Business tycoon and billionaire Robert T. Bigelow who recently gave funding to the Mutual UFO Network and other projects that hope to propel the human race into the future has come under fire in the UFO community after making comments in an interview with the New York Times about alien hostility and fatality of humans in the light of their encounters with UFOs. The entrepreneurial businessman was doing a piece on his funding of a program to put up inflatable habitation modules to begin sending civilians into space when he made his comment.
“I’ve been a researcher and student of U.F.O’s for many, many years,” he said at one point during an interview with New York Times Reporters while outlining his plan, its history, and his long time interest in unidentified flying objects, “Anybody that does research, if people bother to do quality research, come away absolutely convinced. You don’t have to have personal encounters.” The first statement was mainstream enough. Many people either believe or have personal evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial presence and this is slowly making its way into the media’s mainstream. The most troubling claim that would send many UFO researchers into questioning his facts would come next when he said, “People have been killed. People have been hurt. It’s more than observational kind of data.” Rather than taking the opportunity to follow up on Bigelow’s claim by asking who has been killed or hurt, reporters glazed over the topic essentially saying that a lot of people believe in a lot of things with or without evidence. This single act has created a rift in the UFO community as research is not always a uniformed task where everyone learns everything all at once. In fact many UFO researchers focus on cases in their own countries and may miss out on the claims of other countries.
In an effort to mend this rift, Mr. Bigelow’s claim was not out of the blue nor was it out of character for someone attempting to put the appropriate light on the subject. The claim, “People have been killed is actually true in at least one case where on January 7, 1948 Captain Thomas Mantell lost his life while chasing an unidentified flying object moving at incredible speeds. Abel Boro was killed by a mysterious light from a craft that chased him and several other deer hunters in South America. And the list of injuries is too long to even begin to describe.
The most interesting aspect of this story, however, is not the rift between UFO researchers, but rather that a UFO researcher could be more skeptical of a high profile investigator than the New York Times merely because he is a billionaire even as editorial columns can criticize less affluent individuals when they make less dramatic claims. It seems in this case that the truth matters less than its source. Still, Bigelow’s claim of UFO related fatalities and injuries is quite easy to confirm, though reporters would have done well to put them in context.