UFO UpDates Mailing List
From: Jerry Washington <skyeking@aye.net>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 1997 13:55:07 -0400
Fwd Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 01:48:45 -0400
Subject: Re: Shramek's Pranking Past
>Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 14:47:51 +0100
>To: UFO UpDates <updates@enigma.globalserve.net>
>From: Joe McNally <fortean3@easynet.co.uk
>Subject: Chuck Shramek's pranking past?
>This appears in issue 117 of UK science fiction writer Dave
>Langford's fanzine, "Ansible" (available on the web at
>http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible
>- imagine "Saucer Smear" for SF fans and you'd be surprisingly
>close to the truth). While I'd find it hard to sympathise with
>some of the views expressed here, it still makes interesting
>reading.
>CULT CONNECTIONS. _Gregory Frost_ writes: `The recent mass
>suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, has induced me (at the
>urging of Michael Swanwick) to write you regarding my odd
>connection to an event that seems to have prompted that act --
>namely the discovery of the "companion" purportedly following the
>comet Hale-Bopp on its flyby. _[See A116.]_ As is well-known by
>now, the cult was convinced (as are many UFO zipheads who weigh
>in on the internet) that the companion, discovered by amateur
>astronomer Charles Shramek, is an alien mothership, either
>preparing a mass invasion in the style of _Independence Day_, or
>a nice ship waiting to sweep up the souls of the 39 cult members.
[snip]
You know Greg, your comments on Shramek are truly hilarious and
astute. It's hard to believe how gullible some of the schmucks in
this world can be, especially the adherents of the Church of ETs.
Shramek's stunts certainly do serve to point this out. There
truly is a sucker born every minute.
I, myself, used to stick my guitar amp in the window of my house
in Aiken, South Carolina and crank up my Mini-Moog synthesizer,
blasting "outer space" like noises throughout the neighborhood,
prompting worried neighbors to come outside with flashlights
blazing, searching for the source of the "alien" noises. And yes,
before long, the legend of the "secret saucer invasion" was born.
That doesn't negate for a moment, however, the acute reality of
my close encounter with a fully luminous object the size of a
mobile home on a dark, deserted road just west of the Y-12
nuclear installation in my home town of Oak Ridge, TN. A city
which has a long history of UFO surveillance dating back to the
1950s, much like Aiken and its Savannah River Nuclear Plant.
You see Greg, these sightings do actually occur, your rapier wit
notwithstanding.
Reams of documentation recently declassified, confirm that no
less a personage than J. Edgar Hoover was quite concerned with
the presence of these objects in the restricted airspace over Oak
Ridge. Indeed, according to these documents, fighter jets were
scrambled on a number of occasions from McGee Tyson airport in
Knoxville, to intercept these anomalous aircraft as they hovered
over the K-25 Uranium Enrichment facility in the "Atomic City."
Another document attests to Hoover's concern over a "visitation"
by a saucer-shaped craft of unknown origin to the Ag-Farm, the
reserve where Nuclear Medicines, etc., were tested on animals. In
a letter from Hoover to the head of AEC (the Atomic Energy
Commission) Security, he tells of the object, which was first
spotted as it hovered a few feet above the ground, as having to
lift itself up and over some barbed-wire fencing.
A sighting, by the way, that occurred during the day.
Obviously, Hoover had other concerns besides whether or not he
had a run in his stockings.
I'm a die-hard cynic, too, Greg. I'm sure I'd be dismissing the
whole notion of UFOs were it not for my own CE; a frightening
confrontation between an object hovering twenty above the road
and two teenage boys who were neither "believers," or adherents
of some goofy, new-age, avatar. We were, very simply, witnesses
to a phenomenon that continues to defy easy explanations, despite
your laudable efforts to the contrary.
Jerry Washington
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