Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
05-10-2017
NASA Alerts that An Object is Approaching Earth
NASA Alerts that An Object is Approaching Earth
The official estimation says that we need to pay attention (again) to the potential danger of an object heading to the Earth. The asteroid Florence missed the Earth on September 1st, but NASA alerts that the object that they call “2012 TC4” is approaching the Earth and its closest approach will happen on October 12th. New Yorkers will be closer to it than to Tokyo
The object is a bit smaller than Florence,however,this doesn’t help very much because it is much denser and faster. It is thousand times heavier than the Chelyabinsk meteorite that ruined a whole Russian city. The predictions are that it will make the closest approach to earth of any other asteroid of its size. To compare, imagine a watermelon (the Earth) being shot with a BB gun (the asteroid). It will get into the magma, after penetrating the crust and cause magma splashes as well as huge volcanic eruptions.
NASA’s official numbers predict that the probability of an impact is 1 in 600. However, more a coincidence occures,since NASAis holding doomsday exercises on October 12th, the exact date that the asteroid is supposed to “miss” the Earth. It is very possible that they might be just preparations and not actual exercises. Probably not many people have planned to protect themselves on this event. Those who actually have, might need to consider it. The government could be keeping this information wrapped in order not to cause panic among people.
“To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.”
That’s the mission statement of Way of the Future, a nonprofit religious corporation founded by Anthony Levandowski, the god of self-driving vehicles. He’s the engineer who built Google’s autonomous car and founded Otto, a self-driving truck company that was acquired by Uber. He’s now being sued by Alphabet, the parent company of Goggle, for allegedly stealing trade secrets and infringing on patents. Perhaps that’s why he needs an AI god.
Anthony Levandowski
“He had this very weird motivation about robots taking over the world—like actually taking over, in a military sense. It was like [he wanted] to be able to control the world, and robots were the way to do that. He talked about starting a new country on an island. Pretty wild and creepy stuff. And the biggest thing is that he’s always got a secret plan, and you’re not going to know about it.”
That quote from an engineer friend is in an article in Wired and sums up Levandowski’s view on robots … and on Way of the Future. Not much is known about the company/religion. While just discovered now, Wired found that he filed the incorporation paperwork in 2015. There doesn’t appear to be a website or anything more from Levandowski, which goes along with his reputation for “secret plans.”
Artificial intelligence alone is already feared by scientists and technology gurus like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, who sees AI as the antithesis of conventional religion or “summoning the devil.” Others in Silicon Valley see the singularity – when robots or AI surpass human intelligence – to be not too far off. Silicon Valley is said to be moving towards transhumanism, where the human condition is transformed and improved (saved?) by technology.
Is Way of the World already working on the next phase beyond transhumanism where AI becomes a savior and a god? All of sudden, jokes about “AI overlords” aren’t so funny anymore, especially when one considers that plenty of gods destroy many humans while selecting those qualified to be saved.
Levandowski made his name developing a self-driving car which must someday make god-like decisions when in an accident situation where it has to choose who to save and who to run over. Perhaps he’s creating this new religion out of guilt because he knows what the answer will be:
If any group or individual is going to find extraterrestrial life, chances are it will be the SETI Institute. The SETI Institute is a group of interdisciplinary researchers who have been scanning the cosmos for signs of intelligent life for over thirty years. While many false alarms and interesting anomalous signalshave been detected, SETI has yet to find conclusive proof of intelligent life outside of Earth. However, we might be getting close. According to one leading SETI scientist, we might be only a decade or two away from discovering evidence of an intelligent alien civilization.
Someone (or some thing) has to be out there, right?
That prediction was made by Seth Shostak, one of the senior astronomers at the SETI Institute in California. Shostak was interviewed at the Worlds Fair Nano in New York, a convention dedicated to futurology, cutting-edge technology, and all things visionary. Shostak told Futurism that current advances in telescopes, satellites, and data collection mean that we’re on the verge of being able to survey the stars like never before.
SETI’s Breakthrough Listen program has amassed the world’s best radio telescopes to scan for alien communications.
Shostak believes that if current trends continue, we’ll likely discover an alien race within twenty years, but that won’t necessarily mean an intergalactic handshake with little green men, however:
We may find microbial life – the kind you’d find in the corners of your bathtub. We may find that a lot sooner, but that remains to be seen. But it’s gonna happen, I think, in your lifetime. I don’t know about contact. I mean if they’re 500 light years away … you’ll hear a signal that’ll be 500 years old, and if you broadcast back ‘Hi we’re the Earthlings, how’re you doing?’ – it’ll be 1,000 years before you hear back from them. If you ever hear back from them.
Still, microbes on some desolate moon are a lot better than the thought that we might be all alone in the universe. Despite what the Fermi Paradox might say, I find it too hard to believe that in the near-infinite vastness of space, we are the only intelligent life. The big question is when – or if – we’ll ever discover other civilizations and if we’ll even recognize alien life when we see it. Of course, then there’s the question of them being friendly or not. Still, the scariest part of it all is wondering how the human race will react. If history is any guide, not well.
Ancient Kailasa Temple EXPOSED: 60 Mind-bending images of a temple CARVED out of a MOUNTAIN
Ancient Kailasa Temple EXPOSED: 60 Mind-bending images of a temple CARVED out of a MOUNTAIN
The temple itself was built out of a single rock, 164 feet deep, 109 feet wide, and 98 feet high, making it ONE of the BIGGEST MONOLITHIC structures on the planet, carved out of a single rock.
Numerous ancient sites around the globe are evidence that thousands of years ago, ancient cultures spanning from America to Asia had incredible knowledge in a number of fields.
Just as many ancient civilizations had staggering astronomical knowledge thousands of years ago, they perfected their cultures in numerous fields. One of those is engineering and architecture.
The Kailasa Temple at the Ellora Caves in Maharashtra India has fascinated researchers and tourists for centuries. This intricate temple suggests—according to many authors—that thousands of years ago, ancient cultures were far more advanced than what mainstream scholars are crediting them for.
Thousands of years ago, ancient builders were able to quarry supermassive blocks of stone—some of them with a weight of over 50 tons—transport them to various construction sites, precisely shape incredibly hard rocks like andesite, and put into position massive blocks as if the entire process was a giant puzzle.
Proof of their advanced skills is the Kailasa Temple which symbolizes Mount Kailash, the home of Lord Shiva, one of the most important ancient Hindu deities.
According to experts, the Kailasa temple is the 16th from a total of 34 caves which were literally carved out of the surrounding rock.
Mainstream scholars tell us that the ancient caves were built sometime around the fifth and tenth centuries AD, but many others disagree suggesting the caves are much older.
H.P. Blavatsky and M.K. Dhavalikar are just some of the authors who agree that we are looking at serious ancient stuff. M.K. Dhavalikar, who was a notable Indian historian, and archaeologist, author of the book ‘Ellora’, suggests the shrines and the Kailasa temple were not excavated at the same time but are the result of a construction process that belongs to a number of different periods.
But it doesn’t really matter that much how –exactly—old these ancient structures are.
What baffles experts is their incredible precision and design.
It seems very plausible that whoever built these fascinating caves thousands of years ago surely had more than just ordinary hammers, chisels, and picks.
The Kailasa temple in Ellora, Maharashtra, India is a MEGALITH carved out of a SINGLE rock. It is considered as one of the most remarkable cave temples in India, mostly because of its humongous size, architecture and sculptural implementations. In other words, it is one of the many places on Earth that proves how ancient societies—around the globe—were extremely advanced in various fields, possessing a knowledge that allowed them to erect—or carve—mind-bending structures that have remained standing for thousands of years after their creation.
Mars' Meridiani Planum, along the planet's equator, is about 29,700 square miles (77,000 square kilometers) — approximately the size of South Carolina. Deposits on Meridiani Planum can be seen in white.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Smithsonian
Giant deposits of ice may not lie hidden under the surface of Mars, between its equator and poles, as recently suggested, a new study finds.
Now Thomas Watters, lead author on a new study and planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, and his colleagues have found that at one equatorial site on Mars, evidence suggesting it may be rich in ice could just as easily mean that it has little to no ice whatsoever. [Inside Opportunity's Record-Setting Marathon Drive on Mars (Infographic)]
The researchers analyzed data collected by the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, according to the study. They focused on readings it collected from Meridiani Planum, a South Carolina-size area on Mars' equator that the Opportunity rover is currently exploring.
The MARSIS instrument transmits low-frequency radio pulses at Mars, which can penetrate the crust of the Red Planet and get reflected back when they encounter changes in density or composition.
The data from these pulses helped reveal the electrical properties of materials at Meridiani Planum. These electrical properties are often associated with ice-rich deposits, but "results from the Opportunity rover show there is little evidence to support an interpretation that Meridiani Planum deposits were ice-filled," Watters told Space.com.
Although Opportunity found evidence of some minerals at Meridiani Planum that were once formed in or altered by liquid water, the surface deposits there are mainly composed of dry, volcanic sand. "The view of the Opportunity team has been that the Meridiani Planum deposits are dry," Watters said.Watters and his colleagues found that other materials could have been compacted beneath Mars' surface to create an ice-like signal: The data from Meridiani Planum could be explained if the materials were thick layers of ice-free, porous, windblown, volcanic sand. "Many of the recently identified non-polar deposits interpreted to be ice-rich may contain little or no ice at all," Watters said.
The contours of Meridiani Planum may have made it ideal at trapping such windblown sands, the researchers said in the study. The relatively low gravity of Mars and the cold, dry climate that has dominated the planet for billions of years may then have allowed thick sand deposits to remain porous, they added.
These new insights from Meridiani Planum may help researchers identify areas with and without ice that future missions to Mars can access. "The search for accessible ice in the low latitudes of Mars is becoming a major goal in support of future human exploration and the potential for the colonization of Mars," Watters said.
'Alien Megastructure' Ruled Out for Some of Star's Weird Dimming
'Alien Megastructure' Ruled Out for Some of Star's Weird Dimming
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration depicting a hypothetical dust ring orbiting KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian’s Star or Tabby's Star.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
There's a prosaic explanation for at least some of the weirdness of "Tabby's star," it would appear.
The bizarre long-term dimming of Tabby's star — also known as Boyajian's star, or, more formally, KIC 8462852 — is likely caused by dust, not a giant network of solar panels or any other "megastructure" built by advanced aliens, a new study suggests.
Astronomers came to this conclusion after noticing that this dimming was more pronounced in ultraviolet (UV) than infrared light. Any object bigger than a dust grain would cause uniform dimming across all wavelengths, study team members said. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
"This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming," lead author Huan Meng of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star with a roughly 700-day orbital period."
Strange brightness dips
KIC 8462852, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, has generated a great deal of intrigue and speculation since 2015. That year, a team led by astronomer Tabetha Boyajian (hence the star's nicknames) reported that KIC 8462852 had dimmed dramatically several times over the past half-decade or so, once by 22 percent.
No orbiting planet could cause such big dips, so researchers began coming up with possible alternative explanations. These included swarms of comets or comet fragments, interstellar dust and the famous (but unlikely) alien-megastructure hypothesis.
