The Paracast Newsletter
June 23, 2024
www.theparacast.com
UFO Investigator Charles Lear Reveals the Key People Responsible for Some of the Major UFO Myths of the Late 20th Century on The Paracast!
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022, 2023 and 2024 now feature better audio and fewer ads.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode: Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present a return appearance from Charles Lear, author of “Crashed Saucers and Malevolent Aliens: The Emergence of the Popular Modern UFO Mythos in the Late 20th Century.” The book focuses on those responsible for — or guilty of — creating and perpetuating key events involving flying saucer lore, such as the Aztec, NM and Roswell, NM crashes, the MJ-12 documents, disinformation agents, and so on and so forth. Lear also identifies one person, actually an old friend of Gene’s, who is, in part, responsible for three of those legends or myths. Lear has been writing about UFOs for several years and still finds the subject, and the stories of the people involved, fascinating. Besides his interest in all things Fortean, his pursuits include paleontology, geology, hiking, bad movies, and music. He has been a theatre person for most of his life. As a performer, he sticks to Shakespeare, and he makes his living as an I.A.T.S.E. Local One welder/carpenter in the construction shop of the Metropolitan Opera. His first saucer book was “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
After The Paracast — Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on June 23: Charles Lear, author of “Crashed Saucers and Malevolent Aliens: The Emergence of the Popular Modern UFO Mythos in the Late 20th Century,” returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about the origins of more myths in the field, including the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and its possible influence on later reports of alien contacts. Does the profit motive influence some of these claims? Lear also reveals his own views about the cause of the phenomenon, which he refers to as episodes of “high strangeness.” And what about that Harvard study that theorized about UFOs from our own planet, perhaps caused by what the late Mac Tonnies referred to as “cryptoterrestrials”? Lear has been writing about UFOs for several years and still finds the subject, and the stories of the people involved, fascinating. Besides his interest in all things Fortean, his pursuits include paleontology, geology, hiking, bad movies, and music. His first saucer book was “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Visit our new online shop for great branded merchandise at: https://www.theparacast.shop.
Lost in the Roswell Myth
By Gene Steinberg
As much as I would like to avoid talking about such long-time UFO tropes as the 1947 incident at Roswell, it keeps rearing its ugly head. There’s no stopping it.
A main reason is that the incident — whatever really happened — has become a linchpin of UFO reality. At least to some people.
Over the years, the Roswell legend, myth or even the possible reality, has been told over and over again. The town has found ways to make it profitable with a museum and other exhibits, all designed to expand its tourist trade.
Its origins are curious and highly unlikely. It all happened during the original modern flying saucer wave in 1947, not long after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24th sighting of nine mysterious objects made headlines worldwide. Or was it before?
While Arnold’s sighting remains unknown according to most people who have explored the case, what happened at Roswell can be one of several things.
Its beginnings were unlikely. One day a crashed disk is reportedly recovered near Roswell; the next day it’s sorry, folks, just a balloon.
And there it stood, dormant for some 30 years until flying saucer author and lecturer Stanton T. Friedman was contacted by an alleged witness to the event and there it began. More witnesses were located and Friedman worked with two book authors, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, to put it all together.
The result, entitled “The Roswell Incident,” was published in 1980. As books go, it was short, having just 168 pages. Curiously Friedman played second or third fiddle to his partners-in-crime. He didn’t earn a byline, just a credit. Friedman certainly gave me the impression over the years that he expected more recognition. I have no idea about the cash arrangements.
But it was enough to fuel interest in a dormant case, and the discussion has never ended. As much as I have tried to avoid the “R” word, it just seems to rear its head — ugly or otherwise — over and over again.
Several authors have kept the story running. Listeners to The Paracast are familiar with the works of one of them, Kevin D. Randle, who has been at it for years. An Army veteran who served in both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, he understands well the military mind and how to ferret out the information he needs to establish the reality, or lack thereof, of a UFO case.
His first book on the legendary crash, “UFO Crash at Roswell,” coauthored with Donald R. Schmitt, was published in 1991. But it didn’t end there. Over the years, there have been many articles and more books on the subject, the latest being “Understanding Roswell,” published in 2022 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the incident.
In his other life, Randle writes adventure stories and science fiction. In the UFO field, Randle is considered a class act. In addition to his focus on the Roswell case, he has published books on sightings in Levelland, Texas, Socorro, New Mexico and the classic 1952 Washington D.C. case.
But his reputation in the field will always be dominated by his years of study into what really happened in Roswell, and there lies the rub.
Even though he is less confident about some of the lingering stories about the recovery of aliens among the Roswell crash wreckage, he still feels that the episode involved the crash of a genuine spaceship from somewhere else in the universe.
If that’s the case, the U.S. government has been hanging on to a genuine article from another planet for over 75 years. And possibly the remains of its crew. The mind boggles!
