Director's

Since its formation MUFON has been dedicated to finding the truth about UFOs through its mission of investigation, research, and education. There is one truth that is very clear from our excellent work over the past 48 years, and that is the government has successfully kept all aspects of their involvement with UFOs from the public: their intercept procedures, their recovery procedures, their use of unmarked military craft.

And their management procedures for controlling
these processes.

Why would the government keep these things secret? There are several possible reasons that come to mind, any one of which would be an excellent reason:

* They are unable to reliably control our airspace and knowledge of this would make citizens feel unsafe.

* UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors are real and they fear knowledge of this would have an adverse effect on our economy, world religions, or result in public panic.

* Treaties or alliances with one or more extraterrestrial civilizations have been signed without Congressional approval.

* We have successfully reverse engineered these craft years ago, discovering new principles in science and have created our own secret space program.

Happy New Year! I trust your holidays were as fun and exciting as mine were. I began the holiday season early December traveling to Brazil at the request of our National Director, A.J. Gevaerd, to speak at his “V UFOZ 2016” Conference in Iguassu Falls. It was a very successful conference with 20 speakers and more than 300 people in attendance over the four-day event. Most were from South America, including Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay. Great people all, I just wish I knew more Portuguese and Spanish to be able to communicate more effectively with them, especially since all the lectures were in Portuguese!

A.J. and his team did an outstanding job running the conference as well as taking care of
his speakers putting us up at the Foz Presidente Hotel, the site of the conference itself. I was afforded the opportunity to present the MUFON story to a whole new set of International UFO researchers and interested parties. The information shared was well received and MUFON is seen as the gold standard of Ufology in South America and around the world. A number of people came up to me after my presentation asking how they could join MUFON. It’s easy, I told them, just go to our website and click on JOIN! Then get involved locally!

Last month I wrote to you about some exciting goals we have set for ourselves based on strategic planning we completed some months ago. The first goal from that planning meeting was to more than double our membership to 10,000 within the next 12 months. The second being to create underwriting opportunities to allow people to participate in funding projects that are important to MUFON and the UFO field in general, especially UFO Research.

As part of that process you are now beginning to see those changes take place before your very eyes. The first being a newer, cleaner looking, MUFON logo which is being previewed on the cover of the MUFON UFO Journal this month. The second being the evolution of the Journal itself beginning with this issue. We are reshaping and resizing the Journal to be more contemporary, easier to read, and oriented to a new generation of UFO researchers and investigators as well as newly acquired members whom we are actively recruiting.

I invited a team of people to headquarters recently for a strategic planning session on the future of MUFON and Ufology in general. Included were the MUFON Board, many of my direct reports (the people who help me run MUFON day-to-day), and some of our major benefactors who have invested time and money in our future. The meeting lasted two days and focused on our mission and goals as well as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that confront us as an organization doing the great work that we do.  You may be interested to know that our top threat, as well as our top weakness, was lack of funding overall, and more to the point a lack of funding for research.  

Our top opportunities after prioritizing were increasing membership and fundraising as well as international expansion as an organization. Every time we add a new member we increase our pool of funds to allow us to do important research and outreach to the media and public, not to mention influential people in government and industry who have a keen interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Based on our strategic plan we’ve set a goal for ourselves to grow membership in MUFON to 10,000 members in the next 12 months. An ambitious goal for sure, but one that with a solid plan is attainable.

As we have continued to grow as an organization it has become apparent that our infrastructure, last updated back in 2008-2010, has been a hindrance to growth. As such the board recently approved expenditures to upgrade several key elements of our support infrastructure. These elements include our telephone system, computer systems, and our membership system.

Our old phone system was a two-line landline system from AT&T with voicemail. Many times on different days of the week with two-to-three volunteers working in the office we would have both lines continually busy such that calls to MUFON HQ went directly to voicemail without ever being answered on the first or second ring by a live support person. To be honest, I was the biggest offender using one of the two lines for numerous conference calls all in the pursuit of finding answers to the UFO question. Well the good news is that this has all been solved! We have upgraded to four phone lines at headquarters using the latest Cloud-based Voice over IP technology (VOIP) through a service called RingCentral, all for about the same cost as our previous AT&T service. You can check them out at ringcentral.com I know you’ll be suitably impressed. In fact, you might even decide to use this innovative service for your own small business or commercial enterprise. The nice thing about RingCentral is that it allows us to have an infinite number of virtual lines, so much so that we can put the entire MUFON FI team on the service, up to 1,000 people, all with their own unique extensions. It also has a number of great collaboration tools built in including telephone and video conference calling, instant messaging, calendaring and other cool productivity tools. It will be a while before we are fully integrated and using all the new capabilities this new system affords us. The good news is we are now positioned to grow for the future.