The mystery deepened after the initial Boyajian et al. study. For example, other research groups found that, in addition to the occasional short-term brightness dips, Tabby's star dimmed overall by about 20 percent between 1890 and 1989. In addition, a 2016 paper determined that its brightness decreased by 3 percent from 2009 to 2013.
The new study, which was published online Tuesday (Oct. 3) in The Astrophysical Journal, addresses such longer-term events.
From January 2016 to December 2016, Meng and his colleagues (who include Boyajian) studied Tabby's star in infrared and UV light using NASA's Spitzer and Swift space telescopes, respectively. They also observed it in visible light during this period using the 27-inch-wide (68 centimeters) telescope at AstroLAB IRIS, a public observatory near the Belgian village of Zillebeke.
The observed UV dip implicates circumstellar dust — grains large enough to stay in orbit around Tabby's star despite the radiation pressure but small enough that they don't block light uniformly in all wavelengths, the researchers said.
Mysteries remain
The new study does not solve all of KIC 8462852's mysteries, however. For example, it does not address the short-term 20 percent brightness dips, which were detected by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. (Kepler is now observing a different part of the sky during its K2 extended mission and will not follow up on Tabby's star for the forseeable future.)
And a different study — led by Joshua Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California — just found that Tabby's star experienced two brightening spells over the past 11 years. (Simon and his colleagues also determined that the star has dimmed by about 1.5 percent from February 2015 to now.)
"Up until this work, we had thought that the star's changes in brightness were only occurring in one direction — dimming," Simon said in a statement. "The realization that the star sometimes gets brighter in addition to periods of dimming is incompatible with most hypotheses to explain its weird behavior."
Unusual behavior coming from the star known as KIC 8462852, Boyajian’s Star, or Tabby’s Star for short, has caused plenty of hypotheses to circulate about what could be causing apparent dimming there. The star, nicknamed for the lead author on the original paper on the star Tabetha Boyajian, goes through dips in brightness which have been observed from Earth. The brightness dips have eliminated up to 20 percent of the brightness in just days. The star also goes through longer dimming periods.
But new evidence from NASA instruments, studied by researchers, suggests that the dimming can be attributed to an uneven dust cloud moving around the star, effectively blocking some of its light from observers.
Tabby's Star, or KIC 8462852, seen in an illustration from NASA.
Photo: NASA
This theory is grounded in scientific data, while other are not. There’s one theory that the star varies in brightness because there’s an alien superstructure inside of the star harvesting energy from it, said NASA in a press release. Another theory is that the star cosmically swallowed an unstable planet. But these theories are quite unlikely.
New information gathered using the Spitzer and Swift missions in addition to the Belgian AstroLAB IRIS observatory support the theory that the dimming is caused by a moving cloud. By observing the planet in infrared and ultraviolet light separately, researchers found that there was more dimming in the infrared spectrum than in the visible wavelengths. The researchers involved expect that the cloud is orbiting the star about every 700-days or so.
The detailed findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal on Tuesday. The researchers found that the objects causing the dimming at Tabby’s Star are likely tiny, just a few micrometers in diameter, but still large enough that they would stay in orbit around the star. This dust is called circumstellar dust and the reason it merely dims is that it’s not quite large enough to block all light from a star like Tabby’s Star, said the release from NASA.
Amateur scientists and citizen scientists played a role in the research that led to the most recent conclusion. Some people involved had no formal training, said NASA, but their observations and work on publicly available data helped the researchers come to their final conclusions that were published.
The dust explains the longer-term dimming events, but they don’t full explain the shorter-term events. To figure out those events, NASA will need to do more research on the star. One hypothesis is that they’re due to a “swarm of comets,” a common source of dust.
New telescopes will be necessary to study Tabby’s star because those that were trained on it earlier, like the Kepler, have moved on to other areas of space, said NASA.
This illustration depicts a hypothetical uneven ring of dust orbiting KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian’s Star or Tabby’s Star. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)
Are aliens building a huge energy-generating megastructure around a weirdly dimming star? That way-out hypothesis has suffered another blow, thanks to a study that draws upon infrared as well as ultraviolet observations.
The star, known as KIC 8462852 or Tabby’s Star, first came to attention two years ago when citizen scientists sifting through data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope noticed some unusually drastic dips in its brightness. The star’s nickname comes from Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian, the Yale astronomer who oversaw those observations.
Another astronomer, Penn State’s Jason Wright, mused that the data could be explained by the construction of a huge orbital structure known as a Dyson sphere — although he cautioned that “aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider.”
Since then, however, the alien hypothesis has been very much considered — along with more mundane explanations such as swarms of comets, stellar variability or clouds of gas and dust. Further observations found that KIC 8462852, which is about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, has been going through a long-term dimming trend.
Astronomers analyzed data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Swift spacecraft, as well as from the Belgian AstroLAB IRIS observatory, and compared the levels of dimming in infrared vs. ultraviolet wavelengths.
They found that the ultraviolet light dimmed significantly more than the infrared light. That fits the pattern for starlight shining through a haze of dust particles no bigger than about a ten-thousandth of an inch.
The effect is similar to the way the sun reddens in a smoky sky, as was the case in the Pacific Northwest during this summer’s wildfire season. Tiny particles scatter more light in the bluer, shorter-wavelength part of the spectrum, and less light on the redder, longer-wavelength side.
The researchers said a similar effect appears to be at work around Tabby’s Star.
“This pretty much rules out the alien megastructure theory, as that could not explain the wavelength-dependent dimming,” lead author Huan Meng of the University of Arizona said in a NASA news release. “We suspect, instead, there is a cloud of dust orbiting the star with a roughly 700-day orbital period.”
Tabby’s Star is just one among millions in this image from the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae. (Carnegie Institution for Science / ASAS-SN Image / Benjamin Shappee)
The explanation applies to the long-term dimming, but not necessarily to the shorter-term changes in brightness. Those changes could be due to a swarm of comets, or variations in stellar activity, or the breakup of a planet orbiting the star … or even, heaven help us, alien shenanigans.
Meng and his colleagues favor the comet-swarm hypothesis, because passing comets could contribute fine-grained material to orbiting dust clouds.
Yet another study, led by astronomers Josh Simon and Benjamin Shappee at the Carnegie Institution for Science, adds to the intrigue.
The researchers analyzed more than a decade’s worth of observations from the All Sky Automated Survey and the high-precision All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae — and found that Tabby’s Star has gone through periods of significant brightening as well as dimming.
Simon and Shappee said their findings support the view that Tabby’s Star is worth keeping watch on.
“We haven’t solved the mystery yet,” Simon said in a news release. “But understanding the star’s long-term changes is a key piece of the puzzle.”
The first time I heard about Nova Scotia's Shag Harbour UFO incident was about six years ago when a Celtic guitarist with long white hair and a glass eyeball was telling me about it at a house party in Halifax.
As he regaled the fateful day back in 1967 that plagued a sleepy fishing village in rural Nova Scotia with a mystery still unsolved, I became more and more entranced (it didn't help that, at the time, Ancient Aliens was my televised Bible).
My interest grew, and my research furthered as the years went on, and I found out there was an annual festival held at the location of the incident, and that 2017 would mark its 50-year anniversary.
Having never been to Shag Harbour before, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to make my inaugural pilgrimage to the village that was going to celebrate the half-century milestone since an inexplicable flying object fell out of the sky and into the ocean on October 4, 1967. So, I hopped in my car and drove 300 kilometers southwest from Halifax, hoping the truth would be out there.
Shag Harbour Sign
Driving into Shag Harbour is not unlike driving into many of the Maritimes' rural fishing towns—its seaside main road peppered with old wooden boats, old wooden docks, and old wooden homes, all of which are slowly decaying form the salt air. It is quiet, quaint, and completely beautiful, albeit a little tragic to anyone coming from away.
As I continued to drive, I began to notice nondescript signs nailed to telephone poles and churches advertising things like "Lobster Supper," "Baked Bean Supper," "Wednesday Night Kitchen Party," and "UFO Crash Site." You know—normal, fishing village stuff. When I arrived in town, it was the second day of the annual UFO festival, and despite the placidity of the sea and the aged state of everything, the air was electric.
I went straight to the day's main event—a witness panel at the local community center, which was decorated with streamers, balloons, and dozens of old white people. The woman at the registration desk was knitting. She set it aside for a moment and wrote "PRESS PASS" on a small square piece of paper and handed it to me, smiling. I walked into the stucco-ceiling'd, cement-floored room—where I can only imagine every single wedding reception, cribbage tournament, and Knights of Columbus meeting has taken place for the past 60 years—glanced over the UFO memorabilia merchandise table at the back, and made myself comfortable for what would be a two-hour witness testimonial session.
The panel featured firsthand accounts from several people involved in the infamous incident—including eyewitness testimonies from Shag Harbour locals, as well as one from a commercial pilot who was flying a plane at the time of the incident.
As the story goes, on the night of October 4, 1967, a handful of local residents saw a low-flying, brightly lit object head toward Shag Harbour before it quickly crashed into the sea, where it sank before anyone could get to it. It was first reported to authorities as a plane crash by Laurie Wickens—who would become one of the event's key witnesses.
"We went right to the phone booth and called the police and reported a plane crash, and the officer didn't believe me [at first], so I hung up," Wickens, now 67, testified to a crowd of keen onlookers. "But he had gotten the number for the phone booth, so as I made my way back to my car, the phone booth rang, and he wanted to know where [the crash] was, and we told him to meet us. So as we were going back there to meet him, we could see the light drifting in the water, and then me and [my friend] watched the light until it went out."
Shag Harbour DND Memo
Ralph Loewinger was co-piloting a cargo plane from New York to London that same night, and saw the event unfold from a different perspective.
"I just happened to be looking in the right direction, and I saw this formation of bluish-white lights, slanted from upper left to lower right, and I said, 'Ooh—watch this guy,'" he told the room. "And the other two [in the cockpit] looked. I remember the captain's hands and my hands both went for the control yoke—because we figured we were going to have to dodge this guy, he's going right at it."
"And it looked like a big airplane at the time, like a B-52 or a 707, with all of its lights on—there were about five lights, I remember—and he was in a position relative to us of a guy making a left-hand turn, and that would have him crossing our bow. So we were waiting, and these lights just hung there—they did not cross our bow. And I remember the three of us were looking at it, and we said, 'What is this?' And we couldn't discern what it was. I called Boston and asked if they still had us on radar, and he said, 'Yeah,' and I said, 'Well, who's this at 11 o'clock?' He watched the sweep on his radar scope, and he says, 'I don't have anybody out there.' And I said, 'Well, I'm looking at somebody.'"
Norman Smith was a teenager in Shag Harbour in 1967. On the night of the incident, he saw the lights in the sky, and then followed them until they crashed into the water before he, his father, and his uncle hopped in a fishing boat on an immediate rescue mission.
