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

What really happened on the night of January 23, 1974 on the Berwyn Mountains, North Wales? That’s a question I often get asked. It very much depends upon your own opinions and conclusions. That something happened is not in any doubt. The theories range from the fantastic to not much at all. Strange lights were seen on the mountains. There was a small earth tremor. There were rumors of military personnel running around. Then, there is the theory that pretty much nothing at all happened – aside from, that is, the presence of a bunch of poachers looking for rabbits with powerful lamps. And, there’s the most controversial theory of all: that a UFO from another world slammed into the Berwyns. That’s the angle people want to hear about – which is hardly surprising. For years, the story remained fairly obscure. Certainly, there was a lot of coverage – even by the mainstream media – in the days after “it” happened. And a handful of articles were written about the enigma in the 1970s and the 1980s. It was, however, in 1996 when the case was resurrected – and in an incredible fashion. In 1996, a military whistleblower came forward, claiming that aliens had crashed on the Berwyn Mountains back in January 1974. And he knew all about it.

The Berwyn mountain range where the alleged UFO crash took place.

Allegedly, the pummeled bodies of the dead crew were said to have been secretly rushed to a well-guarded facility called Porton Down (in the southwest of England), for hasty examination and even hastier preservation. As is so typically often the case in such situations, the source chose not to provide his name to the UFO research community of the day. He preferred to lurk in the darkness, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. He shared his story only with Tony Dodd, who was a North Yorkshire police sergeant and a UFO investigator. Dodd chose to give his talkative soldier the alias of “James Prescott,” who was said by Dodd to have been long-retired from the British Army. “I cannot named my unit or barracks, as they are still operational,” Prescott told Dodd. In a very baffling way – and although the incident on the Berwyn Mountains occurred on January 23, 1974 – Prescott and his colleagues were ordered to be on “stand-by at short notice” on January 18. That was five days before the Berwyns were briefly highlighted in the nation’s newspapers. Prescott got right into the heart of the story: “We then received orders to proceed with speed towards North Wales. We were halted in Chester in readiness for a military exercise we believed was about to take place. On January 20, the communication to us was ‘hot.’ At approximately 20:13 hours we received orders to proceed to Llangollen in North Wales and to wait at that point.”

According to Prescott there was a huge amount of “ground and aircraft activity” over and around those huge mountains. Remember, this was still January 20, according to Prescott – three days before the ground shook those little old villages at the foot of the mountains. Prescott said that on that same night he and his colleagues were given further orders: “We, that is myself and four others, were ordered to go to Llandderfel and were under strict orders not to stop for any civilians,” claimed Prescott. On arriving at Llandderfel – a small, Welsh village – they could see soldiers racing around. Senior officers were barking orders here, there and everywhere. Aircraft were zooming across the star-filled sky. And all of this was against a background of overwhelming darkness. Prescott and his colleagues were ordered to haul a pair of large, wooden boxes onto the back of their truck, which they did in rapid-fire time. According to Prescott: “We set off with our cargo and during the journey we stopped to get a drink. We were immediately approached by a man in civilian clothes, who produced an I.D. card and ordered us to keep moving, and not to stop until we reached our destination.”

Matters got really weird, as Prescott explained to Dodd: “We were at this time warned not to open the boxes, but to proceed to Porton Down and deliver the boxes. Once inside, the boxes were opened by staff at the facility in our presence. We were shocked to see two creatures which had been placed inside decontamination suits. When the suits were fully opened it was obvious the creatures were clearly not of this world and, when examined, were found to be dead. What I saw in the boxes that day made me change my whole concept of life. The bodies were about five to six feet tall, humanoid in shape, but so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin. Although I did not see a craft at the scene of the recovery, I was informed that a large craft had crashed and was recovered by other military units. Sometime later we joined up with the other elements of our unit, who informed us that they had also transported bodies of ‘alien beings’ to Porton Down, but said that their cargo was still alive.” Prescott finished his sensational story to Dodd by stating that this was “the only time I was ever involved in anything of this nature. This event took place many years ago and I am now retired from the Armed Forces.”

