Ken:

Let me ask this question, I saw where one photo analyst said he would not even analyze a photo, if it came from a computer monitor. Do you feel the same way about that?

Dr. Maccabee:

Are you talking about Sanyo? (Brand of Monitor, it was a misunderstanding)

Ken:

Any kind.

Dr. Maccabee:

Who?

Ken:

You mean the analyst himself?

Dr. Maccabee:

Jeff Sainio?

Ken:

I don't know his name actually, I think there is a few of them that feel that way actually.

Dr. Maccabee::

I wouldn't be surprised, because it can get very difficult. You look at things like pixilation and if you have brightness contours. Let's say the thing is against a bright sky, then the image has brightness variations. If there are constant brightness contours on the image, you have to look to see if any of them are broken at some area around the ufo, as if the ufo image had been pasted in. There are other things that you can look for.

Ken:

Would you examine a photo if somebody told you it came from a monitor?

Dr. Maccabee:

You mean somebody photographed a monitor?

Ken:

I mean they dumped the photo from their monitor to their computer and took the picture from the monitor and printed it and sent it to you.

Dr. Maccabee:

Well the thing is that they would never say that it was taken from the monitor, it would be stupid. They would say it was taken outdoors.

Ken:

Well this analyst said he could spot them, because there is a certain type of fringe around them.

Dr. Maccabee:

That's true. That fringing occurs around them from the fact that you have a scanning system. Almost everything that has high contrast, a dark thing against a bright background or a bright thing against a dark background, will have some sort of fringing effects that you wouldn't get if it were a normal photograph, like a film camera photograph. Video cameras are notorious for that sort of thing. I was just looking at a video yesterday, that somebody had, where there was a bright object against a background sky. At the left side and the right side of this were dark areas. The scanning goes from left to right or right to left, it doesn't go top to bottom. The left and right side dark areas sort of indicate the camera responding to the sudden jump in brightness from the sky to something very dark or from the sky to something that's very bright. Also the computer processing that makes the images in modern cameras can create funny areas around objects that contrast with the sky brightness, areas that some people think are plasmas or distortions around the object.

Ken:

So you would know right away if somebody tried to give you a photo that was from a computer, that is all I was really asking?

Dr. Maccabee:

If they took a film photograph of a computer screen, aside from the fact that you could try and see the individual pixels, the image on the screen itself would be carrying whatever damning information there was.

Observatory Sending Out A Laser Beam
Photo Source: NASA

Ken:

I read that while you were working for the navy, your research was into lasers. Was that correct"

Dr. Maccabee:

I did some yes.

Ken:

When you analyzed photos, have you ever analyzed any photos that would indicate to you that a ufo had a laser onboard or was using some sort of amplified light in their propulsion system?

Dr. Maccabee:

No. I am aware of two photos that show a beam of some sort. I am not saying it is a laser beam, it probably isn't. In Gulf Breeze, Florida in 1988, or I guess it was 1987-1988, a ufo is in the sky with a beam coming down from it, a blue beam. Blue beams have been reported in ufo sightings for years, many years. As far as I know, this is the only actual photograph of the thing.

UFO Sending Out a Blue Beam in Gulf Breeze, Florida - Very Rare Photo
Photo Source: Bruce Maccabee

Ken:

Timothy Good told me a story about an attack on a Russian radar site, where a ufo shot a beam through a sentry, without hurting him, and blew up the radar site. Have you ever heard of that one?

Dr. Maccabee:

I think I vaguely recall something like that. I don't remember the detail of a beam going through a person and blowing up something on the other side.

Ken:

That is pretty incredible isn't it?

Dr. Maccabee:

Well it certainly wouldn't be a laser beam.

Ken:

For sure. How many photographs do you estimate that you have analyzed over the years?

Dr. Maccabee:

Hundreds, I don't know. I have enough to clog up my mind with the cases that have turned out to be worthy of study, without trying to remember all the ones that weren't. Many, many times, someone will send me something and I will spend 5 or 10 minutes, at the most on it and either its a hung jury or forget it. I've got a number of pictures in my collection that belong to other people. These are not pictures that are mine to do with whatever I want. A lot of news organizations that contact me and say, please send me all the ufo video you got, or something to that effect. I tell them that I have stuff, but my job is not to supply the news media and further more, its not mine anyway and you would have to get permission from whoever is the owner. In a sense I pass the buck that way.

