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Dr. Bruce Maccabee is one of the foremost ufo photo analysts and ufo investigators. He has appeared on many tv documentaries and written several books.
www.brumac.8k.com
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Ken:
First
I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity
to get this interview and I would like to let you
know that I have been a fan of yours for many years.
Are we ready, I'll start if you are ready?
Dr.
Maccabee:
Go
ahead.
Ken:
Would
you tell us about your background and what brought
you to the study of ufos and some of the books that
you have written?
Dr.
Maccabee:
Well
I was mildly interested in the subject when I was
a child living in Rutland, Vermont, back in the 50s.
There were a lot of sightings back then reported
in the newspapers (e.g., the 1952 flap) and there
were flying saucer movies. I saw all of those that
came to Rutland. I can remember that, in high school,
I had to read a number of books each semester, and
one of the books I chose to read was the report on "Unidentified
Flying Objects" by Edward R Ruppelt, who was
the first director of Project Blue Book. I read the
book and wrote a little review of it. I guess I lost
the review many, many years ago, but I still have
the book. Its all dog eared and so on now. There
was nothing that I could do about it at that time
except think, oh that's interesting. It wasn't until
the middle 60s, when I was going to a university
in Washington, D.C., to get a PhD in Physics, that
ufos came out of the woodwork you might say, in the
‘65, ‘66, ‘67 time frame. There was a big flap of
sightings in the midwest in early ‘66 and that caused
Congress to order the Air Force to conduct an independent
study of the subject, that is, independent of Project
Blue Book. At that time it became acceptable to talk
about ufos without having a bag over your head. I
suppose the key event in my life was going to a lecture
at an American University in Washington, D.C., by
two guys from NICAP (the National Investigations
Committee On Aerial Phenomena). I suspect it was
Richard Hall and Don Berliner, but it might have
been somebody else. I don't remember much about the
lecture, but I do recall them saying that NICAP was
a volunteer organization and that they needed help
in the main office to answer mail and so on. (NICAP
has sort of been regenerated, in a new form on the
web, in honor of the original name, I guess.) It
was founded by Thomas Brown in 1956. Soon afterward,
Donald Keyhoe became the director in 1957. It had
been around for about 11 years by the time I got
interested in 1968. It was in a couple of ufo books
I had read. By that time I had read a number of ufo
books such as Frank Edwards’ “UFOs, Serious Business”
and others, starting in 1966, I suppose, or ‘67.
Since NICAP was mentioned in the ufo books, I naturally
expected it to be a big organization. I imagined
their office, which was in downtown Washington, D.C.,
to be a big place with lots of people running around
doing all sorts of stuff, with secretaries, scientists
and whatever. In the late fall of ‘68, I went to
where the NICAP office was, 1536 New Hampshire Avenue,
Washington D.C., near a place called DuPont Circle.
Back in those days at DuPont Circle, there were a
lot of row houses. Its all built up into modern office
buildings now, but people actually lived in the area
in those days. I went to this entrance way, which
turned out to have the right number but it turned
out to be a doorway with no door on it and led into
a hallway with stairs. There were bare walls and
a light bulb at the top of the stairs. At the top
of the stairs was another door. By the time I got
to the upper door my anticipation was waning.
Ken:
I
could imagine.
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
opened the door and there was a small suite of rooms,
packed wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with papers
and stuff and an elderly lady secretary, who was
running the whole show. She was the one person that
I met. That was disappointing, to say the least,
because I had envisioned this to be a big organization.
By the time I got there, Don Keyhoe had left. I could
see his desk piled up with papers, but nobody was
there. The other names that I had read about weren't
there either. Nevertheless, I figured if I am here,
at least I will have some access to the files and
then I can make up my own mind as to what is going
on. I did some volunteer work, opened some letters
and the secretary, Isabel Davis, who was a very mentally
astute lady, wanted to know if I could write up one
page, of what we now call, a Q and A sheet, that
she could type with a special typewriter that she
had, that had very small 8 point type,..
Ken:
One
of those elite typewriters.
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
don't know, but it was very small type. She wanted
to be able to put everything on one page, because
she said we get tons of mail. “What I need is one
page that I can fold up and stick in an envelope
and mail out immediately in response.” They got letters
like, "send me everything you have on ufos",
for which the correct response would be, “okay, send
a truck.”
Ken:
(We
both had a good laugh at this point.)
Green
Light Heading Over Car (Recreation)
Photo Source: MorgueFiles
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
did that and that was in maybe ‘68 or ‘69. Several
years later when NICAP was being removed from Washington,
D.C. and transferred to Maryland, I was going through
what was remaining of the files and sure enough,
there were a couple of copies of the thing that I
had written several years before, so I know that
she actually used it. By being active and doing some
volunteer work, I was able to connect up with the
local NICAP subcommittee. NICAP was an organization
somewhat like MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), the present
leading ufo organization. NICAP had a headquarters
and subscribers to their publication (called The
Investigator), and independent subcommittees spread
throughout the United States and in other countries.
