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This later became The British UFO Research Organisation which still exists, albeit having been through several traumatic incarnations.
Our film - with Tim Good as advisor - looked at Gulf Breeze; Rendlesham;Russian Military reports; and included a gallery of well-known UFO videos and stills. It reached a late-night 7 million audience in Britain and vindicated my original pleas to the powers-that-be.
My UFO dossier- past and present
Our first LUFORO COVER - 1961 - breaking UFO ground! In those days there was the excellent Flying Saucer Review, which was about the only serious British UFO magazine. Those involved in the first LUFORO group were Nigel Stephenson, (the driving force and Chairman) ; Suzanne Stebbing; Roy Stemman; G Berrisford; Lionel Beer (who remains with BUFORA) ; Graham Knewstub - our President; Lionel Cramp, aircraft designer was vice-president and Geoffrey Doel -later joined as vice-chairman; and myself as editor. Those were the heady days when we hosted Adamski's visit to London with author Desmond Leslie and funds for running the group were virtually nil.
The first BUFORA cover . In January 1964 LUFORO amalgamated with a new group - the British UFO Research Association. A national organisation was needed to deal with the thousands of reports flooding in not only to ourselves, but to the papers, the police, radio and the Ministry of Defence. The LUFORO core group remained, but Charles Strickland became editor while John Cleary Baker evaluated the reports.
Member societies making up BUFORA were: Anglo-Polish UFO Research Club; British Flying Saucer Bureau; Cambridge University Group for the Investigation of UFOs; Cheltenham Flying Saucer Group; Croydon UFO Research and Investigation society; Direct Investigation Group on Aerial Phenomena; Isle of Wight UFO UFO Investigation Society; Merseyside UFO Research Group; Oxford University UFOs Study Group; Scottish UFO Research Society; Tyneside UFO Society.
Then there were overseas links with publishers like Ray Palmer; NICAP and many others.
In the sixties things were pretty unsophisticated - especially the collecting and evaluating of witness reports. We had no psychological profiles to go on, no satellite tracking systems and of course no camcorders. We DID have skywatches. I remember one evening about 100 of us were on Cley Hill, near Warminster in Wiltshire. I was there with a BBC film crew, and we were attempting to make sense of the event. Arnold West, BUFORA's treasurer, was peering through a perspex dome on his specially converted campervan, and Research Officer, Edgar Hatvany was racing around with walkie talkies. There were some strange pulsing lights just above the horizon which suddenly appeared to great cheers. But the many investigators were so intent on using their walkie talkies that they missed it. It was decided that they were flares put up by a distant military facility. But Warminster itself became known for the Great Hat Fake, when Arthur Shuttlewood, editor of the local paper was unfortunately duped by a prankster who claimed his flying Fedora was in fact an extra-terrestrial craft. Despite this, there were many authenticated reports and the area became a focus for UFO buffs and ley-line addicts.
Today things are quite different. Even the MOD in the guise of Nick Pope seems to be on the band-wagon ( the UFO business can be very lucrative) and if reports are to be believed, grey aliens are busily abducting the most innocent of people. Why then have I never seen one? Britain's AREA 51 is claimed to have been the USAF base at Rendlesham in Suffolk and then BonnyBridge in Scotland claimed fame with reports of the ubiquitous black triangle, seen earlier in Belgium (and chased by a couple of jet fighters with radar contact).
The most convincing evidence for me came when we interviewed military officials in Russia - the gun camera shots (albeit of lights) together with pilot evidence seems quite incontrovertible. Then there was Gulf Breeze. Umm. The polaroid prints seemed too good to be true, and one left feeling that the locals had been exploited by a local, and clever practical joker. Flares sent up on kites was a strong possibility. However, Bruce Maccabee remains convinced that many Gulf Breeze sightings were genuine.
In the thirty or so years I've been involved (on and off) with the UFO controversy, we don't seem to have really got to the crunch of the matter. I've actually seen two UFOs back in the sixties, with about thirty others in a London park, but nix since then. There seem to be fashions - in the fifties we had sci-fi movies where rockets were yet to come, and UFOs took on the expected streamlined gleaming aluminum shapes we'd expect. There were gentle blond-haired visitors from Venus with warnings about atom bombs -eating muffins at Adamski's Palomar café and nicely timed with the Manhattan Project; then we had folksy visitations from green hobgoblins, giants, Springheel Jacks, miniature figures in silver diving suits (the Masse encounter in France) . Now we have sinister Greys which have have captured the imagination, as well as physically capturing people.
The Greys synchronise well with the coming of genetic engineering - black-eyed figures in misty operating rooms bending over hapless abductees and doing some extremely unpleasant things to their lower regions. Abductees report seeing stacks of liquid filled tubes lining the walls of these craft with, inside each, a foetus- the result of ET genetics and human DNA.
Mind you - we musn't forget that abductees go way back to the mid-fifties, when various individuals reported radiation burns, bodily pinholes and even acts of rampant sex with UFO inmates. One, a Joe Simonton, even offered his visitors pancakes (or was it the other way around). Another was filed for divorce when taken on a pleasure trip round the galaxy by a Miss Aura Raines clad in diaphanous underwear. None of them were bug-eyed, green or grey. Just your average humanoid ET.
So does one believe in UFOs? That's the wrong question - they're not, or shouldn't be part of a belief system. There's clearly something going on and even though they still refuse to land on the White House lawn (a pretty sensible thing really, as they'd be blown to pieces) - there are simply to many reports to ignore the phenomenon. Whether the military know something we don't and whether they really do have aliens working at Area 51 perhaps we'll never really know. But not long ago I heard the most convincing story from the daughter of a CIA operative who was working at an American military base. I can't reveal all the details to prevent the guy being harmed, but with no warning whatever, the base was suddenly blacked out, and the several hundred or so staff were amazed to see a massive black disc hovering over their airfield. It remained for ten minutes, then shot off and upwards. All power returned, and the base eventually got back to normal. The witness, now in his late seventies, had never revealed this to anyone until a year ago when he told his daughter, believing he hadn't long to go in this life. So what to make of that?
Maybe there are many different kinds of phenomena here. Hard, nuts and bolts craft entering our time and space from other galaxies. Maybe they're US on some kind of leisure time travel kick.
Could Jacques Vallee's theories about psychic time intersections and the faery figures of folklore be a possibility? Could the grey alien abductions be some kind of race memory - contradicting Darwinist theories - that we're the product of genetic interference dating back many thousands of years?
There is of course, so much we don't know. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, but it is also dangerous, for we are about to enter a time of great changes, where the UFO phenomon will undoubtedly play its part. I myself will predict that come the end of this year, there will be an official announcement preparing the way for a recognition of the reality of the UFO in whatever guise.
Thanks for bearing with me! Lawrence Moore.