But it’s not as if we’ve come any closer to getting a handle on what really happened. As I wrote above, the first interviews with supposed eyewitnesses occurred decades after the event. Memories are faulty. People cannot even agree on what happened minutes ago let alone over 30 years.
So the various books from Randle and other Roswell authors demonstrates that there are different versions of what went on. Some witnesses who seemed credible at first turned out to be less so on further investigation.
Some of it may be due to the natural human tendency to embellish a tale as the years go on. Perhaps years of pop culture sci-fi memes, not to mention loads of UFO sightings that have garnered various levels of publicity, have corrupted or at least altered memories. And surely some people just wanted to get in on the act, and thus exaggerated their involvement or made up stories out of whole cloth.
The skeptics have focused on the wreckage. A popular view is that the Roswell crash involved a balloon, but not a weather balloon as claimed in the initial “corrected” press release.
Instead, it was something called Mogul, a reportedly top secret project where microphones were flown in high-altitude balloons. They were employed to engage in long-distance detection of the sound waves supposedly emitted as the result of atomic bomb tests by the USSR.
It happened in the early days of the Cold War and obviously the Pentagon didn’t want that secret to be disclosed to the opposition.
So was that the source of the Roswell crash? According to Randle, no, and he can cite eyewitness descriptions that seem to vary from what you’d expect from a crashed balloon. He also claims that, based on his research, the reputed Mogul flight did not occur. Hence Project Mogul couldn’t be the cause.
Or could it?
One prominent Mogul advocate was the late Karl T. Pflock, author of “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe,” published in 2001.
Now Pflock was not an ordinary debunker in the fashion of a Philip Klass. He, in fact, believed that there were real UFOs from other planets, and evidently undertook a serious investigation into the possibility that Roswell involved such a spacecraft.
The book was the result of years of serious research, with numerous notes and references. Pflock clearly did his homework, and if his conclusions were decidedly less mysterious and compelling than those of Randle and other Roswell spaceship advocates, that’s probably a matter of different people reaching different conclusions with the same evidence.
It’s too bad Pflock isn’t around. I would have loved to have put him and Randle on The Paracast and hear them them debate the issues.
Alas, all of the people who could have shed light on what really went on in and around Roswell, NM in 1947 are no longer here to tell their tales. Maybe it was always about a crash of a military surveillance balloon. Maybe ET got into a jam and lost one of their spaceships and, for some reason, did not make any overt effort to recover the wreckage.
So 75 years from now, we may still be talking about Roswell, and we’ll be no closer to a solution, sad to say.
Copyright 1999-2024 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
June 23, 2024
www.theparacast.com
UFO Investigator Charles Lear Reveals the Key People Responsible for Some of the Major UFO Myths of the Late 20th Century on The Paracast!
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022, 2023 and 2024 now feature better audio and fewer ads.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode: Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present a return appearance from Charles Lear, author of “Crashed Saucers and Malevolent Aliens: The Emergence of the Popular Modern UFO Mythos in the Late 20th Century.” The book focuses on those responsible for — or guilty of — creating and perpetuating key events involving flying saucer lore, such as the Aztec, NM and Roswell, NM crashes, the MJ-12 documents, disinformation agents, and so on and so forth. Lear also identifies one person, actually an old friend of Gene’s, who is, in part, responsible for three of those legends or myths. Lear has been writing about UFOs for several years and still finds the subject, and the stories of the people involved, fascinating. Besides his interest in all things Fortean, his pursuits include paleontology, geology, hiking, bad movies, and music. He has been a theatre person for most of his life. As a performer, he sticks to Shakespeare, and he makes his living as an I.A.T.S.E. Local One welder/carpenter in the construction shop of the Metropolitan Opera. His first saucer book was “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
After The Paracast — Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on June 23: Charles Lear, author of “Crashed Saucers and Malevolent Aliens: The Emergence of the Popular Modern UFO Mythos in the Late 20th Century,” returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about the origins of more myths in the field, including the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and its possible influence on later reports of alien contacts. Does the profit motive influence some of these claims? Lear also reveals his own views about the cause of the phenomenon, which he refers to as episodes of “high strangeness.” And what about that Harvard study that theorized about UFOs from our own planet, perhaps caused by what the late Mac Tonnies referred to as “cryptoterrestrials”? Lear has been writing about UFOs for several years and still finds the subject, and the stories of the people involved, fascinating. Besides his interest in all things Fortean, his pursuits include paleontology, geology, hiking, bad movies, and music. His first saucer book was “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Visit our new online shop for great branded merchandise at: https://www.theparacast.shop.
Lost in the Roswell Myth
By Gene Steinberg
As much as I would like to avoid talking about such long-time UFO tropes as the 1947 incident at Roswell, it keeps rearing its ugly head. There’s no stopping it.
A main reason is that the incident — whatever really happened — has become a linchpin of UFO reality. At least to some people.
Over the years, the Roswell legend, myth or even the possible reality, has been told over and over again. The town has found ways to make it profitable with a museum and other exhibits, all designed to expand its tourist trade.
