Radioactive Toothpaste and Conspiranoia: The Strange Saga of Ufologist John Ford, Pt. 2
The rise of the Long Island UFO Network (LIUFON), a rockabilly musician & a college professor, escaped monkeys, and the selling of UFO experiencer data
Find the prior installment in the Table of Discontents.
Newsday reporter Marilyn Goldstein wrote that it was “a cool Saturday night at the end of summer” 1988 when she met UFO researcher John Ford.1 A self-described skeptic, she had been sent to investigate Ford and his newly formed band of believers—the Long Island UFO Network—as they prepared to launch their very own hotline for locals to report close encounters with unidentified flying objects. According to Ford, Long Island was in the middle of a UFO flap:
We had a flap out in Southampton this week. Last two days I’ve been on the phone. Continuously. Continual sighting of UFOs. Several witnesses describe unusual thundercloud with beams of light. Orange, pink, green, blue, red and white. Ordinary private people. In the last two days we had ten reports, four today, six yesterday.2
The Long Island UFO Network came together in the spring of 1988 with John Ford presiding over the group as chairman, and his childhood friend Richard (Richie) Stout serving as Vice Chairman. Stout, a former Marine who later worked as a road-kill remover for the town of Brookhaven was, according to an incredibly bizarre book published by Peter Moon (of Montauk Project fame), “privy to many animal mutilations found along the highways in the course of his work.”3 In an article by Jennifer Donelan for The Village Times, Stout relayed a strange story of finding a dead cow on the side of the road that he claimed had been completely drained of blood. When he and Ford went back to the site to investigate, Ford said “Two unmarked aircraft came down. They lit up the area. Where we were was not too far from Brookhaven airport, but these had no registration numbers.” Stout added that the aircraft came “within a couple hundred feet of us. Somebody wanted to see who was there.” A case of shared paranoia, perhaps? Maybe. But for Ford, enemies seemed to lurk around every corner—sometimes extraterrestrial, oftentimes political, but mostly personal.
Back in the early days of LIUFON, their Chief of Investigations was the flamboyant Harry Hepcat—a rock and roll musician with a well coiffed pompadour, a Teddy Boy-style wardrobe and, later, a listing in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. At the time of joining Ford’s group, Hepcat was hosting the Graveyard Shift and the Hardcore Oldies Show on WNYG Radio—you can still find some of his old recordings on YouTube, they’re incredibly charming. Hepcat moved to Long Island in the late 1950s and he’s been there ever since—when he met Marilyn Goldstein on that balmy summer night in 1988 he told her that “Long Island is hot right now,” and that Ford’s group, as well as their UFO hotline, was way overdue.4
They focused their attention on Moriches Bay, frequently parking their cars at Sea Breeze Park where they would spend hours gazing into the night sky. Of course, if you look at it long enough, you’re bound to see something.
…UFO club vice president Richard Stout, who works for the Town of Brookhaven, claim[s] to have actually seen “strange objects” right over Moriches Bay. So who knows. “Basically,” says Stout, what they’ve seen is “just lights you see at a great distance.” That’s just what we see when later we view the videotape they made. “It’s unidentified,” says Stout. “We’re not saying it’s a flying saucer.”5
Harry took his job as Chief of Investigations seriously—looking for the truth in each case, no matter where it took him. In a telephone interview last summer, he told me:
We had a thing off the South Shore of Long Island, beyond the horizon of the water, a thing called Skyquakes that were flashes and booming sounds. And of course he [Ford] figures this was all UFOs. And I discovered that the navy was doing gunnery tests off Long Island, so there’s your flashes, there’s your rumbling sounds. But he didn’t want to hear it. He was furious.
It seemed that even in the first few months of the organization's existence, the cracks were already appearing to show, and where his investigators seemed to favor research and truth, Ford favored flying saucers and malevolent alien mutilators. It’s also probably important to note here that Sea Breeze Park is a mere 13 miles from JFK International Airport and you only need to check the Flight Radar website to see how busy the air traffic around this particular area is. Most notably, Moriches Bay was also where Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded in midair on July 17th, 1996. With the New Jersey drone sighting hysteria in recent memory, it’s easy to see how a hardened UFO believer can look up at the night sky and see saucers instead of passenger aircraft.
To help legitimize their research in the eyes of the often dismissive press, the group appointed a local professor, Theodore (Ted) Benitt who taught at Nassau Community College. According to a 2007 interview, alongside astronomy and geology, Benitt taught a self-designed class called “Metascience—the study of enigmatic phenomena—at the school since 1974, despite confronting the occasional skeptic’s mockery.”6 In a telephone conversation with Benitt, he told me that he had originally met Ford via a student of his who’s father was a manager at a local radio station. The student asked Benitt whether he had heard of the broadcaster and writer Joel Martin and of course, anyone interested in the converging worlds of metaphysics and ufology on Long Island in the 1980’s had.
