Brother Jimmy
(Jim Dilettoso )
and the Saucers
The "Phoenix Lights" made Frances Emma Barwood the
darling of the global space-alien lobby. And it's
transformed computer geek Jim Dilettoso into a star
in the UFO firmament.
The Hack and the Quack
by
Tony Ortega
[from Phoenix New Times March 5-11, 1998]
Jim Dilettoso is playing a duet on a piano with a man who has a
cross made of his own crusty, drying blood on his forehead.
On Dilettoso's own head is a mass of curly grayish hair. His mane
dips and sways with the fluid rhythm he lays down, and his swaying
locks, combined with his wire-rim glasses and the handsome
seriousness of his face, evoke the eccentric genius and renowned UFO
researcher he's rumored to be.
Plucking out a tentative melody on the higher keys, a moon-faced
Giorgio Bongiovanni beams as he tries to keep up. With his tangled
brown locks, Bongiovanni might be taken for a Deadhead if it weren't
for the blackish dried blood decorating his forehead. Ridges of the
finger-smoothed ocher make a crude cross a few inches wide; around
the cross, a field of fresher, redder blood is smeared.
Bongiovanni's blood sources are hidden beneath fingerless gloves.
Eight years ago, Bongiovanni claims, the Virgin Mary visited him,
delivered a message about Jesus consorting with space aliens, and,
after Bongiovanni offered to help carry Christ's message, the Virgin
zapped his palms with lasers that came out of her eyes. He's been
carrying his stigmata ever since, rubbing the blood coming from his
palms, feet and other sites onto his forehead to maintain his cross.
The duet draws a swarm of photographers who block the view of the
other 500 people sitting at tables in the ballroom of the Gold River
Casino in Laughlin, Nevada.
It's the culminating Saturday-night banquet of the Seventh Annual
International UFO Congress. There's a giant blowup space alien in
the parking lot. Extraterrestrials and E.T. hybrids disguised as
middle-aged white people sit among the Earthly guests munching on a
lasagna buffet. In the hall next door, you can get your aura
photographed.
Sitting at the head table, naturally, is Arizona secretary of state
hopeful and former Phoenix councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, who is
scheduled to address the gathering.
"This is all new to us," Barwood's husband, Mike Siavelis, says
sheepishly as the evening descends into surreality.
Barwood merely smiles.
Her tablemates include Stephen Bassett, Barwood's UFO political
consultant who's paid to work the space-alien side of her bid to
become secretary of state. He's busy introducing Barwood to the
luminaries of the UFO community.
The man sitting across from Barwood, for example, Dr. Jim Harder,
once taught electrical engineering at UC-Berkeley but today helps
people, through hypnosis, recover memories of being abducted by
aliens. Bassett speaks of Harder in hushed tones, clearly wanting
Barwood to know that she's in the presence of UFO royalty.
Harder's wife, Cedar, leans over to make an even more startling
revelation.
"My husband," she says, "he's an E.T."
"Did he tell you that?" she's asked.
"He didn't have to. I realized it by observation."
She should know. She reveals later that she recently recovered
memories of being abducted by aliens herself.
Until Barwood's speech caps off the night, the UFO Congress will
entertain itself with bad stand-up comedy, a "song for the future"
by a woman who says she learned it by channeling aliens, and several
group photos.
But the highlight is a tribute given to Shari Adamiak, who recently
died. Rather than eulogize Adamiak with a description of who she was
or what she accomplished, a severe woman chooses instead to tell a
remarkable episode from Adamiak's life.
Adamiak had accompanied UFO researcher Steven Greer on an expedition
into Mexico. There, in a remote area, the two were surprised by
soldiers carrying AK-47 rifles. Suspiciously, the soldiers' uniforms
carried no insignia. Adamiak and Greer figured they were dead, but
they prayed ardently to space aliens. In obvious answer to their
plaint, the two spotted a flying saucer overhead.
The craft had no sooner passed when the soldiers, remarkably...
At this point, the narrator halts, sensing that even in this
atmosphere of abject credulity, her story is reaching ridiculous
proportions. To make sure everyone gets the point, she says
emphatically, as a challenge: "This is a true story."
...the soldiers, under the beneficent influence of
extraterrestrials, walked to a van, dropped their AK-47s, picked up
guitars and began strumming, enabling Adamiak and Greer to make
their escape.
Two women talk about why aliens are abducting so many people. One
says aliens want to create a hybrid human-alien race which will be
able to operate the advanced technology aliens plan on bestowing us.
Truth by assertion: It's in abundant supply at the UFO Congress,
where people are more interested in discussing the implications of
aliens living among us than looking for hard evidence of actual
landings or abductions. As Cedar Harder will say later, the
conventioneers have "moved beyond talking about the nuts and bolts
of UFO investigation."
Aliens are here. They are mating with humans.
And the lights that appeared over Phoenix last March couldn't
possibly have been anything of Earth.
It's been a remarkable year since hundreds of Arizonans thrilled to
lights seen over much of the state March 13, 1997. ["Beware the ides
of March," quoth he. -B:.B:.]
When Barwood, then a councilwoman, asked the city to look into the
sightings, she became a national media phenomenon and will no doubt
bring much outside attention -- and outside campaign donations -- to
her otherwise unglamorous race for secretary of state.
Jim Dilettoso's own star has risen as a result of his proclamations
that the lights over Phoenix could not have been flares, airplanes
or anything else manmade. His scientific-sounding claims have made
him and his Tempe firm, Village Labs, a regular in television, radio
and newspaper reports.
A recent edition of Hard Copy and upcoming specials on Japanese
television, the UPN network, and A&E all feature Dilettoso and the
spectral analysis he claims to do from videotapes of the event.