"We were looking for people and debris," he said during the witness panel. "And we went up to the vicinity of where it was, and we didn't find anything, no piece of material or anything in the water, except for a long streak of foam—yellowish orange foam—which was four to six inches thick, on the water. We searched that all night, then the Coast Guard came, and all we did was go back and forth all night long. I was out again the next day, the divers were there, [and] we stayed there for the better part of the day then gave up and went home. We didn't find anything, and the divers didn't find anything that we could see, so we went home."
"I can't tell you what came down or what landed in the water—if it was a plane or if it was a UFO, I don't know—but there definitely was something that came down out of the sky and landed in the water. I can still see it. I'd like to see it again, I really, really would. [But] I don't know what it was and I probably never will."
For days following the incident, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy, and local fishing boats all scoured the area for survivors or debris, but no trace of anything was ever found.
Captain Ronnie Newell was the skipper aboard the Coast Guard Cutter 101. He said they mobilized within ten minutes of receiving a call from the Rescue Coordination Center in Halifax that a plane had went down.
"We searched that night on the ocean, pretty much the whole rest of the night [but] we didn't see anything," he recalled to the festival crowd. "We were back the next morning—we brought divers down for two days at that time, and they didn't bring up anything that we [saw]. So I can't tell you anything more than that. I'm not saying that it wasn't [a UFO], but it's just that we didn't see anything. Other than the foam that was on the water—but that's all we did see."
Crash site
On October 9, five days after the mysterious object sank off the shoreline and into the abyss, the UFO search had been called off, after extensive efforts turned up nothing. Of course, some will argue that evidence could have been found and was concealed from the public eye—which is somewhat plausible, especially when one considers the fact that there was a secret US military base monitoring subterranean and underwater frequencies for Russian submarine activity just 30 minutes from the crash site.
One of the panelists at the 50 anniversary festival was Bill Boudreau—who worked at this secret base—which was disguised as an oceanographic institute—for 25 years.
"They picked up the crash here in the harbour almost as soon as it happened," he alleged during the witness testimonies.
It's no wonder conspiracy theorists like to have a heyday with this particular UFO event, because, quite frankly, there does seem to be a lot of ammo.
Diver David Cvet—another panelist at the festival—has been surveying the ocean floor of the harbour for years, and claimed he's discovered underwater anomalies, or depressions, in the area where the crash is said to have taken place.
"The point of these dive expeditions is to figure out what these anomalies are—it may or may not support the Shag Harbour Incident—but that's not the point," Cvet told the room. "The fact is that these anomalies do physically exist."
It's here where the USO (unidentified submerged object) theory comes into play.
Interpretive Centre
Cvet described the depression as a dinner plate, with the center being about a foot deep. "It was perfectly round," he said. "A perfect circle. And the covering of this depression was comprised of pebbles two to four centimeters in size. So where are the big rocks? Where are the plants? Where are the scallops, the lobsters, the silt? There was nothing. It was absolutely clear—like someone had swept it the day before."
Noah Morritt is one of the Shag Harbour UFO Festival event directors. He's also a PhD student studying folklore at Memorial University in Newfoundland writing his dissertation on the Shag Harbour Incident. His interest in the event stems from the identity of the community itself and how its people are still grappling with what happened half a century ago.
"[It] left this community with the challenge of, 'so what's a UFO? So they've spent the past 50 years trying to figure out what this is," he said.
But despite countless hours spent studying the town, the history of the event and immersing himself directly in the culture, Morritt is still stumped as to what exactly it was that so many witnesses reported seeing that night.
"There's lots of interpretation of what it was, from flares to some kind of government satellite, or government aircraft, or extraterrestrial aircraft—there's been a whole range of stuff. I have not a clue [what it was]—no idea," he said.
After hearing the eyewitness accounts at the community center that day, I began to make my way out of town, but stopped first at the commemorative crash site just a few minutes up the road. It was here I met Norman Brown, who drove 600 kilometers from Miramichi, New Brunswick, for his first-ever visit to Shag Harbour. When I asked him what drew him to this year's event, he began to tell me his own story of a peculiar sighting he encountered when he was 18 years old off the coast of New Brunswick—just 200 kilometres straight across the Bay of Fundy—that same first week of October in 1967.
"That same night [on October 4]—or it may have been the night before or two nights before—it sounds very much exactly like the spacecraft or UFO that we saw. I firmly believe it was either the same craft, or if there was more than one, it was one that was with them at the time," he told VICE.
"I have no idea what was manning it, or where it was from, but I can tell you that it was no kind of a spacecraft that the Canadian or US Navy or Air Force could have had at that time. There was no sound, [it was] pitch black, glowing a bit—nothing could just hover as steady as that was. It was stationary, [and] you could see it very clear. It was just over top of the trees maybe a couple hundred feet in the air, on a little bit of an angle, and then all of a sudden it just took off with incredible speed, and as it got going you could see the lights getting smaller and smaller and smaller and—gone."
Brown—who admitted that, before his encounter, he did not believe in spaceship sightings—said he hasn't seen anything like that since.
"When I heard stories of people seeing stuff like this in the sixties, I thought, no way, you're crazy, you're making it up." he said. But when I saw it myself, from that point on, I knew that these stories had to be true, because I saw it myself, and I knew it wasn't something from this earth."
Witness Panel
The people and the identity of Shag Harbour have been completely consumed by the events that happened on the night of October 4, 1967. Whether it was from this world or not, whatever fell out of the sky and into the water 50 years ago, has left this village—and researchers, officials, and the public at large—completely stumped as to what exactly it was. At least that's the official story.
There is no closure, and all the witnesses—and the rest of the world—have, are their stories, their unwavering convictions in what they saw, and the sliver of hope that maybe someday, it might come back.
As for me—I was happy to have met the people of this beautiful, dying place, but I was also happy to get back on the road.
As I drove out of Shag Harbour, I saw those old wooden boats and homes and wondered if they'd still be here in another 50 years or whether this would just be another Maritime ghost town with a wonderful and weird past.
There are thousands of reports of strange lights in the skies, even of close contact with apparent vehicles from other parts of the galaxy. But reports of such craft crash-landing and being recovered by our collective governments are a little more few and far between—not to mention a lot less believed.
Regardless, there are many claims of such instances where alien vehicles, technology, and even dead extraterrestrials have ended up in the possession of a select few at the very top (and dark) reaches of world governments. Here are ten of them; make of them what you will.
10. The Paradise Valley Incident - Arizona, 1947
The origins of the Paradise Valley incident are dubious to many, not least because they come mainly from UFO author Frank Scully, whose sources were questionable according to some. Others defend Scully, stating he was a genuine UFO researcher who was, on occasion, purposely fed disinformation. One of these is one-time leading UFO researcher Timothy Good, who claimed to have met a witness to the incident, Selman E. Graves, four decades after it happened.[1]
According to Graves, in October 1947, he and several friends arrived at the home of Walt Sayler in order to participate in a preplanned hunt. Sayler would inform them that the area they had planned to hunt in was “restricted” by the military, who were conducting some kind of unknown activity. A little bemused, Graves and two of the group decided to check out some mines in the area, before meeting up with Sayler and the rest in a new destination. While at the mines, which had a view of the entire off-limits area, Graves could indeed see military activity, including many soldiers near a “large, aluminum dome” that resembled the top of an observatory.
Only when Graves read Scully’s account years later did he come to believe that the “observatory dome” was in fact a crashed UFO. According to Scully, an ex-military member of the public had alerted the military to the craft. Graves believes that person was Walt Sayler, who was a military veteran. In a (further) bizarre twist to the account, urban legend states that the crash site is now the Dreamy Draw Dam recreation area, the downed craft destroyed and covered over due its sheer size of and the military’s inability to move it covertly.
9. UFO Crashes Near Kingman Airport - Arizona, 1953
On the evening of May 21, 1953, around 13 kilometers (8 mi) to the northeast of Kingman Airport in Arizona, an unidentified craft allegedly crashed to Earth.[2] The military quickly sealed off the area and recovered the debris, moving the wreckage to one of two military bases, either the infamous Area 51 in Nevada or Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (Claims vary.) Government officials discreetly rounded up somewhere close to 40 scientists in various fields, and after having them sign secrecy papers, they transported them (in a windowless bus if some sources are to be believed) to where the craft, and its crew, were being housed so that they could better understand both.
According to researcher and author Preston Dennett, one such scientist, Arthur Stancil, would state to Dennett that their investigations would conclude that “the craft struck the ground at 1,200 miles per hour, but was strangely undamaged and definitely not human-made.” Stancil would further describe the object as “tear-drop shaped [ . . . ] like a streamlined cigar.” Another scientist who spoke with Dennett, Leonard Stringfield, claimed that he managed to get a look inside the crashed craft, witnessing with his own eyes “the dead body of a four foot human-like creature in a silver metallic suit.”
The incident was largely kept under wraps by the military until Frank Scully lit the fuse that would bring apparently legitimate witnesses forward to other UFO researchers.
8. The Kalahari Incident - South Africa, 1989
According to reports made by Quest International in the early 1990s, an unknown craft entered South African airspace on May 7, 1989, and was ultimately shot down by intercepting Mirage fighter jets, crashing in the Kalahari Desert near the border with Botswana.[3] The South African military quickly retrieved the craft, noting how their electrical equipment faltered as they did so. Once the UFO was recovered, the area of the crash, some of which featured sand and rock fused together due to intense temperatures, was covered over with fresh sand and dirt to hide any disturbance.
According to leaked papers, two crew members were discovered inside the craft following the retrieval team forcing open a hatch on the shiny, silver, and smooth material of its exterior. Both of these extraterrestrials were still alive, according to the reports. Each wore a tight one-piece suit and had heads much larger and out of proportion to their otherwise thin bodies. Each being was around 122 to 152 centimeters (4′–5′) tall.
According to UFO researcher Tony Dodd, the United States would trade the South African government nuclear technology (something international law forbade them to do) in return for the crippled craft and the two alien beings. Furthermore, Dodd’s “source” claimed that a third alien being was withheld by the South African government and was unknown to the Americans. According to the source, that being was taken to Camp 13, an apparent top secret base near the Kalahari Desert.
7. ‘Empty’ Craft Recovered In The Desert - Utah, 1958
One of the many supposed government files released as part of the Sirius Disclosure Project was that of a downed UFO in a nonspecific location somewhere in the deserts of Utah.[4] The crash happened sometime in 1958 and was recovered successfully by a military unit and was quickly determined to be of alien origin.
That is quite an assertion, given that according to the files, no alien bodies were found. That brings up several questions in itself. How did the military determine it was an “alien craft” if no extraterrestrial bodies were discovered? Did they have previous experience with such things? Was the UFO some kind of drone and simply didn’t contain any live pilots? Or, assuming the craft was intelligently guided, where had the pilots gone? Were they wandering around the Utah desert?
Regarding the actual craft, it was claimed in the files that it was a “technological marvel” and had been analyzed by the “best aerospace scientists” available, but understanding the alien object was still a goal to be realized. They did however, obtain “a large volume of technological data” from this specific recovery. What that data might be or how it might have been used is, of course, anybody’s guess.
