Here is another of my columns taken from October-2006. This ran in UFO Magazine .. the magazine my wife and I ran .. not the UFO of today.
Decker
I Get the Last Word
20 years of publishing a UFO magazine is neither easy or at times, much fun. It is kind of like the little kid trying to convince the adults to go outside and see the weird “thing”, whatever it might be, that the kid just saw. He knows that there is something there, but convincing everyone else can be a real chore!
We’ve always been in a strange position here at UFO Magazine. Back in the early years I was convinced that with just the right case and with just the right presentation, mainstream would look up and notice. Then, they might agree that this UFO thing just might be a topic worth investigating. And there were cases over the years that I still believe should have been the ones! Of course Roswell has been done to death, and in my opinion, done to death poorly. Regardless of the facts that the US Government and its military services lied about the case, AND admitted they lied about it … never made a difference with our “mainstream” media. Its kind of funny, but for example, let todays government officials make a statement about the war in Iraq or Homeland Security or the latest terrorist plot and the media will TEAR IT apart! However, let the topic of UFOs rear its head and that same Government Official say it was a weather balloon or a “Mogul” balloon and they accept it at face value. What is it about UFOs?
Another case that always puzzled me was the case of the Soviet Russian Phobos probes sent to Mars back in 1988. The Russians launched two probes, almost unnoticed by media here in the West, (although NASA was a BIG PART of that mission) looses one probe in a little over a month, the second probe gets to Mars, takes some very amazing photographs, then it is destroyed by “something” that Glavkosmos says “shouldn’t” be there and NOTHING! We, (UFO Magazine) get a picture from a very high former Soviet Air Force Pilot, Dr. Marina Popovich, a former Colonel in the Red Air Force, show it on national television (Larry King Live) and the media doesn’t even care enough about it to ask the obvious question, what in hell is THAT? Oh, it must be a “glitch” in the photograph because WE ALL KNOW THAT SOMETHING LIKE THAT COULDN”T BE REAL! Of course when we got the picture from the Russians they said they didn’t have a clue what that was. But hang on, our Skeptics said the Russians were simply “full of it”, after all EVERYBODY KNOWS that the Russians are superstitious, they believe in all kinds of weird things. (And the skeptics are hoping that we have forgotten that the Russians put up the very first satellite Sputnik, launched the very first man into space, and gave us one hell of a run for our money going to the Moon.) And speaking of the Moon ….
Haven’t you ever wondered why we had such a breakneck race to get to the Moon before the Russki’s back in the 1960’s? Why did we spend untold billions of dollars (and the Russians untold billions of rubles) to get to the Moon, then only land 6 times and wash our hands of it? As a matter of fact the Russians ended up NEVER even sending any of their Cosmonauts up to the Moon. For over 10 years after landing on the Moon, other than Skylab meeting a Russian vehicle in orbit and docking with them, we pretty much left spaceflight behind. Oh sure, the shuttle was on the drawing boards, our “space truck” as it was called, but except for some interplanetary probes we kept right here to Earth. There were rumors to be sure, but when NASA was asked why we stopped going to the Moon, after a decade of promises of what was to come, do you know what they said? Why, after landing on the Moon the American public lost “INTEREST” in going back so we stopped. My God! What a crock! As if the American public loosing interest in something EVER stopped anything a government agency was involved in! Remember the War in VietNam? That lasted about 15 years and people lost interest in that LONG AGO. Of course the media never followed up on the Moon thing. It has been almost 35 years since we set foot on the Moon, and today people have long stopped asking about it.
Well UFO Magazine has often asked such questions and as long as we publish we will continue to ask those questions. The reason? If even one “UFO” in the last 10,000 years has been extra-terrestrial, that is the biggest story in human history. Now, that is a story worth reporting on!
Don Ecker
Decker
I Get the Last Word
20 years of publishing a UFO magazine is neither easy or at times, much fun. It is kind of like the little kid trying to convince the adults to go outside and see the weird “thing”, whatever it might be, that the kid just saw. He knows that there is something there, but convincing everyone else can be a real chore!
We’ve always been in a strange position here at UFO Magazine. Back in the early years I was convinced that with just the right case and with just the right presentation, mainstream would look up and notice. Then, they might agree that this UFO thing just might be a topic worth investigating. And there were cases over the years that I still believe should have been the ones! Of course Roswell has been done to death, and in my opinion, done to death poorly. Regardless of the facts that the US Government and its military services lied about the case, AND admitted they lied about it … never made a difference with our “mainstream” media. Its kind of funny, but for example, let todays government officials make a statement about the war in Iraq or Homeland Security or the latest terrorist plot and the media will TEAR IT apart! However, let the topic of UFOs rear its head and that same Government Official say it was a weather balloon or a “Mogul” balloon and they accept it at face value. What is it about UFOs?
Another case that always puzzled me was the case of the Soviet Russian Phobos probes sent to Mars back in 1988. The Russians launched two probes, almost unnoticed by media here in the West, (although NASA was a BIG PART of that mission) looses one probe in a little over a month, the second probe gets to Mars, takes some very amazing photographs, then it is destroyed by “something” that Glavkosmos says “shouldn’t” be there and NOTHING! We, (UFO Magazine) get a picture from a very high former Soviet Air Force Pilot, Dr. Marina Popovich, a former Colonel in the Red Air Force, show it on national television (Larry King Live) and the media doesn’t even care enough about it to ask the obvious question, what in hell is THAT? Oh, it must be a “glitch” in the photograph because WE ALL KNOW THAT SOMETHING LIKE THAT COULDN”T BE REAL! Of course when we got the picture from the Russians they said they didn’t have a clue what that was. But hang on, our Skeptics said the Russians were simply “full of it”, after all EVERYBODY KNOWS that the Russians are superstitious, they believe in all kinds of weird things. (And the skeptics are hoping that we have forgotten that the Russians put up the very first satellite Sputnik, launched the very first man into space, and gave us one hell of a run for our money going to the Moon.) And speaking of the Moon ….
Haven’t you ever wondered why we had such a breakneck race to get to the Moon before the Russki’s back in the 1960’s? Why did we spend untold billions of dollars (and the Russians untold billions of rubles) to get to the Moon, then only land 6 times and wash our hands of it? As a matter of fact the Russians ended up NEVER even sending any of their Cosmonauts up to the Moon. For over 10 years after landing on the Moon, other than Skylab meeting a Russian vehicle in orbit and docking with them, we pretty much left spaceflight behind. Oh sure, the shuttle was on the drawing boards, our “space truck” as it was called, but except for some interplanetary probes we kept right here to Earth. There were rumors to be sure, but when NASA was asked why we stopped going to the Moon, after a decade of promises of what was to come, do you know what they said? Why, after landing on the Moon the American public lost “INTEREST” in going back so we stopped. My God! What a crock! As if the American public loosing interest in something EVER stopped anything a government agency was involved in! Remember the War in VietNam? That lasted about 15 years and people lost interest in that LONG AGO. Of course the media never followed up on the Moon thing. It has been almost 35 years since we set foot on the Moon, and today people have long stopped asking about it.
Well UFO Magazine has often asked such questions and as long as we publish we will continue to ask those questions. The reason? If even one “UFO” in the last 10,000 years has been extra-terrestrial, that is the biggest story in human history. Now, that is a story worth reporting on!
Don Ecker