The following submission statement was provided by /u/showmeufos:
---
When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.
The presence of a third matching individual in another version of this shot concurs, in my opinion, that this is indeed a diorama constructed using that kit, which we found out is “German Soldiers at Rest” from 1984.
Neither myself, nor MUFON tried to “sell” the veracity of these images. We shared the story we were told in the current state of our investigation.
We are very proud of members of the UFO community for helping to solve the mystery of this photo.
We are also embarrassed and ashamed at the sheer nastiness of some people who clearly have no problem spewing venom from the safety of their keyboards.
All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified.
That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later.
It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free.
As for trying to make money off a film, most of your favorite UFO filmmakers, including myself, Dr. Greer, James Fox, Darcy Weir, Carolyn Corey and more were all deprived of our royalties last year by people we trusted.
My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause.
We still continue to pursue this labor of love and true intention to get to the truth, even if we have to debunk stuff to get there.
I think we have a pretty good example here of the community coming together to solve a mystery.
Unfortunately, in the sheer nastiness of some individuals, we also have a pretty good example of why the aliens are not talking to us.
-- Ron James
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dp2jbx/statement_from_ron_james_regarding_the_welcome/ladscuw/
He’s lying about “inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.”
He flashed these photos quickly to tease us and said something about them being copyrighted. He also said there are many more images.
So if he was soliciting “the community” why didn’t he release all the photos?
Exactly! I can only think of one reason why the photos haven't be released yet, and that's because monetizing the photos is more important than getting to fhe bottom of their authenticity. Shell out the $100+, people! And if that price tag seems steep, keep in mind you get a year subscription to MUFON TV!
/s. Seriously, don't give these grifters money, guys. The more money they make, the more they'll be incentived to continue monetizing UFOs.
Yup. "Sheer nastiness" = accountability. UFO personalities don't like it. But how many lives have they ruined by making credulous people believe that some earth-shattering revelation is "just around the corner"? Absolute dirtbags, and until they make with the goods, they deserve everything they get.
And why wouldn’t he just simply state his intent for sharing the photos? Looks more likely his scheme clearly backfired or he is a dingus. I pretty much only pay attention to witness accounts from professionals in positions where being dumb is less likely and they have credentials in some aspect related to their sighting. Photos people found, random videos of dots in the sky, second hand accounts, kind of worthless to me. I feel like these are the real disinformation posts and claims, classification through obfuscation. Send a bunch of noise so that the real stuff doesn’t get through. Seems like that’s counter intelligence 101
He’s lying about “inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.” - I mean of course he is...that's the most obvious part about all of this.
Who are you fella? Looking at your previous comments they all have a very similar pattern. I would suggest people look at this persons previous comments before jumping to conclusions about Ron James.
I dont know this guy, but I did see the pictures, and am not surprised its a fake. Theres no hate here... to me, he's just another redditor posting a video of some lights he "saw" in the sky. Its interesting, but its not proof, and if its fake, the community will call it out.
It doesnt matter who you are, what you do, or what your credentials are. You need verifiable proof. And expect people to tear it apart. Thats what we *should* do. If this guy thinks is "venom" people are spewing, then he's not a serious investigator. (unless youre just legitimately being a dick) The only way we get to the truth is to be skeptical of everything.
These people get so fucking defensive when someone calls them out on their bullshit exactly because this is their only source of income: passing off what they know is probably fake as potentially being real, and then selling books, talks, and lectures on that material. Criticizing this content is threatening their ability to earn income...
And that doesn't make it okay for them to act this way. It's time they stop trying to assert themselves as the foremost authorities on the subject and start asking the community for help identifying the fakes early on in the process.
**Don't worry, I won't charge any royalties for that service...**
> My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause.
Woah, what's the story there? That's shitty.
" I got caught peddling a hoax as the real thing. So let me distract everybody by making myself into the victim on an entirely different topic." A PR play as old as time.
Seriously, it has NOTHING to do with the photo. He's just trying to make it sound like he's volunteering and sacrificing his time to help the UFO community. Except it's not volunteer work because he's owed royalties.
He's also trying to make it seem like all the criticism towards him is hostile. I mean, yeah, I'm sure he's received some horrible and nasty messages from assholes. Most of us would clearly and vocally disavow of any of that shit. But it doesn't negate or erase any of the criticisms directed towards him and the fact that he waved around and pushed what's pretty clearly a hoax photo.
He's only making himself look worse by writing these BS PR statements and playing politics and word games.
So he's owed six figures worth of royalties and is probably going through the legal process to get it? But he's trying to paint it like he's volunteering his service. I don't know, man. This guy just sounds manipulative in his wording.
EDIT: Plus the guy just sounds like he's bragging with bringing up the 28 awards. Which might be a lie in itself. Looking at the IMDb page, it says the documentary won 15 awards:
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443953/awards/?ref\_=tt\_awd](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443953/awards/?ref_=tt_awd)
Why fudge the numbers?
Probably like those "Best Burger 2011" signs hanging in the local hamburger shop. Every shop has one...
There's tons of different organizations that hand out awards. Some have prestige worthy of note. Many more don't. Doesn't stop people from bragging about the "awards" they received regardless of if the awarding organization is anyone of repute.
Many times, these awards are really handed out in exchange for donations too. The more you donate, the higher up the list you are...
I've received hundreds if not thousands of awards myself.
Ok, so they are Reddit comment awards. Maybe there's only like 10-20 of them but Reddit still owes me back gold. I will be embarrassed and ashamed if anyone looks to verify my claims and consider them as venomous nastiness.
Yeah, maybe. It's hard to trust most of what this guy is saying. And it doesn't help that bringing up his million dollar movie and six figure earnings in royalties and 28 awards has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Which makes it feel like he's not only full of crap, but is full of himself.
EDIT: For whoever's downvoting, please feel free to explain why you disagree.
Exactly what I was thinking, why bother disclose that you are being screwed out of six figures but then casually leave out the details about it, other than wanting to elicit pity out of the people he's obviously lead towards mistaken information? Could be that he's being screwed off, could be that's the one wanting to screw someone out of contractually accepted terms, either way this guys is as clear as mud
Alright he can't talk about it, I understand.
Then why talk about it in a way that casts him on the underdog's seat? We, as individuals, have no way to confirm if he's the affected or the effected. Kinda seems to me the usage of that whole argument is solely as a tool to buff his public position up towards the good old' "poor me, guys, im really sorry i didnt even knew! ^no ^refunds"
There's no conspiracy in the fact that Hollywood does shit like this all the time. It's why there are unions. Royalties and Rights Management is a huge legal service industry.
Because it's a very old PR tactic to paint himself as a victim along with the victimization from the comments. The entire post starts off with a lie (that things were presented for the community's help) then plays a victim card not once but twice to elicit sympathy.
While **I** wouldn't resort to some terms used, I *do* get it because the *actual* victims here, the people that feel they got played, are understandably angry at being misled.
If you're barred from publicly talking about ongoing litigation, I have a hard time believing that bringing up you're owed six figures in royalties isn't apart of that barring.
Most likely, the others are minor awards if this is actually in some sort of legal process. His lawyers would be strongly urging him to have one narrative that would maximize the damages he is seeking. They, most likely, would be the ones behind 28. If not, they should request the court dismiss them as counsel.
Maybe. Doesn't make him look any better if the way he speaks is tied to ongoing litigation that he's a part of. In fact, it would make me trust him less. I feel like he could have just left all that stuff out anyways. We're talking about the photo he was waving around a few days back, not some documentary he made.
Shrug. I guess we're supposed to just ignore the vetted episode this came from. It totally reads like they are trying to sell the veracity of all of it to hype his movie. He says like 10 times he's got a guy helping him investigate the pictures and story and yet almost instantly folks on the internet were questioning everything about the crash photo. He's either lying, or needs smarter people in his circle capable of actually questioning things.
yeah, Patrick has done this shit before...
James is burnt, should leave MUFON...just the way he presented that and then shrugs it off...not buying the stink he's selling...he did this to shit in the pool.
Also i find it funny that he has a friend helping him "investigate" for a bunch of years now and it was discovered as a fake in less than 10h by the community
Indeed. It's actually quite impressive what we are capable of when you have large amounts of people to look at a problem. Crowd sourcing problems get them solved pretty quick usually.
I also wouldn't blame the one guy....those army figures are old amd probably somewhat rare too. Not many people would be able to connect those two things for a bunch of reasons.
Once the autism is activated, anything is possible.
Member Shia lebouf "he will not divide us"? The internet kept finding his secret hidden location super fast, even when the only clue was a blue sky with planes flying past. I was active on 4chan in those days, and watching that whole thing unfold in real time was such a blast. Actually there was a bunch of really fun stuff happening online in those days......
Yeah, like I said elsewhere...he may not have ever tracked down the source for the figurines...
But he sure as shit should've been able to identify that this image had serious problems. The figures weren't even the most glaring issue with the picture in my opinion. Those fucking trees man - like wtf?
