Steiger's Astronaut UFOs x xJust recently I was advised to trust the reliable UFO author Brad Steiger and travel to some unknown byt regular UFO haunting ground. Now, in an irony which I would have scripted had I the power, Steiger has demonstrated exactly how "reliable" his UFO information really is. Let me give MANY SOLID EXAMPLES and invite UFO-agnostics to verify for themselves whether they should believe what Steiger writes, or should NOT believe it. x xI am referring to the "Summer 1994" issue of UFO UNIVERSE magazine, which just hit the newstands. I bought my copy today in a local grocery store and it was well worth the entertainment value. I refer to the article, "Alien Efforts to Undermine Earth's Space Programs". by Sherry Hansen Steiger and Brad Steiger, on pages 34-39. Now, I am assuming that the article does represent the real opinions of the Steigers, but if not, I apologize in advance. x xI urge everyone who considers these claims possible to go out and buy a copy, or two, or ten. It's only money, and as the proverb says, you are soon parted. x xAfter drafting this overview, I noticed that I had used semantically loaded terms of mockery and abuse that have offended some readers and given the pro-UFO camp an excuse to refuse to answer. So I have attempted to scrub the text of ALL OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE (replaced with "*****") to see if we will now get a constructive response from the pro-UFO champions of restrained rhetoric. x xEditor Timothy Beckley (who in my opinion well deserves every penny he convinces UFO believers to spend on his products) wrote: "(Steiger) releases classified information that shows that NASA has long ago been shaking in their boots even if it's behind the scenes, and not for public consumption." Regarding these kinds of stories, the only "shaking" I've ever observed among my co-workers in the space program is from side-splitting fall-on-the-floor laughter over the latest ****** UFO stories associated with space flights. But wait, let's take a sober look at the claims from Steiger, Beckley, and their associates. x xThese following ******* items are not merely an issue of "one opinion versus another", or "secret unverified sources". They show how claims actually are altered from one publishing phase to the next. Inbetween undecided observers can verify these assertions for themselves. x x1. Glenn's fireflies (1962) have long been known to be water ice flakes off his capsule's evaporative cooling system. x x2. Joe Walker's fictitious "admissions" (1962) of cylindrical or discoidal UFOs accompanying his X-15 missions seem to be vastly exaggerated accounts of ice flakes off the rocket planes cryogenic fuel tanks, which he did see and did talk about. A tenth-hand rumor refers to "his assignment" to detect UFOs, but as far as I have been able to determine, no first hand documentation of this story exists, so we are justified in concluding it was a journalistic illusion. x x3. Robert White (1962) also saw objects outside his X-15 at the top of his parabolic path, floating in the near-vacuum of the edge of outer space. No UFO ever "shot out of sight", the small sheet-of-paper sized objects (his own description) fell behind when he reentered the atmosphere. x x4. Gordon Cooper's UFO is a ******* fiction, all the more so because Cooper is a serious "UFO believer" who wants more and better studies. But when asked about the reports of his Mercury-9 UFO (1963), he heatedly denies any such event and denounces fabricated stories by writers. John Keel also imagines and reports as fact 200 persons rushing outside at Muchea, Australia, but when people try to find the original news media documentation which Keel and other claim to rely on, they can't. Did it ever exist at all? There's no proof it did. x5. Steiger refers to large UFOs which surrounded a 3-man Russian spacecraft in October 1963. There were no 3-man Russian space vehicles until October 1964. Steiger misread this or **** ********. x x6. Four UFOs paced an unmanned Gemini craft for one complete orbit? Radar doesn't track spacecraft for one complete orbit, but during launch some ground radars would lock onto engine shock waves downstream of the main booster plume. x x7. UFOs cut short a Soviet space mission in October 1964? It's clear from Soviet space memoirs that the Voskhod had always been aimed at a 24-hour flight, and any expectations of an extension were cut short by the political upheaval surrounding Khrushchev's sudden overthrow, which Steiger doesn't mention. x x8. "Aliens Harass First Human to Walk in Space" (1965). Contrary to almost every factual assertion by Steiger, there was no sudden communications blackout or any mysterious off course diversion (the failure of the autopilot required a manual landing one orbit later). A satellite they saw passing nearby was identified from tracking data as an earler Kosmos booster, no mystery. Nobody "had to come down early to escape the UFO", or "got knocked out of orbit". Those ********** suggestions are unworthy of a reputable UFO writer. x x9. McDivitt and White and the egg-shaped object (1965). This story, too, is badly distorted from even from the first UFO literature accounts. Relying unwisely on Keel's ********** *********, Steiger errs when he says both astronauts saw it (White was asleep), he errs when he says they were over China (they were near Hawaii), he errs when he says that millions of people heard them describe it live (McDivitt talked about it over the