Cassidy Nicholas – MUFON Evolves

For all my bashing of large UFO groups, I haven’t actually confronted someone from one of those groups to pose some of the questions that I’d been asking almost rhetorically. Hearing about Cassidy Nicholas changed that. For the past two years, she has been Associate Communications Producer for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) which puts her in charge of their national media. She is also the author of three books on the paranormal, as well as a field investigator for MUFON, and has hosted many radio interviews. We started out with her experiences as an interviewer and the chance it gives the host to learn directly from the guest, which is something I always like.

How does an investigator keep from imposing their views and even unconscious motivations on a UFO witness? Nicholas says that MUFON field investigators are supposed to adhere to a standard set of questions that have no ET or other bias. She emphasized that they are routinely reminded not to impose any point of view in their reports or questioning. She added that MUFON as a group does not espouse the ET explanation, even though individual members may try to speak for the organization with that belief. I asked of there was any movement towards the inclusion of nonstandard questions about the witness, such as ethnic background as well as subjective data about emotions, feelings, or life changes, and she indicated that they were moving towards some of these goals, and are open to alternate viewpoints.

Cassidy began as a paranormal investigator of ghost and haunting cases, but soon grew tired of the culture of that group, as well as the realization that she might not be able to deal with some of the more disturbing aspects of that world. She says her young son was thrown out of bed in the middle of the night during a period when she was working on a particularly intense case. At one investigation of a site with a myriad of phenomena, she told me that all the various researchers (bigfoot, paranormal, and UFO people) all got along great, which surprised me.

The one statement which impressed me the most in this interview was Cassidy’s response to my question about what she thought was the source of UFO reports and what she might be searching for when investigating a case. “I don’t know,” she said.