"These were not flares," he says with certainty.
For many, the assertions of truth are enough.
And for the media, such proclamations not only prove sufficient but
make for good copy.
Perhaps no assertion has been as widely taken for proof that aliens
visited Phoenix last March than Dilettoso's claims that his
"sophisticated optical analysis" eliminates more prosaic
explanations for the March 13 lights. From the Discovery Channel to
the Arizona Republic to USA Today, Dilettoso has been advertised as
an expert who can divine the nature of lights with his bank of
computers. Not one of the publications or programs has described the
scientific principles behind Dilettoso's claims.
With the arrival of the Phoenix Lights anniversary, news reports
will no doubt mushroom, and Dilettoso and his techniques will
receive more attention as reporters breathlessly tell the UFO story
of the decade: how Phoenix has, in only a year, become the center of
the UFO cosmos, the site of recurring visits by strange aliens, and
home of a heroic political avatar.
What they won't tell you is that Dilettoso employs the language of
science to mask that, given the tools he uses, he is incapable of
doing what he claims to be doing.
So what? you say. Does anyone really care if a few oddballs gain
notoriety from science fiction? Who are they hurting?
Dr. Paul Scowen, a visiting professor of astronomy at Arizona State
University, cares.
"I become quite offended when people pull this sort of nonsense,"
Scowen says. "We in the science business make our living doing this
stuff to the best ability we can, and applying all of the knowledge
that humankind has assembled to this point in science to figure out
what's going on...
"Why should people care? Because it's been so high-profile and
they've been told lies. That's why people should care."
Many Valley residents had gone out last March 13 looking for a
spectacular event in the night sky. Comet Hale-Bopp was near its
closest approach to Earth, and that night it could be seen in the
northwest, as bright a comet as has been seen in 20 years.
The Phoenix Phlyover
About 8:30, however, something else appeared -- a vee pattern of
lights that traveled nearly the entire length of the state in about
40 minutes.
The witnesses included New Times writers. David Holthouse and
Michael Kiefer both saw the pattern of five lights move slowly
overhead. Holthouse says he perceived that something connected the
lights in a boomerang shape; Kiefer disagrees, saying they didn't
seem connected. Like other witnesses, both reported that the vee
made no sound, and each saw slightly different colors in the lights.
Both watched as the lights gradually made their way south and faded
from view.
The many eyewitnesses have elaborated on this basic model: Some saw
that the lights were not connected, others swear they saw a giant
triangular craft joining them, some felt it was at high altitude,
others claim it was barely over their heads and moving very slowly.
All seem to be describing the same lights at the same time: About
8:15 the lights passed over the Prescott area, about 15 minutes
later the vee moved over Phoenix, and at 8:45 it passed south of
Tucson.
That's about 200 miles in 30 minutes, which indicates that the
lights were traveling about 400 miles per hour.
An alert owner of a home video camera caught the 8:30 vee pattern on
tape. Terry Proctor filmed the vee for several minutes. The quality
of the tape is poor, and even under enhancement the video shows
nothing joining the five lights of the pattern. However, the pattern
of lights changes over just a few seconds. The lights clearly move
in relation to each other, proving that the lights represent five
separate objects, rather than a solid body. This is consistent with
witness reports from Prescott, where one light trailed the others
temporarily.
But someone got an even better view than Proctor and his video
camera.
That night, Mitch Stanley and his mother were in the yard of their
Scottsdale home, where Stanley has a large Dobsonian telescope.
He and his mother noticed the vee pattern approaching from the
northwest. Within seconds, Stanley was able to aim the telescope at
the leading three lights of the pattern.
Stanley was using a 10-inch mirror which gathers 1,500 times as much
light as the human eye, and an eyepiece which magnified the sky 60
times, effectively transporting him 60 times closer to the lights
than people on the ground.
When Stanley's mother asked him what he saw, he responded, "Planes."
It was plain to see, Stanley says. Under magnification, Stanley
could clearly see that each light split into pairs, one each on the
tips of squarish wings. Even under the telescope's power, the planes
appeared small, indicating that they were flying high. Stanley says
he followed the planes for about a minute, then turned his telescope
to more interesting objects.
"They were planes. There's no way I could have mistaken that," he
says.
The next day, when radio reports made Stanley aware that many
thought they had seen something extraterrestrial, he told Jack
Jones, another amateur astronomer, about his sighting. Jones later
called both the Arizona Republic and Frances Emma Barwood. Neither
called Jones or Stanley back.
Barwood says she passed on Stanley's name to Dilettoso's Village
Labs, who didn't call the young man until New Times first reported
his story in June.
Although hundreds of Valley residents saw the vee formation, the
media have paid much more attention to a separate event that
occurred later that night.
At 10 p.m., up to nine bright lights were seen to appear, hover for
several minutes, and then disappear southwest of Phoenix in the
direction of the Sierra Estrella. Video cameras at points across the
Valley caught the string of hovering lights. All nine were visible
from some locations, others saw fewer.
Mike Krzyston, from the yard of his Moon Valley home, captured all
nine on video. "I hit pay dirt, finally!" he exclaimed as the lights
appeared. "This is a major sighting!" said another videographer as
he taped five of the lights.
In June, however, KPNX-TV Channel 12 reporter Blair Meeks filmed a
drop of flares by military planes over the Air Force gunnery ranges
southwest of Phoenix. The hovering lights looked remarkably like the
10 p.m. lights of March 13, and Meeks suggested it as a possible
solution to that night's second event.
