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From: Jean van Gemert <jeanvg@dds.nl> Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 13:51:34 +0200 (MET DST) Fwd Date: Sat, 04 Oct 1997 08:36:53 -0400 Subject: Maccabee on Becker - 3 Comment 1: it would appear from this overall history that someone got the blueprint paper from Ed's trash and made a model. Then said person managed to enter Ed's old house while it was on sale and often open for inspection and (a) crimp the pipe and cut off the valve and (b) place the model near the small water pipe in the attic where it would be found by someone feeling along the pipe to find a valve. This hoax probably would have "worked" if Ed had thrown away an old blueprint from a house that he had built before late 1987. Too bad for the hoaxer, he got a blueprint made several years AFTER the UFO photos were taken. Comment 2: Craig Myers told me he was "canvassing the neighborhood" to find out if there were other witnesses. However, I learned from others that he visited only one house, Menzer's. He also told me and others that he had not been given any secret information that led him to ask about a model. When challenged to take a lie detector test on whether or not he had prior knowledge of a model, he declined. Ed, on the other hand, took a carefully administered voice stress test - a type of "lie detector" - which indicated that he had not made the model.) **************************************** Barbara Continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
*********************** COMMENT: It is true that only "Bill" and "Jane" sent to the newspaper photos that show the identical UFO. As for no one ever seeing the UFO at the time Ed photographed it, this is untrue. Frances saw it several times and their children saw it at the time Ed videotaped it (December, 1987) and his daughter was present when Ed got the photos of Frances and the blue beam (Feb. 1988). Of more importance regarding other witnesses is a sighting that occured on January 8, 1990. This sighting was not reported in TGBS (it was too late for inclusion), but is reported in my 1991 MUFON Symposium paper, GULF BREEZE WITHOUT ED (GBWE) and in UARHTP. This sighting began when Ed and Frances were walking in th evening and saw a UFO silhouetted against the uniform cloud cover (backlit by a bright moon). They ran back to their house to get a camera. Ed called several other people before returning the to street to take pictures. During the sighting half a dozen other people arrived, saw the UFO and several took their own photos. This sighting is described in detail starting on page 163 of UARHTP. ***************************** She Continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
**************************** COMMENT: The exact times of Ed's photos and the Somerby's sighting cannot be determined to the minute. Ed's photos could have been taken after sunset. According to Duane Cook, Dori Somerby and Charlie Somerby, when they first saw the photos while they were in the Sentinel newspaper office (the day before publication), recognized the object immediately. This was BEFORE the UFO investigators knew about the photos. ************************** She continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
****************************************
COMMENT:
Hank Boland (a.k.a. "Patrick Hanks") went public with his
testimony in the early summer of 1990. He denied ever being
involved with UFO photo hoaxing.
Becker refers to "seances" held at Ed' house. These were games
intended to give the kids a thrill but were not real seances in which
anyone seriously expected ghosts, spirits or whatever to appear.
However, the use of the term "seance" has become important for the
debunkers of Ed's sightings because their use of the term seems to
give a "justification" for their reference to the photo with the unusual
faint blobby "images" as a "ghost photo."
************************************************************************
She continues:
[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted
by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit
by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment.
