Author: Nick Redfern

It was billed as an event devoted to ‘extraterrestrial life, space exploration and the future’. But Halifax’s local what’s-on guide, The Coast, wasn’t far wrong when it concisely described the New Frontiers Symposium as a place where “all kinds of crazy shit” would be placed under the microscope for scrutiny.

	It might be beneficial if we did not have a future

While back in Britain in the late summer of 2006, I had been contacted by a Canadian friend, Paul Kimball of Red Star Films, with whom I had worked on a number of television projects. He was planning to hold an autumn conference on all things weird in his hometown of Halifax, and asked if I would be interested in giving a presentation. And, so, on a sunny October afternoon – Friday the 13th, no less – I headed out of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, northbound for the chilly climes of Nova Scotia.

The next morning, I made my way into the auditorium of Saint Mary’s University. An increasingly nervous Paul kept casting an anxious eye on the main door, wondering just how many of the good folk of Halifax would part with their hard-earned dollars to attend the conference.

Well, the crowd certainly wasn’t on a par with that of an English Saturday afternoon on the football terraces, but 50 or so people did make the effort and Paul’s strained visage began to take on a slightly more relaxed look.

Following an introduction from symposium host Veronica Reynolds (of the new movie Trailer-Park Boys), UFO researcher Will Wise was first up. The ‘creator and curator’ of both www.bluebookarchive.org and Rational Geek – a blog devoted to, in his own words, “reason, technology, longevity, science and Natalie Portman” – Wise revealed to the audience the phenomenal task that he had taken on.

Most forteans will be aware of Project Blue Book, the US Air Force’s investigation of UFOs that had its origins in its 1940s incarnations of Projects Sign and Grudge, and which finally expired in 1969 (see FT196:30). Today, the files of Blue Book languish in the vaults of the National Archives, Maryland.

Since accessing the files requires the researcher to either make a personal visit to said archives or pay a hefty fee to purchase reel after reel of microfilmed documents, Wise revealed to the audience how he had decided to circumvent both processes and has, as a result, made things considerably easier for the UFO community. Thus was borne www.bluebookarchive.org, which boasts the largest online collection of scanned, high-resolution Blue Book files, all of which can easily be downloaded by anyone with an Internet connection.

It is an undoubted fact that for many of today’s UFO researchers, who were drawn to the subject by the X-Files mania of the 1990s, the halcyon period from the early 1950s to the late 1960s barely registers. For them, the days of Blue Book, Ruppelt, Keyhoe, and Socorro mean little when placed against the ubiquitous Grays, alien abductions, and the ominous black Flying Triangles of the early 21st century.

And, regardless of opinions on the significance or otherwise of the Blue Book files, Wise – recognising the treasure trove of material just sitting on the shelves of the National Archives – has created an Aladdin’s Cave of material that should be checked out by anyone with an interest in official UFO investigations, and long-forgotten, otherwise largely inaccessible, records.

I was on next, talking about my belief that many of the truly mystifying cryptozoological creatures reported around the world are not flesh-and-blood animals but rather Tulpa-like thought-forms, borne out of the human mind and given a degree of occasional, quasi-existence in our world. Many within the audience were highly receptive to the theory. One earnest soul, however, insisted to me just before lunch that Bigfoot and its ilk just had to be flesh-and-blood entities, and that my theory of conjured-up monsters bordered dangerously upon the satanic. “And what if it does?” I asked. He cast me a wary look and ambled off.

It was then the turn of Mac Tonnies to take the stage. An intense thirty-something seemingly fuelled by vast amounts of Starbucks coffee and not much else, Tonnies is the author of After the Martian Apocalypse – a balanced look at the ‘Face on Mars’ controversy – and the acclaimed www.posthumanblues.blogspot.com. But it was not the ancient past of Mars that he had in his sights today. Rather, it was the future of the human species that he wished to discuss – and it was a lecture not without controversy.

Indeed, he caused both raised eyebrows and uneasy laughter in certain quarters when he said that it might be beneficial if we did not have a future. Extinction might not seem ideal for us, but for the rest of the critters over whom we arrogantly lord it – never mind the planet itself – the annihilation of the human race might not be a bad thing at all.

But if the end is not nigh, said Tonnies, we may instead be faced with a scenario in which the human race soon becomes “radically different, as physical impossibilities are dissolved by exponential advances in cybernetics and genetic engineering”. In a thought-provoking presentation, he described how ‘self-mutation’, the fusion of man and machine, and the possibility of ‘uploading’ our minds to computers, could all become commonplace in the future, as the flesh-and-blood humankind of today finds itself elbowed out of the picture and replaced by a new kind of intelligence. In a delicious irony, we may ultimately become something far more alien that those little grey buggers who seem so obsessed with human DNA and rectal probes.