Within days, Tucson Weekly broke the news that the Maryland Air
National Guard, in Arizona for winter training, had a squad of A-10
fighters over the gunnery range that night, and they had dropped
flares. An Arizona National Guard public information officer,
Captain Eileen Bienz, had determined that the flares had been
dropped at 10 p.m. over the North Tac range 30 miles southwest of
Phoenix, at an unusually high altitude: 15,000 feet. (Captain Drew
Sullins, spokesman for the Maryland Air National Guard, says that
the A-10s, which have squarish wings, never went north of Phoenix,
so they could not have been responsible for the formation of planes
seen at 8:30 p.m.)
Local UFO investigator Dick Motzer and others have shown that the
initial appearance of the 10 p.m. lights, the number of lights seen
from different elevations in the Valley, and the timing of the
lights' disappearances all correspond well with flares dropped at
high altitude beyond the Sierra Estrella.
But questions remain.
If Stanley saw that the 8:30 lights were airplanes, whose were they?
And why did Tucson's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where the
Maryland Air National Guard's A-10s returned that night, initially
say it had no planes in the air at that time?
Krzyston and others who taped the 10 p.m. event insist that the 10
p.m. lights hovered in front of, not behind, the Estrella, where the
gunnery ranges lie.
Most publicized objections to the 10 p.m. flares hypothesis have
come from Jim Dilettoso, who claims that sophisticated tests
performed at Village Labs show that the lights filmed by Krzyston
and others could not have been flares -- whatever caused the 10 p.m.
event, Dilettoso claims, was like no source of manmade light.
Local and national media alike have found his statements
irresistible.
While careful to tell the mainstream press that he makes no claims
about extraterrestrials, that his research simply eliminates the
possibility of flares, Dilettoso is perhaps feeling more bold as an
increasing number of reporters seeks his opinions.
With all of the seriousness he could muster, he recently told Hard
Copy:
"These could be the most important events in 50 years."
Dilettoso is needlessly conservative. If the lights of March 13 were
of otherworldly origin, it would be one of the most significant
events in human history.
That's been the holy grail of a movement spawned decades ago that
shows no sign of abating. But research into UFOs has changed
considerably, much to the chagrin of investigators who still insist
on a scientific approach to unexplained sightings.
Dr. Hynek
Interest in "flying saucers" exploded in post-World War II America,
prompting the Air Force to hire an astronomy professor, J. Allen Hynek, and others to investigate. For more than 20 years,
Hynek and
the rest of the Air Force's
Project Blue Book examined UFO
sightings, the vast majority of which were easily explained as
natural phenomena.
The military ended Hynek's contract and Project Blue Book in 1969,
and four years later Hynek, by then head of Northwestern
University's astronomy department, created the Center for UFO
Studies. The center examined UFO claims scientifically and tabulated
its results. In its initial studies, the center found, for example,
that 28 percent of sightings were simply bright stars or planets (in
49 of those cases, witnesses estimated that the celestial objects
were between 200 feet and 125 miles away).
Phil Klass
Of 1,307 cases which the center examined in the early 1970s, only 20
seemed unexplainable. The center stopped short of claiming that
those 20 were caused by alien spacecraft.
UFO investigator Philip J. Klass, in an article about Hynek, points
out that few present researchers apply the same kinds of rigorous
study to the subject. For today's "investigators," the slightest
mystery is obvious proof of an extraterrestrial presence.
Hynek died in 1986 in Scottsdale. By then, the field he helped
pioneer was changing radically.
Jim Marrs
Jim Marrs is a good example. Author of the best-selling Alien
Agenda, Marrs is touted as both an expert on UFOs and the John F.
Kennedy assassination (and, incredibly, connects the two in Alien
Agenda, suggesting that Kennedy was killed for his knowledge of
U.S.-space alien contacts). Oliver Stone mined Marrs' 1990 book
Crossfire for his conspiracy-minded film JFK.
Today, Jim Marrs is giving a sermon.
He's a featured speaker at the Seventh Annual International UFO
Congress. His message: There's no question aliens are among us. The
real question, he asserts, is what their "agenda" is.
"I feel like I'm preaching to the choir. I don't think I need to
explain anything to you," he says in his Texas twang.
Marrs preaches about our moon, for example, asserting that it is
"the original UFO," and a great mystery. Marrs asserts that, unlike
other celestial objects, the moon travels not in an ellipse but "in
a nearly perfectly circular orbit."
No one objects to this falsehood. In fact, the moon moves in a very
respectable ellipse which can change its distance from Earth up to
50,000 kilometers.
To Marrs, the sum of this and other effects -- which include several
basic errors of astronomical knowledge from a best- selling author
who claims to be an expert -- lead to only one, unavoidable
conclusion: It is obvious that an ancient, extraterrestrial race
parked the moon in a perfect orbit around Earth.
No one in the audience laughs.
"I don't have to explain this. You all believe this, right?" Marrs
asks, and he gets a resounding "yes" from the choir.
Meanwhile, two women ignore Marrs as they talk about why aliens are
abducting so many people. One says aliens want to create a hybrid
human-alien race which will be able to operate the advanced
technology aliens plan on bestowing us.
The second woman says that the hybrid race would be pandimensional,
capable of disappearing into the fourth dimension.
Lights in the sky. Bizarre dreams. Objects whizzing by in video
shots which look just like bugs out of focus. Memories of alien
abductions "recovered" by suggestive hypnotherapists.
The movement barely resembles the field of inquiry taken seriously
by the late Hynek.
With a heavy dose of New Age influence, the UFO movement
increasingly grows less like a science and more like a religion.
Some investigators point to an early case that marked this shift:
the elaborate claims of a one-armed Swiss farmer named Eduard
"Billy" Meier.
