock isn't willing to commit himself to a hard and fast date for the last authentic UFO case, but he suggests the following scenario as a "working hypothesis": Based on the data, I'm subjectively certain that we have been visited by nonhuman intelligent beings--to my 1950s-conditioned mind, most likely from an extra-solar planet of our galaxy However, we do not yet have proof of this--as opposed to very strong evidence pointing to it--though such proof very well may be in the data already in hand, as yet unrecognized as such.

I use the past tense advisedly. If I am correct that some sightings were observations of such visitors and their vehicles, I suspect that they were here and left some time ago--arriving in the early to mid-1940s, departing in the late 1960s or early 1970s.... They studied our entire system and us quite closely. Once in a while a couple of grad students got out of hand and buzzed the natives. On occasion some ambitious scientists overstepped a bit and interfered with the local....

Pflock suggests that the strongest evidence of alien visitation are cases like the "classic" Trent photos of 1950 (see www.debunker.com/trent.html) and the Nash-Fortenberry airline pilot sighting of 1952. He also is big on "the famous, and in my considered opinion, real 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill," although the psychiatrist to whom the Hills first told this story didn't believe it, and Betty Hill has since gone on to report--among other things--seeing entire squadrons of UFOs in the skies over New Hampshire, babysitting a ghost, and watching a truck levitate. Pflock's own experience as a youth seeing a "strangelybehaving light in the sky," along with four other people, has also contributed to his belief that at least some UFO sightings were real, even if none of them seem to be today.

Pflock suggests 1973 as a tentative date for the alien departure, which happens to coincide with the last great wave of UFO sightings, at least in the U.S. The implications of his theory for UFOlogy are enormous: Every UFO sighting and abduction claim occurring from about 1974 onward is totally, 100 percent bogus. This would invalidate such UFOlogical classics as the Travis Walton "abduction" (Pflock has elsewhere noted that Walton's account seems to have "borrowed" from Heinlein's science fiction--see this column, July/August 2001); all of the "bedroom abduction" accounts put forth by Budd Hopkins and "the threat" to Earth as discerned by David Jacobs; the Mexico City sightings and videos; and all of the Space Shuttle "UFO videos," to mention just a few.

One possibility to consider is that the aliens did not leave Earth, but simply migrated to the South American country of Chile. Because the locals have reported so many UFO sightings during the past two decades, Miguel Marquez, the mayor of the Maipo River region near Santiago, has declared his region an official "UFO tourism zone (see www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/34636O7.htm). He plans to have two observation centers erected, mark the sites of local sightings, and even offer workshops on important subjects such as how to photograph alien visitors. One Chilean astronomer suggested that people were confused by seeing the bright center of the southern Milky Way, or else the Southern Lights owing to Chile's southern latitude. A better suggestion comes from UFO skeptic James Oberg, who notes that Chile "is on the ground track of satellite launchings from Russia's Plesetsk space center, and rocket reboost firings and fuel dumps have been regularly occurring over that part of the world for about thirty years."