ONE
“A FUNNY THING”
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the California bar exam. It wasn’t the LAPD unit that followed me all the way from Lincoln Boulevard toward LAX and into the parking lot of the Radisson Hotel, turning on its lights and a burst of siren when I pulled into the parking space. I was already late, and now this. The officer was cautious, but aggressive in his glare as he raised his sunglasses and approached the back of my SUV, his one hand resting on his gun and the other motioning me to open the back gate.
“I have to get my canoe paddle out of the back,” I told him, trying to explain that the pneumatic struts that held open the top tail window were broken. “I have to prop it up.” I could see the officer’s suspicions increase as I reached inside, holding the tail window open with one hand while I extracted the canoe paddle with the other. I finally propped the thing open and the officer approached.
“What’s in the boxes?” he asked.
“Magazines,” I told him. With his left index finger he motioned for me to open one of the boxes. A warrantless search? But with the exam attendance registration only minutes away and an impending impound of my car, containing my typewriter, if I demanded a warrant, I acceded and opened one of the boxes. “Magazines,” I said, holding one of them up so he could see it.
I am sure over the course of this officer’s professional law enforcement career there were others whose behavior elicited the same look of utter derision on his face that I saw as he examined the magazine cover and slowly, but almost inaudibly, sighed the letters, “U-F-O” as he traced them with his left hand. His right hand was no longer resting on his gun handle, and waves of disdain were rising off him that were so thick, you could almost see them shimmering in the warm morning Southern California sun.
“These all the same?”
“Yes, our latest edition. Want one? Want a box for the guys at the station house?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bar exam,” I said.
“You’re late. Get inside,” he ordered, jerking his thumb toward the hotel entrance. “And don’t carry so many boxes in your car. Makes us nervous.”
With that he turned around, walked back to his car, turned his light bar off, and drove away, his tires screeching as he wheeled out of the parking lot and busted a U-turn to get back to LAX. My cell phone began to vibrate, but I didn’t pick it up until the black-and-white had spun onto the airport on-ramp.
That wasn’t the funniest thing that happened to me that morning, however. I caught my BlackBerry on the last ring. It was the executive producer of the motion picture company where Nancy, Pat Uskert, and I had pitched a television series called UFO Road Trip.
“Dude, you got game,” the exec said. “History gave us the pilot order. Saddle up.”
My first TV series. And so much for the California bar exam where the proctors would immediately throw out my old clattering typewriter whose keystrokes reverberated throughout the entire test hall so loudly that they drew menacingly vicious looks of hatred, reminiscent of the fierce glares of martial arts acolytes in a Chuck Norris film. These were the young Ivy League Bar candidates, who would eventually flock to the honey-money spigots of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, where they would lap at the heavy flow like thirsty kittens and then inhabit the high-storied glass-walled offices of Wall Street, Century City, or Silicon Valley law firms.
* * *
But I had a pilot order, and the smog never smelled so sweet.
That pilot order would ultimately turn into the first season of the television series, UFO Hunters. And that was how we wound up in Boston on an unseasonably cold and blustery night, perched at our tables, watching the huge sports monitor on the wall of a bar called Cheers.
At first, when the opening credits come up on the television screen, you can only hope that what you’ve done will be a success. You’re sitting with an audience at a bar, watching their reactions, hoping they will take their eyes off their dates, even if only for a minute, to watch what’s happening on the large monitor hanging on the wall. Our field coordinator Dan Zarenkiewicz had asked the bartender if he could turn the channel from whatever game was being played—Celtics or Bruins—to History. He did. And it was the first time anyone in the cast saw what the final cut of the first episode looked like.
Because we’d been on the road, with only a few days off, from September 2007 through January 2008, we never saw the editing process taking place in the postproduction bays at the MPPI production offices in Santa Monica. Therefore, when the first episode aired, we also got a chance to see what an audience—albeit a small audience of young Lochinvars hoisting their Sam Adams or Harpoon lagers and more interested in wooing the girls at their tables than watching what was playing on the huge wall monitor—thought of the show.
