Authors: T.R. Dutton
Since then, others have got to know about the AT through Eamonn’s activities. Unbeknown to me, UFO Magazine’s Editor, the late Graham Birdsall, accompanied by a member of a group called Interseti, Michael (Mike) Murray, visited Eamonn’s observatory in Boyle to interview him and to view the facility. They arrived there on July 23rd, 2003, and viewed the observatory the following day. A full report of the interview and photographs were published subsequently in the September 2003 edition of UFO Magazine. Before publication I received a surprise telephone call from Mike Murray to introduce himself and to tell me about Interseti. He told me he’d been over to Ireland to view Eamonn Ansbro’s observatory and whilst there, he had seen a copy of a paper I had produced. He had been very interested by it and he wondered if I would allow him to publish any of my work on the Interseti web site. Well, I was only too pleased to oblige and sent him a copy of an article I had written called,
‘Outrageous Discoveries’
. Very soon that appeared on the web site. Soon afterwards I received another request. He had a copy of a paper by me dealing with UFO Tactics. Of course, I guessed that would be the paper that Jennifer Jarvis was already displaying on her web site, but I thought there’d be no harm done by having another web site displaying it. Mike Murray must have been given a copy of it by the Ansbros, but he would have the same problems of transfer to his web site as Jennifer had had. Some time later that paper also appeared on the Interseti web site, but not in an altogether accurate or complete form. The article I’d supplied was described as the ‘easy’ version and the paper as the ‘difficult’ version of my theory. (Actually, neither of these documents contain full explanations of the AT.)
Following onto the hostile reception his paper to OSETI III had experienced, my advice to Eamonn was that he should concentrate on obtaining incontrovertible physical evidence of the things in the sky for presentation to the scientific community. In my view, only if such observations were eventually to be accepted would it be appropriate to mention that they had been made at times suggested by the AT. Since then I have heard little from the Ansbros, so I presume Eamonn has taken that advice seriously. But there was to be a further favourable ‘spin-off’ from Eamonn’s appearance at that conference in California.
The SETV Interest
Through, I think, Dr. Allen Tough’s presence there, together with several members of an OSETI sub-group promoting the idea of SETV
(Search for ET Vehicles), I began to receive e-mails from two other members of that group. Besides Dr. Tough, one of those people was Scott Stride of the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (
JPL
) and the other was an astrobiologist
,
Dr. David Darling.
Scott Stride
was intrigued by my suggestion that permanent bases had probably been established outside the solar system, in the distant past, by the ET perpetrators of the surveillance activity. In a series of lively e-mail exchanges we examined the practical difficulties that would have been encountered and the problems of communication with those bases from the ET’s home planet. It was a very stimulating and thought-provoking exchange that finally ‘ran out of steam’.
Allen Tough and David Darling were both keen to have copies of my ‘basics’ paper for consideration. After receipt of his copy, Allen Tough’s e-mailed response was extremely enthusiastic, with many congratulations on having been able to create such a paper and wanting to see the work tested in a rigorous scientific way. He felt his contribution would be to create a protocol for those tests, since that was his special application. After several e-mailed exchanges, he began to realise that the task might not lend itself to the normal processes of checking out a theory, not least because, for observational investigations, the major unknown would be where and when the phenomenon might manifest itself. (I suspect that the NIDS researchers probably made the mistake of going to sites where UFO events had happened in the past, but were no longer manifesting. CSETI and Eamonn Ansbro had the right idea.
Go to the places where activity is currently being concentrated.
) The other means of testing the AT would be to create a new database from attested reports and then to process those reports following my methods. Dr. Tough finally conceded that it was not going to be easy to create a really rigorous protocol.
Dr. Darling was also appreciative and intrigued by the paper. After several e-mailed exchanges about it, he offered to install it on his web site. It turned out that he had an established and NASA-acclaimed web site with the latest news on space exploration displayed and an encyclopaedic facility from which could be accessed information on all manner of things, some of them extremely controversial. Before attempting to install that large ‘basics’ paper, he wondered if he could display an article on the topic, written by me. Unfortunately, after looking through the articles I had produced for special purposes over the years, I decided I would have to create a new one. With a change of title, this turned out to be acceptable and is still accessible under the ‘SETV’ heading of the Encyclopaedia. (Dr. Darling qualified in Britain and worked at Jodrell Bank before moving over to America, where he had settled until the time of our initial exchanges. Soon afterwards, he and his wife retired back to England, but his web site activities continue unabated. I am extremely grateful for the support he continues to give to this life-time’s ‘labour of love’.)
Dr. Massimo Teodorani
It would be greatly remiss of me not to mention the interest shown in my work by Italian astrophysicist, Dr. Massimo Teodorani. This link-up originated after the Ansbros had attended a conference held in Norway to consider the anomalous optical phenomena (AOP) that had been monitored at a remote place called Hessdalen, since the 1980s, by Norwegian scientists. Some years before that conference, I had analysed the timings of the events monitored in 1984 and had communicated my findings to the leader of the project
,
Asst. Professor Erling P. Strand
.
Information about the AOP in Norway had caused Massimo Teodorani to lead a team to investigate the activity in 2000 and then to return to Hessdalen with a better-equipped team during 2001. Dr. Teodorani produced a paper reporting the findings of his EMBLA 2001 mission and, without warning, I found myself presented with a copy of that very fascinating report. The lights in the sky (AOP) had been photographed, videoed, and spectroscopically analysed and, from the information gained, the nature of those mysterious lights had been determined. They were, generally, very strange ball-plasmas, which were observed to be inexplicably complex in form and in behaviour. One specimen seemed to be, unmistakably, a structured disc, for which no natural explanation of any kind could be found. By reporting these facts truthfully, Dr. Teodorani subsequently found himself vehemently under attack from another scientist for concluding in that way.
