Coincidentally, only minutes after the F-16s had returned to base, a man in Brussels managed to capture “the flying triangle” on video. The images, shown on television in many countries, depict the well-known configuration of three white lights and a pulsating red light in the center. SOBEPS investigators later found that the witness had filmed an airliner preparing to land at Zaventem airfield.
As in any modern UFO flap, several videos turned up, the majority of which showed not only aircraft lights but also bright stars or planets. In one instance the reflection of sunlight in distant windows was taken for a low hovering UFO. In another, it was a group of streetlamps that fooled the witnesses. Various reports were generated by imperfections in the autofocus system of early generation camcorders. Many of these early systems have problems focussing on a small point of light. This often resulted in optical oddities that can transform a bright star into a large—sometimes metallic looking—disk.
One of the rare photographic documents that defied explanation was a color slide taken in early April 1990 by a young man from Petit-Rechain, not far from the city of Liège. The photo depicts a black triangle silhouetted against a dark bluish background. There are white blobs of light in each corner and a fourth light, surrounded by a reddish aura, in the center. While coworkers of SOBEPS claim that these lights were probably plasma jets that are part of the object’s propulsion system, skeptics point to glaring contradictions in the testimonies of the two witnesses and to the absence of background details in the picture (making it impossible to verify the object’s actual size and distance).
Famous “Belgian Triangle” photo
Markedly absent during the Belgian wave were reports of electromagnetic effects. As for traces on ground and vegetation, only four such cases were recorded for the 1989-1991 period. None of which constituted the slightest proof of any unusual event.
IN SEARCH OF EXPLANATIONS
Although many cases could be classified as misinterpretations, a considerable percentage remained puzzling, namely those incidents in which independent witnesses reported seeing a similar, unidentified object at close range, during the same night, and within a well-defined area. Three such peak days stand out: November 29, 1989, December 11-12, 1989 and March 12, 1991.
Teleguided spherical balloon equipped with three spotlights. Some investigators suggested that a similar construction may have been responsible for at least some of the Belgian sightings.
Researchers skeptical of an extraterrestrial interpretation argued that the objects described reminded them of ultra light motorized aircraft. This hypothesis was supported by a rumor that an Air Force pilot had flown a home-built ULM without the permission of his superiors.
Others suspected that the Air Force was flying state-of-the-art experimental aircraft, presumably of U.S. design, and was taking advantage of the UFO excitement to draw public attention away from these secret test flights. The revolutionary concept of the first generation stealth planes still sparked the imagination in 1989-1990 and the newest trends in aviation design were also being reflected in the UFO descriptions. Skeptics scrutinized aviation magazines for the latest news on obscureBlack Projects. After all, the much reported configuration of three white lights and a red flashing light was consistent with standard lighting configuration for aircraft. What they failed to take into account was that these presumed wonder planes were supposed to be fast aircraft, not capable of hovering close to the ground, making sharp turns and producing no down-draft, but only a soft humming sound, as was described in the best-documented cases.
Several investigators, troubled by these unusual flight characteristics, sought salvation in the blimp hypothesis, pointing to the “accident” with the blimp-type object in Jupille-sur-Meuse and to the November 29 sightings. With regard to the latter they pointed out that, earlier that same day, several independent witnesses had spotted, in broad daylight, an oval-or cigar-shaped object traveling slowly south of the lake of Gileppe. Moreover, they discovered that teleguided blimps, equipped with bright spotlights and a camera, had indeed been tested in Belgium in late 1989. The owner of these craft turned out to be an eccentric Hungarian who rented his contraptions for publicity purposes and was hoping to gather a few orders from the military as well. It appeared that he had actually contacted not only Major-General De Brouwer, but also the country’s intelligence services, claiming that he himself had single-handedly started the Belgian UFO wave and that he would be willing to prove this in exchange for a big amount of money.
Both the Air Force and the intelligence services gave little credence to the story and turned the offer down. Surprisingly, the inventor later denied having ever flown his radio-controlled balloons outdoors, causing even more confusion. In the end, the only thing that remained certain was that the Belgian UFOs were an important factor in transforming the traditional nuts-and-bolts image of the flying saucer into a new high-tech UFO that pops up almost exclusively at night, looks like a dark, angular structure and carries a panoply of multicolored lights.
—WIM VAN UTRECHT
Bender mystery (“Men in Black”) In September 1953, Albert K. Bender, then director of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), reported that three men dressed in black suits had called on him at his Bridgeport, Connecticut, home and revealed to him the frightening answer to the UFO mystery. Bender confided to IFSB associates soon afterward that the men, whose manner had been threatening, had warned him he would be thrown into jail if he repeated any of the information they had given him.
Gray Barker, Dominick Lucchesi, and August Roberts called on Bender shortly after the supposed incident and were able to draw a few more details out of him. He said the three men in black had told him that for the past two years the United States Government had known the secret of the UFOs. They claimed, according to Bender, that this secret would be revealed in either five months or four years. Shortly after the original visit, one of the strangers returned and imparted additional insight into the mystery, which, Bender said later, tended to ease some of the fear Bender had experienced during and after the first meeting.
