How many friends do you have? We’re talking the “Can you take me to the airport?” kind, not Facebook friends. Finished counting? If you have 109, you can return the favor of taking you to the airport by taking them to Mars, where new research has determined that’s all the humans needed to start a survivable colony on another planet. Knowing that, do you want to change your list?

“Humanity could be threatened with extinction due to some cataclysmic event. As pointed out by Sagan, in this case, the only possible way to avoid the end of the world as we know it might be to settle another planet within a short period of time. But what is the feasibility of survival on another planet for a small group of humans?”

Professor Jean-Marc Salotti from France’s Bordeaux Institut National Polytechnique was inspired by Carl Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, and Elon Musk’s planto build a 100-person Mars spacecraft to investigate the minimum number of people needed to escape Armageddon to another planet and maintain the survival of the human race. In his paper published in Scientific Reports, Salotti starts by making the simple yet necessary assumption that the 110 people could do more than one task and share activities. In that case, if you’re choosing friends to take along, you’d want people who could help you move (a task involving lifting, carrying, placement, driving, navigation, climbing to name a few) rather than a friend who is only able to drive you to the airport.

“Providing that the initial state is viable, it is assumed that survival depends only on two important variables:

Available local resources. A local resource can be a gas, mineral or liquid present on the surface of the planet. It is available if its exploitation is possible to extract useful chemical elements. Specific chemical elements have to be found on the planet for survival (water, oxygen, etc.). They must exist as available local resources or they have to be produced from the exploitation of other local resources.

Production capacity. The production capacity is defined by the number of items (consumables, tools, …) that can be produced among the list of all items needed for survival for a given period of time. For a given number of settlers, the capacity has to reach an acceptable threshold allowing survival and development of the settlement.”

Assuming the planet has resources already there (not exactly the case on Mars, which is why Musk proposed to terraform it first) keeps the ship’s cargo manageable for a quick escape from Earth – just enough to build temporary structures to hold and house everyone until permanent buildings and infrastructure are completed, or at least usable – and, of course, to keep them fed until food van be gathered or grown.

Salotti defines five essential task to help you or the captain pick out the right friends to bring: ecosystem management (air, water, agriculture), energy production, industry (especially extracting minerals and manufacturing), building (construction and landlord) and social activities (health care, day care, education, entertainment, etc.). Time to update your friends list again and remember, everyone needs to multi-task.

Who’s bringing the weapons?

“The minimum number of settlers has been calculated and the result is 110 individuals. Other assumptions can be made. The proposed method allows assessments and comparisons, opening the debate for the best strategy for survival. If this relatively low number is confirmed, survival on another planet might be easier than expected, provided that the organization of the settlers is appropriate.”

Anticipating your surprise and probable disbelief that 110 people (especially out of your group of friends) is all that is needed to move humanity to Mars in an emergency, Salotti agrees it’s open for debate. He also reminds you that your pool of friends might not be the right pool for selecting an appropriate group of settlers.

One final thought … how many of your friends escaping Armageddon would select YOU?

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May 2006 was the date on which a remarkable revelation of the UFO type surfaced. It demonstrated that the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense has a remarkable (and a secret) interest in ball lightning and plasmas – and potentially using them as weapons, no less. It was a revelation that made UFO researchers all across the world sit up and listen and look. For a number of years, it was disclosed, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense had been secretly working on a UFO program. I must make it clear, however, that it wasn’t the kind of project that had dead aliens and crashed UFOs – as per Roswell – at its heart. In fact, it had zero to do with such things. Nevertheless, the disclosure was stunning, all the same. Between 1996 – when the operation began – and February 2000, when the project was completed, the MoD had been carefully and quietly investigating the UFO puzzle. The program’s official title was Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defense Region. Unofficially, it went by the far less lengthy name of Project Condign.

It was due to the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act that the Report surfaced – and with thanks to the investigations of UFO researchers Dr. David Clarke and Gary Anthony. The pair worked hard to try and get the report released. That work eventually paid off. The 465-pages-long report was a fascinating one. Despite the fact that the MoD always maintained it had very little interest in UFOs, the sheer length and depth of the report showed that this was, at the very least, a misunderstanding. Or, at the other extreme, an outright lie. A great deal of focus was placed on the author of the report. His name remained hidden behind closed doors for quite a few years. But, nothing stays hidden forever. And that applies here. The elderly man was a Dr. Ron Haddow.

In 2006, Haddow wrote an adventure-driven novel titled No Weapon Forged. It was reviewed in that same year by John Nicholls, who was writing for Testimony Magazine. In part, Nicholls noted that Haddow “spent the early part of his life in the Royal Air Force, both in flying and in testing the first airborne digital equipment to enter RAF service. His work then changed to teaching radar, electronic warfare, air defense and guided weapons, with special reference to Middle East warfare.” Nicholls continued that Haddow, “continued in research and design of equipment, and later became a Senior Advisor to a NATO Industrial Advisory Group work on future defenses…”  Without a doubt, that’s quite a body of work.

