My 20 Years in the UFO Fog

After discussions with my wife I decided to address the following here on The Paracast. Now that Gene and David made a sub-forum available to me to host my past radio programs, thought this would be an excellent spot to make much in my files available.

If you are new here, not to mention new to UFO research, you may not be too familiar with that guy Don Ecker who posts here. If you have heard the interviews that Gene and David conducted with me in the past, or even heard any of my shows in the past then you know that at one point I was involved in UFO research with UFO Magazine. Not the UFO Magazine you see today, but when I was the Director of Research and my wife, the former Vicki Cooper was Founder and Co-Publisher along with Sheri Stark. Sheri was our former business partner and long time friend of Vicki.

For 20 years Vicki and I were at the center of the vortex that was UFO research. Even today you can still find our footprints all over the web. We had a lot of support then as well as many detractors. The detractors often complained that we simply “didn’t see the truth” of a certain case, person, incident, what have you. The detractors often claimed that we must be paid government operatives, that I myself was CIA, the CIA started UFO, all that kind of crap. I got to the point that I enjoyed hearing that because it was so funny. But, did we make any inroads into UFO research? Well, if you ask me I will tell you “Damn right we did, and you can take that to the bank!” For example ….

UFO Magazine was the first to break NORAD’s tracking of Fastwalkers.
UFO Magazine broke stories of Soviet space encounters all the way back in Issue 01.
UFO Magazine was the FIRST to provide exposes of the charlatans then in the field. People like Bill Cooper, Guy Kirkwood, George Green, etc. with stories backed up with documents, testimony, photographs, you name it. My wife Vicki was a trained journalist, I was a medically retired criminal investigator. You figure it out.
UFO Magazine on national television broke the story of STS 48, the space shuttle mission that encountered UFOs in orbit and what appeared to be weapons firing at the unknowns. (As an aside, the day after I appeared on Larry King Live debating NASA contract scientist Jim Oberg NASA encrypted the live feed from space. I was told by someone in the know that I had personally upset and pissed off the Dept. of Defense by my appearance on CNN)
UFO Magazine broke the story of the former Soviet Phobos 2 probe to Mars and the probes destruction by a HUGE unknown in Mars orbit, along with getting the very last photograph from the Russians showing the unknown.
Hell, I could go on and on but some of you think I might just be blowing Vicki and my horn. Well, YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT I AM.

With all those years in the research field and all the cases I dealt with and all the tough times Vicki and I endured trying to keep the magazine, OUR BABY, viable we finally had to take business partners or fold up shop in late 1997. Immediately the direction of the magazine changed and there was not one damn thing we could do about it. The buyers were in the entertainment arena and their primary goal was to make a buck at it. Not a bad plan in hindsight, hell we never really made a buck, but as a result the magazine, in my opinion, began its downward slide. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we had some kick ass issues but overall I was not happy.

After roughly 5 years those guys decided they were loosing money and closed up shop. They never wanted to hear anything Vicki and I had to say, and I mean nothing but they gave us a chance to continue publishing if we wished. They gave the rights to publish the magazine over to Bill Birnes, his wife Nancy, Vicki and I. There was one more guy but he bailed.

My standards never changed, there were many times we butted heads over articles, stories and so on. Vicki got to the point that she was simply tired of it all and allowed Nancy to take over the reins of chief editor. There was even one time that Nancy told Vicki that she had been bad at the editing job, and that pissed me off. I was another bone of contention. I butted heads with Nancy, and I will not go into that except to say I finally had my fill of it. To paraphrase Gray Barker, at that time I felt exactly like Barker in that “UFOs are a bucket of shit.”

In about November of 2006 I decided to bow out of the field. I began writing the following paper, my goodbye letter to the wonderful world of UFO research. You may have heard of it but not read it so here it is. It is in PDF format and if you like you may read it online or download it to your computer for later reading. It is a sketch of the last 20 years of the UFO field AS I SAW IT.

I would not be honest if I didn’t tell you I took heat after I released this. UFO Magazine had a lawyer send me a letter warning me about talking out of school. People on the web that read it criticized me for all kinds of things. “Oh, its all about Ecker, Ecker must think that having actors for friends is necessary for UFO research, Ecker is negative, etc. etc. “ad nauseam.” Well Gang, the name of this paper is “My 20 Years in the UFO Fog”, this is MY story, or my CAREER in the UFO field. This was MY JOURNEY and I decided to let you in on it. If you don’t like it, well for God’s sake DON’T FREAKEN’ READ IT. You won’t be able to say that I never warned you. And … now on with the show ….

http://www.theparacast.com/darkmatters/20YearsUFOFog.pdf

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