Joel Martin is a fascinating yet little-known character who began his career on Long Island in the 1960s. His weekly talk show covered paranormal events and ESP, unexplained phenomena and, of course, UFOs. He once said that he liked to think of the show as a “large psychic classroom” in which he “was as much a participant as anyone else. Because we did the broadcast live, there was no pre-arranged gimmickry. Anything can happen, and it usually did.”7 In one memorable episode, Martin and the psychic medium Barbara Kent conducted a live seance to reach Martin’s deceased former partner and the mother of his child who had been killed in a car accident. Martin claimed that “all of a sudden I swore for a moment it was her face and voice that came back.”8 Perhaps that experience, along with the trauma of losing a spouse, opened his mind enough to allow another psychic in, this time a man named George Anderson who claimed to be able to communicate directly with the dead. Together they wrote multiple books with titles such as We Don’t Die, We Are Not Forgotten and Our Children Forever.
When Ted Benitt called Joel Martin they hit it off immediately and Martin invited him to a taping of his television show—the imaginatively named The Joel Martin Show—where two guests were going to share their close encounter with a UFO. Appearing with their faces blurred were none other than John Ford and Richard Stout, and they were both interviewed on the show by Benitt. Unfortunately there is, as far as I know, no archive of Joel Martin shows and I have been unable to track down exactly when this taping would have aired—the closest possible candidate I have been able to come up with is a show from March 23rd, 1988 titled “UFOs: The 40th Anniversary”.9 A matter of discussion on the show, according to Benitt, was Stout’s daughters own experiences:
Richard Stout said that his daughter awoke one night with weird lights shining in her room, and she heard voices and screeching sounds outside, which turned out later to be an escaped monkey.10
While I can’t be certain the two events are linked, it’s interesting to note that on the 26th of June 1988, a pet spider monkey named Bubba did escape from a basement window in Suffolk County. According to a news report Bubba chased the neighborhood children and jumped on top of a police car before going back to the basement of his own volition.11 I’m not sure how prominent escaped monkeys were on Long Island in the 1980s but this was the only report I could find. Both Benitt and Hepcat told me that Stout’s daughter had become fixated on moving to California and, just as luck would have it, the alien voices that she had heard in her room had told her that she and her entire family should move there immediately.
Ford was impressed by Benitt’s credentials—he’d been involved in UFO research since high school and had been interviewed on the TV multiple times for his own investigative work. Here was a credible man, a professor, someone that could be the respectable face of Ford’s UFO Network, and Benitt quickly agreed to join. The groups first official meeting was in a diner on Long Island—Harry Hepcat told me that he had heard about the meeting via a colleague at the radio station:
The guy from the news department said to me, there’d been a lot of sightings on Long Island that year and he said there’s a group forming—well, potentially, or they’re thinking of it—and, would you like to join me, I’m supposed to meet them at a diner?12
Of course, Harry joined, along with Professor Benitt, John Ford and Richard Stout. Also present was Leianne Wilson, the group’s secretary and Cindy Grimaldi, their chief investigator. Later on another member of the Grimaldi family joined as treasurer—presumably responsible for collecting the $20 a year membership dues.
In an August 5th, 1988 press release that Harry Hepcat was kind enough to share with me, the group stated that their aims were to “investigate all aspects of the UFO phenomenon on the Island. To compile a computer based information system on UFOs and to look for common characteristics and patterns. To disseminate its information thru [sic] newsletters and a yearly compendulum [sic] on its investigations.”13 That same month they announced that they would be co-sponsoring a conference in October 1988 featuring notable alien abduction writer and abstract expressionist artist Budd Hopkins at the Hauppauge Holiday Inn.
By January 1989 they had grown to 100 members and 18 full-time volunteers and Ford told the South Shore Record that these were “people who don’t believe in wild stories. Everything can be backed up. We have video tapes, audio tapes and we’re willing to play them for the press in the presence of witnesses.”14 Indeed, if you merely relied on newspaper reports from the late eighties and early nineties you’d think that life within the Long Island UFO Network was nothing but sunshine and roses—one big, happy family with the shared goal of uncovering the truth behind the extraterrestrial presence on our planet.
