Unexplained Cases Only If You Ignore All Explanations

by Robert Sheaffer

Book Review: UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record
By Leslie Kean. Harmony Books,
New York, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-307-71684-2.
335 pp. Hardcover, $25.99.

(Reprinted from The Skeptical Inquirer, March/April, 2011. Revisions made March 31, 2012.)


While UFO believers have held for decades that disclosure was just around the corner, the modern Disclosure movement was savvy enough to realize that Disclosure would need a little push. On May 9, 2001, Dr. Steven Greer's Disclosure Project held a press conference in the National Press Club in Washington, DC, featuring twenty people who have made claims of a widespread government conspiracy to conceal the existence of extraterrestrial visitors. After a brief flurry of sensationalist news reports, the mainstream news media simply ignored what Greer and his pals had to say, and nobody followed through on it. The Disclosure Project folks expected that enterprising news reporters would follow up on their leads, and by diligent investigation blow the whole government UFO conspiracy sky-high through diligent investigation. However, it didn't happen, because no experienced reported believed there was anything in the UFO conspiracy claims worth following up.

Enter Leslie Kean (pronounced Kane), a reporter working for Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California, widely known as the radical radio voice of the Peoples Republic of Berkeley. Leslie Kean is the reporter that the Disclosure movement has been waiting for. She says her initiation into the ranks of UFO proponents occurred in 1999 when she was given a copy of a French UFO report called COMETA, which is usually described as a report commissioned by defense officials, but was in fact written by a private group. Like Bentham upon reading Hume, the scales fell from [her] eyes, and she suddenly realized the reality of UFOs as unknown flying vehicles. (Although her fellow UFO proponent John Alexander described the COMETA report as an embarrassment, unsubstantiated data from questionable sources in his book UFOs Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities.) Kean has no doubts whatsoever that the government is hiding something really big from us concerning UFOs, although she professes (a bit disingenuously) to be agnostic on the question of whether they are extraterrestrial.

Of the COMETA report, she says all conventional explanations of something natural or man-made had been eliminated by the authors and their associated teams of experts, and yet these objects were observed at close range by pilots, tracked on radar, and officially photographed. Really? Among the COMETA cases supposedly having no possible explanation were Lakenheath, UK, 1956 except that this case is the subject of Chapter 21 of UFOs Explained (Random House) by the famous UFO skeptic and late fellow of CSI-COP, Philip J. Klass. What does Kean say about Klass demolishing of the evidence presented? Nothing. Klass's name does not appear in the book's index. Kean writes a chapter on The Roots of UFO Debunking in America, but she does not even mention Klass, Menzel, CSICOP, or anyone associated with it. To her, it's all the fault of the government: the United States Air Force (USAF), and especially the once-secret 1953 Robertson Panel of the CIA.

...

Another of her big cases took place in Rendlesham forest in the U.K. in 1980. This case is sometimes called "the British Roswell," although the incident is a claimed landing, not a crash, near a USAF base in Britain. The British skeptic Ian Ridpath has a website discussing a large number of problems with this case, which Kean cheerfully ignores. Her contributor Sgt. James Penniston, USAF (Ret.) displays his notebook with drawings supposedly made during the incident, while Col. Charles I. Halt USAF(Ret.) suggests that Air Force Office of Special Investigations personnel secretly came onto the base and interrogated witnesses, covertly using sodium penothal to brainwash them and erase their memories. Kean doesn't tell us that that Penniston's notebook was never seen publicly until 23 years after the incident, suggesting its authenticity is very dubious. Penniston also has elsewhere stated his belief that the beings that landed in Rendlesham Forest were our distant descendants returning to obtain genetic material to keep their ailing species alive: They are time travellers. They are us. He also claims to have received digitally-encoded telepathic messages from them, that he recorded in his magic notebook. As for Halt, his credibility on the case has suffered greatly, especially since his recent affidavit flatly contradicts many of his original statements (see Ian Ridpath's 2010 article "The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case&quot .