If you prefer to keep a little magic in your
life—by which I mean believing in the possibility of UFOs—then read no
further. For I am going to tell you about the latest UFO hoax. You may remember the sightings of a UFO over Morristown, N.J., in January, which was blogged about and even captured on video that has been posted to YouTube as clips from TV broadcasts and an amateur astronomer. It was all a hoax, as the perpetrators reveal in this month’s issue of eSkeptic. They cooked up a spaceship hoax “to show everyone how unreliable
eyewitness accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs.” They
used five feet of fishing line to tie flares to each of five three-foot
helium balloons and launched them from a field on Jan. 5, 2009. “Once
all five balloons were ready for takeoff (with our fingers on the verge
of frost bite),” they write, “we struck the 15-minute flares and
released them into the sky in increments of fifteen seconds,” filming
the UFOs as they floated away. Media coverage was extensive. A lot of it featured Paul Hurley, a
pilot, and his family, who appeared on several news broadcasts
describing the strange lights they saw in the sky. (For some reason,
reporters find pilots’ UFO sightings especially believable.) Rudy and
Russo repeated the performance four more time, gaining media coverage
for each. Conspiracy Web sites and radio shows covered the sightings,
but “the icing on the cake came when the popular History Channel show
UFO Hunters featured the Morristown UFO one week,” the duo recall. “Bill
Birnes, the lead investigator of the show and the publisher of UFO
Magazine, declared definitively that the Morristown UFO could not have
been flares or Chinese lanterns.” This was the pair’s main quarry, to expose the foolishness of UFO
“investigators.” They write: “Are UFO investigators simply charlatans
looking to make a quick buck off human gullibility? ... If a respected
UFO investigator can be easily manipulated and dead wrong on one UFO
case, is it possible he’s wrong on most (or all)\of them? Do the
networks buy into this nonsense, or are they in it for the ratings?” You can see their handiwork here and here. Nicely done, guys. |