Ä Area: Metaphysics/UFOs and correlation ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Msg#: 315 Date: 10-23-96 11:16
From: Julie Presson Read: Yes Replied: No
To: All Mark:
Subj: Korff [1/2]
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
>>> Part 1 of 2...
Sleuth has spent his life exposing various frauds
Meet Kal Korff, computer gumshoe
By Art Levine
SPECIAL TO MSNBC
Like the FBI sleuths in the "X-Files," Kal Korff believes that the truth
is out there. Kal Korff. But, unlike his fictional counterparts, the
34-year-old computer gumshoe who exposed the alien autopsy hoax often
solves mysterious events in ways that displease true believers in
conspiracy theories or alien spacecraft.
I'm not a skeptic or a believer, I'm just a researcher," he says. "I think
something's out there, but we haven't yet found hard scientific evidence for
it."
A UFO researcher since he was a teen-ager - he was writing a column analyzing
UFO photos at 17 - Korff has spent much of his career debunking UFO hoaxes.
"The public has a right to know the truth behind a purported UFO claim," he
says. A former computer systems analyst at the government's Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, Korff has in recent years headed TotalResearch, a small
research organization that does comprehensive computer-based investigations
on life's enduring mysteries.: 'Alien autopsy film' gets dissected Chat with
Kal Korff on the Internet Aliens invade Internet! Have aliens visited Earth?
Roswell: truth or fiction? They range from the JFK assassination to the most
highly touted UFO claims, including Roswell and the enormous number of UFO
photographs and films produced by Swiss UFO cultist, Eduard "Billy" Meier.
"I've always been bothered by man-made mysteries," Korff says. The solutions,
he believes, can be found.
Prior to debunking Roswell and the autopsy, his previous project - the subject
of a recent book, "Spaceships of the Pleiades" - involved going undercover to
expose as a fraud the Meier photographs and film, which prior to Korff's work
was considered "the hands-down greatest UFO case of all time."
Meier was widely portrayed as a humble Swiss farmer who, starting in the
mid-1970s, had more than 700 direct contacts with aliens from the Pleiades
star system. Meier took more than 1,000 photos and numerous 8 mm films. Silly
as it may seem, the messages from his "alien contacts" and his photos were
studied around the world, and the pictures were verified as authentic by
expert image analysts.
But Korff, who first critiqued the photos when he was 18 years old, decided
after reading a mainstream book that hailed Meier as genuine to settle the
issue once and for all.
"Whenever I study anything, I want the truth, no matter how it comes out,"
he says. He found the truth by going undercover in Meier's UFO cult in 1991,
pretending, with a new beard and an assumed name, to be a Meier loyalist
seeking evidence that could help discredit Meier's leading critic ...
Kal Korff. In doing so, he found inescapable proof of Meier's fakery.
While visiting Meier's farm, he bought hundreds of photos from devotees and
obtained a pristine set of first-generation prints of Meier's most famous
and bizarre photos from a disgruntled ex-follower. These pictures and films
seemed to show flying saucers circling a tree, flying above a lake, hovering
above trees and landing in a forest - and dinosaurs and cavemen Meier snapped
when "time-traveling" in a space-ship.
When Korff analyzed the UFO pictures with sophisticated computer programs
and careful analysis of Meier's camera and photo specs, he discovered how
they were faked. The UFOs, he showed, were models in crisp focus close to
the camera while the outdoor scenery was usually out of focus. These UFOs
were often made of dinner plates and soup bowls, suspended by strings from
helium balloons, and, in some cases, the so-called aliens and UFOs were just
photographed from TV shows - the prints even showed the curve of the monitor.
"The photos were easy to fake," he says. Meier still has a few champions left,
including Michael Hesseman, the autopsy film devotee.
Korff's research into this case left him with a strong message for fellow
UFO seekers: "Don't be so gullible! Whenever anyone makes such sweeping
claims, feel free to demand hard, objective proof."
Korff showed the same zeal for evidence when he decided as a teen-ager to
>>> Continued to next message...
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Ä Area: Metaphysics/UFOs and correlation ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Msg#: 316 Date: 10-23-96 11:16
From: Julie Presson Read: Yes Replied: No
To: All Mark:
Subj: Korff [2/2]
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
>>> Part 2 of 2...
begin studying the JFK assassination. Over the years, he's scanned into
computers virtually every major film, photo and document on the assassination,
and in 1993, on the assassination's 30th anniversary, issued a report
summarizing his findings: Oswald acted alone. In part, his research offered
fresh analysis, he says, because he re-analyzed the Zapruder film and found
that the time frame for the shooting was longer than anyone - from the Warren
Commission to the harshest skeptics - had ever noticed, allowing time for
three shots. His work landed him on the "Larry King Show," and he plans to
issue a book on the topic, "Final Verdict - JFK's Murder SOLVED!" All the
22 gigabytes of data he's digitized will ultimately be released to the public
in condensed form.
In the meantime, he's also been checking out the Loch Ness Monster for the
British Natural History Museum. So far, the photo he's been shown has been
exposed as, yes, a hoax. (
c) 1996 MSNBC
... "META_UFO to Bridge the Gap on Fidonet"...
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Ä Area: Metaphysics/UFOs and correlation ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Msg#: 317 Date: 10-23-96 11:30
From: Julie Presson Read: Yes Replied: No
To: All Mark:
Subj: Roswell [1/2]
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
>>> Part 1 of 2...
