UFO believer exposes fakes, faces resistance from locals

But before you write Giordano off as another alien-obsessed crackpot, there's one thing you should know: Giordano wants someone to prove him wrong.

The Chandler resident regularly offers $100 to anyone who can disprove some of the videos on his site, that is, those he hasn't already debunked himself.

The shift in Giordano's status from disciple to debunker is creating something of a rift in the area's rich UFO-sighting community.

Though the group is easily given to conspiracy theories, Jeff Woolwine, one of Giordano's favorite targets, said the root of Giordano's debunking campaign is nothing more than professional jealousy.

"If I'm faking this stuff, if it's balloons, then why is everyone seeing the same (stuff) in different parts of the country?" said Woolwine, who believes the drawings on South Mountain's rocks have the power to draw out spirits. "I don't care what Giordano says. He's just upset that I filmed them closer."

Giordano, who hosts a UFO-themed radio show on his Web site, www.cnufos.com, has a ready explanation for this, as he does with most of the unexplained and unidentified objects that are sent to him from awestruck residents around the world.

"I've learned that there aren't as many UFOs as people think. I've debunked most of my own ideas," said Giordano, a 39-year-old native New Yorker who's lived in the Valley since 1979. "I want to believe, but I feel like, with all the stuff I have on video, it's still not good enough for me. Most people just don't know any better, or they're just making stuff up."

Giordano said that was a tough lesson for him to learn when he first entered the area's active sky-watching community in 2004.

But his fascination with unidentified objects circling in the night sky goes back much further.

Giordano was taking out the trash with his dad in the 1970s at their home in New York when his father saw an odd-looking red light in the sky and alerted his neighbors. No more than 5 years old at the time, Giordano said he was hooked on the belief that something or someone else is out there, but the thought didn't creep back into his mind until he was walking his wife's dog in April 2004 and saw what he thought was a moving star.

"I thought it was a satellite and then I went back out at 3:30 in the morning and saw the exact same thing," Giordano said.

Within months his Web site was up, but during the next 18 months, Giordano's tone on the site would change from that of an ardent believer to an increasingly skeptical detractor.

Giordano said there are tricks that help explain many of the most popular UFO videos that have proliferated on sites such as YouTube and LiveVideo.com, the most common of which are launching balloons and recording them as they disappear, giving the appearance of a far-off object ascending to the heavens. UFO hunters can also adjust the lighting, zoom and camera angle to make a large object, such as a plane, look like it's a tiny, shiny speck zooming around the sky, he said.

"The thing about the UFO community is, it's such a hard thing to believe that when someone comes along they think I'm trying to ruin it for them. I'm not. I'm trying to keep 'ufology' in tact," Giordano said. "But I think 95 percent of this stuff is fake, 4 percent is unexplained and 1 percent is real, and that even goes for my own stuff."

Giordano has plenty of motivation to set himself apart from the rabble of UFO sleuths in the state: the more he debunks their stories, Giordano sets himself up as a voice that even the most strident skeptics can trust. That's a handy stance when it comes to driving traffic to his Web site and enhancing efforts to increase exposure for his Web-cast radio show in the hopes of getting an over-the-air gig someday.

Giordano admits the appeal of positioning himself as the voice of reason amidst a sea of screwballs, but that doesn't remove the stigma that accompanies his role.

"It's hard for me at work, too. I kept this a secret at my new job. I don't bring it up, ever. I did at the beginning, when I first started the site. I was working as loan officer at the time and when I started getting into this, people there started to treat me differently. They treated my like a freak," said Giordano, who now works as a manager at a Scottsdale glass-replacement company. "My job is normal, my wife is normal, everything in my life is normal, except for this."