The credits came up, the music played, our images in black and white slowly appeared and then dissolved on the screen and the deep voiceover announced that this was “the UFO before Roswell.” A couple of heads at the table perked up from the pitchers in front of them when they heard the word, “Roswell.”
“They’re watching it,” someone on the crew said.
Indeed they were, intermittently, as if allowing their collective gaze to float to the monitor to see what this was all about. No, it wasn’t a Bruins game nor was it the Celtics playing the Lakers, nor was it a shapely starlet hyping the girl-magnet features of a new car, but folks were looking up nevertheless. As the episode, covering the bizarre story of the Maury Island UFO incident and the subsequent crash of a B-25 Mitchell bomber in Kelso, ostensibly carrying UFO debris from the Maury Island, Washington, beach played out, it seemed as if everyone enjoying the January evening at Cheers suddenly knew our name. We were the “UFO Hunters,” and our season had just begun.
I believe one of the attractions of UFO Hunters was the difference between our series and prior specials and documentaries about UFOs. First of all, and believe it or not, UFO Hunters was not about proving that UFOs were real. It was about the evidence-based assertions concerning UFO encounters, sightings, and other UFO-related incidents and the arguments of debunkers. Our process was to focus on whatever real evidence could be gleaned from an incident and to put it through the filters of scientific testing and logical evaluation.
For example, if a debunker argued that the Rex Heflin photos from our episode on James McDonald’s lost UFO files were totally hoaxed because Heflin couldn’t have snapped off three photos of a flying disk in twenty seconds because of the time it took his Polaroid 101 camera to process the prints, we proved that wrong by having a Polaroid expert shoot three photos in under twenty seconds. If debunkers said that the photos were hoaxed because everything in the frame was in focus at the same instant, a “depth of field” issue, our expert showed, again, that by setting his camera lens to infinity, Heflin would have kept items both in the foreground and background in sharp focus.
Prior UFO series, whether on cable or conventional network channels, including the old UFO Files, were focused on asserting unconventional explanations of strange events and then presenting the debunker arguments so as to keep the episodes balanced. From the outset UFO Hunters was different. Our premise was to focus on real people telling real stories of what they perceived to be real UFO encounters. Real witnesses telling their stories with a sense of awe made our episodes truly dramatic and conveyed a sense of urgency to the show’s theme. In addition, particularly in seasons two and three, the series took an entirely different tack, combining organic interaction among the principal investigators with onscreen expert scientific analysis and demonstrations to evaluate the conventional arguments against unconventional events. The result was an almost Sherlock Holmesian pursuit of theories that stood up to the tests of logic and science. That approach is what differentiated us from the UFO shows that had come before us and set the model for those UFO shows that would come after us.
We also realized that rather than stalwartly pounding the table with assertions that UFOs were real, we were going up against the biology of underlying belief systems. Studies have shown that people’s core belief systems may be neurologically wired. In ultrasound and MRI procedures, when test subjects were presented with statements that comported with their core beliefs, certain parts of their brains lit up. When the same subjects were presented with statements that challenged their belief systems, different parts of their brains lit up. Thus for certain individuals holding fast to their core beliefs, no amount of logic or rational argument could change their opinions because there is a neurological filter, a physiological sluice gate, determining what gets through and what doesn’t. Their actual biology predetermines their reactions so that the outcome of the interaction is also predetermined. This helps to explain why some individuals, especially hard-core UFO debunkers refuse to entertain evidence about UFO encounters even when their counterarguments are completely implausible. It explains why debunkers in general cling desperately to the Stanton Friedman maxim of “anything but alien” in order to dismiss real evidence about UFO encounters even when their counter arguments fly directly into the face of established evidence. Thus UFO Hunters took the tack of focusing on the debunker arguments and, like Sherlock Holmes, using evidence to eliminate them one after the other.
