Posted by John Greenewald on Facebook and Reddit over 12 hours ago:
The UFO field has lost one of the greats today... Ted Phillips.
One of my favorite memories of Ted was when I, and fellow television producer Duane Tudahl, took Ted to the Marshall County Museum in Warren, Minnesota for a "UFO Files" episode we were doing for The History Channel.
Ted had never seen the car of police officer Val Johnson, who hit a UFO and crashed his squad car back in 1979. The car STILL EXISTS today in a museum, and we flew Ted there for him to see it first hand, along with interview many others.
Ted's reaction when seeing the car in this episode was 100% real. We kept Ted away from it until we were ready to shoot his segment. Such a crappy thing to have had to do as he waited decades to see it! But, he was a great sport.
He was one of UFOlogy's greatest for a reason. Not only a giant in the UFO field... but a great person and friend. I am lucky to have gotten to know him over the years, and was one of the ones lucky enough to see his files, collection and UFO trace evidence he's collected when I was at his home. It's something I'll never forget, since he was the one who showed me. The man had passion and an amazing knowledgebase he had in his head.
RIP, Ted. Your legacy and pioneering in this field will live on forever.
Ted Phillips, the founder and director of the Center for Physical Trace Research died, on March 10, 2020. Phillips was born in 1942 and spent his life in Missouri.
A young Ted Phillips.
He began investigating UFOs in 1964 and met Dr. J. Allen Hynek during the investigation of the Socorro UFO landing.
Phillips was trained as an engineer and was a professional photographer. He was involved in the Vanguard Satellite Program and was a field engineer on the Minuteman Missile Project. He was also employed as an inspector for the Missouri State Highway Department, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and made presentations at the MUFON Symposiums.
It was Hynek who suggested that Phillips concentrate on UFO physical trace cases. Phillips and his team investigated more than 4000 physical trace cases in more than 90 countries. Phillips once said that if you told him the physical markings left be the UFO, he would be able to describe the craft that left them.
With Hynek, Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. David Saunders, Phillips participated in
Ted Phillips at the Illinois
conference.
the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Sciences meetings. He was also participated as a member of a small group who met with the United Nations Secretary-General. Phillips made presentations to a wide variety of groups and was a participant in several television programs and documentaries dedicated to UFOs.
In recent years he was involved in the investigation of strange lights seen in the Marley Woods in far southern Missouri. I met him in Illinois when he made a presentation about those lights at a UFO conference there. I had hoped to talk to Phillips about this while at the conference but there never seemed to be a couple of moments when the two of us crossed paths, with one exception. I told him it was my impression, from his presentation, that he wasn’t looking toward the extraterrestrial on this. He confirmed that he had thought it was some sort of terrestrial manifestation but he didn’t know what it might be. For those interested, there is more about Phillips’ presentation here:
In the 1970s, he provided a “position statement” for Ron Story’s Encyclopedia of UFOs that said:
The available facts are mostly statistical, but by taking a large number of reports, we can begin to develop a fairly clear picture of the objects observed and the traces left behind. Obviously, a report involving a landed object is of much greater value than a nocturnal light case. The landed object immediately eliminates a number of possibilities. One would not expect a balloon to land, leave unusual traces, and then ascend vertically at high speed. Stars and planets do not appear at ground level between witnesses and a line of trees. When several witnesses observe a disk-shaped object with a metallic surface, no wings and no sound, landing, ascending vertically, they have, with their descriptions, eliminated most of the natural or conventional explanations. When these objects then leave traces at the landing site, we have something tangible to examine
I believe, after thirteen years of investigation, the data indicates a nonterrestrial origin.
Ted Philips, truly one of the pioneers in scientific UFO research and a dedicated investigator is dead at 78.
