http://www.blackvaultradio.com/html/black_vault_radio_w__john_gree.html

In those days I was a totally naive academic, who believed in the neutrality of the media, and in the intellectual honesty of those who reported on stories and investigated the facts behind the stories they reported. Even though it was a time when Old Journalism was changing into the new Participatory Journalism, I still held to the old fashioned belief that the media were just that: media, channels of communication and not part of the stories they reported. Naive indeed. 

What I could not foresee, during those days of innocent academia, was a time in which the media itself would become the story, participants in it so as to make it grow to proportions larger than it should. That has indeed happened a lot over the past four decades. But that’s also what happened to me just a few months ago when two young men named Joe Rudy and Chris Russo decided to teach us all a lesson in what they called “rational thinking” by affixing flares to helium-filled balloons and setting them off into the night sky over the controlled airspace of northern New Jersey in January, 2009, thereby setting off what was to become the “Morristown Lights” hoax. Or, at least, that’s what the media called it. 

As set forth in the various news blogs that reported on this story, Russo and Rudy were aware of various experiments in which people launched flares attached to balloons to try to reproduce a UFO aerial phenomenon. There have been a few television experiments like this, including ones that we did, and, as I understand it, this is what prompted Rudy and Russo to set up their so-called social experiment in what they proclaimed to be "rational thinking."

According to Sharon Begley, writing in her Newsweek blog published on April Fool’s Day, Rudy and Russo had published an article in eSkeptic in which they decided to take the “pseudoscience” of ufology to task by coming up with a scheme to expose ufologists’ lack of rational thinking. OK so far. Their idea, as they also expressed it to Brian Donohue of the Newark Star Ledger, was to expose the “charlatans” in the field of UFO research, the “self-appointed experts, who profit from the public gullibility.” They did this by launching flares attached to balloons and then filing a UFO sighting report with MUFON. The local media bought it and broadcast the story of lights over New Jersey. This, Rudy and Russo said, was actually a “social experiment.” They not only staged the experiment, but then carried it one step further by filing a false report of a UFO sighting to MUFON. MUFON quickly caught onto the hoax by noticing that name that Joe Rudy used to report the sighting did not match his email address in any way. A brilliant experiment, to be sure. 

But Chris and Joe had a bigger target in mind, or so they said. They told Brian Donohue that they were really after UFO Magazine and our television show to get us to bite and, ideally, identify the lights as a flying saucer or some kind of alien spacecraft. That was their stated intent, and, according to Sharon Begley’s Newseek blog, that’s exactly what we did. 

Except we didn’t.

There was one small problem with Sharon Begley’s report, it was inaccurate. Instead of proclaiming the lights to be a flying saucer, we did nothing of the kind. To be more specific, the two Morristown rational-thinking e-skeptics said that I said these couldn’t have been flares or Chinese lanterns. However, a quick review of the video the hoaxers and bloggers referred to shows that I never said anything of the sort. In fact, even Brian Donohue admitted to me over the phone that I never called these lights “flying triangles” or “flying saucers,” but referred to them as what they actually were: unidentified lights. Moreover, on camera I said that it was our intention -- which it was when we said it -- to take the video back to our analyst to have it evaluated to find out exactly what these lights could be. And that’s what we said in our video piece. 

Not to belabor the point, I never said that these lights were a flying triangle, a flying saucer, or any type of alien space craft. I said that although the lights looked rigid with respect to each other, I would have to see what our video analyst would say. As far as I was concerned, because, unlike MUFON, I was not privy to any conversations about the origin of the lights, these were unidentified and would remain so until evaluated by our analyst. And that was it.

Nevertheless, what I said in this piece and what I did not say during this piece seems to have gone over Sharon Begly’s head because, instead of contacting me to confirm any facts that were set forth by Rudy and Russo, she went ahead and published their version of the story that I and UFO Magazine -- which had nothing to do with the story because we never covered it -- had been hoaxed. None of this was true, yet this is what was reported. Thus the self-described hoax was an entirely confabulated story based on claims of the hoaxers themselves, who, to make their point, lied to the folks at MUFON, even going so far as to use a fake name to  make the report. 

From that point on, the various media that covered the Morristown lights story ran with the hoaxers’ version of the facts and the story that appeared on other blogs. I was out of the country at the time, so I let the entire incident go without any comment until Brian Donohue from the New Jersey Ledger decided to cover the fact that both Rudy and Russo had been sentenced to a fine and community service in Hanover Township for their behavior in releasing balloons over the airspace. Somehow, according to Donohue’s column, these guys were cult heroes for hoaxing the media, frightening Paul Hurley’s daughter, an eleven-year-old girl, and hoaxing us. But they never hoaxed us and never hoaxed MUFON. On camera I said the lights were simply unidentified. UFO Magazine never even covered the story. And the Hanover Township police called the lights flares on balloons from the outset. 

