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Feb. 27, 2014 - Project Camelot
33:53
PROJECT CAMELOT: BOB FISKE: MUFON EXPOSED
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Time Text
Thank you.
Bob Fisk.
Okay, with Bob Fisk, and this is the preliminary to the interview.
So, Bob, tell us who you are and why you're coming forward at this time.
Okay, well, I'm a MUFON investigator who lives in Vail, Colorado.
I'm also a lifetime MUFON member.
I've had a long-term history in UFOs and I joined MUFON about 2000 when I decided to Take it up as a serious hobby.
And I've been an investigator for them.
I've done about three dozen investigations from UFON.
And I've also been in law enforcement and security for almost 30 years now and been trained in investigations and that.
But it all happened back in March of 2012 when I was at my job in Vail, which is as a security officer, and I was outside.
It was a nice day in March, mostly blue skies, And looking to the east, I saw a UFO. I mean, there was no doubt in my mind almost from the get-go of what I was seeing.
It was maybe a mile away and about 500 feet off the ground.
It had two intensely bright lights like headlights that were sparkling.
And made it so bright that I can only see a dark object behind it.
And then the object descended to about a thousand feet when it suddenly just vanished on me, which is something UFOs do a lot.
So I dutifully filed a report with MUFON the next day.
And a day or so later, I received an email questionnaire from the investigator who was assigned the case.
And I later found out this was the assistant state director.
For Colorado MUFON. And I was kind of surprised, you know, why I got the, why you sent an email questionnaire, because, you know, the most important part of our investigations is doing in-person interviews, the best way to establish witness credibility in my feeling.
And so I was kind of confused about it, especially the first line in my narrative I put in, that I was a MUFON field investigator.
And I kind of at least expected him maybe to call to say hi, seeing as how I work weekends on my job, so I rarely make it down to the meetings.
But that hasn't been a problem, I guess, so far.
Nobody said I had to come to the meetings.
Okay, hold on one minute.
I'm going to stop you right there.
Hi, I'm Carrie Cassidy from Project Camelot, and we're here with Robert Fisk.
He's explaining about his experience with MUFON. He's been a MUFON investigator for how many years?
Well, 14.
I joined in 2000.
It was a couple years later before I took my exam, but at least a good 10 years or more.
Wow, yeah.
And he also has, as he's mentioned, a background in law enforcement.
But he's had some strange sort of interactions with MUFON over the last, what, two years?
Over the last two years, yeah.
And I'll start with my sighting report, which I had a sighting report in March of 2012 near where I work.
I was at work at the time, and it was a good UFO sighting.
Kind of a picture of it, if you can see some of that.
But the object was about a mile off and about 500 feet off the ground when I first saw it, and it rose to about 1,000 feet, and then it just vanished right in front of me.
Knowing what I do about UFOs, I said that was a good sighting.
I filed a report with MUFON the next day.
Two days later, I received an e-mail questionnaire from the A field investigator assigned to investigate my case and I thought it was kind of strange at the time because we're supposed to do personal interviews with witnesses and I thought as I put my narrative of my On the first line, I put an MMU fund investigator from him.
So I was kind of surprised I didn't get a call from him.
But I filled out the questionnaire and sent it back to him and didn't hear anything else back.
But about some weeks later, I was looking in the CMS incident reporting and At my case and I found out that without any investigation at all, the investigator declared that I was either seeing a commercial aircraft or hallucinating.
Which really kind of took me so I emailed and investigated back who I found out was the assistant state director for Colorado MUFON. We're good
looking through CMS and I found out that sending out these email questionnaires, they were like form letters being sent to witnesses and I feel, you know, if somebody makes a report to MUFON on a UFO, he at least deserves a good investigation of it.
And that includes, you know, the investigative calling these people.
Like I said, it's the best way to establish credibility, witness credibility, is doing interviews in person and hand-to-hand over the phone.
But I noticed that there were many reports being filed that looked like they were sending out these email questionnaires.
Now, the state director I had concentrated all investigations in the hands of just four investigators, which was himself, the assistant state director, and I think the assistant state director's wife, and another investigator.
From the time I was looking between January 1st and June, there were something like 72 reports received by Colorado MUFON, of which these four investigators handled 70 of them.
