UFOs Will Crash, Part II
Mike Smith
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Last week, in “My Strange New Mexico,” we examined a mysterious film that some believe shows the crash of a UFO in the desert of south-central New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, in 1997. The film depicts a white, football-shaped craft as it plummets from the sky, skips violently across the ground, and explodes. (Click the highlighted link above to read the previous installment of this story.)
Over fifteen or so noiseless seconds, this intriguing footage plays out with no commentary, no captions, and no known filmmaker willing to take credit for it. Where it really came from, who shot it, or even when it was first viewed, remains uncertain.
In the last few days, after the column about this unusual film appeared in print and online, a number of interesting e-mails have arrived at the top-secret “My Strange New Mexico” lair, printed and delivered, of course, by a trained staff of flightless five-foot-tall owls.
One such letter, from someone calling himself Light Eye, read simply, “This video was made by Ted Loman. It’s not a UFO crash.”
Another—by Peter Gersten, former Director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS)—said, “Ted Loman produced the video on UFO crashes and created the opening scene of the skipping UFO.”
Ted Loman is a well-known UFO researcher. In 1973, Loman became convinced he needed to travel to a certain mountain in Baja, Mexico, where aliens were going to land, pick him up, and take him back to his home planet. His family forced him to go to a psychiatrist instead, and for the most part he filed the incident away in his mind for around seventeen years. Then, in 1989, he suffered a severe injury while melting silver in a laboratory—an injury that cost him his sight in his left eye, forced him to don a pirate-style eye patch, and gave his father the opportunity to read to him about UFOs and their supposed role in the universe. In 1991, Loman began hosting and producing a weekly cable access show in Tucson, Arizona, UFOAZ Talks, a live one-hour show that examined the reported presence of UFOs in the West.
In 1997, the show changed its name to Off the Record, and broadened its focus to include alternative medicine and ancient mysteries. Also in 1997, Loman interviewed a group known as “Total Overcomers, One Step Beyond Human”—or, as the world would soon come to know them, the Heaven’s Gate cult. When thirty-eight members of that cult committed mass suicide sometime later, believing their souls would soon be ascending into space to join Jesus Christ on a spaceship hidden behind the then-visible Comet Hale-Bopp, Loman and his footage of the cult became much in demand, appearing on shows ranging from Geraldo! to Larry King Live. In 1997, the show—by then widely syndicated—changed its name to Off the Record, and in 2002, Off the Record went off the air. Loman moved to northern Idaho, and there he finished work on a documentary about UFO crashes entitled It Fell From the Sky. The footage of the White Sands appeared as the opening scene of that hard-to-find 2000 documentary.
Loman is currently on vacation in Mexico, and unavailable for comment, but Peter Gersten—who served with Loman on CAUS’s board of directors—said, “The only thing that isn’t real about [It Fell From the Sky] is that opening scene. That is not real. …I don’t remember if it was actually CGI or some sort of computer enhancement.”
In an undated online clip from UFO Connections, a Sacramento, California cable access show, Loman played the video of the crash as if it were something new, claiming he didn’t know when it was made and saying the footage had not been professionally analyzed.
Of the film, he said, “That came to me through Jaime Maussan. Right. And, uh, uh, I don’t know where Jaime got it. Well, I just don’t know where—it’s best to say I don’t know where Jaime got this. But, I, uh, I believe it to be at White Sands. But I cannot, and I will not, confirm or deny that it is, uh, I’ll leave it up to the viewers to, to, see it and watch it, and decide for themselves.”
This was followed by a cryptic and somewhat evasive exchange between Loman and Cynthia Siegel, the show’s host.
Siegel: “But if you thought it was a complete piece of junk you would not have brought it to the show.”
Loman: “It’s not…whatever it is, it’s fascinating.”
Siegel: “It is fascinating. The question is whether it’s actually a UFO.”
Loman: “No, I never raised that question.”
Siegel: “No?”
“I can tell you that [Loman] would not have made the film up as a visual aid for the show,” Jilaen Sherwood, an artist who has worked with Loman, said. “I do know Ted very well and if he mentioned on the show that he got this footage from Jaime, then he probably did.”
