Ed Gelb, polygrapher who 'acquitted' John and Patsy Ramsey, was key player in Travis Walton
The media never mentions the UFO connection.

6/9/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.

If you turned on a TV this week, or read a newspaper or tabloid, then you saw the spin-game in action as the Ramsey affair took a bizarre twist on the national stage. It is not so intriguing that JonBenet Ramsey's parents passed a private polygraph test regarding the 1996 murder. Nor that the media had a field day with the story - CNN and Establishment news shows tended to support the Ramseys, while Jay Leno played fire-snorting skeptic, and the National Enquirer played their game of "spin-the-buzz" with a headline: HOW JONBENET'S PARENTS PASSED LIE DETECTOR.

The bizarre part is that our dumbed-down media never came up with one of the most interesting angles about polygrapher Ed Gelb, which would have tossed a UFO spin into the mix. FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD has often been described as my personal search for THE TRUTH along Hollywood Boulevard, and the joke and wink, of course, is that TRUTH with a capital "T" always bounces, shrinks or stretches depending upon who is packaging and promoting it.

The story you probably heard was that the wealthy couple from Boulder, Colorado, who the tabloids attacked mercilessly for involvement in or cover-up of the murder of JonBenet, got a clean bill of health from Ed Gelb. He was not a government-affiliated polygrapher - not the FBI hiree that law enforcement would have liked to have handle the job. But Gelb is about as close to FBI as you can get without actually wearing a badge. The Ramseys made a strategic (and probably wise) decision to select Gelb to be the one to test them, given his excellent reputation as former head of the American Polygraph Association and the respect he is afforded by police departments throughout the land. The aim of the Ramseys seems to be to go on the offensive against their accusers and to try to quell any plans for a possible indictment that might be festering back in Colorado.

Now I'm well aware that the readership of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD is likely to be as divided about the issue of polygraphs as it is about everything ufological, conspiratorial, political, and cosmic. The naysayers will snap back that polygraphs are not admissible in courts of law for a good reason - because they are easy to fake. They'll quote books such as HOW TO STING THE POLYGRAPH, by Doug Williams, a detective sergeant in the Oklahoma City Police Department who claims polygraphs have only about 50 percent accuracy, so you'd might as well just flip a coin. Others still swear by polygraphs and think they're good as gold. Ed Gelb claims about a 95% accuracy rate for polygraphs.

Ed Gelb is a man I know and respect, and my personal opinion on polygraphs is much closer to Gelb's opinion than that of Williams. A surprise for FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD readers - I used to work for Ed Gelb. In fact, my very first job and credit as a Hollywood producer was on Ed Gelb's TV show, LIE DETECTOR. It wasn't Gelb's show alone. He shared the spotlight with none other than attorney, F. Lee Bailey, famous for the Patty Hearst case as well as for having been one of O. J. Simpson's "Dream Team" attorneys. I found working for the team of Bailey and Gelb to be an education of incalculable value. We shot about sixty half-hour shows of LIE DETECTOR before the show died a cruel, but not unusual, ratings death. Each show had between one and three guests. People would come on the nationally syndicated TV show wanting to prove they were telling the truth about something important. Sometimes it was people accused of having committed a crime, and they claimed to be innocent. Usually the polygraph reinforced their guilt, but very occasionally we found indication of a miscarriage of justice. Other times it was people who had an unbelievable story, and they wanted to show that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. One of the most interesting and popular segments I produced involved psychic detective Dorothy Allison, who passed away very recently, but whose book on how she solved many crimes by psychic means has attained cult classic status.

An unusual synchronicity about this tale is the fact that the Los Angeles Times ran the following story this week about the Ramseys and psychic Dorothy Allison - RAMSEYS PUT SKETCH OF A SUSPECT ON WEB. The story states, "John and Patsy Ramsey have posted a psychic's composite sketch of a suspect in their daughter's murder on their Internet site. The sketch is based on the work of the late psychic Dorothy Allison, who claimed to have assisted police investigations. Allison, who died last year, came up with her vision of the suspect during a 1998 appearance on a network television show."

