UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Date of sighting: November 5, 1975
Location of sighting: Central Arizona, USA
Source: Coral Lorenzen, APRO

This is the anniversary of one of the most publicized and most amazing evidence backed sightings to date. I am amazed that Travis still lectures about it every year and he even has a book at his website that he will personally sign for you if you wish it. Click to to see Travis's UFO site.
Scott C. Waring

Report states:
On November 5, 1975, six young woodcutters, along with their employer, were working in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, engaged in a tree-thinning contract for the U. S. Forest Service. The forest is located in east central Arizona, and the work area is fifteen miles from Heber.

The story begins at approximately 6:10 P.M., when the men were heading home in a seven-man crew-cab truck. Traveling along a bull-dozed trail, one of the men sighted a gold-colored glow through the thickets. As they rounded a right-hand turn, they saw the source of the glow - a structural object hovering approximately fifteen feet above a clearing and a scant ninety feet or so from the viewers.

Travis Walton, twenty-two, was sitting on the right- hand passenger side of the front seat. When he saw the object, he called to Mike Rogers, the driver and boss of the crew, to stop. Hardly waiting for the truck to come to a complete halt, Walton jumped out and, at a fast walk, approached a woodpile (stacked by the thinners) to get a closer look. As his fellow employees called for him to be careful and come back, he stood and looked at the object, which was at a 60-degree elevation from his position. It had the shape of two "pie pans" or shallow bowls placed rim to rim. A "beeping" sound was heard by all.

Walton stepped back a couple of paces, intending to vacate the vicinity of the craft when his friends were startled to see a blue-green beam shoot out from the bottom of the craft, striking Walton in the upper area of his body, lifting him from the ground with his arms out stretched, and flinging him back to the ground.

Thinking he and the others were in danger, Rogers restarted the truck and left the area. A quarter of a mile away, he stopped and the six men looked back. They saw a light rise from the ground and streak into the north east, originating in the area where they had left Travis. Thinking it was the object, Rogers turned the truck around and drove back to the clearing.

For fifteen minutes the men searched for Walton, covering the near area and calling, but to no avail. Rogers then decided to drive to Heber, the nearest town, and report Walton's disappearance to the sheriff. On the way, they debated what they should tell, doubting that the truth would be believed, but, unable to come up with an acceptable explanation, they told what they had experienced.

On November 10, the six men were given polygraph tests which established that they had not harmed Walton (it had been implied that they had done away with Travis and hidden his remains, despite the fact that Rogers was his best friend of many years standing) and that they had, actually, seen a UFO.

On the night of November 10, at approximately midnight, a call came in to the Grant Neff residence (Mrs. Neff was Travis' sister and at the time the only Walton in Snowflake, Arizona, with a telephone). It was Travis, sounding confused and disoriented, saying he was at a phone booth in Heber and in terrible pain. Neff went to Mrs. Kellett's (Travis' mother) home, picked up Travis' brother Duane, who had come up from Phoenix when notified of his brother's disappearance, and drove at breakneck speed to Heber, where they found Travis slumped in a phone booth. He had a five-day growth of beard and appeared thin but was otherwise apparently all right.

Within hours, Duane drove Travis to his home in Phoenix, intent on keeping him away from the horde of reporters, which had plagued the Walton family during Travis' disappearance, and to obtain medical treatment.

For a short time, Duane Walton was frustrated by the representative of a local UFO group, who sent him to a pseudomedical hypnotist, but he was eventually contacted by the AERIAL PHENOMENA RESEARCH ORGANI ZATION (APRO), which called in a team of medical experts.

Ultimately, Walton was given the Minnesota Multi Phase Personality Inventory (MMPI), Rorschach (commonly called Inkblot) Polygraph and Psychological Stress Evaluator tests, all of which established that he had told the truth as he knew it. All of these tests were conducted and interpreted by experts.

Unfortunately, Walton only recalls an hour or two of his five-day absence. He claims to have awoke on a table in a room which he first assumed was a hospital. The ceiling seemed low, there was an oval-shaped metallic-colored apparatus on his chest (his denim jacket and shirt were pulled up), and he was in considerable pain. The "air" in the room seemed oppressive, i.e., warm and damp. It took a few minutes to get his wits about him, and when he became fully aware of his surroundings, he realized he was in no ordinary hospital. Around the "table" on which he reclined were three strange creatures-strange, because they were less than five feet tall, very pale, with large, domed heads, large eyes, small nose, mouth, and ears, and their bodies, encased in tannish orange, seamless jumpsuits, and were very thin.

Upon seeing them, Walton struggled to his feet, and when they approached him with their fingernail-less hands outstretched, he grabbed a rodlike object from an adjacent table and prepared to defend himself. After flailing about with the instrument for a moment or two, Walton was surprised to see the trio file out of the door and turn to the right.

After the creatures left, Walton also exited the room, turning left. Following a curved corridor, looking for a way out, he found a circular room with a chair (which was too small for him but nevertheless he sat in it) with a "screen" on each arm. He touched a lever and the "stars" on the "ceiling" above seemed to move, so he moved the lever back to its original position and decided against further experimentation.

Shortly, a "man," approximately six feet tall, with brown hair and strange golden-brown eyes, appeared at the door which Travis had entered. He beckoned to Travis, and Travis went to him, babbling question after question, none of which were answered. The "man" said nothing, took Travis by the arm, led him out into the corridor or hall, to the right, then stopped, whereupon a section of the wall opened. He had not touched anything. They walked into a small room, the door behind them closed, and seconds later a door opened in front of them. They then went down an incline (apparently out of the enclosure Walton had been in) where Walton found him self in a large enclosure resembling a quarter of a cylinder. There were three or four oval-shaped metallic objects parked there (the same apparent metallic substance as everything else he had seen). He was led by the "man" (who was clad in a blue "jumpsuit" with a clear "helmet") through the enclosure, to another door into a room where there were three other human-appearing individuals-two men and a woman. They resembled the first, except that, although they wore the same clothing, they were without helmets.

