"Bill" Birnes (born November 7, 1944) is an American author, the chairman of the board at Sunrise Community Counseling Center, and ufologist.
[2] Birnes served as a Lily Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and taught literature and linguistics at Trenton State College.
[3] 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.
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.
He starred in UFO Hunters (2008–2009) as leader of an investigative team of fellow ufologists,[6] and later wrote a book by the same name documenting his experiences on the show.