Apparently the men, or at least the agency they represented, continued to monitor Bender’s activities. He alleged that once, after he had made a “bad slip” during a longdistance telephone conversation with another saucer buff, a call came from Washington, D.C., and a voice warned him to be more careful in the future.
Soon afterward Bender closed down the IFSB. In the last issue of the organization’s publication, Space Review, he wrote cryptically, in his first public allusion to the episode, “STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucer is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.
“We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”
Bender withdrew from the UFO field and resisted pressure to discuss the matter further. Although serious UFOlogists viewed his claims with considerable skepticism, occult-and contactee-oriented saucerians speculated endlessly about the possible identity of the “Three Men,” as they came to be called. The Three Men were variously held to be CIA operatives, space people, evil astral entities, demons, agents of an international Nazi conspiracy, or agents of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Bender’s former associate Gray Barker, a Clarksburg, West Virginia, publisher, tirelessly promoted the mystery and started a small industry specializing in Bender-related materials. Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) is an entertaining excursion into the outer reaches of UFOlogical paranoia which recounted the Bender affair and other similar alleged silencings of UFO researchers in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
In 1962, Bender suddenly announced he was ready to tell all and did so in a volume published that year by Barker’s Saucerian Books. The eagerly a
waited Flying Saucers and the Three Men proved a disappointing climax to the nine-year-old controversy. Even Barker conceded privately that he could not swallow Bender’s fantastic tale of abduction to the South Pole by monstrous space beings. Practically everyone who read it, even those ordinarily predisposed to unbridled credulity, dismissed the book as a work of conscious or unconscious fiction. Ben-der himself showed minimal enthusiasm for it and did little to promote it. Soon afterward he moved to Los Angeles and secured an unlisted telephone number.
But Three Men does shed some light on the background of the Bender Mystery and points (albeit unintentionally) to the likely solution. It reveals Bender’s longtime obsession with science fiction, horror movies, and the occult. Bender, at the time of the alleged visitation a bachelor living with his stepfather, had converted his section of the house into a “chamber of horrors,” with paintings of monsters on the walls and shrunken heads and artificial bats on the tables and shelves. Reading the book one cannot resist an obvious conclusion—that Bender was ripe for what might euphemistically be termed a “psychological experience.”
In 1976, Bender, now the director of an organization seeking to perpetuate the music of film composer Max Steiner, wrote, replying to a letter from a UFOlogist, “In 1977 something spectacular will take place involving space.” In this, as in his 1953 prediction that the truth about UFOs would be known in five months or four years, Bender proved to be a poor prophet.
—JEROME CLARK
Bermuda Triangle-UFO link A popular explanation for the disappearances of ships and planes in the so-called “Bermuda Triangle” is the “UFO-capture theory.” Upon close inspection, however, the supposed UFO link is found to be merely a literary creation without basis in fact.
Over the past half-century, more than a hundred ships and planes, with over a thousand persons on board, have supposedly disappeared-some say “mysteriously, without a trace”—in an area variously dubbed “the Bermuda Triangle,” “the Devil’s Triangle,” “the Hoodoo Sea,” “the Triangle of Death,” and “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.” It is actually a large area of undefinable shape around, and including, the triangle formed by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, where sea and air traffic is said to be the greatest. For reasons which are to follow, some writers have “theorized” a UFO-connection to explain the “strange” disappearances.
The Bermuda Triangle-UFO link, to missing vessels was perhaps first hinted at in the 1930s by Charles Fort (1874-1932), who, as his biographer Loren Gross writes for this encyclopedia, “played with the notion that mysterious vanishments of ocean vessels and their crews…may be due to wanton seizures by spacemen.” Two decades later, astronomer Morris K. Jessup (1900-59), in his book The Case for the UFO (1955), wrote: “To attempt to postulate motive for space inhabitants kidnapping crews from ships…is in the realm of pure speculation. On the other hand…our space friends would want to know what has happened to us since they left, or what has happened to us since they put us down here. Again, there is always the possibility that the open seas provide an easy catching place.”
More recently, author Charles Berlitz capitalized on the “Triangle” and a possible UFO-connection by quoting, in his bestselling book The Bermuda Triangle (1974), his friend J. Manson Valentine, who reported several UFO sightings in the area. Berlitz also quoted a reporter by the name of Art Ford, who claimed that a final radio transmission, picked up by a ham operator from one of the doomed pilots (in this case, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, flight leader of the five Navy torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945), contained the warning: “Don’t come after me….They look like they are from outer space.” (According to a transcript from the Navy Inquiry Board, what Taylor actually said was: “I know where I am now. I’m at 2,300 feet. Don’t come after me.”)