Billy Meier
Since 1975,
Meier has claimed to have had more than 700 contacts
with aliens from the Pleiades star cluster. In most of those
contacts, a female alien named Semjase has appeared to Meier,
allowed him to photograph her spacecraft, taken him on rides in the
craft, and even whisked him into the past to meet Jesus Christ, who
was duly impressed with the advice Meier gave him. He has taken more
than 1,000 photographs of Semjase's craft (which Semjase only
reveals to Meier when he is alone), as well as photos of alien
women, closeups of famous celestial objects, and even the eye of
God. Meier claims that he is the reincarnation of Christ and that
his teachings, based on what Semjase tells him, will save mankind.
W. Stevens
Arizonans were instrumental in promoting Meier-mania. Beginning in
the late 1970s, Wendelle C. Stevens, a Tucson UFO enthusiast, and
others began touting and publishing Meier's photos (while playing
down the messianic stuff).
Looking at Meier's photos, it's hard to believe he was ever taken
seriously. Yet several Arizonans assured the UFO-hungry public that
they had tested Meier's photographs and had found them to be
genuine.
One of these investigators included a young man who claimed that he
had used computers to verify the authenticity of Meier's
photographs.
His name was Jim Dilettoso.
Kal Korff
Kal Korff is one UFO researcher who believes Jim Dilettoso is a
poseur.
Korff became interested in UFOs and began corresponding with
Wendelle C. Stevens in the late 1970s. The two swapped UFO photos,
and Korff studied the Billy Meier phenomenon. When the normally open
Stevens refused to discuss certain aspects of the Meier case, Korff
grew suspicious.
His doubts led him to write two books, one in 1980, the second in
1995, debunking the Meier case. In 1991, Korff traveled under an
assumed name to Switzerland and inspected many unpublished Meier
photographs. Korff's investigation, revealed in his book Spaceships
of the Pleiades, showed that Meier's outer-space photographs were
actually crude snapshots of TV science programs.
One photo is of two out-of-focus women who Meier insisted were
aliens. In a tape-recorded interview with Korff, Jim Dilettoso
claimed that the photo was authentic because the woman in the
foreground had elongated ear lobes. But Korff showed that a clearer,
unpublished photo taken by Meier revealed that the elongated ear
lobes were actually lengths of the woman's hair.
In one of Wendelle C. Stevens' books of Meier photographs,
futuristic-looking (for 1979) computer enhancements of the spaceship
photos are accompanied by captions which purport to describe tests
that authenticated Meier's photos.
De Anza Systems, a San Jose company, was credited with providing the
computers to do the analyses.
In 1981, Korff interviewed De Anza employee Ken Dinwiddie, who
confirmed that Dilettoso had brought the Meier photos to his shop.
But Dilettoso and another man had simply asked that De Anza make
some sample enhancements of the photos as a demonstration.
"They came to De Anza under the pretext of wanting to buy our
equipment. We demonstrated it, and they snapped many pictures and
left. We made no data interpretations whatsoever," Dinwiddie told
Korff in the presence of two other investigators.
"What about the captions which appear in the [Meier] book under each
photo? Are they correct?" Korff asked Dinwiddie.
"Those are their interpretations, not ours. Nothing we did would
have defined what those results meant."
It was clear to Dinwiddie, Korff writes, that Dilettoso and Stevens
dreamed up the impressive-sounding captions despite that they had
nothing to do with demonstrations De Anza had performed.
Korff showed Dinwiddie a caption below a Meier photo that purports
to show a hovering spacecraft: "Thermogram -- color density
separations -- low frequencies properties of light/time of day are
correct; light values on ground are reflected in craft bottom;
eliminates double exposures and paste-ups."
"No, we put those colors in the photo!" Dinwiddie exclaimed. "Jim
[Dilettoso] said, 'Can you make the bottom of the object appear to
reflect the ground below?' I said yes, and we performed the
operations that they asked for."
Added Dinwiddie: "My impression of Jim Dilettoso is that he freely
chooses to use whatever descriptive text he enjoys to describe
things. He is not particularly versed in computer technology. He's a
pretty good piano player, though."
Korff says that since his book was published in 1995, Dilettoso has
made no efforts to dispute its contents.
Dilettoso tells New Times that he didn't write the captions, but
that they aren't misleading. "If you talked to Ken Dinwiddie today,
he would say we didn't do this."
New Times did talk to Ken Dinwiddie last week, and he remembers
things the way Korff describes them.
Dilettoso has applied even more questionable methods in his
"validation" of UFO photographs.
In 1987 and 1988, he worked for an Arizona affiliate of NASA; his
work involved helping NASA technology get to the private sector, he
says.
But he admits that he wasn't working for NASA in 1991 when he
provided Wendelle C. Stevens with a seven-page analysis of UFO
photographs taken in Puerto Rico. On NASA stationery, Dilettoso
writes that "this is not an official project," but concludes that
the photos of a flying saucer encountering an F-14 Tomcat are
authentic.
A. Huneeus
Puerto Rican UFO investigator Antonio Huneeus says the case involved
a man named Amaury Rivera who claimed he was abducted by aliens on
his way home from work in 1988 and managed to get a picture of their
spacecraft as it left with three Tomcat jets in hot pursuit. Huneeus
says that UFO enthusiasts who were convinced of the truth of
Rivera's story early on now dismiss it as a hoax after, among other
things, a photographer named German Gutierrez admitted that he had
helped Rivera fake his snapshots.
But Huneeus points out that the case has still played prominently in
Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Argentina and Taiwan, always with
the startling revelation that NASA had confirmed the authenticity of
Rivera's photographs.
Dilettoso admits that he was no longer working for NASA when he gave
his analysis to Stevens, but he says Stevens had lost the analysis
he had done three years earlier when he had been employed by the
space agency.
"He came into my office and asked me to write the letter and, you
know, I did," he says. "An Air Force colonel coming to me and asking
for that letter, I at least took pause and said ahhh, all right, but
this is not an official project," he says.
