[extropy-chat] Personal UFO experiences was NSA's disclosures on UFOs

[Keith Henson]

I would just stick a URL in, but you would have to wade through a lot to 
find it.

This is from

September 1987 "BASIS", newsletter of the Bay Area Skeptics
-----------------------------------------------------------
          Bay Area Skeptics Information Sheet
                    Vol. 6, No. 9
                 Editor:  Kent Harker

snip

ANOTHER CAUSE FOR UFO SIGHTINGS
by H. Keith Henson

Most UFO sightings have origins in natural phenomena, or
misidentification of man-made lights, such as the Woodbridge case
reported in the Fall '86 "Skeptical Inquirer". But there are cases
that are the result of deception. I know, because I was involved
in three of them, and have personal knowledge of one more. Of the
four cases, only one was ever exposed.

My earliest experience was in 1959, when a group of my high-school
friends and I hung a fluorescent light on thin wires over a street
in Prescott, Arizona, and made it flicker with a Model T spark
coil. We would turn it on at night when a car was only a hundred
feet away, so the driver was hard put to see what it was before the
car had passed under it. People would stop, back up, look again and
again, and never figure out what they had seen, while we were up
on someone's porch trying to keep from with bursting with laughter.

It worked so well that we moved our activities to a highway outside
of town. If our victims had their radios on, all the better,
because close proximity to a spark coil makes a radio sound like
crushing a mountain of cornflakes with a bulldozer. The number of
locals who encountered our UFOs was at least in the dozens.
Prescott's reputation as a UFO center may have some of its origins
in our pranks.

In 1960, I started engineering studies at the University of
Arizona. A number of my friends from Prescott were also going to
school there, and by next year, we had founded the Druid Student
Center just north of the campus. The origin of "The Druids" and the
story of the "Bandersnatch", an off-campus humor newspaper we
published in the mid-to-late '60s are a story in themselves.

Our UFO constructions, which peaked in 1962, were a relatively
minor part of our activities, though they brought us a great deal
of publicity.

It took a long time to learn to build a really good UFO.  We had
been launching hydrogen-filled plastic dry-cleaning bags in
Prescott since 1958. My old aluminum-and-lye hydrogen generator may
still be in the basement of my parents' house. When we moved to
Tucson, we found a place that sold us an unperforated, 2,000-foot
roll of dry-cleaning plastic tubing. We discovered that while
natural gas had only half the lift of helium, it had enough, and
was available at the turn of a valve. We launched several long
tubes in the daytime with rolls of toilet paper that made long
streamers when a fuse released the paper.

We lifted several radar corners with these balloons, but never got
any feedback that anyone noticed them, so we quit. We also launched
a number of sections of tubing with fuses and small packets of
gunpowder to set them on fire. One of these (about 100 feet long)
got picked up by the news media when a large number of people
reported it as a crashed plane. The Air Force "explanation" of
"neon lights reflecting off low clouds" certainly didn't satisfy
anyone who saw huge flames leaping in the sky. We did this only a
few times because we never really felt good about dropping flaming
plastic over the city, though it most likely went out before
hitting the ground.

The first one in the UFO series (all launched at night) we sent up
with a battery and bulb. Knowing what we were looking at, we were
able to track it in a car far across the city. But a flashlight
bulb looks like a star from any distance away, and it wasn't easy
to track. Next variation was a candle. The first one went out when
it was launched. We then tried putting the candle near the bottom
of a six-foot-long bag of clear plastic closed on the bottom to
stop the draft. It worked OK, buy we had the same problem we did
with the bulb; it looked like a star.

Next we made up five-to-six-foot-long bags of light-colored crepe
paper to diffuse the light. That made the light much more visible.
Our most common version used eight one-inch candle stubs sitting
on tin-can lids that were soldered to a stiff, four-foot wire. The
straight wire was centered with thread in a ring of small, stiff
wire that had a crepe paper bag folded over and stapled to it.  The
bags were made of two sheets of paper by folding three edges over
twice and stapling, then turning the bag inside-out.

We used a generous 10 feet of strong thread to hang these lanterns
under two 40-foot pieces of plastic tubing. (No point in getting
lighted candles too near all that gas!)

They worked great. Our UFOs were visible for miles. The air flow
in Tucson during the summer was usually toward the mountains, and
they would fade out after about 10-15 minutes.

Not all of them were a success. One got rained on and came down
about 15 blocks away, but we managed to recover that one without
getting caught, though a small dog had hysterics when it came down
in his yard. (Dr. MacDonald of UFO fame saw that one and said it
had come down somewhere between where he was and some mountains 20
miles away.) We got to where we almost felt obliged to send one up
at least twice a week, because so many people in the city were
looking for them.

We got caught trying to outdo ourselves. We built a two-lantern
version and used three pieces of tubing that we tied in a triangle
to lift it. This one really caused a stir, because it looked like
a red UFO and a green one playing tag in the sky as it went up in
a spiral. However, at the last minute, a light wind came up -- our
UFO was sure to tangle in the power wires if we launched it from
the back yard -- so we walked the whole works across a major street
and let it go from a parking lot at the University of Arizona. Some
high-school kids saw us, and couldn't resist the chance to solve
the big mystery. They talked to the local reporters, and, the next
day, both the local reporters and Dr. MacDonald were beating on our
door.

I was temporarily out of school at the time, working as an engineer
for a local TV station, when the story broke. There was an
excitable middle-aged woman who did an early local news program at
the station, who came bursting into the control area wanting to
know why I didn't tell her as soon as the story broke so she could
interview me on the news (which she proceeded to do). We wondered
if we would get into trouble, but no one in a legal capacity ever
said a thing about it. We put up a weak story about tracking local
nighttime winds.

While we were causing all the stories, the Tucson papers treated
it straight. They reported that moving lights in the sky had been
seen by a number of witnesses, but didn't take it any further. Dr.
MacDonald treated it straight, too, and was only about an hour
behind the reporter.

Years later, I found out that a second cousin of mine had been
launching similar UFOs over Albuquerque about the same time.

The significant point is that of four different incidents, we
jokers were only caught once. Had we been a little more cautious
or gotten tired of causing the fuss, we never would have been
caught.

For me, the story has always been a handy way to deal with a UFO
believer. When they ask me if I believe in UFOs, I say, "Of course.
I used to build them."

**************

http://linuxmafia.com/pub/skeptic/newsletters/basis/basissep.87

Ten years after this bit the TV show "Sightings" had me make and launch a 
UFO for them.  I have a tape of that show somewhere.

I wrote it up, but picking out the part that applies to my building a UFO 
from the adventures of that day picketing a UFO cult (scientology) is too 
much trouble.  Here is a URL, the UFO business is mostly near the bottom.

http://www.solitarytrees.net/pickets/henson.htm

Keith Henson