Dark Matters Radio

Welcome back to another edition of the Dark Matters Blog. It’s been several weeks since I’ve left a post, and after much consideration I decided what I wanted to write about. In the last couple of weeks I have had several topics that I’ve considered then discarded. Since my last post we have a new President, national and international news continues to be the “pits”, and in trying to keep this post a little lighter, I have decided to write about AREA 51! Huh you say? Area 51 Don? Isn’t that about UFOs and aliens and didn’t you say you quit that?

Okay, let me explain. Since the holidays are over Vicki and I have been doing some cleaning out of some of our junk. For a number of years I have had a huge filing cabinet in my office that Vic decided she wanted to use in her office. She and I did some major cleaning out of my office including moving the file drawer to her office, then she started going through the files stored there. Follow me so far? She would pull out files, glance at them and then shove them back in my office. (All these files came from our days running UFO Magazine.) Anyway, in those files, many dealt with the Area 51 story.

Now back when we ran UFO Magazine, Hollywood would contact us when they were making a film dealing with ET’s or aliens. Sci-Fi pictures seemed to gravitate to our offices and one of the flicks that did was Independence Day, or ID4. Because most of ID4 dealt with Area 51 we were interested since we’ve covered that beat since the story first broke back in 1988.

The journalist that broke the story was George Knapp, a friend of ours and KLAS Chnl. 8 (Las Vegas) investigative reporter. George broke the story on Bob Lazar in a Channel 8 broadcast. Need me to refresh you on Lazar? He was the guy that alleged he was hired by EG&G to “back engineer” alien technology at the government’s super secret base at Area 51. So the story goes, the government has a number of recovered ET ships or saucers stored there in the middle of no-where. (and if you’ve ever been there – it is in the middle of no-where.)

So anyway, “INDEPENDENCE DAY” was in production, we contacted them and we ran several articles on the project. (Here is a cover shot from one issue. It shows the “recovered” alien craft stored out at Area 51.) As excitement began to build someone at 20th Century Fox contacted the politico’s in Nevada (and who in hell knows?) somebody came up with the brilliant idea to rename Highway 375 to the “ET Highway.” The ceremony would take place in Rachel, Nevada and among other dignitaries would be Nevada Governor Bob Miller.

Vicki and I were invited to speak along with George Knapp and the Director of the Mutual UFO Network. I promo-ed the gig heavily on my radio show UFOs Tonite!, and entire bus loads of folks went out there for the festivities.

Like any endeavor created by man, there were the “kill-joys” with this bunch. One guy we knew, Glenn Campbell, had been very involved in the whole Area 51 thing, and for awhile he published a paper called The Groom Lake Desert Rat, all about what was going on with Area 51 (the secret base) while also running a newsgroup called UFO Mind. For some unknown reason Campbell took umbrage at the State of Nevada and 20^th Century Fox renaming Highway 375 to ET Highway. He went on a rampage and his “victory” was managing to detour one bus full of tourista’s down some damn side road instead of to the site where all the festivities were taking place!

Lots of celebrities’ showed up. Dean Devlin, Brent Spiner, Robert Loggia, and Jeff Goldblum were the ones to make it. Will Smith and Randy Quaid didn’t make it, nor did Roland Emerich. Gov. Bob Miller addressed the crowd, then Vicki and I did, George Knapp talked and later the MUFON guy was clean up batter. The movie ended up making better than three quarters of a billion dollars, we got a free trip to the desert. (Oh, did I mention that originally Vic and I were on the bus with the “Stars” but then we were moved to a bus with the rest of the peons. I guess all that high-powered star power didn’t want to rub elbows with us working folk!)

The upshot is that I can “brag” that Vicki and I helped dedicate the ET Highway, got a free ride to that damn hot and windy desert, and we still had to buy tickets to the flick itself! But hey! I personally liked the movie … Go Figure.

