Sometimes, having a dramatic UFO encounter really sucks, especially if you consider yourself a rational, left-brain, analytical thinker. Because when you go public with it, “skeptics,” “believers,” and everybody in between makes certain assumptions, and next thing you know is, you’ve got a label hanging around your neck and the rhetorical sludge gets so deep and ridiculous you need scuba gear to keep from drowning in it.

Personally, De Void’s favorite X-Files exhortation was “Deny Everything”/CREDIT: The X-Files

“Remember that X-Files poster with the Billy Meier (beamship) photo, ‘I Want To Believe’? What the f*#! is wrong with people? They’ll believe anything! Well, you know what? Wanting to believe is a lot different from wanting to understand. Two completely different things. And as an extreme experiencer who’s also a skeptic, there’s no way I can win. I’ll never win this one. Never ever.”

This is an excerpt from a recent chat with David Biedny, the former co-host of The Paracast, a weekly webcast promoting discussions on various aspects of the paranormal. Biedny bailed three years ago, largely for reasons too off-topic to get into here. But it’s also true that the outspoken Biedny — a multi-media technologist and Photoshop pioneer — became disenthralled with the endlessly uninformed blovations emanating from both ends of the UFO peanut gallery.

Provocative, unsparing, pressing guests with a prosecutor’s zeal for detail, Biedny was primed to pounce at the first scent of BS, and his spirited colloquys often alienated great swaths of what the MSM calls the “UFO community.” Especially critical of evidence by fiat and quick to denounce those he considered hucksters, Biedny often shocked and alarmed die-hard “believers,” and rarely joined discussions at UFO seminars. Even though — with a number of paranormal encounters in his personal history — he had much to offer.

In 2006, on the front end of his four-year run with The Paracast, Biedny shared a remarkable first-hand story with listeners, about an early-evening encounter he had as an 11-year-old in Caracas, Venezuela, during the summer of 1974. Roughly the size of a full salami held at arm’s length, a dark, silent cigar-shaped object parked over the capitol city in broad daylight. Biedny, his mom, dad, and 8-year-old brother joined countless motorists and pedestrians who stopped dead in their tracks to watch what happened next. Three smaller objects descended from the apparent underbelly; two moved to the front of the bigger one, while a third went aft to complete a triangular configuration.

“We were almost underneath the thing,” Biedny recalls today from his home in New York. “I saw the bright light underneath this craft and I saw these — I remember them as discs, my brother remembers them as lights.” The spectacle held its form for a matter of minutes, not seconds. And then the whole thing, the entire formation, simply vanished. Even so, Biedny got an eerie feeling that whatever he had just seen was still there, lingering, perhaps still observing. Obviously, it left a life-long impression.

Anyhow, Biedny even invited his brother to the Paracast to share his own unique impressions. They recalled some Venezuelan newspaper coverage of the event, but neither could remember the exact date. And naturally, lacking that sort of corroboration, Biedny’s veracity was called into question by the usual suspects, and then some. After all, a brazen incident of that magnitude and duration should’ve been logged in somebody’s records somewhere, right? But an accounting of it – foreign or domestic – was nowhere to be found. Until a few months ago. When Venezuelan researcher Hector Escalante, who wasn’t even alive in 1974, began combing through microfilm archives. And he found it in the 8/1/74 edition of 2001, a Caracas daily.

Venezuelan researcher Hector Escalante rescued media coverage of this 1974 phenomenon over Caracas from oblivion just last month/CREDIT: 2001

There was at least one significant discrepancy between the Biednys’ recollection and the newspaper version. 2001 claimed reports began pouring in around 11:30 on the evening of July 31. Difficult to reconcile that point. However, 2001 also reported “thousands” of eyewitnesses to “four luminous objects,” flying not only above Caracas but in multiple locations across the country. Witnesses included an airline captain as well as government radar operators, who actually saw the UFO(s) but couldn’t pick them up on the screen. Furthermore, the sightings created such an uproar that then-President Carlos Andres Perez huddled with his cabinet, but “there was no formal interpretation of what happened,” according to 2001. Escalante discovered additional coverage of the same UFO encounter in two other Venezuelan dailies.

Anyone who sees this sort of weirdness doesn’t need third-person media coverage to validate that experience. On the other hand, backup never hurts, and there’s no doubt now that Biedny was a startled spectator to something that may well have rivaled the famous 1997 “Phoenix Lights” in scope and theater. If, that is, anybody outside Venezuela had ever heard of it.

“It makes me wonder how many of these mass-scale incidents have happened around the world that may have remained essentially lost to time due to the fact that the coverage doesn’t happen in English,” Biedny wonders. “English-speaking researchers just don’t know about it. I think the numbers are probably not insubstantial, and statistically significant. To me, that’s the bigger story. And the problem with understanding the anomalous fill-in-the-blank is always with human beings.

“Human beings always f*#! things up. Nobody can be truly objective. Nobody’s really capable of it.”

So it goes.