Ken:

I think we all have those collections. When a ufo is photographed over water, does it distort the finer points of the photograph. I mean when the photograph is given an extreme enlargement and the ufo is only a few feet above the waves, does rising vapor effect the clarity of the object?

Dr. Maccabee:

I don't recall seeing a picture where the ufo is only a few feet above the waves, so I don't know. I do recall a photograph taken from some place, I don't recall if it was the Bahamas, West Indies, or some area that I can't remember, since it was years ago that I've seen it. There were some people on a sailing vessel at a dock and they are looking over an expanse of water. They saw an object come up out of the water, sort of tilt back and forth as if it were shaking the water off and then takeoff. One guy had a camera and he was photographing the scenery and he photographed this object and it actually seemed to show a spray of water coming off of it. It was 10, 20 or 30 feet above the ocean at that point, when it happened. I wouldn't say that it caused a distortion. The only other photo that I can think of offhand is one from Gulf Breeze in April 1994, of an object that hovered over the Santa Rosa Sound and appeared to have sucked water up into it. The photo isn’t very clear, because it was taken with a Polaroid Model 600 camera, but it didn't seem to do any strange optical distortion.

UFO Over Water
Photo Source: Bruce Maccabee

Ken:

Could you account for the turbulence that you sometimes see around ufos, what do you think causes that?

Dr. Maccabee:

Well it may depend on how you define turbulence The Trents said that when the thing took off it was at least 1,000 or 2,000 feet away from them. Shortly after it took off to the left, they felt a big blast of wind. I would suggest that the object had pushed the atmosphere somehow or other. A guy name A.C. Urie, whose daytime sighting was in August 1947, reported an object that was flying down the Snake River Canyon. He was inside the Snake River Canyon and it was about 1,200 feet wide and 400 feet deep, where he was. The object was traveling rapidly and it seemed to be following the contours of the bottom of the canyon as it stayed about seventy five feet above the canyon floor. He said the trees seemed to swirl around as the thing passed over, as if it were creating a swirling of the atmosphere. There have been other cases where some atmospheric effects occurred. In some cases people think that some waviness or distortion in the vicinity of the ufo are the result of something happening to the atmosphere. Whatever the ufo uses for propulsion could be pushing the atmosphere as a side effect, not the main effect.

Ken:

Do you think that maybe this might be due to some sort of anti gravity field, instead of pushing the atmosphere, that it might change the gravity around these objects?

Dr. Maccabee:

If it changes the gravity around the object, who knows what is going to happen? If it decreases the gravity, it may make a volume of the air go upwards and if it increases the gravitational effect, then maybe it would make the atmosphere sink downwards. I don't really know. There could be other things that might happen if you did sizably change the gravitational field. Light coming through it might get bent in a strange way. I don't know if anyone has tried to work out what would happen if you had some volume inside the atmosphere where the gravitational field.... I can tell one thing that would happen if you reduced the gravitational field, the coupling between the earth and a particular volume of atmosphere would be less and that volume of atmosphere would weigh less and it would start to rise upwards. It might also get a horizontal displacement, because the earth is rotating at a particular speed. If this element of atmosphere suddenly were lighter, it would get pushed sideways by the heavier, unaffected atmosphere. You might get some lateral distortion, lateral movement as well as some vertical movement.

Ken:

I have been very interested in some of the sighting of ufos in Mexico, over the years and I was told that you analyzed the Mexican ufo sighting of August 6th 1997. That is the one with the video showing a large ufo flying over a building in Mexico. Could you tell us what your findings were?

Dr. Maccabee:

Well again this is on my website, probably I should tell you what my website is, since I mentioned it.

Ken:

Yeah, tell us what it is.

Dr. Maccabee:

www.brumac.8k.com or you can simply Google on my name, Bruce Maccabee. Anyway, the video of August 6th, 1997, from Mexico City, looked very good. This object is at the left hand side of the apartment building and at the very beginning it is rotating and wobbling and so on. It moves to the right of the field of view and appears to go behind the building, then comes up from above the building. It travels along to the right and then appears to go off into the distance. On the building you see a whole bunch of windows. It is a big apartment building. Little wind socks are along the edges of the top of the building. I don't know why, I don't know what good it does them to know the direction of the wind, but that is what these little things are. They become of some interest because only when the camera is focused and not moving can you clearly see these windsocks. Anyway Jeff Sainio, he is now the official MUFON photo analyst. (He had a big series of articles in the MUFON journal that you might have read on photo analysis.) Anyway he and I probably spent hundreds of hours analyzing this thing in various ways to try and understand it. This was an anonymous case. A story came along with it that said the person didn't want to come forward because he was illegally in Mexico, if I recall.