Its origins are curious and highly unlikely. It all happened during the original modern flying saucer wave in 1947, not long after Kenneth Arnold’s June 24th sighting of nine mysterious objects made headlines worldwide. Or was it before?
While Arnold’s sighting remains unknown according to most people who have explored the case, what happened at Roswell can be one of several things.
Its beginnings were unlikely. One day a crashed disk is reportedly recovered near Roswell; the next day it’s sorry, folks, just a balloon.
And there it stood, dormant for some 30 years until flying saucer author and lecturer Stanton T. Friedman was contacted by an alleged witness to the event and there it began. More witnesses were located and Friedman worked with two book authors, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, to put it all together.
The result, entitled “The Roswell Incident,” was published in 1980. As books go, it was short, having just 168 pages. Curiously Friedman played second or third fiddle to his partners-in-crime. He didn’t earn a byline, just a credit. Friedman certainly gave me the impression over the years that he expected more recognition. I have no idea about the cash arrangements.
But it was enough to fuel interest in a dormant case, and the discussion has never ended. As much as I have tried to avoid the “R” word, it just seems to rear its head — ugly or otherwise — over and over again.
Several authors have kept the story running. Listeners to The Paracast are familiar with the works of one of them, Kevin D. Randle, who has been at it for years. An Army veteran who served in both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, he understands well the military mind and how to ferret out the information he needs to establish the reality, or lack thereof, of a UFO case.
His first book on the legendary crash, “UFO Crash at Roswell,” coauthored with Donald R. Schmitt, was published in 1991. But it didn’t end there. Over the years, there have been many articles and more books on the subject, the latest being “Understanding Roswell,” published in 2022 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the incident.
In his other life, Randle writes adventure stories and science fiction. In the UFO field, Randle is considered a class act. In addition to his focus on the Roswell case, he has published books on sightings in Levelland, Texas, Socorro, New Mexico and the classic 1952 Washington D.C. case.
But his reputation in the field will always be dominated by his years of study into what really happened in Roswell, and there lies the rub.
Even though he is less confident about some of the lingering stories about the recovery of aliens among the Roswell crash wreckage, he still feels that the episode involved the crash of a genuine spaceship from somewhere else in the universe.
If that’s the case, the U.S. government has been hanging on to a genuine article from another planet for over 75 years. And possibly the remains of its crew. The mind boggles!
But it’s not as if we’ve come any closer to getting a handle on what really happened. As I wrote above, the first interviews with supposed eyewitnesses occurred decades after the event. Memories are faulty. People cannot even agree on what happened minutes ago let alone over 30 years.
So the various books from Randle and other Roswell authors demonstrates that there are different versions of what went on. Some witnesses who seemed credible at first turned out to be less so on further investigation.
Some of it may be due to the natural human tendency to embellish a tale as the years go on. Perhaps years of pop culture sci-fi memes, not to mention loads of UFO sightings that have garnered various levels of publicity, have corrupted or at least altered memories. And surely some people just wanted to get in on the act, and thus exaggerated their involvement or made up stories out of whole cloth.
The skeptics have focused on the wreckage. A popular view is that the Roswell crash involved a balloon, but not a weather balloon as claimed in the initial “corrected” press release.
Instead, it was something called Mogul, a reportedly top secret project where microphones were flown in high-altitude balloons. They were employed to engage in long-distance detection of the sound waves supposedly emitted as the result of atomic bomb tests by the USSR.
It happened in the early days of the Cold War and obviously the Pentagon didn’t want that secret to be disclosed to the opposition.
So was that the source of the Roswell crash? According to Randle, no, and he can cite eyewitness descriptions that seem to vary from what you’d expect from a crashed balloon. He also claims that, based on his research, the reputed Mogul flight did not occur. Hence Project Mogul couldn’t be the cause.
Or could it?
One prominent Mogul advocate was the late Karl T. Pflock, author of “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe,” published in 2001.
Now Pflock was not an ordinary debunker in the fashion of a Philip Klass. He, in fact, believed that there were real UFOs from other planets, and evidently undertook a serious investigation into the possibility that Roswell involved such a spacecraft.
The book was the result of years of serious research, with numerous notes and references. Pflock clearly did his homework, and if his conclusions were decidedly less mysterious and compelling than those of Randle and other Roswell spaceship advocates, that’s probably a matter of different people reaching different conclusions with the same evidence.
It’s too bad Pflock isn’t around. I would have loved to have put him and Randle on The Paracast and hear them them debate the issues.
Alas, all of the people who could have shed light on what really went on in and around Roswell, NM in 1947 are no longer here to tell their tales. Maybe it was always about a crash of a military surveillance balloon. Maybe ET got into a jam and lost one of their spaceships and, for some reason, did not make any overt effort to recover the wreckage.
So 75 years from now, we may still be talking about Roswell, and we’ll be no closer to a solution, sad to say.
Copyright 1999-2024 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!