They gestured to him to get upon a table. He resisted, but they eventually succeeded in their efforts and Travis reclined; an apparatus resembling an oxygen mask with a black ball attached was placed over his face and he lost consciousness.

Travis awoke about midnight about a quarter mile west of Heber, Arizona. He was lying on his stomach and raised up to watch the curved, metallic hull of an aircraft taking off straight up, reflecting the yellow stripe of the dividing line of the highway below.

What did Travis Walton see? What did he experience? Tests indicate that he has related his experience truthfully. His book The Walton Experience (1978) will tend to illuminate the reader and enable him to make his own judgment.

After more than 20 years of construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is complete and, following in-depth testing, the largest-ever space telescope is expected to launch within two years, NASA officials announced today (Nov. 2).

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden hosted a news conference to announce the milestone this morning at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, overlooking the 18 large mirrors that will collect infrared light, sheltered behind a tennis-court-size sun shield. JWST is considered the successor to NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope.

"Today, we're celebrating the fact that our telescope is finished, and we're about to prove that it works," said John Mather, an astrophysicist and senior project scientist for the telescope. "We've done two decades of innovation and hard work, and this is the result — we're opening up a whole new territory of astronomy." [How NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Works (Infographic)]

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is an $8.8 billion space observatory built to observe the infrared universe like never before. See how NASA's James Webb Space Telescope works in this Space.com infographic
**Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist**

The telescope will be much more powerful than even Hubble for two main reasons, Mather said at the conference. First, it will be the biggest telescope mirror to fly in space. "You can see this beautiful, gold telescope is seven times the collecting area of the Hubble telescope," Mather said. And second, it is designed to collect infrared light, which Hubble is not very sensitive to.

Earth's atmosphere glows in the infrared, so such measurements can't be made from the ground. Hubble emits its own heat, which would obscure infrared readings. JWST will run close to absolute zero in temperature and rest at a point in space called the Lagrange Point 2, which is directly behind Earth from the sun's perspective. That way, Earth can shield the telescope from some of the sun's infrared emission, and the sun shield can protect the telescope from both bodies' heat.

The telescope's infrared view will pierce through obscuring cosmic dust to reveal the universe's first galaxies and spy on newly forming planetary systems. It also will be sensitive enough to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets that pass in front of their stars, perhaps to search for signs of life, Mather said.

The telescope would be able to see a bumblebee a moon's distance away, he added — both in reflected light and in the body heat the bee emitted. Its mirrors are so smooth that if you stretched the array to the size of the U.S., the hills and valleys of irregularity would be only a few inches high, Mather said.

In addition to Bolden and Mather, Christopher Scolese, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center; Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's new associate administrator for science; Eric Smith, the telescope's program director; and Bill Ochs, director of the James Webb mission, attended the news conference.

The James Webb Space Telescope is fully assembled, officials said Nov. 2 — and on track for an October 2018 launch.

"Some of you that have followed JWST know that it almost didn't happen, and it's mainly because of the people that are sitting here, able to talk to you today, that we're all here and within two years of launch," Bolden said.

The telescope was originally scheduled to launch in 2014, at a cost of about $5 billion, but a series of setbacks and budget constraints delayed and nearly canceled the project. Now, though, officials affirmed that the telescope is on track and on budget for an October 2018 launch on an Ariane 5 rocket. (As a result of the delays, JWST's cost is now $8.7 billion, Ochs said.) The project is led by NASA but supported by international partners, including the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

The telescope's testing at Goddard, which has already begun, will ensure that it can withstand the shaking and loud noise of a rocket launch. Then, it will be moved to Texas, where its focus will be tested, and then to California for some final assembly. The testing is particularly high-stakes, because unlike Hubble, which was repaired and refocused in orbit by astronauts, this telescope is not intended to be repaired by humans.

"It's critically important to get it right here on the ground, and that's the purpose for the tests that we're doing here and, most importantly, for the tests when we get it down to Johnson [Space Center] in Chamber A, the big vacuum chamber," Bolden said.

"[We need to] make sure it can, in fact, be focused, so that we don't find, as we did with Hubble, that we don't have the ability to do what we thought it was going to be able to do," Bolden said, referring to the repairs needed to focus Hubble after launch. Each of JWST's mirrors is individually tunable, he said, so they can be adjusted without a corrective lens like the one astronauts put on Hubble.

"Our lessons learned from the Hubble [telescope incident] were, if you really care about something, you've got to measure it at least twice," Mather added. "And if you don't get the same answer, you'd better figure out why."

Researchers will make observations with the telescope for at least 5 years, and will carry enough fuel for 10 years — if they're lucky, JWST will last even longer, Mather and Bolden said. They added that the craft will absolutely be hit by space debris over the course of its lifespan, and that it's designed to function fine with small holes in its mirrors.

The full telescope, with a 21.3-foot (6.5 meters) mirror assembly, is too large to launch fully extended, so the telescope will be carefully furled during launch and will have to unfold over the course of two weeks once it's in space, Mather said. After that, the sun shield will be extended carefully, and the telescope will be given time to cool down. Finally, it will be focused, they said.

By six months after launch, the telescope will be ready to begin doing science.

Mather alluded to the "7 minutes of terror" of the Curiosity Mars rover's automated landing in 2012 — a famously complicated maneuver that used a rocket-powered sky crane to lower the vehicle to the Martian surface.

"This is six months of terror," he said.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.