MLK and LBJ?

And From the Archives I Ponder UFOs

(I wanted to let MLK’s day go by with personal remembrance and ignore politicians, but alas, ignorance cries out for attention. I address a bit of it below, but the conservatives who suggest we live in a post-racist nation are out of their minds. The work that Dr. King began has not made the progress he or any of his followers had envisioned, yet American politicos are attempting to use King’s words against him and fog his legacy with their absurd interpretations. Don’t let them. My thoughts on that below, and then a long feature piece from the archives on my reporting on UFOs through the years. Turns out that’s way more interesting than politics. If you are not a subscriber, please consider becoming one, free or paid, I’d appreciate it. Also, when you share, good things happen for my readership; it goes up. Thanks - JM)

After having watched and listened to Republicans and conservatives quote Martin Luther King on the national holiday in his honor, I was inclined to skip dinner. The witnessed hypocrisy was prompting a kind of gastro-intestinal distress. Conservatives like to quote King to suggest they believe in his aspirations for racial equality in the U.S. but they use a singular quote without context from the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” The unsubtle attempt is to turn King’s words against him by suggesting the civil rights leader would have been against Affirmative Action and efforts to treat everyone equally. When the quote is left to stand alone, as the Republicans deploy it, the words suggest King didn’t want black children to be helped by policy.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Of course, the full speech suggests that such a day cannot come until black children and adults are treated equally under the law. That did not happen while King was alive and it has not happened while we are alive. The implication is that King wanted to ignore racial injustice and inequality with a kind of philosophical locution of, “Can’t we all just get along?” King’s dream for his four little children could never come true without a constant effort to end institutional racism, which required government programs and constant work to change a culture that was struggling with undoing close to 200 years of racial antipathy and a past and wealth built greatly upon slavery. The conservative argument is that King was saying to forget about skin color, which is ludicrous.

The quote is seemingly the only one Republicans know how to use, or can remember. In the most politically putrid of fashions, they are trying to use King’s words to defeat progressive politics that will facilitate lesser racism in the U.S., if not end it. The front runner in the hypocrisy race, as in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who quoted King’s “four little children” line at a speech on the national holiday. In front of the podium where he stood there was a sign that read, “Stop Woke.” His Stop Woke Act in Florida bans gender identity lessons and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. We certainly can’t have children learning about what racism has done to this nation, and people with a different color of melanin in their skin.

King’s linguistics calling on America to be better tend to be ignored by politicians on the right. When he made his first public speech about the War in Vietnam on April 4, 1967, Reverend King caused more anger than some of his civil rights pronouncements. There were 3000 people in the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City to hear him that day. The talk he gave, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” forced much of American media and the nation’s political infrastructure to confront our actions in Southeast Asia. Here is a quote from the hour-long speech that will never be spoken by a Republican.

“This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

My belief is, in fact, the speech at Riverside is what got King killed. While the national media stopped just short of calling King a traitor, the reaction by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, was more visceral and angry.

“What is that goddamned nigger preacher doing to me?,” he asked. “We gave him the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we gave him the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we gave him the War on Poverty. What more does he want?” 

LJB felt betrayed. His feelings were hurt, and he was being called out on possibly the most misguided war in American history and the useless deaths of youth. I had never contemplated the idea that King was assassinated because he was feeding the resistance to a war that LBJ was prosecuting, but that spring day in 1968 when a gunman took him down in Memphis, my best friend was banging on the front door of my childhood home and trying to convince me the murder was a message because it happened exactly one year to the day from the Vietnam speech King gave in NYC. If leading protests to achieve civil rights were successful, there’s no reason to think the spiritual leader could not be the primal force in resistance to end the war. Silencing his voice had huge political benefit for LBJ.

I am aware such suggestions, even the associations, make people uncomfortable, especially in Texas, but they must be contemplated. Even the reverend’s wife, Coretta Scott King, and their children have publicly indicated that they believe convicted assassin James Earl Ray was innocent and there was likely FBI involvement. Release of FBI files in the past 25 years included a copy of a letter sent to King by the agency informing the preacher that his phones were tapped and the feds had evidence of his affairs and the materials would be publicly released unless he “killed himself.” The FBI had been following and harassing King for years. Why is it hard to believe the agency might have been complicit in his assassination? Further, LBJ and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover were neighbors and political consorts and it is a virtual certainty the president knew what was transpiring with regards to monitoring King’s every movement. If the president were sufficiently angered by King’s rhetoric and the increasing political resistance to Vietnam, he’d only need to suggest an executive action to Hoover to end King’s life.

