MSNBC

June 29 —

A panel of nine scientists is calling for further research into physical evidence associated with unidentified flying objects. The report has caused a sensation in the UFO community, but more skeptical scientists

including a member of the panel

caution that there’s less than meets the eye.

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Test your knowledge of UFO lore

Press release on UFO report, published by The Society for Scientific Exploration

NBC’s George Lewis reports on the panel’s review of UFO evidence.

THE 50-PAGE report is the end product of a months-long review funded by philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller. The review focused on physical phenomena — such as photographs, radar readings and biological effects of UFO incidents — rather than subjective claims about alien encounters or abductions.

The panel said a few cases may have involved "rare but significant phenomena such as electrical activity, but there was no convincing evidence pointing to unknown physical processes or to the involvement of extraterrestrial intelligence."

Nevertheless, panel members said scientists might "learn something new" by studying UFO phenomena. They said France’s Service for the Investigation of Re-entry Phenomena, known by the French acronym SEPRA, may provide a model for future research.

The U.S. government’s last comprehensive study of UFO phenomena was the Colorado Project, conducted for the Air Force under the direction of Edward Condon, a University of Colorado physics professor. That 1968 study concluded that further study of UFOs "probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." But the panel said the chances of a scientific advance were better today than they were in the 1960s, due to improvements in technical capabilities.

"The best chance of getting meaningful answers would be to focus on the cases with physical evidence" rather than merely eyewitness reports, said the panel’s director, Stanford physicist Peter Sturrock.

LOOKING AT EVIDENCE

Among the evidence reviewed during the panel’s deliberations was a 1981 photograph taken by a family on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The picture shows a silvery oval-shaped object that has a glow and brightness consistent with a reflecting metal object. The panel called the case "intriguing" but said the evidence could not sway a neutral scientist.

The panel reviewed another sighting, near Paris in January 1994. An airline captain, co-pilot and flight attendant all reported seeing an object resembling a gigantic disk with slightly fuzzy edges. Swiss radar detected the object for 50 seconds. The panel said radar reports require very specialized analysis, and researchers would need access to raw radar data with military approval for further study.

The group also reviewed reports of unusual damage to vegetation, ground traces of soil disturbance and physiological effects on purported witnesses, such as marks and burns on the skin, memory loss and double vision. The scientists recommended testing for radiation exposure, as well as rapid treatment and reporting of such injuries.

In general, the report bemoaned the lack of scientific rigor in the evidence provided by UFO investigators.

"I was really disappointed at the quality of the evidence that they presented," said University of Arizona planetary scientist H.J. Melosh, a member of the panel who characterized himself as a skeptic. "It was a real letdown."

For example, he said UFO investigators appeared not to have fully explored the possibility that the disk seen on the Vancouver Island photograph may have been due to a film defect. "They just haven’t got a clue as to how to think critically and make the kind of critical assessments that are required to get the support of the scientific community," he said.

However, he said the incidents involving possible radiation effects should be investigated for any evidence of military involvement. And he favored some form of small-scale UFO research group modeled after SEPRA.

Melosh said he had a hand in writing the report’s final draft to moderate its tone.

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"We were under heavy pressure to support the UFO community’s agenda," he said, "but I think we resisted it."

Other members of the panel included Von Eshleman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford; Thomas Holzer, a physicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research; University of Arizona planetary scientist Randy Jokipii; Francois Louange, managing director of Fleximage; James Papike, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico; Guenther Reitz of the German Aerospace Center; University of Virginia astronomer Charles Tolbert; and Bernard Veyret of the Bioelectromagnetics Laboratory at the University of Bordeaux.

PRO AND CON

The report was published Monday in the summer issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. The journal’s editor-in-chief, astrophysicist Bernhard Haisch, said he hoped that the report would bring more scientific respectability and more funding for the study of unidentified flying objects.

"Just as I get money from NASA to study X-ray emissions from Proxima Centauri, there ought to be a mechanism to apply for some interesting studies, to carry out some experiments," said Haisch, who also works as a staff physicist for Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

However, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, doubted that the report would make a difference.

"The fact that a press release is issued by a professor who works at a particular place does not make it credible or mainstream," he said. "There are plenty of professors who believe all kinds of nutty things."

Matthew Nisbet, public relations director for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, said there was "nothing new" in the report — and he contested the idea that more institutional resources should be put toward investigating UFO sightings.

"Though they merit investigation, there are other things that we need to be spending our money on right now," he said.

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The folly and faith of Heaven’s Gate

One year later,

legacy is caught

in legal, spiritual

limbo

This was the scene on March 27, 1997: San Diego and Los Angeles County medical examiner personnel remove victims of the Heaven's Gate suicides.

By Alan Boyle

MSNBC

March 26 — It’s been exactly a year since 39 Heaven’s Gate adherents committed suicide in the belief that a spaceship would transport their souls to a higher level. In the months since then, Heaven’s Gate has fallen from Internet stardom to laughingstock status. But experts say the group’s rise and fall has taught them a lot about how new religions work even in a high-tech age.