For me, the most enjoyable and satisfying lecture of the day was that of Greg Bishop, editor of the acclaimed, and now sadly-defunct, Excluded Middle magazine, and author of the 2005 book Project Beta, arguably one of the most important ufological titles of the last 50 years (I don’t make such claims lightly – if you haven’t read it yet, do so, and you’ll see what I mean).

Bishop’s talk was entitled ‘The 1950s Flying Saucer Contactees – A Bunch of Liars or Unrecognised Art Movement?’ “What is the purpose of art?” he asked the audience, before answering: “It is an attempt to communicate one person’s ideas to another, perhaps in ways that are non-verbal. But what if the message you are trying to pass on comes from a non-human source, or at least one that you want people to believe originates from another planet?”

Enter the contactees, such as the three Georges (Adamski, Van Tassel, and Hunt-Williamson), Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry and many others.

Bishop clearly has a great affection for the contactee era, and he told the audience: “While many have dismissed the 1950s UFO contactees as a rabble of hucksters, there is much more to their story, and in many ways it also fits comfortably within the history of non-scheduled religious movements.”

His lecture encompassed the points that: “sometimes sincere work of the contactees, their legacy, the large body of literature and imagery they produced to deliver the message that Space Brothers were here to save us from ourselves”, as well as the possibility that “extra-human intelligences may communicate through the subconscious”. So were they liars or artists? Probably a bit of both.

Following on from Bishop was organiser Paul Kimball himself. In an amusing and highly animated lecture that saw him playing the on-stage role of fighter pilot, radar operator, and numerous other characters, Kimball revealed how he had confidentially polled a “select group of UFO experts” for their ‘Top 10 UFO cases’, several of which he then proceeded to reveal to the audience. These included the famous (albeit controversial) 1978 case of vanishing pilot Frederick Valentich; the 1976 close encounter over Iran in which a pilot of the Iranian Air Force almost engaged a UFO in combat; and a couple of radar-visual cases from the 1950s. Paul makes his position clear: he does not know what UFOs are or aren’t – only that ‘something’ strange is in our skies.

Stanton Friedman took the stage next, with ‘Flying Saucers and Physics’. Castigating the “nasty, noisy negativists” for proclaiming that “the laws of physics would have to be violated” if UFOs really were visiting us, Friedman delved deep into the world of nuclear-powered aircraft and fusion propulsion systems, loudly stating that “technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way”.

Not everyone will agree with Friedman’s views on the possibility that aliens are visiting us from across the galaxies. Few, however, can doubt that he has the ability to explain the ways and means by which such events may be taking place, and in a fashion that makes the physics of it all understandable.

Then, after a two-hour dinner in downtown Halifax, it was time for the keynote speaker, Robert Zimmerman. An award-winning space historian and the author of Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, Zimmerman has an intriguing background. From the mid-1970s until 1996, he worked in the film industry, at which point he began a transition from moviemaker to full-time non-fiction science writer.

Says Zimmerman: “I had decided that instead of making dismal, violent movies that said nothing positive about human nature, I would focus on telling the exciting stories of scientists, engineers, and astronauts in their never-ending efforts to push the limits of human experience, either as researchers trying to solve the mysteries of nature or as explorers trying to push the unknown.”

Although his lecture was not strictly fortean in nature, it nevertheless revealed some strange and eye-opening stories, including that of the Russian cosmonaut who undertook a three-hour spacewalk in a suit held together by duct-tape and thread. And, in the question-and-answer session that followed the conference, he put paid to the tales in circulation that the Russians – in the early days of manned space flight – had lost one or more cosmonauts in space. Yes, there had been some accidents, said Zimmerman; but in these cases the victims were merely dummies designed to simulate human flight. “Were these the same dummies that the Air Force says crashed at Roswell?” piped up someone from the audience.

And then, it was over. The final word goes to Paul Kimball: “Yes, I wish the numbers had been higher, and yes, I’m going to take a not-insubstantial financial loss on the Symposium this year. But that’s only part of the story. From a ‘Do we do it again?’ point of view, I see the attendance as a beginning, not an end. The folks who showed up are something we can build on. And we will. More important, for me at least, is the sense of satisfaction in a job well done – a risk taken, and rewards gained, although perhaps not in the usual ways that people might think of. You have to start somewhere if you’re going to build something. To use a cliché: Rome wasn’t built in a day. So too with the New Frontiers Symposium, which will have a 2007 edition.”