This is, of course, a sensational yarn. A weird one, too. The bizarre angle of the military being put on alert several days before the event had even occurred was very strange and, admittedly, difficult to understand. In fact, a careful look at all of Prescott’s words shows that Prescott wasn’t even on-site when the main events of January 23 took place. Prescott’s involvement occurred between January 18 and January 20. Finally: Dodd said Prescott had proof he was in the military at the right time: January 1974. What that proof was, I have no idea. Dodd was very careful about how he chose his words. On top of that, Dodd’s dead now. Also, no-one else in the UFO arena ever got to meet Prescott, talk with him on the phone, or have any kind of communication with him. Yes, it’s an intriguing story. But, that’s really all it can be viewed as. Unless, someone comes forward to add more to the story.

An international exercise to simulate an asteroid striking Earth has come to an end. With just six days to go before a fictitious impact, things don’t look good for a 298 km-wide region between Prague and Munich.

Two years ago, the organisers of this event accidentally destroyed New York City, and now it’s time for a border region intersecting Germany, Austria, and Czech Republic to meet the same fate. When I covered the early days of this week’s simulation on Wednesday, the gathered experts were weighing their options as a 140 metre-wide asteroid barrelled toward Central Europe.

This may sound like a grim role-playing game, but it’s very serious business. Led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies, the asteroid impact simulation is meant to prepare scientists, planners, and key decision makers for the real thing, should it ever occur. The tabletop exercise began this past Monday, and it’s happening virtually at the 7th IAA Planetary Defence Conference, which is being hosted by the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs with help from ESA.

“Practice and training for different situations is an important part of preparedness, whether it’s done by medical professionals or sports teams or artistic performers,” Andy Rivkin, a research astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, explained in an email. “For planetary defence, this is our chance to get people together with different expertise who don’t often get the chance to work together and look at different scenarios. This can help greatly in identifying important issues that we might not identify while working as small groups or individuals.”

Rivkin, who participated in the event, is the co-leader of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which aims to smash a spacecraft into asteroid Dimorphos in late 2022 (for real). By crashing into an asteroid, a kinetic impactor like DART can “change the arrival time of the asteroid so it doesn’t arrive at the crossroads the same time as Earth, Rivkin said, adding that his group is testing what “happens in detail when you change the speed of an asteroid,” in this case Dimorphos.

A distinguishing feature about this year’s simulation is that the asteroid came out of the blue, so to speak. Named “2021 PDC,” it was discovered just six months before its scheduled rendezvous with Earth. The odds of an impact were initially assessed at 1 in 2,500, but that was bumped to 1 in 100 during the first day of the simulation. By Day 2, the odds were ramped up to a full 100%, with the impact site identified as being in Central Europe.

For me, a key takeaway from this year’s simulation was the dramatic way in which key variables, such as the probable impact area and affected population size, were affected by new observations. At one point, for example, North Africa, the UK, and much of Scandinavia were inside the possible strike zone.

The participants in the simulation deemed it impossible to deploy a mitigation effort, such as a kinetic impactor or nuclear bomb, given the short timeframe — a consideration not lost on planetary geologist Angela Stickle, another DART team member who participated in the exercise.

“The timeline for deflection is important,” explained Stickle, leader of the DART impact modelling working group, in an email. “Kinetic impactors work best when they are done years in advance, so the small push that you give has enough time to really change the incoming orbit away from the Earth, so even if we could have launched a kinetic impactor spacecraft like DART in the tabletop exercise scenario, we might have been too late to really steer it off course.”

Previous tabletop exercises provided many years of warning time, but not this one. Accordingly, the focus of exercise was geared toward the disaster response and the importance of identifying dangerous asteroids in advance.

