UFO Conference 2008

UFO Conference Speaker Bios (2008)

Stephen Bassett is arguably the leading advocate in the nation for ending the 60-year government imposed truth embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and the planet earth. He is a political activist, lobbyist, commentator, columnist and conference producer. He is the founder of the Paradigm Research Group, the Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee (X-PPAC), the author of the Paradigm Clock website and the executive producer of the X-Conference. His work has been covered worldwide including the Washington Post, Washington Times, New York Times, Legal Times, Christian Science Monitor, National Journal, Pravda, London Sunday Express and Roll Call.

Richard Dolan studied history, English, and philosophy as an undergraduate at Alfred University. His deep passion for the discipline of history resulted in a scholarship to study at Oxford University and a near miss for a Rhodes scholarship. He chose instead to do graduate work at the University of Rochester, where he focused on German and Soviet studies before moving on to American Cold War diplomacy. Not wanting to teach, he left academia to write. In 1994 he became interested in the UFO problem, approaching it from the angle of history and politics. He was intrigued by the cultural schizophrenia - the fact that mainstream and academic culture (official culture) continued to treat UFOs as amusement, but that so many intelligent people privately had taken it seriously. Throughout 1995, 1996, and 1997 he conducted a systematic bibliographic search, hunting down the many out-of-print books and UFO documents released over the years through the Freedom of Information Act. He found the amount of information nearly overwhelming. A detailed chronology of relevant events was prepared in advance of writing his critically acclaimed book, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up, 1947-1973. This book provides the crucial foundation everyone needs: a clear, comprehensive, but concise historical narrative of the problem. He is now at work on the study's second volume, which will take the story through the remainder of the 20th century.

Jim Marrs A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Mr. Marrs earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of North Texas in 1966 and attended Graduate School at Texas Tech in Lubbock for two years more. He has worked for several Texas newspapers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where beginning in 1968 he served as police reporter and general assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe and the Middle East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War, he became military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative reporter. Since 1980, Mr. Marrs has been a free-lance writer, author and public relations consultant. He also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism tabloid, a cable television show and several videos. In 2007, Mr. Marrs retired from the University of Texas at Arlington where he had taught a course on the Kennedy assassination since 1976. In 1989, his book, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, was published to critical acclaim and reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February 1992. It became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK. Mr. Marrs served as a chief consultant for both the film’s screenplay and production. Beginning in 1992, Mr. Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book on a top-secret government program involving the psychic phenomenon known as remote viewing only to have it mysteriously canceled as it was going to press in the summer of 1995. Within two months, the story of military-developed remote viewing broke nationally in the Washington Post after the CIA revealed the program but put their own spin on psychic studies. Psi Spies was finally published by New Page Books in 2007. His website is JimMarrs.com. In May, 1997, Marrs’ in-depth investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, was published by HarperCollins Publishers. Mr. Marrs has been a featured speaker at a number of national conferences including the Annual International UFO Congress and the Annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference. It has been translated into several foreign languages and become the top-selling non-fiction UFO book in the world. He began teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2000. Also in early 2000, HarperCollins published Rule by Secrecy, which traced the hidden history that connects modern secret societies to the Ancient Mysteries. It too reached the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2003, his book The War on Freedom probed the conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. It was released in 2006 under the title The Terror Conspiracy. In mid-2008, his book The Rise of the Fourth Reich, detailing the infiltration of National Socialism into the USA, was published. An award-winning journalist, Mr. Marrs is listed both in Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America. Mr. Marrs has won several writing and photography awards including the Aviation/Aerospace Writer’s Association’s National Writing Award and Newsmaker of the Year Award from the Fort Worth Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 1993, Mr. Marrs received Freedom Magazine’s Human Rights Leadership Award. Mr. Marrs has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CSPAN, the Discovery, Learning and History Channels, This Morning America, Geraldo, Montel Williams, Today, Tech TV and The Larry King, George Noory and Art Bell radio programs along with numerous national and regional radio and TV shows. He is a former president of the Press Club of Fort Worth and a current member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Linda Moulton Howe is a graduate of Stanford University with a Masters Degree in Communication. She has devoted her documentary film, television and radio career to productions concerning science, medicine, and the environment. Linda produced an update to her original documentary, A Strange Harvest, about the continuing worldwide animal mutilation mystery in her independent production, STRANGE HARVESTS 1993. She also contracted with Paramount Studios as Supervising Producer and Original Concept creator for an hour special based on her Earth Mysteries program. That hour, UFO Report: Sightings, was first broadcast in October 1991 and led to the Sightings series on the Fox network. Linda has written four books: An Alien Harvest which investigates the worldwide animal mutilation phenomenon and Glimpses of Other Realities, Volumes I and II which concern U.S. military, intelligence and civilian testimonies about other forces that interact with earth life. Her fourth book, Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles, was updated in a 2nd Edition with expanded 2001 content and released in July 2002. It is an investigative report about scientific research of unusual formations in cereal crops and grasses around the world and videotapes, photographs and eyewitness descriptions of mysterious small lights associated with the enigmatic crop formations. Linda continues to write, produce and speak at national and international conferences and symposiums, including NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She also produces, writes and reports for television segments and has been interviewed on a Larry King Live special, CNN; The O'Reilly Factor, FOX; Sightings and Strange Universe, FOX; NBC's The Other Side; cable's Montel Williams; Britain's Union Pictures, ITN and BBC; The Discovery and Learning Channel special Evidence On Earth; and the NBC network special, Mysterious Origins of Man. Linda produces, reports, and edits the award-winning science, environment and earth mysteries news website, Earthfiles.com. In 2006, Earthfiles received the W3 Silver Award in the news category. Linda also reports science, environment and earth mysteries news for Premiere Radio Networks Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, Los Angeles; and Unknowncountry.com's Dreamland radio with Whitley Strieber.