Also, there are claims of unusual electromagnetic effects occurring in the Triangle, a common feature of many UFO reports. Actually, none of the “magnetic anomalies” claimed about the area are true. Reports of compass needles spinning crazily have never been substantiated. The fact that the compass points to true north from the Triangle does not cause confusion, but rather, simplifies navigation. (The compass points to true north from many other places in the world. The only part of the Triangle from which it does point directly north is at the southern tip of Florida.) Those who claim that the north-pointing compass is strange or confusing lack even the most fundamental knowledge of magnetism, compasses, or navigation. The presence of a “Space/Time warp” (whatever that means) is, again, unsubstantiated, to say the least.
Popular author John Wallace Spencer, in a revised version of his book Limbo of the Lost (1973), offered a provocative theory: He reasoned that: “Since a 575-foot vessel with 39 crew members disappearing 50 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, and commercial airliners disappearing while coming in for a landing cannot happen according to earthly standards and yet are happening, I am forced to conclude that they are actually being taken away from our planet for a variety of reasons.”
In a 1975 version of the book, retitled Limbo of the Lost—Today, Spencer modified his UFO theory so that the extraterrestrials were no longer carting the captives away from Earth but were taking them to hidden underwater facilities, where the ETs conducted experiments on the earthlings and their machinery. But Spencer offered no evidence that UFOs had been present or were even sighted in conjunction with any of the incidents he described. In other words, it seems that some authors are apparently dressing up their accounts by including UFOs in order to attempt to make a bigger story.
The UFO-capture theme was again used in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It turned out that five Navy torpedo bombers that disappeared in 1945 were taken aboard a gigantic “Mother Ship”; and all of its captives (who had not aged over the years) were released at the end of the movie to help demonstrate that the extraterrestrials are indeed friendly after all.
In reality, the “Bermuda Triangle Mystery” has been shown, in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved, by Larry Kusche (1975), to be a sham—an accumulation of careless research, misconceptions, sensationalism, and downright falsification of data—and is so regarded by most leading UFO researchers. For example, the 575-foot ship that Spencer claimed had disappeared was found within two weeks, sunken in shallow water. Volatile fumes in the holds had exploded, nearly tearing the ship in two. The airliner that Spencer said had disappeared while on a landing approach was a chartered DC-3 that lost its way at night in 1948, out of sight of land, because of radio navigational problems. Thorough investigations of other incidents by Kusche led to similar “down to earth” explanations.
According to the April 1978 issue of J. Allen Hynek’s International UFO Reporter: “The Bermuda Trian gle stories…are NOT relayed by the pilots or sailors who experience them; they are the fraudulent literary distortions of a small handful of authors. All Triangle mysteries so far have been easily explainable once the actual records have been examined. Would that the more baffling UFOs (which are themselves the mysteries) were so easily resolved.”
—RONALD D. STORY
Bethurum, Truman (1898-1969). Truman Bethurum was one of the five major “contactees” of the 1950s. He claimed to have met Space People on numerous occasions. He said that the “captain” gave him information about the workings of “flying saucers” and life on the planet Clarion. Bethurum offered no evidence to substantiate these claims, and most UFO researchers regard him as a charlatan.
Truman Bethurum
Bethurum became famous in 1954 with the publication of his book, Aboard a Flying Saucer. In it, Bethurum claimed that he encountered a landed flying saucer in the Mojave Desert, where he was laying asphalt for a construction company. Invited aboard the flying saucer, he said, he met the crew and its female captain, Aura Rhanes. She explained to Bethurum that she had come form an idyllic society on the planet Clarion, where there was no war, divorce, or taxes. Clarion could not be seen from Earth because it was always behind the moon.
Bethurum struck up a friendship with Aura Rhanes. After the first encounter, he met with her ten more times at lunch counters and other such mundane places. During these meetings, she gave more information about Clarion, and she explained the composition of her “saucer.” Once she tried to aid Bethurum by predicting what would happen on his job. Eventually, Rhanes invited Bethurum and some of his guests to take a ride in the flying saucer; but when the time came, Aura Rhanes and the saucer did not show up, and Bethurum never saw her again.
Drawing of the lady captain, Aura Rhanes
All but the most desperate contactee advocates have considered Bethurum’s book to be a hoax. Bethurum stuck by the story and capitalized on it by appearing on television and radio shows and giving lectures at contactee-oriented UFO conventions. He was friends with “Professor” George Adamski and other contactees of the period, and his claims were similar to those of Adamski, Fry, and Angelucci.
In 1969, Edward U. Condon used nearly two pages of his Condon Rerport to prove that Clarion could not possibly exist. For Condon, Clarion was evidence of the gullibility of UFO “believers.”
Bethurum died on May 21, 1969, in Landers, California. The following year, Timothy Green Beckley published some previously unpublished material by Bethurum which rehashed the story in his 1954 book and gave additional details about the planet Clarion. Bethurum’s Aboard a Flying Saucer is now considered a relic of the 1950s, a time when contactees were “media events.” Its main importance is as an example of how individuals have tried to exploit the UFO phenomenon for their own gain.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 21