Back in the early 90′s I was mainly tied up with doing research and media for UFO Magazine. During those years I was also doing lots of appearances in the television media along with public speaking engagements for UFO Magazine. Still finding myself with a bit of spare time I decided to expand my freelance writing activities. I knew someone that (at that time) done several articles for Soldier of Fortune Magazine, and he told me it paid damned well. I was interested. I was familar with SOF Magazine from reading it back in the late 70′s and 1980′s, so I sent them an inquiry.

I haven’t read SOF in years but back then (early 1990′s) they had a column called “I Was There.” This column mainly dealt with either military happenings or police incidents. A lot of those articles, by neccessity, were of a very serious nature but .. not always. I decided to give this some thought.  Now, back when I was a cop I had some serious things happen .. but I also had some damn funny things (in retrospect) occur to! Then I remembered an incident, one night in about the summer of 1974, and I started laughing out loud. I put it down in an article, sent it off to SOF .. and after they read it .. they passed! Well I filed it and forgot about it.

This past weekend my wife was out in the garage doing some “straightening out” (we finally got all the Christmas decorations packed away again) and came back inside carrying some papers. She popped into my office and said “hey, look what I found!” I checked and it was that old forgotten article I had written for SOF Magazine. I read it again, laughed and then thought “What the hell? Maybe somebody here might find it enjoyable. Here it is .. A True Story .. for your reading pleasure.

I WAS THERE
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE Magazine (Rejected by them)
by Don Ecker

Cops, Keys, Drunks and Old Plymouths

It was late summer in 1974. It had been a gruelling last couple of weeks. My partner, R. Bruce Soliday and I were on patrol during “swing shift” and the last couple of weeks had been pretty damn stressful.

Soliday had just finished 20 years with the U. S. Army, and had retired the year before. Like me Bruce had done a tour in Viet Nam, and had survived Tet in ’68′ during some pretty intense fighting in Saigon. He had done his last ten years as an Army M.P. and had done some work with C. I. D. I had done my time with the Army A.S.A. SOD.

I returned back to the world in early fall, 1972, after spending almost six months in Army hospitals. I had been caught up in the almost forgotten “Easter Invasion” of spring 1972. When the NVA swarmed across the 17th parallel in March 30, 1972, I had been stationed on the “Z” with my team at a forgotten firebase called Alpha 4. We were overrun by elements of the NVA 308th division, E & Eed out to be picked up by a Huey Slick, and then I managed to get dinged at a MAC V compound in Quang Tri.

I re-entered back to the “world” to return to school, but after one semester gave it up to go to work for HEW, Social Security Administration. I hated it, but spent almost a year there until the Police Department opened up, I applied and was hired.

Starting in January of 1974, I found the job challenging. But until I started, I had not realized how much I missed the action, or any action. One of the problems with a small town PD such as this was a lack of funding. The city administration got by hiring qualified part timers such as Soliday.

Anyway, we had been working long hours the last several weeks. There was an outlaw biker club that had been causing problems, also a couple of rapes, and a smash and bash burglary gang. We also had some intelligence that the outlaw bikers were pretty p.o.ed because of the heat we had been giving them, and were going to get even.

After midnight while on patrol, we were driving along a deserted residential street when we saw “the car” in the middle of the street. Parked, lights out and no one visible. I pulled the cruiser over and turned on the 4-way flashers.

Bruce and I looked at each other. Setup? Ambush? All the juices began flowing in both of us. I exited the drivers side, Bruce the passenger side, and we both unsnapped our holsters. The car was an old “58″ or “59″ Plymouth with Tennessee plates. We both approached the car using extreme caution, swinging our flashlights around looking for anything suspicious. Looking into the rear of the suspect vehicle, I noticed trash all over the rear seat, and by the time I reached the front seat, I had drawn my pistol.

Sprawled across the seat was the body of a man. Seeing me draw, Bruce drew and took aim at the right rear of the car. Looking further, I noticed the man was breathing, and ordered him to sit up and raise his hands. All I got was a long and very satisfying snore! Holstering my revolver, I took my flashlight and poked the guy on his shoulder.