So Dilettoso did the favor for Stevens, who indeed is a former Air
Force colonel. He's also an ex-convict. Department of Corrections
records show that he pleaded guilty to child molestation and spent
five years in prison. He was released in 1988.
Jim Dilettoso is asked to explain how he can look at videotape of
the March 13, 10 p.m. event and, using image analysis, declare that
the lights are not flares.
He begins by explaining that the electromagnetic spectrum includes
x-rays, infrared radiation, visible light.
And musical notes.
It's one of the least preposterous things Dilettoso says during a
two-hour interview.
Jimmy D's Village Labs
He's sitting in the conference room at Village Labs. In the next
room, there's a bank of computers which has become a fixture in
television footage filmed at the Tempe firm. On the walls and spread
out over the large table are charts and diagrams which suggest that
complex work happens here.
Dilettoso has finished his explanations about music as a form of
electromagnetic energy (it isn't, of course, but it seems rude to
interrupt), and he's now explaining how a camcorder can, even from
miles away, record the finest details of a light bulb, such as its
glowing filament, if you just know how to extract that image from
the recorded blob of light. His computers can do just that,
Dilettoso says.
If this were possible, astronomers and other scientists would gladly
beat a path to Dilettoso's door. Unfortunately, there's something
that prevents a camcorder from recording such detail.
It's called physics.
The power of a camcorder, telescope or other visual device to
resolve a distant object is limited by its optics. The larger the
mirror or lens used, the greater the power to resolve faraway
things. That's why astronomers crave bigger and bigger mirrors for
observatories -- the bigger the mirror, the farther into space a
telescope can resolve details.
With a lens less than an inch across, the typical camcorder has a
rather myopic view of the world. Any light source more than a mile
or so away simply cannot be resolved with any detail. Distant lights
-- streetlights, flares, alien headlights, even -- become "point
sources." Like the stars in the night sky, there's no detail to be
made out in them.
The narrow lens of a camcorder focuses the light of a point source
onto an electronic chip, which gets excited, so to speak, and
releases a pattern of electrons, called pixels, that is translated
into an analog signal which is put on videotape. What eventually
comes out is your television's attempt to describe how the
electronic chip reacted when it was struck by the light of a distant
bonfire, for example.
The actual light from that bonfire is long gone, however, and has
nothing physically to do with the electronic signal on your
videotape.
Which is a shame. Astronomers have long known that you can learn
amazing things from that original source of light.
Unable to reach the stars for tests, scientists figured out how to
perform experiments on the light coming from them instead. Using
prisms or gratings, astronomers separate that light into its
constituent colors, called a spectrum, which allows them to
determine a star's chemical make-up. This process is called spectral
analysis.
Trying to do spectral analysis on the image produced by a camcorder,
however, would be like testing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln for his
DNA. The man and his image are two very separate things.
Still, Jim Dilettoso claims to perform just that kind of magic.
On a computer monitor, he brings up an image of Comet Hale-Bopp. The
comet has a line segment cutting across it and, in another window, a
corresponding graph with red, blue and green lines measuring the
brightness of the slice.
He shows similar frames with similar line segments cutting through
streetlights, the known flares captured by Channel 12, and the 10
p.m. lights of March 13.
Each results in a different graph.
It's rather obvious that the graphs are simply measurements of pixel
brightness in the cross-sections he's taken.
But Dilettoso claims that the graphs show much more. To him, they
represent the frequencies of light making up each of the images. He
claims he's doing spectral analysis, measuring the actual properties
of the light sources themselves, and can show intrinsic differences
between video images of streetlights, flares, and whatever caused
the 10 p.m. lights.
Because the graph of a known flare is different than one of the 10
p.m. lights, Dilettoso concludes that they cannot be the same kinds
of objects.
In fact, Dilettoso claims that the graphs of the 10 p.m. Phoenix
Lights show that they are like no known light produced by mankind.
The fallacy in Dilettoso's analysis is easily demonstrated. When
he's asked to compare the graph of one known flare to another one in
the same frame, he gladly does so. But he admits that the two flares
will produce different graphs.
In fact, Dilettoso admits, when he looks at different slices of the
same flare image, he never gets the same graph twice. And when he
produces some of those graphs on demand, many of them look identical
to the graphs of the 10 p.m. lights.
When he's asked to produce an average graph for a flare, or anything
that he could show as a model that he uses to distinguish flares
from other sources, he can't, saying that he knows a flare's graph
when he sees it.
It's an evasive answer which hints at the truth: Dilettoso is only
measuring the way distant lights happen to excite the electronic
chip in camcorders (which is affected by atmospheric conditions,
camera movement and other factors), and not any real properties of
the sources of lights themselves.
Met with skepticism, Dilettoso reacts by claiming that his methods
have been lauded by experts.
"Dr. Richard Powell at the University of Arizona believes that my
techniques are not merely valid but advanced to the degree where
there was nothing more that they could add," he says.
Powell, the UofA's director of optical sciences, confirms that he
spoke with Dilettoso. "He called here and I talked to him, and I
could not, for the life of me, understand him," Powell says.
"I don't know how you take a photograph or a videotape after the
fact and analyze it and get that information out. We didn't say that
his method was valid, we said we didn't have any other way that was
any better," Powell says.
Hearing that Powell denies calling his techniques "advanced,"
Dilettoso claims that Media Cybernetics, the company which sells
Image Pro Plus, told him that the software package would do the kind
of spectral analysis he does.
Jeff Knipe of Media Cybernetics disagrees.
"All he's simply doing is
drawing a line profile through that point of light and looking at
the histogram of the red, green and blue. And that's really the
extent of Image Pro ... Spectroscopy is a different field."