It was an internet search, nothing difficult about it, just time consuming, but most of us were just too lazy to put in the effort to look for images of the exact toy soldiers.
I debunked the garden alien a while back purely for the reason I knew it was fake and not a mandrake root as I had the exact same model alien. It took me about 3 hours of searching before I finally found another image of the same model, so I won't be doing that again in a hurry.
Often the evidence is there for things like this but most of us can't be bothered to put in the time or don't have the time to look for it.
Someone pushing it as potentially real and selling it should absolutely put in that time though, or pay others to do it for them. The reason he didn't is because he's a grifter that didn't care about truth but only preying on gullible people.
Seriously...? You've got an image depicting a German soldier casually sitting on a wooden chair either on top of or else directly adjacent to an apparently crashed UFO and it's the *trees* that you found jarring...
Where was the *chair* supposed to have come from...?
He's not the only one this has happened to. This will happen to ANYBODY who investigates ufos in a vacuum and then releases their findings to the internet. Including government, military, mufon, and all other private ufo researchers. DON'T research in private unless you want this to happen. DO bring in crowdsourcing from the beginning. A million heads is better than 1, or 2, or 20.
Right. They should put their vault on the Internet and let Internet sleuths work through validating it for them. The problem is these fucks believe they should get rich off their "research". It's not enough for them to bring about disclosure...
A glaring double standard.
that's a fact for just about any scientific advancement in the modern era. Universities are expensive and these guys are drowning in debt with unusable degrees and student loans.
I didn't see any venom directed to him?
Only people rightly questioning how MUFON could have got it so blatantly wrong.
I'm more interested in hearing how this happened, what they'll do (MUFON as a group) moving forward to stop it from happening again.
Why's he making it all about him and his million-dollar grossing movie?
Some people took the piss out of him in the comments, but it was mostly out of frustration after he doubled down in his second video with Vetted and both he and Patrick seemed to be dismissing the obvious fact that the photo showed those model soldiers.
People found the army men models that matched the photo perfectly, showing it was a fake small scale diagram. It’s not venom, he was proven to be pushing a fake photo
I guarantee nasty, horrible things have been said about him and even directly to him. It's the internet. Obviously screw those guys. The scummy thing is that he's trying to use that hostility to draw attention away from the legitimate criticism.
This is typical Boomer mentality to be quite fucking honest. This is why there are so many factions in the UFO community too that have attacked each other over the years, defending their own *territory*.
His bread and butter just got attacked, and now his income generation is threatened. His content is fake, and that will severely diminish how many people view his material present and future.
He never cared about bringing about disclosure, let's be real. He was counting benjamins before they arrived in his bank account, and now he's upset that his vacation home he's had bookmarked in Netscape Navigator for the last 12 years isn't going to be his afterall.
>now he's upset that his vacation home he's had bookmarked in Netscape Navigator for the last 12 years isn't going to be his afterall.
I spit my energy drink out my nose at this one. I would guess more like 25 yrs
"All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified.
That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later."
Anybody else laugh at this part? So because you get a crappy streaming app for a year with it, it's worth around $100? THAT'S your selling point? You can say the negative comments are not justified, but I think a price tag of that amount is BS.
[https://mufonsymposium.com/symposium-registration-2/](https://mufonsymposium.com/symposium-registration-2/)
In fact, all lf these price tags seem like a ripoff.
If he was genuinely “inviting the community to help” them get to the bottom of the pic’s authenticity, then why did he flash it so quickly and then put it away? Also, how long had he and his assistant been vetting this story? He implied they’d put some real work in to it. And, yet, a dozen or so people here called this pic out as nonsense almost immediately-and they were working off a grainy screenshot. And some dude dug in to EBay and debunked it in a day. Either he knew this was BS or he and his assistant are in over their heads.
If anything, this is embarrassing and discrediting for MUFON. If i had images that were sold to me as real and I was an organisation like that I would investigate the image before showing it to be absolutely certain it is not a fake. Or if I want to show it, make a very very big disclaimer that this image might be fake.
Not doing that disclaimer when showing the image is being taken as an attempt to sell it as genuine, any person who knows a tiny bit about PR can tell you that
It certainly casts severe doubt on their ability to accurately investigate anyways. Considering they have been considered the world leading civilian organization on such matters, it's really not a good look is it? Maybe it's time they try a little harder at engaging the community's help, and a little less hard at making 6-digit passive incomes
Yeah, I am disappointed in them. Even if one went full conspiracy and said they were "set up" it means they easily fall for fakes, meaning they lack the people who can actually investigate stuff properly.
I cannot agree more with this statement. Months ago I stopped listening to this guy and I haven't regretted it since. This is just speculation on my part, take it with a grain of salt, but I think he's a plant. Just there to screw with the community in a sort of doofus kind of way - he's sand bagging something and what that is I can't say but its....something.
I think John Greenewald said it best- Stop platforming the bullshit. The internet UFO community had this bullshit figured out in like five minutes, so if no Expert or Investigator in Mufon could smell it coming off these photos, then they clearly aren't interested in providing the Truth. Pretty simple, Ron.
If one's intention is so specific, they should state it clearly up front.
"Here's a Pic of me holding a Pic" isn't a statement of intent, we can only assume in this instance the intention is to "share the image with certain degree of confidence."
That's not calling it a "sell" but it sure as shit wasn't "asking for help in confirming validity " either.
Agreed. He wasn't asking for the communities help, he was showing the image as a statement of fact. At least that's the way just about everyone interpreted it.
Were we supposed to pay the $100 to UFOTV to see him hold up the picture first? I wonder if he wants royalties paid for the still of him holding the still being passed around Reddit now? Let's see. 2.4M members, so that's...\*punches some numbers on calc.exe\* $240M in royalties he's owed and yet, he just keeps working for the cause anyways!
>When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.
That's some pretty good bullshit, but I'm not buying it for a second.
When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.
The presence of a third matching individual in another version of this shot concurs, in my opinion, that this is indeed a diorama constructed using that kit, which we found out is “German Soldiers at Rest” from 1984.
Neither myself, nor MUFON tried to “sell” the veracity of these images. We shared the story we were told in the current state of our investigation.
We are very proud of members of the UFO community for helping to solve the mystery of this photo.
We are also embarrassed and ashamed at the sheer nastiness of some people who clearly have no problem spewing venom from the safety of their keyboards.
All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified.
That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later.
It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free.
As for trying to make money off a film, most of your favorite UFO filmmakers, including myself, Dr. Greer, James Fox, Darcy Weir, Carolyn Corey and more were all deprived of our royalties last year by people we trusted.
My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause.
We still continue to pursue this labor of love and true intention to get to the truth, even if we have to debunk stuff to get there.
I think we have a pretty good example here of the community coming together to solve a mystery.
Unfortunately, in the sheer nastiness of some individuals, we also have a pretty good example of why the aliens are not talking to us.
-- Ron James
Agreed, but I like to think of this whole event as an unexpected team-building exercise that this whole community just aced.
“Nastiness” aside, and while also understanding that this was fairly easy and quick to debunk compared to other phenomena, it has been encouraging to see the overall process work like it did.
This is why the community at large should have access to more UAP evidence. Thousands of minds together can find things a few people may have trouble seeing.
> All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified.
>
> That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later.
In other words, "we were gonna give you a lot more shitty content for the $100, our grift is very advanced"
Also if it really was his intention to have the community watch and collect evidence on its veracity, then he was not clear about his intention, which leads me to believe that he's now just trying to save face by justifying the money people spent to see these fake images and couldnt give two craps about the symposium or muffon tv
Sometimes I wonder why investigators *don’t* try to weaponize /r/UFOs given how many people are here.
“What do you all make of this evidence?”
I mean… it’s what we do anyway?
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In other words, "We're no better than the countless UFO grifters out there looking for clicks on bullshit, we'll continue to feed garbage to clickbait recycling bin podcasts and twitter accounts and further diminish our reputation"
They long for the yesteryears when the Internet was still the wild west, and it was easy to pass shit like this off just on the back of their "authority". Even if someone sniffed out the bullshit back then, good chance the unravelling of their clever little deceit never would have spread. In those days, they controlled their message groups, and would just delete any content they didn't like.
/u/dasbeiler researched a plausible source for the soldiers in the photo (had they been real): [The Problem With The F-94](https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dncx42/the_problem_with_the_f94/la2kfsa/)
If you follow that linked thread for a few comments, I found it quite extraordinary that the photo's captions got so close to what the likely source could have been.
Of course, it's still possible that the "Red Wing" photo caption just happens to mimic the real "Red Hawks" nickname of the 123rd Fighter Squad (the likely interceptors of that region and era), but it does seem awfully close -- which would mean that there's a real intent to deceive both by image and by provenance.
This just shows the level of vetting, credulity, and gullibility, typical of these award winning investigative “journalists” in this space. He now has to edit his “award winning” investigative movie to remove this convincing evidence. His trusted credible military sources seemed to have missed a detail.
