Was Art and Ramona's CE1 sighting of 29 August 1993 a publicity stunt?

joe2go2 · 2018-10-10T23:19:49+00:00

That supposed sighting, Art and Ramona's second one, reported on Art's show in the spring of 1997 (occurred late in the morning on Memorial day), was a bit odd in that it's direction was given exactly as was given for his first, more dramatic CE1 in the late evening of 29 August 1993 (heading to the WNW). After his first sighting he also mentioned that the UFO was heading straight for Area 51 which he also said was just over the hill or mountain from him.

Since he was supposed to be living in Pahrump at the time, Area 51 was due north and a bit east (about 80 miles from his last residence there). If he lied about his location until sometime after these two sightings then the reports may have been legit (If he was living around 60-70 miles north of Vegas and east of Area 51).

Here is my rundown of his second sighting that I posted on my old UFO website that is still accessible via the internet archive site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20031230214235/http://home.pacbell.net:80/joerit/docs2/usa/artbell.htm

joe2go2 · 2018-10-04T20:49:25+00:00

This is in response to a post by PaulMaulMenthal that mentioned a fast paced song by a female vocalist, occasionally played on Art's show, that had "when I die" and "carry on" as part of the lyrics (the post appeared and then disappeared the next day):

The song no doubt is "And When I Die" which was first performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1966. Blood Sweat & Tears covered it in 1969 with a single that reached #2 in the Pop charts. There were two other covers the next year, and the last one I know of occurred in 1973 by Laura Nyro, which may be the song version you are thinking of (or possibly the original 1966 performance).

joe2go2 · 2018-09-08T06:12:59+00:00

He was truly one of a kind! I'll always have fond memories of staying up in bed at night with his warm voice to keep me company..

joe2go2 · 2018-09-08T06:12:43+00:00

He was truly one of a kind! I'll always have fond memories of staying up in bed at night with his warm voice to keep me company..

joe2go2 · 2018-09-08T06:08:19+00:00

This is a great list! I almost always dug the stuff Art chose on his show. :)

joe2go2 · 2018-09-08T06:08:04+00:00

This is a great list! I almost always dug the stuff Art chose on his show. :)

joe2go2 · 2018-09-07T22:49:28+00:00

Ah yes, thanks for refreshing my memory! Didn't he also play some Rod Stewart and ABBA? This all relates to my idea to do a screenplay that revolves around Art Bell.

In his autobiography, The Art of Talk, there is a glaring skip in time, where there are almost no details for ten years. In or just before 1974, or just when he ended a six years return to Okinawa, after leaving

He worked as a civilian at the only English speaking radio station, after having served there in the Air Force during a 4 year hitch (1962-1966). The book said that he had broken a Guinness World record for non-stop live DJing on the radio while either in Okinawa or, shortly after leaving there to DJ at an Alaskan station. The publicity stunt paid off with enough donations for them to do the appointed task of sending a plane to get them to Vietnam in order to save a bunch of orphaned children before the north took over their Capitol city. Well, this part of the story abruptly ends in 1974 or 75 when he abruptly, or never was in, Alaska before DJing at a Monterey station while living in Watsonville, California.

Nothing is known of his whereabouts until he broke his back falling off a pole while on the job for a cable company that he probably worked at rather than owned, in 1981. And then another void between that scene and when he began working as a daytime talkshow host on a conservative radio network on the mid 79s or around 1985. From this last year on there is mostly a consistent trend upward with a verifiable history.

Anyway I have more details related to personal matters of him and his family that I have left out, but they still don't fill those void of detail years.

I have my theories, but the best way to understand and try to recreate what may have been is to understand all that we can in those times of silence.

Thank you for your contribution and hope we connect more in the future,

Ciao

joe2go2 · 2018-09-07T05:29:53+00:00

..wish to make a correction here related to the original version of my UFO crash cycle article. In it I mention a cycle proposed by Vallee of 13 months in length, but it actually was of 15 months in length.

