Zoological Journalist - Richard Freeman, Considers the Question: Is Bigfoot A Man, Another Ape, An Unknown species of Bear, or All of the Above?

...And we're back!

During my long hiatus from updating this blog, I have become increasingly fascinated by accounts of the Himalayan Yeti and North American Sasquatch, often called Bigfoot because of the large humanlike footprints of these mystery animals or 'wild men' leave in the forests of North America, and the wild, remote mountains of Asia. 

Roger Patterson with Bigfoot print cast from 1967

  Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951

Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Steve Berry in 2016
(Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

Although the name 'Bigfoot' was not coined by newspapers until the 1950s, the phenomenon of an ape-like wild man living in the forests and mountains had been recorded in the storytelling cultures of different Himalayan peoples and Native American tribes for centuries. How could it be possible that two almost identical legends could develop independently from one another, separated by vast oceans in complete isolation, with a traceable lineage that extends over centuries? 

Further, if there are no native ape species in America; how is it possible then that Native Americans seem to have appeared to have known what an ape looked like before contact with European-American settlers? 

At the very least this would suggest that something resembling an ape must have been known to the ancestors of modern Native Americans. Could this be a race memory from the time before the Native Americans arrived on the American continent, presumably from Asia where the Yeti dwells? 

After combing YouTube for every documentary I could find, and joining Kindle Unlimited to read up on what Arthur C. Clarke called in his popular 1970s series Mysterious  World, "The Missing Apemen", I had more questions than answers.

Back in 2009, I had the privilege of asking Zoological Journalist, Richard Freeman, a few questions about his Cryptozoology research into mystery animals not yet accepted to exist by the scientific establishment. This was Freeman's response when I asked him about the Yeti:

The yeti, possibly a surviving form of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki that lived in China and India 500,000 years ago. Hair has been analysed in the UK, USA and China. The results were the same: unknown primate.

The full Q&A text interview can still be found HERE. Over a decade on, I decided to get back in touch with Richard Freeman to see if he had any thoughts on some of the questions I had. It would take a book for anyone to answer all of my questions, so in our email correspondence we focused on the following topics for discussion:

Is Bigfoot an ape more closely related to known apes? Or is it an offshoot of earlier forms of humans that survived into modern times? Is it a bear, an ape, a man, or three different creatures including all of these?

What are the similarities and differences between the footprints found in Asia and North America? 

The Patterson-Gimlin film. What is the best evidence it is real?

The famous Yeti scalp that was was found to be a fake. Is it possible it could be a form of clothing worn by real Yetis? 

Below is Richard Freeman's full, informative and thoughtful reply to my questions.

Richard Freeman

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Orang Pendek drawing from the documentary The X Creatures
(BBC/Discovery, 1998)

There is more than one type of mystery primate around the world. Some of these, like the Orang pendek, seem to be undiscovered species of ape. Others like the Almasty seem to be relic hominins - relations of the ancestors of man. The long and short of it is that we do not know for sure until we get a type specimen. 

We found hair near Orang pendek tracks in Sumatra. These were analyzed by Lars Thomas, an expert in animal hair based at Copenhagen University. He concluded that they were similar too but distinct from the Sumatran orangutan. Lars concluded that there is a large, unknown species of primate on Sumatra. I think this is the fourth extant species of orangutan. 

Startling new evidence for the Yeti has emerged recently. TV vet and naturalist Mark Evens, formally a Yeti skeptic, took an expedition into the mountains of Bhutan to make a documentary called Lost Kingdom of the Yeti. Water was taken from a pool in the mountains where the Yeti had been reported. From this environmental DNA was taken. Known as eDNA for short, this consists of traces of DNA an organism leaves in the environment. It is a relatively new development and could prove an invaluable tool for cryptozoology as the techniques for extracting traces of eDNA improve. Back in the lab the eDNA from the water was tested and several known species were discovered but there was also anomalous DNA. It came from a primate that shared 99% of its DNA with humans. Chimps share 98%. Whatever left that eDNA at the drinking hole was something unknown to science and closely related to man.

Dr Eva Bellmaine and Mark Evans discuss eDNA testing (Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

I contacted Dr Eva Bellmaine, the French geneticist involved in the project. She confirmed the details and said that the samples were being held by a French company called Spygen. I contacted Spygen in order to see if we could conduct further tests. Spygen said that they were not the legal owners of the sample and later claimed it had been destroyed.

Some have suggested that it is nothing more than a bear. Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner claimed in his 2000 book My Search for The Yeti that the creature was nothing more than a brown bear. This is curious as on previous occasions he had claimed to have seen the Yeti and described it as a primate-type animal.

I once interviewed the actor Brian Blessed, a renowned explorer, and mountaineer himself, for a long-defunct and not very good magazine called Quest. Blessed, who is a friend of Messner, said that he had told him of his encounter with a Yeti. Blessed said that Messner had walked around some rocks and came "face to face" with the creature. He said it was not a bear, was 7 feet tall, man-like, and stood erect.

There are other occasions when Messner’s descriptions sound precious little like a bear. Julian Champkin of the Daily Mail wrote on August 16th, 1997, that Messner has:

…encountered the Yeti; and not once, but four times, once close enough to touch it. More importantly, he claims to have photographs of the creature, including a mother Yeti tending her child, and a Yeti skeleton.

 

Needless to say, none of his pictures have been forthcoming. Messner goes on to be quoted in the newspaper article to claim:

“...I searched for a week, 12 hours a day, in an area with no trees,” he says. “I didn't expect to find one so soon. First, we saw a mother with her child. I could only take a photograph from the back. The child had bright red fur, the older animal's fur was black. She was over two meters tall, with dark hair, just like the legend. When they saw us they disappeared.”

Two days later, he claimed to have come across and filmed a sleeping Yeti. The film is just as noticeable as the photos by its absence.

In an article relating to the BBC’s Natural World documentary on the Yeti, Messner describes seeing one from a range of 30 meters in Southern Tibet. The article says Messner is sure it is some kind of primate. He describes it in the article thus:

It was bigger than me, quite hairy and strong, dark brown-black hair falling over his eyes. He stood on two legs and immediately I thought he corresponds to the descriptions I heard from Sherpas and Tibetans.