“Huh? Whash amatter?” as he struggled to sit up. Then he let me have it. A blast hit me, a blast of Milwaukee’s finest. Oh Boy, I thought. Another damn drunk, and parked in the middle of the damn street.

By this time Bruce was on my side of the car covering me as I ordered the man out. I took the keys from the ignition, and not thinking, I tossed them on the dashboard as I patted the guy down. Trouble was, the heater vent on the old dash had a hole in it the size of a manhole, and clunk, the keys fell inside.

The suspect looked at me and started to giggle. I cuffed the guy and had him stand off to the side, as Bruce helped him stand up. He kept falling to the side. Looking inside, I noticed that the car’s heater ran down from the dash through the floorboards. “How the hell we gonna get the keys out?” I asked Bruce. He stepped over to look, and the suspect promptly fell down and went back to sleep.

Bruce looked inside and said “Well, we could call a tow truck, but then the whole night is shot ;or … lets see if we can pry the heater up from the floor boards, and maybe the keys will fallout.”

I woke the guy up, and asked if he minded if we did that. “Sure ting offisher, no problem“, except we didn’t have a pry bar. “No problem sir” the drunk mumbled lurching over to his trunk, and then he kicked the trunk hatch popping it open as he fell back to the street.

Inside were tools, the guy was a carpenter. Among his tools was on old rusty crow bar. For the next 20 minutes we worked on the car hoping we got no calls.

“They made these things damned good didn’t they” Bruce said as he smashed some fingers on the now torn metal.

I took over, and with a final herculean smash, the steel wall of the heater tore up from the floor. Out dropped the guy’s keys, and Bruce and I looked at each other with a satisfied smirk. Having worked with such diligence, I never took note of the damage we did to the inside of the car. Bruce took one final look and said with a note of awe in his voice, “God Don, it looks like someone fragged the car!” Taking a good look I agreed. Bruce, with a wife and 3 kids on his mind said, “You don’t think we will have to pay for this do you?”

Suddenly that thought hit me too. We were not the best paid cops in the world, and I had visions of my next pay check sorely depleted. “Well, what do you want to do?” I asked my partner. “Well, other than being parked in the middle of the street, the guy wasn’t doing anything. Do you want to pull his car off the street and put him back in?”

That sounded like a great idea, so we stuck the sleeping drunk in the back seat, and I drove the car off the side of the road. sticking his keys into the glove box, we took one final look at that old Plymouth and its owner, broke into a belly laugh and quickly left the scene.

The next morning I drove by and he was gone. I often wondered what he thought when he saw the mess under his dash, and then I grinned.
———————————————–

Damn, and to think SOF passed on this Gem!

Keep Looking UP!

Let’s get one thing straight from the onset … UFOs are real. If you look up and see something in the sky that you can not identify, that is a UFO. UFO does NOT mean aliens or spaceship, got that?

The real question should be, are ANY UFOs … someone else’s technology? Someone that ain’t from around here! (here means Earth.) Got that?

For better than 20 years, this is what I did. Back in the day, back when I was the Director of Research for UFO Magazine, I investigated and researched the question of UFOs and  cases looking for proof that at least some of these things were ( or might be ) somebody else’s technology. Confused yet? God knows, I think I still am … confused that is. Over those years I came across SOME cases that caused my hair to stand on end, and some cases that caused me to break down in uncontrollable laughter. Yes, the field was that huge … wonder on one side and hilarity on the other. You see, we tried to be ( we at UFO Magazine .. a publication begun by my wife and still publishing today without us) the clearinghouse for the real and the unreal. Being a former policeman, I had little time for the bullshit artists ( lots of them ) or the woo-woo factor. ( You know, the aliens are coming here to save us from … us. They want to teach us a better way, the aliens hate war so we should get rid of the army, not militarize space, wear flowers in our hair, save the whales, love a dolphin, pray to the fairies … oh yeah, and send $50 bucks when you get done reading this!)