Ken:

That is a twist, isn't it?

Dr. Maccabee:

Yeah. If I recall correctly, he was from Nicaragua or some place in Central America and was illegally in Mexico and he didn't want to be deported. Jaime Maussan showed the video on TV soon after he got it. It was in August 6th supposedly, the date on the video and it wasn't until September that he got a hold of it. It was mailed to him with a letter saying essentially that “we saw this thing, video taped it and we can't come forward.” Two guys are heard talking on the videotape. A letter that came along with the video said they couldn’t come forward because “we know what happens to people who report UFOs,” or something like that. Also, if I recall correctly, “We are illegally in Mexico, have a good job here and don't want to get kicked out,” or words to that effect. Maussan showed the video on TV more than a month after the sighting and someone called him up and said, "I know where that is, I know the building" and sure enough they were able to identify the building that is in the picture and backtrack from that building along the line of sight to the building from where this was taken. It was a building that had security guards around it. I don't recall what companies were in this building, but it was some building housing a number of different corporations. Furthermore there were some ground witnesses to this thing. A few people claimed that they had seen it, but nobody had come forward until after this video was shown. Sainio [Jeff Sainio, MUFON photoanalyst] and I spent a lot of time on it. It had backup witnesses and although it was anonymous, it seemed to be a pretty good video. The more we analyzed it, the more it began to fall apart. Finally we discovered, what I like to call the fingerprints of a hoax. If you go to the website, you can see the magnitude of the effect that I am talking about. The camera was quite steady for most of the film, but not perfectly steady. Sainio began to realize that he could plot the fuzziness of the edges of the ufo verses the fuzziness of the edges of the building. The fuzziness being a result of camera motion, in other words if a camera is jiggling up and down, left and right when you are holding the camera, you are introducing a little bit of blur or fuzziness into the edges of everything. Camera motion fuzziness should produce the same amount of fuzziness in every edge in the picture. What Sainio began to notice was that the fuzziness of the building edge was exceeding the fuzziness of the ufo. That raised a big question, how could that be? Then we found a couple of frames where it was completely obvious. The fuzziness due to camera motion completely blurred out these little windsocks and, of course, the horizontal edges of the building were easy to compare. Vertical motion smears a horizontal edge. The edges of the building in a couple of frames, were totally smeared. Guess what the edges of the ufo were? They were unsmeared. They looked exactly the same in the frames where the building was smeared and where the building was not smeared. At my website I show comparison pictures.

www.brumac.8k.com/MexCityAug697/MexCtySmearAnaysis.html

Ken: That is amazing. Has there been an improvement in the tools to analyze photos since you started and if so, in what way?

Dr. Maccabee:

Each case sort of demands its own type of analysis. There are certain general principles you can use, but what is on the video is going to determine what you do to analyze it. It all comes down to sweat, tears and elbow grease. You need some intelligence to know, when looking at a particular type of video, what is the best thing to do. The bottom line is that the best a video can do is act as a recollection to a witness. If you don't have the witness, you don't have a story. I say to your audience, that if you look at the videos that are out on the internet, they turn up on YouTube everyday I guess nowadays, with no witnesses you may as well just forget it. You are not going to be able to prove a thing.

Photo Of 1870 UFO, Said To Be First UFO Photo
Photo Source: Public Domain

Ken:

Have you ever analyzed or even seen that famous 1870 photo of a cigar shaped ufo, that purports to be the first ufo photo ever taken?

Dr. Maccabee:

I am not familiar with that.

Ken:

We'll skip that then.

Dr. Maccabee:

There were a number of them from the old days I guess. I recall something that was on the surface of Mt. Washington, On the snow pack on Mt. Washington. It raised questions. It looked like a big cigar shaped ufo.

Ken:

I think we may be talking about the same one. This was above a mountain and I think that it was Mt. Washington. As a matter of fact, this sounds crazy, but I saw it on a website on the internet and somebody was trying to prove a case, that it had a swastika on the side of it.

Dr. Maccabee:

What?

Left: Phoenix Lights (Recreation)
Right: Phoenix Triangle
Photo Source:: MorgueFile

Ken:

Yeah, do you believe that? Well anyway, what is your opinion of the Phoenix lights? Do you think that they were just flares, or do you think that they were ufos?

