Citizens Against UFO Secrecy board member discusses his interest in UFO research.
2/8/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Ted Loman and UFO television are synonymous. Since 1991, Loman has been hosting UFO-oriented TV shows that showcase some of the most well-known names in ufology. Until the end of 1997, Loman, along with UFO artist Jim Nichols (and later Peggy Kane), hosted UFO AZ Talks. Signaling their reach into topics outside of ufology, a new show began airing soon thereafter -- Off the Record -- which today is broadcast on public-access cable channels in more than 30 cities around the nation. Interviews with respected authors and alternative medicine experts can be seen from Tucson, Arizona (Loman.s hometown) to, West Hollywood, to the Big Apple. Recent guests include prognosticator Dr. Louis Turi, adventurer Jerry Wills, and UFO lobbyist Steven Bassett.
But Loman didn.t start rolling the cameras thinking about rolling out his program from coast to coast. "I got into it thinking I was going to do eight shows and get out of it," he recollects. And he didn.t even begin to seriously research UFOs until a work-related accident rendered him legally blind (Loman ran a metalworking business), and took him "out of the whole paradigm I was involved in," as he puts it.
To his future viewers. good fortune, the Loman.s time in recovery allowed him to gain insight into the possibility of extraterrestrial life. While recuperating at his father.s house in northern Idaho, Loman was exposed to tapes of paranormal radio show Billy Goodman Happening, which was very similar in concept to the Art Bell.s radio show. Loman.s father also read to his son the Earth Chronicles books of Zecharia Sitchin. Returning to Tucson, Loman met famed ufologist Wendelle Stevens, also a resident of Tucson, who showed the fledgling ufologist the way to UFO clubs and conferences. At one such conference, Loman met someone who was professionally involved with public-access TV.
AlienZoo: You hadn.t come into contact with UFO research prior to the accident?
Ted Loman: No. I could look back in time and say that I can recall two specific times that UFO phenomena came to my attention. One was when I was eight or nine. My father was reading the newspaper in the living room; maybe the newspaper had something about UFOs. I recall asking my father if UFOs were real. He said something like, .Yes, the U.S. government has recovered one in a lake in Peru. And they.re keeping it top secret.. But that was the end of that.
Then, in 1973 . or right around there, and to this day I don.t know why this happened . I told my wife that I had to get to a mountain in Mexico. I knew the mountain was right across the border, in Baja, Mexico. And I knew I had to be there on December 8, at 12 o.clock, because the aliens were going to pick me up, and I wasn.t from this planet. Immediately, not only my mother, but my wife, wanted me to see a psychiatrist. You see, I really believed this. I was packing my stuff. The psychiatrist said I was having a textbook case of an .implosion,. a nervous breakdown, that I needed to be in group therapy.
I never went into group therapy. December 8 passed. I never thought of it again until about 1990, when I was blinded.
AlienZoo: In all of the UFO work you.ve done over the years, the breakthrough point in your research involved the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate sect. You had interviewed the sect.s leaders Bo and Peep, as they were called. After the suicide, though, your interview footage of Bo . Marshall Applewhite . was heavily sought after by the major TV and cable networks. You were a guest on Larry King.s show. What was it like for you, to find yourself in the limelight so quickly?
Loman: Actually, it wasn.t research. What happened, briefly, was that in the beginning, I didn.t know them as Heaven.s Gate. They were called Heaven.s Gate in their demise. I knew them as the Total Overcomers, One Step Beyond Human. When they came to Tucson, to give a presentation, they happened to come to a store, called the Blue Millennium, which I was involved with at the time. I asked them if I could do an interview with them; subsequently, I videotaped their lecture. They were on my show. They did some other things. And then they left.
I never saw them or heard from them again, other than five weeks before they killed themselves, committed suicide, went on the back of a flying saucer . or whatever they did. A member called me up, and said, .Do you remember me? We.re called Heaven.s Gate. We have a Web site, and we would like to send some pictures of Bo, our leader. They sent me a tape. And I forgot about them.
Somebody had called me up on the day of the event, but I said I knew nothing about Heaven.s Gate. But I looked into my paperwork, and I called the San Diego Police Department, telling them I had five hours of video that was available to them. They took down my number and said someone would get back to me. And then I called CNN. Someone said they.d get back to me, but nobody got back to me.
A gentleman at NBC eventually called me, asking me what the tape was worth, and I made the agreement. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I can recall how after they left the store, I turned to the store owner, .Wow! That.s the closest I.ve been to an alien.. These people were the kindest people I had ever met in my life. But they were so androgynous . the girls and the guys all looked very much the same. They were very intelligent. In fact, one of the guys I did interview . his name, or the name he went by then, is Sawyer . had left the group six months prior to their exit. Even when I did the interview I felt like I had a connection to this guy. And I had the opportunity to be on Geraldo with him. We had a great time. I remembered who he was; he remembered who I was. We had a great time back in New York. Fortunately for him, he didn.t castrate himself; he got married, and now he has a baby girl.
AlienZoo: What was the lasting impact of Heaven.s Gate on ufology? Did it damage UFO studies in any way?
Loman: I think you.re going to get varied answers within the UFO field itself. The field, itself, has a tainted reputation anyway . brought on by mainstream media. There a lot of very dedicated, serious people within this field. There are also people who find their way into situations, and are shown as the vocal minority. And they get all of the press. But it doesn.t portray the field genuinely.