The bullshit artists and the woo-woo bunch didn’t like me so much, and in the spirit of being absolutely UPFRONT, I thought they were Full Of It … to the eyebrows and higher. It made an interesting 20 years.  And, lest I forget, the other bunch, the Skeptics, were full of shit too. Not all of them to be sure, just most of them. Why, you ask, would I say that? Simply because it’s the dishonesty of their positions.

I do not have the space here in this post to lay it all out, but in time I will using additional posts. Lets simply take one example. (And God knows, I have MANY – MANY of them!)

I will assume that if you are reading this blog, you have at least a partial understanding and knowledge of the UFO field. Philip J. Klass, for years the spokesman of the Skeptical side of things, was the bug-a-boo Skeptic confronting so many UFO cases in the press and on the TV.

I knew Klass fairly well, and as matter of fact, I saved Klass from a drunk UFO Bubba in Pensacola, Florida at the 1990 MUFON Symposium. (The guy was drunk, big and mean and Klass was old, small and helpless. Hell, I never liked big guys picking on little guys anyway.)

Klass and I had a number of confrontations over the years. One such confrontation took place in Denver, Colorado about 1992. It was hosted by Mike Corbin of ParaNet and Klass and I debated the reality of the UFO field. Okay, so far so good, but then Klass tried to smear a dead guy, Frederick Valentich, a civilian Australian pilot, that disappeared during a UFO encounter over the Bass Strait.

When this topic was raised during the debate, Klass tried to smear Valentich as a “drug smuggler” evading the authorities. His “proof”? Valentich ( according to Klass ) had four ( 4 ) life preservers on board his aircraft! I lit into Klass like “white on rice.” Phil was also sneaky as I found out. Years before I came on the UFO scene Phil had contributed to the downfall of a brilliant scientist, Dr. James McDonald.  The following is from Wikipedia.

“McDonald engaged in an often savagely adversarial relationship with aviation journalist and skeptic Philip J. Klass, who argued in his first book that nearly all UFOs can be explained by ball lightning[5]. At first, the duo exchanged cordial letters on the subject. Klass was rather guarded in his application of the plasma theory at the time, and McDonald agreed that it might explain a small portion of UFO reports. However, Klass quickly expanded his hypothesis arguing that most if not all UFOs, and even cases of alleged alien abduction, could be explained as plasmas. McDonald thought this was absurd, and offered a detailed rebuttal against Klass’s thesis[6]. Many observers—even those skeptical of UFOs—concluded Klass lacked even a basic understanding of the theories he proposed[7]
In late 1967, McDonald secured a modest grant from the Office of Naval Research in order to study cloud formations in Australia. While in Australia, McDonald conducted some UFO research on his own time. Klass mounted an extended, concerted campaign against McDonald, arguing that he had squandered government funds. The ONR responded by announcing that they knew of McDonald’s UFO interests and had no objections to his personal hobbies. The University of Arizona came to McDonald’s defense, announcing that McDonald’s UFO research was done on his own time, and had no adverse impact on his regular teaching and research duties at the university.
Klass then demonstrated that McDonald was spending at least small sums of government research funds on UFO research, and the ONR, apparently fearing controversy, decided to no longer fund McDonald’s cloud research.”
Later, because of this and also because of testimony McDonald gave to the US Congress, his marriage began to falter. McDonald’s life spun out of control and he began to plot his own suicide. After one failed attempt he was successful on the next attempt. Klass continued on for years on his merry crusade against “subversive and dangerous” thinking.

Now, please allow me to relate one final example of the dishonesty of Phil Klass. While broadcasting my show UFOs Tonite! in January of 1995, I had Klass on as a guest and the discussion became somewhat heated. First it concerned the Roswell Crash, and Klass claiming that Army Air Corp Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, was trying to “win” a $3,000. “reward” that some unknown newspaper was offering for “proof” of a flying saucer! When I called Klass on that, he threatened to hang up the phone in the middle of the show. ( touchy, eh? ) Later we were discussing the infamous Washington DC 1952 overflights, Phil claimed that the Air Force was so dis-interested, that it took them about an hour to get aircraft there to check out the UFOs. When I corrected him and told him it was because the Air Force was re-surfacing the runways Klass began screaming “BULLSHIT” on the air. 3 times he screamed it!  When I called him on it he became embarrassed and hung up in mid-show. That was the last time I ever spoke to Klass.

