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ALFAs: My Mistake


In a previous post about Peter Gersten's Leap of Faith I mentioned that among the people hanging around Bell Rock were a couple of men dressed up as aliens, springy antennas on their heads, covered from head to toe with aluminum foil.

I call such a costumed person an ALFA -- short for an aluminum foil alien. I spotted the tinfoil twins in a news video from a TV station in Phoenix, Arizona, KSAZ Fox 10, that was covering the Leap of Faith event back on December 21, 2012.

If I had been paying close attention I would have noticed that the ALFAs clip was not part of the Leap of Faith story; the news program was switching from one story to another with overlapping video.

The shot of the ALFAs had a dateline banner saying BUGARACH FRANCE which was the scene of another end-of-the-world event centered around a mountain called Pic de Bugarach that supposedly concealed an alien vessel would come out and rescue true believers from doomsday. I had assumed the dateline banner was incorrect and that the ALFAs clowning around were part of the Peter Gersten event. I thought there was a mix-up, the wrong dateline was shown as I've seen happen with news programs.

I discovered my mistake after I recalled a UFO flap here in the US back in the 1970s. If memory serves me – sometimes it doesn't – TIME or Newsweek ran a photo of a couple of tricksters dressed up as ALFAs during the flap. They were lurking around at night in the woods, scaring the hell out of people, from what I recall. Fortunately no one they encountered was carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle. (Tinfoil makes lousy body armor.)

I wanted to write about ALFAs, maybe even finding a copy of the two tricksters I had seen in the news magazine. During my Google search I encountered two familiar characters who I had assumed had been hanging around Bell Rock in Sedona Arizona, waiting for Peter Gersten to leap into an interdimensional portal (or just commit suicide).

Well, it turns out the two ALFAs in the news video were indeed hanging around Bugarach, not Sedona. I've come across images of the guys with captions explaining they were in France, not Arizona. Here's an image (Credit: Marko Drobnjakovic / Associated Press) posted by The Detroit News in an article talking about doomsday hotspots around the world:


Anyway, I might be returning to the ALFA topic but with more research, taking the angle of photographic and video hoaxes. If I do I'll try to pay more attention to details.

Comments

X. Dell said…
So will there be another pic by the light of a silvery moon?
6:35 PM
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