Une publication populaire est récemment parue dans la presse indiquant à ses lecteurs que les astronautes de Apollo 11 avaient été suivis sur la Lune par une masse d'énergie intelligente
. Dans le même
morceau est également prétendu qu'un contact télépathique avec des ovnis eut lieu au Pentagone dès 1959
. Le n° suivant arborait une
photographie
retouchée de la NASA, avec une flèche pointant vers un objet non-identifié
qui
n'apparait pas dans les clichés originaux de la NASA.
Cette publication est-elle le National Enquirer, ou un chatoyant tabloïd sensationnaliste ? Devinez ! Ce n'était rien d'autre que le Science Digest, qui était encore il y a peu l'une des sources les plus fiables d'information scientifique pour monsieur-tout-le-monde. Les clubs ufologiques les plus fous, les auteurs ufologues les moins scrupuleux, et de nombreuses publications de tabloïds se reposent depuis longtemps sur ce genre de mythe. Mais on ne s'attend absolument pas à voir un magazine respecté comme le Science Digest exploiter de tels éléments sensationnalistes.
James Mullaney, auteur de l'histoire ovni dans le numéro de Juillet de Science Digest, suggère que
les ovnis sont des dispositifs éducatifs menant l'humanité vers le futur
. Ses déclarations selon lesquelles des
ovnis auraient été contactés télépathiquement
au Pentagone ont été largement reprises dans les cercles
ufologiques, malgré le
fait que personne n'ai jamais produit la moindre documentation de quelque sorte que ce soit pour étayer cette
affirmation. Les investigations du sous-comité Ovni en utilisant le FOIA et d'autres
sources suggèrent que l'histoire du contact ovni télépathique
soit
absolument sans aucun fondement. Cependant, ni Mullaney ni les rédacteurs-en-chef du Science Digest
ne semblent avoir essayé une seule fois de vérifier cette affirmation étonnante.
Mullaney répète la blague du U.S. News & World Report du lundi 18, qui promet que le
gouvernement—ou peut-être le Président lui-même—publiera des révélations troublantes
de dossiers de la CIA sur les ovnis avant la fin de l'année. Ce morceau est généralement considéré comme
ayant été déclenché par la demande peu informée de Jody Powell de déclasser l'ensemble des archives de l'USAF sur les ovnis : une action qui a déjà été menée par l'administration Ford. Les journaux américains—et maintenant Science
Digest—ont fait exploser l'incident au-delà de toute mesure.
James Mullaney utilise aussi les pages du Science Digest pour régurgiter les résultats sordides de l'un des canulars spatiaux les plus infâmes de la décennie. Un auteur ufologue japonais nommé Matsumura publia une série de photos de la NASA dans son magazine en 1974, après quoi Robert Barry (a far-out buff whose "Twentieth Century UFO Bureau" is intimately associated with fundamentalist preacher Carl Mclntyre's organization) passed the photos to an editor of the tabloid weekly Modern People in l'année suivante. They created such a sensation that they were reprinted in a special magazine People UFO, edited by Tony Richards, which is still being sold. (NASA is "hiding" UFO photos, claims the ad.) Some of these photos even have graduated to the hardcover UFO market. But the former NASA photos have suffered airbrushing, cropping, and "contrast enhancement" whose result is to produce counterfeit UFOs out of reflections, glares, and other ordinary spaceflight visual effects. It is to one of these Japanese forgeries that Mullaney is alluding when he claims that the Apollo 11 crewmen were followed by "a mass of intelligent energy." The assertion that the astronauts remarked on such an apparition over the radio is an out-and-out fantasy.
The August Science Digest contains a piece by longtime UFO buff Don Berliner
, charging the Air Force with "censorship" and "coverup" of UFO data, even though
all of the Air Force's UFO files have been declassified and made easily available to the public at the National
Archives in Washington. How does this constitute a "coverup"? Most of the names of the UFO witnesses have been removed
from the records, as required by federal law in the recently-passed Privacy Act. (Prior to the passage of this act,
Berliner and many others were granted free access to the files and the names at the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air
Force Base, Alabama.) Yet Berliner—and Science Digest—sneer that this is only "the official explanation," and hint at
motivations far more sinister. The August issue also contains a story on how satellites can be used to track ships
which might otherwise vanish in the dreaded Bermuda Triangle, and it contains a notice of the publication of a new
science book: What Your Aura Tells Me, by alleged psychic and UFO contactee Ray Stanford.
The single photo used with the Berliner article allegedly shows an "unidentified object," which supposedly was photographed by the Apollo 11 astronauts. The original photo, before the artist got to it, does indeed show an odd-shaped object which the astronauts photographed while they were taking tourist photos of the earth, soon after they had separated from their S4B rocket. The obvious fragment of torn insulation is one of hundreds which can be seen on a typical space mission.
But in the photo published in Science Digest, the insulation fragment was airbrushed out. Instead, a nondescript white blob appears near the center of the photo, labeled as an "unidentified object." This object does not appear on the original NASA photograph (see photos on page 43). Where could it have come from?
Science Digest's chief editor, Daniel Button, vehemently insists that he did not add the spurious "unidentified object" to the photograph, although he admits retouching out the insulation fragment, so as to not distract the reader from the supposedly "true" unidentified. The "mystery object" was on the photograph when he obtained it from NASA headquarters in Washington, Button says. Then why do all other copies of the NASA print, except the one at Science Digest, show nothing at all where Button's UFO is supposed to be? Mr. Button has an explanation: because Science Digest has requested the photograph, NASA has begun to "retouch" the photo so that the object no longer appears! "My suspicion is right now that NASA has changed its policy and changed its story and altered its negatives and prints," he stated. If Mr. Button is correct, NASA's massive retouching effort must have been phenomenally effective, affecting even the first transparencies made from the flight films at the photo archives of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which one of us (JEO) has examined and found not to contain Button's UFO. NASA's chief photo archivist in Houston, Richard Underwood, has stated to us in writing that he developed the original negative himself, and that it never has contained any such object. Indeed, NASA's censorship must even extend backwards in time, altering prints which had left their office long before they were panicked by the enquiries of Science Digest.
While the editors of Science Digest are trying to pooh-pooh the significance of this UFO misinformation, their blunders have been enshrined for all time in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, to lay in wait as a snare for future researchers. Perhaps the circulation crunch, which has seen four editors in the past four years desperately trying new promotional gimmicks to keep this Hearst Corporation magazine in the black, has dulled the editors' sense of journalistic responsibility.