Klass died August 9, 2005. The “skunk” left the garden party. ( Phil often described himself as a Skunk at the UFO garden party.) I will say this, he left an impression on all who knew him.
I left UFO research in January of 2007, perhaps more on that later. I suppose my point to you is that the UFO “thing” is vastly complex, not easily understood and one must have the patience of Job. (You know, the guy in the bible.) There is more to it than meets the eye, but I will leave that for another day. So, remember to
Keep looking up and I will catch you the next time around!

Jeeze, I woke up this morning and it hit me … it’s 2009 … already! Man, oh man, who would have “thunk” it? On New Year’s Eve I hit the sack about 10:30 PM and never even gave midnight a thought. This morning however, I did that thing that many folks do … gave the last few years a review. Oh, Boy!

It was about October, 1995 or so, (back in my other life when I was a recognized “expert” in the UFO field – more on that later) when I got a telephone call from Paul Davids.

Vicki and I have known Paul for years and years, and you may recognize him as the Executive Producer of the movie ROSWELL. Roswell is the film based on the real life happenings that took place in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 involving the alleged crash of an Unidentified Flying Object or UFO. This happened next to the only “nuclear capable” military organization in the world at that time. Roswell is synonymous today with UFOs and ETs. Back in those days, Vicki and I were “UFO Magazine,” a publication my wife and her then partner began in 1986 and that we ran almost single handedly. We had covered Paul’s movie extensively in our magazine.

On this date, however, Paul called to ask me if I would be interested in appearing (briefly) in a new film he was shooting … ” Starry Night .” I was initially flattered, thinking O-boy! Hollywood finally saw me as a “Star in the Rough” (until Paul told me it would be an unpaid spot! Of course, why change my MO now?) It seemed that he needed two reporters covering the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California on New Years Day, which was New Years, 1996. The movie plot was pretty simple … a century after his death, Vincent van Gogh magically returns to present day America, arriving at the Rose Parade, (where by the way he is hit by one of the floats) and after getting out of the hospital realize’s his art is worth millions! My role, along with Brandon Scott, was to play a reporter reporting on the accident involving van Gogh. Nah, we didn’t have a script per se, we ad-libbed our speaking parts, making it up as we went along.

Brandon Scott & Don Ecker

Making movies close to Hollywood, California can be tricky. You got to know what you’re doing … and so importantly … you gotta have all the right paperwork and licenses to film on location. At the time Paul had a budget that wouldn’t buy lunch for two at Burger King. In other words, he didn’t have the paperwork. There was the camera man filming me and Brandon, ad-libbing our sparkling commentary, and all the while the real cops were looking at us suspiciously. The Rose Parade was going on and the actor playing van Gogh popped out into the street pretending to get hit … ah hell, you get the idea.

We all met at Pauls about 1:30 or 2:00 AM, then trucked over to Pasadena looking for a spot to set up. Now, if you’ve ever gone to Pasadena just before the Rose Parade you will know that you don’t have room to even turn around, much less set up a film shoot. With all those people there you would think someone was giving away free beer and pretzels, and they get there the day before. (And that isn’t even mentioning the football game after the parade.) We schlepped around until later in the afternoon, making sure Paul got all the shots he needed. Then … years went by and nada.

I bumped into Paul at a MUFON meeting sometime after 2001 or so. When I saw him I walked up and after shaking hands and asking how he was, I asked about “Starry Night.” The film was released in 1999, and guess what? My segment (with Brandon Scott) was left on the cutting room floor … That’s when it hit me … my acting career was over … before it even began!

Flash forward to present … Here is a wish for a Happy Prosperous 2009. May Peace Reign.

Starry Night video clip