What is a bufora?

I was looking through a catalogue of twentieth-century Norwegian piano music (the way you do) when I came across an interesting short piece by Geirr Tveitt (b. 1909, Bergen; d. 1981) called 'Huldre - bufora'. Well as we all know, and Wikipedia is always ready to remind us, in Scandinavian folklore a huldre is a stunningly beautiful, sometimes naked woman with long hair; though from behind she is hollow like an old tree trunk, and has an animal's tail.

Well, I suppose 'hollow like an old tree trunk' is a pretty accurate description of BUFORA these days, but I couldn't make out why a Norwegian composer would be celebrating a British UFO group. The catalogue helpfully gave an English translation of the title as 'Huldre - transhumans'. This was even more puzzling. I found that American ufologist Mac Tonnies was claiming to be a practitioner of 'transhuman ufology' here, but its relationship to Norwegian piano music seemed marginal. Then I noticed that the word was actually transhumance and all became clear(ish).

Another source told me that transhumance is the "transfer of livestock from one grazing ground to another, as from lowlands to highlands, with the changing of seasons".

So in Norwegian, bufora is the practice of moving cattle around in large numbers. Having learned this I wish I could make some smart, satirical comment, but I just don't seem to be able to.

By the way, if you'd like to hear some of Tveitt's music, and it's really rather lovely, here's a link to buy the CD with the bufora piece on it in an orchestral arrangement.:

MOD closes 'UFO desk'

The closure of the 'UFO desk' at the Ministry of Defence has has already been welcomed by some Serious Ufologists (as they are sometimes referred to). Other Serious Ufologists are less happy about this, but mainly because it leaves them with no point of contact in the MoD to assist them in identifying the causes of some UFO reports.

It has been suggested that the reason for the closure of this small department is to save money, but the real reason is probably because that it has been decided that information received by the UFO desk is of no use for defence or national security purposes. It is less easy for potentially hostile aircraft to sneak through these days, thanks to improvements in radar and other remote sensing devices, such as satellites.

Of course, Really Serious Ufologists are aware that there is no such thing as the 'True UFO', which is 'really' an ET spacecraft, in the opinion of many American Serious Ufologists. There are undoubtedly many different causes of unsolved UFO cases, if only we knew the full and true details, and it is unlikely that any of them are of vital interest to the MoD.

By closing this facility, the MoD can dispose of a possible unnecessary distraction and source of embarrassment, and leave UFO investigation to the ufologists, serious or otherwise. -- John Harney

25 Years Ago - Magonia 17

One feature of the old print version of Magonia that I quite liked doing was the ‘25 Years Ago’ piece. One reason was that it was always useful for filling in the odd half page that invariably seemed to be left over once I’d got everything else laid out for the printers.

The other, rather better, reason was that it gave a glimpse of how attitudes to UFOs and ufology had changed in the intervening quarter-century - or more usually how little had changed. So I thought I’d start giving it a go here on the blog.

For some reason the October 1984 Magonia was a special ETH issue, with contributions from Jenny Randles and Luis Gonzáles, as well as Magonia’s regular mobsters, John Harney and Peter Rogerson.

Jenny’s piece was a careful bet-hedging exercise, concluding: “…are the UFO phenomena alien in origin? If we mean in the traditional sense of gravity-powered spaceships from Alpha Centuri my answer must be no.” But not so fast, chaps: “But I have a growing suspicion that the ETH is a more subtle - or quasi-conscious - sense may yet provide a few surprises.” Well, 25 years on and we’re still waiting!

Peter Rogerson’s article, People of a Different Shape, pointed out the basic contradiction in the ETH argument, in that all attempts to define it are constrained by our own evolution and culture, and that even those things we take as universal constants - physics, chemistry, mathematics - are themselves “products of the way we human beings perceive the universe”.

As Magonia’s professional contrarian, John Harney came up with a Plea for the ETH, even going so far as to look at the question from the ET’s point of view, and raising the possibility that they might be here, but we haven’t noticed them. Rather like Jenny, he concludes: “There is a chance that the revival of the ETH in a more subtle and sophisticated form might possibly yield interesting results”. Hmmm.