The subcommittees were small organizations that actually
had meetings, did the investigations and wrote the
reports and sent them back to headquarters. The Washington
D.C. subcommittee was run right out of the NICAP
office and I met some of those people and I went
on my first ufo investigation in 1969. It turned
out to be interesting. A lady had been driving down
a road in the western suburbs of Washington, D.C.,
called Tuckerman Lane and she saw green lights flying
over her car as she drove along . We went to her
house, it was a nice house, a row house, I think.
She was a teacher, her husband was an accountant.
People who weren't likely to be making a ufo hoax.
We got in her car and rode along with her along the
same road. There were trees on both sides. We couldn't
see any reason that there would be green lights appearing
to pass over the car. There was a stop light and
that is only green light and everybody knows what
a stop light is. That sighting had to go into the
files as unidentified. Perhaps the key point here
is in the comparison with the experiences of other
people. Other people, I have read, started to get
interested and went out to do some investigations
and the cases turned out to be complete misidentifications
or hoaxes, something that wasn't very interesting
at all and after doing several investigations like
that, the persons would just sort of drop out, or
become skeptical of the whole subject.
Ken:
I
can understand that.
Dr.
Maccabee:
Yeah.
I can understand that too. If the first cases I was
involved with were like the one that involved a young
child’s sighting of a red light, probably a red setting
sun, I probably wouldn’t have gotten interested,
either. More important was a case from Mt. Jackson,
Virginia, which is in the Shenandoah Valley. A man,
an elected county official, saw an object shaped
somewhat like in elongated football, hovering over
one of the mountains just before sunset and the object
stayed visible for many minutes. He viewed it through
binoculars, was able to triangulate it and get an
angular size and he brought his family out to witness
it. It was a really solid sighting of something that
was hovering over this mountain. Then there was another
case in the early 1970’s that involved multiple witnesses
and a landed craft. Outside the craft there was a
creature holding a glowing ball. That was a very
complicated case and unidentified. In retrospect,
it was also a missed opportunity to investigate something
that few people were thinking about at the time,
missing time and abduction. But, anyway, the first
cases that I got involved with had some meat to them
and of course at the same time I was studying books
and reading reports in The Investigator about what
was going on around the country and around the world.
This was the beginning of the 1970’s, the first decade
during which there was no Project Blue Book. The
Air Force had closed Project Blue Book because of
the Condon study at Colorado University, which resulted
from congressional pressure on the Air Force. The
study had taken place in ‘68 and ’69. The conclusion,
written by Dr. Edward Condon, stated that the 20
year Air Force of study of ufos (Projects Sign, Grudge
and Blue Book), had led to no new knowledge and he
didn't think that continued study was worthwhile
and ...
Ken:
Until
he changed his mind when he got older.
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
don't know that Condon every changed his mind?
Ken:
I
thought he did.
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
don't recall anything......
Ken:
Maybe
I am wrong about that.
Dr.
Maccabee:
Yeah,
well he basically read the whole subject off along
with the Condon study itself. If you read through
the whole thing, it has a lot of scientific padding,
you might say. There are chapters on optics and chapters
on radar. It turned out to be of great value as a
reference book for physical phenomena. The Condon
study tackled only about 100 cases. If you look in
the index of the report, you will find about 30 cases
unexplained, you can look up unexplained cases. You
would think that a study done by skeptical scientists,
of a phenomenon that they claim is either misidentifications,
hoaxes or delusions, would show, don't you think,
that they would be able to explain everything? Instead
the 30 percent of unexplained cases is even larger
than the Project Blue Book level of unexplained cases.
Ken:
Right.
Isn't the accepted figure today somewhere around
10 to 12 percent?
Dr.
Maccabee:
I
was reading statistics from a number of places just
recently and 5 percent and 10 percent has sort of
been a good numbers, but upon reevaluation some people
put it as high as 20 percent. The so called Special
Report Number 14, which was done in 1952 and 53 by
the Battelle Memorial Institute, in conjunction with
Project Blue Book personnel at Wright Patterson Air
Force Base, was never referred to by Condon, but
it was the largest government statistical study,
ever carried out. It tackled 4,000 cases. They were
collected between 1947 and December 1952. They threw
away 800 of them as being too nebulous, that left
3,201. Out of that, they claimed about 20 percent
unidentified out of the whole group of cases. But
if you remove from analysis all the civilian witnesses,
you were left with only military witnesses, many
of whom were on duty at the time of their sightings.