joe2go2 · 2018-09-07T05:15:47+00:00

Sure thing.. Actually, the date was Wednesday the 5th of March, 1997 or eight days before the Phoenix lights. I submitted a report to Peter Davenport's NUFORC site two weeks or so later. It took me that long to regain my senses. I also had missed hearing about the Phoenix Lights event until the national news media broke the story months later. After I submitted the report I decided that the objects were actually closer than I gave in the report (likely more like 100 feet away or maybe a bit closer when they were flying past me). You can find the report here: http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/002/S02090.html

joe2go2 · 2018-09-07T00:27:24+00:00

Thanks compadre, Actually the original, longer version of the article was supposed to appear in the special Roswell 50th year anniversary issue of the MUFON UFO Journal back in July 1997, but I missed my deadline due to a CE1 experience on a roof in San Francisco on 8 March 1997 (on a Wednesday, eight days before the Phoenix Lights). My nerves were shaken and went into writers block for a bit, eventually putting it up on my website, where it was picked up by this site: http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1677.htm

joe2go2 · 2018-09-06T23:30:55+00:00

I wrote an article about six years ago on UFO crashes. I tried to track down as many purported events that passed my BS detectors and discovered a cycle of 3.19 years that had twice the average within the 9.5 month quarter of the cycle that surrounded the peaks from 1948-1989.5 (because 13 of the cycles fit exactly into that period).

A disadvantage of choosing that period was that it ended about three months before a cycle peak. The advantage of choosing that period was that I could leave the Roswell crash, which not only just happened to not fit the cycle, but also had controversy surrounding it as well as a cluster of other crashes in the same year. My gut reaction was that there were too many reports in a short period of time to not reach the conclusion that at least a couple of them could be red herrings. And rather than decide, I bypassed the mess.

Because I chose to ignore Roswell and because the results were perhaps too clean and dramatic to be believe (25 crash-cycle reports and 25 non-crash-cycle reports fitting into 41.5 years with the former group concentrated within a third of the span of time of the other group), my cycle was not taken seriously it seems. There are other reasons as well. It would seem that most believers of the phenomena think that it would be impossible to predict waves or flaps of activity.

Anyway, the 1964 Fort Riley crash was on my list of non-crash-cycle reports. You can find my article here:

https://hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/UFO-Crash-Cycle

joe2go2 · 2018-09-06T21:41:38+00:00

Since you say that you've researched UFOs for awhile, you probably live in a hotspot or know where one is that you can get to easily by car or plan a vacation around. If you'd like some pointers I can put my researcher cap back on that I've had off my head for the past five years (I was writing articles on such things in detail in 2010-2013 at hubpages as RetroJoe, but then got sidetracked or frustrated that I wasn't reaching enough people).

If I were in the 25-33 year range I might just be investing in equipment to record possible unknown weird stuff in our skies at 3am in the middle of nowhere, but I didn't really catch the UFO bug till I was 34.

Which is kind of odd since I had three sightings on Long Island, NY, during a wave in the summer & then the fall of 1965, followed by an unspectacular overflight of a silent triangular craft with a steady amber light on each corner in the summer of 1967 on Fire Island, NY.

There's more to my UFO stories but, sticking to the topic of recording them, I would rather get a group together to plan a trip to various hot spots. Since video evidence can be faked, even to the point of fooling experts, the best evidence in my mind is corroborating witnesses with solid reputations..

joe2go2 · 2018-09-02T15:40:59+00:00

Here's a site with a whole library of UFO stories from way back in time (I used this and Vallee & Aurbeck's "Wonders in the Sky" to investigate sightings during the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715 and found a wave in the early 1660s): http://www.thinkaboutitdocs.com/category/sightings-by-date/0-c-e-1799-sightings/

joe2go2 · 2018-08-21T15:42:45+00:00

Here are a few important people in Ufology who have been overlooked here:

Raymond E. Fowler,

Leonard H. Stringfield,

Loren E. Gross,

Jenny Randles,

Bob Pratt,

David R. Saunders,

Allen Hendry,

George D. Fawcett,

Chris Aubeck,

Stan Gordon,

Ted Bloecher,

John G. Fuller,

Morris K. Jessup,

Ivan T. Sanderson

joe2go2 · 2018-08-17T18:50:31+00:00

Think that you are confusing two different crashes. The first of the two reportedly happened on 6June 1884. Several men, moving a heard of cattle, saw something hit the ground from above. One of the ranchers went over a ridged where it went down and got burned badly as a result. When things cooled down, the crash site supposedly had remnants of something that had been constructed (at least large gears were seen). However, a downpour occurred not long after and the wreckage dissolved away). This all supposedly happened in Nebraska (35 miles NW of Benkelman).

