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

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Dwindling Supplies

Over the past three years, a lot has changed for the city of Cape Town. Seated in a geologic bowl beneath Table Mountain and historically fed by heavy winter precipitation, the South African metropolis has been known as a haven of abundant natural water. This year, however, Cape Town may be the first major city in the world to run out of water.

A three-year drought in the region around Cape Town has caused levels in its water-supplying dams to drop dangerously low. Experts have predicted that the city will reach “day zero,” a point at which the dams drop below 13.5 percent of their combined capacity, on April 21.

If that happens, all non-emergency municipal water supplies will be turned off except in the poorest neighborhoods. Residents will be required to source their water from one of 200 available collection sites. Each resident will have access to 6.6 gallons per day, a maximum enforced by armed guards charged with keeping the peace.

For now, the city is working on water recycling projects and constructing three desalination plants, which they hope to have up and running by March. It is also enforcing a water limit of 23 gallons per person per day.

Time Magazine reports that the Cape Town drought has led to a backlog of orders for water storage tanks, and according to the publication, “unwashed hair is now a symbol of upright citizenship” in the city.

In a controversial move, Cape Town has even produced a live water-monitoring mapthat displays how much water properties are using in order to encourage — or shame — residents into matching their neighbors’ good habits.

“The potential water-saving benefit for all of Cape Town of making water consumption indicators publicly available outweighs any privacy issues at this stage of the crisis,” Zara Nicholson‚ spokesperson for Mayor Patricia de Lille, told Cape Town Etc. “This behavior-modification tool attempts to acknowledge good savers and encourage those who have yet to join the efforts.”

Climate Change, Today

If the situation caused by the Cape Town drought sounds like the beginning of a Mad Max-esque dystopia to you, you’re not alone.

Regional residents have expressed astonishment and fear over the coming crisis. Some have even protested what they believe was a failure by the Cape Town government to address the problem, all amidst a growing corruption scandalconcerning the Cape Town mayor.

Above all else, the Cape Town drought and its implications for residents may be a stark reminder that climate change is not a future concern — it’s a reality of our present, happening at this very moment.

As with any single weather or climate event, it’s difficult to blame the Cape Town drought solely on our dependence on fossil fuels. Climate change just isn’t that simple. Yet just as experts are making progress in connecting individual events, such as hurricanes, to climate change, analysis has shown that Cape Town’s regional drought was likely worsened by human actions.

The chances of extreme drought are increasing in the Western Cape region overall. While wet and snowy years will still happen, the area is trending toward being dry and drought-prone. Local climate trends certainly have something to do with this, but so do globally increasing temperatures and shifting weather patterns.

Indeed, research has found that hotter, drier weather is becoming more common across the globe.

One study predicts that nearly 74 percent of global populations will be threatened by dangerous heatwaves by the close of the century, and we could even see record-high summer temperatures every other year as soon as 2030. In 2015, NASA satellite data found that one-third of global groundwater reservoirs were over-stressed by human use, suggesting a grim outcome if we do not learn to use water more sustainably.

Cape Town is just one example of these predictions spilling over into reality.

Attempts to try and understand what happened in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980 have been thwarted by the fact that a sizeable number of official files on the case have been destroyed or have gone missing. Or, rather, that’s the story told to us. It wasn’t long after the events occurred that rumors began to circulate that on the second night of what were three nights of encounters, the U.K. planned to evacuate a very nearby prison HM Prison Highpoint North. Other stories surfaced, suggesting that Blundeston Prison and Hollesley Bay Youth Correctional Center were also primed for evacuation. Clearly, something of a deeply serious nature was going on at the height of the encounters.

One of those who took a deep interest in the Rendlesham Forest events was Lord Hill-Norton, who, from 1971 to 1973 was the Chief of the U.K.’s Defense Staff. He pressed for answers – not just on the case itself but on those evacuation orders too. Just like Roswell, the paperwork was gone. It was on January 23, 2001 that Lord Hill-Norton raised the evacuation issue with the Government’s House of Lords. Hill-Norton wanted answers to what he said were “instructions to prepare for a possible evacuation at some time between 25 and 30 December 1980.”

It didn’t take long for the government to get back to the by-then-retired Lord Hill-Norton. Available records from Blundeston Prison and Hollesley Bay Youth Correctional Center didn’t reveal anything odd at all. HM Prison Highpoint North, however, was quite another story. It turned out the December 1980 log-book from the base could not be found. Log-books for the other months were intact. When pushed for further information, the only thing that was offered by the government was the notion that the log-book had been mistakenly destroyed. Right.

Lord Hill-Norton didn’t stop there: he demanded access to the radar tapes of various military bases in the area, on the nights in question. Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean responded that all of the tapes had been routinely wiped clean: there was nothing to see. A trend was clearly developing.

What was certainly the most amazing – and suspicious – aspect of all this reared its head in May 2011. Freedom of Information Act documents on the Rendlesham Forest case surfaced that caught the attention of not just UFO researchers, by the U.K.’s media, too. The files were notable because of what they said about the case specifically. Rather, they were files which revealed that there was a massive gap in the Defense Intelligence papers where the Rendlesham papers should have been kept. Internal memos released via FOIA legislation showed that the Ministry of Defense suspected that “a deliberate attempt had been made to eradicate the records covering this incident.” Precisely who had done the eradicating was never proved. Like the Roswell files, though, the papers were gone and no-one had any kind of solid answer.

Further files were found to have been destroyed too, not just on Rendlesham but on other cases too. Film-footage of a UFO taken by a military pilot, in U.K. airspace, in 1956, was said by the government to have “probably” been destroyed. In 1999, the crew of a military vessel, the HMS Manchester, encountered a UFO during a naval operation in the North Sea. All aboard were unanimous that they had seen a large, circular-shaped craft flying in close proximity to the ship. I am not exaggerating when I say that the U.K. government failed to respond properly for data on the case because “an unusually strong gust of wind” below the ship’s log-book overboard!

Moving onto Australia, in the summer of 2011, the Australian Department of Defense admitted to having misplaced a UFO file that should have been packed with reports. Natalie Carpenter, of the nation’s Freedom of Information Office, responded to media inquiries by stating that, “The files could not be located and Headquarters Air Command formally advised that this file is deemed lost.”

UFO researcher-author Whitley Strieber made a very good observation, on June 6, 2011: “Last week, the Australian government announced that it has ‘lost’ its UFO files. Thus it joins the United States, which ‘lost’ all the files relating to the Roswell AFB dating from 1947 through 1952, and the United Kingdom, which recently announced that it has ‘lost’ all the files relating to the Rendlesham Forest UFO Case.”