Bill Birnes

William J. "Bill" Birnes (born 7 November 1944) is an American author, ghostwriter, and ufologist. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from New York University (1974; dissertation on Piers Plowman) and a J.D. from Concord Law School. He has held academic posts, including a Lily Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and teaching at Trenton State College, before moving into popular writing on true crime and the paranormal.

UFO Magazine and publishing

Birnes became the publisher of UFO Magazine, a Los Angeles-based newsstand periodical founded in 1986 by journalists Vicki Ecker and Sherie Stark. His wife, novelist Nancy Hayfield Birnes, edited the magazine during his tenure, and Birnes also wrote for it. The magazine ran for 158 issues before its final issue in 2012. Its history is one of frequent changes in schedule and ownership, and the magazine has been described in a reference work as "the primary English-language UFO newsstand periodical" whose publishers "were not above fabricating stories to fill space" (Wikipedia: UFO Magazine). Under Birnes and the Ecker-era writers the magazine is credited with first reporting several Roswell-related accounts, including Philip J. Corso's claims about technology and Jesse Marcel Jr.'s debris story.

The Day After Roswell and television work

His best-known book is The Day After Roswell (1998), ghostwritten with Corso, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel who claimed that alien technology from the 1947 Roswell crash had been seeded into American industry. The book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, peaking at number twelve. Birnes has said he found Corso's UFO material "compelling enough for its own book" (Wikipedia: William J. Birnes). He later wrote Unsolved UFO Mysteries (2000, with Harold Burt), The UFO Magazine UFO Encyclopedia (2004), Aliens in America (2010), and UFOs and The White House (2018). He also co-wrote The Riverman (1995) with criminologist Robert Keppel, a true-crime account of the Green River Killer case.

From 2008 to 2009 Birnes was the lead investigator on the History Channel series UFO Hunters, which premiered in January 2008 and ran for three seasons. He wrote two companion books under the same title (2009 and 2016) and appeared on Ancient Aliens from 2009 to 2013. Critics were not kind to the format: a 2008 New York Times review, as reported by Wikipedia, faulted the presenters' acting, and blog and video-store reviews generally found the episodes offered little new footage or fact (Wikipedia: UFO Hunters).

Controversies and the Morris County hoax

The clearest test of the show's credibility came in January 2009, when a set of red lights over Morris County, New Jersey, was featured on UFO Hunters. Birnes dismissed the flare-based explanations police had offered. In early April 2009 the men responsible came forward and admitted they had tied road flares to helium balloons as a social experiment about manufacturing a media event around UFO sightings. Prosecutors named them as Joe Rudy and Chris Russo and said they would face disorderly-conduct charges (Wikipedia: Morristown UFO hoax; Live Science, 1 April 2009). The episode was widely cited as a mark against the show's investigative claims.

Birnes's broader views are more speculative. He has argued that Earth has been visited by several kinds of extraterrestrials and that NASA retouched photographs to remove alien evidence, and he has advanced claims about Apollo missions that mainstream space historians do not accept. These remain his personal positions and have not been substantiated by independent evidence.

Assessment

Birnes is best understood as a commercial figure of popular ufology rather than a field investigator. His documented contributions are publishing, ghostwriting, and television presentation, and his strongest sourcing is for those roles. His UFO claims rest largely on the testimony of others, such as Corso, and on the magazine's own reporting, which an encyclopedia has described as not always careful about fact. The Morris County hoax shows the risk of staging dramatic investigations for a broadcast audience.