Retired doctor tries to educate people on existence of alien life
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| Dr. Richard Oconnor |
O'Connor is a retired doctor who left St. Peter's Hospital in Helena in July after 28 years as an anesthesiologist.
When his other medical experience is added in, he's been working in operating rooms for more than 30 years.
Seated in the living room of his home with its view of timbered and snowy mountains, he said, "I'm one of the people that believe our world is being visited.
"For me there's no single piece of evidence that leads me to that conclusion."
Instead, it is the preponderous amount of evidence on the subject, he said, that supports his conclusion.
The testimony of government officials, those in the military as well as the sightings by pilots and ordinary people, he explained, all point to a "first contact" being underway — something that's been happening for decades and even centuries before these more recent encounters.
"Who has the motive to lie about this?" he asked.
For him the answer to who is withholding the truth is obvious: those in the military and who hold the political reins, as aliens have far greater power as evidenced by their ability to travel great distances to reach Earth.
Intricate designs carved overnight into crop fields are other evidence of such contacts, O'Connor said.
These designs that come in all shapes, he added, "They're trying to tell us something."
Several websites are devoted to explaining and pondering crop circles and one decodes the binary code employed in one that reportedly says, "Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises. Much pain, but still time. Believe there is good out there. We oppose deception. Conduit closing. 0x07"
The closing sequence of numbers, 0x07, is said by the website to produce the tone of a typewriter bell.
Livestock mutilations in farm and ranch fields are also among what leads O'Connor to conclude otherworldly life forms are slowly revealing their presence as they watch and interact with Earth's inhabitants.
At one time he had set up a radio dish in his yard pointing toward the sky directly overhead. A computer with an open email program was attached to the dish in hopes of enticing a message.
"But it just did not happen," he said.
More than two years ago, he posted an Internet message inviting alien space ships to reveal themselves by flying by his cameras. A computer program helped him scan the roughly 270,000 photographs he had acquired by November from those cameras.
Late last year he was startled by what he thought he saw among those photographs.
"On November the 4th, I thought I had found it," he said.
"It certainly fit a lot of descriptions people have given about their own sightings," he said.
A link to an incident
O'Connor, 60, is tall with blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. His brown hair is pulled into a pony tail.
Although he's soft-spoken, an emotional intensity surfaces when he talks about the threat nuclear weapons pose to the planet and the attention they've drawn from aliens.
O'Connor's interest in UFOs spans decades, yet a single event, meeting Dr. Jesse A. Marcel Jr., who practiced medicine with him at St. Peter's Hospital, helped cement his belief.
Marcel told O'Connor had seen some of the July 1947 crash debris from the desert northwest of Roswell, New Mexico.
O'Connor and Marcel worked together as colleagues. They were friends too, and, "His story was always the same," O'Connor said.
"I came to the conclusion 30 years ago that this man was not a liar," he added. "He was a very responsible person."
Marcel's father, who was also Jesse A. Marcel, was the chief intelligence officer with the 509th Bombardment Group and was among the military personnel who responded to the Roswell crash site, O'Connor said.
Marcel's father brought home some of the crash debris to show his family. His son, who was 11 years old at the time, never forgot what he saw and described the thin metal I-beam parts with their peculiar purple markings, O'Connor said.
According to the Roswell UFO Museum website, the crash was reported by rancher W.W. "Mack" Brazel, who with the son of another family rode to check on sheep after a fierce thunderstorm the previous night.
Brazel noticed metal debris and saw a shallow trench several hundred feet long carved into the land.
The rancher recovered several large pieces of the debris and took them home with him. He then showed them to the family of the man that had ridden with him.
Brazel then reported his discovery to the county sheriff who reported it to Maj. Marcel at the Roswell Army Air Field. The debris site was closed while the wreckage was recovered.
"I didn't know what we were picking up," the museum website reads as Marcel's comments regarding the debris. "I still don't know what it was … It could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or experimental balloon … I've seen rockets … sent up at the White Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or rocket."