Luis Gonzáles’s piece considered something also touched on in John’s article: that ET contact with Earth may have been operating over a timescale of several centuries, imagining a self-sustaining ‘world ship’ ship with a population of up to a million ETs, settled somewhere in the asteroid belt. He makes quite a good case for it, confessing that he almost convinced himself. But in a mood of regret concludes: “We need the ETH. If UFOs were explained and psychologists, sociologists, geophysicists, etc., etc., take over, what are we poor ufologists going to talk about?”

Indeed!

Theatre of Trance

Amy Lehman. Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists in Performance. McFarland and Company, 2009.

There is a growing academic interest in the spiritualist movement and its alleged phenomena as a means of artistic expression, We have reviewed in the past several studies which have reviewed 'spirit photographs' in the context of the art and history of photography and their use of the conventions of photography and related visual arts. Now it is the turn of the performing arts.

Amy Lehman is on the faculty of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of South Carolina, and here presents a study of the mesmeric and spiritualist trances as performances, showing how they often reflected the theatrical conventions of the 19th century, in particular those surrounding the role of women.

Trance allowed a permission (or excuse) for women to escape the passive, demure and subordinate roles that society expected of them. Thus under the influence of mesmerist John Elliotson, the 'normally' quiet and demure Elizabeth O’Keefe becomes a sassy variety artiste and comedienne, whose performance seems to foreshadow some of the saucy music hall acts of the latter part of the century. Under the influence of mesmerism the respectably bourgeois Anna Cora Mowat could let her wild side out by being possessed by her alter ego 'Gypsy'. Gypsy, with its connotations of wildness and liberation from the restraints of corseted respectability, was just one of the marginalised figures that such women personated, others included Katie King, the abused and ruined daughter of a pirate, Blacks and Native Americans (using classical dime western language).

As in today’s Hollywood, the line between show business and politics could be very blurred, for example the much married Cora Lynn Victoria Scott Hatch Tappan Daniels Richmond, who combined trance lectures with radical abolitionism. One could also think of the radical feminist and medium Victoria Claffin Woodhull here. Again possession by spirits could allow women into the forbidden political sphere.

It was not just such public platform performers who found liberation from respectability in mediumistic performances, Laura the very respectable daughter of the very, very respectable Judge Edmonds demonstrated in trance such a knowledge of low bars and the even lower boys who frequented them, that it could only be respectably explained by her being possessed by the spirit of a rough and roguish paper-boy who had been killed a streetcar accident!

As theatre audiences began to demand more realism and ever more dramatic special effects, mediums began to produce their own special effects in the theatre of materialisation. This was a theatre of erotic charge, where the proof of the spiritual nature of characters like Katie King was that they weren't wearing corsets! Lehman reprints the hilarious seduction of the ageing Robert Dale Owen, by a medium whose idea of being a private medium wasn’t all that unadjacent to that of a private dancer.

Dale Owen seems to have been too innocent to know that he was being seduced, but it is not at all obvious that the same can be said of William Crooks and Florence Cook (alias Katie King). It might be though that he was simply blinded by the belief that a mere woman, let alone “an innocent 15 year old schoolgirl” could fool him, the great scientist. As we in Magonia have often commented, it is this attitude which leaves any number of 'investigators' to be fooled by people they regard as their social and intellectual inferiors.

As Amy Lehman points out in her introduction, the theatre itself has origins within shamanism; a point made by Rogan Taylor in The Death and Resurrection Show back in the 1980s. The roots of theatrical roleplay, trance and dissociation may lie in the ability to become totally absorbed in a role. But this 'trance', this absorption surely is not just confined to the performer but also to the audience, who can be swept away by the performance, and who can laugh and cry and love and hate and feel love and grief for characters in what is 'nothing but' a performance'

Normally this absorption ends with the end of the performance, but not always. We know of performers now whose whole life (and even death) is one ceaseless performance. Perhaps there are also audiences who stay in this state of absorption, rather like the people who send flowers to the funerals of dead soap opera characters. -- Peter Rogerson

The Rings of Earth

A stunning piece of imaginative animation, with a hat-tip to Kentaro Mori: http://forgetomori.com/



... and do they really have a building like that in Malmo?

Witchcraft and masculinity

Alison Rowlands. (ed.). Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.-- Reviewed by Peter Rogerson

There are two popular modern conceptions about the witchcraft trials of the early modern period, the idea that they were a sort of gender war launched by patriarchal males against women, and a older idea that they represented the hangover from medieval superstition. This book explicitly challenges the former, and serves to remind us even more clearly how false the latter is.