6. The Berwyn Mountain Incident - Wales, 1974
Although the official explanation was an earthquake and a meteorite no less, the disturbance was allegedly confirmed to be a UFO encounter following the release of government UFO records almost 40 years later.[5] Of course, many UFO researchers have conducted extensive research on the case, and between their collective accounts and the declassified files, a fuller picture of what appears to have transpired is available.
A huge explosion rang out from the Berwyn Mountains in Wales at shortly after 8:30 PM on January 23, 1974. The boom registered 3.5 on the Richter Scale, with the British Geological Survey stating the disturbance was “likely” an earthquake. Local residents weren’t so sure.
Margaret Fry, respected UFO researcher, spent considerable time at the scene as it unfolded. She spoke to many locals, all of whom reported hearing a loud explosion that made the ground shake. Very few accepted the earthquake theory. One of them, a nurse named Pat Evans, was driving near the area of the apparent impact that evening. She recalled seeing a pulsating orange glow on the hillside and stated “It had to be a UFO of some sorts!”
Fry would also tell of speaking to local hotel and bar managers in the days following the incident. One particular hotel manager spoke of an influx of American military personnel to the area and of the woodlands near the site being completely sealed off.
In his book Alien Investigator, Tony Dodd revealed a conversation he had with a whistle-blower who claimed to have transported “live alien beings” sealed in advanced chemical containers to Porton Down, well-known to some in the UFO and conspiracy fields who believe such otherworldly beings reside within the walls of the facility.
5. Aztec Crash - New Mexico, 1948
The supposed UFO crash in Aztec, New Mexico, on March 25, 1948, was considered to be a complete fabrication for decades, even by many in the UFO community. The account—another incident that traces its roots back to the controversial Frank Scully—tells of a crippled craft recovered by the US military and moved to various bases over a two-week period. (Such was the size of it.) Perhaps most controversial (or bizarre, depending on your perspective) are the claims that up to 16 dead alien bodies were said to have been discovered (and transported) from the crash site.
The incident has been examined by various researchers over the years, and apparent “further supportive” evidence to the original account would result in the 2015 book The Aztec UFO Incident, by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey and Dr. Frank Thayer.[6] Not only did they present recently (at the time) declassified intelligence documents supporting the claims but also numerous witnesses who all repeated the same thing: They were required, often under duress, to sign secrecy waivers concerning what they had witnessed.
4. Strange Creature Discovered In Gdynia - (Soviet) Poland, 1959
In early 1959 in Cold War–era Poland (then under the control of the Soviet Union), a strange “radiant object” was seen falling to Earth by several witnesses, appearing to vanish in the dark waters of the harbor.[7]
Reports were made, and while the Polish Navy did discover an apparent piece of wreckage, which was sent for further study, nothing else was found. The area around the harbor was nonetheless placed under military guard. This was still the case several days later, when a “strange silhouette” was reported dragging itself from the water and lying, exhausted and weakened, on the sand.
According to reports, “the man” didn’t speak any known language, and he appeared to have suffered severe burns to his face. His body was covered by some kind of uniform. When he was further examined at a local hospital, doctors could not remove the clothing, as there were no obvious zips or fasteners, and the material, while thin and soft to the touch, was as strong as metal.
Accounts differ as to the exact details of how the man came to his end and whether he was indeed from another world, but it appears he did die shortly after his discovery. Assuming for one moment that the account is true, the remains of the being are said to be somewhere in an underground bunker under the streets of Moscow.
3. Laredo Crash - Texas, 1948
According to reports in the book Fallen Angel—UFO Crash Near Laredo, Texas, by Noe Torres, two fully armed US military aircraft gave chase to a large “silver-disc shaped” craft of unknown origin, before witnessing the apparently otherworldly object go crashing into the ground near Laredo, Texas, on July 7, 1948.[8]
The military would soon seal off the area, and a special “retrieval team” was sent to obtain the crippled spaceship so that it might be inspected in secret. According to Torres, the UFO was taken to a secret military base in San Antonio. Further adding to the overall mystery and fascination of the account was that the “badly burned body of a non-human entity” was also taken into the possession of the US military.
Although there were persistent rumors of the encounter, both in the UFOcommunity and locally in Laredo, it was not until the late 1970s that the story began to gain nationwide attention when, amid the sudden popularity of UFOs and aliens in pop culture, various UFO magazines began to pick up on the incident, consequently bringing forth “whistle-blowers” who would confirm the event.
2. Battle Between UFOs - Russia, 1989
An absolute plethora of UFO sightings occurred behind the Iron Curtain in the Cold War days. However, many of them were not reported until after the fall of the Berlin Wall (often many years after they happened). Given the fact that the Soviet regime most often told their citizens that such sightings were the work of the “evil United States” (and so much disinformation ensued), perhaps such reports need an extra pinch of salt. That being said, an incident that is claimed to have happened on September 16, 1989, is too intriguing for most UFO enthusiasts to ignore.[9]
On this evening, not only did an otherworldly craft fall to Earth, but a full-on “alien battle” ensued beforehand. Over the port of Zaostrovka on the River Kama, several “silver disc” UFOs attacked a different “darker coloured craft,” firing “beams of light” at it, forcing it to crash in a military training ground. Dozens of people apparently saw the battle, and all electricity in the area ceased to work.
The crashed UFO was guarded in the swampland it had fallen into until late November, when the cold weather froze the swamps and allowed Soviet troops to investigate further. All that is known is that the four troops who were sent to investigate the craft soon became “extremely ill” with suspected radiation sickness, and the area was consequently sealed off.
Shortly after midnight on January 20, 1996, reports of a strange, glowing craft “crashing to the ground” were received by authorities in Varginha, Brazil.[10]Unknown to residents at the time was that the Brazilian military was also tracking a UFO entering their airspace.
As bizarre as these events undoubtedly were, even weirder were the reports that emergency departments began receiving of a “strange creature” roaming around the area. Originally treating the reports as a hoax or prank, the authorities (or those representing them) were said to be as surprised as the locals when they came face-to-face with the “dazed and confused” otherworldly being.
The extraterrestrial was quickly captured and held before the Brazilian military took possession of it. From there, the trail goes cold, and those suspected of having performed studies and eventual autopsies on the creature deny any involvement. Whether intentionally or not, the incident is now widely regarded as a hoax.
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The REAL FIRE IN THE SKY ~ The WALTON EXPERIENCE by Travis Walton
The REAL FIRE IN THE SKY ~ The WALTON EXPERIENCE by Travis Walton
Travis Walton is an American logger who was allegedly abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, while working with a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton could not be found, but reappeared after a five-day search.
The Walton case received mainstream publicity and remains one of the best-known instances of alleged alien abduction. UFO historian Jerome Clark writes that "Few abduction reports have generated as much controversy" as the Walton case. It is furthermore one of the very few alleged alien abduction cases with some corroborative eyewitnesses.
In 1993, Walton's book was adapted into a film, Fire in the Sky, directed by Robert Lieberman and starring D. B. Sweeney as Travis Walton. The film found "Moderate success, mixed reviews, and ufologists 'complaints about its inaccuracies and exaggerations." Especially inaccurate was the portion of the film detailing his time on the UFO; it bears almost no resemblance to the original narrative.
This is the story of Travis Walton, from Travis Walton. If you ever had the chance to catch the movie "Fire in the Sky" then you know the story of Travis, and what he claims happened to him. But if you are like us, we were a little surprised to find out how much of the movie was not what Travis actually had said happened to him. I mean we understand making things work in a film. But changing what he actually said, about something like this.... The story alone was very good. From the time of his abduction until his return, you get a bit of a different story when you hear it strait from Travis.
And if you are not familiar with this story. We would strongly urge you to take a listen.µ
In 1969, the U.S. Air Force closed down their “Project Blue Book” investigation of “Unidentified Flying Objects” by claiming their evaluations of more than 12,000 sightings had not yielded a single instance where a UFO had ever posed a threat to national security, nor demonstrated technology “beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge”, nor been categorized as extraterrestrial. Headquartered at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio where legend long suggests recovered salvage from the 1947 Roswell incident was taken for further research and development, all of the project’s declassified records were allegedly transferred to the National Archives and Records Service.
Photograph of the The National Archives, taken by Nick Cooper 3 February, 2007.
(Credit: Nick Cooper/Wikimedia Commons)
But did the Air Force really shut down the project, or just move it into a private sphere where the public could be kept at arm’s length? A handful of government documents have slipped out over the years pointing to the latter scenario. A look back at Project Blue Book is insightful here, for knowledge of how the project evolved remains relevant to modern assessments as well as the effort to gauge what current high-level insiders might know. Historical information indicates that the Army Air Force took serious attention to UFOs when reports of “foo fighters” started coming in from pilots during World War II. Further sightings at military installations in 1947 led to classified orders that UFO reports be sent to division offices at Wright-Patterson Air Field where General Nathan Twining was selected to oversee any type of evaluation.
Twining authored the now legendary September 23, 1947 classified memo to Air Force General George Schulgen in which he responded to a request for information about “flying saucer sightings” by reporting his team’s opinion that, “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” This apparently catalyzed the Air Force’s decision to open an official investigation into the UFO phenomenon, as Project Sign was then established near the end of 1947. Major General L. C. Craigie sent a directive to Twining to collect and evaluate information “concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be construed to be of concern to the national security.”
General Nathan Twining, author of the September 23, 1947 memo. He later earned a fourth star and became USAF Chief of Staff — and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A precursor to Project Blue Book, Project Sign was where Ohio State University astronomy professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek first became involved with the government study of UFOs. Hynek was contracted by the project to analyze UFO reports and determine if objects observed were misidentified astronomical phenomena. Generally skeptical, Hynek still found that roughly 20 percent of the reports could not be explained in such a manner.
In History of the United States Air Force Programs by Thomas Tulien, we learn that Project Sign’s studies led to an intelligence “estimate of the situation” in the fall of 1948 which suggested that flying objects ranging from pilot Kenneth Arnold’s famous Washington sighting to those witnessed by personnel at Muroc AFB, Rapid City AFB (now Ellsworth AFB), and Los Alamos Laboratory were interplanetary spacecraft (a conclusion largely based around the spectacular maneuvers reported, beyond the scope of modern quantum physics). Upper brass such as Director of Intelligence Maj. General Charles Cabell and Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg didn’t care for that assessment however, leading to a political battle for control of the project between the Pentagon and the Air Force. This tussle was won by the Pentagon, with Project Sign ordered to send all case files to the Pentagon and USAF Scientific Advisory Board for further assessment.
General Hoyt Vandenberg
Project Sign staff were soon transferred or reassigned and Project Grudge was launched in the early part of 1949, with a new staff and a directive that UFO reports could be explained with conventional reasoning. Project Grudge wasn’t nearly as active in conducting studies as Project Sign, yet those pesky UFOs still refused to disappear. New project director Lt. Edward J. Ruppelt sought out Hynek again for help interpreting UFO reports, however over time Hynek’s position began to evolve as he realized that the unexplained 20 percent presented a genuine scientific challenge.