Bodies were also reported to have been recovered from the wreckage, according to the website.
A news release from the Roswell Army Air Base was printed by the local newspaper and broadcast by radio stations that the "wreckage of a crashed disk had been recovered."
A weather balloon was substituted for the wreckage during a subsequent evaluation at what was then Fort Worth Army Air Field, the website explained, and the wreckage was now that of the balloon.
"(It) was a cover story. The whole balloon part of it. That was the part of the story we were told to give to the public and news, and that was it," the website quoted Brig. Gen. Thomas DuBose, chief of staff of the 8th Air Force, as having said.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Roswell event was a UFO that crashed in the desert," O'Connor said. "And our military recovered it, and then they covered it up.
"I think that's been a huge disservice to humanity, in my opinion."
Jesse A. Marcel Library
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| Jesse A. Marcel Library (JAMAL) |
A Freedom of Information Act request was made to the Department of the Air Force, headquarters 341st missile wing, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls regarding sightings of unidentified flying objects over Montana since 1999.
"Manual and computer searches were conducted and we have no records responsive to your request and we are not aware of any other records systems which are likely to produce any responsive records," stated the Feb. 19 response.
"That's unfortunate," O'Connor said. "I guarantee you that's not true."
O'Connor sees withholding of information as hindering the scientific and social evolution of the world and called for funding for study and evaluation.
For more than 60 years people have been convinced that contact by aliens is not real, O'Connor said, explaining that daily life with jobs and families leaves little time for people to consider the issue in depth.
"Trying to sort out what's fact and what's fiction is not a simple process," he added.
To help people learn about these first contacts, O'Connor opened the Jesse A. Marcel Library in March 2012. It's named for the elder Marcel and located in a building near his home.
On Tuesday nights between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. when it's open, presentations and discussions are held for the typical 10 to 20 people who come.
Perhaps 150 have come when the museum's open on most Tuesday nights. Some were there to learn. Others came to share stories.
The museum's website is found at jamal.org and O'Connor can be reached at richard@cropcirclesresearchfoundation.org.
"I think this is so important, I want to take every opportunity I can to educate people about it," he said.
O'Connor said he asked Marcel, who died about a year and a half after the museum's opening, how the elder Marcel would have reacted at having the museum named after him. Marcel said his father would have been honored.
"For me, this has evolved beyond the realm of belief," O'Connor said.
People who look will find enough good and credible information, he explained, that will transition into "something they will know to be pretty much true."
Risking ridicule
Ridicule has helped to keep people from talking about what they have seen and experienced, O'Connor said.
"We don't want to be labeled as the kook down the block that believes in little green men."
Yet this is the risk he takes and explained he's had the time to look at the evidence that supports his beliefs.
And had he not known and worked with Marcel at St. Peter's Hospital, he too might be among those who express disbelief, he said.
If people from Earth were to find a planet where life existed, it would make sense to hold off from barging in and instead first watch and study life on that world, O'Connor said.
Earth, he said, may be "the most profound reality show that an intelligent being can observe."
Aliens watching this planet may be studying us to learn from our actions, he said, but he's quick to add that this is all speculation. There's no way anyone can know.
"But these all seem to be plausible explanations, of course, given that they're here," he said.
O'Connor, who created an Internal Revenue Service recognized non-profit organization for his research, said he's spent several tens of thousands of dollars on what he's doing to foster awareness of alien contacts.
"I want to help people get up to speed on this and understand," he said.
And, still, the quest continues to document an encounter, even if it's a fleeting image captured as a result of a response to his email invitation to fly past his cameras.
"I was just sort of hopeful that they would see it," he said. "It seems reasonable to me that they would be able to do that."
"It would be remarkable if it did happen," he said and added, "But so far it hasn't happened yet.
"I'm just interested in finding out the truth about this," O'Connor said.
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