So why did Messner write a book trying to explain away the Yeti as a bear when this transparently was not the creature he claimed to have seen? Was it because of fear of ridicule? And what became of the photos and film? Was Messner trying to take the focus away from these or make them seem less important by saying the yeti was just a bear? Could this be because the film and photos did not exist?

Sherpas become angry when Westerners say that the Yeti is just a bear, and quite rightly. The animal they pick repeatedly as looking most like the yeti is the gorilla but walking on two legs rather than four. The Yeti has a flat, ape-like face. The Yeti walks almost constantly on two legs. The Yeti can manipulate things with its hands and hence must have opposable thumbs. It is said to sometimes hurl large rocks and swing clubs. Bears have none of the above features. The Yeti is clearly some kind of primate, most likely a great ape. Until he delivers the goods, I’m inclined to dismiss Messner’s claims.

The term ‘Yeti’ is applied to three different creatures. The Dzu-teh is a hulking biped eight to ten feet tall with dark hair. It leaves massive, manlike footprints. 

The Mi-teh is more man-sized and moves both bipedally and on all fours. It has reddish hair and leaves tracks that have a divergent big toe. 

The smallest type, around four feet tall is known as the Teh-lma and has light brown to yellowish hair. The creatures have many regional names and are reported from the Himalayas, Tibet, China, Malaysia, and India.

The Dzu-teh seems identical to the North American Sasquatch. It may have crossed over the land bridge between Asia and North America during the ice age. The prime candidate for this larger kind is a massive ape from the fossil record known as Gigantopithecus blacki. This creature is known only from its massive fossil teeth and jaws. The fossil teeth were first found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935 by Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald. They were being sold as 'dragon's teeth'. Koenigswald recognized them as the molars of a titanic ape. Post-cranial remains have never been found but extrapolating from the size of the teeth and jaws Gigantopithecus may have stood ten feet tall and weighed 1300lb. The flaring of the lower jaws made Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum conclude that the neck extended directly under the creature's head meaning that it walked upright on two legs.

Pitting and wear patterns on the teeth of Gigantopithecus suggest a fibrous diet similar to that of the giant panda. The creature probably fed on bamboo, but fossil seeds found lodged between the teeth prove that it also fed on fruit. Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in China, Vietnam, and India. It was a hugely successful primate species existing for over two million years before becoming extinct 100,000 years ago due to climate change. However, some think that the animal simply retreated into the mountain forests and still exists today.

Another theory holds that the Yeti is some huge relic hominin.

The Yeti is not white. Its hair ranges from reddish to brown to black. In all my years of research, I have only come across two reports that give the Yeti white hair. The confusion comes from a mistranslation of one of the beast's many names, Metoh-kangmi, Sino-Tibetan for 'abominable man of the rocks'. It was mistranslated as 'abominable man of the snows. This is where we get the western term ‘Abominable Snowman’ from. It is also where the false idea of a white, snow-dwelling beast comes from. Above the snowline, there is little for a large primate to eat. The lush forests in the lower valleys make much more sense for a Yeti habitat. The term ‘Yeti’ is Tibetan for 'rock beast'.

The witnesses I spoke to in the Garo Hills in Northern India described the Yeti, known there as 'Mande barung', described it as ten feet tall and looking like a huge, upright gorilla.

The wild men of the former USSR, Mongolia, and Central Asia sound much more man-like than the hulking Yetis of Tibet, the Himalayas, and north India. The Russians took them so seriously that they even had an official Snowman Commission to investigate the creatures. At the time it was thought that they may be a relic form of Neanderthal. Since then, however, we have discovered that Neanderthals looked very much like us. It has been said that if you washed and shaved a Neanderthal and put him in modern clothes, he could walk down the street in any major city without raising anybody's eyebrows. Sure, he may look somewhat ugly by our standards, but he would clearly be human. Neanderthals used fire, made sophisticated tools and clothes, and may have even had a concept of religion and an afterlife. They sometimes buried their dead with grave goods. This is clearly not what we are dealing with here.

It is more likely that the wild men reported today are an offshoot of a much more primitive species of hominin. In recent years both fossil, sub-fossil and genetic evidence has unearthed many new species of human relatives. We know that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. The genomes of all non-African people contain 1.5-4 % Neanderthal DNA.

In March of 2010, a tiny fragment of finger bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. The bone was so well preserved that the whole genome was intact within it. It turned out to be from a new species of archaic human that have since been named the Denisovans. Only fragments of this species have been discovered - the finger bone, a toe bone, and two teeth - so the appearance of the Denisovans is unknown. However, they interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. Between 4 and 6% of the genome of Melanesians (people from New Guinea and the surrounding islands) is inherited from the Denisovans.

Some hominins are suggested not by any fossil remains but by genetic markers on populations of modern man. As well as Denisovan DNA Melanesians appear to have inherited DNA from another hominin currently unknown from the fossil record. Yet another unknown archaic hominin appears to have left genetic material in the populations of sub-Saharan Africans.

In 2003, some sub-fossil remains were found in the Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The remains were of a tiny species of hominin that were named Homo floresiensis. The remains were dated to around 50,000 years ago. The creatures would have stood no more than three feet, seven inches tall. The remains were found with stone tools and weapons as well as evidence of fire making. They seemed to have hunted giant rodents and pygmy elephants that lived on the island.

Homo floresiensis was thought to be a dwarf island form of Homo Erectus, the hominin that was the ancestor of not only modern humans but Neanderthals, Denisovians, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo antecessor. More recent examination of the remains however showed that they were more closely related to Homo habilis a more primitive hominin that has never been recorded outside of Africa and died out some 1,5 million years ago. So, Homo floresiensis not only half a world away from where it should have been but also nearly one and a half million years out of time. It also begs the question “what else is out there?”

TV Naturalist Mark Evens compared with the height of Homo floresiensis (Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast, 2016)

More recently, two, as yet un-named species of hominin dating to only ten thousand years ago (an eye blink in evolutionary terms) have been unearthed at Red Deer Cave in southwest China. They seem also to have affinities to Homo habilis. It seems that Homo habilis may have had its own lineage outside of Africa alongside Homo erectus.

As for the Patterson-Gimlin film, I will share my own thoughts, looking at the film through the eyes of a natural historian.