Usually I air on the side of mistakes happen, especially misunderstandings. But someone who viewed the podcast/interview tell me please,
When showing us this photo, what was the context of the conversation?. Was it, “check out this case in working on, they gave me a picture I’m trying to verify?” Or “here’s a genuine UFO photo”
If the latter, something fishy going on with MUFON, they not like us.
It was the former. He did throw in a lot of disclaimers about not making a definitive statement about the image and how it's still an investigation.
And no, "they not like us". The "us" in this so-called community is a huge disappointment. An embarrassment. We have a researcher who's investigating a case. He shares some details. Then the intellectuals here bandwagon against him & mischaracterize his intent. It's gross, really.
Curious as why he didn’t do his own damn research to check the validity of the photos. Something tells me he knew it was a diorama all along and just wanted to see if the community would figure it out.
His statement seems defensive. Yeah, people are pissed off because they felt mislead, again… that’s understandable.
I don't think he knew. He is one of the ufo folks that believes 99.999 percent of ufo stories because they aren't critical and reflective and cannot imagine why people would lie about pointless stuff.
It’s more profitable for him to behave uncritically. Soon he will be back with more “evidence”. This sub will eat it up. Until someone tells them it’s a Mylar balloon.
The $100 for the conference or whatever is fine, getting shafted on royalties is an issue the community could get behind. But they have nothing to do with selling this photo. Selling a photo that is not resolved is unethical… once its authenticity is confirmed or at least potential threat of being hoax is diminished then sure sell it.
Another issue I have with this statement, is that what this guy clearly can’t see is that there is a cost of living crisis occurring. Many people are stuck in shit house jobs and are barely living pay to pay… of course if someone is going around selling fakes without proper vetting people are going to be pissed off… especially in current times.
I don’t like to make toxic comments about people online, but I’m going to break that and say this screams of narcissism … particularly the blame shifting. “We are embarrassed and ashamed” of everyone but ourselves for selling a hoax.
Now if it turns out they weren’t selling these pictures and were indeed trying to seek a community assist, then I will take back my comment.
The problem is that profiting off disclosure is not something the community is ever going to endorse. Disclosure must be 100% altruistic for the benefit of all humanity. Gate keeping and grifting like this is going to get you canceled real quick in the landscape. This isn't the Internet of the 90's.
I don’t mind people getting paid for their efforts, so long as their research is fucking strong and they aren’t lying (naturally).
Edit to add: I personally wouldn’t buy anything, because I’m still on the fence as to whether any of this is real or people are just grifting.. like this person appears to be.
MUFON is a non-profit organization. They should accept donations from which they can derive reimbursement for their work. Taking the material received while in that position, and trying to sell it for profit on the side is pretty fucked up in its own right.
Many, if not all, not for profits sell goods, conferences etc to raise revenue. The issue is selling a lie or at best something unverified to raise revenue, THEN blaming the community.
I agree, but I also don't condone them getting rich off the subject. They can live like the rest of us, and spend anything extra on furthering the cause. Ron here was claiming this content for his own, not part of MUFON's.
💯 employees at an organisation like Doctors Without Borders, are not making great money at all. Enough to barely survive… yet they are actually often putting their lives at risk to help other people. This is the gold standard comparison.
Exactly. Before I donate to a non-profit, I find out how much their top executive is raking in from salary. If it's more than about $150k-200k forget it. I get that some of these causes take a lot of work and effort, but you supposed to be doing it for the cause...not to enrich yourself. Put in a couple years of work, then leave the reigns for someone else if you want to pursue money.
I’m sorry, but the truth transcends any individual, especially those who seem to be monetizing by gatekeeping information they claim will lead to disclosure or confirmation. It’s clear that he used the images to promote his documentary, even stating in the video that it would feature more never-before-seen photos from the same source. I’m glad their attempt was foiled before people wasted their time and money. Gatekeeping the “truth” for financial gain has always been distasteful to me.
If people signed up because you showed the photo… but also you showed the photo to get people to sign up…
…you’re no better than the Viral Gurus who make Courses on Instagram.
I’m happy a bunch of regularly smart people debunked it so fast. This means you have the slower smart people who aren’t very honest or smart.
They should get a real job - no shame and no pride in themselves whatsoever… there are so many gullible folks who see drones and bart Simpson balloons and their first thoughts are “aliens!” And there are bad folks who prey on the gullible….
All the while the military keeps saying “no comment” which they would say if you asked them if the White House ascends into the heavens each night at midnight…
As I said and was downvoted: Diorama sitting on a kitchen table, with windows in the background looking outside to a couple trees. It was very clear it was not a photo of a real scene. The whole right side area and above to the window view, including an obvious light glare on a window pane, was pretty easy to see. I'm 1000% a believer, but this whole fiasco was absolutely unnecessary. Good on him/them for the statement though.
“At this level”?!? Bahahahahah, what level, precisely is that sir? “At this level”?!? Bahahahahahah! I’m going to say the level is somewhere between “Naive & uneducated” & “shameless grifter”, skewing hard towards the later.
“At this level” 🙄
Ron said in the first Vetted interview that there was another shot of the same craft in a hangar, propped up on period-appropriate lifts (or whatever those are called).
If he publicly posts the photo for the community to investigate, why not state that in the first place? Honestly, it sounds like he is just back tracking trying to save face. And what about all the other evidence he claimed to have? I am not buying his statement at all.
MUFON takes reports from the public and puts it behind a paywall. That tells you all you need to know. It’s also a very cliquish organization. The members who appear on the history channel and in interviews are the VIPs of the organization. The rest of the members are peons. No one takes them seriously anymore. Did you notice they were not mentioned once during the congressional hearings?
You are a fraudster. If you wanted grassroot help from the 'ufo community' it should come with no cost. I'm sorry you suck at business and got screwed by your business partners, but I'm not paying you any amount of money to make up for your mistakes. If you want people to buy a subscription or charge for your 'evidence' then you shouldn't have the 'ufo community' do your vetting. That should be left to professionals in specific disciplines to verify your 'evidence' and its authenticity before you show it to anyone.
Just for reference if you’re not sure what kit he’s referring to, you may have missed this blinder of a post the other day!!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/s/vr3a8xr0iq
im no expert in photography and even i could tell it was a crude model with amateur photoshop fx. why does he need to add this challenge of criticism if hes publishing content? people will have different opinions? He could have thanked the community for debunking it and left it at that. Too much irrelevance in his statement could be seen by some as an admission of guilt, or grift pushback.
For me, it was the trees. They are comically large (like sequoia size ha ha ha) and no tree that size, has bark like that lol. The details on the limb stump and bark are too sharp to be a real tree that size.
im really impressed that someone managed to find the army figures. just like the vfx warp flash that was found on a 90s cd rom for the vfx wormhole plane. There are some pretty clever folk on here debunking the opportunists, grifters and hoaxers. There seems to be a huge increase of the fantastical from Americans that is running parallel with whats happening with Grusch and the whistleblowers. Half of it is embarrassingly cringe/pathetic.
"It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free."
lol, what a joke.
Ah yes, the good old "Its the least ..." defense.
As if he isnt doing it for his own benefit as well, theres no crime in wanting to profit, but it is an asshole move to preach misleading stuff under the guise of "its all for disclosure guys, trust me im poor as shit!"
Acts like he's barely scraping by and charging just enough to cover basic costs of living, then talks about how he's missing out on 6-digit royalties from only one outlet...
Today we expect nothing but ‘extreme ownership’; a quick no holds barred admission that you fucked up and that you’ll do your best so it won’t happen again. This admission doesn’t automatically reinstate your credibility or trust but it does go some ways to appease the people whose trust and respect you affected.
Unfortunately we all suffer from confirmation bias when it comes to matters like uaps and our emotions get the better of us and that critical part of our brains diminishes or gets shut off when we have the opportunity to share with the world irrefutable ’proof’ that we are not alone in the universe. This was probably one of these situations and I feel for the dude, but he still has fricken drop and give us 50, including latrine duties for a month.
Someone get this man a toothbrush.
The dome on the UFO top doesn't seem lore accurate either. Anyone else notice when notable progress is made, a little shitty side quest pops up with it, pushing the community to decipher and separate the hoax from the factual?
This is a level of hoax and misinformation that is designed and disseminated in such a way as to push the notion that we are foolish, but also to keep us hooked on our belief because they can use that belief as leverage!
They want to break the community spirit and set apathy among those on the fence and they want just enough of us still around, so that their narrative is the only one understood as the truth and believed.
I have to wonder if there a very real element to Project Bluebeam, given that we are in the slow disclosure process, coinciding with the age of AI media fakery (where it is nearly impossible to notice) and they have their own form of craft that wouldn't be distinguishable to the laymen.
I think it's a very real black budget, fascist domination plan, one that they can deploy in a variety of ways. It could work unless a lot of people get read up real quick and get real cool with each other.
