Eight months of UFOlogy

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.

• Travis Walton and Mike Rogers hoaxed their five workmates with a UFO sighting in the hope of winning $100,000 from the National Enquirer. They got $5000 and didn't own up to the men whose lives they'd ruined even as the checks were handed out.
• Travis thought he was making a film with a self-titled producer who knew him socially. He was fed up with his "job" (UFO conference appearances, pretending to be compassionate about other people's abduction experiences, retelling his Heinlein rip-off abduction story, and coming up with new crap about stolen fetuses and magic DNA to keep things fresh). He thought he'd be paid a large sum to retire on, making his "confession" worthwhile. 
• Mike Rogers got wind of the money on offer, tried to get his cut, and when it all fell through both he and Travis pressed the reset button and continue to be toxic people because of their secret.

• Betty & Barney Hill mistook a beacon for a UFO chasing them. Betty persuaded her gullible husband that they'd been abducted by polite aliens for quaint 1960s-style experiments.
• The story broke a few years later, making them famous. Barney died prematurely and Betty went completely batty but everyone was too nice to tell her.
• Her niece Kathleen Marden continues to promote the family legacy even though there is no evidence whatsoever that it's based on fact. Stanton Friedman promoted Betty's star map in his lectures despite not believing it was real.
• There are people in this field who have gone to their graves, or are preparing to do so, without the basic integrity to admit how full of shit they are.

• Anjali (Angelia Schultz), suffering from physical and mental problems, with visited with cancer-stricken Wayne and and came away believing she'd met aliens in his mountain who told her we have to transcend or we'll respawn on Orion. Her experience has striking similarities to a DMT trip with guided meditation. She says she took "medicinal cannabis resin"!
• She said her life was preoccupied with organizing an expedition of top scientists and journalists to return to the base for evidence although all we saw at this end was a mathematically inexplicable Twitter poll where, if the two famous winners had declined to join the team (she never asked them first), the 44th and 46th most popular contenders would've won the coveted spots.
• When Wayne allegedly found out about his co-starring role in Anjali's drama, he allegedly got stressed and sick but has said nothing about what really happened. She says he denied permission for the expedition, so she blamed the internet and rebranded as a New Age guru. Her aliens suddenly learned to speak archaic English and have secret teachings to reveal. After many requests she may start a podcast which I imagine will be a sort of countdown to her predicted doomsday in 2027.
• Can't wait for that one.

• John Mack fucked with the minds of school children until they believed the flash in the trees and regular-sized human they saw outside their school two months earlier was actually a flying saucer with tiny aliens giving them telepathic messages about the environment.
• Two of the children are now grown women who should know better, telling tall tales about what they saw that completely contradict what was said and seen at the time.
• Even adults who are professionally trained to understand the human mind can somehow end up believing aliens are regularly abducting humans to do boring experiments on them in their boring spaceships or to make babies with them because nobody understands biology anymore or give them telepathic messages saying nothing new.
• On a related note, regressive hypnotherapy is a bullshit tool for uncovering the truth. Practitioners like Barbara Lamb, who make their victims believe their imaginative diarrhoea is real, are unethical and dangerous.

Banner by Virtual-Pudding9409, collage of Su's art with embellishments

• Su of SandiaWisdom who has the follower count and adulation Anjali aspires to, talks to tootin' aliens who tell her false things like Skinny Bob is their cousin and Charlie Wiser doesn't have a science background, which makes you wonder why anyone should take them seriously.
• She was a sweet lady selling art of aliens with freaky noses, but she became another charlatan building up the hopes of her followers who are desperate for disclosure of something that doesn't exist and willing to swallow every excuse she offers for why nothing ever changes. Her big disclosure event of Fall 2021 fizzled into the promise of "more tic tacs" and a decade-old photo of a UFO on her mountain.
• Those who follow people like Su and Anjali are victims but there's a point at which their gullibility and their disregard for rational thought and reasonable evidence causes me to lose sympathy.

• Creature maker Ben Phillips (& co.) created 37 seconds of animation using his own props and a Mars Attacks puppet, slapped on a few filters, uploaded it to YouTube, and fooled a bunch of people that it showed a visiting alien crew from the 40s. Ben gets his kicks talking about how amazing his own footage is - so amazing, he concludes, that it must be real.
• On r/SkinnyBob, the guy who runs the sub uses sockpuppets to argue with himself but he and his alts are all in agreement that Skinny Bob is real because darn it he looks so real. He offered 30K to the creator, if a hoax, but says he can withdraw the prize at any time thus making it worthless.
• I am 100% certain that if and when Skinny Bob is proven beyond doubt to be a hoax, it won't stop the people who believed in him and now have to admit they were wrong from tracking down the next alien video or leaked top secret files so they'll have something else to believe in.

Happy new year. May all your dreams come true, and, if you chase the truth, all your beliefs be shattered.