Then the percentage of unexplained increased to about
30 percent. The better the cases, the more likely
they are to be unexplained.
Ken:
I
understand, better witnesses, sure.
Would
you say that your main interest now is in analyzing
ufo photographs?
First
Photo Of McMinnville UFO
Photo Source: Bruce Maccabee
Dr.
Maccabee:
Well
that's a large part of what I have been doing. I
got into that because of the McMinnville case that
I tackled back in ‘74, and I have learned a lot about
photography and videography over the years, so I
end up reviewing a lot of stuff, but that is not
the only thing that I do. I also do historical studies.
I was active years ago under the Freedom of Information
Act. I was the first person to get hold of the FBI's
file on “flying discs.” At that time, nobody (outside
the FBI) even knew there was an FBI file. Ruppelt,
in his book, indicated that the FBI wasn't interested.
He didn't know.
Ken:
Obviously.
Dr.
Maccabee:
The
FBI was like a black hole, information went in and
never came out, until 1977.
Book
that describes the FBI interest in flying saucers.
Source: Bruce
Maccabee
Ken:
Many
people today mistakenly think that they are photo
analyst experts, I guess its because of software
like Photoshop and that. Tell us as a professional
photo analyst, what steps do you take to determine
if a photo is genuine?
Dr.
Maccabee:
You
have to realize that a photo, a ufo does not make.
A video or a movie with sound, now that's more difficult
to fake. What it comes down to is this: the photo
can't prove a ufo is real, the best or worst it can
do is provide evidence that there is a fake. We have
seen that in a number of cases and I have some on
my website. Consider, for example, the relatively
recent August 2006 Chinese video. It has been viewed
by over half a million people on YouTube. You get
comments like “wow.” Some of your audience may recognize
it, if I describe it. It shows a tall narrow building
on the left hand side and a ufo, the classic disc
shape thing in the upper right. The ufo moves from
the right towards the left, that is, it is moving
slowly toward the building but at a higher altitude.
As it moves, the camera zooms in and when the disc
gets to a certain place, all of a sudden with a bright
flash of light it is gone. If you look at it frame
by frame, you can see that there is a whole bunch
of lights that appear around the edge of the object
and in the next frame it is gone. I looked at this
carefully and when I first saw it, I noticed that
there was something weird going on. We know that
the camera was zooming in, because the image of the
building was increasing continuously, but the image
size of the ufo didn't seem to continuously increase
at the same rate. I analyzed it carefully, frame
by frame and it became clear that when the camera
zoomed in and increased the magnification of the
building, the magnification of the building didn't
match the magnification of the ufo. Maybe I should
say it the other way around? It certainly seems reasonable
that the building was real, so its image growth would
be a measure of the magnification or zoom factor.
The problem was that, whereas the ufo image did increase
in size, it did not increase by the same amount.
The building image increased by about 40%, but the
ufo image by only about 14%. You can’t have one part
of the field of view have one magnification factor
and another part have another magnification factor.
If the camera had a lens that was so bad the magnification
was not uniform, every picture would be severely
distorted. Of course, you could imagine that the
ufo moved away from the camera just as the camera
was zooming in, but that would require an unusual
coincidence between camera operation and the motions
of the object. The bottom line is that the difference
in magnifications suggests a fake in which the faker
wasn’t careful about pasting a ufo image into a zooming
video sequence. Then there was the last frame with
the br
ight
flash as the object disappeared. It showed lights
around the edges of the object. There were 7 lights.
If they were equally spaced around the disc, which
is what you are supposed to assume, they would have
occurred in certain locations with respect to the
image, looking at it obliquely from below. You are
not directly beneath it, you are looking at it from
an angle. It turned out that the positions of the
lights didn't agree with how they would appear, if
it had been a real object with 7 lights spaced equally
around the edge. The closest lights would have made
an arc instead of the straight line of lights in
the picture. So there were a couple things that were
wrong with that video. The analysis of it is on my
website, http://brumac.8k.com/ChineseUFO/ChinaAug2006.html.
FRAMES FROM THE CHINESE
UFO VIDEO
Source: Bruce
Maccabee
Ken:
Well
I saw something, a video and something came to mind.
It was of a ufo where a cluster of ufos appeared
in the background. It was against the sky, there
were no buildings, not even a cloud in the sky and
I said to myself, "how could anyone tell if
the cluster was moving or the camera was moving",
because the cluster was going one way, the big ufo
was going another way apparently, but it could have
been the big ufo was standing still and these were
balloons and they were drifting another way or someone
was moving the camera, I just don't see without a
reference, without reference points, how can you
analyze it, you know what I mean?
Dr.
Maccabee:
Yeah,
right. Well like I said a photo does not a ufo make.
