Still Out There

Thought for the day:  Do the aliens on the moon pull down their pants and 'earth' their friends for fun?  [Matthew Heines]

[morguefile]

As promised, today we're gonna continue on with last week's post Outta This World  about hoaxes involving aliens and flying saucers. (Or are they hoaxes...?)

I've been convinced for a long time that the flying saucers are real and interplantary. In other words, we are being watched by beings from outer space. [Albert Chop, Deputy Director of NASA]

We all know that UFOs are real. All we need to ask is where do they come from. [astronaut Edgar Mitchell, 1971]

We all know that UFOs are real. Too many good men have seen them that don't have hallucinations. [Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker]

Until they come to see us from their planet, I wait patiently. I hear them saying: 'Don't call us, we'll call you.'  [Marlene Dietrich, 1962]

So where were we?  Ah yes, we just talked about the alleged landing of an alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Let's fast-forward to 1993, shall we?

That's the year Ray Santelli claimed to have original footage of an alien autopsy performed on one of the aliens who crash-landed in Roswell. Said he bought it from a retired military cameraman for a hundred thousand dollars. He then actioned off the rights to broadcast it. Highest bidder? FOX, which then showed it on TV in 1995. Eleven years later, it was shown to be a hoax. Although Santelli admitted that some scenes were shot in a London flat, using a body created by a sculptor, he also claimed he only did that because of the degradation of the original film. He said it was of such poor quality, he reproduced it. Still, he swore the original film was the real deal. Didn't stop him from producing a comedy film called Alien Autopsy, though.

"alien" on display in the GBI museum 

Now let's go back to 1953, when some Georgia police officers stopped to investigate a pickup truck sitting in the middle of the road. The truck's headlights were shining on what appeared to be an alien lying in the road... a  2 1/2 foot tall hairless humanoid with dark round eyes. The men claimed when they drove over the top of the hill, they saw a UFO and three aliens in the road. Although they tried to avoid them, they hit one of them. The other two took off in the spaceship, leaving a big scorch mark on the road in the process. The true story? Twenty-eight year old Ed Watters made a ten-dollar bet with his pals that he could get his name in the newspaper within the week. To do so, he purchased a capuchin monkey from the pet store... for fifty bucks. He killed that poor monkey, removed its hair with a depilatory, and chopped off its tail. The scorches in the road? The guys did it with a blow torch. It didn't take long for the authorities to identify the alien as a monkey, and Watters was charged with cruelty to animals, a charge he beat on a technicality. So he was fined forty bucks for highway obstruction. Yeah, all three of the guys got their names in the newspaper, and Watters won his ten bucks, but it cost him ninety. And he got so tired of being called the monkey man, he had to leave town. The monkey, however, stayed. It's still on display at the GBI museum. The cruel prank came to be known as the Great Monkey Hoax.

[morguefile]

Okay, you're gonna have to work with me here. Imagine you see some mysterious red lights in that picture of the night sky, okay...?

On several occasions in 2009, mysterious red lights were seen in the sky above Morristown, New Jersey. Turned out to be five helium balloons attached to flares. Perpetrators Joe Rudy and Chris Russo confessed to launching the hoax to prove how unreliable eye-witness accounts of UFOs are. They may have proven their point, as police stations were flooded with telephone calls about the strange lights. However, the police were not amused, and the two pranksters were each slapped with $250 fines and fifty hours of community service.

[wikipedia]

There have been all kinds of hoaxes over the years, but many people believe Betty and Barney Hill were actually abducted by aliens in 1961. Evidently, the state of New Hampshire believes them. The state erected this plaque on the 50th anniversary of the event.

This is one of my favorite stories. It occurred in Bad Axe, Michigan in 1958, when motorists started reporting sightings of a little blue man. A glowing little blue man. Reports got more and more fantastic, ranging from claims that he was ten feet tall (not so little!) to him running faster than any human being to him coming out of nowhere and then suddenly disappearing. None of which, of course, was true. Once again, the hoax was pulled by a trio of men. The costume consisted of long underwear, gloves, combat boots, a sheet with eyeholes, and a football helmet with flashing lights... all spray-painted with glow-in-the-dark blue paint. Of the conspirators, Jerry Sprague, Don Weiss, and LeRoy Schultz, only one actually wore the bizarre outfit. Sprague, and that's because the long johns belonged to him... and he was the only one who could fit into them. None of these guys were charged with anything; they were simply released from custody with a warning. (But that's quite a mug shot, isn't it?)

The reason I like this last story, and the reason I saved it for last, is so I could end with a video of a 1958 song. Called... what else? The Little Blue Man. (Believe it or not, Smarticus used to sing the chorus of this song to me...)

The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble.  [Ellen DeGeneres]

How would it be if we discovered that aliens only stopped by earth to let their kids take a leak?  [Jay Leno]

                               Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.