And there was no listing of any secondary investigators involved, even though the state director says, oh, we have teams, we're leading teams of investigators.
I found nothing in the narratives saying that there are other investigators involved in these investigations.
Apparently...
Again, all I've seen is email questionnaires, and even where there were phone numbers given for the witnesses, it showed no attempt at calling them.
You know, I know enough about what's a good investigation and what isn't these days, and after my experience in sending out an email questionnaire, there's no investigation at all.
The state director was, when I finally emailed him, because I wasn't getting a response from the field investigator, he was telling me how these are good investigations we're doing and how he's fit by the assistant state director's investigation, which wasn't any.
He said I could be investigated by email, or I mean interviewed by email.
That was one of the funny lines.
This exchange, I found out that he had also put me on inactive.
I wasn't getting any new cases.
And he had done that the previous fall, I guess, of 2011.
And when I asked him, you know, why was I put on inactive?
And this was done without my knowledge or permission.
And when I asked him that, he essentially lied and said I had asked for this.
Wow.
And then he changed his story.
And then he said, well, I was having personal problems.
But I had only met him once at the 2011 symposium Well, not in my life.
It was kind of disrupting, but I didn't ask, you know, to be cut out of that.
But he used that as an excuse, I guess, the next time, saying that, you know, I was having a personal problem, I guess, in his opinion, that made me ineligible to be a field investigator.
And finally, you know, finally he comes up with, and I've got this in the email here, and I'd like to read it.
Okay.
So anyway, finally he justified it, saying that it is my prerogative as state director to make any FI inactive at any time and for any reason that seems good to me.
He said, I do not need to consult, notify, or obtain your permission to do this.
That's pretty interesting.
Now, I requested, I said, where does it say you move on manually of the power to do this?
And it took him, like, nine months to send me It says nothing on page 17 of the state director's handbook.
Basically, it says they are expected to counsel or otherwise properly correct their staff if a violation of refund policy or investigative protocol.
And the state director to include additional training, demotions, or dismisses of the state officer of the field and Investigators can handle most cases of misconduct.
And it says, however, a notification must be sent to the director of investigations, which I doubt that he did on any of this.
But there's nothing in it since he has the power to suspend me or expel me or...
Especially without notifying you.
That just seems, you know, wrong in any organization.
It doesn't give you a chance to defend yourself or, you know.
Yeah, and I started sending appeals to MUFON headquarters, to the international director.
Never got a reply for over a year from who was the last international director.
I can't think of his name.
But I asked for a lawsuit against the state director.
I think he acted on fairly personal reasons and went against, exceeded his authority.
So I mentioned that in an email to the international director and finally he responded.
But he wouldn't do anything.
He promised he would maybe investigate my original sighting report, but that never happened.
And then Jan Hartson took over at the last meeting and at the last symposium, he became the international director.
I did the email to Jan a couple weeks ago and asked him to look at this thing again and no reply.
Okay, well, so this is very interesting.
I'm just curious, up until like 2011, or exactly when you had the siding, had you had any other problems sort of in move on or within?
Well, the other state director, and I live up in the area of Colorado where there's a lot of sightings, Eagle County.
We've had a lot of them over the years and interesting cases and things that I've heard.
The last state director, Leslie Varnico, let me do my own investigation.
Apparently she trusts me to be credible and, you know, that I was somebody to You know, she believed I saw what I saw, and in every case, you know, I'm sure I was seeing good UFOs, alien craft in all of my reports, I think, even some of the ones where I'm not sure, and there's been a lot of them up there, and I don't even report anywhere unless I'm positive, you know.
So, in other words, when you say your reports, are you saying that you are the one who actually saw the sighting or that somebody else saw the sighting and then you went and interviewed them?
Well, both.
Some were other people sighting.
There were maybe half a dozen or so over the year that were mine.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
Okay.
And is that usual for MUFON investigators to have sightings of their own?
Well, I would think so.
I think that it would be something to get you interested, generally, is having a good sighting to begin with.
I can't imagine anybody wanting to join MUFON who at least didn't believe that UFOs were real.
Okay.
So you, in other words, during your ten years with MUFON, you have had a number of sightings.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Okay.