Our episodes were successful as we traveled to Washington State to unravel the mysteries of the Maury Island and Kelso incidents; to New England to interview Betty Hill’s niece Kathy Marden about her aunt’s description of her abduction and subsequent recovered memories about what happened onboard what she described as a spacecraft. We also went to places like Catalina Island in Santa Monica Bay to explore the stories of unidentified submerged objects and their interaction with human beings. We hit a high point with our trip to England where we investigated the case of the strange object United States Air Force personnel saw in Rendlesham Forest right outside RAF Bentwaters, a NATO nuclear weapons base that was staffed and managed by the USAF. And as we pursued these investigations, we emphasized that our mission was to peel away the known from the unknown to get to what we could not identify as conventional.
This peeling away, this process of eliminating what we could explain dispositively from what we could not explain became the primary focus of each episode. Our scientific demonstrations, separating and eliminating the known from the unknown, enabled us to pinpoint what was unidentifiable when it came to an event. We hunted for the unidentifiable by documenting the identifiable. And it worked.
By the time we were midway into the 2008 season, there were preliminary rumblings from the network. Our ratings, over a million households, were good, but were they good enough to get us a second season? We’d had conversations with our executive at History, who told us that the decision was still up in the air. More numbers had to come in. And then, in early spring, we landed in Suffolk, Virginia, for what would be a fateful encounter with Terrell Copeland, whose videos of UFOs and his story of following a giant triangle floating across the sky captured our attention as well as that of a number of folks on YouTube. Copeland had been a Marine, but had left the service for medical reasons. He told me privately—although our show runner and coexecutive producer, Al LaGarde, had a camera on us the whole time and could hear our conversation through my open mike—about his experiences with a strange woman who had contacted him and urged him to connect with his “star seed.”
As the conversation progressed, Terrell described an incident in which he had heard a sound at the door of his apartment and heard someone trying to turn the doorknob. Thinking someone was trying to break in, Terrell, who had been napping on his couch, reached for his handgun, but realized with a shock that he was completely paralyzed. He could move his eyes, could think, but his hands and feet were frozen. Then he heard a voice resonate in his mind, telling him not to go for his gun, that all would be well if he just relaxed. Then, whoever or whatever was at his door simply disappeared and Terrell was able to move again.
Pat Uskert and I walked Terrell back into his parents’ house where we continued the conversation. Terrell told us about his strange ability to know exactly when the phone would ring and who was on the other end. It was uncanny, but it was only one of a number of strange, seemingly psychic, abilities that Terrell described. But he kept on returning to his questions about his “star seed.” What was it? How did he get it? And what was he supposed to do about it?
* * *
I had heard this same line of inquiry many times before from other individuals during the course of my tenure at UFO Magazine, and I had also heard Phil Corso talk about it, so I suggested to Terrell that maybe he was a hybrid ET-human who was contacted by others who wanted to show him how to manifest his abilities.
Pat Uskert was freaked out to the point of near apoplexy and chastised me—and that’s putting it mildly—for making that suggestion. Al LaGarde, seeing the makings of an organic TV moment, rushed the two of us outside where we continued our debate, with Pat saying that I shouldn’t jump to an unprovable conclusion and my saying that it was just a suggestion. The conversation was recorded, of course, and made its way to the editing room where our newly hired story editor, Stu Chait, was reviewing the raw footage before the first gross cuts of material. But that afternoon, visiting the editing bay in the postproduction suite was our new network executive, Mike Stiller, who was watching the editing process.
When the first editor went to cut the Terrell Copeland “you are a hybrid” conversation and Pat’s response, Stu Chait told him to put it back in, saying it was the kind of spontaneous television moment that the network might like. We could always cut it out in a later round. However, as the fate of our second season of UFO Hunters was hanging in the balance—up or down—Mike Stiller saw the scene and instantly saw the promise of that interaction. He later told me that it was at that moment he decided the show should go into a second season. Stu Chait’s instincts had saved the day, and that’s how UFO Hunters was renewed for its second season.
And that’s where we start this book.
Copyright © 2015 by A&E Television Network, LLC