Heaven.s Gate were basically an isolated group within the field of ufology. They were not mainstream by any means. They were a group set aside within the field of ufology. There are a lot of groups like that, still, in ufology. But there are a lot of groups like that in religion. Organized religion is no different from anything else; it has different types of cultish groups. Did David Koresh damage religion? David Koresh damaged David Koresh, not religion as a whole. Nor did Heaven.s Gate with ufology.
AlienZoo: You.re on the board of directors of CAUS, the Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. CAUS's director, Peter Gersten, is making progress and news with his lawsuits against the U.S. government and the State of Arizona, claiming that these governments must improve their investigations of UFOs, to protect citizens from invasion. You.ve got to be excited about what CAUS is up to. Do you think that CAUS will make serious headway in gaining protection for citizens?
Loman: I don.t think Peter, you, or I . or anybody . believes that. What you have to do in the field of ufology is constantly, constantly gnaw away at the leg of the chair. Peter happens to be an attorney, knows the law, and has the time to gnaw at the chair. Do we believe that the government is going to begin to roll over, and say, .Here it all is. We.re going to tell you everything.? No. Not anymore than videotapes of lights in the sky are going make a difference to the outside community and the UFO field.
It.s the process: The process has to work outward from integrity as much as possible.
AlienZoo: To talk about your show . you.ve interviewed hundreds of people, easily upwards of 300 or 400 people. Who were the most memorable guests?
Loman: I have interviewed people I thought I would never have a chance to interview, such as Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut, who doesn.t do many interviews. A lot of what I do with the product after I finish it. Early on, people in the UFO community were pretty shy of being interviewed, because of producers sound-biting them. What I would do, in the beginning, with a friend of mine, Kevin Slone, was travel around the Southwest with camera in hand, and attend conferences. I.d promise certain people within the field to send them a final copy of the interview, or the raw footage. The name UFO AZ was known for doing what we said we were going to do. We wouldn.t soundbyte anybody. We came with the idea that if you.re going to lie, our audiences would be able to see it. Throughout the years, we developed a good reputation for what we had done and how we treated people on the show. We don.t take two hours of video and try to show three minutes of it.
AlienZoo: Your other interest is investigating UFO crash sites.
Loman: I always felt a need not to take sides. I never joined MUFON, CUFOS, or APRO while we were doing UFO AZ. When the alien autopsy video came out, and I saw how investigators said things without doing any research, I thought it was pretty tacky. UFO AZ, Wendelle Stevens, Michael Hesemann, and I went out to crash sites. In doing that, we came up with information that nobody else had.
I furthered the investigations. I went to eye-witnesses of crash retrievals from Paradise Valley to Flagstaff to White Sands to Roswell to Aztec. I felt it was necessary to get first-hand, at least second-hand, information pertaining to crash sites, because I believe this information will stand the test of time. And I.m still doing that.
AlienZoo: What do crash sites look like? And what are the methods you use to investigate them?
Loman: Amazingly, the crash sites I.ve been investigating are at least 45 to 50 years old. They look like desert. A tree could grow up in the spot where the crash is claimed to have occurred.
If somebody says, .Something crashed here,. you get as much information from them as you can, and you work backward from there. There isn.t a sign in the ground that reads, .Saucer crashed here.. But there are things that can tell something irregular happened. For instance, a crash site that I.ve investigated in the Flagstaff area, we went out there with a group of Native Americans, who have prior knowledge of this thing crashing there. Following their lead, we brought out metal detectors, we took pictures of treetops, and climbed the trees to see whether what came in burned the tops of 50-year-old trees. We looked at trees that might have been cut, to bring in equipment to take something, which may have been 50 feet in diameter, out of a forested area.
I also went back into an area, through colleges and newspapers, looking for reports about a meteorite hitting an area, which was cordoned off because of a fire. We found evidence in the newspaper . near Flagstaff . that military bombers were hired by the forest service to take pictures of the forest, for forest husbandry, the day after the crash that we.re talking about. This doesn.t say that there was a crashed flying saucer, but at no other time could we find Air Force bombers paid to take high-altitude pictures of the forest.
A lot of these things draw correlations. You have to keep asking questions. You have to be a detective. You have to be willing to find out if somebody lied to you, too. If you.re going to present something to the public, then you.ve got a responsibility. If you.re in the UFO field, you have an even bigger responsibility, so that when someone asks you a question, you don.t say, .Gee, I didn.t check into that..
AlienZoo: There.s a lot of infighting going on in ufology. What can be done to improve the situation?
Loman: This only occurs when there is nothing going on in the world of ufology. When nothing is going on, people start sniping. George Knapp said it best, when talking about conspiracies, whether government moles infiltrated the UFO community: There.s no need, because UFO people will feed on themselves like piranha. As for badmouthing, only the people within the field know it. The mainstream doesn.t know it. Within ufology, the closer to the center, the more information you.re privileged to know. The further out, you don.t even know who is in the center in the ring. This will always happen, but it will always keep in those who are able to maintain integrity in the field.
I.ve always said that you can.t be worried about what other people are doing. You can.t change that. But you can change what.s around you. I.ve talked with Bob Dean and Wendelle Stevens more than anybody out there in the field, and I.ve never heard them say a bad word about anybody in the field. They just change the subject. I think that.s what we need more of.'