Real-Life X-Files (34 page)

In Confirmation, Whitley Strieber describes several of the implants, including one removed from his own external ear by a physician. It turned out to be collagen, the substance from which cartilage is formed (Strieber 1998,228). Strieber admits that the promised “hard evidence” provided by implants is not so hard after all: “I hope this book will not cause a rush to judgement,” he writes, “with skeptics trying to prove that evi’dence so far retrieved is worthless while UFO believers conclude that it is proof. Both approaches are a waste of time, because the conclusive evidence has not yet been gathered” (Strieber 1998, 255). A similar admission comes from ufologist David E. Pritchard, an M.I.T. physicist who, with Mack, hosted the 1992 Abduction Study Conference at M.I.T. (Pritchard emphasized that the conference was merely held there; it was not an M.I.T. conference.) Pritchard gave a presentation on a suspected implant, a tiny object with a collagen sheen that he acknowledged might have grown in the alleged abductee. (It had supposedly been implanted in the man’s penis but worked itself out over time.) Pritchard conceded: “I don’t have anything conclusive. What I have is just what you usually get in this business: it will provide more beliefs for the believers and will be instantly skeptified by the skeptics, and it’s not very good evidence if it won't move the lines at all. The point is to convince the jury.”(Bryan 1995, 50-51).

Of course, it is not skeptics but implant advocates who have the burden of proof—a burden they have emphatically failed to meet. Indeed, the implant concept—like the larger alien abduction phenomenon itself—lacks proof that it has an objective reality. Instead, the evidence indicates it is simply part of an evolving UFO mythology. Its theme of entities exerting influence over humans is one seen in many variants, ranging from ancient mythical lore to modern science fiction and persisting in some form in popular culture. There have always been individuals—fantasizers as well as paranoid schizophrenics—who have heard voices that directed or controlled them, voices that are expressions of hopes and fears. Therefore it seems safe to predict that there will be further claims of “hard evidence” of extraterrestrial visitation. We may also
expect that misperceptions and exaggerations of natural phenomena, as well as hoaxes, will abound.

References

Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell. 1992.
Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, 209 UFOs, Psychics, and Other Mysteries
. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 227.

Bryan, C.D.B. 1995.
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
. New York: Knopf, 50- 51.

Chan, Cecilia. 2001. Out of this world: Doctor’s sideline is extraterrestrial investigations.
Daily News
(Woodland Hills, Calif.), March 18.

Clark, Jerome. 1992. Abduction artifact. Fate, April, 19-22.

Fowler, Raymond E. 1979.
The Andreasson Affair
. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice- Hall.

Jacobs, David. 1992.
Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions
. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Klass, Philip J. 1974.
UFOs Explained
. New York: Vintage, 299.

———. 1989.
UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game
. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus.

Linderman, Debra L. 1998. Surgeon tells first results of implant analysis. Excerpted from CNI News, vol. 15.8 (Feb. 26,1996).

Mack, John E. 1994.
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
. New York: Ballantine.

Nickell, Joe. 1995.
Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings
. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 211.

Okuda, Michael, and Denise Okuda. 1997.
The Star Trek Encyclopedia
. New York: Pocket, 141,303.

Priscu, Virgil. 1998. Rebuttal to Derrell Sims the implant guy! Internet posting to the UFO Folklore Center.
http://www.shoah.free-online.co.uk/801/Ab-
duct/sims.html

Rachleff, Owen S. 1971.
The Occult Conceit
. Chicago: Cowles, 108.

Sachs, Margaret. 1980.
The UFO Encyclopedia
. New York: Perigee.

Strieber, Whitley. 1985.
Communion: A True Story
. New York: William Morrow.

———. 1998.
Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us
. New York: St. Martin’s.

Wray, Shannon. 1993. Notes of interview with Dorothy Wallis for
The Shirley Show
, n.d. (faxed to Joe Nickell March 31; show taped April 1).

Chapter 35

On February 7,1996,1 appeared on the
Mark Walberg Show
, a television program produced in New York City. Among other guests—who included an alien abductee and her hypnotherapist, a UFO conspiracy theorist, and a pair of ghost hunters—there were two “psychics,” one of whom claimed to assist police departments. He was Ron Bard from southern New York State.

Walberg asked, “Ron, how did you discover this ability?”

Bard replied, Well, it’s been in my family for quite a few generations. I’ve solved over 110 murder cases and returned 150 missing children in my career so far,” he boasted.

“And how did you help them … ?”

“The one that stands in my mind most,” Bard replied, “was two girls found in plastic bags in Harrison, New York. Anybody can call the Chief of Harrison Police Department and find this out for fact,” he challenged.

I resolved to do just that.

Bard continued: “They found two girls in plastic bags. We went to the scene. The girls weren’t identifiable. We identified the girls, found an unmarked key in the pocket, went to the south Bronx, unlocked the door—there is a lot of putting the evidence together inevitably—the key worked in the lock and that’s how we found the murderer”(Bard 1996).