It was both surprising and interesting that the Ramseys selected one of our former LIE DETECTOR guests to be their psychic detective. It's unlikely Gelb referred them to Allison, as the Ramsey's association with Allison was two years prior to Gelb administering their polygraph. However, note that when Dorothy Allison appeared in the segment of LIE DETECTOR which I produced, she was found to be truthful. She sincerely believed she solved her most famous case by "psychic detective" techniques, and had not exercised any deception by hiding any "inside information" that could have been given to her in a conventional way. (I highly recommend a book written about her, THE DOROTHY ALLISON STORY).

Ed Gelb administered a polygraph on camera to each person who came on the show. We pre-screened the subjects, so Gelb and Bailey could determine that we would probably get clean answers on the air, meaning a firm "true" or "false," rather than the gray zone of "inconclusive." Pre-screening also gave the benefit of additional certainty about the results, since each subject was essentially tested twice. I learned during that year or so of TV segment producing that Ed Gelb was a master at the polygraph. He could explain the charts brilliantly, and there were always complexities and subtleties that you needed to be highly trained to understand. Many times the results on the TV show would surprise me. I would get to know a guest I had brought in to be on the show, I'd size up the person's story, and I'd form my own personal opinion of whether the guest was "Honest John" or a B.S. artist. It was surprising to me the number of times my guess proved wrong. Often our instincts about someone's truthfulness are flatly contradicted by the polygraph. It's also a fact that the polygraph is much more likely to show an "inconclusive" result than it is to show a truthful person as a liar or a liar as "Honest John."

Now for the UFO connection
It so happens that Ed Gelb was called in after Travis Walton claimed he was abducted from a forest in Snowflake, Arizona, by space aliens and kept for five days aboard their spaceship before being returned to Earth. There were five witnesses to Travis Walton being beamed aboard an alien craft. Ed Gelb ran the polygraphs on those witnesses. All of the witnesses had been under suspicion of murdering Travis Walton. When Walton was reported as a missing person, and when Walton's fellow loggers told their story about the flying saucer, the sheriff was none too impressed. The suspicions about these witnesses, and whether they committed foul play against the missing Walton, was dramatized rather well in the motion picture FIRE IN THE SKY, starring James Garner as the sheriff. It's true that the film had one obvious failing - the way it exaggerated what Travis claimed happened to him aboard the spaceship. Hollywood made it a very scary experience. They turned the aliens into sado-masochistic medical experimenters, like a Joseph Mengele in outer space, which other abductees claimed, but not Walton. However, FIRE IN THE SKY was quite a straightforward dramatic presentation of what Travis Walton and his five witnesses said actually happened on November 5, 1975. The film was based on an excellent book by Travis Walton that has since been republished as FIRE IN THE SKY: THE WALTON EXPERIENCE. I highly recommend it, especially the last 100 pages or so which castigate UFO debunkers like Philip Klass as brilliantly as anything else I have read.

Ed Gelb gave tests to those five witnesses and then gave them a clean bill of health. He stated that each of the tests was conclusively "truthful." Then he declared that the statistical odds of five people "beating the machine" all on the same incident they witnessed was about one in a million. Five liars would have to conspire to tell a false "flying saucer story" and then successfully get results out of the polygraph that said they were telling the truth. Ed Gelb is one of the best interpreters of polygraph tests in the U.S. It seemed rather gutsy when he publicly stated that conclusion. By declaring the witnesses "truthful," he essentially endorsed as fact that Travis Walton really was zapped aboard a cosmic craft and flown through the universe with bug-eyed Greys for five days, before showing up back in the woods of Snowflake, Arizona. You'll find a video clip of a much younger Ed Gelb making that declaration in an early UFO video called UFOS ARE REAL (the video released under that name before Stanton Friedman did a subsequent video using the same title. Friedman appears extensively in both). I'm very surprised that no one working for CNN or any other news outlet tracked down that footage to put on TV last week when Ed Gelb was a number one news story.