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FEW PEOPLE had heard of "Heaven’s Gate" before March 26, 1997, when a former member of the group found bodies neatly arranged in various rooms of their rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. The 39 victims had killed themselves with a lethal combination of barbiturates, vodka and suffocation.

In their last months, the monkish members of Heaven’s Gate earned money by creating Web sites for others — and they also used the Internet to distribute their religious philosophy. In newsgroup postings, videos and Web manifestos, the group warned that Earth was about to be "recycled," and that salvation could be attained only through strict discipline and obedience to the group’s older member, known as Do. The faithful took the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp as a sign that the time had come for them to "shed their containers" and board an interdimensional craft for a higher realm.

Internet users jammed the group’s network of mirror sites to learn more — and it soon came out that Do was actually Marshall Applewhite, the leader of a UFO sect that had gone underground in the late 1970s. Even as the bodies were being identified, additional Heaven’s Gate mirror sites and parody sites proliferated like a virus on the Internet.

This was the scene Wednesday: A realty consultant makes his way up the front steps of the Heaven's Gate mansion, which has been on the market for months.

WORLDLY GOODS STUCK IN LIMBO

But Heaven’s Gate passed out of the public spotlight even before Hale-Bopp faded from sight. Virtually everything the group left behind — from its bunk beds of death to its Web site addresses — is tied up in legal wrangling:

San Diego County officials are planning to auction off the possessions of the 39 initial victims, including computers, chairs, two vans, a truck and a purple shroud. The auction could take place next month, but legal claims by former members of the group could cause delays in the schedule. Estimates of the estate’s value range around $5,000 — but families of the victims are seeking more than $125,000 in reimbursement for burial costs, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

One-time members of the group and relatives of the victims also are fighting over proceeds from the sale of Heaven’s Gate paraphernalia such as mouse pads, as well as control of the Heaven’s Gate Web sites. Not that the properties were all that valuable anyway: Chuck Humphrey, who had taken over the Web sites and the souvenir business after the mass suicides, said in November that the business was a money-loser. Humphrey killed himself in Arizona last month.

The man who found the bodies, Rio DiAngelo, is still making a go of the Web-authoring business and has tried to avoid the legal mess by re-registering the business site used by Heaven’s Gate under a slightly different name: Higher Source Website Design Co.

The 9,000-square-foot mansion where the suicides took place is still up for sale, despite a highly publicized closed-bid auction last November. Appraiser Randall Bell, who gave a tour of the house Wednesday, said owner Sam Koutchesfahani can’t get his asking price of $1.6 million because of the Heaven’s Gate stigma. Although the house has had a thorough cleaning, some unpleasant smells still occasional waft through the rooms.

While the legal wrangling continues, observers of religion and society are trying to digest the lessons of Heaven’s Gate. Ironically, on the eve of the anniversary, yet another religious group known as God’s Salvation Church dealt with disappointment over yet another failed prophecy.

But although the Taiwanese-Texan church uses its own brand of flying-saucer imagery as part of its beliefs, the expectations of divine guidance ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Once his prophecies went wrong, church leader Hon-Ming Chen quickly told outsiders that his predictions about God’s arrival should be regarded as "nonsense."

Lonnie Kliever, head of the religious studies department at Southern Methodist University, said there are big differences between God’s Salvation Church and Heaven’s Gate. The fatal beliefs of Applewhite’s group drew heavily from a tradition of 19th-century spiritualism that said ordinary human existence was a thing to be shunned.

"What you have in Heaven’s Gate is that you’ve got to graduate from bodily existence to the next higher realm to make progress, and that graduation is necessitated by shedding your body," Kliever said.

In the modern world, such beliefs are often considered misguided or even deviant. But Kliever and other experts on religion say it would be wrong to classify Heaven’s Gate as a simple case of mass madness.

"Most people have difficulty trying to understand these religions in religious terms because they sound so foreign," Kliever said. "They try to explain these groups in non-religious terms — political conspiracy, financial fraud, brainwashing central figures, manipulative people. And I think none of the non-religious explanations captures the reality of these alternative religions."

University of Montana sociologist Robert Balch, who has followed the group’s progress from its heyday in the 1970s to its demise in the 1990s, believes that Heaven’s Gate is now shut forever. He sees no evidence that any former members are planning to follow in Applewhite’s and Humphrey’s footsteps.

He also notes that none of the former members has emerged with angry tales of abuse or manipulation — which Balch finds unusual.

"While there are some people out there I’ve talked to who are negative about their experience, they’re few and far between," Balch said. "A lot of that stems from the fact that we just haven’t found any evidence of corruption or abuse."

To be sure, the death of Heaven’s Gate was sensational and bizarre. But for all the high-tech mumbo-jumbo about aliens and interdimensional spaceships, the life of Heaven’s Gate was par for the course, Balch said.

"Most new religions go through a kind of red-hot phase of fanaticism and extreme behavior that’s considered weird by mainstream society," Balch said. "If they survive long enough, they mellow out and enter the mainstream."