Firstly, the creature is a female, with visible breasts. If you were going to fake a film of bigfoot by using a tall man in an ape suit, where in the equation would you think of adding large hairy breasts? Such an artifact would make the costume more expensive and harder to create. In known ape species, the females have fairly flat breasts. Human females have rounded breasts as a counterbalance to the large buttocks. Humans are bipeds and walk upright. The gluteal muscles keep the body level when the legs are lifted. Human female pelvic girdles are broad in order to accommodate the birth canal. Hence the buttocks of human females are larger and more rounded than males. Great apes are knuckle walkers and move on all fours, ergo they lack developed buttock muscles and the pendulous breasts that counterbalance them. A hypothetical upright walking female ape would have rounded buttocks and breasts. The creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film possesses both of these. 

Secondly, the creature turns its head sideways and the viewer can clearly see a thick brow ridge and a forehead that slopes away at an angle to make a cone-shaped head somewhat like that of a gorilla. Fossil hominins display this same acutely sloping forehead above a thick brow ridge. The human forehead rises up directly above the brow. If the creature in the film was a man in a suit his human head would not fit into a mask with such a sloping forehead, there simply would not be enough room unless the mask was very oversized like some kind of carnival headpiece which it is clearly not.

Thirdly, the limb and body proportions of the creature are non-human. The torso is longer than a human's and the hip proportionately lower. The arms are 10% longer than a human's. The upper legs are longer than a human’s and the lower part is shorter. Even if you could make such a convincing costume, you could not get a human to fit into it. The arm and leg joints cannot be made to line up. Muscles can clearly be seen moving under the hair. In short, the subject in the film is not a man in a costume. 

 

And then we have the footprints. Jimmy Chillcutt a crime scene investigator and latent fingerprint examiner from the Conroe, Texas Police Department has taken fingerprints of many primates in zoos. He has examined many of the sasquatch print casts in the collection of Jeff Meldrum. He has found dermal ridges that lay parallel to the edge of the feet. 

The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I've ever seen. It certainly wasn't human, and of no known primate that I've examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.

The Yeti scalp from Nepal was an artifact made from the skin of a serow, a type of wild goat. However, it is thought that the monks used it in rituals where they dressed up as the Yeti. 

Khumjung's famous Yeti scalp (The X Creatures, 1998)

There are no reports of yeti wearing clothes. Their thick fur would give them ample protection and they are forest dwellers and not creatures of the eternal snows of the mountain peaks.

The sasquatch has on rare occasions been seen wearing human clothes. It seems they had stolen the clothes and put them on for amusement. Known apes and monkeys have been recorded as doing this. The Russian Almasty is said to sometimes do the same thing.

Big thanks to Richard Freeman for doing this!

Please visit his Amazon Author Page where you can find all of his books.

Visit The Centre for Fortean Zoology to find out more about Richard Freeman's Cryptozoology work: cfz.org.uk

Adam Davies (Monster Quest) answers some questions about the similarities 

between the Himalayan Yeti and North American Bigfoot.

A Room 101 Interview with Andrew May – Author of ‘Conspiracy History’

In his new book Conspiracy History – A History of the World for Conspiracy Theorists, Andrew May shows how conspiracy theories have been used to explain important political events long before the JFK assassination, going back as far as the time of Ancient Egypt. 

  

ROOM 101: In the first chapter you start by defining the term conspiracy theory; why do you think so many people associate the term with the paranormal when conspiracies have been a regular occurrence throughout history? 

  

ANDREW MAY: That’s a good question! I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I guess part of the answer is there’s a big overlap in the readership of the two subjects. People who are interested in conspiracies are also often interested in the paranormal. They’re people who don’t automatically believe what they’re told – people who are always questioning authority. The media slaps the “crackpot” label on both interests, but there’s an important difference. Paranormal phenomena, whether or not they’re real, have a big problem in that they conflict with well-established laws of physics. But conspiracies are completely consistent with the laws of human nature. That’s why the same types of conspiracy recur over and over again throughout history.

   

ROOM 101: It is often said that the JFK assassination was the event that gave birth to the widespread belief in conspiracy theories in the United States, however, it could be argued there is a conspiracy theory in the US constitution. The Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to “keep and bear arms” as a safeguard against the government turning tyrannical. Any thoughts on this? 

   

ANDREW MAY: I’m not sure I would put it quite like that. When the Second Amendment was formulated, the idea of democracy was very new, and people must have seen it as very fragile. Most of the world at that time was controlled by a small number of powerful monarchies and empires. There must have been a real fear that the US could revert to that situation. But your question reminds me of something I was just reading about – Gödel’s Loophole. Kurt Gödel was a 20th-century mathematician, who was famous as a logical thinker – some people say he was the greatest logician in history. At one point he claimed to have discovered a logical flaw in the Constitution that would allow the US to become a tyrannical dictatorship. But no one knows what his argument was – he never wrote it down! 

   

ROOM 101: Why do you think in recent years with films like V For Vendetta the image of Guy Fawkes has become a symbol for many people who believe in conspiracy theories? 

   

ANDREW MAY: I think it largely came about as an accident, although it’s a very neat one. I’m a big fan of Guy Fawkes – the real historical character – so I love the way he’s now seen as a hero instead of a villain. As I say in the book, he may have been the victim of a government conspiracy himself. People think of him as an anarchist, because he tried to blow up Parliament. “The last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions” – I think that’s a great phrase. But really Fawkes wasn’t an anarchist at all – he just wanted a better deal for Catholics at a time of extreme religious intolerance.

   

ROOM 101: In chapter two you write about false flag operations like “Operation Northwoods” the Pentagon’s insane plan to create a pretext for war with Castro by staging attacks on the United States and blaming Cuba. Is it too much of a leap of faith from this to question the official history of the events surrounding the JFK assassination or 9/11 as many conspiracy writers do? 

   

ANDREW MAY: The answer to this one is a definite “yes and no”! Yes, the Operation Northwoods document proves the US is prepared to mount a false flag operation in order to achieve its objectives. But I’m doubtful whether they’re competent enough to pull off a really large-scale operation successfully. As you say, Operation Northwoods itself was a pretty crazy idea. An earlier operation against Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion – which was effectively a false flag operation in its own right – was a complete disaster. A double disaster, in fact – the invasion failed, and the world knew right away that the US was behind it. So, I’m skeptical that they could have pulled off 9/11 all by themselves. On the other hand, I’m sure the Bush administration turned a blind eye to warnings of a big attack because they thought they could use it as an excuse to invade Iraq.

