Bob White
From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project
Contents |
Biography
Bob White is known worldwide as the only UFO witness to recover physical evidence of a craft and pass conclusive polygraph tests. He is the author of UFO Hard Evidence (Galde Press 2004), and the former director of the Museum of the Unexplained. http://ufoevidence.conforums.com/index.cgi White first came forward with his UFO claims following his retirement in 1996.
White was referred to the National Institute for Discovery Science (N.I.D.S.) by the UFO organization MUFON's researcher, Dr. John Carpenter. In 1996, White sent a piece of his UFO debris to N.I.D.S. who employed the lab at New Mexico Tech to conduct a metallurgical analysis. The scope of this analysis was limited, as explained to White by the New Mexico Tech scientist following it's completion. This analysis is included in White's book, UFO Hard Evidence.
Cosgrove-Meurer, producers of the popular 1990's television show Unsolved Mysteries, flew White to the infamous Los Alamos National Labs in late 1996 for testing. This analysis was first published in White's book. This analysis is highly controversial as the labs preferred test to determine the nature of White's UFO fragment would have always shown negative results. White claims that Los Alamos kept a piece of his UFO object. Differences in the Los Alamos and New Mexico Tech analyses prompted additional scientific testing in the late 1990's. (See White's book)
White made a sworn statement about the events of his UFO encounter and passed a conclusive polygraph test, given by a police polygrapher in 1998.
Following White's lecture at the Rocky Mountain UFO Conference in 2000, White was made aware of recently declassified Top Secret Army documents that appeared to show an object identical to White's in a 1940's file named "Flying Saucers from Denmark."
White received media recognition from newspapers (Gannet), paranormal radio shows, and television (Extra, regional news shows), and by 2000 had launched the Museum of the Unexplained in Reeds Spring, MO.
The Museum and White were featured in nationwide media (Fox News Network, Associated Press and others) following White's announcement that he would sell his UFO object for $10,000,000.
The Museum staff initiated more scientific testing (See White's book) including announcing claims that the object had exposed x-ray film and may be omitting electro-magnetic field energy. An announcement was made by the Museum in 2003 that Isotopic Abundance Ratio tests used to determine extra-terrestrial origin fall within the ranges of two established Martian Meteorites.
in 2004, White's story was the season opener in the UK television show Jane Goldman Investigates. The show hired a Colorado State Patrol polygraph officer who administered White's second polygraph and detected no deception.
White and his team of researchers and scientists have revisited the area of White's encounter several times and are including the scientific testing and interviews in their own video documentary.
A lighter moment occurred when White and a Museum staff member appeared on the Judge Joe Brown show to settle a lawsuit. Complete with the UFO Object and photos of the Museum's UFO Bus, Brown proclaims to White at show's end; "Hell, I don't know, you may be right."
The 2005 History Channel program "UFO Hunters" opened with a recreation of White's encounter and a focus on the Army documents and White's visit inside Los Alamos National Labs. This was the first time the documents and video of the Los Alamos visit aired on national television.
White now does interviews, lectures, and travels to promote his book UFO Hard Evidence.
http://photobucket.com/albums/v33/larryroyc/bob%20white%20object%20evidence/bob_white_object.jpg
Misc. Press Articles
Man finds tough sell for his "UFO discovery"
REEDS SPRING, Mo. - Bob White is convinced his story deserves a grand stage, that his most prized possession should be displayed before a national audience. It should draw tourists from all over the country, he figures, and be a major attraction for people who want to see an artifact that White swears was retrieved from a UFO in 1985. Instead, White's find is in tiny Reeds Spring in southwestern Missouri, secured in a locked display case at Museum of the Unexplained, a converted video-rental store that, during a recent morning, went more than three hours without a customer.
White can't figure it out.
All he wants to do is find some believers. He wants people to quit snickering and looking at him as if he's crazy. He wants them to listen to his story, to take a hard look at his metallic artifact, to give him a chance.
"This," White said, "is the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life."
The odds are stacked against him. He and his partner at the museum, Robert Gibbons, have been rejected and ridiculed. White estimates he has spent more than $60,000 traveling to conferences, starting the museum, having the artifact tested and retested. And yet he forges on.
"I'm 73 years old," White said. "I don't have much longer.
"What I'd like to see before I'm gone is the national media get their heads out of their ... " White paused, choosing his words carefully, "out of the sand. I'd like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real."
Scientists theorize that the "UFO" lights that White said he encountered could have been nothing more than a meteorite, that his artifact could be space debris. Some scientists who have tested the object said there was nothing extraterrestrial about it.
Ask White whether he believed in unidentified flying objects prior to 1985, and he scrunches up his nose.
"Never," he said. "Not a bit. I was the biggest skeptic in the world."