Dr. Maccabee:

Well I think the things that were video taped were flares. The Phoenix case divides into two parts. You have to go back and look at the history of the Phoenix case, to see what happened. We are talking about March 13, 1997. Most people don't realize it, but there were lights in the sky that were video taped before and after that, especially afterwards. Numerous videos were taken afterwards of lights in the sky. I began my own analysis by analyzing sightings that occurred in 1998, a year afterwards. The thing about March 13, 1997, is that the whole thing began with sightings near Prescott, Arizona. I believe it is about 50 miles north, I am not sure, of Phoenix. The National UFO Reporting Center started receiving phone calls from there and they received phone calls working their way down toward Phoenix. The guy, Davenport, who runs the National UFO Reporting Center, said that he could see this object move, from the way the reports were coming in. It was moving south along a big highway. Suddenly he got a lot of phone calls from the Phoenix area itself. People were talking about this big triangular thing passing right over their heads. This is the time of comet Hale-Bopp, what ever it was....

Ken:

The comet that crashed into Jupiter?

Dr. Maccabee:

No that was a different one. That was Levy something...

Ken:

Shoemaker Levy.

Dr. Maccabee:

That's right. So people would be out in the evening looking at this comet. They got more than they had bargained for. A number of witnesses have come forward soon afterwards and in the years since, saying that they saw this thing flying directly over their heads, blocking out the stars. It had a triangular shape and some people thought that it was as big as a city block and so on and it didn't make any noise. They didn't think that it was very high up, but they couldn't really tell. They didn't know how big it was. In any event that is like 8:30 that night. This thing supposedly went southward from Prescott, Arizona, starting at 8:00 o'clock, got over Phoenix about 8:30 and then headed, presumably, toward Tucson. That was the end for most Phoenix people. Somewhere around 8:30 this thing passed over and that was it. I guess they started calling in to the news media about their sightings. About 10:00 o'clock that night, 3 people noticed that there were lights appearing off in the horizon, southwest of Phoenix. They got videos. The next day when the news media was reporting about sightings that occurred at 8:30 the previous night, the people who got videos said “wow, we saw it and we got videos of it.” So immediately the news media jumped on the videos and started showing them the very next day. It became the Phoenix Lights case. Since nobody had video of a dark triangle flying over, the news media had to go with what they had which were videos of lights, so it became the Phoenix Lights case and should have been the Phoenix triangle case. That happened on March 13, there was an initial flurry of activity, what were these lights? The news media people called the Air Force. The Air Force said we don't know, we didn't have anything up in the air. There were all these people saying it was a ufo and ufo investigators started putting together a story that this big triangle had flown over Phoenix at 8:30 and headed down toward Tucson. There were some reports north of the Tucson area so, as they put the story together, they thought it turned around and went back to Phoenix. By 10:00 o'clock it supposedly had gotten back to some place southwest or nearly over Phoenix and then it turned its big lights on and that is when the videotapes were made. That was the initial story put together by the ufo investigators and bought lock stock and barrel, more or less, by the news media. So that connected the 8:30 triangle with the 10:00 PM lights. Perhaps the most famous video shows what I call the Krzysten Arc, in the video obtained by Mike Krzysten, where you see these lights appearing one after the other, starting on the right hand side and moving toward the left and you hear him saying "Hey Sue, you've got to come out here and see this". He was talking to his wife. He had video taped lights like this in the past, but it was always only a couple of them, but this was a spectacular sighting from his point of view.

A year later I was asked to investigate the Phoenix Lights by Lynne Kitei, Dr. Lynne Kitei, who has written a book that came out two years ago on the subject. She was being anonymous at that point. Her video had been shown various times and she had promoted its use. She was known as Doctor X at first, then Doctor Lynne. She didn't want to release her complete name until her book came out. Back in 1998 she contacted me and asked me to look over her videos. She had videos from many nights, not just March 13, because there had been this big controversy. The sightings occurred in 1997 and as I stated there was an early amount of interest in the subject and then it sort of faded out, since the Air Force didn't admit to anything. Nobody could prove anything about it. Then in June, I think it was of 1997, a public information officer at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, found out that the Maryland National Guard was using the Goldwater Training Range, which is west of Tucson, for activities and they had been dropping flares as late as 10:00 o'clock that night. All of a sudden the flare theory flared up. The witnesses said that this could not possibly be, because these things were hovering, they were not falling down, they were hovering steadily, they were very bright, gold and yellow or orange colored or something like that. They didn't have any smoke and you couldn't see any parachutes and they couldn't possibly be flares. Further more, they have never dropped flares over Phoenix. The witnesses believed that these lights were over Phoenix, which is the key point in their own misidentification.