New Times took audio and videotapes of Dilettoso describing his
image processing to Dr. Paul Scowen, the visiting professor of
astronomy at ASU. Scowen left Great Britain in 1987 and received his
Ph.D. in Astronomy at Rice University in 1993; he now uses the
Hubble Space Telescope to study star formation.
"All Dilettoso is doing is extracting a brightness profile. It makes
no statement about frequency distribution. What he's getting his
knickers in a twist about is he's heard the term 'spatial frequency'
and he's confusing it," Scowen says. "He's getting his terms mixed
up. He knows the words, but he doesn't understand the concepts
behind them."
Scowen notes that when Dilettoso is asked about the limitations of
camcorders and videotape, he repeatedly responds: "It's all I've
got."
"He's not saying the rest -- that it's insufficient," Scowen says.
Curious graduate students peek over Scowen's shoulders, shaking
their heads at the videotapes of the Phoenix Lights and Dilettoso's
claims about them.
"Nobody asks astronomers to take a look at these images. And that's
what we do for a living," says Ph.D. candidate Steve Mutz.
Professor Rogier Windhorst walks in and asks what his students are
poring over. Someone tells him Dilettoso claims to be doing spectral
analysis from videotape.
"Oh, you can't do that. It's bullshit," Windhorst barks.
"It's a consensus now," Mutz says with a laugh.
Among the true believers, Jim Dilettoso makes even more surprising
claims. At the Seventh Annual International UFO Congress, Dilettoso
compared the Phoenix Lights to other UFO sightings through the years
and in many parts of the globe.
"If we theorize that the lights are intelligently guided, or perhaps
that the lights are perhaps the intelligences themselves, we might
find that this new activity is unrelated to disc-shaped flying
saucers. ... It may be that these are light-beings," Dilettoso told
his audience.
To the press, Dilettoso's careful not to make such outrageous
claims. He and his partner, Michael Tanner, instead disseminate a
confusing seven-page summary of the many accounts of the 8:30 vee
formation, and rather than deduce that different witnesses
interpreted the same phenomenon in different ways (which humans have
a tendency to do), they suggest that Arizonans actually saw
different gigantic triangular crafts at different times and
different places. Mitch Stanley is mentioned in a single line:
"An
amateur astronomer in Phoenix [actually Scottsdale] wrote it off as
a formation of conventional airplanes."
As for the 10 p.m. event, Dilettoso asserts that his video analyses
tell him flares could not possibly be what Mike Krzyston and others
captured on videotape, saying, "I don't know what they were. I just
know that they weren't flares."
A credulous media, more interested in hyping the Phoenix Lights
mystery rather than taking a sober look at the evidence, have
repeatedly broadcast those claims. The Discovery Channel, in its
October 26 program UFO's Over Phoenix, reported the results of
Dilettoso's "high-tech sophisticated optical analysis" as if they
were fact.
To its credit, the Discovery Channel did perform another, and
apparently solid, test to the flare hypothesis. The network
submitted Krzyston's footage to Dr. Leonid Rudin at the Pasadena
image-processing firm Cognitech. Rudin was also given a daytime shot
from Krzyston's yard showing the distant Sierra Estrella, which is
invisible in the nighttime video. Rudin matched the day and night
shots frame by frame, lining them up on a distant ridge. The result:
an animation loop showing that the flares are not only above the
Estrella, but blink out as they reach the top of the mountains,
precisely as distant flares would.
In a "10-Files" episode, KSAZ Channel 10, however, questioned the
Cognitech analysis. Krzyston insists to Channel 10 that the objects
were hovering below the Estrella ridgeline and couldn't have fallen
behind the mountains. Channel 10 suggested cryptically that
Cognitech purposely faked its test -- "Has the footage been altered?
And by whom and why? The mystery continues" -- and showed its own
test, which a Channel 10 production man claimed took "not long at
all," proving that the 10 p.m. lights in Krzyston's video were well
below the Estrella ridgeline.
New Times asked Scowen to perform the test himself, using two frames
grabbed from Krzyston's original video and a 35 mm daytime photo
taken from Krzyston's yard by UFO researcher Dick Motzer. After a
half-hour of careful scaling, positioning, and rotation with imaging
software, Scowen found a good match for the ridge visible in both
shots. His results: The flares are just above the Estrella ridgeline
or right at it, just as Rudin at Cognitech had found.
Afterward, Scowen was shown the "10-Files" episode and its claim
that Channel 10 matched the frames quickly. He wonders how they
could have checked several parameters in only a short time.
"You
have to make sure that the zoom is set the same way. If it's a
standard camcorder, there's no numeric readout of the zoom. ... Did
the guy at Channel 10 match the scale? My guess is that he just laid
the two pictures on top of each other."
Rod Haberer, producer of the "10-Files" piece, says that he's
"comfortable with what we put on the air." But when he's asked what
software the station used to match and scale the daytime and
nighttime shots, he admits that they didn't use a computer at all.
Channel 10 simply laid one image from Krzyston's video atop another
in a digital editing machine.
Scowen says it doesn't surprise him. "We're used to dealing with
this with the lay public. People do the minimum until they get the
answer they want. In science you have to go back and check and
recheck to make sure you're correct. I think Cognitech did a great
job," Scowen says.
Rudin says his firm took its job seriously when the Discovery
Channel asked it to match the images. "I testify in a court of law
routinely; I'm a diplomate of several forensic societies," Rudin
says. "Basically, you're talking to the guys who do this for a
living."
Told that an astrophysics professor found the Cognitech experiment
more convincing, Haberer suggested that his station had merely
presented a different point of view, as if the question of a flare
falling either behind or in front of a mountain had more than one
answer.
