Wag the UFO

It is a damn shame that the sensational always drowns out common sense in this world. If you have any doubt that is true, then you haven’t been paying attention. How else do you think a reality TV star with zero political experience and a lifetime trail of criminality and corruption but with the gift for razzle and dazzle became President of the United States? Seducing the masses is a fine art.

The same holds true for the world of the Paranormal including UFOs. The more sensational the claim, the more likely it is to be embraced by the general public who have an insatiable appetite for the macabre, the bizarre and the strange. Once a UFO well runs dry however (hint: Roswell), then a new rabbit hole is dug by charlatans and perpetuators. Sometimes the UFO rabbit holes are dug by our own intelligence agencies who have for decades involved themselves in the business of UFOs for any number of mundane reasons – from foreign counterintelligence concerns to black project obfuscation.

Occasionally, however, a UFO rabbit hole is dug that is so ostentatious in its myth building that it spawns a whole cottage industry including wasting of millions of taxpayer dollars. One such rabbit hole is the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah’s Uintah basin.

If you can just for a moment ignore the sensational claims that have been pandered in George Knapp and Colm Kelleher’s book Hunt for the Skinwalker and spend the time examining the red flags that have popped up surrounding this fairy tale, hopefully critical thinking will win out over  your appetite to be entertained.

So let’s start with three major red flags that gets lost in all of the noise about DIA funded UFO research, newfound Navy interest in the subject, conflicting DOD statements, and To The Stars shenanigans.

Red Flag # 1: The myth of a long UFO/Paranormal history of the Skinwalker Ranch. 

Get yourself a copy of the revised edition of Dr. Frank Salisbury’s book The Utah UFO Display, copyright 2010 and focus on pages 218-226. Here you will find an alternative interpretation of reality then the sensational Knapp/Kelleher fairy tale. 

You see, Dr. Salisbury in 2009 was able to interview Garth Myers, the brother of the original owner of the ranch, who just happened to live nearby Salisbury’s home in Salt Lake City. Garth Myers' brother Kenneth Myers and Kenneth’s wife Edith Childs purchased the ranch in 1933. Kenneth died in 1987 and Edith continued to live on the ranch until she left for a rest home. When Edith died in March, 1994, the ranch reverted to Garth Myers and his sisters, Helen M. Baxter and LaPriel Poulson. Garth was the executor of the estate and sold the ranch some three month later in mid-1994 to Terry and Gwen Sherman.

Garth vigorously denied that there was any UFO activity or otherworldly events occurring on the ranch while his brother and sister in law lived there and before it was sold to the Shermans, some sixty plus years of zero high strangeness. But here comes the kicker. Soon after Robert Bigelow bought the ranch in 1996 from the Shermans, Bigelow called Garth Myers and asked Garth why he never told anyone about the UFO’s on the ranch. Myers responded – that’s because the UFOs didn’t show up till the Shermans bought it. Bigelow’s response? “Oh, you’re not telling me the truth.”

So, stop for a second and ponder the strange scene I just described as recounted by Garth Myers to Dr. Frank Salisbury. Why was billionaire Bigelow attempting to bully Garth Myers who sold the ranch to the Shermans into admitting high strangeness activity on the ranch that had no basis in reality? Wag the UFO.

Red Flag # 2: The Bob Lazar tie-in to the Skinwalker Ranch.

Junior Hicks who coauthored the Utah UFO Display had his own interesting story to tell Dr. Salisbury and me when we interviewed him in 2009. Hicks mentioned that one day he arrived on the ranch during the time when Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS) group was there allegedly conducting research. Some strange metal rods had been found on the ranch after a recent UFO sighting and one of the NIDS' scientists told Hicks that they had the metal rods analyzed, and lo and behold, they were made of Element 115. Cue the sirens and flashing lights! Element 115 is the core component of another deep UFO rabbit hole that has spawned its own mythology – the Bob Lazar story.

If you are not familiar with the Bob Lazar story, well than google his name and familiarize yourself with this two-bit charlatan who by the way was also promoted by George Knapp. So why is this an important red flag? Well you see, Element 115 did not exist in 2009, except in the vivid imaginations of Lazar and his promoters. Today, Element 115 is known as Moscovium, a synthetic chemical element first synthesized in 2003 by a joint team of Russian and American scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia. Wag the UFO.

Red Flag # 3: The Bigelow-Lazar Business Relationship

Robert Bigelow is an interesting character – the Howard Hughes of our day – and despite all his so-called altruistic enthusiasm for the study of UFOs, he sure keeps some strange bedfellows. One of them was charlatan Bob Lazar who worked in 1990 for a Utah corporation that Bigelow was president of called Zeta Reticuli 2. Interesting name for the company.

Looking at the Lazar story chronology – Lazar went public in late 1989 with his fantastic tale of reverse engineering alien craft at Area 51. In an interview with George Knapp, Lazar claimed that he was shown photos of alien beings that came from the fourth planet of the second star of the binary star system Zeta Reticuli in the constellation Reticulum. 

And Lazar didn’t just pull that particular star system out of his own reticulum…it was already known to those in UFO circles as the potential origin of the alien beings who abducted Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. Except, Zeta Reticuli was pinpointed by a schoolteacher and amateur astronomer based on a star map that Betty Hill drew post hypnosis – a hypothesis that has since been disproved. Wag the UFO.

So you take the mythology built from a 1961  UFO abduction story – aliens from Zeta Reticuli – and meld it into the mythology of Bob Lazar’s claims of seeing photos of Zeta Reticuli aliens and reverse engineering alien spacecraft that can fly with the help of at-that-time non-existent Element 115 – and then that same Element 115 that was “impossible to synthesize” as Bob Lazar claimed in his George Knapp interview, mysteriously shows up as metal rods on the Skinwalker Ranch. You see where this is going? Yes, wag the UFO.

So before you become too enamored of AATIP and AAWSAP and DIA personnel on the Skinwalker Ranch, spend some time first pondering these red flags that indicate that all is not as it seems. Myth built on top of myth, built on top of more myth and sprinkled with a Billionaire trying to bully you into his version of the truth equals a whole lot of BS. 

The fact that millions of US taxpayer dollars were spent chasing after these fairy tales is what investigative journalists should really be exposing to the light of the day. Instead we are being fed a daily diet of the sensational and the amazing – with even respected newspapers like the New York Times falling under the spell of feeding the public what they most desire. Are you entertained yet?