This certainly sounded like an amazing case of psychic power. Un-fortunately, an examination of news stories relating to the case (Gannett 1984) and the testimony of the Harrison police chief (Dorio 1996a, 1996b) paint quite a different picture. The first newspaper account was March 9, 1984. It reported that “the bound, frozen bodies of two unidentified
women, possibly teenagers”—each in a green trash bag tied at the top with rope—had been discovered near Harrison High School. “One of the women was white, the other black,” the newspaper reported. “Both had their hands tied behind their backs with twine, and were curled up, almost in a fetal position.” A detective was quoted as saying that the young women appeared to have been dumped at the site after being killed—the cause of death not yet having been determined. Subsequent reports told of the difficulty police were having in learning the identities of the two victims, neither of whom was carrying identification. The victims had been fully clothed, and there was no evidence of sexual abuse. They had died from suffocation. An item found in one of the plastic bags—which police would not identify at the time—led them to a particular area of the Bronx. The item was a key that had been made in a store on Southern Boulevard, so the police search was focused on that vicinity.

In just over a month, police circulars bearing descriptions and morgue photos of the victims, together with articles in a Spanish-language news-paper, had brought forth the parents of one young woman and the mother of another—each looking for a missing child. They identified their respective daughters as Daisy Rivera, 20, and Iris Comacho, 15, both from the Bronx and both Hispanic. The key in Miss Rivera s possession fit the door to her apartment. Before that, according to an April 15 newspaper account, police thought the key might have belonged to the murderer.

Eventually, after a five-month investigation of the case, in the after-math of a drug raid in Yonkers, police were able to arrest three men for the murders. Eyewitnesses named those responsible and told how one man had ordered the older of the two females killed because he thought she was an undercover agent, and the teenage girl because she had said something that offended him. Each of the three killers was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life—the maximum under New York law (Gannett 1984).

Only a couple of news reports relating to the case referred to a psychic. And although no name was given, it was not Ron Bard but his mother (Dorio 1996a). “She” was described in the news reports as a “volunteer psychic.” Her involvement had been permitted by the lieutenant in charge of the case, who spoke of what he considered her accuracy in the case. One account attributes to him the statement that she helped both to identify the bodies and hone in on the murderer, while another account
quotes him as saying, “She helped primarily for identification.” In fact, she helped in neither way.

If the psychic had indeed helped in the identification, the lieutenant would have to have withheld that information from his own detectives. We know this because a major detective on the case was the current Harrison police chief, Louis Dorio, who insists that “the identification was done by sheer police work, not a psychic”(Dorio 1996b). Indeed, the lieutenant himself admitted that “what she told us didn’t really lead to things, but after we discovered answers, we could confirm what she told us.” This, in fact, is the major technique used by so-called “police psychics” and it is called retrofitting (discussed in chapter 17). The alleged clairvoyant tosses out several “clues,” like “water” and “ the number 7.” Typically, these are merely puzzling to the police, but after they solve the crime by ordinary if often dogged detective work, the psychic retroactively fits the “clues” to the now-known facts. Credulous police officers may even assist in this. The psychic does not even need many of the “clues” to be counted as hits; the rest will be conveniently forgotten, or dismissed as the natural consequence of an imperfect “power,” or heroically interpreted.

Chief Dorio gave the following account of the Harrison murder investigation:

I was one of the primary investigators on what we refer to as the “Bag Murder Case” in 1984. As such, I never worked with Mr. Bard. I did meet his mother a couple of times and she provided some visions or whatever on things that at the time were of no use to our investigation. Some of the things she said, a true believer may give credence to; for example, she held a key and said, “I see a red door.” That information did not help in the investigation as our area of search was the south Bronx and there are thousands of red doors. After we found the residence (through investigation), it did turn out to have a red apartment door. That is an example of the information supplied. (Dorio 1996a)

In other words, the psychic was using the technique of retrofitting. Chief Dorio continued: “This case was solved by information cultivated and investigated by those of us who were involved. Our arrest and convictions were due to diligent police work, not visions” (Dorio 1996a). He added somewhat sarcastically, “I do not remember seeing Mr. Bard on the witness stand during the trial,” and he concluded, “I would strongly deny that any involvement by Mr. Bard solved this case” (Dorio 1996a).

This is in sharp contrast to the statements and claims made on the
Mark Walberg
Show by Ron Bard. The case that he cited as apparently his best, “the one that stands in my mind most,” was one that as far as the police and reporters knew was solely his mother’s. It is true that on the TV show he said “we,” instead of just “I,” which we may now see as a possible reference to his mother s involvement. If he did in fact collaborate with her on the case, it is curious that he has so completely distorted the basic facts—stating for example, that a key led to the discovery of the murderer when in fact it did not. The bottom line is that neither Bard nor his mother helped solve the double homicide. If this is one of the best cases he can cite, his other cases must be poor indeed.

References

Bard, Ron. 1996. Interviewed on the
Mark Walberg Show
, New York City, Feb. 7.

Dorio, Louis A. 1996a. Letter to Joe Nickell, Feb. 20.

———. 1996b. Follow-up letter to Joe Nickell, n.d., together with annotated newspaper clippings. (See Gannett 1984.)

Gannett Westchester Newspapers. 1984. Various clippings from March to September (inclusive) supplied and annotated by Harrison, N.Y., police chief Louis A. Dorio.

Chapter 36