    

ROOM 101: Do you see any parallels between the Lincoln assassination and the JFK assassination a century later? 

   

ANDREW MAY: Well, there are a lot of parallels between the two assassinations, but I’ll focus on aspects that are of particular interest in the context of conspiracy theories. To start with, both assassinations happened in the wake of massive crises – the Civil War in the case of Lincoln, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in Kennedy’s case. Predictably, the official view places the blame on the obvious “enemy” of the day. We’re told that a small group of disenfranchised southern rebels was responsible for the plot against Lincoln, while a pro-Cuban communist sympathizer acted alone against Kennedy. But when you look at the evidence more closely, it makes more sense for the brains behind both attacks to be people who were supposedly on the same side as the victims. They had far more to gain from an assassination than the “enemy” did. 

   

ROOM 101: What do you think of the widespread belief within conspiracy research circles that the Illuminati pre-dates 1776 and continues to exist today? Is it a simple way to explain a complex and rapidly changing world, or is there an element of truth to the idea of a secret group steering, if not controlling exactly, world events behind the political and financial scenes? 

   

ANDREW MAY: The book discusses over 70 historical conspiracies, spread over a period of thousands of years, but they all have one important thing in common. The people behind the conspiracy wanted to see results right away, in their own lifetime. That’s even true of the Bavarian Illuminati, who may have been behind the French Revolution. I find it difficult to believe in long-term conspiracies that require many generations before they come to fruition – that’s simply not the way human nature works. On the other hand, history has a way of repeating itself, so Illuminati-like groups do crop up again and again. Some of them may even adopt the name Illuminati, but I don’t believe they’re doggedly following the same agenda century after century. 

  

ROOM 101: Are there any controversial conspiracy theories that you think could be true? 

   

ANDREW MAY: In a way, the very essence of a good conspiracy theory is that it “could be true” – that’s why they have such appeal. Conspiracy theories usually fit all the known facts just as well as the conventional narrative does. The key question is whether the conspiracy theory is MORE LIKELY than the conventional view. The most obvious case where this is true is the JFK assassination. The idea that it was simply the work of a lone gunman – an attack out of the blue, which took the authorities completely by surprise – is almost impossible to believe. There are at least a dozen conspiracy theories that are more likely than that! 

   

ROOM 101: Thanks for doing the interview. Where can readers buy Conspiracy History and your other books? 

  

ANDREW MAY: The book is published in Britain by Bretwalda Books. The paperback should be available from all good booksellers in the UK, and through online retailers such as Amazon in other countries. There’s also a Kindle version, which may be easier for people outside the UK to get hold of.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Radio Replay - 27th July 2014

 
Could ghosts be 3D psychic recordings? 

 

Are humans the descendants of apes genetically modified by ancient astronauts? 

 

Was the Rendlesham Forest incident really a mind control experiment? 

 

Just some of the topics touched on in this interesting discussion.

Nigel Kneale - Richard's Room 101

Born on the Isle of Man, Nigel Kneale was a writer active in television, film, radio drama, and prose fiction. He wrote professionally for over fifty years and was, in many ways, the father of serious science-fiction drama on television. Kneale’s most famous creation is the legendary Professor Bernard Quatermass, a heroic rocket scientist who saved humanity from a range of very different alien menaces in a trilogy of stories written by the Manx writer in the 1950s. 

   

The trilogy began with The Quatermass Experiment, in which the first-ever manned space rocket returns to Earth with two of the three astronauts on board missing and the third possessed by some kind of hostile alien organism. In time, this organism consumes and changes the last astronaut into something horrific: a creature that threatens to possess and consume all other life on Earth. However, Quatermass confronts the monster and, with a moving speech, reaches what is left of his friend's humanity, persuading him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of mankind.

   

In the next story, Quatermass II, the professor is asked to examine strange meteorite showers falling in rural England. His investigations lead to him discovering a vast conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British Government. Somehow these aliens, who have a group consciousness similar to the Borg in Star Trek, can control the minds of people exposed to an alien parasite concealed in their meteorite-like projectiles. The aliens plan to colonise the Earth, but Quatermass manages to stop them by destroying their asteroid base in orbit, very sadly losing his close friend and colleague Dr. Pugh in the process. 

    

Finally, in the best and last story of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass becomes involved in the discovery of a strange object near some apemen remains that are millions of years old, at an archaeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. The odd object is first thought to be an unexploded World War II bomb, but then more apemen remains are found mysteriously inside the back of the object and later, more disturbingly, the decaying bodies of dead insect-like creatures are found inside the front. The object turns out to be a nuclear-powered spaceship, five million years old, the creatures: Martians and the apemen: their creations … us … the human race.

  

In the story, we learn that when Mars was dying, the ancient Martians had tried to create a colony on Earth by proxy. They altered mankind’s early ancestors, giving them minds and abilities like their own, but with a body adapted to Earth. More worryingly, they also passed on to mankind their genocidal instincts to destroy anyone different from themselves. In effect, making us the Martians now. Fortunately, the Martians died out before completing their plan, and, as humankind bred and further evolved, most outgrew their darker Martian inheritance.

  

Unfortunately, somehow the spaceship reawakens the old Martian instincts, transforming more and more people into genocidal Martians on a race purge, destroying anyone unaffected by the ship’s evil influence. However, Quatermass finds a way to stop the ethnic cleansing before the Martians turn the Earth into a second dead planet. He also tragically loses another friend in doing so.

  

   

  

In each of the three Quatermass stories, Kneale managed to tap into the popular interests and, more importantly, anxieties of the time. In The Quatermass Experiment, he played on the mass interest in the early space race and the new threat of nuclear war. The UK conducted the earliest post-war tests of captured Nazi V-2 rockets in Operation Backfire, less than six months after the war in Europe ended, and the development of a British launch system to carry a nuclear device started in 1950. So there was a real fear that one of these rockets could come falling out of the sky bringing with it destruction, as one does in The Quatermass Experiment. Then, in Quatermass II, before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kneale exploited the popular paranoia about the threat of communist infiltration and subversion of the West. Like nuclear war, this was a real fear at the time. For instance, in 1951, two members of the British establishment, Burgess and Maclean, had made international headlines by very publicly defecting to the Soviet Union. And, finally, with the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 still very much fresh in peoples' minds, Kneale wrote Quatermass and the Pit admittedly as a fable about race hate.