	Nick Pope used to run the British Government's UFO project at the Ministry of Defence. Initially sceptical, his research and investigation into the UFO phenomenon and access to formerly classified government files on the subject soon convinced him that the phenomenon raised important defence and national security issues, especially when the witnesses were military pilots or where UFOs were tracked on radar. Nick also looked into other mysteries such as alien abductions, crop circles and ghosts. He now continues his research in a private capacity and is recognised as a leading authority on UFOs and the unexplained. He does extensive media work, lectures all around the world and has acted as consultant on numerous television documentaries.
	Bill Ryan has a BSc in Mathematics with Physics and Psychology (Bristol University, UK, 1974), and followed this with a brief stint in teaching. For 27 years he was a management consultant specializing in personal and team development, leadership training and executive coaching. Major long-term clients included BAe (Systems) Ltd (formerly British Aerospace), Hewlett-Packard, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Kerry Lynn Cassidy has a BA in English with graduate work in Sociology, an MBA certificate from the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, and was competitively selected to attend a year of film school at the UCLA Extension Short Fiction Film Program as one of their first "hyphenates": a writer-director-producer.
	With a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering from Colorado and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell, a 43-year career at McDonnell Douglas managing research and development projects and over 40 years of investigation into UFOs, Dr. Robert Wood is uniquely qualified to provide credible analysis about the nature of the UFO reality. He began reconstructing the (MAJIC) Special Operations Manual in 1995. He has given lectures and authored many articles on the UFO topic including "Validating the New Majestic Documents," "The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis Is Not That Bad," "Spelling Error Forensic Linguistics" and "Alien Viruses and Leaked Documents." He has personally handled and now possesses many leaked documents.

Born in Maryland in 1955, Ryan S. Wood first became interested in UFOs when his father, Dr. Robert Wood, was engaged in deciphering the physics of UFOs while managing a research project on anti-gravity for McDonnell Douglas. Ryan is now regarded as a leading authority on the Top Secret classified Majestic-12 intelligence documents and the 1941 Cape Girardeau, Missouri UFO Crash. He is the recent author of MAJIC EYES ONLY: Earths Encounters With Extraterrestrial Technology a landmark review and synthesis of 74 UFO crash retrieval events. A frequent lecturer on the UFO subject, Ryan has taught college courses and made numerous presentations about UFOs to civic organizations and at ufology conferences. He has organized three worldwide UFO crash retrieval symposia www.ufoconference.com and once presented a UFO lecture to a class on National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School that formed the basis of the final exam. He manages the content of www.majesticdocuments.com and along with his father was the executive producer of a television documentary on the authenticity of the Majestic-12 documents called The Secret. Mr. Wood earned a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cal Poly, and is particularly interested in UFO documents. As a UFO researcher with MUFON he has chosen to specialize in the strategic problems of ufology: unquestionable proof, improved media acceptance, and increased participation in the UFO field.