The current hoax "fairy tale," as Chris so succinctly described it, is silly enough without the information Ray brought to the show. I have to say I admire Ray's approach to "outing" Dr. Colgate's character issues. He just tells us straight up that he thinks some of Colgate's behavior is relevant, and proceeds to fill us in. If what Ray says about Colgate is true (and I have no reason at this point to doubt it), then he is an asshole and a creep. If he actually used the story about tying down a steam relief valve to recruit students, then he was promoting criminal activity in a very irresponsible way. People go to prison for such "pranks." It is unfortunate that such behavior from the president of such an institution in that place and time is all too believable.
Ray was citing information provided by John Shipmann, a student at NM Tech starting in 1966. Shipmann did a series of essays in the student newspaper in the 1980s, and the items about Colgate Ray cites are from this essay, reprinted on Shipmann's webpage:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/write/uproar.html
It should be pointed out that since the uproar about Colgate and Socorro began, Shipman notes that Colgate contacted him and totally denies the story about tying down the steam relief valve. Instead, he says, he bypassed the thermostat control to heat the pool. Shipman says he must have misremembered Colgate's recruiting speech at his high school--could very well be. The original story did seem a bit suspect.
The story about Colgate calling their smoke ring generator with a hundred foot plastic tube PBC, for Paul Bunyon's Condom, seems pretty innocuous. A little risque perhaps, but not much.
However, the story that does creep me out, which Shipman hasn't retracted, is the following: "With a male-female ratio of six to one, there was a lot of complaining about the lack of social life (read: sex). One night at the Capitol my friend Speckled Trout and I listened raptly as Colgate described his plan for a student-run bordello. He had all the logistics figured out. The Student Council would rent a house within walking distance of campus, and hire two female students. The charge would be ten bucks a throw, with a small rake-off to pay off the authorities and the rest split fifty-fifty with the Student Council. Was he serious? I'll never know."
If he was serious, he was proposing criminal activity, prostitution and bribery of officials to look the other way. If he wasn't serious, he is indeed an asshole and a creep. I might expect pimply-faced college freshmen in the dorm to joke that way, but the college president? At best, he has an extremely strange sense of humor that does call into question his character (again assuming the story is true).
It's also interesting that Colgate was claiming the sighting was a hoax immediately after it happened.
This was the most relevant thing about Colgate directly related to Socorro. Also relevant is that Colgate (according to Ray) didn't say he actually knew it was a hoax, but only suspected it, because he knew that aliens visiting Earth was impossible. Further, he believed that only Tech students would be smart enough to pull it off. So again, no real knowledge, just opinions based on personal prejudice.
Of course any number of "officials" investigating the episode would have loved to have such a convenient explanation handed to them, and the fact that no one gave it any credence at the time tells us all we need to know about Bragalia's claim. As if we needed it. The idea of people like Hynek, Air Force officers, state police officers, the press, and any number of others somehow missing any evidence of a hoax is laughable. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in the desert knows there would be footprints everywhere. For weeks.
And why does anyone still talk about tests of Surveyor or the LEM? That is absurd in so many ways. The only testing of the LEM was done on the "Flying Bedstead," a malevolent contraption designed to give the astronauts some experience with the control behavior. It had zero range, and looked anything but egg shaped. The actual LEM was designed to *just barely* fly in 1/6 Earth's gravity and no atmosphere, so of course it could not be test flown on Earth.
Anyway, as many have said before, you have to assume Zamorra was an idiot, Hynek a fool, and a dozen other people were all drunk and delusional for any of Bragalia's nonsense to even begin to look plausible.
The part that pisses me off about this whole idiotic affair is the fact that people who don't know any of the facts will seize the "hoax explanation" uncritically and write off an event that remains a mystery. It's not hard to imagine that is the whole purpose of this charade.
I agree 100% with everything said here. "Solutions" like the lunar Surveyor or LEM or the "Flying Bedstead" are all complete nonsense. More problems with this baloney: not a single LEM had even been built yet, the only practice Bedstead was over at Edwards AFB a good 800 miles away, flew on a tether, and wasn't operational at the time anyway, and on and on.
It was really quite impossible for anybody to hoax the object Zamora observed or the physical evidence left behind that confirmed many aspects of Zamora's story. There were other witnesses as well. Nearly all would have to be liars, and as Hynek pointed out, Zamora, the Socorro police department, and the FBI would all have to be in on the hoax to make it work. The police and FBI combed the area immediately afterward looking for any evidence of a hoax, such as footprints of hoaxers or necessary equipment to pull it off, and never found a thing. If there was such evidence, they would have had to conceal it. Zamora would have had to lie about what he observed, and again, on and on.
These hoaxing scenarios were considered so near impossible, that even the debunking Air Force would or could not label it a hoax.
All this points to Colgate making up the whole hoax claim. There are some good things to mention about Colgate in his fields of actual expertise. In his nuclear monitoring activities for the AEC, he was asked to look into nuclear explosions in space. He discovered that a supernova explosion might be misconstrued as a nuclear attack by satellite sensors and trigger a nuclear war. Glad somebody caught that one. Hopefully the problem has since been rectified.
This led Colgate to explore what causes stars to explode in the first place, and came up with one of the early theoretical explanations of supernova. This turned out to be incomplete, but is incorporated into current more complete explanations.
David Rudiak
Yes - His emotionalism is definitely not an asset . . . If we all want the field to be taken seriously, he & others need to remember to put a lid on it when things get a little heated - especially when someone challenges them . . . I'm not saying that they need to drone on in a monotone - but they need to avoid sounding like they've just finished watching an episode of The Roadrunner Show . . . 