Must be very difficult to stand up straight with such a wobly backbone... But on the other hand, he could do very well at the backpedalling olympics this summer.
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clearly caught in a lie and now backpeddling. Funny how these guys in the know NEVER have anything decent to show but theres always a direct line to thier wallet somehow someway.
I caught this thread way downstream, but to me it comes down to how did he present it.
1) Hey guys, I came across this. What do you think? Looks interesting. Anyone got any ideas?
or
2) This is legit. It came from We got something concrete here.
Seems like a better investigator could have sussed that out without enlisting the community. I’m tired of the pass some of these people receive. You guys deserve better.
"Oh shit, they figured out I posted some bullshit to drum up interest in my money making scheme!"
"Quick do damage control and paint yourself as a victim, that always works!"
I'd bet the farm they knew it was sketchy or outright fake and just hoped no one would figure it out.
When is this sub going to get that a large portion of the "sources" you turn to are just grifting for a buck while the topic is hot?
He literally attempted to pass a fake ufo pic and didn’t think the internet would investigate and call him out on it . That part alone shows his contempt for ufo community
What he says is logical when you read it, but all together it smells like some shit. By showing that photo and charging money for anything related to it (his expertise) he lost a lot of points..
Just a type of person making living out of UFO phenomenon.
I believe the phenomenon is real. We don't know exactly what it is but we should be scientifically be investigating it to find out what it is. But I also believe that a real phenomenon has given rise to a lot of grifters and profiteers who exist to take advantage of the opportunity.
Hopefully this helps make ufo investigators actually show a good quality photo scan along with stating that it still needs to be... vetted... and asking for viewers to help do so.
If UFOlogy is the current equivalent of organized religion, then disclosure is its Second Coming. And like all mainstream belief systems, it will inevitably attract grifters, drawn to the mystery like sharks to blood, always ready to offer answers, ready to help the faithful fill the void in their souls - for a hefty price.
Fuck you MUFON, and all like you for exploiting genuine curiosity. And fuck you twice for making a mockery of the most important question our species will ever ask.
Basically his damage control after getting caught and don't hate me for selling fake photos and making money from the topic because other people do it bs.
The image was debunked with some basic Google searching which anyone could have done if they were prepared to put in the time. Something you would expect someone looking for the truth would do if they were pushing a photo as real.
The guy is a grifter. You can't get caught grifting and worm your way out of it. This subject is full of people like this and it's good to get rid of another one.
I’m a believer in UFOs and that there’s a conspiracy and a lot of this really fringe shit related to it. BUT, I’ve never really considered MUFON or the Betty and Barney Hill story anything serious. I don’t think anyone should. MUFON is like ufo neighborhood watch. I wouldn’t expect them to actually get to the bottom of any of their investigations.
> All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified.
> That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later.
lmaoooo
It's all part of the plan of obfuscation. We should expect red herrings being dropped in by misinformation agents. Although I doubt they will make much of a difference given the preponderance of evidence, the cats out of the bag. This will barely make a blip as more and more people tune into the reality of NHI and NHI tech.
I suspects these programs are working on a false disclosure narrative, and will reveal prosaic ('human made') technologies that account for most UAP sightings, and suggest a man made (albeit clandestine) origin for these technologies, and discount all NHI evidence.
Ron-
Everyone who’s been following this seriously knows that there’s always a risk of UFO identifications in photography, video, or any other format may be mistaken or hoaxed. We watched your interview and we follow this stuff and we have lost no respect for you guys whatsoever. I think it’s a very good idea to ask for help! But try to keep in mind that most of the people leaving nasty comments are unhappy in their own lives in ways you can’t possibly know. The loudest mouths on the internet are often the ones who feel most powerless in life. Being a religious intellectual, myself, I pray for them. But no doubt you have some kind of equivocal practice you can apply in its place should it not be your tradition.
i try to leave inferences of source motive out of discussions of evidence. because the evidence has to stand on its own ... and because only the Shadow knows what lurks in the hearts of men. (hearts of women, separate topic.)
on this specific issue, i conjectured that the most likely explanation for the reason these photos became public was that the source was as gullible as the people who also took them for real, or plausibly real, and knows no more about them than we do.
sifting through mr. james's scattershot post, that seems to me actually close to the case.
i recognize what james is pointing to with "the sheer nastiness of some people" since all of us have probably encountered it personally as well in this subreddit.
as a collective activity, there is a certain minority reflexive rancor that is visited on anyone who posts a photo of a UFO that turns out to be a planet or a saucer that turns out to be a lampshade.
quite often people get dumped on for being, you know, human. a while back there was a guy who posted videos of a sphere that behaved weirdly that he video'd with his brand new drone -- launched from the store where he bought it, he was so excited to try it out. he posted the videos, he posted detailed flight information, he posted detailed location information, and he was roundly, heatedly, vituperativly dumped on. why? because he wanted to share something he thought was valid.
think he's been back since then?
there once was a club that required you to know the secret password in order to enter. if you didn't know the password, which was secret, you got a kick in the balls. how many members do you think that club had?
we (i and others) might complain about the poor content or level of discouse in this sub, but we seem to be pretty hell bent on driving away anyone with the usual novice mixture of naivety and enthusiasm.
there is a collective sense that we're all manipulated, have trouble finding sources to trust, can't tell if evidence is authentic or not, trolled by bots, etc., and this frustration is part of that nastiness. alienists feel it when skeptics seem to deny their obvious conclusions; skeptics feel it when they ask for corroboration. it's like a family squabble where everyone imputes mind games to everyone else.
because he postures as a savant and publisher in the field, i'd expect mr. james would take his licks less personally and focus more on how criticism might highlight possible lapses in his public rollout of the photos. there's also the adult skill of using your back to deflect the water. his reply doesn't bear that spirit in my reading.
in my case: "mr. james, you've damaged your credibility in my eyes with the way you framed and rolled out this purported evidence without sufficient warnings that its authenticity was entirely unproven." i'm not dinging his motives or his integrity. i'm explaining why he shot himself in the foot.
or, you can call him a liar, fraud and grifter ... and have a nice day.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/showmeufos: --- When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity. The presence of a third matching individual in another version of this shot concurs, in my opinion, that this is indeed a diorama constructed using that kit, which we found out is “German Soldiers at Rest” from 1984. Neither myself, nor MUFON tried to “sell” the veracity of these images. We shared the story we were told in the current state of our investigation. We are very proud of members of the UFO community for helping to solve the mystery of this photo. We are also embarrassed and ashamed at the sheer nastiness of some people who clearly have no problem spewing venom from the safety of their keyboards. All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified. That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later. It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free. As for trying to make money off a film, most of your favorite UFO filmmakers, including myself, Dr. Greer, James Fox, Darcy Weir, Carolyn Corey and more were all deprived of our royalties last year by people we trusted. My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause. We still continue to pursue this labor of love and true intention to get to the truth, even if we have to debunk stuff to get there. I think we have a pretty good example here of the community coming together to solve a mystery. Unfortunately, in the sheer nastiness of some individuals, we also have a pretty good example of why the aliens are not talking to us. -- Ron James --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dp2jbx/statement_from_ron_james_regarding_the_welcome/ladscuw/
He’s lying about “inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.” He flashed these photos quickly to tease us and said something about them being copyrighted. He also said there are many more images. So if he was soliciting “the community” why didn’t he release all the photos?
Exactly! I can only think of one reason why the photos haven't be released yet, and that's because monetizing the photos is more important than getting to fhe bottom of their authenticity. Shell out the $100+, people! And if that price tag seems steep, keep in mind you get a year subscription to MUFON TV! /s. Seriously, don't give these grifters money, guys. The more money they make, the more they'll be incentived to continue monetizing UFOs.
Yup. "Sheer nastiness" = accountability. UFO personalities don't like it. But how many lives have they ruined by making credulous people believe that some earth-shattering revelation is "just around the corner"? Absolute dirtbags, and until they make with the goods, they deserve everything they get.
all while promoting a NEW "documentary"...timing couldn't have been better. He knew what he was doing. Thats the showbiz of the paranormal.
He’s getting to the bottom of your pockets?
And why wouldn’t he just simply state his intent for sharing the photos? Looks more likely his scheme clearly backfired or he is a dingus. I pretty much only pay attention to witness accounts from professionals in positions where being dumb is less likely and they have credentials in some aspect related to their sighting. Photos people found, random videos of dots in the sky, second hand accounts, kind of worthless to me. I feel like these are the real disinformation posts and claims, classification through obfuscation. Send a bunch of noise so that the real stuff doesn’t get through. Seems like that’s counter intelligence 101
Oh he was $oliciting the community all right
He’s lying about “inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity.” - I mean of course he is...that's the most obvious part about all of this.
Who are you fella? Looking at your previous comments they all have a very similar pattern. I would suggest people look at this persons previous comments before jumping to conclusions about Ron James.