That all changed overnight. Here's how he remembers it:
White and a friend were driving from Denver to Las Vegas on a desolate highway near the Colorado-Utah border. It was 2 or 3 a.m., he said, and White was sleeping in the passenger seat. At one point, his friend woke him up and pointed out a strange light in the distance. White didn't think much of it and went back to sleep.
Then his friend woke him up again. This time, White said, the lights were blinding.
He got out of the car and stared, dumbfounded. The object was about 100 yards in front of him, he said, "and it was huge ... absolutely huge."
In time, he said, the lights bolted toward the sky and connected with a pair of neon, tubular lights, "the mother ship," White guesses now. And just like that, he said, the entire contraption zipped eastward through the Colorado sky and disappeared.
"What I saw," White said, "was not of this Earth."
As the craft flew away, White said, he noticed an orange light falling to the ground. A locator probe? Something that simply broke off? It was red hot when he reached it, he said, but in time it cooled enough to pick up. White shoved the object into the trunk of the car.
The object is about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like a teardrop. It has a coarse, metallic exterior and weighs less than 2 pounds. It looks a bit like it could be a petrified pine cone and is composed primarily of aluminum.
White has had the item tested several times, hoping for some answers.
The Nevada-based National Institute for Discovery Science in 1996 sent a sample of the object to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
"The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane," said Colm Kelleher, a scientist at the National Institute for Discovery Science.
"We didn't find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial. Now you can make the argument that we didn't spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn't cover every base."
Another scientist who tested it at a California laboratory and who asked that his name and that of the laboratory not be used said, "It didn't show any extraterrestrial signature."
Sgt. Gary Carpenter, who works at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., said it was not uncommon for NORAD to get calls about strange lights and unidentified objects. Not once, he said, has the object been identified as an alien spacecraft.
"Usually it turns out to be space debris from a satellite that's decaying, or it's in the realm of naturally occurring, celestial lights," he said. "It could be something like a falling star. It could be contrails, the things you would see trailing an aircraft."
White opened the Museum of the Unexplained with visions of turning it into a destination. He wasn't looking to get rich, according to the Missouri secretary of state's office, the museum was registered as a nonprofit organization in August 2000, but he hoped to spread the word about his experience.
The museum, about 13 miles north of the glitzy Branson strip, might as well be in another world. There are no neon signs pointing the way, no twinkling lights outside the front door. Rather, it's sandwiched between the Humane Society thrift shop and the Sunrise Cafe on Main Street.
It has struggled, unable to tap into the Branson spinoff crowd and secure a niche audience of its own. Only 2,800 people went through the doors that first year, when admission was free, and the museum hasn't been able to replicate those numbers since.
These days, patrons age 12 and older pay $5 to stroll through about 2,000 square feet of space. Exhibits include a keyboard from the movie "Men in Black II" in which the shift key doesn't capitalize or decapitalize but translates from English to an alien language. Other exhibits are little more than newspaper articles or passages from the Internet affixed to the wall with thumb tacks.
The focal point is White's artifact, and he takes no chances with its safety. Motion detectors, closed-circuit TV and window and door alarms protect it at all times. White packs it up in a gun case every day at 5 p.m., and the object never spends the night at the same place two nights in a row. You can never be too sure, he figures, even in a town with just 465 residents.
"I'm happy for them that they're having a good time, but I guess I'm just not into that kind of thing," said Kacee Cashman, the Reeds Spring city clerk since 1998. "I really think they've been accepted, but everybody's kind of taking it with a grain of salt."
Said White, "I don't know what I have to do to prove this is the truth. You can't make this stuff up."
source: The Seattle Times By Steve Rock Knight Ridder Newspapers
Discuss Bob White:
MUSEUM OF THE UNEXPLAINED TEST RESULTS
MATCH EXTRATERRESTRIAL FINDINGS FROM MARS ARTIFACTS DID BOB WHITE'S UFO OBJECT COME FROM MARS? ORIGIN MAY HAVE BEEN FOUND FOR RECOVERED UFO MATERIAL
Original headline: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2003/9/prweb81709.php
Researchers and scientists at the Museum of the Unexplained are excited about startling new revelations about Bob White's mysterious "object" recovered from a UFO encounter in 1985 near Grand Junction, CO.
Bob's object has been tested at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico Tech, and at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, Ca.
Dr. Robert Gibbons, former scientist with NASA, and current Executive Director of the Museum, made this statement. "We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob's object with the planet Mars.
Isotope abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May, 1999 in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the QUE 94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for Bob's object was 0.712. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found India in 1865 was 0.723. Bob's object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites!"