All that was the background to the link-up, by e-mail, with Massimo Teodorani that followed my receipt of his paper. He became conversant with my Hessdalen findings and, during the course of our exchanges, told me of approximately 30 AOP sites scattered in various parts of the world. I asked for those sites to be located for me and then ran the AT programs for each one. I was able to report that at least 10 of those sites had been found to be linked by common AT ground tracks. This impressed Dr. Teodorani and, subsequently, he told me he had referred to my theory in one of his recent papers. Then followed a prolonged gap in communications, when we had no cause to write to each other again; but recently I have received, via the Internet, a copy of a paper he has produced of an analysis of UFO events in the Hudson River Valley
area
of the USA. This work had been facilitated by data provided by Jennifer Jarvis.
Michael Hesemann.
My wife, Marion, and I met Michael Hesemann for the first time, in August, 1991, at an informal meeting of crop circle researchers assembled at the Waggon and Horses Inn, Beckhampton, near Avebury, Wiltshire. As the meeting drew to a close, we were approached by a fairly tall man, with a rounded and cheerful face and well- trimmed dark beard, who introduced himself as Michael Hesemann. He and his cameraman, Peter Heppa, had come over from Germany to collect information about the crop circles. He had been interested by my claimed discovery that they were being produced by an advanced airborne projector, which was beyond human technology and which we would be unable to replicate. He was even more interested when he discovered, before my retirement, I had been a senior projects engineer in the Future Projects Department of British Aerospace, Manchester. He wanted to know everything about the bold claim I was making concerning the creation of genuine crop circles. After a prolonged explanation from me, Hesemann wanted a videoed interview with me there and then. Unfortunately, the time was by then racing on towards midnight and the weary landlord was telling us all to leave. We left the premises, as asked, and wandered across the road to the overspill carpark (where we had parked), still talking with Michael Hesemann. He suggested he could interview me out there in the unlit car park if we used our car headlights to illuminate the scene. He was going to pretend we were in a crop-circle at night. This caused me great amusement because any slight shuffling on the gravel seemed to give the game away. There was also the little problem that it was difficult not to get a small post-box in shot. Just as we had sorted ourselves out at about midnight, drizzle rain began to fall. “No problem”, I said. I had an umbrella in our car. This was taken out and Michael and I stood under the umbrella for the interview. Then Peter, the cameraman, complained that the video recorder was getting wet! On Michael’s suggestion, we two could stand in the rain and Marion could hold the umbrella over Peter and the camera. After trying this out, Michael and I were getting rather wet as the drizzle became more intense and Peter wasn’t at all happy with the pictures he was getting. So, Michael at this point in the proceedings decided he would have to change his plans for the following morning, because he was determined to get my story on tape.
The next morning dawned sunny and bright and Hesemann rang us at our B&B to arrange for us to meet him in Marlborough. He would then drive ahead of us to guide us to a recent pictogram at
Clench Common
, near Marlborough. We all arrived on site at soon after 11 am. for that interview, this time, to be genuinely videoed in a real crop formation. Marion and I remember that interview with some enjoyment and amusement. The sun was by then high in the sky and the shadows on my face were very dark and deep. Just when it seemed we were all lined up for the interview, Peter protested to Michael, “He looks like a skeleton!” So we all waltzed round again until the shot pleased our discerning cameraman. The results of that effort were later incorporated into the Hesemann video,
‘ Das Mysterium der Kornkreise’
(Crop Circle Mysteries) which, on a later occasion, Michael presented to me. (It was an English version with a German title sleeve.) The encounter with Hesemann was also described in his book with the title, ‘
Botschaft aus dem Kosmos’
, a copy of which he presented to me with a glowing inscription when we met again in July 1993. Unfortunately, this was the complete German edition, so I had to content myself by just looking at the photographs and picking up the meaning of the odd word here and there.
On a later occasion, Marion and I sat at a table with Hesemann and his cameraman outside a deserted winery, while I tried to explain the nature of the Astronautical Theory. It was not easy, but I thought every attempt to break through into public consciousness with such potentially important discoveries was to be considered worthwhile. I discovered some years later that Hesemann had tried to summarise all I had told him in one paragraph of his book,
‘UFOs – The Secret History.
’ Unfortunately, he’d got the story wrong and had implied that the words were mine by using inverted commas. When I became aware of this, I registered a complaint with him by telephone, but I don’t think he ever changed anything in subsequent editions.
I think the last time we met up with Michael Hesemann was at the 1993 crop circle conference in Bath, Somerset. He introduced me in such flattering terms to his German companion that I thought he must be joking! (He had a mischievous sense of humour.) However, he assured me later that he had been very serious. Later still, he requested timing graphs for several places in Germany. These I supplied and, after that, I heard nothing more from him. However, I have received two visits from Peter Heppa to provide him with two interviews, on an ‘old friends’ basis, for his own video productions. Peter told us that Michael Hesemann has now returned to his original archaeological studies.
Joyce Murphy.
We first encountered Texan Joyce Murphy and her husband, Pike, during our travels in Wiltshire in the early 1990s. Joyce had formed a tour company for the purpose of taking small groups of Americans to global locations featuring UFO and paranormal activity. With Pike acting as her co-ordinator and driver of the hired mini-bus, on that occasion they had brought a group to England to view the crop formations, meet the people involved in research and to watch the skies over the fields. Their base was the ‘The Merlin’ in Marlborough, a small licensed hotel which had come to be regarded as a kind of ‘Mecca’ for overseas visitors. (Michael Hesemann and Peter had often stayed there).