I Get the Last Word
July -- 2006
by Don Ecker
Recently I was speaking to someone about my continued interest in the UFO field. As I mentioned to her, my main interest has centered around two areas of UFO research, and they are military encounters and UFOs in space. (And this includes lunar phenomena.) As we continued to talk about this, STS-48 (a shuttle mission in 1992) was mentioned in connection with the recent British MOD statements claiming all UFOs are simply “plasma.” How many times are the authorities going to drag out this old and tired canard? I mean “Holy Cow!” Phil Klass tried this back in the ‘60s and he was shot down again and again.
Why is STS-48 such a stellar example of something weird happening in our skies? Let’s take a quick look back.
In very early 1992, Don Ratsch, an investigator back in Maryland, sent me a videotape of the STS-48 mission he secured from a “live feed” at a cable TV station. The footage showed a number of incidents with anomalies of unexplained objects flying in near-Earth space. While the shuttle is seen over Australia and New Zealand, an object rises above the limn of the earth and after a moment or two is followed by an unexplained burst of light, then “something” streaks directly toward the UFO. The UFO immediately makes about a 140-degree right-angle turn and streaks out into space. It then comes back around to the left of the image and heads back toward Earth. Even though this is the most famous incident, others can be clearly seen on the videotape.
When I saw this I was truly amazed. It just so happens that about this time, Bruce Maccabee was in southern California. He called me and my wife and said he would like to see us. I invited him over, along with several other people. After everyone was there, I told them about this video. I popped it into my VCR and proceeded to play it. Everyone was blown away, but I remember Maccabee being very silent about it. This was very strange, as I found out later.
I called a couple of producers I knew and told them about this amazing video. The first one to get back to me was a guy, Dean Vallas, I knew on the old tabloid show “Hard Copy,” and after he saw it he wanted to run it on their next broadcast. They interviewed me for the show and aired the footage, and afterwards the talk really started in UFOdom. A producer I knew on “Larry King Live” called me up and asked me to run the footage down to the CNN studios here in Los Angeles. After its screening there, he wanted to do a show about STS-48 and asked me to appear. They wanted to include a skeptic, and after Phil Klass declined, Dr. James Oberg, a NASA contract scientist, was suggested. Oberg agreed to do the show and we appeared around June 27, 1992. The “spin” that was being “test flown” on this segment of King’s show was this: What everyone was seeing was “frozen urine” dumped by the space shuttle. I knew this was nonsense, because the water dump occurred AFTER the anomaly--known as “incident 2”--was viewed.
Now comes the weird part. I had spoken extensively with Don Ratsch about this video. He informed me that a lot of people were very concerned, even scared by what this represented. Ratsch then informed me that Vince DiPietro (the same DiPietro who helped shine a lot of light on the Face on Mars) and Bruce Maccabee had taken this footage to a Congressman, voicing their great concern about the implications of something “shooting” at the UFO. As I later found out, DiPietro, an employee at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, even began fearing for his life when the STS-footage was widely released. DiPietro and Maccabee (who had sat in my living room and NEVER LET ON he was familiar with STS-48!) were trying to create a stir in government circles about what went on with the shuttle mission.
During the Larry King broadcast, I started out by asking James Oberg if he was under any security restrictions; in other words, could he legally speak about this case, being a government contract scientist? He became very annoyed by the question and accused me of coming on only to sell magazines! But when King told him it was a “fair question,” Oberg answered that he could not speak about DoD matters--but STS-48 was something he could discuss. Later during the broadcast two calls were taken, BOTH FROM NASA EMPLOYEES! Amazingly, one of the calls was from Vince DiPietro, who tried to diss the footage by claiming it was ice. I called him on it, however, and forced him to admit that one of the “incidents” clearly showed a “domed disc object. He admitted he didn’t know what it was. Clearly, at this time DiPietro was still concerned for his safety.
Plasma? Well, as it turned out, the very next day NASA encrypted the live feed from outer space. Since that day, every broadcast the public has seen from shuttle missions has either been time delayed or vetted before being shown to the public. Back in 1992, the stated reason for the live video encryption was to protect astronaut privacy because of health concerns. Uh-huh.
About two or three weeks later I received a telephone call from someone back east with some very interesting scuttlebutt. This caller told me I had really “pissed off” some folks at the Pentagon. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I asked. I was told that what with the Larry King broadcast showing the strange object in orbit and my comments that it looked like something shooting at it, action was taken so that something like this wouldn’t happen again. Plasma?
So, the more things change, the more they stay the same. After almost 60 years of official denials and obfuscation, the same tired old explanations are trotted out time and again. All UFOs are plasma and misidentifications, got that? Don’t believe your lying eyes or the man behind the curtain. If aliens show up, we’ll tell you! Yeah, sure.