The problem with the sex war and radical feminist interpretations of witchcraft is that, as Alison Rowlands points out in her introductory paper, about 20-25% of the victims of the witchcraft trials were men, and in some places they were a majority. It is this anomaly of male witches, which a group of scholars meeting at the University of Exeter in April 2006 addressed, and the papers in this collection are based on those given there.

Much of the discussion will be of great interest to academics in the fields of fields of the history of the family, ideas about magic, gender studies, sociology of deviance etc., but perhaps what the lay audience would want is some deep insight into the nature of persecutionary outbreaks.

There are no grand conclusions, no one formula to explain male witches, but there are a number of hints and recurring themes. Some groups of men might, certainly in some places, be vulnerable; shepherds and herdsmen for example, perhaps because they were seen as needing magical knowledge to care for their flocks, or perhaps because they were regarded as outsiders, living for much of the year in the wilderness beyond the village with their animals. Also suspected of possessing magical knowledge were the blacksmiths, masters of the magic of fire and metal, forgers of the sword and the ploughshare. (One might even argue that in a sense they give birth to these implements of life and death and in some way partake of women's charisma of childbirth).

A broader theme is the one which really shows how wrong popular ideas of 'medieval superstition' is that the rise of witchcraft accusations is deeply linked to processes of modernisation, on one hand, the increased sexual puritanism and drive for behavioural and ideological purity in both the Reformed Churches, and the post-Council of Trent Counter Reformation Catholic Church, or the other a move away from ideas of masculinity based on physical violence and honour culture to one based on dignity, self restraint and the rule of law. Those men accused were often those whose sexual promiscuity or aggression meant that they were running foul of this twin processes of modernisation; men who failed to live up to the expectation of being new model fathers of new model families. They represented groups on the margins of society (the rogues, the mob, the abyss, the rough working class, the underclass) that threatened its order. Far from being its antithesis, then perhaps the witchcraft persecutions are the precursors of Newtonian physics, inclosures and rational recreation

If there is an overarching theme it is perhaps this idea of creating the perfect, hermetically sealed, neat and tidy society of the pure and elect, and the witches represent all those things - women, animal keepers, fire masters, the rough, wild and erotic in general - who are seen as far too close to wild nature and its raw forces of creation and destruction. This can be seen very clearly where men are denounced as werewolves, the idea that men can fall out of the human, ordered world and become assimilated into the realm of wild nature in its most ravenous, predatory and destructive form.

Human beings, being material creatures in a material world can, however, can never create the perfect republic of virtue or become idealised New Model (Christian, Soviet, Islamic or whatever) People. The tighter and the more claustrophobic society becomes, the more invidious and ubiquitous its enemies will be seen. The witches are no longer wild women, rough men and semi-outsiders, they are everyone, no-one is safe from suspicion. There are places like Bamberg where the elites turn on themselves and whole streets were decimated or parts of the Rhineland where the witch hunters themselves are denounced not just as witches, but as the secret leaders of the enemy.

It becomes pointless at this point to ask why some are denounced and others are not, for that is a rational question, and the world of reason and of rational reasons is unimaginably far behind. This is the world of the great purge and the great terror. In this extremity people will denounce the friends, family and neighbours because it would require too much thought and too much mental energy to think beyond them to more distant targets.

And the question of who are the witches, who have secretly hated, lusted, envied, dreamed of vengeance or of a better life, quarrelled and raged, is easily answered, it was, is and always will be, all and everyone.

The art and airships of Charles Dellschau

Dennis Crenshaw (In collaboration with P. G. Navarro). The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club and the Airships of the 1800's. Anomalist Books, 2009

When he died at the great age of 92 in 1923, Texas butcher Charles A. Dellschau left behind a secret and a mystery. These were a series of note books, filled with paintings of fantastic flying machines, which only came to light when his descendants had a clearout. By a process of serendipity they came to the attention of graphic designer and ufologist Peter Navarro. By decoding and translating writings in and around the pictures Navarro pieced together a tale of Dellschau's involvement in a secret society of inventors living in gold-rush California. He created a vivid cast of over 60 characters, and a range of Heath-Robinsonish flying machine, the Aeros, with names like Aero Goosey, Aero Babymyn, Aero Honeymoon and so on. They were the work of this secret group The Sonora Aero Club, and its even more shadowy backer the NYMZA.