  

Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy clearly had a huge impact that continues to be felt even today, influencing everyone from Chris Carter to Gene Roddenberry. The Quatermass Experiment (1953) was the very first science fiction production to be written especially for an adult television audience and cleared the way for the many others that followed it. Also, the three basic alien invasion storylines were first pioneered on television by Kneale in the Quatermass stories. In The Quatermass Experiment, we go to the aliens and bring them back, in Quatermass II the aliens come to us, and in Quatermass and the Pit, we discover that the aliens were here all along.

  

But it would be a mistake to think that Nigel Kneale only wrote stories involving alien possession and invasion. An excellent example of this is The Abominable Snowman, a 1957 Hammer horror film based on Kneale’s own BBC television play The Creature. Again tapping into popular interest at the time, the film follows the exploits of an English anthropologist with an American expedition as they search the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti, the apemen of Tibet. In the real world, speculation about the existence of an unidentified creature living in the Himalayas had been sparked off in November 1951, when Eric Shipton and Michael Ward of the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found several large footprints as they traversed the Menlung Glacier, and, two years later, Edmund Hillary made a similar discovery during his historic conquest of Mount Everest.

   

In the film, Kneale turns perceptions on their head by suggesting that the so-called Abominable Snowman is not so abominable at all and, perhaps, even a great deal better than mankind who turn out to be the real monsters. The central idea being that the Yeti are our collateral descendants from the apes and are patiently and peacefully waiting for mankind to destroy himself, either quickly through war or slowly through pollution, before descending from the mountains to inherit the Earth. 

  

Another excellent example is The Stone Tape, a Christmas ghost story from 1972 and Kneale’s last major original work for the BBC. Like Quatermass and the Pit before it (which suggested that poltergeist activity could be explained by the psychic abilities left to us by the Martians), The Stone Tape combined science fiction with the supernatural. The television play revolves around a group of scientists who move into a new research facility: an allegedly haunted Victorian mansion. Curious, they investigate the alleged ghost but soon determine that it is really just some kind of recording of a past event somehow stored by stone in one of the rooms (the stone tape of the title). Believing that this discovery may lead to the development of a whole new recording medium, which they were originally brought together to find in the first place, they throw all their knowledge and high-tech equipment into trying to find a means of playing back the stone tape recording at will. However, their investigations only serve to unleash a far older and more malevolent force, with tragic consequences. Of course, The Stone Tape is where “the stone tape theory” familiar to many paranormal researchers today originates. 

   

Kneale also wrote three excellent dystopian texts, a fourth Quatermass story The Quatermass Conclusion, a 1954 television adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, and The Year of the Sex Olympics. It is the last of these that proved to be the most prophetic. Broadcast in 1968 The Year of the Sex Olympics seemed to accurately predict the creation of reality TV in the 1990s.

 

Set “sooner than you think” in the TV play society is divided between “low-drives” that receive no education and “hi-drives” who control the government and media. The low drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornography that the hi-drives believe will pacify them. But after the accidental death of a protester during the Sex Olympics gets a massive audience response, the authorities create a new TV programme, The Live Life Show. In the new show, a family is moved to a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches. 

   

Hopefully, this goes some way to answering the question of who Nigel Kneale was. Of all the great science fiction writers to emerge from these islands since World War II, including the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps only Nigel Kneale comes anywhere close to matching H G. Wells in terms of lasting public impact and sheer brilliance. Both successfully tapped into the mass anxieties of their time and placed them at the centre of their stories, making science fiction accessible to the general public. In short, what Wells did for science fiction in print, Kneale did on television, clearing the way for intelligent science fiction drama on the small screen.

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The Welsh Roswell: Did A UFO Crash In North Wales In 1974? - Richard's Room 101

What has become known in UFO circles as the “Welsh Roswell” or Berwyn Mountain incident splits the UFO research community into two distinct camps, those who believe that an alien spacecraft crashed on the Mountain range and those who believe the seemingly out-of-this-world events can be explained by a combination of natural phenomena and the popularity of shows such as the X-Files which feed the public’s need to believe in the unexplained. What is not in any doubt is that something happened on the Berwyn Mountain, North Wales on the night of January 20, 1974. The events on the mountain range were witnessed by the whole community. Police Constable Gwilym Owen stated, “there was a great roar and a bang. The Sky lit up over the mountains. The colour was yellowish but other people in the valley described seeing blue light.” 

   

Annie Williams who lives in the nearby town of Llandrillo told investigators about what she witnessed that January night. “I saw this bright light hanging in the sky,” she said. 

   

“It had a long fiery tale which seemed to be motionless for several minuets, going dim and then very brilliant, like a dormant fire which keeps coming to life. It would have been like an electric light bulb in shape, except that it seemed to have rough edges. Then fell somewhere behind my bungalow, and the earth shook.”

 

   

Other witnesses also reported the ground shaking as if something had crashed into the side of the mountain. David Hughes of the local village post office at Ysbyty Ifan reported that “The whole house shook violently and suddenly. It began quite suddenly, lasted for a few seconds, then stopped just as suddenly.” 

    

Hundreds of locals fearing a plane had crashed on the mountain phoned the emergency services, and within an hour police were searching the mountain. Five days after these mysterious events, on January 25, 1974, it was reported in the British press that an RAF mountain rescue team had also been dispatched to the area, but allegedly found nothing. One member of the public who heard an explosion and was convinced something had crashed into the mountain was district nurse Pat Evans. Thinking that a plane had crashed after contacting Colwyn Bay police she made her way up the mountain to offer assistance to the survivors while they waited for the emergency services to arrive. Instead of finding a crashed plane, however, she saw a bright ball of red light on the mountainside.

   

“There were no flames shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform; round in shape … it was a flat round”. As she watched, she observed the light change in colour from red to yellow and then white. Smaller “fairy lights” could be seen nearby. Too far away to reach on foot, the nurse turned back to head home, puzzled by what she had seen. 