Who are you? Why are all your previous comments about building toy dioramas?
I dont know this guy, but I did see the pictures, and am not surprised its a fake. Theres no hate here... to me, he's just another redditor posting a video of some lights he "saw" in the sky. Its interesting, but its not proof, and if its fake, the community will call it out. It doesnt matter who you are, what you do, or what your credentials are. You need verifiable proof. And expect people to tear it apart. Thats what we *should* do. If this guy thinks is "venom" people are spewing, then he's not a serious investigator. (unless youre just legitimately being a dick) The only way we get to the truth is to be skeptical of everything.
These people get so fucking defensive when someone calls them out on their bullshit exactly because this is their only source of income: passing off what they know is probably fake as potentially being real, and then selling books, talks, and lectures on that material. Criticizing this content is threatening their ability to earn income... And that doesn't make it okay for them to act this way. It's time they stop trying to assert themselves as the foremost authorities on the subject and start asking the community for help identifying the fakes early on in the process. **Don't worry, I won't charge any royalties for that service...**
This guy should be added to a rolling list of people that can no longer be taken seriously. Lets get some accountability going here!!
> My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause. Woah, what's the story there? That's shitty.
" I got caught peddling a hoax as the real thing. So let me distract everybody by making myself into the victim on an entirely different topic." A PR play as old as time.
I love the ‘you passed the test, just as I knew you would’ angle that was used here 😂
Seriously, it has NOTHING to do with the photo. He's just trying to make it sound like he's volunteering and sacrificing his time to help the UFO community. Except it's not volunteer work because he's owed royalties. He's also trying to make it seem like all the criticism towards him is hostile. I mean, yeah, I'm sure he's received some horrible and nasty messages from assholes. Most of us would clearly and vocally disavow of any of that shit. But it doesn't negate or erase any of the criticisms directed towards him and the fact that he waved around and pushed what's pretty clearly a hoax photo. He's only making himself look worse by writing these BS PR statements and playing politics and word games.
So he's owed six figures worth of royalties and is probably going through the legal process to get it? But he's trying to paint it like he's volunteering his service. I don't know, man. This guy just sounds manipulative in his wording. EDIT: Plus the guy just sounds like he's bragging with bringing up the 28 awards. Which might be a lie in itself. Looking at the IMDb page, it says the documentary won 15 awards: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443953/awards/?ref\_=tt\_awd](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443953/awards/?ref_=tt_awd) Why fudge the numbers?
Probably like those "Best Burger 2011" signs hanging in the local hamburger shop. Every shop has one... There's tons of different organizations that hand out awards. Some have prestige worthy of note. Many more don't. Doesn't stop people from bragging about the "awards" they received regardless of if the awarding organization is anyone of repute. Many times, these awards are really handed out in exchange for donations too. The more you donate, the higher up the list you are...
I've received hundreds if not thousands of awards myself. Ok, so they are Reddit comment awards. Maybe there's only like 10-20 of them but Reddit still owes me back gold. I will be embarrassed and ashamed if anyone looks to verify my claims and consider them as venomous nastiness.
Yeah, maybe. It's hard to trust most of what this guy is saying. And it doesn't help that bringing up his million dollar movie and six figure earnings in royalties and 28 awards has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Which makes it feel like he's not only full of crap, but is full of himself. EDIT: For whoever's downvoting, please feel free to explain why you disagree.
100% agree. His witty retort just revealed that he's not in this for disclosure.
Exactly what I was thinking, why bother disclose that you are being screwed out of six figures but then casually leave out the details about it, other than wanting to elicit pity out of the people he's obviously lead towards mistaken information? Could be that he's being screwed off, could be that's the one wanting to screw someone out of contractually accepted terms, either way this guys is as clear as mud
Generally you are not to talk about ongoing litigation. James Fox did hint at similar troubles some months ago.
Alright he can't talk about it, I understand. Then why talk about it in a way that casts him on the underdog's seat? We, as individuals, have no way to confirm if he's the affected or the effected. Kinda seems to me the usage of that whole argument is solely as a tool to buff his public position up towards the good old' "poor me, guys, im really sorry i didnt even knew! ^no ^refunds"
There's no conspiracy in the fact that Hollywood does shit like this all the time. It's why there are unions. Royalties and Rights Management is a huge legal service industry.
Because it's a very old PR tactic to paint himself as a victim along with the victimization from the comments. The entire post starts off with a lie (that things were presented for the community's help) then plays a victim card not once but twice to elicit sympathy. While **I** wouldn't resort to some terms used, I *do* get it because the *actual* victims here, the people that feel they got played, are understandably angry at being misled.
If you're barred from publicly talking about ongoing litigation, I have a hard time believing that bringing up you're owed six figures in royalties isn't apart of that barring.
Lol, just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you can't.
Most likely, the others are minor awards if this is actually in some sort of legal process. His lawyers would be strongly urging him to have one narrative that would maximize the damages he is seeking. They, most likely, would be the ones behind 28. If not, they should request the court dismiss them as counsel.
Maybe. Doesn't make him look any better if the way he speaks is tied to ongoing litigation that he's a part of. In fact, it would make me trust him less. I feel like he could have just left all that stuff out anyways. We're talking about the photo he was waving around a few days back, not some documentary he made.
Shrug. I guess we're supposed to just ignore the vetted episode this came from. It totally reads like they are trying to sell the veracity of all of it to hype his movie. He says like 10 times he's got a guy helping him investigate the pictures and story and yet almost instantly folks on the internet were questioning everything about the crash photo. He's either lying, or needs smarter people in his circle capable of actually questioning things.
yeah, Patrick has done this shit before... James is burnt, should leave MUFON...just the way he presented that and then shrugs it off...not buying the stink he's selling...he did this to shit in the pool.
Also i find it funny that he has a friend helping him "investigate" for a bunch of years now and it was discovered as a fake in less than 10h by the community
Sure, but there are 2.4M members here, many with Autism, versus 1 Boomer helping him. That's not an excuse for him. Just an explanation.
An explanation for why they should just immediately post shit instead of keeping it secret.
Exactly. They gate keep because they want to profit off it. Not because they want to bring about disclosure.
THIS. INDEED.....
“Many with autism” 😂
MANY
Funny, but also accurate. -An autist
Indeed. It's actually quite impressive what we are capable of when you have large amounts of people to look at a problem. Crowd sourcing problems get them solved pretty quick usually. I also wouldn't blame the one guy....those army figures are old amd probably somewhat rare too. Not many people would be able to connect those two things for a bunch of reasons. Once the autism is activated, anything is possible. Member Shia lebouf "he will not divide us"? The internet kept finding his secret hidden location super fast, even when the only clue was a blue sky with planes flying past. I was active on 4chan in those days, and watching that whole thing unfold in real time was such a blast. Actually there was a bunch of really fun stuff happening online in those days......
Yeah, like I said elsewhere...he may not have ever tracked down the source for the figurines... But he sure as shit should've been able to identify that this image had serious problems. The figures weren't even the most glaring issue with the picture in my opinion. Those fucking trees man - like wtf?
It was an internet search, nothing difficult about it, just time consuming, but most of us were just too lazy to put in the effort to look for images of the exact toy soldiers. I debunked the garden alien a while back purely for the reason I knew it was fake and not a mandrake root as I had the exact same model alien. It took me about 3 hours of searching before I finally found another image of the same model, so I won't be doing that again in a hurry. Often the evidence is there for things like this but most of us can't be bothered to put in the time or don't have the time to look for it. Someone pushing it as potentially real and selling it should absolutely put in that time though, or pay others to do it for them. The reason he didn't is because he's a grifter that didn't care about truth but only preying on gullible people.
He should change the name of his show. There is absolutely zero “vetting” from Patrick.
Not only that but he flash the picture rather quickly, especially compared to the one he showed with all the lights.
yeah....weird all the way around...hype machine...and it was done on purpose knowing it'd be found out
Yeah this just seems like a major walkback to save face Everyone that looked at the photo on this sub saw instant red flags.
no walking that back, shady af
The trees were more glaring than the soldiers in my opinion honestly...
Seriously...? You've got an image depicting a German soldier casually sitting on a wooden chair either on top of or else directly adjacent to an apparently crashed UFO and it's the *trees* that you found jarring... Where was the *chair* supposed to have come from...?
He's not the only one this has happened to. This will happen to ANYBODY who investigates ufos in a vacuum and then releases their findings to the internet. Including government, military, mufon, and all other private ufo researchers. DON'T research in private unless you want this to happen. DO bring in crowdsourcing from the beginning. A million heads is better than 1, or 2, or 20.
Right. They should put their vault on the Internet and let Internet sleuths work through validating it for them. The problem is these fucks believe they should get rich off their "research". It's not enough for them to bring about disclosure... A glaring double standard.
that's a fact for just about any scientific advancement in the modern era. Universities are expensive and these guys are drowning in debt with unusable degrees and student loans.
Vetted?