At the time of the discovery of these notebooks in the late 1960s there was much interest among ufologists in the mystery airships of 1896/7, and the tales of mysterious inventors which surfaced at the time. Ufologists had originally seen the airships as early flying saucers and had assumed that they came from outer space, but as they studied the airship stories in more depth and realised that many claimed contact with very terrestrial pilots, so the idea of secret inventors began to grow on some of them.

Among those who took up the Dellschau story was Jerome Clark, who made it the centrepiece of his chapter on the airship in his and Loren Coleman's The Unidentified. Clark suggested that the mysterious NYMZA were a group of occult initiates building airships at the bidding of 'the others' (whether extaterrestrials or John Keel's ultraterrestrials was never clear). By the time the book was ready for publication, Clark had repudiated this view in favour of para-depth psychological theorising, and tried, without success, to get this chapter recalled.

As shown in this book, attempts to trace the people in the Sonora Aero Club turned out to be fruitless, and Navarro himself, with obvious reluctance, accepted that the story was the work of Dellschau's imagination. However some of the other people involved including author?/editor? Crenshaw start going deep down into crank territory, with ideas of 26 elements lighter than hydrogen (as hydrogen consists of a single proton and electron its obvious that no chemical element can be lighter, the only 'element' which is, is the very short lived positronium, which consists of an electron and positron orbiting each other before they mutually annihilate), and the ubiquitous Viktor Schauberger.

Meanwhile, Dellschau's work has flown the coop from the world of free energy cranks, just as expertly as any airship, into the realms of high art, and the art establishment is now hailing Dellschau as a great American, naive, self taught, outsider and visionary artist, and just single sheets of his notebooks are selling at prices only bankers can afford.

The story of Dellschau has its fascinations and one might hope that some proper art historians have a real go at trying to track down his life and inspiration in more detail. This book really does not do that, in fact it is not really a proper book at all, more like an assemblage of notes and articles, some repeating each other, others contradicting each other. By far the best part are Dellschau's images, and Navarro's own reconstruction of them.

Perhaps sadly, like publisher Dennis Stacy, I do not believe that the Sonora Aero Club ever existed in the world of physics and geography. Writing in Saucer Smear for July 20th 2004 - http://www.martiansgohome.com/smear/v51/ss040720.htm - Stacy describes Dellschau as a visionary or outsider artist, driven by a manic personal vision and concludes: "In short, Dellschau's Sonora Aero Club, rather than a historical record of a secret society and its unsung pioneers of aviation, should properly be seen as a personal flight of fancy, a near obsession with the advances in aviation that were taking place outside his self-cloistered garret as he drew and dreamed."

I think there are some clues to the origin of the Sonora Aero Club: the images remind you of the magical machines from children's stories, and look at those cute names of the aeros. I would hazard the guess that the origin of the Sonora Aero Club lay in bedtime stories he told his children when they were small, these stories of magical machines, secret societies, exotic codes etc. all appeal to children.

In the last twenty years of his life, alone in his attic, he retreats into this world of the imagination, a place when times were good and he was young, and the future belonged to his children (at least one of whom died). There is a clue to his sudden compulsive creativity in his death certificate (found through http://www.familysearch.org/), his cause of death is given as 'arteriosclerosis', this was a term often used up to the 1970s to describe what we now call dementia or Alzheimer's disease, and there are forms of these which are characterised by a new flowering of creativity. This might be linked to the disinhibition which led to the presumably scatological and sexual language which so shocked the lady translator that she refused to translate them, and the strange rambling quality of the whole.

Dellschau was not quite painting for himself alone, but for the "wonder weaver", not as Crenshaw apparently believes, a sort of detective weaving through a maze, but anyone who can use the images and story fragments to weave their own wonder tales with them, Surely this is what Navarro, Crenshaw and others have done, and the stories in this book owe as much to their imagination as to Dellschau's. Whether the audience is ufologist or art appreciator, this broken old man is leading us back into the realms of pure childhood imagination. -- Reviewed by peter Rogerson

Website changes

I've made a change to the layout on the Magonia Archive website. The link on the front page to the book review index has been replaced with an issue-by-issue contents list to each individual issue of MUFOB and Magonia magazines (the pictorial link panel for this should be replaced shortly - now replaced, thanks to Kentaro Mori). The book review index which was at this site is now housed on a separate blog page, as most of you will probably have noticed.