I’ve always wondered why that is so hard to believe but Americans can easily be convinced that three random crazy gunmen appeared at just the right time to be able to take down three inspiring leaders of their generation who were turning the country away from racial animus and war profiteering.

(As long as I am on the subject of conspiracies, (not theories), this week’s piece from the archives is a long take on UFOs and my involvement in trying to understand the subject in a rational way. I was assigned, but also fascinated. You might be, too.)

Let’s begin by stipulating that skepticism is paramount to this narrative, and adhere to Carl Sagan’s dictum that, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” By what has become known as the “Sagan Standard,” no one has yet provided incontrovertible proof that extraterrestrial beings or unexplained objects in the sky are more than illusions or delusions.

And that used to give Ricky Sorrells comfort, (if he thought about such things at all), until he saw something in daylight, directly above him on his Texas ranch, which he has never been able to explain.

“I don’t like talking about it, no sir,” he told me years ago. “But I also don’t like people thinking I’m crazy.”

The new year of 2008 had just begun and Sorrells, a machinist and rancher, was out walking his property, carrying a rifle with a high-powered scope, looking for deer. The ranch is located just outside Stephenville, a college and agricultural community in the region of Texas known as the “Cross Timbers.” Sorrells did not see a deer on that particular day.

“What I saw was a large black triangle,” he said. “I’ve told everyone this. It was maybe 300 feet directly over my head. I think it was two or three football fields long; it blocked out the sun and made no sound. I raised my rifle to look through the scope and I could tell there were no bolts or rivets or anything that looked like it held the thing together. But there were some lights.”

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Sorrells is country solid, big upper arms from daily labor, a baseball cap on his head, and a loose tee shirt when he met reporters and TV cameras. The most amazing part of his story was that he said he saw the object several times over his ranch land and when he refused to stop talking about it, he heard from a man who would not identify himself and ordered Sorrells to shut up.

“He came to my property,” he said. “And he told me, ‘We have the same caliber weapons you do but more of them.’ Then he just walked away.”

If the rancher machinist is crazy, then mental instability was a bit of a pandemic in Erath County in the first quarter of 2008. A constable described a craft similar to the one Sorrells detailed and a Stephenville businessman, Steve Allen, a pilot probably disinclined to discuss UFOs, was blunt about what he witnessed.

“I don't know if it was a biblical experience or somebody from a different universe or whatever, but it was definitely not from around these parts," Allen said.

What separates the Stephenville incident from other UFOs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) is the fact there is extant data. The incident transcended the dismissal of country folks having too many beers and seeing things because radar records became available through a Freedom of Information Request. The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) had filed formal documents asking for the data from nearby Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, which used to be known as Carswell AFB.

Regardless of what the recordings showed, skeptics said there was good chance the radar signal had been scattered by weather or anomalous propagation, the creation of information where none actually exists by atmospheric moisture deflecting a radar wave toward the ground. The Air Force, which originally had issued a public statement denying the presence of training flights in the area, later corrected itself and said there had been several aircraft in training flights at the time and that may have accounted for an optical illusion caused by lights on those jets.

MUFON’s report on the incident, however, delivered six months after the sightings, said the radar returns showed an object that moved at 3000 mph and then slowed to under 50 mph in seconds. The data also revealed the ten U.S. Air Force jets in the same area (the ones the Air Force originally had said didn’t exist) and one unidentified craft moving toward Prairie Chapel Ranch, the home of then President George W. Bush, and restricted air space.

Sorrells said he saw military jets approaching the giant triangle floating silently above the trees on his ranch. They were moving so quickly, he was convinced they would crash into the object, which he had described at one time as being 100 feet tall. Just when a collision appeared imminent, Sorrells said the triangle almost instantaneously slipped away and disappeared.

“I know what people think about this,” he told me later on the phone. “But I don’t care. I know what I saw, and I’m a Christian. This sure isn’t anything I’d want to see. I don’t really know what to believe any more, you know what I mean? This just throws everything into doubt. I’ve got no idea how to look at the world anymore.”

There was an attendant media frenzy in Stephenville, especially after dozens more people, many reputable, began seeing triangulated lights being chased by fighter jets. Tonally, much of the news coverage from out of town reeked of condescension, suggesting rural Rednecklandia is the locale where one might expect such phenomena. By the time the radar readings had received broad public distribution through the MUFON report, the wider world had wagged on to discover new distractions.

The times have, however, changed.