Behind the scenes LIUFON was hardly the Waltons. During the group's investigations, Professor Benitt told me that Ford “would jump at the opportunity for any light to be a UFO.” On one occasion Ford pointed at a star twinkling in the sky and boldly declared that it was of alien origin. In mid-1988 alleged abductee Virginia Stevens joined the group as an investigator, but it wasn’t long before she started to notice something wrong. She had originally joined the group with the goal of helping experiencers through providing counseling/therapy and she had petitioned Ford to offer some form of support to the people that rang his UFO hotline at all hours of the day and night, but according to her, he refused. Ford had also taken a drawing of the alien being she claimed to have seen to the local press without her consent, ultimately making her feel “obligated by the chairman to tell my story to a reporter, against my better judgement and in clear psychological distress.”15
The death blow came in September 1989 when Ford sent a letter to various UFO researchers across Long Island and beyond. He informed them that LIUFON had a “new policy” of permitting researchers access to their case files—including sensitive information regarding witnesses and experiencers—for a fee.
Our rate schedule is as such—examination of a witness case folder and any audio recording for interviews—$40.00; examination of a witness case folder, audio recordings, and any video recording $180.00. This is provided where applicable and where the researcher agrees to respect the confidential identity of witnesses from public disclosure.16
It brings to mind the Carpenter Affair—a case documented by researcher and writer Jack Brewer—in which licensed social worker John Carpenter sold the case files of “140 clients, people suspecting themselves to be alien abductees to Robert Bigelow and his now dissolved National Institute for Discovery Science.”17 It seemed as if John Ford ran so that John Carpenter could walk, and the cracks that had begun to show amongst Ford’s motley crew of UFO investigators were quickly becoming craters.
(NOTE: If anyone has any information on the Long Island UFO Network or the case of John Ford please feel free to email me at weirdreadsemilylouise@gmail.com.)
Tanner here. Thank you for reading Getting Spooked and my special thanks goes out to my wife Emily for writing a followup piece in her series on John Ford. As usual, since she won’t do so herself, go check out her exceptional documentaries at Weird Reads with Emily Louise or find her on Bluesky at @weirdreadsemily.bsky.social.
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Goldstein, Marilyn. “(516)”. Newsday (Nassau Edition). 7 September 1988. https://www.newspapers.com/article/newsday-nassau-edition-long-island-ufo/159442260/.
Ibid.
Gordon, Wade. The Brookhaven Connection. Westbury: Sky Books. 2001. Page 15
Goldstein, Marilyn. “(516)”. Newsday (Nassau Edition). 7 September 1988. https://www.newspapers.com/article/newsday-nassau-edition-long-island-ufo/159442260/.
Ibid.
Bolger, Timothy. “They Believe: Long Islanders Allege UFO Sightings, Alien Abductions”. Long Island Press. 25 October 2007. https://archive.longislandpress.com/2007/10/25/they-believe/.
“Joel Martin: Best Selling Author, Paranormal Journalist.” Margaret Wendt. https://margaretwendt.com/joel_martin.php.
Kerins, Annabel. “A talk show host grows in his job.” Newsday (New York). 6 December 1979. https://www.newspapers.com/article/newsday-a-talk-show-host-grows-in-his-jo/171469015/.
“Viacom TV6 Highlights.” Newsday (Nassau Edition). 20 March 1988. https://www.newspapers.com/article/newsday-nassau-edition-joel-martin-ufo/171471303/. [If anyone has a copy of this, or other Joel Martin shows, please get in touch!]
Author telephone interview with Ted Benitt, 31 May 2024.
“Escaped Primate Monkeys Around With Authorities.” Poughkeepsie Journal. 26 June 1988. https://www.newspapers.com/article/poughkeepsie-journal-escaped-primate-mon/171471639/.
Author telephone interview with Harry Hepcat, 16 May 2024.
5 August 1988 LIUFON press release ℅ Harry Hepcat.
Lesser, Harriet. “UFOs sighted here”. South Shore Record (New York). 26 January 1989.
Letter from Virginia Stevens to LIUFON staff and investigators, 14 April 1989 ℅ Harry Hepcat.
Letter from John Ford to UFO researchers, 14 September 1989 ℅ Harry Hepcat.
Brewer, Jack. “The Carpenter Affair: For The Record.” The UFO Trail. 22 October 2013. https://ufotrail.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-carpenter-affair-for-record.html.
 | A guest post by
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The questions with Ford have little to do with UFOs or his guilt or innocence, but with the nature of treatment and the length of his incarceration. But this sets the stage for all that followed.
Excellent article.
Any writer that can segue from road kill collectors to escaped monkeys and lets sell off the witness reports for cash has my vote of approval!!