I hope that by producing a contents list it might help readers to more trace articles more easily, and also to place individual articles into some sort of historical context. I have recently put up a number of pieces from the very early days of the Merseyside UFO Bulletin, which do not now refect the views of the writers (including myself) but it is important to place these on record to show how currents of ufological thought have evolved over the decades.

This is an on-going projects, and the list will be added to over time. Some articles listed have not yet been linked from the archive, but I have put the titles on to indicate my plans for future developments.

The Contents List is here:
http://magonia.haaan.com/2009/magonia-review-of-books/

and the Book Review index is here:
mrobindex.blogspot.com/

Liberal Democrat (Out of) Focus

From the Southern Daily Echo, 5th November:

Cllr Adrian Hicks demands answers over extra-terrestrials.

A Hampshire councillor has made a bizarre video claiming that aliens are secretly walking the planet. Adrian Hicks posted the 27-minute speech on the Internet.

He addresses a shady organisation called Majestic which he alleges is made up of scientists, military officers and politicians tasked with making contact with extra terrestrials following a UFO crash in 1947.

The 52-year-old Liberal Democrat is calling for the unelected group, which he says has links to both the UK and US governments, to come clean and tell the public about the existence of aliens. Earlier this year, the Daily Echo reported Cllr Hicks’ claims that he had had a close encounter with an alien in Winchester’s High Street in 2004.

The Winchester city councillor told the Daily Echo that addressing the group was the reason he stood for election.

Cllr Hicks, of Granville Place, Wharf Hill, said: “Majestic’s success in protecting mankind from the shock that we are far from alone in the universe has been completely successful.

“For the past 60 years the subject has been shrouded in secrecy. The magnificent job they have done in keeping from us, the ordinary citizens, that we are not alone, is in itself a truly remarkable achievement.

“An organisation that started small but is now colossal, its dilemma is when to formally announce that extra terrestrial contact has been established.”

Majestic is said to have formed after executive order by former US President Harry Truman in 1947 after a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947.

Conspiracy theorists say it is headed by America’s most senior scientific military experts and has a mandate to make contact with extra terrestrial “visitors”.

In the video, entitled 'Judgement and Democracy', Cllr Hicks speaks with a Lib Dem logo clearly visible on the screen. He claims contact has been established with numerous extra terrestrial visitors and that technology such as lasers, fibre optic silicon chips and nano technology have been “reverse engineered” from crashed alien crafts during the past 50 years.

Cllr Kelsie Learney, Lib Dem group leader, said: “Adrian is an excellent councillor and works really hard for his constituents. His UFO beliefs are his beliefs and have nothing to do with the Liberal Democrats.”

An orthopaedic technician in the A&E department at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital for some 35 years, Cllr Hicks won a place for the Liberal Democrats on the city council in 2007. He is up for re-election in 2011.

The Pelican at Socorro

We learn that Lonnie Zamora [left], the witness of the famous Socorro UFO incident has died. This has provoked a flurry of comments on the American UFO UpDates discussion group, particularly in response to previous allegations by Anthony Bragalia on the UFO Iconoclast(s) blog http://ufocon.blogspot.com/ that the event was a hoax perpetrated by students at New Mexico Tech college. This had led to a great deal of foaming at the mouth by some of the UpDates regulars, particularly because of the allegations' unfortunate coincidence with Zamora's death.

Our friend the Pelican had a few words to say about possible hoaxes at Socorro in his column in Magonia 91, published February 2007:

"One feature which never fails to brighten ufology is the pick-and-mix approach to solving UFO cases. It also never fails to provide good reasons why ufology will never be taken seriously by mainstream scientists and politicians, apart from a few who have evidently gone soft in the head, usually due to the ravages of advancing age. These are the sort of people who take Exopolitics seriously rather than seeing it for what it is - a kind of role-playing fantasy game in which one can score points by winding up "serious ufologists" by cleverly getting them to write lengthy refutations of stories by "whistle-blowers" about alien activities which are too absurd to be worth noting.