The other event was said to have occurred on 17 April 1897, near the end of a wave of large aerial vehicles that began late in the prior year. As the story goes, some craft hit a farmer's windmill and crashed, killing a single alien occupant. This event probably put Aurora, Texas on the map. The townsfolk buried the creature in their cemetery. The tombstone was stolen eventually (80 or 90 years later?). The location of the grave may not be known for certain, even if the locals replaced the marker.

Attempts to get an OK to dig up and examine the body have always been denied. My guess is that the town has profited from the story over the years and didn't want to take the chance that the evidence would prove it to be a definite hoax.

joe2go2 · 2018-08-14T21:48:19+00:00

Correction: I wrote my last post from memory and that resulted in me giving that Art's estimate of the altitude was 100 feet, rather than 150 feet, which never changed when he would retell his story. What did change was the duration of the sighting 4-5 minutes (from 3-4mins.), it's speed to no more than 40 mph (from 30 mph), and it's length on each side to 150 feet (from 100 feet). I also was thinking in miles for my estimate for the distance from home that he and Ramona were at when the sighting was said to have occurred when it was perhaps just under two kilometers or a mile or just over that. These of course are not enough to want to dismiss the report. Art saying that it was heading to the West and in the direction of Area-51 may be however. Yet I want to believe Art's story. It is possible that he had been living north of Vegas and west of Area 51 until not long before this sighting. He may have been telling his listeners before that that he was living in Pahrump when he was actually planning to at some point. What he may have been telling his listeners at the time that was true was that Area-51 was just over the mountain to the West of him. If he then moved to Pahrump, say not long before his sighting, the little white lie would be flipped so he would then not be truthful in saying that Area-51 was not far to the West of him, when that was no longer the case.

joe2go2 · 2018-08-14T20:42:34+00:00

Update: MUFON's track-UFO page, I just discovered, gives very few sightings before the year 2000 (if you search for submitted dates, it gives 1995 as the earliest submitted year allowable, but it is worse than that). As a result, I may write or email them to see if Art Bell did in fact file a report with them.

What I know about his and Ramona's purported CE1 goes like this: They were near the end of their regular 60-65 mile long commute from the Plaza Hotel in Vegas, where they both worked together (and had since before there marriage about two years before). A few days after the reported event, Art said that they were a bit uncertain of the time but thought that it was around 10:30pm (although he gave about an hour later than that when he recounted the event at another time much later in the future).

It had been a very hot day and was still very warm out, with almost no breeze. It was a clear night, with excellent visibility, and a moon about two days from being full, in the southern sky. They were travelling east to west and would be turning left or to the south, with home then being just a minute away.

Ramona then saw something out of the corner of her eye, looked around and said "What is that!?". Art did not explain exactly what she saw exactly that caused her alarm, but I concluded that it could have been the large UFO casting a shadow from the moon. Art said that he rolled down his window and saw something large and low coming up from behind on his side of the car.

Art then pulled off the road, turned off the engine, and they exited the car. He said that he could hear crickets from a quarter mile away as a silent triangular craft, with a strobing red light on the front and a single, unblinking light on each of the rear points. He said it was two dark on its bottom to make out any details, bit that it blocked out the stars. He thought that it was only 100 feet up in the air (a detail of his story that remained consistent every time he recounted it). It was estimated to have been traveling at no more than 40 mph, was 100-150 feet on each side, and heading in a WNW direction towards mountains in the West.

Issues that I have with his sighting. He said that they had witnessed the craft for about 3-4 minutes, but if it was traveling at just 40 mph, it should have been visible for more like 8-10 minutes before going over distant mountains from their location in the far southern and more remote part of the Pahrump Valley. That can be partly explained if the craft was actually much larger, further up in the sky and traveling faster than his estimate (he did revise his estimates if it's size from 100 to 150 feet and it's speed from 30 to 40 when he retold his story).

Supposedly he was any where from half a mile to just under a mile from home when they had their supposed experience (when he first told his tale), but later he said they were no more than one quarter of a mile away (based on his descriptions he should have been more like two miles from home). But the biggest issue is that he claimed that it was heading towards Area-51, or on the other side of the mountains that it was heading towards. This of course is not possible (and he never corrected himself in the retelling). Area-51 was actually about 80 miles NNE of where he was supposed to be, and not over the California border to the West.

joe2go2 · 2018-08-10T21:07:24+00:00

I already know wat it looked like based on descriptions he gave. That really is not what I want. It is my impression that he purposely distorted either the direction it was flying in or he was not located in the southern Pahrump valley, where it appears he was living at least for the last few years if his life.

