MUFON's "Cherry" Bomb

An invisible rip in the fabric

by Billy Cox

De Void tends to ignore personality-spattered UFO food fights because a) they’re boring, like real life and b) nobody outside the small circles of what the MSM describes as “believers” gives a damn anyway. But lately, the longest-running private UFO research group in the country is having a PR problem that’s getting a little too loud to ignore — and its new leader is using the C word.

“I’m not trying to be conspiracy minded,” says Clifford Clift, the international director for the Mutual UFO Network. “But there always seems to be somebody out there, when we start going in the right direction, who starts putting us through detours.”

OK, wait. MUFON’s been around since 1969, no mean feat considering how it relies on an all-volunteer staff to conduct its thankless mission of sifting through UFO reports, most of which turn out to be rubbish. Yet, despite its limitations, the 501(c)3 manages to do pretty good work, and its “UFO Stalker” sightings map continues to update its cool interactive database in real time.

So maybe a better story here should be how infrequently management-level ego eruptions actually spill into the public domain, given the inherent lack of recognition or material perks in this wretched field. And especially given the number of paranoid, delusional and grandiose wack jobs who routinely inject themselves into diligent UFO investigations.

But that’s exactly what happened at a MUFON meeting on May 2, when Ken Cherry, the Texas MUFON director, went sideways and tore into everyone from witnesses to the national leadership. Evidently, two years of frustration emanating from the 1/8/08 Stephenville incident — the most well-documented UFO event of the modern era — blew like a BP wellhead.

No one escaped Cherry’s spray, which showered “outsiders” who had the audacity to enter his fiefdom without personal invitations. Cherry said one investigator was so stupid he “didn’t know how to use a computer”; another “one of these so-called experts” came with “multiple degrees and a smart ass.” He accused then-international director James Carrion of doing “a lot to discredit MUFON” with a pattern of “incompetence” suggesting “evidence of a conspiracy.”

After charging MUFON with conducting “an unwarranted and unauthorized investigation behind our backs” and for “discrediting witnesses,” the dude went on to repeat the offense himself. Singling out one eyewitness by name for his “psychological problems,” Cherry chided other “nutcase” greedheads for peddling bogus UFO footage in 2008 to the media. Then he pitched his own DVDs and videos, recorded from an earlier lecture in San Jose, for only $10.
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