There were videos taken by Mike Krzysten, Lynne Kitei and Chuck Riordan. Riordan was about 35 miles east of Mike Krzysten. When Lynne Kitei said she wanted me to look at this stuff, I said okay, give me the videos, and she did. She got me a big map, a contour map of the area. By good fortune I happened to have other business in Phoenix in May, 1998, so I visited her and she was able to take me to the houses of herself, Krzysten and Riordan. From these visits I got geographical information which I combined with information from the videos in order to determine the directions they were looking when they videotaped. After several weeks of studying the information, I started to plot sighting lines on a map and made a triangulation. I could determine the sighting line from Mike Krzysten's house and I could determine the sighting line from Chuck Riordan's house and these 2 sighting lines crossed, but not over Phoenix. They crossed about 60 to 80 miles south, southwest of Phoenix, which was in the area of the Barry Goldwater training range. Furthermore I could determine that these things had an angular elevation, that is that the lights were at some angular elevation above the horizon. When I projected that out to the distance, it turned out to be 10,000 to 15,000 feet. The Maryland National Guard guys had said they dropped some flares from 10,000 to 15,000 feet, or words to that effect. High altitude flare drops were not usual. More and more of the story has come out just recently in the last year or so. One of the guys that was flying said that,"we had a whole bunch of flares and we had to drop them before we landed. We were using up all our flares. We didn't want to take any home". This was their last day of activity in 1997, the Maryland National Guard was going to leave the next day, so they dropped all their flares.

There were 8 flares per airplane. In the total history of that night there was the appearance of a single light that Mike Krzysten saw as he was looking southward over Phoenix.. This is what caused him to turn his camera on. This single light was sitting there and sitting there. There might have been a couple of other individual lights, but the point is that he had his camera going, when all of a sudden this arc of light started. It's a good thing that he got the beginning of it, because when you watch it, you can see that the arc of light is made up of a total of 8 lights that appear one after the other. Bing, bing, bing, bing , bing, like that. Well it turns out that each plane carried eight flares. What I could imagine is that there were a couple of planes that had one flare apiece and they threw those out, and one of these attracted the attention of Mike Krzysten who then got his camera and started videotaping. The planes would have been traveling eastward from the Goldwater Training area to Tucson and from the viewpoint of someone looking southward from the Phoenix area, that would be going from west to east, from right to left. The lights Krzysten videotaped appear one after the other from right to left to create the arc. I imagined that there was one plane that hadn't used any of its flares and he threw all 8 of them out, one after another, as he flew eastward in a curved path. My point is that there is a lot of consistency. The witnesses still argued that they couldn't be flares, because they didn't move. Well by digitizing the pictures and looking very carefully at the angular elevations of the lights above with fixed lights on the ground, I could prove that they did move. They dropped downwards and moved to the left. The general flow of the atmosphere was from the west toward the east, which since you are looking southward from Phoenix means from right to left. These things were falling downwards and you could even calculate the rate of fall. It turned out to be comparable to what you would expect from a parachute flare. They said the lights lasted a long time. That is a collective statement. If you looked at any one particular light, none of them lasted any more than 5 minutes, which is the maximum burn time of these LUU-2 flares that they dropped, Each of them lasted for less than 5 minutes and most of them lasted for less than 4 minutes.

There are a lot of technical details, but the bottom line is that triangulation put it way south of Phoenix, sort of consistent with the flare theory, so my argument is that the ufo was a dark triangle at 8:30 and at 10 p.m. people saw these flares and they were off on the horizon, the flares were not overhead. People were not looking straight up at the flares the way they were looking straight up at the dark triangle.

Ken:

And the 2 events got mingled.

Dr. Maccabee:

The two events got mingled because they happened the same night. Some people argue that it happened intentionally, because the black triangle flew over and the Air Force immediately sent up planes to introduce misinformation into the sightings.

Ken:

I don't think so.

Dr. Maccabee:

The Maryland National Guard claimed that they had been doing training stuff for a week beforehand or something like that. They said that this was their last day and it had all been planned ahead of time.

Ken:

I'm sure that when someone reports a triangle, not many times have they dropped flares, if you know what I mean?

Dr. Maccabee:

Yeah. I don't think that they ever dropped flares.