Yet, General Cabell ultimately became discontent with Project Grudge’s lack of substantive analysis and re-organized the project again in the spring of 1952, forming Project Blue Book. This was soon followed by one the most notable UFO incidents in American history, when a wave of sightings hit Washington D.C. in late July. Air Force Director of Intelligence Maj. General John Samford held the Pentagon’s largest press conference since World War II to dismiss the sightings as a result of “temperature inversion”, but President Truman meanwhile directed the CIA to start looking into the matter. This led to the formation of the Robertson Panel, which quickly came to conclusions in 1953 which were similar to that of Project Grudge in claiming there was no evidence of a direct threat to national security and that the the Air Force should work to demystify UFOs. The Panel also concluded that “the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic.” This issue of government sovereignty being threatened by the existence of extraterrestrial visitors has haunted Ufology ever since (and was the subject of an academic paper “Sovereignty and the UFO” by Alexander Wendt and Bud Duvall that was first presented at The Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies in 2006.)
Edward Ruppelt (standing center) at July 29, 1952 Pentagon UFO press conference. Also pictured, Major Generals Roger Ramey (seated left), USAF operations chief, and John A. Samford (seated right), USAF director of intelligence.
(image credit: Wikipedia)
While there were many extraordinary UFO incidents that occurred during the Blue Book era that were not included in the study, some of the most compelling UFO encounters in history are among the 12,000 cases. The actual number of “unknowns” (regarded as unexplained) has changed over the years, with the Air Force originally noting 701 as the “official number”, though only listing at first 564 in declassified documents, and later with FOIA releases revealing an actual number of over 1,500. The majority of these unknowns involve highly credible professional witnesses, many with the military. They include; 1952 San Marcos Air Force Base involving at least 6 Air Force personell; 1959 Bunker Hill Air Force Base encounter involving mutiple Airmen and an attempted intercept by a jet; 1964, Socorro, New Mexico case involving police officer Lonnie Zamora; and the 1968 airborne encounter with a pilot near Ocala, Florida with radar confirmation.
While publicly the Air Force was actively trying to get ot the bottom of UFO’s, privately they were utilizing Blue Book to now turn away from attempting to investigate the nature of the phenomenon and focus on the public relations issues of trying to downplay them. Hynek however was still embedded with Blue Book and did not concur with the Robertson Panel. He was determined to take on a role as an open-minded investigator, telling a gathering of physicists that “Ridicule is not part of the scientific method.” And while Hynek was now trying to investigate the true nature behind these phenomena, it soon became apparent to him that the investigative methods used by others at Project Blue Book were grossly inadequate to properly investigate and analyze these phenomena. Career opportunities in the astronomy field would keep Hynek busy, yet high profile UFO incidents would continue to bring him back to Project Blue Book. Potential cases would go through an unscientific screening process before reaching Blue Book’s attention and then individually selected for analysis. The majority of each investigation was then performed remotely, with Hynek as one of the only members of the project that would insist on conducting personal interviews and field investigations.
Dr. Howard P. Robertson, the California astrophysicist who chaired the 1953 CIA Panel and recommended Thornton Page.
A 1966 mass UFO sighting in Michigan became a turning point for Project Blue Book when Hynek was dispatched to investigate. Under intense pressure from the Air Force and the media, Hynek suggested a swamp gas explanation at a press conference that was quickly ridiculed and which he later cited as a career low point. The subsequent publicity however put him in the public eye as a UFO expert and he successfully lobbied Congress for an unbiased scientific study of the phenomenon. But the University of Colorado study led by skeptical physicist Edward Condon was far from unbiased, with Condon reported to have been biased all along. “The Condon Committee” came to a conclusion similar to that of the CIA’s Robertson Panel, declaring that UFOs were not worthy of serious study, sealing the fate of Project Blue Book and closing the government’s public investigation of UFO’s in 1969.
Hynek however kept moving forward, and while he was the face of the now controversial Project Blue Book, he became a strong public advocate for the continuing study of the UFO phenomenon. He published several books on the topic and introduced his “Close Encounters” classification system, which became solidified in the public consciousness when director Steven Spielberg utilized it for the title of his 1977 blockbuster film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which featured a cameo by Hynek in the climactic ending.) Hynek also founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and kept studying the phenomenon up until his passing in 1986.
Dr. J. Allen Hynek
A variety of notable experts have strongly suggested that there were other agendas to Project Blue Book and that its termination did not mark the end of government investigations and research into UFO phenomena. Prominent author and Ufologist Kevin Randle, once a special investigator with CUFOS organization, was one of the first to review Project Blue Book’s declassified files in 1976 and found evidence to indicate that Blue Book was not being sent the reports on sightings that were deemed potential threats to national security. Modern Ufologist Grant Cameron, a widely recognized expert on presidential knowledge of UFOs, has suggested that the shutdown of Project Blue Book merely moved the project into the “black budget” era of deeper secrecy. Ufologist Christopher Chacon, best known as one of the world’s top Anomalists, knew Hynek personally and has been continuously investigating close encounter incidents worldwide for nearly thirty years. Chacon’s stint with a scientific think-tank allowed him an unprecedented access to all of Project Blue Book’s files, including those that are still classified, Chacon noting the presense of multiple agendas behind Blue Book’s existence and supposed termination. Historian Richard Dolan a pre-eminent expert on the topic of government secrecy surrounding UFOs, not only rebutted Edward Condon’s conclusions in the Condon Committee’s report, but also found sources that state many of the Project Blue Book cases were fictitious and part of a misinformation campaign. Researcher John Greenewald, best known as the creator of The Black Vault website, has become one of the top experts on Blue Book because of his intimate familiarity with the files, having acquired an incomparable collection of documents after filing more than 7,000 FOIA requests.
In the 1984 book Clear Intent by Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood (later re-published as The UFO Cover-Up), Hynek authored a foreword that helped shine a light on the truth of the government continuing to take UFOs quite seriously. This is proven in the book through documents obtained concerning UFO incidents up through the 1970s. Hynek took the opportunity to summarize the inherent contradiction of the government’s position following the closure of Blue Book. He noted that “the authors have made revealing use of documents released through the mechanism of the Freedom of Information Act and other data which have been made available to them… which show that the CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of prevarication.” Hynek goes on to reference NSA documents that were denied investigators by the courts on the grounds that they could jeopardize national security. “If this is so, then this very fact loudly proclaims that UFOs are not figments of the imagination but are, instead, quite real and of vital interest. For the government to continue to maintain that UFOs are nonexistent in the face of the documents already released… is puerile and in a sense an insult to the American people…”
It has been 48 years since Project Blue Book was officially terminated, but it’s place in history, whether as a superficial-scientific study or a public relations campaign, forever transformed the UFO landscape and our culture as a whole. For good or bad, Blue Book and the fascinating possibility of UFO’s captivated the country, divided the scientific and political communities and transformed the cultural landscape, producing an ongoing tsunami of questions and moreover fueling the need for answers. With such a provocative topic of scientific study that crosses-over into philosophical, psychological and sociological arenas, how could we ever not expect that we would be forever changed, no matter what results Project Blue Book produced.
J. Allen Hynek’s can be seen in a scene towards the end of the Close Encounters movie.
The legacy of Project Blue Book lives on thanks to Hynek’s post-Blue Book contributions, the FOIA, all subsequent UFO research and of course the pop culture world, which includes Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and such recent movies as Arrival. While Project Blue Book was steeped in controversy, it undoubtedly led to an increased cultural awareness about the UFO phenomenon. Perhaps the story and legacy of Project Blue Book and that of Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s rise to celebrity as a renowned astronomer who joined the project as a skeptic and left it with the belief that UFOs demand serious scientific inquiry mirrors our own place, in a world now immersed in modern technology, reminding us the need to occasionally step-back with humility and realize we don’t have all the answers and be open-minded to the possibilities.
Learn more about how UFOs have been tracked after Blue Book…
Director Of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, Paul Hertz, has made a terrifying statement on aliens and the ET reality.
The NASA director didn’t hold back as he explained that it wouldn’t be humans that would discover aliens, it would be them that discover us.
Paul Hertz was named the director of Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA back in March 2012.
His role consists of being responsible for research programs and missions focused on understanding how the universe works, and to search for Earth-like planets.
When asked about the possibility of humans finding extraterrestrial life outside of our own planet, Hertz said:
So, again no, we didn’t discover aliens on Europa. This shouldn’t come as a huge shock to anyone. We told you repeatedly that today’s announcement Wouldn’t be about aliens. But every time We do one of these things with the press, inevitably you guys think it’s going to be about aliens.
So I’ll let you in on a little secret: NASA will literally never hold a press conference announcing We’ve discovered aliens. Because We’re never going to discover aliens. Aliens are going to discover us, and when they do it won’t be pretty. You can take that to the bank.
There certainly Won’t be enough time for a press conference about it. You probably won’t even have time to blink. Just a hot white flash in the sky and then lights out.
As far as the universe is concerned, relatively speaking, We’re infants. Lord knows we act like it. I mean you guys see the same garbage We do, right? Would you tolerate any of this? If you were them? I know sure as shit Wouldn’t. Not even for a second.
We’re basically infants and when the adults show up — and they will show up sooner or later — it’s game over.
Best case scenario, we wipe ourselves off the face of the planet before they get a crack at us.
You Want an announcement about aliens? Here it is: Be careful what you wish for. If you guys knew even a fraction of the shit we do, you’d never sleep again. I promise you that.
– Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Lightning Strike Disables UFO’s Cloaking Shield
Lightning Strike Disables UFO’s Cloaking Shield
It seems that lightning strikes affect a UFO’s cloacking shield, as proven by the accompanying video.
A unidentified flying item’s cloacking shield is one of its best resources since it enables the craft’s inhabitants to stay undetected while playing out their activities on Earth.
Obvious light can be viewed as a wavering electric and magnetic field and on the grounds that the cloaking shield takes a shot at an unmistakable level, it must work on some sort of electromagnetic standard we have yet to find. You know what else is electromagnetic? The enormous power surge caused by a lightning strike. So it turns out that when a covered UFO is hit by the thousand or so Giga Watts released by a lightning bolt, some interference may happen.
The following is a rare sight of such a phenomenon.
Amid a current rainstorm in the U.S., an extensive, round UFO ended up noticeably obvious in the wake of interacting with the enormous voltage of an electrical discharge between clouds. It is not clear whether the craft was coincidentally hit or it was there precisely consequently. Maybe these advanced vehicles can collect energy from an assortment of sources, including, however not constrained to volcanoes, lightning and solar wind.
After lightning touches its surface, the UFO becomes noticeably obvious for roughly 30 seconds amid which it stays lit and enlightens the sky and clouds encompassing its huge body. Once the UFO vanishes, the encompassing range comes back to its typical radiance.
In spite of the fact that recordings like this are uncommon, they are not unbelievable. In a past article, we demonstrated to you an fleet of UFOs recharging their their batteries during an electrical storm. Another video that rapidly became a sensation included an UFO leaving a lightning storm at a high speed.
Clearly aliens dependably require two things: human specimens and a mess of energy.
UFOs aren't necessarily alien spacecraft. And some purported UFOs aren't UFOs at all. Take the example from Apollo 16.