    

 After the initial frenzy of media interest, the story gradually died down and was almost forgotten about, until the mid-Nineties when the Roswell UFO crash was approaching its 50th anniversary and the alien autopsy hoax was generating new interest in an old topic.

     

Alien bodies and Wreckage 

In 1996 retired police sergeant Tony Dodd published in UFO Magazine an account of a man who claimed he was in the British Army at the time of the Berwyn Mountain crash. According to this anonymous whistleblower in January 1974 his unit “received orders to proceed with speed towards North Wales.” After arriving at Llangollen, North Wales on the evening of January 20, Dodd’s source noticed a great deal of “ground and air” activity in the area. “We, that is myself and four others, were ordered to go to Llandderfel and were under strict orders not to stop for any civilians.” 

    

Upon arriving in the small Welsh village his team was then ordered to load two large oblong boxes into their vehicles and to take them to the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, England. Warned not to look inside, some hours later they arrived at Porton Down and delivered the mysterious cargo. 

      

It is then alleged that the staff at Porton Down opened the boxes still within sight of Dodd’s informant and others. Inside we are told were the remains of two alien beings “five to six feet tall” which had been put inside “decontamination suits.” The Porton Down staff removed the suits, revealing creatures to be “so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin.”

     

The Army source also told Dodd, “Although I did not see a craft at the scene of the recovery, I was informed that a large craft had crashed and was recovered by other military units.” Even more bizarre was this former Army man’s claims that he was told by others in his unit that they had also delivered extraterrestrial beings to Porton Down, but that these creatures were “still alive.” 

    

While the claims of Dodd’s British Army source have never been proven to have really occurred, it is interesting at least that someone that nobody disputes investigated the UFO phenomenon for the British Government, Nick Pope, wrote a science fiction novel, Operation Thunder Child, in which alien creatures are taken for study at Porton Down. “In any contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation the key strategic objective would be to open lines of communication and facilitate peaceful contact. Secondary objectives would include information exchange, with a particular emphasis on science and technology,” Nick Pope told me in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds column in 2009.

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Could There Be An Alien Base Inside The Bermuda Triangle? - Richard's Room 101

The Bermuda Triangle, sometimes known as the “Devil’s Triangle”, is a triangular area of the north-western Atlantic Ocean bounded by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and a point near Melbourne, Florida, where famously numerous ships and aircraft have mysteriously disappeared throughout the ages. Since records began in 1851, it is estimated that an amazing 8,127 people have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle. However, perhaps the most intriguing and famous disappearance of all, occurred just after WWII on December 5, 1945, when an entire squadron of aircraft vanished without a trace and no clue as to what happened to them. Of course, this was the infamous Flight 19, which, more than any other case, brought the triangle into popular consciousness, sparking all kinds of explanations. The strangest and most interesting is the theory that they were abducted by aliens who have a base somewhere in the triangle, interesting because the alien/UFO theory was popularised by Stephen Spielberg in his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

    

While there could be a rational explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19, it is worth remembering that Lt. Charles Taylor was exonerated in 1947 by the Board for Correction of Naval Records, at the request of his mother, in regard to “responsibility for loss of lives and naval aircraft” and that the conclusion of the US Navy’s report was changed to “cause unknown”. 

  

The earliest suggestion that Flight 19 was anything other than just an accident, that this author has seen, came in the form of a “Letter to the editor” from one “Edward R. Walker of Colorado” in the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. The letter shows that almost immediately after the disappearance of Flight 19, people were already beginning to speculate that the incident was more than just the result of pilot error due to poor weather. In his letter Walker writes:

   

“A couple months ago I read another AP dispatch about SIX NAVY PLANES disappearing ALL AT ONE TIME off the coast of Florida. Hundreds of hours were spent searching for a trace of them but none was found. Wish I had cut this out for you also, but you can verify that yourself. This is one of the strangest happenings that I have ever heard of in my lifetime. Even if they had flown over a carpet on anti-aircraft fire one or two would have gotten through. As I remember the article it wasn’t even storming.”

   

In his response to Walker’s letter the editor, Ray Palmer, who went on to become the editor of Fate magazine, not only agreed that something unexplained had happened to Flight 19 but also all but accused the US Navy of a cover-up:

   

 “About those Navy planes, now you’ve got something! As we remember it, search planes also failed to come back. Not a sign, not a message, just instant disappearance. And no fuss about it since, just official forgetfulness. Your EDITOR would like to KNOW what happened, because it wasn’t anything ordinary.”

   

In his book Berlitz also considered more esoteric and paranormal possibilities to explain the disappearances inside the triangle, including chapters on space and time warps, energy devices left behind from an advanced lost civilization, as well as extraterrestrials and even cryptoterrestrials: 

   

“Lacking a logical and readily acceptable explanation, independent researchers concerned with the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have gone even further afield — some to explanations based on exceptions to natural law, others to suggestions of interdimensional changeover through a passageway equivalent to a “hole in the sky” (which aircraft can enter but not leave), others believe the disappearances are engineered by entities from inner or outer space, while still others offer theories offer a theory or combinations of theories that the phenomenon may be essentially caused by still functioning man-made power complexes belonging to a science considerably older than and very different to ours.” 

   

 According to most triangle researchers, Christopher Columbus was probably the first person to document allegedly strange phenomena in the area. On October 11, 1492, the eve of discovering the New World, Columbus reports that he and his crew observed a mysterious light moving strangely up and down in the evening sky, appearing and quickly disappearing several times that night. Columbus wrote in his log:

   

“The land was first seen by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana, although the Admiral at ten o’clock that evening standing on the quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land; calling to Pero Gutierrez, groom of the King’s wardrobe, he told him he saw a light, and bid him look that way, which he did and saw it; he did the same to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, whom the King and Queen had sent with the squadron as comptroller, but he was unable to see it from his situation. The Admiral again perceived it once or twice, appearing like the light of a wax candle moving up and down, which some thought an indication of land. But the Admiral held it for certain that land was near…”

 

   

Whatever Columbus and his crew saw that historic night is probably impossible to know for sure now. In that limited sense, at least, the odd light is a true UFO in that it will probably always be unidentified. Perhaps more interesting, though, are the bizarre compass readings Columbus also recorded in the triangle.