This, unfortunately, hardly improves the film’s credibility. Jaime Maussan is a popular Mexican television host, the self-proclaimed “Mike Wallace of Mexico,” with a reputation as an overeager and perhaps recklessly naive promoter of notorious UFO hoaxes. Many of the videos featured on his website are the sort of alleged UFO footage that almost anyone with a trash can lid and a camcorder could film, though others remain intriguing. He has promoted a joke filmed by the Sci-Fi Channel as an actual sighting, promoted the idea of Comet Hale-Bopp hiding giant UFOs intent on evacuating the planet, repeatedly cited nonexistent evidence for numerous cases, and, for what it's worth, has been included in UFOWatchdog.com’s UFO Hall of Shame.
The film of the White Sands crash evidently came from either Maussan—the man who has inspired such online headlines as “Jaime Maussan: Damaging Serious UFOlogy One Hoax at a Time”—or it was made by Ted Loman for his documentary.
The absolute truth still remains to be learned, but—unless Loman tries and succeeds at a little interstellar hitchhiking while in Mexico—the truth will come out eventually, and the record will at last be set straight.
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It seems Ted Loman did not make this video after all. Check out "UFOs Will Crash, Part III" for more information, just by clicking right here.
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Reader Comments (7)
If you, or anyone you know, has additional information about this video, I would love to hear from you at mike@mystrangenewmexico.com.
i am a computer graphics tech, and the first thing we did with it in 1997 was to take every 5th frame and composite the whole scene up as best we could in photoshop. (we had to guesstimate the trajectory between a couple of power poles where there was no ground to use as a reference point) it was clear that the whole thing was shot on a tripod as the camera pans right to left, but the camera's attitude is always perpendicular to the ground.
at the time i was doing a bit of stereoscopic 3D computer work, so had some LCD shutter glasses and a box which you connected to a tv, to separate out the two fields of a frame of video into a stereoscopic image. (wiki that it u dont understand how a frame of video can contain 2 interlaced images)
noting that the camera pan was reasonably steady, i thought well there are 450 - 500 similar, but always slightly different persperctives.
so i first 'image steadied' the footage so the ufo was always center of screen, and doubled the duration so i had frames consisting of 1 field only ... then i took two frames (maybe one or two frames apart) and reinterlaced them, thus creating a video of stereoscopic images...
the video was noisy vhs, but when converted to a stereoscopic movie, it is quite clear the ufo is spinning around and around on its own axis (not a cruise missile), clips the ground along a small portion of its circumference, and dust clouds appeared to travel towards the direction of the camera, then it recovers, until it crashs again and explodes.
this was over ten years ago, and the tapes i had a long since gone, but i do recall the stereoscopic version was very convincing, and it was put on a tv program here in new zealand, hosted by a local investigator called ian wishart.
i think i still have the photoshop composite on cd somewhere and some of the image steady footage as mpeg1s, but dont have the betaSP tape with the stereoscopic footage
anyway my analysis convinced me 'cause i could see heaps more of the scene sterescopically that the 2D version ... just lucky the camera was panning as it was to provide so many perspectives, and made making the stereoscopic version possible
hi from new zealand
ANT :-)
I can't wait to write Part III.
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No, no audio, what I mean by 'noisy' is the picture isnt that clear (compared to professional video tape), and vhs is quite low resolution, but it does have a lot of frames per second, so it records lots of images ... In some ways it is better than today's mpeg's or dvd's as on analogue video tape each frame is recorded, in most digital formats, only one real frame is recorded every 0.5 seconds, the computer algorithm that encodes the video footage "makes up" the 11 (pal) - 14 (ntsc) inbetween frames.
(A good example of this is when you look at the footage of the first plane hitting wtc on 911 taken by the two french brothers who were shooting the documenatary on life as a nyc firefighter ... If you single frame step through the dvd it looks like the aeroplane melts into the building.)
The dust clouds are almost invisible in the 2d version, and appear to look like random noise, but when viewed in the 'stereoscopic version', their direction is clearly visible, as is the craft's rotation.
2. Do you have any recollection of what Ian Wishart's TV program was called? I'm having trouble finding it on the Web...though there's quite a bit about him.