Image above: High-resolution, digital scan of a full frame from the original Apollo 16 film showing the object in question (top center) and its position relative to the moon. Reflections in the window are also visible (left and right). Credit: NASA
Beginning their return from the moon to an April 27, 1972, splashdown, Astronauts John Young, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke captured about four seconds of video footage of an object that seemed to look a lot like Hollywood's version of a spacecraft from another world.
Image on right: Image enhancement of the object and linear feature. Credit: NASA
The thing was described as "a saucer-shaped object with a dome on top." The images were captured with a 16mm motion picture camera shooting at 12 frames per second from a command/service module window. The object appears momentarily near the moon. As the camera pans, it moves out of the field of view. It reappears as the camera pans back. It appeared in about 50 frames.
Some very bright people recently worked hard to analyze that footage. Their conclusion was that the object wasn't at all what some observers thought it seemed to be. There is no indication the Apollo 16 crew ever thought the film showed anything special.
A group headed by Gregory Byrne of Johnson Space Center's Image Science and Analysis Group completed a report on its investigation earlier this year. They used a video copy of the film initially, then did a high-resolution digital scan of the original film for detailed analysis.
Image on left: View of the Apollo Command/Service Module from the Lunar Module during Apollo 17 showing the location of the EVA floodlight/boom. Credit: NASA
They stabilized images to correct for camera movement, and then aligned multiple frames in a sequence. One thing that showed them was that the object appeared to move slightly with respect to the moon, because of parallax brought about by slight camera motions and the nearness of the object to the camera.
The investigators also combined several frames in a sequence, to give them higher resolution and greater contrast than individual frames. The combinations showed them more clearly a "linear feature" attached to one side of the object. They also looked at archived images from other Apollo missions.
Bottom line: "All of the evidence in this analysis is consistent with the conclusion that the object in the Apollo 16 film was the EVA [spacewalk] floodlight/boom. There is no evidence in the photographic record to suggest otherwise."
Image above: Enhanced Apollo 16 image (left) compared with features of the EVA floodlight/boom from the perspective of a Command/Service Module window (right).
Reports of “trace cases,” where UFOs leave their fingerprints behind, are steadily growing. They can be easily dismissed as lies from attention-seeking weirdos, but when they come from professionals such as pilots, policemen, soldiers, and scientists, it makes you wonder. These are not the career fields that encourage employees to swing on the extraterrestrial vine; they stand to lose a lot by reporting or investigating a UFO. (Of course, they can also stand to gain a fair amount due to the publicity.) This doesn’t mean that civilian sightings are less important. Trace cases, like any other good mystery, cannot be proven to everybody’s satisfaction, but they remain eternally fascinating to paranormal sleuths, whether armchair or professional.
10. Cruiser Bruiser
A moody UFO had no respect for the law when it was approached by a deputy sheriff in 1979. While on patrol outside the small community of Stephen, Minnesota, Val Johnson encountered something that would give him and his cruiser the UFO version of weaseling out of a ticket. Around 2:00 AM, the deputy noticed a bright object hovering above the road and decided to investigate a little closer. The UFO suddenly rocketed straight at his patrol car, killing the engine. The last thing Johnson remembered was light all around him and the sound of glass shattering. When he woke up, the strange object was gone and he was blind and bruised but able to radio for help.
Fellow policemen soon arrived and found Johnson’s 1977 Ford worse off than he was. The windshield was splintered and smashed, there were dents in the hood, and both a headlight and the roof beacon were wrecked. The car’s two radio antennae were bent, respectively at 45- and 90-degree angles. Johnson also stated that the car’s clock and his wristwatch both stopped for 14 minutes and that he had blacked out for 39 minutes. Time in the Val Johnson story is the only suspicious factor in an otherwise compelling UFO trace case. He never clarified how he knew that he had been unconscious for exactly 39 minutes, nor did he explain what had made him aware that the two clocks had lost time and how he measured the time lost as 14 minutes.
The medical evidence was a little more solid. The doctor who attended to Johnson described his sight injury as similar to welder burns caused by extreme exposure to UV light. Thankfully, he eventually recovered his vision, and the patrol car—original damage intact—now stands in a museum in the Minnesota town of Warren.
9. The Killer Ice Cream Cone
On January 7, 1948, Captain Thomas Mantell was leading a squadron of four F-51 Mustangs to an airfield in northern Kentucky, unaware that a giant cone-shaped object in the air was already freaking out civilians, military, and highway patrols. The coned craft gave witnesses the impression of being reflective and at least 90 meters (300 ft) in diameter. Since they were incidentally in the right airspace, a tower operator requested that Mantell investigate. The Mustangs climbed in altitude to reach their target, but at 6,800 meters (22,500 ft), low fuel or oxygen forced all the other pilots to return to base.
Alone, Mantell continued ascending and radioed his last message, saying that he saw the object directly ahead and that he was going to give the chase another 10 minutes. But shortly afterward, a horrified local watched Mantell’s plane circle three times before it dove out of the sky and exploded about halfway to the ground. The extreme fringe believed that Mantell had been shot down by an extraterrestrial force. The director of Project Grudge, Edward J. Ruppelt, blamed the incident on the Skyhook balloon. The US Navy was secretly developing the Skyhook, a massive ice cream cone–shaped balloon made of reflective aluminum. None of the witnesses had heard about or seen Skyhook before.
According to Ruppelt’s sources, several of them were launched about 240 kilometers (150 mi) away on the same day as the Mantell UFO. While Ruppelt couldn’t locate the flight records that would’ve proved his theory, he was satisfied that the wind patterns for January 7 would’ve taken a Skyhook into the locations of the reported sightings.
On December 27, 1980, John Burroughs met the most eye-popping sight of his life. He was one of the first airmen on the scene at the alleged landing site in Rendlesham Forest, a touchdown that would later become Britain’s flagship UFO mystery. During the encounter, some of the men were said to have touched the conical craft, but the group eventually fled the forest when some of them started falling into a trance-like state and had to be physically dragged away from the object.
Burroughs, an American, believed that his proximity to the craft that night had exposed him to something deadly, possibly radiation, which later caused severe heart problems and other health complaints. For years, he fought for disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs, bravely sticking to his story that a spaceship had made him sick. To build his case, Burroughs needed the right paperwork, but the VA could only trace his service records back to 1982, two years after the incident. He had to go through two Arizona senators’ offices before he could get the discharge papers which proved he’d been stationed near Rendlesham around the time of the incident.
He also produced Project Condign as evidence—a declassified British study that sidelined UFOs as a little-understood form of weather “plasma” called “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP). Even Condign concluded that it was conceivable that the Rendlesham witnesses had been exposed to radiation, albeit from UAP. What helped sway the VA’s final decision in Burrough’s favor were his service medical records, which could be viewed by the agency but not Burroughs. Based on these documents and others, Burroughs was finally awarded full disability and some acknowledgement that his bad health had really been caused by a close encounter.
7. The Kecksburg Acorn
A mass-witness sighting allegedly took place on December 9, 1965, and ended when something plowed into the Earth at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. A meteor-like object blazed through Ontario, Canada, and six US states, dropping debris and leaving sonic booms and field fires in its wake. Thousands saw it in the sky and later read in the newspapers that it was just that: a meteor. But there are those who believe it fell in the woods at Kecksburg and that it was a car-sized object shaped like an acorn. Unearthly symbols were written on it, something close to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
While witnesses insist it attracted a heavy military presence, the US Army said they found nothing. Yet years later, amid pressure to release the truth about the Kecksburg incident, NASA admitted that they’d examined debris from the site and found that it had been a Russian satellite. When ordered by a judge to produce the documentation of their findings, NASA seemed to have misplaced them. The only Soviet candidate that remotely fit was Kosmos 96, an acorn-shaped satellite which wasn’t nearly as big as the Kecksburg object. Even NASA’s chief scientist for orbital debris, Nicholas L. Johnson, stated that Kosmos had nothing to do with the fireball sightings or the crash, which may still turn out to be two separate events.
US Space Command also reported that Kosmos crashed in Canada 13 hours before the sightings started. In 2003, scientists discovered topless trees leading toward the spot where the object was reportedly found. The damage was dated to the year of the crash. While one scientist felt that ice was probably responsible, it’s plausible that an incoming object could’ve sheared the trees as it crashed through them.
6. The Water Thief
During the same year as the Rendlesham Forest incident, an Australian farm worker named George Blackwell had a run-in with a thirsty UFO. He was roused from his sleep at about 1:00 AM by frantic farm animals bellowing and galloping and an unearthly whistling sound. Checking to see what was going on, the 54-year-old was astonished to see cattle trying to escape a double-domed object hovering about 3 meters (10 ft) above the ground. The craft appeared to be checking a shed, a hedge, a silo, and finally a water tank, whistling loudly all the way.
The open water tank seemed to hold the object’s attention for a while before it finally settled on the ground. Blackwell approached the object on his motorbike but was forced to stop 15 meters (50 ft) away due to the earsplitting whistling. He estimated its height to be about 4.5 meters (15 ft) and the diameter to be 8 meters (26 ft). The surface was dotted with orange and blue lights that might’ve been round windows. But the weirdest feature was a moving black tube which inflated to a size bigger than the UFO itself. When the craft took off, apparently with the 38,000 liters (10,000 gal) of water later discovered missing from the tank, the creepy tube shrank back into the middle of the object’s base.
For a long time, the cattle avoided the black ring marking the landing site and, for more than a week, the headache-plagued Blackwell suffered from diarrhea and couldn’t hold much food down. For days after the sighting, his wristwatch would only tick when he wasn’t wearing it.
5. The Lavender Crater
In 1965, a French farmer heard a noise which he took to be a helicopter landing on his property and decided to investigate. Maurice Masse, 41, raised lavender just outside the town of Valensole in the south of France. Going out to his field, he encountered a dull oval shape about 3.5 meters (11 ft) wide and 2.5 meters (8 ft) high. Resting on its belly with six legs, it reminded him of a spider. There was also a pair of child-sized entities scrutinizing the lavender.
When Masse tried to get closer, one of the creatures paralyzed him by pointing a rod at him. They resembled the classic greys except that they were white, neckless, and had elfish ears. They boarded the craft and, for 15 minutes after their departure, Masse was unable to move. The weather had been dry for some time, but the landing site was a sopping wet crater. About a day later, the wetness was gone and the ground turned hard as concrete while the rest of the field’s earth remained crumbly. For months afterward, Masse suffered from a strange sleeping disorder where he slept 15 hours at a stretch, which wasn’t normal for him.
French government agencies and police gathered interesting data from the site. The landing area showed highly elevated levels of calcium when compared to the rest of the field. Dents and a 3-meter-wide (10 ft) spherical space showed that something had been there. The lavender plants around the crater were sick and dying, and for 10 years nothing would grow in that spot.
4. The Ubatuba Case
While the only danger one UFO in Brazil presented was to itself—it exploded like a firecracker—it’s possibly one of the most noteworthy trace cases. On September 14, 1957, columnist Ibrahim Sued received a letter from a fan who had a fantastic story and the proof to back it up. The envelope contained three white metal pieces allegedly from a disk that had disintegrated above a beach in Ubatuba, Sao Paulo. The fan, who claimed to have witnessed this event, was never identified.
