UFO Hoaxes: Some were pretty good

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

Many UFO cases are considered by UFO buffs as hoaxed, but only a few truly were.

My pal Kevin Randle has recently presented a listing of obtuse materials that make up the Billie Meier long-running tale of “Plejaren” visitors from the Pleiades star system.

The Billie Meier “fiction” is not bad, as fiction – amateurish certainly – but not awful and it has gulled many in the UFO community.

As a “hoax” it’s rather good, as was that of a predecessor of Meier’s:

George Adamski’s longish fictive effort was imaginative and original, fleshed out with the help of co-conspirators (friends).

We all enjoyed Professor Adamski’s tale up until it was undone by what we found out about the planet Venus and copies of a fictional/quasi-philosophical/religious oriented work of his, prior to his flying saucer story, became fodder for skeptics who thought Adamski was a fraud from the get-go.

Adamski is lumped in with UFO story-tellers branded as “contactees” – See Nick Redfern’s superb book by that title for the “membership.”

You might think that contactees like Orfeo Angelucci or Truman Bethurum were hoaxers but I tend to side with Nick Redfern’s inclination that they were impulsed to present their stories by a government psy-operations, especially Angelucci. (You might use Google to see Nick’s renderings on this.)

(The psychological operational methodology using a flying saucer or UFO based scenario is well-defined in the “disclosure” of CIA operative Bosco Nedelcovic about the 1957 Vilas Boas case, which Nick covers thoroughly in his Contactees book.)

Another case thought to be a hoax was the 1952 Sonny Desvergers “scoutmaster” episode.

But I’m disinclined to write this story off as a full-fledged hoax because of the radiated (contaminated) soil discovered in the area where Desvergers said he encountered a hovering flying saucer that zapped him with a ray of some kind.

The reason many consider the tale fraudulent derives from the shaky background of Desvergers and his attempt to capitalize on the event.

If it was a hoax, the Desvergers tale was supported by little details that gave it heft.

Many UFO followers think that the 1975 Travis Walton “abduction” tale is a continuing hoax, but I write this one off as an episode of an hallucinogenic-infused escapade that took on a UFO abduction patina some time shortly after Mr. Walton was found distressed along a road nearby his alleged encounter.

The 1987 Gulf Breeze, Florida “sightings with some remarkable but hokey UFO videos has to be a hoax since models of the pictured UFOs were found in the attic of the perpetrator, Ed Walters.

Tony Bragalia has done yeoman’s work trying to prove that the 1964 Socorro/Zamora sighting was a hoaxed event created by students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Mr. Bragalia has gathered a slew of interesting tidbits that lend credence to the possibility that the event was a staged scenario to flummox Police Officer Zamora, but those tidbits fly in the face of the “facts” that emerged from the stealthy witness account of Officer Zamora and the subsequent evaluation of the event from top to bottom.

Yet, one can’t dismiss, out of hand, the possibility of a hoax, but I’m not buying it and a few others are not buying it either.

This doesn’t mean that the Socorro event was an ET mission spotted by Officer Zamora. It merely means that the 1964 sighting remains open to scrutiny, which Kevin Randle does in his pending book, out in October, Encounter in the Desert: The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro.

Anyway, some UFO tales have been juicy despite being concocted.

I didn’t even get to pummel the 1948 Aztec “fiction” which remains, for me, an open question of sorts.

But that for another time.

RR