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REAL TV, broadcast 1998... I was living in taiwan when it was aired on new zealand tv, but when I came back to n.z. a saw the episode on a vhs tape a friend has ... If my friend can locate it in his vhs library, I could encode it to mpeg
3. Any chance of turning up that Photoshop composite or those image steady mpeg1s?
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have emailed you where to find them, but no stereoscopic version ... In those days video capable hard drives were expensive (us$1000 for 4gb)... We recorded all cg animations we used to make onto a video hard drive recorder, and when the drive was full we wiped the hard drive .. It was archived to pal betaSP, but recall the tape didn’t quite have the clarity of the original version stored on hard drive, and havent seen those tapes for over 7 years .. It could be recreated from a nice version of the footage though, but you still need the lcd shutter glasses and video sync separater box (which drives the glasses) to view it ... At the time I did make a red/cyan version, but it was nowhere as clear as the colour / sterescopic / interlaced version
4. With all the scrutiny you gave this footage, did you ever notice anything that would have suggested that the video had been modified or tampered with? Any traces of CGI, et cetera
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Only the fade in from white which was done from jaime maussen's tv program "3rd millenium"
The idea of converting things to a stereoscopic format is to see if the ufo pops in and out of "z" space ... ie does it look like it was originally in that environment, or has it been composited in ... If it where, the stereoscopic version would not have been so convincing ... It appeared to be in the correct place, perspective, acting orrectly when viewed stereoscopically in 3d space, etc, not behaving falsely. It would have been quite tricky to do in those days, and not many people where doing 3d cg then
Dear Mr Good, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you like this but there is something that has been on my mind for sometime now. Round about 1998 I believe you were on the “Breakfast show on I T V “, you were being interviewed by Fiona, some Scotsman and the resident psychiatrist. In that interview you commented on a video of an alleged UFO crashing in the desert somewhere, I believe that it was an anonymous person who had put it in the public domain. I had to take my daughter to work that morning so I asked my wife to record the interview, however on viewing it later I was a bit disappointed as to what was on the video. The video didn’t seem to have anything outstanding on it and I was about to erase it when for some reason I thought I would take a second look. However on viewing it I couldn’t see anything of note, my opinion was that it was an artillery shell and having been in the army had fired and seen many shells fired on the ranges where we practiced. Strangely to my own surprise and annoyance I found myself rewinding the tape a number of times, I can’t explain what made me do it as it didn’t seem of any interest to me. The video recorder was quite a good one it had four heads, slow motion and stop frame. I then thought that I would freeze the frame and take a closer look at the screen, what I saw made my jaw drop, under the image was a little triangular shaped light. At about this time I had also realised that it wasn’t an artillery shell as the curve was a downward curve, I lost count after that how many times I replayed the tape backwards and forwards. However there was an even bigger surprise to come at the end of the video, the bit after the final crash where the craft is disintegrating into a mass of sparks, there appeared to be something going on. What I discovered was that this bit at the end was in fact the beginning of the clip, and was equally as long as the bit that was shown as the main part. I first thought that some I T V technician hadn’t got it quite right and had screened it from the middle, I had been intending to write and ask you if this was right; but I never did. Since then I have seen this video on the web and they only show it from the middle and the back bit has been clipped off.
The main piece that is now missing from that clip showed what the cameraman saw, this was what I remember from viewing it many times. The first few frames seemed to have nothing on them, then a circular object came into view and appeared to be falling out of control and in a vertical dive. The craft then turns on its axis gradually until it gets to the first or second frame of the video, that video seems to be accepted as the real thing but is only the second half of the whole video. It seems that someone has cut the video in half and transposed them, maybe intentionally or accidentally. However I timed both clips as fifteen seconds long whereas the video on the web is eighteen seconds long.
If you are not sure what I am talking about here is the link and a couple of pictures which may jog your memory. By the way I forgot to tell you that I accidentally erased the clip that I first copied and was wondering how I might get hold of the original video.
May I say that until I saw this video clip I was a bit sceptical about UFO crashes, of course it may not be aliens, it might be the military testing some new craft.

http://infectiousvideos.com/index.php?p=showvid&a=playvid&sid=0287&sterm=
Dan Embleton.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alien+autopsy
I recently took a trip with a team of UFO experts (and a prominent UFO author) out to the site where that UFO (the one that alien was supposedly was recovered from) allegedly crashed, and while it was really interesting, I came away less than convinced that anything this side of sheep herding had ever happened there. That--known as the Cameraman's Crash Site--will for sure be a column one of these days, as it definitely deserves some attention, if only to investigate a bit more and set the record straight.
I have two rocks sitting near me in my office right now that have what's supposed to be melted silica on them from the flame vortex that the crashing UFO rode in on.
They look pretty cool, anyway, as did the alleged crash site, which is situated at the end of a sandstone canyon just as wide as the road that winds through it.