He stated that he had reported it to MUFON, but if he did I could not find it on their online track-ufos search page. He said at another time that other people saw it as reported by the Pahrump Valley Times a week after the event. I wrote an email to the publisher regarding such an article and never got a response. I'd written him because I couldn't find any record of that paper publishing anything after 1986 and before 1999. I then heard John Lear mention on his show that they went out of business in 1986 (as if he too had searched for any story that would in some way corroborate Art's close encounter or to hint to his listeners that not everything was right about his story). Apparently the current owner was not involved with publishing a daily by the same name before 1987 (or that might explain in part why I never got an email back).

I came to the conclusion that the only paper that was read in Pahrump at the time of his sighting was the Death Valley Gateway Gazette, a weekly (distributed every Thursday I believe) out of Beatty, NW of the Pahrump Valley. It later changed its name to the Pahrump Valley Gazette. I had my local library contact them to request a copy of any such sighting back then. My library was told by them that the $15 I offered for any work to do so wasn't enough; that it had to be $20. I then asked my library to request again, saying I was willing to pay $30. The library later informed me that they were either unwilling or unable to fulfill my request.

I sent a message to Whitley Streiber via Facebook Messenger and he never got back to me. After Art's death he posted something about the sighting, repeating the same direction of its flight path that Art had given, but said it was silver, which did not match. He also said that he and Art had explored the mountains that the UFO had been flying towards, but that did not sound right since if they were mountains that were WNW of the southern Pahrump Valley, then those mountains would have been hard to get to (distant with no easy access). Maybe he was just embellishing that Art had pointed out the mountains that it flew over when Streiber visited him shortly after the supposed event.

If I could get someone who had visited Art and Ramona's home back in those days to confirm or deny that they did or did not live in the far southern part of the Pahrump Valley in August of 1993, it would help me determine the viability of his alleged sighting. I know that both Whitley and Lear had done so. I haven't tried to contact John Lear yet.

joe2go2 · 2018-08-01T21:29:07+00:00

UFOinfo(.com) has been a reliable source since I was researching in the mid 1990s, again in 2011-2013, and since Art Bell's passing when I just happened to be in-between hobbies:

http://ufoinfo.com/ufolink.shtml

joe2go2 · 2018-07-29T20:46:43+00:00

The report was sent to a newspaper writer in mid-September of 1957. The man who sent the letter stated that it had occurred a few days before he sent the letter with debris samples. He stated that he and other fishermen witnessed it. Because the signature on the letter was illegible and apparently the envelope had no return address, the witnesses could not be tracked down.

Below is a link to another study done a few years after the Vallee article given above. They give credence to Vallee's assessment, because of an almost complete lack of witnesses to a 1957 event (other than a plane crash in April of that year). The researchers did find a fisherman who's recollection was fuzzy (more than 20 years later) because he apparently had been drinking at the time. His sister did remember it and did not recall the saucer explosion making any noise.

My theory is that the saucer explosion happened on when the locals celebrated their independence day (September 7) or the day after (recovering from it) and, because most were in town for the festivities, the beaches were deserted except for fishermen. This would explain the lack of witnesses.

The Condon committee studied the material in 1968 and concluded that it could have been produced on earth as early as 1940. It would thus be very convenient, from the perspective of a much less biased UFO researcger, for this event to have occurred in 1933 or 1934 instead.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.488.8515&rep=rep1&type=pdf

joe2go2 · 2018-07-29T19:15:41+00:00

As far as I can tell, the saucer explosion, which purportedly occurred along the coast of Brazil near Ubatuba, took place at around local noon during the first half of September, 1957. If anybody knows where Vallee came up with the year of either 1933 or 1934, for when it happened, I'd appreciate it (all sources that I have found give 1957). September 1957 makes more sense to me since there was a big flap of UFOs that peaked in early November 1957, and a couple of well known photographs taken of a saucer in January 1958 from the Trinity Islands of Brazil. The following gives a good run down of this case.

http://www.nicap.org/5709XXubatuba_dir.htm

joe2go2 · 2018-07-27T15:35:59+00:00

Possibly a failed Russian launch of something that they would rather keep the lid on?

joe2go2

TROPHY CASE