"However, back to pick-and-mix. The Pelican takes as his example the notorious Socorro sighting of 24 April 1964 when police officer Lonnie Zamora claimed to have witnessed the brief landing of a strange craft. Although a few UFO believers were of the opinion that Zamora had witnessed a brief visit to Socorro by a pair of ETs, most of them were rather more cautious and preferred to classify the case as unexplained, unless and until some further reliable information was forthcoming. However, some of them couldn't resist accusing Hector Quintanilla, the head of Project Blue Book at the time, of being a "debunker" even though he, too, listed the sighting as unexplained.

"Sceptics were generally less cautious, as some seemed desperate to provide a mundane explanation, even if it had to be force-fitted by the usual process of ignoring awkward details.

"Here The Pelican must remind readers that he is not a sceptic -- at least not in the manner of those for whom scepticism is practised as a kind of secular alternative to religion -- despite the misinformation put about by certain unscrupulous American ufologists.

"The force-fitted explanations range from the almost plausible to the utterly ridiculous, so let us take a brief look at some of them.

"One of the favourite explanations is that Zamora was startled and confused by the unexpected appearance of a hot-air balloon. These balloons, in their present form, were new and quite rare at the time of the sighting. This explanation seemed less likely when all efforts to find any record of such a balloon being in the area at the time failed. Another problem, ignored by many, was that a strong wind was said to have been blowing at the time, which would have made a hot-air balloon unmanageable. There is also the problem of how it could have disappeared over the horizon before anyone else arrived on the scene, despite being unable to travel any faster than the wind.

"Another theory, investigated by Quintanilla, was the possibility that it was the test of a lunar landing vehicle, but he found that these were not operational in April 1964. (1)

"A similar explanation was offered which suggested that it might have been a test of a Lunar Surveyor. Such tests, involving the Surveyor being attached to a helicopter, were actually being carried out on the White Sands Missile Range on 24 April 1964, although apparently not at the time of the sighting. (2) However, it seems unlikely that the tests would take place so near a town and that Zamora would fail to realise that he was looking at a device attached to a helicopter. Again, there is the problem of how the helicopter, encumbered by the Surveyor, would manage to disappear from view before any other witnesses arrived.

"Now we come to the obvious explanation, apparently first seriously suggested by Phil Klass, that it was a hoax. Although sceptics have pointed to inconsistencies in Zamora's account, and later alterations to it, those who interviewed him, including the sceptical Quintanilla, were convinced he was telling what he believed to be the truth. As the mayor of Socorro owned the land on which the incident took place, it was alleged that he conceived the idea of a UFO hoax which would enable him to develop the area as a tourist attraction. So he at least had a possible motive. But it has not been explained what motive Zamora would have had, or why he should be willing to get involved in something which could bring him and the local police force into disrepute.

"A variation on the hoax theme was that Zamora was not a hoaxer but was the victim of a hoax devised by a group of physics students. As no one could identify these people or suggest what they could have rigged up to fool Zamora, then managed to dismantle and remove before anyone else arrived, then this explanation was taken seriously by hardly anyone.

"The Pelican has saved the silliest explanation to the last. "A mirage of Canopus was the object reported by police patrolman Lonnie Zamora over Socorro (New Mexico) in April 1964. This appears to have been caused by an inversion over the Rio Grande valley, south of the town." (3) This is the verdict of Steuart Campbell, who has some pretty weird notions about mirages, ones not shared, needless to say, by experts on atmospheric optical phenomena. According to Campbell, mirages were also the causes of many other well-known UFO incidents, such as Trindade, a "mirage of Jupiter", the Cash-Landrum report, Canopus again. A mirage of Canopus also lured Frederick Valentich to his death in the Bass Strait, Australia. This shows that Saucer Logic can be used by sceptics as well as believers. Or perhaps that should be Inverse Saucer Logic?

"Anyway, so far as the Socorro case is concerned, The Pelican remains perched firmly on the fence."

Notes :
1. Hector J. Quintanilla, 'Project Blue Book's last years', in Hilary Evans and Dennis Stacy (eds), UFOs 1947-1997, John Brown, London, 1997
2. David E. Thomas, 'The Socorro, NM UFO - Explained?' www.nmsr.org/socorro.htm
3. Steuart Campbell, 'Mirages: Can mirages explain UFO reports?' www.astronomycafe.net/weird/lights/mirUFO.htm