following hour as he passed near tracking sites). Steiger errs when he claims the astronauts (sic!) described it as egg-shaped. McDivitt described it as beer-can-shaped (like his own Titan-2 booster, which I think it was). A photo of an egg-shaped light smear, widely thought to show "the UFO", does not, according to McDivitt himself. x x10. Bormann (sic!) and Lovell and a massive spherical object (1965). There is no original documentation that what they saw was either "massive" or "spherical", so how did Steiger and Keel reach that conclusion? Probably just their ***********. The small objects were spotted at the point in their orbit where they were criss-crossing a spray of fuel from their booster, with which they were deliberately flying formation. In those early days, all the unearthly implications of orbital mechanics hadn't been thought out, but now we understand how out-of-plane motion (such as the frozen fuel snowstorm) sets up a criss-crossing orbit which passes back and forth every 45 minutes. That's exactly when they spotted "bogies". x x11. Young and Collins (1966), another garbled almost beyond recognition ordinary spaceflight event. During a space walk, Collins noted a bright object near the horizon which he took to be the Agena target satellite (the "second stage"), but it turned out not to be since it was only Venus, as the astronauts realized a few hours later (Collins told me about this). The "other UFO over Australia" has no "paper trail", I can't find any reference to it in earlier UFO literature or in the crew's flight report. Does this mean that Steiger made it up? What's the other possibility? x12. Conrad and Gordon on Gemini-11 took pictures of a passing satellite over the South Atlantic, moving at orbital speed across their nose. What Steiger "forgets" to tell his readers is that tracking data and eyewitness details positively identified the satellite as the decaying Proton-3 Soviet satellite. End of story. x x13. Wallops Island (1966) launches a barium cloud, and suddenly, according to Steiger, "the sky was full of UFOs". Of course, lots of people THOUGHT they saw UFOs, but what they were seeing was the barium cloud. Incredibly, Steiger suggests that the barium cloud attracted genuine UFOs for people to see (as long as the people didn't see the barium cloud, too -- nobody seems to have reported seeing a barium cloud AND a UFO). x x14. Lovell and Aldren (sic!) sight four objects lined up that "weren't stars". The crew figured that out since they had just jettisoned four bags of trash an hour before, but Steiger "forgot" to mention that too. Mere carelessness? x x15. The Apollo-11 UFO story from Azhazha et al. is reported by Steiger as authentic. This is DELIGHTFUL, since as I explained in OMNI in the April issue, Azhazha had given up an atomic bomb story on Apollo-13 to embrace this other story. As I detailed in a complete chapter in my 1982 book "UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries", the elaborate Apollo-11 UFO story is concocted from photographic hoaxes and fabricated voice transcripts. At the time I did this original research (about 1980), serious ufologists such as Hynek and Hendry assured me I was wasting my time on overkill, since only "half-wits" (Hynek's term) would ever fall for this clumsy hoax. Now, either Steiger has, or he expects his readers to, so maybe I was right to try and debunk it back then. x x16. Chatelain's "strange object" seen on the third day of the Apollo-11 mission was the accompanying S4B booster, which had drifted several hundred miles away from the command module during the long coasting climb up and out from Earth. The crew took turns trying to discern details at the very limits of eyeball/monocular resolution. But nobody thought it was something unusual. x xAnyhow, as I said, when I researched these kinds of cases back in the late 1970s, and published detailed explanations of the most famous claims in magazines and books, I was teased by leading ufologists for wasting efforts on "easy ones" which "nobody ever really believed anyway" (David Jacobs's words). Perhaps in hindsight I had a better estimate of the infinite gullibility of the "UFO buffs" than did Hynek and his coworkers. x xWell, is there any disagreement over this? Doesn't it look like Steiger is trying to foist some rehashed and further garbled *** ***** ***** on a new generation of UFO *****? Has he succeeded? x xx Magazine articles by James Oberg relating to "Astronauts and UFOs" "Space World" magazine is on microfiche at many large libraries, it's probably the best bet. Also, my book "UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries" (Donning, 1982) had a full chapter on the Apollo-11 legends. The NOVA report on UFOs (1982) showed some research results also. Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact 1976 Nov Unidentified Fraudulent Objects 1980 Nov Space Folklore Fate 1980 Sep Myths,Mysteries of the Moon Ideal's UFO Magazine 1980 May Apollo Sightings, Fact or Fiction? Official UFO 1976 Oct Astronauts and UFOs Search (Palmer Publications) 1976 Winter Space Folklore & Pseudo-Science 1977 Fall Modern Myths and Mysteries of 1977 Winter the Moon (part 1 and 2) Skeptical Inquirer 1978 Fall Astronaut "UFO" Sightings Space World (Associate Editor, 1976-1980) 1977 Feb Astronauts and UFOs :The Whole Story True UFOs and Outer Space 1977 Summer UFOs & Outer Space Mysteries 1978 Spring Unsolved Moon Mysteries 1979 Spring Astronauts and UFOs UFO Report (Saga) 1981 Fall The Gemini-4 UFO