   

Today, the triangle is supposedly one of only two places in the world, the other being the Dragon’s Sea in the Pacific, in which there is an unusual level of magnetic interference that can adversely affect compass readings. Whether paranormal or not, this magnetic interference is definitely interesting. Many have speculated that UFOs may be using some form of electromagnetic propulsion. Perhaps there could be a link of some kind between the magnetic interference, UFO sightings, and the mysterious disappearances in the triangle? 

   

Doctor Who fans will remember “The Sea Devils” a classic 1972 Jon Pertwee story written by Malcolm Hulke, the plot of which is very reminiscent of the triangle mystery. The story involves the Third Doctor and his companion Joe Grant investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships off the English South Coast and the discovery that an ancient race of amphibious reptiles, operating from a deep underwater base is responsible. 

   

Science fiction is filled with interesting storylines that parallel mysteries like the Bermuda Triangle, but is it possible that there really could be another civilization, of any kind, sharing the planet with us, living beneath the waves in seclusion? 

  

Amazingly, it is true that we actually know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of our own oceans. In theory, at least, it is possible that anything could be down there hidden beneath the depths. What's more, making things more interesting, about half of all UFO sightings are said to take place near large bodies of water. 

   

In Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs (1970), renowned zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson hypothesized that an advanced aquatic non-human civilization may have evolved right here on the Earth. This parallel, aquatic civilization could be twice as old as mankind, Sanderson proposes, and may well have developed space flight long before us. Sanderson even goes as far as suggesting that such a civilization could be behind many of the mysterious disappearances in the triangle as well as UFO sightings. Interestingly, more recently Sanderson’s ideas have been echoed somewhat in Mac Tonnies’ last book before his untimely passing in 2009 The Cryptoterrestrials. The year before his death, I had the privilege of interviewing Tonnies about his cryptoterrestrial hypothesis that we are sharing this world with another indigenous intelligent species: 

   

“I’m fascinated by accounts of apparent UFO occupants and have been rethinking who or what we might be dealing with. I’m of the opinion that the extraterrestrial interpretation is incomplete. Could we be interacting with indigenous humanoids? That’s the question I’m posing in the book I’m writing. Time will tell if it.” 

  

While the ETH or extraterrestrial hypothesis has become synonymous with the UFO phenomenon in popular culture, many serious UFO researchers give the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis equal kudos. In 2009 in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds blog, I asked former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope about Doctor Who’s Sea Devils and what he thought about the possibility that we humans are sharing the planet with another intelligent Earth species: “Well, I hope these monsters are brought back at some stage! I reference the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis a fair bit in my first sci-fi novel, Operation Thunder Child. There are plenty of USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) reports and many UFO sightings where an object is seen over water, so who knows? I’m not hugely attracted to the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, but I certainly can’t rule it out. And as the saying goes, we arguably know less about the deep ocean than we do about the Moon or Mars.” 

   

Richard Freeman, who is a researcher for the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ), the only full-time scientific organisation dedicated to the study of unknown species of animals, went also agreed that extraterrestrial hypothesis needed to be considered when I interviewed him in 2009: “I have never bought the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The so-called ‘aliens’ are generally too humanoid looking to have evolved on another biosphere. If ‘alien’ encounters are objective events, and that’s a big if, I think the creatures are coming through time or dimensions rather than from outer space. There seems to be a strange analogue with fairy lore as well.” 

   

Another possibility, of course, could be that the planet has somehow been covertly colonised by an extraterrestrial civilization from another solar system. In Unearthly Disclosure (2000), best-selling author Timothy Good disclosed information given to him by “a senior reporter in Washington, DC,” who, in turn, received it from “a senior US Air Force officer”, about the existence of extraterrestrial bases on the Earth. Good writes: “According to the officer, aliens have been coming to Earth for a very long time. Following the Second World War, they began to establish permanent bases here, in Australia, the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean, the Soviet Union and in the United States.” 

   

If extraterrestrials are really coming to Earth from another solar system, it would probably make sense that they would establish such bases to save them continue making the long voyage back and forth home. Also, the reference to the Caribbean is intriguing because that is where part of the Bermuda Triangle is located. 

   

However, whether from this world or another, where better to build an impenetrable, covert base than beneath the oceans of the world. The Bermuda Triangle, in particular, might also make a good location for such a base because of the volcanic activity there, which could be used to generate geothermal electricity as a power source.

  

The biggest problem with the alien base theory, of course, is like the wreckage of the missing planes and ships, why hasn’t it been found by the many detailed searches inside the triangle? Perhaps instead of a base, the Bermuda Triangle is the location of a “wormhole” to another world. 

   

In his book, another possibility Berlitz considered was that there could be a “vortex” or “portal” somewhere in the triangle which aliens from another planet or dimension are using as a bridge or gateway to Earth. An outrageous theory back in 1974 when The Bermuda Triangle was first published. 

   

Today, however, serious scientists regularly discuss the possibility of other dimensions and “wormholes” in books and on scientific documentaries for TV. In the bestselling book Hyperspace Michio Kaku refers to Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle: 

   

“Ever since Flight 19, a group of U.S. military torpedo bombers, vanished in the Caribbean 30 years ago, mystery writers too have used higher dimensions as a convenient solution to the puzzle of the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil’s Triangle. Some have conjectured that airplanes and ships disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle actually entered some sort of passageway to another world.” 

  

The internationally acclaimed physicist also explains in his book how such a “passageway” could work. Comparing space travellers to flatworms living on an apple, Kaku writes: 

   

“It’s obvious to these worms that their world, which they call Appleworld, is flat and two dimensional, like themselves. One worm, however, named Columbus, is obsessed by the notion that Appleworld is somehow finite and curved in something he calls the third demission. He even invents two new words, up and down, to describe motion in this invisible third dimension … By burrowing into the apple, he can carve a tunnel, creating a convenient shortcut to distant lands. These tunnels, which considerably reduce the time and discomfort of a long journey, he calls wormholes. They demonstrate that the shortest path between two points is not necessary a straight line, as he’s been taught, but a wormhole.” 

   

Perhaps the disappearance of Flight 19 and other planes and ships inside the Bermuda Triangle can be explained away by more mundane explanations, such as intense weather conditions and human error, but until we more fully explore the bottom of the world’s oceans we have no way of knowing for sure what could be down there.