For years, the U.K. UFO research community sought to find out who it was that wrote Project Condign. A good friend of mine, Irene Bott, almost got to the heart of that mystery in the late 1990s. From 1996 to 2000, Irene ran the U.K.-based Staffordshire UFO Group. On one particular day while I was hanging out at Irene’s then-home, she put a call in to the Ministry of Defense. The purpose was to inquire about a UFO incident that she was looking into at the time. For reasons that still remain fully unclear to this day, Irene was transferred by the MoD operator who answered her call not to the MoD’s “UFO desk” that Nick Pope previously ran, but to none other than Ron Haddow. Documentation now in the public domain shows that Haddow and his colleagues were deeply concerned by this spectacular error. That Haddow actually spoke with Irene hardly impressed the Ministry of Defense, as the now-declassified documents on the Haddow-Bott conversation show. By all accounts, the whole thing caused a fair degree of concern within the MoD. And for Haddow, too. Just another day in the weird, intrigue-filled world of UFOs and government.

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The September 1961 “alien abduction” incident of Betty and Barney Hill – chronicled in John Fuller’s 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey – still provokes interest and intrigue to this very day. It is to alien abductions what Roswell is to tales of crashed UFOs: a key case in the history of Ufology. What if, however, aliens did not abduct Betty and Barney? What if the pair were led to believe they had undergone something that had extraterrestrial origins, when things were actually much different? One of those who came to believe that the Hills had been subjected to an MK-ULTRA-type event was the late Philip Coppens. He said: “It is clear that the Hills were being monitored by USAF [U.S. Air Force] Intelligence before the encounter took place, through Major James MacDonald, who had befriended them some time earlier. Betty Hill wrote to [UFO researcher / author] Donald Keyhoe who, despite the fact that he received over a hundred letters a day, homed in on this initially unremarkable case. Within twenty-four hours, Keyhoe had arranged for the Hills to be visited by top-level scientists, including C.D. Jackson, who had previously (definitely not coincidentally) worked on psychological warfare techniques for President Eisenhower [italics mine]. Stretching coincidence far beyond breaking point, Jackson already knew Major MacDonald…”

Betty and Barney Hill.

Philip continued on: “It seems that Betty and Barney Hill were at the center of a web that involved USAF Intelligence and top military experts in psychological warfare. The evidence suggests that the Hills were the subjects – victims – of a psychological experiment.”  Those who believe that the Betty and Barney Hill experience was a genuine alien abduction case might very well dismiss the words of Coppens. That’s not a wise approach to take, though. Sadly, Coppens was unable to continue his work on the case for long on this topic. In 2012, he was quickly taken by a very rare form of cancer at the age of just forty-one: Angiosarcoma. Philip Coppens is gone, but the threads of his research have allowed us to take his investigations further into the associations between UFOs and mind-manipulation.

As for Fuller, he was an intriguing character. When he died in 1990, at the age of seventy-six, the New York Times ran an obituary on him. It was written by a Times journalist, Edwin McDowell, who stated: “Mr. Fuller was sometimes criticized by reviewers for not using footnotes in his books and for what they judged was the implausibility of his topics. But as Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times Book Review in reviewing ‘The Poison That Fell From the Sky,’ Mr. Fuller ‘keeps raising the most unsettling of questions.’ Moreover, even before passage of the Freedom of Information Act, he had a facility for somehow obtaining Government documents [italics mine], which he incorporated in some of his books.””

The fact that Fuller had a strange knack for getting his hands on official papers prior to FOIA legislation was passed, suggests strongly that he moved in intriguing places and with equally intriguing people. Powerful people, too, no doubt. Indeed, back in 1957, Fuller had a decidedly clandestine meeting with a Dr. Karlis Osis, as Marie Jones and Larry Flaxman note in their 2015 book, Mind Wars. As now-declassified CIA files on Osis reveal, he was deep into a wide range of fringe sciences and technologies, including out-of-body experiences, how to alter brain wave frequencies, the means to affect “various biophysical changes,” and mind manipulation. It’s no wonder that Osis was also secretly consulted by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA teams.

After getting to know Fuller, Dr. Osis guardedly informed him on what was going down with the MK-ULTRA people – of the successes that had been achieved, but also of the disastrous accidents that had occurred with certain hallucinogens. Osis also made Fuller an unforeseen, amazing offer: how would he, Fuller, like to be the very first investigative journalist to break at least a part of the MK-ULTRA story to the Unites States’ media? Clearly, Osis was recklessly playing both sides at the same time – the government and the media – for reasons that, today, are lost and not clear. As a writer, though, Fuller immediately recognized the dollar value of the story that, potentially, just might be tossed into his lap. At the time, the mid-to-late 1950s, Fuller chose not to publish anything that might have compromised the mind-control programs that both the CIA and the U.S. Army were heavily into at that time. Clearly, however, Fuller never lost the undeniable allure of all this.

From the mid-1950s, and up to at least the latter part of the 1960s, John Fuller was inextricably, and clandestinely, tied to some of the most significant players in MK-ULTRA. And, Philip Coppens’ work put psychological warfare expert C.D. Jackson right in the heart of the Hill’s encounter on that dark and dangerous night home in September 1961. Does this prove that the Hill affair was some kind of MK-ULTRA-type experiment? No, it does not. At the very least, though, we should dig further into the matter of these thought-provoking threads and characters referred to above.