William J. Birnes

William J. "Bill" Birnes (born November 7, 1944) is an American author, ghostwriter,expert on serial killers, chairman of the board at Sunrise Community Counseling Center, and ufologist. He was the publisher of and wrote for UFO Magazine, and was the lead investigator on the TV show UFO Hunters. He has authored or coauthored books on a variety of topics, including the paranormal, UFOs, criminology, computer science, and novels. He ghostwrote The Day After Roswell with Philip J. Corso, which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller List.

Early life and education

William J. Birnes was born November 7, 1944. In 1974, Birnes earned a Ph.D. in medieval literature from New York University with a dissertation on Piers Plowman. Birnes earned a J.D. degree from Concord Law School, a private online law school.

He is married to novelist Nancy Hayfield. Together they ran a computer science business in the 1980s.

Career

Birnes served as a Lily Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and taught literature and linguistics at Trenton State College. He is also a lawyer. Birnes has repeatedly appeared as a guest on the late night radio talk-show Coast to Coast AM to discuss UFOs, and has coauthored a book with its host George Noory.

Birnes, a ghostwriter, has written or coauthored books on computer science, the paranormal, criminology, and science fiction novels. With Ethan Phillips, he authored the Star Trek Cookbook. Birnes approached Phillips to write the book. As a writer of popular nonfiction, he co-authored The Riverman with detective/academic Robert D. Keppel (1995), an account of serial killer Ted Bundy's involvement in the apprehension of Green River Killer Gary Ridgway. The book was adapted into a made-for-TV film (2004) on A&E, The Riverman. His coauthored book about Mickey Rooney with Richard A. Lertzman was described by Publishers Weekly as the "definitive biography".

Ufology

Birnes ghostwrote The Day After Roswell (1998), credited to Philip J. Corso, which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller List for three weeks, peaking at number twelve on the list. According to Birnes, he spent two years working on the book with Corso. They had initially wanted to do a memoir based on his military experiences, but when Corso referenced UFOs during their conversations, Birnes found what he said "compelling enough for its own book".

He was the publisher of UFO Magazine out of Los Angeles, and also wrote for the magazine. He is the lead investigator on the History Channel show UFO Hunters. Birnes believes that Earth has been visited by many different types of extraterrestrials, and that pictures taken by NASA have been airbrushed to remove any evidence of alien activity. Birnes speculates that NASA may have taken missions to the Moon after Apollo 17, but these missions were kept secret from the public due to alien interference and new-found extraterrestrial artifacts. Birnes claims that NASA made three additional trips to the Moon; Apollo 18, Apollo 19, and Apollo 20. Additionally, he claims that the Apollo 13 incident was actually an extraterrestrial attack meant to scare humans away from landing on the Moon.

Birnes's credibility was questioned when a UFO sighting over Morris County, New Jersey, on January 5, 2009, was later revealed to be the result of a hoax. The sighting was featured on an episode of UFO Hunters, and Birnes dismissed reports that witnesses saw flares attached to balloons, claiming instead that the movement of lights ruled out the possibility of flares, "a theory "UFO Hunters" has already tested and proven implausible". But on April Fool's Day 2009, two college students, Joe Rudy and Chris Russo, admitted that they had deliberately launched balloons tied to flares near the local airport on January 5 as a "social experiment on how to create your own media event surrounding UFO sightings...to show everyone how unreliable eyewitness accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs." A review of UFO Hunters by Neil Genzlinger said "Mr. Birnes and his colleagues add to the campy feel of the series by not being very good actors, trying in vain to make the discoveries that they no doubt researched ahead of time appear spontaneous on camera." Birnes later wrote two books with the same name as the show documenting his experiences with it.

In addition to UFO Hunters, he has appeared on the History Channel's television documentary series Ancient Aliens (2009–2013).