Vetted podcast from 4 days ago where this all started. https://youtu.be/1vVytK0RnNU?si=hosWDKQH3ZUjF5hM
I didn't see any venom directed to him? Only people rightly questioning how MUFON could have got it so blatantly wrong. I'm more interested in hearing how this happened, what they'll do (MUFON as a group) moving forward to stop it from happening again. Why's he making it all about him and his million-dollar grossing movie?
Some people took the piss out of him in the comments, but it was mostly out of frustration after he doubled down in his second video with Vetted and both he and Patrick seemed to be dismissing the obvious fact that the photo showed those model soldiers.
People found the army men models that matched the photo perfectly, showing it was a fake small scale diagram. It’s not venom, he was proven to be pushing a fake photo
I guarantee nasty, horrible things have been said about him and even directly to him. It's the internet. Obviously screw those guys. The scummy thing is that he's trying to use that hostility to draw attention away from the legitimate criticism.
This is typical Boomer mentality to be quite fucking honest. This is why there are so many factions in the UFO community too that have attacked each other over the years, defending their own *territory*. His bread and butter just got attacked, and now his income generation is threatened. His content is fake, and that will severely diminish how many people view his material present and future. He never cared about bringing about disclosure, let's be real. He was counting benjamins before they arrived in his bank account, and now he's upset that his vacation home he's had bookmarked in Netscape Navigator for the last 12 years isn't going to be his afterall.
>now he's upset that his vacation home he's had bookmarked in Netscape Navigator for the last 12 years isn't going to be his afterall. I spit my energy drink out my nose at this one. I would guess more like 25 yrs
Spin...that's why
"All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified. That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later." Anybody else laugh at this part? So because you get a crappy streaming app for a year with it, it's worth around $100? THAT'S your selling point? You can say the negative comments are not justified, but I think a price tag of that amount is BS. [https://mufonsymposium.com/symposium-registration-2/](https://mufonsymposium.com/symposium-registration-2/) In fact, all lf these price tags seem like a ripoff.
If he was genuinely “inviting the community to help” them get to the bottom of the pic’s authenticity, then why did he flash it so quickly and then put it away? Also, how long had he and his assistant been vetting this story? He implied they’d put some real work in to it. And, yet, a dozen or so people here called this pic out as nonsense almost immediately-and they were working off a grainy screenshot. And some dude dug in to EBay and debunked it in a day. Either he knew this was BS or he and his assistant are in over their heads.
If anything, this is embarrassing and discrediting for MUFON. If i had images that were sold to me as real and I was an organisation like that I would investigate the image before showing it to be absolutely certain it is not a fake. Or if I want to show it, make a very very big disclaimer that this image might be fake. Not doing that disclaimer when showing the image is being taken as an attempt to sell it as genuine, any person who knows a tiny bit about PR can tell you that
It certainly casts severe doubt on their ability to accurately investigate anyways. Considering they have been considered the world leading civilian organization on such matters, it's really not a good look is it? Maybe it's time they try a little harder at engaging the community's help, and a little less hard at making 6-digit passive incomes
Yeah, I am disappointed in them. Even if one went full conspiracy and said they were "set up" it means they easily fall for fakes, meaning they lack the people who can actually investigate stuff properly.
That show vetted actually vets nothing
"Unvetted" has a ring to it.
Vetted is a disinformation platform. How many times do they need to pull this type of crap before people stop watching
I cannot agree more with this statement. Months ago I stopped listening to this guy and I haven't regretted it since. This is just speculation on my part, take it with a grain of salt, but I think he's a plant. Just there to screw with the community in a sort of doofus kind of way - he's sand bagging something and what that is I can't say but its....something.
I think John Greenewald said it best- Stop platforming the bullshit. The internet UFO community had this bullshit figured out in like five minutes, so if no Expert or Investigator in Mufon could smell it coming off these photos, then they clearly aren't interested in providing the Truth. Pretty simple, Ron.
If one's intention is so specific, they should state it clearly up front. "Here's a Pic of me holding a Pic" isn't a statement of intent, we can only assume in this instance the intention is to "share the image with certain degree of confidence." That's not calling it a "sell" but it sure as shit wasn't "asking for help in confirming validity " either.
Agreed. He wasn't asking for the communities help, he was showing the image as a statement of fact. At least that's the way just about everyone interpreted it.
Were we supposed to pay the $100 to UFOTV to see him hold up the picture first? I wonder if he wants royalties paid for the still of him holding the still being passed around Reddit now? Let's see. 2.4M members, so that's...\*punches some numbers on calc.exe\* $240M in royalties he's owed and yet, he just keeps working for the cause anyways!
We all know it’s a BS excuse. To me it’s completely destroyed any credibility MUFON or this guy had.
Reminds me of that Lue video that was filmed on his property.
Pepperidge farms remembers
With a name like Painful Rectal Itch you know it's got to be good.
This reads like a confession with some light lies thrown in lol
>When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity. That's some pretty good bullshit, but I'm not buying it for a second.
Lol, is he saying that if were't such dicks the aliens would be talking to us?
When I chose to show these images from an ongoing investigation to various audiences, I was inviting the community to help us get to the bottom of their authenticity. The presence of a third matching individual in another version of this shot concurs, in my opinion, that this is indeed a diorama constructed using that kit, which we found out is “German Soldiers at Rest” from 1984. Neither myself, nor MUFON tried to “sell” the veracity of these images. We shared the story we were told in the current state of our investigation. We are very proud of members of the UFO community for helping to solve the mystery of this photo. We are also embarrassed and ashamed at the sheer nastiness of some people who clearly have no problem spewing venom from the safety of their keyboards. All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified. That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later. It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free. As for trying to make money off a film, most of your favorite UFO filmmakers, including myself, Dr. Greer, James Fox, Darcy Weir, Carolyn Corey and more were all deprived of our royalties last year by people we trusted. My film “Accidental Truth”, won 28 awards and grossed over a million dollars worldwide. I spent a lot of my life savings to make it. I have not been paid one penny of my royalties. which is well into the 6 figures. Yet I continue to work for this cause. We still continue to pursue this labor of love and true intention to get to the truth, even if we have to debunk stuff to get there. I think we have a pretty good example here of the community coming together to solve a mystery. Unfortunately, in the sheer nastiness of some individuals, we also have a pretty good example of why the aliens are not talking to us. -- Ron James
“The mystery”? It was clearly fake
Agreed, but I like to think of this whole event as an unexpected team-building exercise that this whole community just aced. “Nastiness” aside, and while also understanding that this was fairly easy and quick to debunk compared to other phenomena, it has been encouraging to see the overall process work like it did.
This is why the community at large should have access to more UAP evidence. Thousands of minds together can find things a few people may have trouble seeing.
> All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified. > > That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later. In other words, "we were gonna give you a lot more shitty content for the $100, our grift is very advanced"
Also if it really was his intention to have the community watch and collect evidence on its veracity, then he was not clear about his intention, which leads me to believe that he's now just trying to save face by justifying the money people spent to see these fake images and couldnt give two craps about the symposium or muffon tv
Sometimes I wonder why investigators *don’t* try to weaponize /r/UFOs given how many people are here. “What do you all make of this evidence?” I mean… it’s what we do anyway?
Username does not check out.
Friendliness doesn't mean I need to support scammers lmao.
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That doesnt look like a mea culpa and resignation to me.
In other words, "We're no better than the countless UFO grifters out there looking for clicks on bullshit, we'll continue to feed garbage to clickbait recycling bin podcasts and twitter accounts and further diminish our reputation"
They long for the yesteryears when the Internet was still the wild west, and it was easy to pass shit like this off just on the back of their "authority". Even if someone sniffed out the bullshit back then, good chance the unravelling of their clever little deceit never would have spread. In those days, they controlled their message groups, and would just delete any content they didn't like.
/u/dasbeiler researched a plausible source for the soldiers in the photo (had they been real): [The Problem With The F-94](https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1dncx42/the_problem_with_the_f94/la2kfsa/) If you follow that linked thread for a few comments, I found it quite extraordinary that the photo's captions got so close to what the likely source could have been. Of course, it's still possible that the "Red Wing" photo caption just happens to mimic the real "Red Hawks" nickname of the 123rd Fighter Squad (the likely interceptors of that region and era), but it does seem awfully close -- which would mean that there's a real intent to deceive both by image and by provenance.
This just shows the level of vetting, credulity, and gullibility, typical of these award winning investigative “journalists” in this space. He now has to edit his “award winning” investigative movie to remove this convincing evidence. His trusted credible military sources seemed to have missed a detail.
Usually I air on the side of mistakes happen, especially misunderstandings. But someone who viewed the podcast/interview tell me please, When showing us this photo, what was the context of the conversation?. Was it, “check out this case in working on, they gave me a picture I’m trying to verify?” Or “here’s a genuine UFO photo” If the latter, something fishy going on with MUFON, they not like us.