What does tend to make it is the backup, the context,
the surrounding history. What happened before, what
happened afterwards. In the McMinnville case from
the 1950s there was a classic ufo disc. Two photographs
were taken by a farmer. His wife saw it first and
yelled for him to bring the camera. He took the pictures.
Ken:
Is
that the one where its over the roof?
Dr.
Maccabee:
You
see a building on the left hand side, which is the
garage....
Ken:
Right,
that the picture that I am......
Dr.
Maccabee:
Not
really over the garage, to the right of being over
the garage...
Ken:
Right,
that is the picture that I meant.
Dr.
Maccabee:
First
Photo taken by Paul Trent
Photo Source:
Bruce Maccabee
There
are 2 pictures. In the first one you see the oval
bottom of it, the oval is presumably circular, actually
it is not quite circular. Then in the second picture
you see a more edge-on view.
Second
Photo by Paul Trent
Photo Source:
Bruce Maccabee
It
has been in great dispute over the years. It happened
in 1950. The Trents died in 1995 and 1996. You could
follow their whole life, from the time those pictures
were taken to afterwards. I started doing that. I
started interviewing them in 1975 or 1976 and I talked
to Mrs.Trent many times over the next 5 years or
so. I collected interviews done by other people over
the years and put a huge analysis on my website.
The skeptics had argued initially that you could
prove by the photos, that it was a hoax. I countered
that argument and showed that the photos don’t prove
a hoax. However, it is clear that the photos either
show the “real thing” or they are part of a hoax,
there is no halfway point. But the photos alone don't
prove that it is real or that it is a hoax.
Ken:
I
understand.
Dr.
Maccabee:
So
ufo cases like this are the high risk, high payoff
cases, where there is no doubt that it is either
the real thing or it is a hoax.
Ken:
Well
how do you feel.....
Dr.
Maccabee:
Wait...
Ken:
I'm
sorry.
Dr.
Maccabee:
Let
me finish.
Ken:
I
didn't mean to cut you off.
Dr.
Maccabee:
Since
you can't prove by the picture that it is a hoax,
the best you can do with the picture, is say that
the picture is neutral. It acts as an aid to the
memory of the witness. “What did you see?” “Well
I got this photograph here, I saw that.” If the photo
doesn't prove that it’s real by itself, then you
have to look at everything else. So we started looking
at the Trent's background history and the things
that they were doing. The skeptics had claimed that
these photos were taken in the morning, but the witnesses,
the Trents said that the photos were taken in the
evening, just before sunset. The skeptics have claimed
that they faked the pictures in the morning. This
is a rural area where they live and farmers are more
likely to be up in the morning. Therefore if the
Trents had said the pictures were taken in the morning
there would be the question of why didn't any other
farmers see it? In the evening during sunset the
farmers would be in their homes eating, so according
to the skeptics, the Trents would be able to explain
the lack of other witnesses by faking the pictures
in the morning, but then saying they were taken in
the evening when other people would be in their homes
eating supper. That was the skeptical argument. Well
it turned out that Mr. Trent was a farmer, he had
his own farm, he had his own cows and he also did
the milk run for the local dairy. He would get up
at 4:30, 5:00 o'clock in the morning, take care of
his own animals and then start his milk run. When
you are doing a milk run, you've got other farmers
out there with cows that are loaded with milk. The
cows and the milk have to be taken care of. You don't
stop at 7:30 in the morning, spend many minutes faking
ufo photos and then go on your milk run.
Ken:
That's
true, that's very true.
Dr.
Maccabee:
Its
that sort of thing that is contextual evidence. Numerous
people interviewed the Trents. You just look at these
people and you know that they couldn't pull off the
hoax. It was the background stuff that was convincing
and the photos were just sort of neutral. There are
cases where you can say that, if this was faked it
was very difficult. For example it would require
the will to do it obviously, the intelligence to
do it and in some cases, special equipment to do
it. In recent years we have had people that would
make a photo montage, it is very easily done with
things like Photoshop and so on. Especially the cases
that are anonymous, there are a number of them on
the internet. People will look at them, especially
someone who is uneducated in the subject, and say, "wow
look at that." But someone who is educated in
the subject will say, "Well it's useless information." Without
knowing who did it, you can't go and talk to them
and find out what is the story behind the whole thing.
Somebody who is anonymous simply publishes the story, "I
was walking outside and I had my camera and I was
photographing butterflies and this thing flew over
and I took pictures of it", and if you don't
know who the witness is, you can't verify the background
story.
Ken:
Right
I understand.
Dr.
Maccabee::
Anybody
who is going to submit ufo photos had better be prepared
for an FBI level grilling. The closer it gets to
being a real ufo, the more difficult the hoax will
be and the tougher the investigation gets.
UFO
Image On Computer Monitor (Recreation)
Photo Source: MorgueFile