See Here
for more information.]*************** COMMENT: The Journal story was wrong here, as in several other places. Both Ed and Frances searched. The local investigators did not have enough time to check and recheck the story before it was published and Ed tried to leave Frances out of involvement as much as he could. The story is presented correctly in A History of the Gulf Breeze Sightings (AHGBS). *************** She continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
***************************** COMMMENT: Is this a potential "error in the story" or is this Ed honestly reporting a typically stupid, illogical action which sometimes people do "in the heat of the moment?" **********************************[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
**************************************** COMMENT: the investigators slightly mixed up the beginning of the first event with the beginning of the second. Ed did not try to sneak out of bed the second time. *****************************************[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
********************************************* COMMENT: Again, the investigators writing for the Journal mixed up the beginning of the first sighting with the beginning of the second. **************************************************[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
****************************************** COMMENT: again, the investigators got the story wrong. Had Becker used AHGBS as her reference she would have read: "He got up and walked to the glass French door at the end of the bedroom... He pulled the venetian blind...expecting to see the UFO once again hovering over the field." ************************[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
****************************** COMMENT: again the investigators got the story slightly wrong. In AHGBS I wrote "When Ed screamed his wife sat up in bed and she saw the creature, too." *******************************[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
********************************* COMMENT: When Ed first told this story to the investigators he left Frances out of it as much as possible to minimize the possible impact on her if the press or general public found out who Ed really was. I did not mention that Frances helped Ed when I wrote AHGBS, because Ed wanted me to leave her part of the "leg pulling" out of the story. ************************************** She continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
****************************** COMMENT: The answer to the above question is somewhat of a "no brainer." The MUFON team (primarily Donald Ware, USAF, ret., and Charles Flannigan, a real estate agent) conducted the investigation part time. They were not "professional" investigators. They based their report primarily on a single taped interview with Ed in early January. The fact is that they didn't get the story completely correct. My version in AHGBS was better because I did a more detailed interview and I had their interview as a starting point. However, my interview was done in the middle of February, too late to impact the MUFON Journal articles. (Besides, they didn't submit their manuscript to me for review, so I didn't know what they wrote until I saw the published version.) AHGBS is not a perfect history either. I didn't put all the details into AHGBS that Ed put into TGBS because (a) I didn't know everything and (b) many things I knew had to be left out to save space (the article was very long). There was just too much to investigate, not only Ed's sightings but others, with the result that many things were unmentioned in AHGBS. *************************************** She continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
**************************** COMMENT: Here Barbara is making the cardinal mistake of assuming that that newspaper or journal reports are perfectly accurate. It should be emphasized that Ed and Frances took several months to write the book and they wrote it with some painstaking care, whereas the journal articles were written in a couple of weeks in order quickly get the basic story out to the interested public. *************************************** She continues:[The quoted text that was once at this location was deleted by the webmaster on 10/9/97 in response to the threat of lawsuit by Barbara Becker, who claims copyright infringment. See Here for more information.]
************************************
COMMENT: The preceding "it would seem..." statement by Becker
is pure conjecture on her part. She refers to the 8 hypnosis
sessions carried out by Dr. Dan Overlade in the summer of 1988.
Overlade was convinced by the results of several standard
psychological tests he administered that Ed was basically a normal
person, i.e., sane, and certainly not a sociopath. Overlade was
convinced that Ed really was in a state of hypnosis as he recounted
earlier events (abductions). Of course, at the time of this writing
in 1990 the content of these sessions was only partially known to a
few people. (They were published in Abductions In Gulf Breeze in
1994.) So, would it be "easy" for Ed to make up a story under
hypnosis? That is a matter for conjecture with no evidence other
than the UFO related information itself.
Becker seems to think it would "easy" for Ed to spin out a yarn
while Duane Cook was riding in the truck at the same time. This is
"easy for her to say," because she hasn't seen the videotape of that
trip. However, the fact is that it would be very DIFFICULT for an
actor (Ed) to create this story while reacting to someone (Duane
Cook) who was not aware of the "script."
Finally, a storyteller is no more able to pass lie detector tests
than anyone else, unless the story teller happens to have a sociopathic
personality (and can't seem to distinguish reality from fantasy). As
Dr. Overlade and also Harvey McLaughlin (who administered 2 lie
detector/polygraph tests to Ed) stated emphatically to me, Ed does
not have a sociopathic personality. (Neither I nor any of the other
investigators have found Ed "carrying on" the way a sociopath
would, confusing demonstrable fact with fiction and amplifying on
stories, etc.)
*********************************
__________________________________________________________________________
Science, Logic, and the UFO Debate:
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