I am often asked by friends and family what are the most significant UFO cases that would allow one to know for certain the UFO phenomenon is real. There are several that I usually share with them.  

​The first is the Travis Walton case of November 1975 near Snowflake, AZ. I like this case because the witness is one of the most approachable people you will ever meet. One can walk right up to Travis and ask him about his encounter and he’ll take the time to talk with you just like he has done 10,000 times before. It started as he and his coworkers were heading home from a day of working in the mountains, when they noticed a light in the distance. Thinking it might be a forest fire they drove over to check it out, only to find a large, saucer-shaped craft hovering several feet off the ground. For some unexplained reason, Travis exited the truck and ran toward the object only to be struck by a beam of light and knocked back several feet falling limp to the ground. His buddies, scared for their lives, hightailed it out of there. Travis ended up aboard the craft with several strange beings staring at him. There are several things that make this case compelling. The first is that it was witnessed by seven (7), count them SEVEN, people. The second is that Travis, upon his return, was able to recount what had happened aboard the ship including his encounter with several types of beings without the aid of hypnosis. A truly amazing case. Not to mention that all seven witnesses were given lie detector tests by the local sheriff and passed. WOW! It doesn’t get any better than this. Travis Walton may be a vendor at this year’s Symposium. Why not come and talk to him yourself.

Our mission statement is “The Scientific Study of UFOs for the Benefit of Humanity.” The word science comes from the Latin “scientia” meaning knowledge. So how is science defined? According to Webster’s dictionary, the definition of science is “knowledge attained through study or practice,” or “knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method.”

What does this really mean? Science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge. The term science also refers to the organized body of knowledge people have gained using that system. Less formally, the word science often describes any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from it. I would say that the Case Management System (CMS) that MUFON employs to gather firsthand data, or knowledge, on UFOs is such a system, or organized body of knowledge. And it will be even better with the NEW Global UFO Database being designed and built with funds generously donated by people like you and me.

PictureSpaceX Red Dragon landing on MARS sometime in 2018. Credit: Space X Well, not quite now, but if a few futuristic thinkers have their way – very, very, soon. Last year ended with Charles Bolden, head NASA Administrator, saying that the United States would have men on Mars around 2030, a mere 14 years from now. Then just last month Elon Musk, president and founder of SpaceX, upped the ante declaring that SpaceX would put a lander on Mars by 2018 and hinted at putting men on Mars by 2025. How will they do this? With their little Red Dragon spacecraft of course. Measuring about 20 feet tall and 12 feet wide, the Red Dragon will not carry astronauts when it lands on Mars in 2018, a short two years from now.

It will land on Mars to show the new capsule’s ability to reach far-flung destinations throughout our solar system, SpaceX said. Musk plans to unveil SpaceX’s concept for sending humans to Mars this September at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.

After a great deal of planning, and preparation, I am happy to announce the creation of a book publishing partnership between MUFON and one of our members, Deborah Herman, CEO of Micro Publishing Media, Inc.

Deborah approached us about a year ago with the idea of MUFON getting into the book publishing business to help current authors of UFO books make even more money through active marketing and distribution of their book(s). This will happen through her marketing and publishing firm Micro Publishing Media. Using MPM an author’s book can be published as an e-book as well as a print-on-demand book. The exciting thing about print-on-demand is that it does not require inventory, just a computerized version of the book. It will also be a great option for new authors who may be considering self-publishing through Amazon’s CreateSpace application. The advantage of going with MUFON Books and MPM will be the active marketing and distribution of one’s book that one does not get through CreateSpace. Publishing a book is the easy part, selling it takes a marketing and distribution plan which most private authors do not have.  CreateSpace limits an author to only Amazon as an online retailer with no marketing plan. Our books can be on all of the retailers and our e-books are supported by our distributor's sales team on over one-hundred e-book sites internationally. This will be an outstanding alternative for creating, publishing, and distributing one’s book, as well as a way for new and seasoned authors alike to generate more income for themselves.

Spring is finally here and there is increasing anticipation and excitement in the air about the 2016 MUFON Symposium which is quickly approaching. If you haven’t heard, this year’s Symposium will be held August 25–28th at the Four-Star Hilton Lake Buena Vista Hotel in beautiful Orlando, Florida. The hotel sits on Disney Property and offers free shuttle service to the Magic Kingdom and Walt Disney World to make your stay even more enjoyable.

The MUFON Florida team has chosen the theme for this year’s event: “UFOs: From our Oceans to Outer Space” and lined up an outstanding slate of speakers and special events to make this one of our best Symposiums ever. You can check out the details online at MufonSymposium.com. Some exciting special events have been added to the weekend including a tour of the Kennedy Space Center featuring lunch with an astronaut, some interesting lunchtime speaker panels, two experiencer workshops, and even discount tickets to the Magic Kingdom. How can you beat that?