The media and government have begun to treat UFOs as a legitimate topic of concern. A new kind of mania has emerged after the release of recordings from U.S. aircraft training off the coast of California. Suddenly, the New York Times, New Yorker, and CBS’ 60 Minutes, have produced serious and lengthy reports on the inexplicable movements of unidentified phenomena, and the U.S. military has been in cooperation. The UFO phenomenon, long the subject of cultural ridicule, will also be addressed, at least in part, by a congressional analysis that is pending an early summer release.

This transition has been slow and tremulous for many reasons. Twenty-five years ago, I was standing next to a picnic table at a public park in Gulf Breeze, Florida, when one of the people who gathered there regularly began to yell, “Yo, Bubba.” Probably not an uncommon phrase in that part of the South, but the woman was pointing northward to a bright light hovering about 30 degrees above the horizon. Bubba was the nickname locals had given to a UFO that almost seemed to show up on a schedule, and it had, thus far, defied explanation.

My two-man camera crew and I had been assigned by CBS Houston television to do a series of reports on UFO phenomena, and Gulf Breeze was having a “flap” that was unending. A city alderman had also published a successful book with clear, color photos of a UFO he said had been stalking his family. The pictures were ridiculed as fraudulent but had been taken with an early digital camera and no one had ever provided proof the startling shots had been faked.

But I was mostly intrigued by the bright white light that appeared in almost the same place multiple nights each week. Our cameras had recorded the object as it hung generally motionless. A few smaller lights dropped out, moved parallel to the ground, and then either faded out or rose back up to the central illumination, whatever that was. Before Bubba disappeared for the evening after 5-10 minutes, through the camera lens, it appeared to grow significantly brighter and spun at an absurd rate of speed just prior to making a quick movement upwards that rendered the sky dark.

If this were a stunt, it was baffling how someone might have pulled it off. The skies around Gulf Breeze are some of the most heavily trafficked with aircraft anywhere in the U.S. Pensacola Naval Air Stations at Sherman and Whiting Fields are nearby as is Eglin Air Force Base, (the military’s nuclear weapon depository), and Pensacola International Airport. An illuminated object hanging in busy flight lanes ought to have been identified and forced to the ground, which is why I pulled out my brick-sized cell phone and called the Air Traffic Control towers at each of the airports.

“Hi, I’m a TV news reporter, and I’m out here in Gulf Breeze and we are video-taping this bright object in the sky. Do you all see that from your station?”

“Yep, sure do.”

“Are you picking it up on radar?”

“Nope, we never do.”

“You mean you see it frequently, but not on radar?”

“Almost every night, mister. Used to send a flight up to check it out but it was always gone before we got there.”

“And no idea what it is?”

“No, sir, but if you figure it out, let us know. It’s driving us all crazy.”

I did not figure it out, nor did anyone else, but one person believed the light or craft or whatever it was, could be communicated with, or the intelligences operating it could be reached with the thoughts of us loitering around the concrete picnic tables in the park. In fact, Steven Greer, M.D., was confident the group surrounding him comprised a “boarding party” for what he described as a “CE5” event, a close encounter of the fifth kind, which is a conscious interaction and contact between humans and aliens.

Greer, an accomplished emergency room trauma surgeon, was in the process of quitting his job and devoting his life to solving the UFO and alien mystery, an intrigue that had clung to him since a sighting he experienced as a 9-year-old. He had recently founded CSETI, the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and was transitioning from life-saving medicine to cosmic evangelist for contact with humans. A few nights prior, Greer, and a few of his apostles at that time, claimed to have had communication via lights to alien craft hovering above the Intra-Coastal Canal.

I recall one of the participants telling me off camera, “We’re not sure what we saw. Doctor Greer seems to be. But there’s a lot of light twinkling across a lot of water. We could have just been seeing refractions from one of the hotels on the beach. I’m not sure.”

Greer struck me as a serious man, bespectacled and fit, who was convinced he was at the nexus of one of the most important developments in human history. In the quarter century that has passed since we met, he continues to argue governments are hiding the truth about other intelligences humanity has encountered. A year after the Gulf Breeze flap had died down, Greer founded the non-profit Disclosure Project, which, eventually, brought together pilots, government insiders, air traffic controllers, and military officials to share what they experienced regarding aliens and their conveyances.

When he began his conference that day in 2001 in the ballroom of the National Press Club, Greer sounded like he was personally administering an astonishing future for every human.

"This is the end of the childhood of the human race,” he said to a few dozen TV cameras. “It is time for us to become mature adults among the cosmic civilizations that are out there."