The testing done on one of the pieces destroyed it but gave interesting findings. It was revealed to be magnesium with above average density, and when the study stated that the magnesium was purer than that which human technology could produce, the fragments became an overnight sensation in UFO circles. The University of Colorado tested one of the two remaining pieces and found that it wasn’t as pure, but since the Brazil sample no longer existed, its purity couldn’t be verified. However, the Colorado study did concede that their piece was packed with an abnormal amount of strontium, something not found in normal magnesium. The metal had also been strengthened during its manufacturing with a process called directional crystallization, a technique unknown in 1957 when the fragments were mailed to the columnist.
3. Fire On The Highway
On September 16, 1965, two South African police constables were on night patrol. They were driving on the Pretoria-Bronkhorstspruit highway, their evening shift so far uneventful, but then midnight changed everything. It’s unclear who first saw the contraption sitting on the highway, but it was a sight that neither would ever forget. It certainly wasn’t terribly frightening—the craft was a simple, copper-colored disk—but what struck Constables John Lockem and Koos De Klerk was what happened when the UFO sped off seconds after they sighted it.
Fleeing, the craft shot away in a rush of speed and heat, spewing an overload of fire that bounced 1 meter (3 ft) off the asphalt. The highway actually caught fire. An area of 1.8 meters (6 ft) in diameter burned so intensely that gravel separated from the tar. During the official investigation that followed, it was found that a section of the road had collapsed, most likely under the weight of the large UFO. Samples taken from the carnage were sent away for analysis, but the results were never made public.
2. The Scoutmaster Attack
A case occurred on August 19, 1952, that stumped the investigators of Project Blue Book. That night, Deputy Sheriff Mott N. Partin responded to a call that three terrified children had shown up at the caller’s farmhouse. They were scouts claiming that their scoutmaster, “Sonny” Desvergers, had collapsed while investigating strange lights on a rural road in Palm Beach. Going back to the scene, the cops didn’t have to search long. Desvergers emerged from the trees in a traumatized state which the 19-year police force veteran Partin felt was genuine.
The scoutmaster claimed that he’d been attacked by a UFO and had three tiny burn holes in his hat and singe marks on his arms. The case eventually landed on the desk of Blue Book investigator Edward J. Ruppelt. Investigations at the scene didn’t immediately find anything conclusive, and Ruppelt learned from the scouts that they never saw the original lights that had caught Desvergers’s attention. However, the boys did witness subsequent lights, including a red light that seemingly caused their scoutmaster to faint.
Desvergers’s story held despite Ruppelt’s attempts to trip him up, but Ruppelt smelled a publicity stunt for financial gain when Desvergers hired a press agent and made ridiculous claims to reporters. Then Desvergers’s history of lying, going AWOL, and car theft (which got him removed from the US Marines) caught up with him. Ruppelt was now weary of him, and his press agent abandoned him. Certain now that the sighting was a hoax, Ruppelt was at a loss to explain how the whole thing was staged. Nor could he or the FBI lab discover what had burned the scoutmaster’s cap or how some of the grass taken from the site had charred roots while their leaves were fine. Nothing prevents a compulsive liar from having a supernatural experience. Either Desvergers told the truth, somewhat embellished, or he managed to pull off a hoax that left one of the best investigators in the business without answers.
1. The Maury Mystery
On June 21, 1947, Harold Dahl and his crew claimed that they’d survived a frightening encounter that damaged their boat, injured one of them, and killed their dog. Navigating around Maury Island, Dahl’s men noticed six doughnut-shaped objects above them. One was faltering badly. Before it flew away with the others, the UFO spewed a stream of shiny flakes (these caused the harm to the witnesses). The next day, Dahl was cornered by a Man in Black (MIB) who told him to mind his own business. But the story had already reached Kenneth Arnold, who himself had his historic sighting three days after the Maury incident. He met with Dahl, who handed over some of the debris but not the photos he’d snapped of the crafts.
Perhaps due to the local MIB and FBI threatening legal steps if Dahl didn’t drop the matter and admit it was a hoax, Dahl eventually did exactly that. Two Air Force officers, Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown, were going to take the debris to Fort Hamilton for analysis, but their B-25 went down shortly after takeoff. The military cordoned off 150 acres around the crash site but abandoned most of the wreckage after a week. Some speculated that they were done tinkering because they had found the extraterrestrial flakes.
Two days after the Air Force fatalities, another plane crashed, this time with Arnold on board. He barely survived. The Tecoma Times claimed that the B-25 was deliberately downed to prevent the fragments from reaching Fort Hamilton. Two weeks after publication, the journalist who wrote the article, Paul Lance, died from a cause that couldn’t be identified, despite a 36-hour autopsy. The case remains torn in two camps—those who believe Dahl faked the whole thing and those who feel that key truth seekers were silenced and that Dahl was frightened into saying it was a hoax.
UFO captured? Clancy man believes he proves they exist
UFO captured? Clancy man believes he proves they exist
Phil Drake, pdrake@greatfallstribune.comPublished
CLANCY, Mont.— For nearly two years Dr. Richard O’Connor has kept two cameras pointed at the sky with the deep hope and belief that something might be out there.
And then, after nearly 280,000 photos captured by motion detection, it happened.
Or maybe not.
But O’Connor’s findings of what he believes are two unidentified flying objects has set off a barrage of email exchanges, some of them angry, in the community of UFO fans and experts.
About noon on Nov. 4, his cameras captured five photos of something flying through the skies of Montana that is hard for some to explain.
“It appears to be a light source,” O’Connor said. “In my opinion, even a hardened skeptic would say ‘Wow, that is what I expect a UFO would look like.’”
But his discovery has sparked some debate, leaving the doctor to find his own photo experts to determine what his cameras may have captured.
The answers to this mystery remain up in the air.
O’Connor comes by his fascination with UFOs honestly. He said that for more than 25 years he was friends with Jesse Marcel Jr., perhaps best known for being a longtime doctor in Helena. O’Connor, now retired, worked as an anesthesiologist at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena.
But Marcel may be even better known for something that happened to him as a child in New Mexico in July 1947.
His father, Maj. Jesse Marcel, was sent by his base commander to investigate the crash of a UFO on a ranch outside of Roswell Army Air Field. He loaded some of the wreckage into his vehicle and drove it home to show Jesse Jr., who was then 10.
They couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. According to Marcel Jr’s Sept. 1, 2013, obituary in the Helena Independent Record, The U.S. Army Air Corps issued a press release saying a “flying saucer” was found, but public uproar forced them to retract the statement and say a weather balloon had been found instead.
Those who were at the crash site were then sworn to secrecy. But in the ‘70s Marcel Sr. and his son began speaking about what they had seen, believing the coverup was a grave injustice to the public.
Marcel Jr. had a distinguished career not only as a doctor, but in the military as well. He was 76 when he died.
And after knowing him for nearly a quarter century, O’Connor deeply believes Marcel saw what he saw as a child.
O’Connor, 60, even set up the Jesse A. Marcel Jr. Library on his rural property and his friend was there for its dedication.
He says he told him, “Your story is important and to continue to educate the public we should open a library.”
And then he installed two Reconyx Hyperfire PC 900 Trail cameras on the southeast corner of his house with the goal of educating the public about the UFO phenomena. When triggered by motion, the cameras, which are about 30 feet off the ground, shoot 20 photos at approximately 1-second intervals.
He also posted a message on the Internet, giving the latitude and longitude of the cameras in the hopes that aliens would see it.
“Come, let us take your picture,” he said, reasoning that if they had the capability to get here they would also have the ability to find people who are reaching out to them.
The cameras were programmed to take photographs of moving objects. Among the 280,000 photos are a vast array of birds, squirrel tails and treetops dancing in the wind.
And then on Nov. 4, O’Connor says he noticed something.
“Basically what you see it a very symmetrical, smooth and reflective surface that appears to have his own light source,” he said.
Neither the FAA, nor the Air Force nor NASA handle UFO calls anymore, an FAA spokesman said, adding they are referred to National UFO Reporting Center, an organization that investigates UFO sightings and/or alien contacts. It was founded in 1974 by Robert J. Gribble.
The website features listings of UFO sightings by state. For instance, on Nov. 18, someone reported seeing three flashes of green light that lit up the entire sky after a power outage. On Nov. 11 in Great Falls, someone reported seeing a silent triangular object heading east to west before turning smoothly south and going out of sight. Massive in size. On Sept. 26, someone in Great Falls reported seeing a green glowing fireball.
My Montana in photos 2015
O’Connor, who says he hasno knowledge of how to manipulate photos on a computer, forwarded his photos to NUFORC, which were there for a few weeks and then came a query to them from the Tribune.
Peter Davenport, now the head of the NUFORC, forwarded the photos to “a skilled photo-analyst,” requesting that he try to ‘extract’ more information about the object than mere visual inspection would permit.”
NUFORC is a self-funded website that Davenport describes as a “labor of love.”
“I do it so people have a place to call if they see a UFO,” he said.
The first review was heartening.
“Bottom line, I think the images are real, but remain a mystery,” the photo analyst wrote. “I suspect the lights in the first and last photos are sun reflections off of something rather than any propulsion system.”
And higher up in his assessment he wrote: “Thus, I conclude it is a puzzle to solve rather than a fake.”
But another analyst didn’t agree and angered O’Connor by proclaiming the photos “100 percent fake.”
O’Connor expressed his anger in an email to Davenport, saying he would get an unbiased photograph analysis. Davenport also suggests that O’Connor submit his photos to someone whose reputation he trusts.
O’Connor has also offered to take a polygraph.
O’Connor now plans to meet with various experts in photo analysis to get their take on his pictures.
Rick and Morty creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland took advantage of their third season finale—which largely took place within the White House—to shout out a few famous conspiracies.
It's right there in the episode's title. For those who don't know, "The Rickchurian Mortydate" is a riff on the Manchurian Candidate, a book and two movies about a conspiracy to get a Russian sleeper cell operative elected president. Harmon revealed his relationship with conspiracies in an interview with VICE earlier this year. "I think that when JFK was assassinated, the part of your brain that is ready and able to connect all the dots necessary to prove that there was an order to this, and it was a sinister order, are the same exact chemicals in your brain that you need to write stories," he said.
Harmon describes conspiracy theories as a method of coping with reality, the same way people tripping on mushrooms convince themselves that everything makes sense when the walls are melting. Roiland quips, "So definitely do acid, and JFK was an inside job."
A ton of homages to these theories are revealed during an epic techno-showdown between Rick and the president of the United States (Keith David), when they crash through the White House's top secret subterranean tunnels. The action is blink-and-you'll-miss-it fast, so we combed the sequence in slow motion to identify all the conspiracies the showrunners thought would be funny to include.
1. The Moon Landing Was Faked
A replica of the Apollo 11 moon lander and a set depicting the surface of the moon buried beneath the White House would certainly be incriminating evidence for those who believe the moon landing was faked. The idea that the United States faked the moon landing for political victory in the space race against the Soviet Union is appealing, especially because skepticism is so necessary in today's fake news media environment. This conspiracy is also referenced in Rick and Morty's take on simulation theory, "M. Night Shamayliens."