In other words, the reporting on the incident was not based on any actual facts of the incident, but on stories covered by other bloggers and the story told by the hoaxers themselves. It was a media-fed story only.

The folks who were hoaxed, twice, were the media outlets, which fed on their own coverage to find humor in the entire event. The other folks, who were hoaxed and jumped into the fray to pound their own chests in a frenzy of communal hypergrandiosity, were the self-described UFO commentators, self-appointed UFO investigators, self-proclaimed podcast pundits, and just about anybody in the nonfield of ufology, who wanted to get in a shot before the story faded away. 

In fact, the ufologists, who were suckered into this nonstory, were the real gulls. They fell for the hoax because most, if not all, of them had not actually seen the video pieces, which later appeared on Youtube. Had they done their own independent analyses of the events, they would have realized that the only hoax was the hoax the hoaxers were claiming to have perpetrated. In other words, it never happened, but the ufologists seeking to inflict wounds upon themselves, made an event appear to be real that never was. This is all too common among self-promoting UFO commentators, looking for anything they can use to incite their cult followers.

Phil Corso, (I know, I know), once said that neither the government nor the military ever needed to cover anything up because the UFO community did a better job of covering up and pumping out disinformation than any military agency could. And this Morristown case study shows, simply from the perspective of the media spin and the ufologists’ collective response, that Corso was right.

This case study also shows that Stan Friedman is right when he says that debunkers, even our own debunkers in the UFO Taliban, operate by proclaiming something to be true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Pounding the table to them is better than pounding the facts because the facts are often too inconvenient for ufologists to swallow, and, besides, they’ve already made up their minds.

For me, this would have been a perfect case study for student discussion in an Introduction to Media and Communications course had there been an Internet, a Youtube, or personal computers way back then on some nice, brisk, fall day on the suburban campus of Trenton State College. 

But that was long ago before there was a ufology.

Our UFO Hunters Season has only two more weeks to go to complete principal photography for season 3. So I'm on the road, out of pocket, and in the matrix until the end of May with a lot of lose ends dangling and a lot of unanswered questions about what's happened since January when the season began. 

The problems is that when you're filming a television show for a network, you're working for that network, not for yourself. So, regardless of the desire to go after the people that are spreading  questionable information and making false characterizations, you have to hold your fire and stand fire until you're free to speak. And that time is coming.

So in just a few weeks I'll be adding to Nancy's Faq Attack with some faqs and answers of my own,  including stories about the hoaxing of the media in the Morristown lights, the real story of The Day After Corso, and what it's like on both sides of the camera in reality television. 

So stay tuned to this blog because in a few weeks, it will be time for "here's what we know."

The snow is probably over two feet deep, and they don't plow out here. It's a penetrating cold, even in the few moments of sunlight. Above us is this huge support structure called the Henge, a ring like the one at Stonehenge, only over a hundred feet high an built by construction workers during World War II. Around us are the bombed out structures of buildings. We don't know who bombed them, almost on the Czech border, the Germans, the Russians, or the Americans. 

We're here to meet a Polish UFO expert on Nazi secret weapons to talk about the Die Glocke, the legendary Nazi Bell. Did it exist? Was it a time-traveling machine? Was it all a myth? Can we find the residue of Red Mercury? Are we at the very site of the  Wonder Weapon?

It's  been a long journey from Berlin to Peenemunde to a desolate German underground facility in Poland. And every stop along the way is burdened by the history of what happened at these places and how America's military rocket program was begun by the work of Nazi scientists, who were, in truth, war criminals. Our German hosts, historians mostly, except for a 90-year old self-declared SS officer and member of the mysterious Vril Society, are uncomfortably conscious of the past crimes in these places and the names of the concentration camps that supplied the slave labor to keep these facilities functioning. They, too, lament the past and the victims.

I'm trying to keep a reporter's mindset: watch, listen, ask questions, let your respondents speak their truths, document, and interpret later. But it's hard. The photos on the wall of the concentration camp victims in their striped pajamas working in sub-freezing cold and ill-heated factories are frightening. The special Anne Frank exhibit advertised on a bulletin board wall at Peenemunde is grimly ironic. Our guests, academically cordial in a way that I remember only too well from my years teaching college, are encyclopedic in their recitation of the facts: X number of laborers, these types of weapons, those types of propulsion systems, the names of scientists, and the day they closed down Peenemunde to take the work underground to places like Mittelbau-Dora and Nordhausen to escape the allied bombing. 

