 Photo of a reportedly magical craft, Calvine 1990. (c) Kevin Russell The Calvine UFO made a comeback in 2022. It is, according to UK academic David Clarke, "the best image of an unidentified flying object ever taken" - an unsurprising opinion from the man who tracked down the photo 32 years after it was taken.
Before he became a part of the story he was investigating, Clarke found no good evidence the craft was real (alien or otherwise) and preferred the conclusion that it was a hoax. Now he promotes the mystery of the photograph as a high-tech black project craft hovering over the Scottish moors in full view of two hapless hikers (but no one else) taking a break from their menial hotel jobs. He hasn't explained why his previous analysis was wrong. And he not only ridicules skeptical theories but misrepresents them. The way Clarke has been dishonestly reporting on one aspect of this story in particular, for no apparent reason other than to mislead, leads me to conclude that he believes the photo is a hoax - specifically, that it is a 3D star ornament, a theory first proposed by Wim van Utrecht. His accomplice in this deception is Andrew Robinson, the photography expert who analyzed the Calvine UFO. Robinson has softened his stance to include the possibility of a hoax, but can't come right out and say it's a model without undermining his "expert" analysis.
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 In 1952, Shell R. Alpert, US Coast Guard photographer, shot this formation of four bright lights through the window of his photo lab in Salem MA, in the middle of the 2-week “Washington flap”.
It’s hailed as a classic UFO photo. It was in all the papers! Was it a genuine UFO? A misunderstanding? Or a hoax?  Rex Heflin's 3 UFO polaroids (colorized), Santa Ana CA, Aug 3, 1965 Just because a vintage UFO photo has been analyzed by experts and pronounced either genuine or, at the very least, undebunked, doesn't mean we shouldn't take another look at it.
On Aug 3, 1965, while on the job taking photos of road signs that needed replacing, Rex Heflin took three shots of a UFO passing over the road with his Polaroid 101 camera. For some reason he didn't get out of his vehicle first. He estimated the UFO was 1/8 mile (200 meters) away and 150 feet (46 meters) up in the air. My immediate instinctual reactions to these photos are (1) it looks like a small, close object, and (2) it looks like a simple machined object from an Earthly factory, or the most boring UFO in UFO history. But instincts aren't enough to debunk the fanciful tale of an honest-man-who-never-retracted, so let's take a closer look.  While Charlie Wiser does not use any alts on social media, it's up to others to decide whether or not they want or need alts. Not my business.
However, when someone is deliberately exploiting known weaknesses to manipulate others in a community (which I'll loosely define as a group using a platform to discuss a topic - #ufotwitter on Twitter, UFO-related subreddits, etc.), I have thoughts about it, especially if that user has gone one step further and attempted to gain people's trust with a personal touch - in DMs.  Balwyn Bell, 1966 (detail) I've written before about the little red flag in a case that can't be reconciled with witness statements being true. Once that nugget of truth is forgotten, and the hoax is given free rein, laziness sets in. The original research and documentation are forgotten in favor of the re-re-repeated myth.
What if the answer was back there at the start all along? When the nugget comes to light, the case falls apart. When the gods are smiling, that nugget is also hilarious.  Some of the experiences reported by sufferers of sleep paralysis. None of these events are recorded by observers in the sleep laboratory. They are not real. Sleep paralysis has been offered as an explanation for some alien abduction experiences (I first read about it from Carl Sagan but I'm sure he wasn't the first), and the evidence shows the explanation is a good one.
For the three main cases covered on this site, I've added links to my relevant Twitter threads that cover aspects of each case in summary form.
The tweets are linked as bulleted lists from the main page for each case: My pinned tweet lists a few additional threads, including for these cases:
 In May someone on Twitter told me about an alien abduction case where two guys on different continents woke up wearing each other’s shirts. Then he mentioned Travis Walton, who I'd never heard of, and I read some stuff and made this site.
Since then I've looked into a handful of cases that interested me, bitten the heads off a few people who think they know better than me what I should be interested in, and written some Twitter threads. This is a retrospective from my point of view of the past 8 months, itemizing some things I've learned.  The name Skinny Bob kept coming up on Twitter. Every time I googled the name, I ended up at YouTube videos depicting alien creature sightings with titles like: "This looks like Skinny Bob."
But who was Skinny Bob? I get emails. Sometimes they are sent by people in an RPG who appear to believe I am in the same RPG. It's pretty funny.
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