But that's entertainment, which is what the nation is likely to get
on March 11, when the UPN network devotes a half-hour to the Phoenix
Lights in its program "UFO: Danger in the Skies." Producer Hilary
Roberts says that Dilettoso is featured prominently and that no, her
network did not independently examine his claims. His "analysis"
will be one of several voices presented uncritically in the program.
"We want the viewer to decide who's right," she says, apparently
unconcerned that the public can hardly decide what's true when media
deliver unexamined claims as fact.
Perhaps no news organization, however, has been as accommodating to
Jim Dilettoso as the Arizona Republic. For weeks following the March
13 incident, the Republic promoted flying saucers in nearly every
section. Dilettoso could be found on the front page, claiming to
have found a drawing in his attic which, underneath another image,
mysteriously depicts an alien autopsy; the article suggested that
Dilettoso's Shroud-of- Turin-like autopsy drawing has something to
do with a flying saucer which supposedly landed in Paradise Valley
in 1947.
But the Republic's business section topped that story with a glowing
July 1 account about Dilettoso and the cutting-edge things he does
at Village Labs.
The paper reported that Dilettoso was on the verge of creating a
massive supercomputer network which would give PC owners access to
supercomputing power, and claimed that Village Labs and TRW had each
invested $3 million in a computer called RenderRing1. One benefit
would be the ability to send entire movies over phone lines at
incredible speeds. His system would make Tempe the nexus of a
special-effects processing center: Village Labs was already helping
well-known firms with their special effects, Dilettoso claimed, and
had a hand in the complex effects of the movie Titanic.
Dilettoso's sales pitch sounds familiar. Five years ago, New Times
profiled him and his futuristic plans ("High Tech's Missing Link,"
April 21, 1993). Back then, those ambitions were largely the same:
Village Labs would develop massive computer networks that would
change the movie industry.
Dilettoso also told New Times he had an undergraduate degree from
the University of Hartford and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering
from McGill University in Montreal. But records at the University of
Hartford showed that he had taken a single math class there; McGill
University said it had never heard of him.
Today, Dilettoso denies that he ever claimed to have college
degrees.
"I have 160 to 180 college credits scattered all over the
place. I tell people that all the time," he says when the subject
comes up.
There's another version of the Village Labs story that Dilettoso is
not as quick to tell: that rather than operating from income
generated by his computer wizardry, Dilettoso has for years been the
beneficiary of eccentric millionaire Geordie Hormel, the heir to the
Spam fortune, who pays Village Labs' bills.
Until last year, that is. Hormel pulled the plug on Village Labs in
July 1997, and court records show that after Hormel stopped paying
rent, the building's owner, the Marchant Corporation of California,
sued to kick Dilettoso out.
Marchant's attorneys argued successfully that Hormel, not Dilettoso,
was the lessee, and a Superior Court judge found in favor of
Marchant, ordering Dilettoso and Village Labs to vacate the
premises. But Dilettoso convinced Hormel to bail him out one last
time; Hormel shelled out $62,000 for a bond that would allow
Dilettoso to file an appeal -- and he occupies the building in the
meantime, the rent covered by the bond. Hormel says he now regrets
paying for it.
Last week, Dilettoso's appeal ran out. He says that Village Labs
will vacate the building in a matter of days.
Hormel's wife Jamie contends that Dilettoso and Village Labs have
existed primarily through her husband's largess:
"[Geordie] has paid
everything. He's paid rent and salaries and lawsuits for when Jim
didn't pay salaries."
Geordie Hormel confirms that since the company's founding in 1993,
he has put about $2 million into Village Labs. But he's reluctant to
criticize Dilettoso, afraid he won't get any of his investment back.
His wife is less shy, saying,
"[Dilettoso]'s just a liar ... I mean,
there was an article in the Republic in the business section on him
and it was such a lie. ... He tells Geordie that we're going to get
money from TRW in three more weeks, then strings him along for a few
more weeks. It's happened for years."
Dilettoso defends the Republic article, saying that Village Labs had
invested $3 million on the project with TRW. But he later admits
that no actual money was put up by his firm; the $3 million figure
was a total of Village Labs' rent and salaries since its inception,
most of which was supplied by Hormel. He also admitted that Village
Labs' "design" work was unpaid.
TRW spokeswoman Linda Javier says that in fact neither side put up
cash in the project.
"We didn't make any investments. We used a
system that was built on our own with R&D funding." Asked about Dilettoso's claims, Javier responds, "He has a different way of
looking at things."
Says Jamie Hormel: "Supposedly he was working on that Titanic movie.
[But] I haven't seen him do one thing he was supposed to have done."
Dilettoso claims that in Village Labs' work on the special effects
for Titanic, he collaborated with a Digital Domain engineer named
"Wook."
"Wook said that Mr. Dilettoso's and Village Labs' contribution to
the production of Titanic was nothing," says Digital Domain's Les
Jones. Wook concurs.
When he's pressed about the claims made in the Republic story,
Dilettoso says that it's true the various deals have not
materialized. But he says he was the victim of an elaborate
conspiracy by a TRW executive who wanted to learn Village Labs'
techniques and then promote them as his own.
In the meantime, he continues to shop his plans of linking
supercomputers, and entertains reporters in front of a bank of
computer screens in a studiolike room which he uses for his UFO
alchemy.
Perhaps Dilettoso's greatest trick: helping transform Frances Emma
Barwood into a national poster child for the UFO movement.
But he meant for that poster child to be someone who already had
global notoriety: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
It was to Arpaio that Dilettoso steered an EXTRA film crew on May 6.
When the crew found the sheriff out to lunch, they went to City Hall
in search of another public official to interview. Frances Emma
Barwood says she found their questions reasonable -- why hadn't
local government done anything about the sightings? And she brought
it up in that afternoon's city council meeting. She wasn't prepared
for the avalanche of attention, praise and ridicule that would
follow.