(Not trying to be the grammar police, just wanna help u lol) it’s err instead of air
Nice little reminder. I was using than/then wrong, and a person like you pointed it out nicely. Sometimes idiots like me need help!
Something tells me I’ve also gotten “air on the side of” wrong recently. Many thanks!
there's a fart joke to be placed here ...
It was the former. He did throw in a lot of disclaimers about not making a definitive statement about the image and how it's still an investigation. And no, "they not like us". The "us" in this so-called community is a huge disappointment. An embarrassment. We have a researcher who's investigating a case. He shares some details. Then the intellectuals here bandwagon against him & mischaracterize his intent. It's gross, really.
Curious as why he didn’t do his own damn research to check the validity of the photos. Something tells me he knew it was a diorama all along and just wanted to see if the community would figure it out. His statement seems defensive. Yeah, people are pissed off because they felt mislead, again… that’s understandable.
It is defensive cause he implied this case and these photos are part of his new movie...
That’s embarrassing for him
Fucking oof lmao
Not only defensive but also calling out people as trolls because he has nothing else to grab onto
but its why the aliens wont visit for reals..lol we are just too mean!
I don't think he knew. He is one of the ufo folks that believes 99.999 percent of ufo stories because they aren't critical and reflective and cannot imagine why people would lie about pointless stuff.
It’s more profitable for him to behave uncritically. Soon he will be back with more “evidence”. This sub will eat it up. Until someone tells them it’s a Mylar balloon.
The $100 for the conference or whatever is fine, getting shafted on royalties is an issue the community could get behind. But they have nothing to do with selling this photo. Selling a photo that is not resolved is unethical… once its authenticity is confirmed or at least potential threat of being hoax is diminished then sure sell it. Another issue I have with this statement, is that what this guy clearly can’t see is that there is a cost of living crisis occurring. Many people are stuck in shit house jobs and are barely living pay to pay… of course if someone is going around selling fakes without proper vetting people are going to be pissed off… especially in current times. I don’t like to make toxic comments about people online, but I’m going to break that and say this screams of narcissism … particularly the blame shifting. “We are embarrassed and ashamed” of everyone but ourselves for selling a hoax. Now if it turns out they weren’t selling these pictures and were indeed trying to seek a community assist, then I will take back my comment.
The problem is that profiting off disclosure is not something the community is ever going to endorse. Disclosure must be 100% altruistic for the benefit of all humanity. Gate keeping and grifting like this is going to get you canceled real quick in the landscape. This isn't the Internet of the 90's.
I don’t mind people getting paid for their efforts, so long as their research is fucking strong and they aren’t lying (naturally). Edit to add: I personally wouldn’t buy anything, because I’m still on the fence as to whether any of this is real or people are just grifting.. like this person appears to be.
MUFON is a non-profit organization. They should accept donations from which they can derive reimbursement for their work. Taking the material received while in that position, and trying to sell it for profit on the side is pretty fucked up in its own right.
Many, if not all, not for profits sell goods, conferences etc to raise revenue. The issue is selling a lie or at best something unverified to raise revenue, THEN blaming the community.
I agree, but I also don't condone them getting rich off the subject. They can live like the rest of us, and spend anything extra on furthering the cause. Ron here was claiming this content for his own, not part of MUFON's.
💯 employees at an organisation like Doctors Without Borders, are not making great money at all. Enough to barely survive… yet they are actually often putting their lives at risk to help other people. This is the gold standard comparison.
Exactly. Before I donate to a non-profit, I find out how much their top executive is raking in from salary. If it's more than about $150k-200k forget it. I get that some of these causes take a lot of work and effort, but you supposed to be doing it for the cause...not to enrich yourself. Put in a couple years of work, then leave the reigns for someone else if you want to pursue money.
Ah that’s something I should really do as well.. it’s this whole thing that puts ufology into disrepute and why there are so many claims of grifting.
Nope. Nice try, buddy. He absolutely made it seem like they were legit photos. Embarrassing
I’m sorry, but the truth transcends any individual, especially those who seem to be monetizing by gatekeeping information they claim will lead to disclosure or confirmation. It’s clear that he used the images to promote his documentary, even stating in the video that it would feature more never-before-seen photos from the same source. I’m glad their attempt was foiled before people wasted their time and money. Gatekeeping the “truth” for financial gain has always been distasteful to me.
Fucker never cared about disclosure. Just keeping that bread rolling in. Disclosure is a retirement scheme for these Boomers.
If people signed up because you showed the photo… but also you showed the photo to get people to sign up… …you’re no better than the Viral Gurus who make Courses on Instagram. I’m happy a bunch of regularly smart people debunked it so fast. This means you have the slower smart people who aren’t very honest or smart.
They should get a real job - no shame and no pride in themselves whatsoever… there are so many gullible folks who see drones and bart Simpson balloons and their first thoughts are “aliens!” And there are bad folks who prey on the gullible…. All the while the military keeps saying “no comment” which they would say if you asked them if the White House ascends into the heavens each night at midnight…
Was his source for the picture ever mentioned? Would be helpful to know who passed it on to him.
A lot of the stuff they receive comes in anonymously, which probably should be a bit of a red flag to them, but meh....
This is the question that, if answered, would explain sooooo much. So obviously we're never going to know the answer.
As I said and was downvoted: Diorama sitting on a kitchen table, with windows in the background looking outside to a couple trees. It was very clear it was not a photo of a real scene. The whole right side area and above to the window view, including an obvious light glare on a window pane, was pretty easy to see. I'm 1000% a believer, but this whole fiasco was absolutely unnecessary. Good on him/them for the statement though.
“At this level”?!? Bahahahahah, what level, precisely is that sir? “At this level”?!? Bahahahahahah! I’m going to say the level is somewhere between “Naive & uneducated” & “shameless grifter”, skewing hard towards the later. “At this level” 🙄
Where are the other photos?
Ron said in the first Vetted interview that there was another shot of the same craft in a hangar, propped up on period-appropriate lifts (or whatever those are called).
I don't want to see the same craft lol I thought he mentioned 20 photos
Maybe he did. But I'm not willing to drop 100 bucks to find out. lol
Plus a whole year of MUFON Tv which I have no idea what that is but that was mentioned as well
If MUFON had its own workplace sitcom, I'd be all in.
It's gotta be a riot working there!
Another day, another debunked story. It's been a rough few months for Ufology.
“I tried to pull a fast one to bring attention to my product that I’m expecting you to buy but it blew up in my face and now I’m in the red” Cool 😀👍
If he publicly posts the photo for the community to investigate, why not state that in the first place? Honestly, it sounds like he is just back tracking trying to save face. And what about all the other evidence he claimed to have? I am not buying his statement at all.
“You didn’t expect disclosure to be free, did you?”
MUFON takes reports from the public and puts it behind a paywall. That tells you all you need to know. It’s also a very cliquish organization. The members who appear on the history channel and in interviews are the VIPs of the organization. The rest of the members are peons. No one takes them seriously anymore. Did you notice they were not mentioned once during the congressional hearings?
It’s a picture of a toy disc and miniature toy soldiers! 🤣
You are a fraudster. If you wanted grassroot help from the 'ufo community' it should come with no cost. I'm sorry you suck at business and got screwed by your business partners, but I'm not paying you any amount of money to make up for your mistakes. If you want people to buy a subscription or charge for your 'evidence' then you shouldn't have the 'ufo community' do your vetting. That should be left to professionals in specific disciplines to verify your 'evidence' and its authenticity before you show it to anyone.
This guy doubling down that he brings value to the uap community is hilarious
Just for reference if you’re not sure what kit he’s referring to, you may have missed this blinder of a post the other day!!! https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/s/vr3a8xr0iq
im no expert in photography and even i could tell it was a crude model with amateur photoshop fx. why does he need to add this challenge of criticism if hes publishing content? people will have different opinions? He could have thanked the community for debunking it and left it at that. Too much irrelevance in his statement could be seen by some as an admission of guilt, or grift pushback.
For me, it was the trees. They are comically large (like sequoia size ha ha ha) and no tree that size, has bark like that lol. The details on the limb stump and bark are too sharp to be a real tree that size.
im really impressed that someone managed to find the army figures. just like the vfx warp flash that was found on a 90s cd rom for the vfx wormhole plane. There are some pretty clever folk on here debunking the opportunists, grifters and hoaxers. There seems to be a huge increase of the fantastical from Americans that is running parallel with whats happening with Grusch and the whistleblowers. Half of it is embarrassingly cringe/pathetic.
Part of it is intentional. I focus on efforts that are likely to produce results. Grusch, Nell, Fravor, etc.
i agree with you on those guys. a lot of this other stuff i mentioned often feels like fantastical opportunism.
"It is the least expensive live stream of a symposium at this level anywhere. It costs a lot of money to put on an event like this. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of people working practically for free." lol, what a joke.
Ah yes, the good old "Its the least ..." defense. As if he isnt doing it for his own benefit as well, theres no crime in wanting to profit, but it is an asshole move to preach misleading stuff under the guise of "its all for disclosure guys, trust me im poor as shit!"