Accordingly, the tabletop simulation became an exercise in predicting the possible damage that might be inflicted by the asteroid and where that damage might occur. This wasn’t an easy task, given many uncertainties about the offending object, such as its size and physical makeup. Initial estimates placed the asteroid at between 35 metres and 700 metres in length, followed by a more refined estimate of 140 metres, which “significantly reduces the worst-case size and corresponding worst-case impact energies,” according to the Day 3 report.

Updated map showing the threatened area in Central Europe.

(Image: NASA/JPL)

Which brings us to the final day of the exercise (turns out this was a four-day project, not five days as was originally reported). Day 4 takes place on October 14, 2021 — just six days before impact. With the impact now imminent and the fake asteroid plainly in sight, the dreadful predicament became clear.

The fictitious impact would occur on October 20, 2021 at 17:02:25 UTC, give or take one second. This level of precision is really fascinating, and it demonstrates the high degree to which we’d be prepared for that fateful moment, allowing people in the affected and surrounding areas to evacuate or take cover.

Images taken by the Goldstone Observatory the day before constrained the size of the asteroid to 105 metres across. It was not as big as feared, but still big enough to cause serious damage. For Mallory DeCoster, a systems and mechanical engineer and DART investigation team member from Johns Hopkins who also participated in the exercise, the ongoing uncertainty about the asteroid’s size proved troublesome.

Map showing the various regions under threat according to severity level.

(Image: NASA/JPL)

“We know that one of the most critical pieces of information for decision makers is high-fidelity information about the size of the asteroid,” she said. “In the hypothetical impact scenario, we saw that current instrument capabilities left us with quite a large range of possible sizes for the asteroid, ranging from a low-threat 30 metre diameter to a continent-exploding 700 metre diameter. This showcased how important it is to invest in instruments such as ground-based radars and space-based infrared sensors to provide high-resolution characterisation metrics.”

The fake asteroid was projected to strike Earth at speeds reaching 16 km per second, or 54,718 km per hour. Ground zero was predicted to reside within a 23 km range, but this number was expected to shrink by half in the coming days as the asteroid got nearer. The impact site was centred near the borders of three countries: Germany, Czech Republic, and Austria.

This area is mostly rural, and no estimates were given about the size of the affected population. In a worst-case scenario, the asteroid would inflict damage extending out for 150 km in all directions. A threat map indicated the regions designated as unsurvivable, critical, severe, and serious. Prague, a city of 1.27 million people, resides on the outer border of the serious zone, while Munich appeared to be out of harm’s way.

Had this situation been real, the International Asteroid Warning Network — a group that detects, tracks, and characterises potentially hazardous asteroids — would have disseminated this information in accordance with an UN General Assembly resolution, according to today’s report. This would be to done to “ensure that all countries … are aware of potential threats,” and to emphasise the need for developing “effective emergency response and disaster management in the event of a near-Earth object impact,” according to the resolution.

Stickle said several things stood out to her about this year’s exercise, including the importance of clear public communication, particularly providing information to people about the threat and what can be done to prevent impacts on Earth.

“I think DART can be a good addition to this as an example of how we are preparing and testing the needed technology; the mission provides a good opportunity to have public communication and engagement,” wrote Stickle. “The exercise also showed the importance of being able to rapidly deploy kinetic impactors in an emergency scenario.” That said, she described the six-month timeline as being “pretty sporty,” as they’d have to act really fast, even with a mitigation solution ready to go.

Mallory DeCoster, systems and mechanical engineer and DART investigation team member also chimed in, saying we “really need to find and track more asteroids,” adding that this isn’t surprising, “but this short-warning-time scenario definitely highlights the importance of this.”

And with that the roundtable was complete, as there was really nothing left to do but wait for the asteroid to strike. It’s all very morbid, but this year’s simulation proved to be worthwhile. Hopefully these exercises will continue to remain within the realm of fiction.