The Martian meteorite data came from a scientific paper published on the website of the Planetary Science Research Discoveries, an educational website supported by NASA's Office of Space Sciences and by the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium.
Dr. Gibbons is calling for more scientific tests on the Bob White object to prove its origin once and for all.
Bob White still is "out there" regarding visitors from other planets. And I mean that in a good way. Since I wrote about the Branson West resident seven years ago, White, 74, has attracted attention around this planet with an odd chunk of metal he says came from a brilliantly glowing, astonishingly fast "unidentified flying object."
White displayed the carrot-shaped curiosity he jokingly calls "space doo-doo" in a storefront museum in Reeds Spring from 2000 to 2004. Nowadays he takes it on tour in a 42-foot-long former city bus.
White has submitted the strange souvenir for analysis at eight laboratories, and he's passed two lie-detector tests. He has been interviewed on several radio programs, and last year was featured on the British TV show "Jane Goldman Investigates."
Most recently, White caught the attention of American cable TV's History Channel, which will focus on White and his mysterious metallic glob in a segment of its "UFO Files" series scheduled to show at 7 p.m. Monday.
When the History Channel crew arrived at his Stone County home two months ago, "my neighbors saw the three vans and the cameras, and they thought I'd won a million dollars from that (Publishers) Clearing House thing," White recalls with a chuckle.
White's UFO encounter occurred one night in the early 1980s, when he still was on the road as a musician. He and a friend were driving near Grand Junction, Colo., when they saw a glowing orb alongside a remote highway.
White says that when he tried to approach the bizarre light, it zoomed skyward and melded with a larger UFO, then disappeared — but not before something fell off and plummeted in a fireball.
White says he retrieved the blob of metal but kept it to himself for a dozen years because he "didn't want to be ridiculed as some 'flying saucer nut.'"
Eventually, however, he decided to go public with what he feels is a piece of "hard evidence" that proves UFOs aren't all mere optical illusions or the product of hucksters.
In his first-ever interview in 1998, White told me he hoped that if enough people became aware of his find, scientific experts and government agencies would be forced to seriously investigate UFOs — or reveal secrets already known about alien spacecraft.
That hasn't happened. But White isn't discouraged. This week's History Channel show is a sign of public interest, he believes. And he recently learned that his may not be the only known example of "hard evidence."
"They found an object that looks just like mine in Denmark back in the 1940s," White says. "We got a government report that had been 'classified' for years. On the cover are the words 'Recovered from flying saucer in Denmark.' Inside are photos of the thing — and it looks exactly like mine."
That would be remarkable because the metal object that White usually keeps locked in a local bank vault is extraordinary in its appearance.
The conical curiosity started out about 10 inches long, but has lost a half-inch due to whittling for lab samples. It is almost three inches in diameter at the large end, and tapers to about a half-inch on the small end. It weighs 1.5 pounds.
The most unusual aspect of the object to the casual observer is its surface texture. It appears almost organic, like petrified tree bark or neatly layered bird feathers.
Scientific observers find unusual properties as well, according to White. Lab analyses have revealed the object to be of uncommon composition. White says he is particularly intrigued by test results showing his object has "strontium isotope abundance ratios" that match properties of meteorites recovered in India and Antarctica.
White details all this and more in a new 125-page book titled "UFO Hard Evidence," available from the publisher (www.galdepress.com) or White's Web site (www.ufohardevidence.com).
Accompanied by neighbor Larry Cekander, White plans to head westward soon for a nine-month tour in the mobile museum to show off his "space doo-doo." He figures the History Channel exposure will bring invitations to park the bus in prominent spots likely to attract crowds.
"I'm not trying to get rich off this thing," White insists. He wants admission to the mobile museum to be free, and is counting on sales of the book and T-shirts to keep the bus rolling.
"Honest and truly," White emphasizes, "all I'm trying to do is encourage people who believe they've actually seen UFOs to come forward. A lot of them are reluctant because the government and the military and some so-called experts have declared them to be nuts.
"Well, I saw a UFO, and I know I'm not a nut because a piece of it came off and I have it. I don't know for sure exactly what it is, but I do know it's real. You can see it; you can touch it.
"So if enough people demand that some legitimate authority determine the origin of this object, and if it's proven to be extraterrestrial, then I predict people will be coming out of the woodwork telling about UFOs they've seen but been afraid to talk about.
"Nobody wants to be alone in claiming they've seen a UFO. I've been there, done that, and it's no fun," White says.
"But maybe now we have the key to prove, once and for all, that UFOs or flying saucers or whatever you want to call them really are out there."
E-mail former News-Leader associate editor Mike O'Brien via obriencolumn@sbc global.net.
http://www.bahraintribune.com/ArticleDetail.asp?CategoryId=7&ArticleId=35867