But was this particular sighting unique in some way?
Um...
Well, the shape of the craft was unique.
I hadn't seen anything like that before, even though I've seen it in pictures.
It looked like two big sparkling headlights, bright lights with the dark object behind it.
I've seen these in photos and drawings and other videos.
More recently, there was one that they showed on the Fact or Fate show about a UFO. Oh yeah.
Okay, so again, just putting this up there for people to see.
But it's distinctly after the sighting that things kind of went pear-shaped with MUFON? Yeah.
Okay, and you started being treated in a very unusual way.
I mean, I feel I had a valid complaint about the quality of the investigation.
Again, sending out an email questionnaire is not doing an investigation.
But your other sightings, did they also investigate those other sightings, or was it because you were supposedly no longer involved with MUFON at the time that you had this sighting?
Well, I didn't know.
You didn't know you weren't involved?
Previous state director, you know, if I reported a signing, she accepted that I, you know, that it was a good signing.
Okay, but nobody ever sent you a questionnaire in the past or things like that?
No, and I thought that was, again, highly unusual because...
So nobody tried to interview you?
I mean, just even, you know, I mean, here you are, a member of this organization.
How many members are there in, do you know, like, roughly how many people are members of...
In Colorado?
I'm not really sure now.
I mean, unfortunately, like you say, I wasn't able to make the meetings over the years because I've always been working this job on the weekends.
Right.
And your job was a security guard, is that correct?
A security officer, yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Was there a change in MUFON, would you say, since 2011 or 2010, which might have...
Well, again, very strange, and we're talking about in the way possibly government agencies work in MUFON. Oh, definitely.
Back in, some years back, Clifford Cliff took over after James Carey, and James Carey, if you remember, worked for the NSA before becoming an international director.
Right.
I guess I was told, because I think people came to believe he wasn't working in MUFON's best interest.
And after that, Clifford Cliff took over.
And Cliff's a very affable guy, but he was the one that he fired Leslie Barnigal as state director.
It was a little uproar, because I guess he fired a couple of them at the same time, who had been long-time state directors, and Leslie, I thought, did a hell of a job.
She was doing the symposium for many years, and I liked her, and it was Cliff who put in the current state director.
That kind of bothered me, you know, thinking back on it now, you know, it's kind of, you know, I wonder why Leslie got fired.
So you never heard any back-channel talk about why these hearings went on?
No, as I remember, nothing other than that.
They were very hush-hush.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
What about when you, you know, isn't MUFON, don't they have like an overhead?
In other words, every state has a MUFON and there's a state director, but then there's somebody...
Well, there's the international director and then there's the board of directors.
I see.
And again, I'm not even sure who is all on it right now.
I'd like to look at, find out the names.
I've been trying to get their attention because one thing, And if I did anything wrong professionally, which I didn't, you know, he could take action against me.
But using his personal feelings, you know, shouldn't have an option there.
Okay, have you got any friends within the MUFON organization itself that report to you things going on from time to time?
No, unfortunately I don't.
I don't really know anybody because like I said I don't attend the meetings.
I think at the time I was put on inactive and before that I think I was the only field investigator on the west slope of Colorado, west of the Divide, because Leslie was giving me pretty much all the sighting reports down there.
And again, it seems, you know, why put me on inactive?
If you've got an experienced investigator in that area, why do it?
Did they replace you with anyone that you're aware of?
Did they replace you?
In other words, you said you're the only one in that area.
No, I did notice that there was one report up nearby in the Glenwood Springs area, which is not that far from Vail, and I remember it was assigned to the same investigator who did mine.
And I remember thinking at the time, oh, we must have a new field investigator up this way, you know, giving him an assignment.
But it turns out he lives in, I guess, Colorado Springs.
Wow, that's far away.
Yeah.
So pretty hard to investigate something if you live that far away from the crime center.
You know, for me, sending out email questionnaires...
Conclusion that, you know, this isn't worth investigating.
And like I said, most of them turned out as IFOs, identified flying objects.
There were a few that were listed as insufficient data.
So are you able to sort of give, like, over a period of time, you say that these were, were you able to see any records of how many sightings and then what group of them were categorized in a certain way?
Well, I saw a lot of them.