Until next time.
July -- 2006
by Don Ecker
Recently I was speaking to someone about my continued interest in the UFO field. As I mentioned to her, my main interest has centered around two areas of UFO research, and they are military encounters and UFOs in space. (And this includes lunar phenomena.) As we continued to talk about this, STS-48 (a shuttle mission in 1992) was mentioned in connection with the recent British MOD statements claiming all UFOs are simply “plasma.” How many times are the authorities going to drag out this old and tired canard? I mean “Holy Cow!” Phil Klass tried this back in the ‘60s and he was shot down again and again.
Why is STS-48 such a stellar example of something weird happening in our skies? Let’s take a quick look back.
In very early 1992, Don Ratsch, an investigator back in Maryland, sent me a videotape of the STS-48 mission he secured from a “live feed” at a cable TV station. The footage showed a number of incidents with anomalies of unexplained objects flying in near-Earth space. While the shuttle is seen over Australia and New Zealand, an object rises above the limn of the earth and after a moment or two is followed by an unexplained burst of light, then “something” streaks directly toward the UFO. The UFO immediately makes about a 140-degree right-angle turn and streaks out into space. It then comes back around to the left of the image and heads back toward Earth. Even though this is the most famous incident, others can be clearly seen on the videotape.
When I saw this I was truly amazed. It just so happens that about this time, Bruce Maccabee was in southern California. He called me and my wife and said he would like to see us. I invited him over, along with several other people. After everyone was there, I told them about this video. I popped it into my VCR and proceeded to play it. Everyone was blown away, but I remember Maccabee being very silent about it. This was very strange, as I found out later.
I called a couple of producers I knew and told them about this amazing video. The first one to get back to me was a guy, Dean Vallas, I knew on the old tabloid show “Hard Copy,” and after he saw it he wanted to run it on their next broadcast. They interviewed me for the show and aired the footage, and afterwards the talk really started in UFOdom. A producer I knew on “Larry King Live” called me up and asked me to run the footage down to the CNN studios here in Los Angeles. After its screening there, he wanted to do a show about STS-48 and asked me to appear. They wanted to include a skeptic, and after Phil Klass declined, Dr. James Oberg, a NASA contract scientist, was suggested. Oberg agreed to do the show and we appeared around June 27, 1992. The “spin” that was being “test flown” on this segment of King’s show was this: What everyone was seeing was “frozen urine” dumped by the space shuttle. I knew this was nonsense, because the water dump occurred AFTER the anomaly--known as “incident 2”--was viewed.
Now comes the weird part. I had spoken extensively with Don Ratsch about this video. He informed me that a lot of people were very concerned, even scared by what this represented. Ratsch then informed me that Vince DiPietro (the same DiPietro who helped shine a lot of light on the Face on Mars) and Bruce Maccabee had taken this footage to a Congressman, voicing their great concern about the implications of something “shooting” at the UFO. As I later found out, DiPietro, an employee at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, even began fearing for his life when the STS-footage was widely released. DiPietro and Maccabee (who had sat in my living room and NEVER LET ON he was familiar with STS-48!) were trying to create a stir in government circles about what went on with the shuttle mission.
During the Larry King broadcast, I started out by asking James Oberg if he was under any security restrictions; in other words, could he legally speak about this case, being a government contract scientist? He became very annoyed by the question and accused me of coming on only to sell magazines! But when King told him it was a “fair question,” Oberg answered that he could not speak about DoD matters--but STS-48 was something he could discuss. Later during the broadcast two calls were taken, BOTH FROM NASA EMPLOYEES! Amazingly, one of the calls was from Vince DiPietro, who tried to diss the footage by claiming it was ice. I called him on it, however, and forced him to admit that one of the “incidents” clearly showed a “domed disc object. He admitted he didn’t know what it was. Clearly, at this time DiPietro was still concerned for his safety.
Plasma? Well, as it turned out, the very next day NASA encrypted the live feed from outer space. Since that day, every broadcast the public has seen from shuttle missions has either been time delayed or vetted before being shown to the public. Back in 1992, the stated reason for the live video encryption was to protect astronaut privacy because of health concerns. Uh-huh.
About two or three weeks later I received a telephone call from someone back east with some very interesting scuttlebutt. This caller told me I had really “pissed off” some folks at the Pentagon. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I asked. I was told that what with the Larry King broadcast showing the strange object in orbit and my comments that it looked like something shooting at it, action was taken so that something like this wouldn’t happen again. Plasma?
So, the more things change, the more they stay the same. After almost 60 years of official denials and obfuscation, the same tired old explanations are trotted out time and again. All UFOs are plasma and misidentifications, got that? Don’t believe your lying eyes or the man behind the curtain. If aliens show up, we’ll tell you! Yeah, sure.
Until next time.