Needless to say, at the time of the Walton abduction, the Establishment hated Ed Gelb's results. As we all know, the Establishment takes the official position that neither flying saucers nor alien surveillance craft exist. How could Ed Gelb have been right without the Establishment being dead wrong? The chief watchdog of "the Establishment's Paradigm," UFO-debunker and author Philip J. Klass, refused to accept Ed Gelb's results or conclusions. He believed that five witnesses had indeed "tricked" a polygraph machine, and that Ed Gelb had been duped. In Klass's klassic anti-UFO book called UFOS EXPLAINED, he dumps all over Travis Walton and the witnesses, making all sorts of charges that I believe most fair-minded readers would feel were absurd or malicious. As mentioned earlier, Walton makes quick work of Klass in the last 100 pages of the republished version of his book.

Klass offered skeptics the opportunity to believe that Walton and his fellow woodcutters were in violation of a contract they had for clearing land, and that only an "Act of God" could have excused them of their dereliction under the contract. Thus, he thinks that these fellows invented an "Act of God" by concocting a ridiculous story about a UFO. Klass attacks the polygraph results, but he never had any reasonable basis to do so. His charges about the woodcutters and the land-clearing contract have been shown to be utterly without merit.

It may be contrary to the common "urban myth" to say this, but I for one do not believe that people can "beat" the polygraph machine when the test is given by a really competent examiner. But let's assume for a moment that I'm wrong and that Doug Williams, author of HOW TO STING THE POLYGRAPH, is correct in claiming polygraphs have no better than a 50% accuracy rate. Using Douglas's figures, for two people to beat the machine, the odds would be 25%. For three witnesses to fool it, we're down to 12.5%. Four witnesses have a 6.25% chance, and for all five Walton Witnesses to beat the polygraph (if each had a 50-50 chance of fooling the machine), the odds were only 3.125 in 100. Take your pick. Approximately three chances in one hundred (as Douglas would calculate) or one chance in a million (as Gelb would calculate), either way Gelb's polygraphs on the Travis Walton witnesses would lead any reasonable person to the following conclusion:

It is VERY probable that Travis Walton was actually abducted by aliens as he claimed and spent five days aboard an extraterrestrial flying saucer that the government tells us does not and cannot exist.

Suppose CNN and the Establishment TV shows and newspapers had added this fact about Ed Gelb's past polygraph activities to their story on the Ramseys. Those shows tended to SUPPORT the Ramseys. Thus, they would have been in the uncomfortable position of having to support the existence of aliens and flying saucers, too. If they accepted Gelb's reputation and skills in a case with two witnesses (the Ramseys), they certainly would have been backed into the corner of accepting his results in a case with five witnesses (the Walton abduction). This may explain why the Walton matter was left off the air. Perhaps some junior news exec DID come up with this fascinating information about Gelb. We can only imagine how it was cut by the execs above who would have said "no time for that." Or perhaps no one in the media ever did pick up that fact. Perhaps our country truly has a media run by sleepwalking nitwits who excel at "dumbing down" the public precisely because their own intellectual deficiencies are so profound.

Of course, the anti-Ramsey factions didn't pick up on the Gelb/UFO connection, either. Jay Leno's writers were also asleep on the job, and so was the National Enquirer. They missed their chance to spin the Ed Gelb story, to make him look like something of a gullible fool. "First he wants us to believe a UFO alien abduction story, then he brings us news of the Ramsey's innocence - when will he try to sell us a bridge in Brooklyn?" Of course, that kind of attack would have been quite unfair to Ed Gelb, in my opinion. I personally think the man is about as level, sincere, tough, and immune to manipulation as anyone I've met.

All of this amounts to an extraordinary lesson in media hypocrisy, and the fact that THE TRUTH, as the Establishment defines it, is like computer morphing software. If the shoe fits, they wear it. If it doesn't fit, they will hide the shoe and claim it never existed, and then they will change the subject. Or, if they are asleep on the job (as is often the case), they'll never find the shoe and they'll dance barefoot through the dandelions, thinking they're buttercups.

And so there you have it, folks. The world spins. Hollywood spins. Our heads spin. And throughout the spinning, inconsistencies are glossed over, material facts are omitted and hypocrisy rules. But we'll find THE TRUTH yet, won't we? Join me again at AlienZoo next Friday for more FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD, and we'll keep trying!