I started writing down numbers of some of them.
Okay.
But I was seeing so many sighting reports that were being listed as IFOs.
So if it's an IFO, they mean the same?
I mean they identified as a commercial aircraft or weather balloon or something like that.
Interesting.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean...
You know, of course I'm Camelot, I'm always looking at the larger conspiracies of things, right?
So, if you've got something going on here, you've got a sort of shuffling of the people that are in charge, and that happened a year, was it in 2011, are we saying?
Where the people, you said that this woman, Leslie, was fired, and you said there were a few firings?
Yeah, that was probably...
What year was that?
I'm thinking around maybe 2010 or something, but...
We can check that later.
So you're saying there was a changing, though, and then this guy, you called him Clifford Cliff?
Clifford Cliff, he was head of international director after Kerrigan for a number of years, I think maybe about three years there.
But is he the current international director?
No, the current international director is Jan Hartson, who's had an Orange County move on, I think.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
He always seemed like a fair guy.
I talked to him at conferences, but, you know, he didn't get back my email, so it's kind of...
Interesting.
You know, there's a speaker here from MUFON this weekend, isn't there?
Robert Powell?
Yeah.
Oh, I got up.
And the question section and asked him flat out, do you think the NSA is working in MUFON right now?
And I told him my feelings, you know, that I feel positively.
I went through some of the history of, you know, government snooping and getting involved in there.
You know, mentioned Kerry and everything, and he kind of said, well, maybe there was, and, you know, but, you know, I don't think there's any more, and he says something about having any proof, and I said, well, I don't have any proof, but, you know, the NSA doesn't pay, here I am, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Okay, well...
This is very interesting.
I'm still puzzled because you're saying you made these reports all along, you know, you did these investigations for over ten years, and then suddenly everything sort of falls apart when you have this sighting.
Yeah, because not so much a sighting, but again, when I saw what kind of investigation or non-investigation that they were doing on this.
When exactly was the sighting and then was the response?
If you could give me the exact dates of that.
Do you know?
Well, I might have it written down here, I think.
It would just be interesting to see.
I mean, obviously you know the whole thing with Edward Snowden and the disclosures about the NSA and where things are going.
Needless to say, not so long ago, they built that new facility in Salt Lake.
Yeah, I had the sighting on March 10, 2012.
I think it was about 3.15 in the afternoon.
All right.
I reported it.
That was on a Saturday.
I reported it on the 11th of Sunday and got the email, I think, just two days later on the 12th.
Okay, and then once you got the email, which was a questionnaire, did you actually fill out the questionnaire?
Yeah.
Okay, and you sent it back in, and then nothing else, and you then found out it was classified as an IFO, as you call it, or having been a...
Hallucination.
Hallucination.
Yeah.
We're ridiculing witnesses now.
Incredible.
But approximately what month was the classification when you found out?
Well, I went back.
It was the beginning of June, I believe, when I was checking back.
And I was kind of wondering why I hadn't gotten any reports or assignments up that way.
And I was checking to see if there were any sightings up my way.
And I looked at my sighting from the 10th, and that's when I decided.
It's an aircraft or hallucinations.
Now, this is a database, is that correct?
Yeah.
And is this open to the public?
Parts of it, not the investigative part.
Really?
That's interesting.
The initial reports are usually open to the public, but you can go and classify and find out how many there are, but to get in and find out what the investigator determined.
Oh, really?
They don't publish what conclusions they've come to about the sighting?
No, otherwise I would have been looking in there and trying to get some more information for my...
That's actually quite interesting in and of itself.
That I got cut off to, you know.
Right.
Well, I mean, we're actually doing this on purpose because I myself, as Project Camelot, have gotten a lot of sort of off-channel information about MUFON as being a highly, you know, managed organization, managed by various intelligence agencies.
Certainly believable that NSA would be one of them.
I just use them as a cover for any government agency, I guess.
I think it's probably the NSIU probably has the most interest in MUFON, though.
Yeah?
Okay.
But this piece of information is quite interesting if you think about it, because, in other words, if you want to think of it as there's a sighting, and then there's an investigation, and then there's a conclusion, but you're saying the conclusion about the sighting is never published, so that the public does not know whether...