A tiny diorama of the Twin Towers, one burned and broken, refers to the niche belief that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the towers, the World Trade Center, and the pentagon were orchestrated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. We don't know whether or not Rick is a 9/11 truther, but in the season opener, "The Rickshank Rickdemption," we see his memory of watching 9/11 on TV and grumbling, "They're going to use this to take away our freedoms!"
Crates of "magic bullets" and a blood-spattered 60s-style limousine sporting tiny American flags immediately conjure the mother of all government conspiracy theories, John F. Kennedy's. assassination.
4. The CIA Killed Tupac Shakur
If you're not among the conspiracy theorists who think Tupac is alive and sitting on a beach somewhere in Cuba, you may believe that the CIA was behind the rap icon and political activist's death by drive-by shooting. To our knowledge, however, there is no theory that he's buried between the floorboards of the White House.
5. OG Fake News: The Crossing of the Delaware
Next to the fake moon landing set is a squad of mannequins posed like the famous Emanuel Leutze painting, George Washington Crossing the Delaware. While not related to any government cover-ups, the image, painted more than 60 years after the Revolutionary War, is famously full of false information. One NYC teacher uses it to explain to her students that they can't believe all the media they consume, even if it seems like a primary source. Its inclusion here is a reference to fake history, unless Harmon and Roiland know of a National Treasure–esque message drawn on the painting's back that we couldn't find on the internet.
6. Freemasons Still Rule the United States
Rick's face shatters a blood-red pentagram and lit candles, which could be a reference to prolific conspiracy theorist Mark S. Watson's belief in an "Occult Government." The five-pointed star also recalls Masonic imagery, which could point Illuminati and Freemason sects within this dimension's White House that are working toward the New World Order. Or, you know, this one speeds by the screen so quickly, it could just be decorative.
7. The Government Has Made Alien Contact
A flying saucer concealed behind the 9/11 diorama points toward government contact with aliens far predating Earth's victory in an interstellar music reality show, and eventual assimilation into the Galactic Federal Government. Some conspiracy theorists claim to have spotted UFOs entering the White House itself, but we all know the United State's secret alien findings are stored in Area 51, right?
In February, three were discovered circling a star, Trappist-1, 40 light years away. Last November, one even closer yet was found — four light years away — orbiting our next-door neighbor, Proxima Centauri. By one estimate, there are as many as 40 billion planets similar to Earth just in our Milky Way galaxy.
With so many potentially habitable exoplanets (as they are called), many believe that it is inevitable that life, even intelligent life, must have arisen on some of them.
But what would those life forms be like?
If we're to believe Hollywood, quite a lot like life here on Earth. From Star Trek to Star Wars to Valerian and beyond, most interplanetary science-fiction movies populate their worlds with lifeforms quite similar — in general appearance and biology — to what has evolved here on Planet Earth. Guardians of the Galaxytakes this approach to a new extreme, including Groot, a humanoid evolved from a botanical ancestor (perhaps explaining its limited vocabulary).
Yet, not all films agree. Last year's Arrival introduced hexapods, organisms with seemingly little affinity to any species here on the home planet.
So, what should we expect? An Avatar-like ecosystem full of species slightly different from those on Earth, or a world composed of unfamiliar organisms?
The great astronomer Carl Sagan was in Arrival's camp, proclaiming "extraterrestrials would be very different from us." Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould expressed similar sentiments, but felt that there was no way to scientifically study the question other than finding life on another planet.
Yet not everyone agrees and, in recent years, the question of how predictable evolution is has become a topic of great scientific inquiry. Convergent evolution is the phenomenon of species independently evolving to be similar. Usually it results from the species adapting to similar situations, natural selection favoring the same solution to the same problem posed by the environment. Convergent evolution was known to Charles Darwin but, until relatively recently, we thought it was uncommon, a great example of the power of natural selection, but not commonplace. We now know, however, that convergence is far from rare; rather, it is pervasive, occurring all around us. Think, for example, of fast-swimming marine predators: dolphins, sharks, tuna and ichthyosaurs (extinct marine reptiles from the Age of the Dinosaurs) all evolved a very stream-lined body shape and powerful tails for rapid and efficient locomotion. Or consider Euphorbia plants from dry parts of Africa. Tough-skinned, often green, with spines instead of leaves, they look like cacti, but they're not — the Old- and New-World doppelgängers have independently evolved the same traits to cope with water loss and herbivores in arid regions.
The pervasiveness of convergence has led some evolutionary biologists to proclaim evolution deterministic, the outcome downright inevitable (see two books by Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solutions and The Runes of Evolution, and also Convergent Evolution by George McGhee). If the environment repeatedly poses the same challenges, and if natural selection repeatedly produces the optimal solutions, then evolution is repeatable. And, as a corollary, we can predict what life would be like on an Earth-like planet — pretty much the same as here. The argument can be taken one step further — the Homo sapiens species is supremely adapted to life on Earth, the adaptations we forged as we emerged on the savannahs of Africa proving a brilliant stepping-stone to global dominance. Consequently, if evolution is so deterministic, the expectation for life on planets like our own is clear: Humanoid life forms should evolve and dominate, just like here. Hollywood has it right.
Unfortunately, there's a problem with this argument. Although the list of examples of convergence is impressive, it wouldn't be hard to make an equally impressive list of non-convergence. Off the top of my head, here are some evolutionary singletons, types of animals that have evolved just once, without a close match: sauropod dinosaurs, like Brontosaurus (Dinosaur purists may note that the name Brontosauruswas long ago discarded, replaced for quirky scientific reasons with Apatosaurus. To those killjoy know-it-alls I respond, "Haha! Thanks to new scientific discoveries, the name Brontosaurus was resurrected in 2015."); elephants; the kiwi; sloths; and the world's greatest animal, the duck-billed platypus. Each of these types of animals has evolved a single time, with no close evolutionary match, now or ever (True: Sauropods and elephants are similar in being huge, lumbering herbivores — but I'm focused on much more similar evolutionary matches).
If evolution is so deterministic, its outcome so predictable, it's hard to understand why there are no matches for these evolutionary singletons. Streams like the ones platypuses inhabit are found on every continent except Antarctica, yet the duckbill hails only from Down Under. Suitable tropical tree branches occur around the world, but sloths only evolved in South America. Why sauropods in the Mesozoic and not today?
The reason is simple: There are actually multiple different ways to solve a problem posed by the environment. Consider the woodpecker and the aye-aye, two completely different animals that live a similar lifestyle, tapping on wood to detect the tunnels of wood-eating grubs, chiseling into the wood to get to the tunnels, then extracting the grubs. But the species have evolved completely different tools to do so, the bird a tough beak, an extremely long tongue covered in prickles, and a skull reinforced against concussions to withstand the repeated jackhammering. The aye-aye, on the other hand, has a long skeletal finger that can twist in any direction and protruding incisors to do the excavating.
We don't need to find life on other planets to test the convergence hypothesis. All we have to do is go to New Zealand, an island on which life has diversified in the absence of terrestrial mammals. If the outcome of natural selection is deterministic, then a world dominated by birds would look pretty much like life elsewhere on the planet. But of course, it doesn't. The kiwi may live a lifestyle similar to a badger, but it doesn't look at all like one. The dominant herbivore is, or was, a ten-foot tall bird (the moa), quite different from deer or bison. Throw in flightless parrots, carnivorous parrots, bats that forage by walking around in the leaf-litter and many more, and we can throw the convergence hypothesis out the window. New Zealand is a distinct evolutionary world, the evolutionary outcome unique.
The question is no longer whether convergence or lack of convergence is common: We know now that both are. Rather, scientists are interested in understanding why convergence occurs in some cases, and not others. It's still early days, but one conclusion is clear: Closely-related species (or populations of the same species) tend to adapt in the same way, not surprisingly because they start out so similar in so many ways — natural selection is likely to modify them in similar ways. By contrast, distantly-related species, initially different in so many attributes, are much more likely to find different ways to adapt to the same situation. Think about the difference between birds and mammals: The former have beaks, the latter teeth and fingers. It's not surprising that woodpeckers and aye-ayes found different ways to solve the same problem.
Of course, life couldn't be more distantly related than if it occurred on another planet. With all the differences that such life forms must exhibit, natural selection (if it occurred — who's to say that evolutionary processes would be the same?) might very well sculpt well-adapted species, but they wouldn't look at all like us and our earthly compatriots. The aye-aye and the kiwi tell us that. And that means that the minority opinion in Hollywood is almost surely correct.
If you want to think about what extraterrestrial life might be like, watch Arrival, not Avatar or Guardians of the Galaxy.
Molecules once thought to be biomarkers for life have been detected around a young star in the Rho Opiuchi star-forming region of space
(Credit: SA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech; acknowledgement: R. Hurt (JPL-Caltech), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
The European Space Agency (ESA) has some good news and bad news for extraterrestrial enthusiasts. The good news is that a molecule thought to be a biomarker for life has been found for the first time in abundance in a comet and around a young star. The bad news is that the find indicates that the molecule isn't the clear indicator of life that it was once believed to be.
Since we can't exactly spot microscopic lifeforms from afar, astronomers have adopted other ways to measure a particular planet's likelihood of housing alien life. Traces of certain compounds left by organic processes, often called biomarkers, can be sifted out of soil or water samples by rovers, or detected in the atmosphere by telescopes and orbiters.
Methyl chloride is fairly common here on Earth, belonging to a class of molecules known as organohalogens. These organic compounds are made up of carbon bonded to at least one halogen – fluorine, chlorine, bromine or iodine – and are produced mostly through biological processes. In theory, that means that any celestial body where we detect an abundance of these is a good place to look for life.
Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile found methyl chloride around a young binary star known as IRAS 16293-2422, about 400 light-years away in a star-forming region of space called Rho Ophiuchi. This marks the first time any organohalogen has been spotted in space, but rather than give hope that life exists in that system, the discovery instead throws doubt on methyl chloride's reliability as a biomarker.
The presence of these organic compounds around such a young star suggests they may arise during the planet-forming phase of a system. To get a better understanding of how the molecules may form, the researchers turned their attention to a comet, which acts as time capsules from the birth of a star, preserving the chemical composition of the cloud of material stars arise from.
In this case, the team zeroed in on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which was visited by the ESA's Rosetta mission between 2014 and 2016. By sifting through the data collected by the spacecraft, the team found an abundance of methyl chloride in the comet, lending further weight to the idea that the compound arises during the planet-forming phase. In particular, the signals were strongest in measurements made in May 2015, when the comet was approaching the Sun and was giving off a lot of hydrogen chloride.
"We found it but it is very elusive, one of the 'chameleons' of our molecule zoo, only present during short times when we observed a lot of chlorine," says Kathrin Altwegg, principal investigator of the project.
The find may be disappointing for those hoping to find life in the cosmos, but it doesn't mean the search is off: rather, it's just a little more complicated than previously thought.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
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