The Roswell incident: truth or fiction?
By Art Levine
SPECIAL TO MSNBC
UFO researcher Kal Korff is taking dead aim at the most fervently accepted
UFO incident ever in his new book "The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't
Want You to Know," to be published in May by Prometheus Books.
The purported UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in July 1947, is the Holy Grail
of UFO events, routinely cited as having more than 350 "witnesses" to either
the spacecraft, strange debris or alien bodies. Building on the work of other
researchers, Korff adds damning new details that undermine the claims of
virtually every major witness featured in numerous books and TV specials on
the alleged event.
In truth, there are only a relative handful of essential witnesses to the
Roswell incident, and many of them aren't very believable. "Roswell is
another frustrating UFO case without hard evidence," Korff concludes.
The Roswell incident has been enshrined in the public mind as a government
cover-up - a "cosmic Watergate" - through hot-selling books and a TV
docudrama on Showtime. Although versions vary, here are some highlights of
the event, as UFO advocates tell it:
In early July 1947, air intelligence officer Jesse Marcel and other officers
were sent from the Roswell Army Air Field to look at suspected flying saucer
debris on a sheep ranch 75 miles northwest of Roswell. The material Marcel
saw - including plastic beams with hieroglyphics and a strangely strong foil -
was not of this planet, he believed. The day after the alleged crash, other
witnesses, including intelligence operative Frank Kaufman (also known as
Steve McKenzie) and James Ragsdale, saw five tiny bodies and a spaceship at
the UFO crash site, located in a rocky area 35 miles north of town. An Army
nurse named Naomi Selff later told mortician Glenn Dennis about the dead
aliens she saw and drew their big-eyed, bulb-headed pictures on a prescription
pad. She was transferred a few days later and disappeared. The bodies and
debris were shipped to major military air fields in Fort Worth, Texas, and
elsewhere, and by July 8 (this is confirmed) a Roswell press officer issued
a press release announcing the discovery of a flying disc. Later that day,
the brigadier general at the Fort Worth base declared that the flying saucer
debris actually came from a smashed weather balloon he craftily displayed for
reporters.
This nefarious cover-up would last for decades. Protestors march in front of
the General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C., in 1995 to raise awareness
about an examination being conducted by the GAO for documents about an alleged
UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., in 1947.
Korff and others have effectively demolished much of this myth by challenging
the credibility of witnesses. The case's central figure, the late Marcel, for
instance, had claimed to interviewers he'd flown 468 hours of combat and was
awarded five medals for shooting enemy aircraft, but his military records
show he wasn't a pilot. "If someone lies about their background, why should
we believe him?" Korff asks.
And the strange debris Marcel and others found apparently wasn't so
otherworldly after all: the top-secret Project Mogul spy balloons that were
in a train 600 feet in length used a strong foil backed by plastic for their
radar reflectors - which were also reinforced with a tape made with odd
flowerlike designs resembling hieroglyphics. (Curiously, Marcel even posed
for pictures with the balloon debris, but insisted they were from a UFO.)
Korff agrees with a 1994 Air Force report that concluded that the Roswell
debris came from a crashed Mogul package.
But he goes further, by pointing to flaws in other witnesses' statements.
James Ragsdale has even been disavowed by the author who first cited him -
Kevin Randle - because he later changed his story to put the crash in a
completely different, wooded area, where he also said he came close enough
to the bodies to remove eight gold space helmets. As for Kaufman, the Zelig
of Roswell, although he left the military in 1945, he claims he was sent to
a radar base 100 miles away to track the UFO, and was then dispatched on a
special intelligence mission to monitor the spacecraft and corpses. There's
no record of any nurse named Naomi working at Roswell in the late 1940s,
and no nurses were transferred in 1947.
The crumbling of the Roswell story even has some of its staunchest advocates
>>> Continued to next message...
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Ä Area: Metaphysics/UFOs and correlation ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Msg#: 318 Date: 10-23-96 11:30
From: Julie Presson Read: Yes Replied: No
To: All Mark:
Subj: Roswell [2/2]
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
>>> Part 2 of 2...
worried. Kevin Randle, who has spent eight years researching Roswell and
co-wrote the book, "UFO Crash at Roswell," that was the basis of the Showtime
movie, says, "If I had to rely on what's in the public record, I'd throw up.
The evidence is not strong and it's not compelling." 'If Frank Kaufman goes
down, we're in deep trouble.'
- KEVIN RANDLE Co-author, "UFO Crash at Roswell He now rests his faith on a
UFO crash largely on the uncorroborated statements he was told by two
now-dead Roswell military officers - and on unauthenticated documents about
the UFO crash in the hands of the controversial Frank Kaufman. "If Kaufman
goes down, we're in deep trouble," Randle says.
In Korff's new book, that's what happens. "Kaufman's lying," Korff says,
noting that there's little evidence to support the varying claims he told
different researchers, including his claim to have attended a UFO crisis
meeting with Charles Lindbergh on the Roswell base. (Kaufman now denies
he ever said that.) Kaufman, now 80, says of his critics, "Who are they to
question me? It's up to them to disprove me."
To Korff, the Roswell mess is sadly reminiscent of earlier research
embarrassments. "It's another self-inflicted wound by Ufologists," he notes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a pro-UFO slant on Roswell, check www.roswell.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(c) 1996 MSNBC
... "META_UFO to Bridge the Gap on Fidonet"...
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