Unlike you, who found out that their sighting was then classified as, you know, IFO or nonsense or swamp gas, or they could classify it as anything, right?
So what we're talking about are records that are not public knowledge and therefore it's suspect.
Their conclusions could be suspect.
There's no place of appeal, for example, where a person could say, hey, you reached the wrong conclusion and why.
So it is interesting in terms of the history of UFO sightings and that this is one of the major organizations Where people tend to go, would you say?
Well, again, as I wrote in that one piece I gave you, we would be a target for these people.
And the government decided that long ago, they had the American public learn the truth about UFOs is a threat to national security.
So any organization, a person, or group that is trying to do this, naturally becomes a target for them.
And I think we would be, like I say, very naive and even stupid to not admit that they would have people in there.
I mean, I'm convinced there's people in MUFON now that are probably working for the NSA or one of those groups.
Just who they are and how many of them, I don't know.
But, you know, I certainly suspect this.
I mean, what the people in Colorado and MUFON were doing was the same thing the Air Force used to do.
They weren't doing good investigations.
It was ridiculous.
Quick explanations.
It's a government operation.
They're just trying to explain away as many as possible.
So maybe when somebody calls them, you find them looking for statistics.
Oh, we explained away about 6% of them, which is what the Air Force used to say, oh, 6%.
And that's what they were public with.
And so, of course, people think most people are crazy.
Well, you know, this is fascinating.
I also wonder, though, a person like you who had a background in law enforcement, even before you got involved in doing investigations, right, for MUFON, and we're talking, you said, 10 years, at least 10 years, even longer, right, before you actually signed up to be an investigator?
I've been investigating, I think, for at least 10 years.
But it took me a few to get through the manual.
And I was reading books on the subject because, like I say, I'd kind of been on the fringes of UFOs, but when I decided to take it up as a serious hobby in 2000, that's when I got my first PC and got online and got to all the good websites and learned what was going on.
I mean, I started reading books and trying to catch up on everything.
So there was kind of a time before I took the Okay, but during those 10 years, were you, in other words, were you getting indications that there might be something going on?
In other words, you seem to have kind of kept to yourself.
You seem to have done your own investigations.
You say the state director back then seemed to treat you well, and you felt there was an openness.
Yeah, she actually sent an email saying to somebody else, but I got a copy of her.
She said that One of her best investigators.
Okay.
And at that time, how were those sightings classified?
Do you know?
Mine?
Yeah, the ones back in those ten years.
Well, the sightings I had, they varied.
I mean, some I did identify, you know, an actual object, a planet or something.
Right.
Some, and unfortunately, sometimes you get a person who makes a report, but you can't get in touch with them to do an interview.
Sure.
And I've had a few of those ones that on paper seemed like real good reports.
And unfortunately, you know, they wouldn't call me back or I'd never make contact.
So those became like insufficient data.
I see.
And we're classified to that.
The remainder I had were all really good reports of alien craft.
Some of them were really good too.
Close encounters type stuff.
But in terms of the people or the treatment that you got in those years leading up to this kind of sort of incident.
Well fine, nobody ever said anything.
Leslie never sent me an email saying I need Especially when they were in Denver, I made all of them because they were right close by to where I live.
I went to a couple in Orange County.
Great.
Well, this is really, really interesting, I have to say.
Obviously, this is going to go on the web.
Yeah, there's a lot of good people in MUFON who are doing good investigations of this.
People in there who aren't, for reasons we can only speculate at, that are doing things and not working and move funds by its interest and we need to get them out of there and get back to doing good investigations.
I hope to be back doing investigations again someday, but even if it doesn't Well, this is wonderful, and you're quite brave, I would say, coming forward in this way.
I was a Chicago policeman.
So that you're the right person for the job, so to speak.
I don't scare easy.
It was funny, after I called you, gee, maybe the NSA doesn't want to retire.
Okay.
All right.
Well, you know, I guess we can wrap this up unless you have something else that you would like to add.
Well, only I'd like to see you become a good organization again and be dedicated to doing good investigations and UFOs and hoping to solve the problem and ending UFO secrecy.
There you go.
All right.
Thank you, Bob Fitz.
Take care.
Thank you.
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