by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
On a rolling desert plain, shabby with yellow grass and sagebrush, a large, white, oval-shaped object falls through the sky at an estimated speed of 200 to 300 mph - bouncing and skidding across the desert before exploding into a shower of fiery debris. As if expecting it, a camera captures the entire event - panning smoothly to the left along the course of the crashing object, carefully framing its every motion - and the footage sweeps across the Internet.
The majority of people familiar with this video believe it to have been filmed around southern New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range in early 1997, and many believe it to be the first recorded footage of an extraterrestrial UFO crash.
In this column's previous installment, it was learned that perhaps one of the first people to show this video to the public was a well-known UFO enthusiast and TV personality named Ted Loman. A friend of Loman, Peter Gersten, claimed Loman may have manufactured the video to aid a documentary. At the time, Loman was unavailable for comment, but an online video clip showed him saying that he had gotten the clip from Mexican UFOlogist Jaime Maussan.
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Recently, I spoke with Loman from his home in northern Idaho.
"Peter G. is a close friend, and not knowing where I got the infamous lead-in video, thought I had (created it using) computer graphics," Loman said. "Not true. At first, I thought it was a flying saucer ... but now I think it isn't of a UFO. It's a missile being tested. It was almost as if it was staged. Someone had to know where to put the camera at the right time ... But I don't even care if it was a missile. It looked provocative."
Loman recalls that even the copy of the video he first saw almost 10 years ago seemed to have been a copy of a copy of something that had originally been shot on film.
"I got it from Jaime (Maussan) in the late 1990s," Loman said. "I don't even remember where he said he got it from. He was kind of secretive about where he got it. Very hush-hush."
More than one UFO Web site has said this video first premiered at the Australian International UFO Symposium of 1997. Glennys MacKay, the organizer of the symposium, confirmed this and said the film was submitted to them by author Jonathan Eisen of Auckland, New Zealand. Eisen recalled first showing the video to keynote a UFO symposium that he held in Auckland in 1997. He took the video to the Australian UFO Symposium, and later that year it was shown on television in Australia, England and New Zealand.
"I received the crash video from Jaime upon his arrival in New Zealand," Eisen said. "(Maussan) said at the time that it arrived anonymously at his desk in Mexico City, and he never found out who did it."
And then there's Monte Marlin. Marlin represents White Sands Missile Range's Public Affairs Office, and recently said, "Our optics branch identifies (this video) as an infrared shot of a Navy missile test ... I do not have any specific information on this test or its date. I am fairly confident that it is from White Sands."
At this point, it seems safe to conclude that this video shows something being officially tested at White Sands - maybe some sort of top-secret missile - but certainly something that was expected, something that eventually made its way to Maussan, who then began promoting it, perhaps a bit dishonestly, perhaps just prematurely, as the crash of an extraterrestrial craft. Maussan has remained unavailable for comment, but no matter what he might have to say on the matter, far too much contradictory information exists surrounding this enigmatic video to draw any final conclusions. And maybe that's all right. Maybe the mystery is more interesting than the truth. Maybe we should just enjoy this video for all the possibilities it implies.
Mike Smith is a UNM history student and the author of Towns of the Sandia Mountains. Suggest ideas for future "My Strange New Mexico" columns at AntarcticSuburbs@yahoo.com
View this video online at MyStrangeNewMexico.com,
and draw your own
conclusions.