She also didn't expect to see Arpaio grovel.
Barwood's instant celebrity was the kind of attention Arpaio craves.
So, at a veterans' function a few days later, Barwood says Arpaio
begged her to send him a letter, officially asking his office to
investigate the March 13 lights.
She says she promised to do so. But only hours later, Arpaio aide
David Hendershott called her and told her not to send it. She says
he didn't explain why.
Hendershott says Barwood remembers things incorrectly. He claims it
was Barwood who asked if she could send a letter to Arpaio
requesting the posse's help interviewing witnesses.
"That's not it at all," counters Barwood, who says that Arpaio
pleaded with her in front of veterans who later told her they were
surprised to see him so agitated.
Barwood pressed on as the only public official asking why local,
state and federal governments didn't take an interest in what seemed
to be a questionable use of Arizona airspace, at the very least.
Barwood was told that the city had no air force and could do nothing
about the sightings. The Air Force, meanwhile, told her that it had
gotten out of the business of investigating UFOs and that it was a
local matter.
Barwood and the many who saw the lights were understandably
frustrated.
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base's spokesman Lieutenant Keith Shepherd
didn't help matters. Shepherd told news organizations, including New
Times, that the base had no planes in the air at the time of the
8:30 and 10 p.m. events. In her investigation, however, Captain
Eileen Bienz of the Arizona National Guard later heard from National
Guard helicopter pilots from a Marana air base that they had spotted
a group of A-10s heading for Tucson at about 10 p.m.
Only after Bienz asked Davis-Monthan about the planes did Shepherd
confirm that the Maryland Air National Guard had used the base for
its winter exercises and had dropped flares southwest of Phoenix
that night.
Shepherd told New Times that he had earlier spoken about the base's
own planes. Reporters had simply asked him the wrong question.
It's no wonder that so many people believe the military maintains a
UFO cover-up.
The military's reluctance to divulge information also led to
confusion about what was seen on radar that night. The media have
widely circulated reports that the 8:30 and 10 p.m. lights were
mysteriously invisible to radar.
But a formation of a craft or crafts traveling at high altitude over
Phoenix would have been monitored by FAA radar operators in
Albuquerque, not at Sky Harbor Airport, says air traffic controller
Bill Grava, who was on duty at Sky Harbor that night and witnessed
the later, 10 p.m. lights. Grava says that if five planes in a vee
passed over Phoenix at 8:30 p.m., they would have been represented
by a sole asterisk on consoles at Sky Harbor -- not something that
would have raised the curiosity of operators. As for the 10 p.m.
event, Grava acknowledges that the North Tac range is beyond Sky
Harbor's radar; if planes dropped flares over the range, it's no
mystery why they would not have appeared on consoles at the airport.
Luke Air Force base has more powerful radar systems. But Luke's
Captain Stacey Cotton says that radar operators at the base were
asked if they had seen anything unusual that night, and answered no.
She says that a formation of five planes -- traveling at high
altitude above Sky Harbor's and outside of Luke's restricted air
spaces -- would not have been considered unusual. Neither would a
flare drop over the gunnery range.
Whether the 8:30 vee formation did register on the FAA's radar
monitored in Albuquerque will apparently never be known. Despite the
fervent activities of UFO investigators in the days following the
sightings, no one bothered to make a formal request with the Federal
Aviation Administration's regional office for radar tapes of the
Phoenix area for March 13. If anyone had made such a request by
March 28, there would be a permanent record for the public to
examine, says the FAA's Gary Perrin.
Meanwhile, no base or airport has come forward to identify the five
planes that traveled over Arizona seen by so many people, including
Mitch Stanley and his powerful telescope.
It's hard to blame Barwood for calling for more openness in
government.
On the other hand, Barwood lamely complains that she's been unfairly
labeled the UFO candidate. She asserts that her campaign really has
nothing to do with space aliens.
She says this as she waits to speak at the International UFO
Congress, sitting at a table with her paid UFO campaign consultant,
while they're entertained by the piano playing of a man who wears a
cross of his own blood on his forehead in his efforts to spread his
message that angels and space aliens are one and the same.
Her January 13 press conference to announce her candidacy was only
slightly less weird.
Barwood was flanked by a collection of oddballs that included
several UFO dignitaries as well as emissaries representing Arizona's
militias, patriot movement and anti-immigrant groups.
Barwood did her best to deflate the weirdness by talking about
mundane, secular secretary of state things. Such tasks are the
nominative reward for winning the post, but Barwood admits that she
wants it simply because it would put her only a heartbeat away from
the governorship. "If Arizona had a lieutenant governor, I'd run for
that," she says.
Barwood says she's frustrated that reporters only want to hear about
her thoughts on UFOs (she's never seen one, but at the UFO Congress,
she makes it clear she thinks the Phoenix Lights must have been some
gigantic, triangular spacecraft or military project). The
militia-friendly conservative tries to make reporters understand
that she's more interested in other issues, such as guaranteeing
Arizonans the right to carry arms in any place and in any way.
But the UFOs will not go away.
When Barwood finishes her press conference, a woman ascends the
podium to make her own, unscheduled announcement.
"I would like to speak to the press also. I know what the lights
over Phoenix are. I know what's going on with the federal
government," she says. "It's my husband. Col. Berger J. Addington,
who is the king of kings, the lord of lords. He flies the stealth.
He builds cities. And he should flesh up here pretty soon in his
multiracial skin. ... He is the true president of the United
States."
The woman is politely led away from the podium, and Barwood can't
suppress a grin.
Expect more of the same in the coming months.
Go
Back
|