Bob Shell: Nova Nonsense

Illustration_Roswell_lab-Nova
A.I. simulation of Roswell Lab.

Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2025

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Nova Nonsense

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I was excited when I saw the announcement that the PBS science series NOVA was going to devote a program to UFOs. There have been several very good recent programs on NEWSNATION, so I had high hopes for PBS taking the subject seriously for a change. 

Unfortunately, the NOVA program was a bunch of poorly researched nonsense. They ignored most of the good research done since at least the 1950s. 

As just one example, Major Jesse Marcel, the man who first collected some of the debris from the Famous Roswell event, said on numerous occasions late in his life that the debris he was holding in the famous press conference photo was not the material he recovered from the Foster Ranch near Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. There was a coverup by the government, which was later admitted. But NOVA repeated the long debunked nonsense that what crashed was a Mogul Balloon Array. 

I knew Jesse Marcel, Jr. He wrote the foreword for the 1997 book ‘Beyond Roswell,’ of which I was the coauthor. 

Jesse Jr. was twelve years old when his father excitedly came home one night to show his wife and son some of the debris he’d collected on the Foster Ranch. It was not debris from a weather balloon, with which Marcel was quite familiar, nor was it debris from a Mogul Balloon train, which Marcel would easily have recognized. 

Marcel Senior had been involved in balloon recoveries, and would never have confused balloon debris with exotic material. There was material that looked like tinfoil, but when crushed and released, returned to it’s original shape. (We are just learning to make such ‘memory materials.’) There were I-beams with ‘hieroglyphics’ on them that were as light as balsa wood but could not be bent or burned. 

In that photo, taken by James Bond Johnson, General Ramey is holding a telegram. Image analysis has shown that it refers to ‘victims’ of the crash. Weather/Mogul balloon victims? 

It was a disservice to PBS viewers to present long disproved material as factual and irrelevant pseudoscience about the videos taken by fighter pilots, the famous ‘TikTak’ and ‘Gimbel’ videos and others. 

The program was essentially another tired old attempt to debunk the whole UFO phenomenon, attempts to explain the extraordinary as misinterpreted ordinary. We’re long past that. 

Toward the end of the program, they repeated the old ‘They can’t get here from there’ mantra, because the universe is just so big. This reminds me of Lord Kelvin saying that heavier than air flying machines were impossible. Yes, they were — within the technological framework that Kelvin understood. Just because we can’t build faster than light (FTL) craft with our current technology does not mean that it is impossible. NASA is, in fact, exploring the possibilities of warp drive technology in Houston. A civilization even a hundred years in advance of ours probably has solved the problems of FTL travel, or might be using quantum teleportation to instantaneously jump from place to place in the universe. Physicists have already done quantum teleportation on a molecular level. 

The argument that ‘they’ can’t get here is specious. 

I have been researching the UFO phenomenon since the 1960s. In the early 1970s I wrote a regular column on the subject for Gnostica magazine. I have watched numerous feeble attempts to debunk the phenomenon over all of those years, but the UFOs ignored the nonsense and just kept doing their thing, and people worldwide kept seeing and encountering them. 

It’s long past time to stop the silliness and admit that they are here, we don’t know what they are or where they’re from, and they’ve been here a very long time.

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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models.  He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.

On September 16, 2024  Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.

To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-ancient-aliens/

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