We stop at a bombed out field that housed the barracks of some of the slave laborers at Peenemunde. Our host tells us that it was ironic that the first news of the existence of Peenemunde reached the British from an escaped concentration camp victim. The RAF then bombed Peenemunde in 1943, only they bombed the barracks housing the slave laborers, almost all of whom died in the raid.

Our trip continues to the underground facilities in Poland that, legend has it, housed the project that developed the Bell. The cave walls reek of death. The cold is the cold of death, not of winter. The sound of water dripping and running along the ditches inside, echoing within the massive structure carved inside a mountain, makes the place seem alive with the spirits of the dead. This is reality, not legend. 

There is still one remaining worker alive somewhere in Poland or Germany who attests to something so critical taking place at these sites that the SS went to incredible lengths to keep the project functioning even though they knew, by 1943, that the war had been lost at the failed siege at Stalingrad. 

And now we're trudging through the snow around a structure allegedly used to hold down a device so powerful that it could have been a delivery system for a weapon of mass destruction aimed at New York, where, in 1945,  I  was living in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights. So now it's even more personal. You can look at the stories of the Holocaust and the War in a textbook or learn about them first hand from your aunts and uncles in Brooklyn, but only feel the impact decades later when you stare at the proof and realize that whatever this thing was it might have been aimed at your city and launched, but for the Battle of the Bulge.

Downtown Berlin, today, looks more like Fifth Avenue and 57th Street than it does anything else. But the looming Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and some relics of the old Berlin Wall are reminders of the past and the Cold War. You can have your picture taken with a man in a Soviet Army uniform or a British Tommy. You can stand, smiling, under the Hammer and Sickle or even flash a V sign at the camera before you grab a quick Starbucks on the corner. But the past weighs heavy and you're all too happy to get away. 

Far away.

Drifting off, I hear the voices of the flight attendants, all speaking German. German, my first language spoken to me by my grandmother, but forgotten over sixty years. German, although one of my languages in graduate school, it was only the language of scholarly journals and not spoken German. Yet here it is, playing back a tape recorder deep in a memory stored as a bunch of cells buried in a convolutional swirl somewhere. The words resonate, the announcements sound like orders. They are orders, orders to do things right. "Alles is im ordnung." 

UFO Hunters is smack in the middle of its long march across Eastern Europe for our middle episodes. Winter gear all packed, waterproof trekking boots all packed, World War II B-17 bomber jacket all wrapped around me in the ice-cold cabin. This isn't just another location shoot. It's a trip back to the beginnings of my own family. 

My cousin, Norman Davis, then a young B-17 bombardier over Schweinfort, crouched in the tiny cabin under the  navigator and pilot cockpit. A burst of flak from an AAA shell blows up he cabin above him and pieces of the pilot and co-pilot rain down upon him. His own cabin is wet with blood, but he is flying the plane now, staying in rigid formation as Luftwaffe fighters knife through the squadron. But the B-17s are rigid as they head over the target with rounds tearing into the planes' midsections, shredding the waist gunners like so much meat. 

Over the target, my cousin calls "bombs away," retribution for the war and the terrible camps, and he and the rest of the squadron wing their way back to England and the protection of the Mustangs that will escort them home. With the pilot and co-pilot bleeding out their last, my cousin Norman manages to bring the crippled plane in for a landing, He will get a hero's welcome and a medal from General Eisenhower. And he will go down in family history. But he is dead now, just like so many of the very young men who faced almost certain death in the skies over Germany more than 65 years ago. 

Memories well up inside of me as the announcements in German continue. Now just sinking into sleep, I can hear the voices of great uncles and great aunts, those who made it out just in time, and remember the faces of those who didn't. And I am going there now to the very spot where concentration camp inmates were forced into stacking the ceramic bricks to protect the Nazi scientists from Red Mercury contamination. And then those very same Nazi scientists came here with full immunity from war crimes because we needed their technology and their brain power. 

But we are flying back there now, German announcements  ringing in my ears, memories flooding into dreams, and the sound of a German lullaby from long ago and far away soothing it all. My first language is coming back to me, absent all these years, alive in the darkness of dreams, and taking me back to where I was. 

Over the sea into the endless night,

Bitte, kinde, langsam schlaff, schoenheit.

There are conspiracies afoot, indeed.

See you on Wednesday nights when our new season starts on March 26.