We must still be toddling along in our pull-ups because global acknowledgement of any off-planet intelligence is either hidden, ignored, or generally irrelevant to the daily business of making a buck, grabbing a beer, paying your mortgage, or driving soccer carpool. Greer’s Disclosure conference got a lot of reporters’ attention, people who had never before spoken publicly about what they knew made for great news copy, and the cumulative evidence was compelling, but nothing changed in terms of the government’s willingness to divulge secrets or march out a spindly-legged alien, nor was proof of alien existence unveiled.

The doctor, however, has pressed onward, regardless. He has produced a number of documentaries on the subject of UFOs and held an untold number of curated “contact” events that have generated an increasing amount of revenue for his various endeavors, which critics suggest are more entertainment for fun and profit than science. If unrelenting focus will roll back the door to the secret saucer hangar, though, we have the right man on the job in Greer.

Before I left that beach side park in Gulf Breeze, Greer must have sensed my skepticism. I think he had heard one of his landing party participants talking to me about a UFO the man had claimed to have seen up close, which he had described as, “Definitely a Type 2 Zeta Reticuli craft.” (Better mileage per gallon than Type 1?) The doctor suggested I go to Harvard and interview John Mack, another M.D., who was described as applying scientific rigor to his research.

Mack was focusing his work on the abduction phenomenon and people who insisted they had been taken aboard UFOs against their will by almond-eyed creatures who then harvested genetic material from their abductees. These narratives had a predictable negative impact on attempts to identify anomalous objects moving through the night sky. The general population scoffed, and UFO research credibility suffered. Subjects consistently described floating through walls up into spacecraft hovering over their homes or cars, being probed with frightening instruments, and even having sperm and eggs involuntarily harvested from their bodies.

If there were anyone who might break through this mass perception, John Mack seemed a likely candidate. The founder of Harvard’s school of psychiatry, he was a 1977 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), entitled, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence. Mack, angular, professorial, and wearing the predictable tweed jacket, told me there were too many cases of abduction, or belief in abduction, for a reasonable researcher to ignore. He screened various individuals who were referred to him before deciding if they were potential clients and subjects for hypnotic regression.

We were allowed to video record a hypnosis session with a woman, who, when in a state of trance, began to cry and scream as she narrated her abduction by creatures with pear-shaped heads and black eyes. Sobbing uncontrollably, Mack had to remind her she was not experiencing the beings, she was only recalling what had happened, which did not end her hopeless pleas of, “Make them leave. I don’t want them here. I don’t want them here. Oh, oh, I’m so afraid they are going to do that to me again.”

His next book became a consequence of Mack regressing dozens of self-identified abductees. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens was published in 1994, a large volume of his case studies that had prompted a peer group committee at the university to investigate Mack and threaten to censure or even terminate his tenure at Harvard. Undaunted, the professor told me, on camera, and later any journalist who contacted him, “We have no way of knowing if these experiences are real. What we do know is that they are real to these individuals and that makes them important enough for us to research what is happening. This seems, at a minimum, like a mass phenomenon of the human subconscious.”

The intrigue with UFOs and alien intelligences, if they exist, is, of course, elemental to life’s big, cosmic questions. The nature of the human condition is to want answers about the universe, why we are here, and if we are alone. Conventional science, though, continues to keep a measured distance from this particular topic of UFOs with the exception of a constant search for radio signals from distant galaxies. In fairness, though, while there are innumerable witnesses, physical forensic evidence is lacking.

Unfortunately, where science dares not go, a gap exists that is readily filled by fervent believers lacking training or research discipline. Eventually, the seekers tend to be culturally vilified, and, in many cases, are exposed as less than diligent, even more promotional than scientific, and they lose any earned authority. The Florida homebuilder, for example, who had taken the startling pictures of the Gulf Breeze UFOs, was later decried as a scam artist when a model resembling the pictured craft was discovered in the attic of his home after he moved. Who is better at building models than architects? This one was a convincing replica of historic descriptions of UFOs and was stylishly created out of paper plates.

Even Mack’s reputation took a hit when he fell for a story from a 37-year-old woman who told him she had been taken onto a UFO with President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. She gave tapes of her hypnosis sessions to Time magazine and Mack was suddenly headlined in the publication as “The Man from Outer Space.”

Greer, meanwhile, who has turned himself into an authority on the topic, seems to survive factual indiscretions without great harm to his reputation. In one of his documentaries, he displayed a six-inch humanoid looking skeleton that he said was recovered from the Atacama Desert in Chile. The doctor was convinced the desiccated skeleton was the body of an ancient alien, but his premise fell apart when Stanford researchers sequenced the genetic material and proved it was a human child that had most likely died in birth about four decades previous its discovery.