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The Betty Hill Star Map - Richard's Room 101

On the night of 19/20 September 1961, on their way home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from a short break in Canada, something happened to Betty and Barney Hill that began a new controversy in UFO research that continues even today. While modern polls show that as many as four million Americans could believe they might have been abducted by aliens, back in 1966 when the first book detailing the Hill case The Interrupted Journey was first published, the New England couple’s claims of alien contact were almost unheard of. There had been the famous Contactees of the 1950s, men and women who claimed they had been visited by the human-looking occupants of flying saucers with warnings about nuclear war and environmental concerns. But the experiences of the Hills were completely different, reporting beings that were obviously not human, and had no such messages.

   

Instead under hypothesis, the Hills told of how they were kidnapped and experimented on by short humanoid beings aboard a “cigar-shaped” craft that had pursued the couple that September night as they traveled home on Route 3 between Lancaster and Concord. The alien abduction phenomenon was born. 

    

There are two major explanations often given to explain the Hills’ recollections under hypnosis. The first offered by some psychiatrists is that the Hills’ abduction experience was a hallucination brought on by the stress of being an interracial couple during the end of the segregation era in the United States. But this explanation was discounted by Betty Hill, who said the couple’s interracial marriage caused no significant problems with their friends or family. This was echoed by Dr. Simon, who also thought that the Hills’ interracial marriage didn’t influence the couple’s abduction account in any way. 

    

In 1990 Martin Kottmeyer suggested in his article “Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports “ that Barney’s account of his abduction experience under hypnosis might have been influenced by an episode of the popular science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, entitled “The Bellero Shield”, which was broadcast twelve days before Barney’s first hypnotic session. This episode featured an alien being with large wraparound eyes reminiscent of the eyes of the alien beings described by Barney under hypnosis. In his article, Kottmeyer wrote: 

   

 “Wraparound eyes are an extreme rarity in science fiction films. I know of only one instance. They appeared on the alien of an episode of an old TV series The Outer Limits entitled “The Bellero Shield”. A person familiar with Barney’s sketch in “The Interrupted Journey” and the sketch done in collaboration with the artist David Baker will find a “frisson” of “déjà vu” creeping up his spine when seeing this episode. The resemblance is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both aliens. Could it be by chance? Consider this: Barney first described and drew the wraparound eyes during the hypnosis session dated 22 February 1964. “The Bellero Shield” was first broadcast on 10 February 1964. Only twelve days separate the two instances. If the identification is admitted, the commonness of wraparound eyes in the abduction literature falls to cultural forces.” (Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports, Martin S. Kottmeyer)

     

When asked about The Outer Limits TV series Betty claimed to have “never heard of it”. Kottmeyer also pointed out that the medical tests the Hills described were reminiscent of scenes in the 1953 science fiction film, Invaders from Mars. 

   

Clearly, there are superficial similarities between the ‘Bellero alien’ from The Outer Limits episode and the oval-headed beings described by Barney and Betty, but there are significant differences between the two also. The Hill aliens were dressed in black, shiny uniforms and were “somehow not human”. The ‘Bellero alien’ in contrast was dressed in all white, and while humanoid, was very clearly non-human. 

   

While it is possible that some of what the Hills ‘remembered’ under hypnosis could have been influenced by the science fiction films and TV shows of the 1950s and 60s, the best evidence that Betty and Barney Hill didn’t make up or imagine everything they said under hypnosis, is the star map drawn by Betty Hill. 

    

In 1968, Marjorie Fish of Oak Harbor, Ohio read The Interrupted Journey. Fish was an elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer. Intrigued by the “star map”, Fish wondered if it might be “possible to determine which star system the space travelers came from. Assuming that one of the fifteen stars on the map must represent the Earth’s Sun; Fish constructed a three-dimensional model of nearby Sun-like stars using thread and beads, basing stellar distances on those published in the 1969 Gliese Star Catalogue. Studying thousands of vantage points the only one that seemed to match the Hill map was from the viewpoint of the double star system of Zeta Reticuli. 

      

This was significant because the distance information needed to match three stars, forming the distinctive triangle Hill said she remembered, was not generally available until the 1969 Gliese Catalogue came out. Five years after Betty Hill drew the star map. 

     

Fish sent her analysis to Webb and agreeing with her conclusions, Webb sent the map to Terence Dickinson, editor of the popular magazine Astronomy. Dickinson did not endorse Fish and Webb’s conclusions, but for the first time in the journal’s history, Astronomy invited comments and debate on a UFO report, starting with an opening article in the December 1974 issue. For about a year afterward, the opinions page of Astronomy carried arguments for and against Fish’s star map. Notable was an argument made by Carl Sagan and Steven Soter, arguing that the seeming “star map” was little more than a random alignment of chance points. In contrast, those more favorable to the map, such as Dr. David Saunders, a statistician who had been on the Condon UFO study, argued that the unusual alignment of key Sun-like stars in a plane centered around Zeta Reticuli (first described by Fish) was statistically improbable to have happened by chance from a random group of stars in our immediate neighborhood. 

   

Skeptic Robert Sheaffer, in an accompanying article, said that a map devised by Charles W. Atterberg, about the same time as Fish, was an even better match to Hill’s map and made more sense. The base stars, Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani, plus the others were also closer to the sun than the Hill map. Fish counter-argued that the base stars in the Atterberg map were considered much less likely to harbor life than Zeta Reticuli and the map lacked a consistent grouping of sun-like stars along the lined routes. 

    

Another interpretation of the star map was offered in 1993 by two German crop circle enthusiasts, Joachim Koch and Hans-Jürgen Kyborg, who suggested that the map depicted planets in the solar system, not nearby stars. The objects in the map, they said, closely match the positions of the sun, the six inner planets, and several asteroids around 1960. This would parallel other abduction accounts where witnesses claim to be shown such depictions, though admittedly often elaborate and unmistakably our own solar system.

   

Barney Hill died in 1969 and Betty in 2004 and both stuck to their abduction account until the time of their deaths. While it is possible elements of their story were influenced by the Cold War science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s; the star map, if Fish’s interpretation is correct, couldn’t have been based on prior knowledge.

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