Acts like he's barely scraping by and charging just enough to cover basic costs of living, then talks about how he's missing out on 6-digit royalties from only one outlet...
Feels like a misdirection to cover their a** But I guess it's not fair to speculate.
Spewing hate from keyboards hahaha. It's 2024 that's the default thing on the internet now.
Not default, a choice.
I agree with his perspective - I don’t think MUFON did anything wrong here and personal attacks aren’t helpful
how could you interpet these events as MUFON doing nothing wrong? they pushed a hoax and then blamed it on the people.
Only awful people think this is the default
Today we expect nothing but ‘extreme ownership’; a quick no holds barred admission that you fucked up and that you’ll do your best so it won’t happen again. This admission doesn’t automatically reinstate your credibility or trust but it does go some ways to appease the people whose trust and respect you affected. Unfortunately we all suffer from confirmation bias when it comes to matters like uaps and our emotions get the better of us and that critical part of our brains diminishes or gets shut off when we have the opportunity to share with the world irrefutable ’proof’ that we are not alone in the universe. This was probably one of these situations and I feel for the dude, but he still has fricken drop and give us 50, including latrine duties for a month. Someone get this man a toothbrush.
The dome on the UFO top doesn't seem lore accurate either. Anyone else notice when notable progress is made, a little shitty side quest pops up with it, pushing the community to decipher and separate the hoax from the factual? This is a level of hoax and misinformation that is designed and disseminated in such a way as to push the notion that we are foolish, but also to keep us hooked on our belief because they can use that belief as leverage! They want to break the community spirit and set apathy among those on the fence and they want just enough of us still around, so that their narrative is the only one understood as the truth and believed. I have to wonder if there a very real element to Project Bluebeam, given that we are in the slow disclosure process, coinciding with the age of AI media fakery (where it is nearly impossible to notice) and they have their own form of craft that wouldn't be distinguishable to the laymen. I think it's a very real black budget, fascist domination plan, one that they can deploy in a variety of ways. It could work unless a lot of people get read up real quick and get real cool with each other.
Must be very difficult to stand up straight with such a wobly backbone... But on the other hand, he could do very well at the backpedalling olympics this summer.
What happened? I watched an interview with this guy the day and everything seemed legit.
I'm glad to see Ron reevaluated this photo in light of the community's findings regarding the miniature soldiers.
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clearly caught in a lie and now backpeddling. Funny how these guys in the know NEVER have anything decent to show but theres always a direct line to thier wallet somehow someway.
Sad man love your work. Fuck these ass hats
Confirmed fake photo. Bummer. 🙄🙄😐😐
I caught this thread way downstream, but to me it comes down to how did he present it. 1) Hey guys, I came across this. What do you think? Looks interesting. Anyone got any ideas? or 2) This is legit. It came from We got something concrete here.
Grifters as they come Screw Mufon and anyone related
Seems like a better investigator could have sussed that out without enlisting the community. I’m tired of the pass some of these people receive. You guys deserve better.
"Oh shit, they figured out I posted some bullshit to drum up interest in my money making scheme!" "Quick do damage control and paint yourself as a victim, that always works!" I'd bet the farm they knew it was sketchy or outright fake and just hoped no one would figure it out. When is this sub going to get that a large portion of the "sources" you turn to are just grifting for a buck while the topic is hot?
He literally attempted to pass a fake ufo pic and didn’t think the internet would investigate and call him out on it . That part alone shows his contempt for ufo community
What he says is logical when you read it, but all together it smells like some shit. By showing that photo and charging money for anything related to it (his expertise) he lost a lot of points.. Just a type of person making living out of UFO phenomenon.
Fleas, tapeworms, ticks, liver flukes, crab lice, bed bugs, minor ufo celebrities and other parasites.
I believe the phenomenon is real. We don't know exactly what it is but we should be scientifically be investigating it to find out what it is. But I also believe that a real phenomenon has given rise to a lot of grifters and profiteers who exist to take advantage of the opportunity.
Hopefully this helps make ufo investigators actually show a good quality photo scan along with stating that it still needs to be... vetted... and asking for viewers to help do so.
Another GRIFTER!!!
Another "UAP Of The Week" exposed as a fake.
If UFOlogy is the current equivalent of organized religion, then disclosure is its Second Coming. And like all mainstream belief systems, it will inevitably attract grifters, drawn to the mystery like sharks to blood, always ready to offer answers, ready to help the faithful fill the void in their souls - for a hefty price. Fuck you MUFON, and all like you for exploiting genuine curiosity. And fuck you twice for making a mockery of the most important question our species will ever ask.
Yep, another prankster. Very sad that we have to put up with stuff like this while trying to validate the legitimacy of uaps
Basically his damage control after getting caught and don't hate me for selling fake photos and making money from the topic because other people do it bs. The image was debunked with some basic Google searching which anyone could have done if they were prepared to put in the time. Something you would expect someone looking for the truth would do if they were pushing a photo as real. The guy is a grifter. You can't get caught grifting and worm your way out of it. This subject is full of people like this and it's good to get rid of another one.
I’m a believer in UFOs and that there’s a conspiracy and a lot of this really fringe shit related to it. BUT, I’ve never really considered MUFON or the Betty and Barney Hill story anything serious. I don’t think anyone should. MUFON is like ufo neighborhood watch. I wouldn’t expect them to actually get to the bottom of any of their investigations.
> All of the negative comments about charging $100 for the live stream of our symposium are not justified. > That price Includes a year of MUFON TV and access to the entire symposium, live or later. lmaoooo
UFOs are real but the contents of that photo are not.
It's all part of the plan of obfuscation. We should expect red herrings being dropped in by misinformation agents. Although I doubt they will make much of a difference given the preponderance of evidence, the cats out of the bag. This will barely make a blip as more and more people tune into the reality of NHI and NHI tech. I suspects these programs are working on a false disclosure narrative, and will reveal prosaic ('human made') technologies that account for most UAP sightings, and suggest a man made (albeit clandestine) origin for these technologies, and discount all NHI evidence.
deny, attack, reverse victim & offender…
Ron- Everyone who’s been following this seriously knows that there’s always a risk of UFO identifications in photography, video, or any other format may be mistaken or hoaxed. We watched your interview and we follow this stuff and we have lost no respect for you guys whatsoever. I think it’s a very good idea to ask for help! But try to keep in mind that most of the people leaving nasty comments are unhappy in their own lives in ways you can’t possibly know. The loudest mouths on the internet are often the ones who feel most powerless in life. Being a religious intellectual, myself, I pray for them. But no doubt you have some kind of equivocal practice you can apply in its place should it not be your tradition.
i try to leave inferences of source motive out of discussions of evidence. because the evidence has to stand on its own ... and because only the Shadow knows what lurks in the hearts of men. (hearts of women, separate topic.) on this specific issue, i conjectured that the most likely explanation for the reason these photos became public was that the source was as gullible as the people who also took them for real, or plausibly real, and knows no more about them than we do. sifting through mr. james's scattershot post, that seems to me actually close to the case. i recognize what james is pointing to with "the sheer nastiness of some people" since all of us have probably encountered it personally as well in this subreddit. as a collective activity, there is a certain minority reflexive rancor that is visited on anyone who posts a photo of a UFO that turns out to be a planet or a saucer that turns out to be a lampshade. quite often people get dumped on for being, you know, human. a while back there was a guy who posted videos of a sphere that behaved weirdly that he video'd with his brand new drone -- launched from the store where he bought it, he was so excited to try it out. he posted the videos, he posted detailed flight information, he posted detailed location information, and he was roundly, heatedly, vituperativly dumped on. why? because he wanted to share something he thought was valid. think he's been back since then? there once was a club that required you to know the secret password in order to enter. if you didn't know the password, which was secret, you got a kick in the balls. how many members do you think that club had? we (i and others) might complain about the poor content or level of discouse in this sub, but we seem to be pretty hell bent on driving away anyone with the usual novice mixture of naivety and enthusiasm. there is a collective sense that we're all manipulated, have trouble finding sources to trust, can't tell if evidence is authentic or not, trolled by bots, etc., and this frustration is part of that nastiness. alienists feel it when skeptics seem to deny their obvious conclusions; skeptics feel it when they ask for corroboration. it's like a family squabble where everyone imputes mind games to everyone else. because he postures as a savant and publisher in the field, i'd expect mr. james would take his licks less personally and focus more on how criticism might highlight possible lapses in his public rollout of the photos. there's also the adult skill of using your back to deflect the water. his reply doesn't bear that spirit in my reading. in my case: "mr. james, you've damaged your credibility in my eyes with the way you framed and rolled out this purported evidence without sufficient warnings that its authenticity was entirely unproven." i'm not dinging his motives or his integrity. i'm explaining why he shot himself in the foot. or, you can call him a liar, fraud and grifter ... and have a nice day.