“We don’t know what it is, but it most certainly is not a deformed human,” Greer said, a surprising assertion given that he already knew of the results of the scientific investigation conducted at one of the country’s premier research institutions. In fact, it was a deformed human that Stanford’s scientists said carried a range of seven mutations that were all related to human growth. Was Greer trying to fool his followers and the uninitiated into thinking we finally had captured evasive proof we were not alone? Or would the truth ruin the marketing for his latest documentary film?

There might also be similar deceptions presently unfolding.

When 60 Minutes, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, published and broadcast their examinations of the UFO phenomenon, their primary source was Luis Elizondo, a man who claimed to have run the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Lue, as he is known familiarly, is credited with leaking cockpit recordings from F-18s that ostensibly show unidentified craft moving in a manner that defies known physics. Elizondo has told reporters that he ran A-Tip before he decided to leave the Pentagon and release the videos because he felt there was a cover-up.

The CBS broadcast, which was billed as the first time 60 Minutes had taken on the subject of UFOs, interviewed Elizondo and corroborated his assertions with sound bites from Chris Mellon, a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Often considered the gold standard in long-form TV journalism, the apparently ground-breaking segment left a few important matters on the cutting room floor. The most critical of these was that there appears to be no proof that Elizondo ran AATIP, or even worked for it while at the Pentagon, and that he and Mellon both are employed by the To the Stars Academy.

To the Stars was founded by Blink-182 musician Tom Delonge, an admitted UFO enthusiast, and his organization hired Elizondo only days after he had left the Pentagon. Mellon is also on staff at To the Stars as a consultant on national security affairs. The organization seems to be more of a television production company than any type of research endeavor and produced the History Channel reality show starring Elizondo, called Unidentified, which was based on the military tapes.

The fact that this information was excluded from the 60 Minutes piece was stunning and diminishes whatever scientific value may be contained in the aircraft tapes of the “tic tac” UFOs, which one pilot said the US military encounters on a daily basis. The Intercept, a web publication that investigated Elizondo as his reality TV show was being launched, tried to confirm his role running A-Tip but was unable to acquire any such information. The article quotes Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood, who said, “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.”

Cynics have already begun to indulge in a mental exercise that suggests Elizondo and Mellon are involved in a kind of black ops disinformation campaign to discredit the field of UFOlogy. Their suspicions are not without some experiential basis given the historic coverups of “Project Blue Book” and the “Condon Report” from the 60s, which offered explanations for sightings that were as absurd as swamp gas in Western Michigan. Whatever is presently transpiring, whether it is confusion, misdirection, or inadvertent obfuscation, it is harming any scientific effort to determine what was recorded by those F-18 jet cameras. The notion that an enemy of the U.S. has been able to produce technology to spy on American shores by not being subject to the laws of physics seems more than a bit specious, though, and a false rationalization for keeping the research generally inside the Department of Defense. If there are UFOs, America must turn them into weapons before every other country?

The current journalistic scrum over these ephemera can arguably be pegged to 1897 and a story in the Dallas Morning News. The report was about the crash of an airship in Aurora Texas, which supposedly had run into a windmill on a farm and caught fire. The newspaper carried a story that detailed the death of an “airship” pilot who had burned when the cigar-shaped vessel fell to the ground. The pilot, according to the paper, was disfigured, but there was enough of his body remaining to confirm he was not from this planet. According to the reporter, the local experts reached a conclusion the being was “a native of Mars.” All this supposedly happened six years before the Wright brothers had made their first flight in a heavier than air vehicle. The alien was buried beneath a tree in Aurora, and multiple efforts through the years, to have his body exhumed, were stopped by the town’s council, and the original stone, marking the burial plot, has disappeared.

Too many years and an overwhelming number of sightings have come and gone since Aurora, and there is still no accepted set of scientific facts on the subject. The UFOs, though, fit cultural archetypes. The mystery has evolved with human experiencers, and there will probably be accumulating confusion until an alien holds a news conference with the president in the Oval Office.

Out in the Texas Cross Timbers, though, the Stephenville triangle sightings changed nothing, and the mystery lingers. Military jets from Dyess Air Force Base and Carswell still cross the night sky on training exercises and passenger jets on their trans-continental runs leave contrails across the stars. We can assume, also, Ricky Sorrells continues to walk his ranch and hunt deer come some sunny days, but it is unlikely he ever does it any more without wondering what he saw that chill morning in 2008.

And why it stopped right where he was standing.