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

Of all the planets in our solar system, Uranus is arguably one of the most unique and mysterious. Its discovery by astronomer William Herschel in 1781 marked the first location of a planet using a telescope, although ironically, Herschel initially thought the planet had merely been a star, or perhaps a comet.

Subsequent observations by astronomer Johann Elert Bode would eventually confirm the planetary status of the mysterious celestial object, which Herschel proposed naming Georgium Sidus in honor of King George III. The idea was vetoed, and Bode’s choice of naming the planet after the Greek god of the sky won out in the end.

Astronomer William Herschel

(Public Domain).

Along with Neptune, Uranus is one of two planets known as ice giants—a planet composed of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium—whose mass is comprised of materials that include methane, ammonia, and water surrounding a rocky core. Despite its status as an “ice giant,” the composition of Uranus is mostly rather warm and fluid, and there is hardly anything about the temperature of its core, which clocks in at an estimated 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Despite this, Uranus remains a cold and windy locale. Possessing the third largest diameter in our solar system, the planet is also curious on account of its rotation at what is almost a 90-degree angle to relative to its orbit. Thus, the plant has the appearance of a “rolling” motion with its orbit, rather than the vertical spin of our own planet.

Uranus is host to 27 small moons, as well as 13 rings which, arguably, are its most curious feature. In fact, some astronomers have called the planet’s rings nearly invisible, and seemingly impossible on account of the way that they seemingly defy the expectations of astronomers.

Uranus and its rings, as seen through the Hubble Space Telescope, with both its rings and an aurora visible

(NASA/Public Domain).

The planet’s 13 rings are divided into two sets — the inner rings of which are mostly dark and narrow, while its two remaining outer rings are a striking rusty red ring encircled by an outermost ring resembling Saturn’s blue E ring. Belts of dust particulate also rest outside some of the planet’s larger rings.

Despite the fact that so much is known and can be observed about the rings of Uranus, astronomers have experienced ongoing difficulties accounting for their appearance and behavior. One problem has to do with their composition: if the rings are composed of tiny bits of matter, it would have been expected that within a mere few decades that these rings would have continued to spread into a series of much wider rings.

Of course, in the centuries since its discovery, the rings of Uranus appear to have remained intact, although they have only been officially known to exist since 1977 when a trio of astronomers, James Elliot, Jessica Mink and Ted Dunham, made the discovery from aboard the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which at the time had been fitted with a special infrared telescope. Despite this being the occasion of the “official” discovery of Uranus’s rings, earlier observations date as far back to Herschel, who also claimed to have seen them. In an entry dated February 22, 1789, the astronomer had written of his observations of the planet that “A ring was suspected.” An additional claimed observation of rings encircling Uranus also occurred again in 1847, though this account remains somewhat more questionable.

The Uranian rings, photographed by Voyager 2 in 1986

(NASA/Public Domain).

Indeed, if observations of the rings of Uranus appear to have been made for more than two centuries, it would seem unlikely that they were a recent formation, at least by human standards of the passage of time. Another curiosity has to do with the fact that the rings are nearly invisible, as their “official” discovery required the use of an infrared telescope. Astronomers have long contended that the rings of Uranus should be brighter and easily visible like those of its neighbor, Saturn.

The peculiar darkness of the rings encircling Uranus have prompted some astronomers in the past to consider whether they might actually not be rings at all, but instead tiny single satellites (i.e. moons) producing trace amounts of gas as they coast along in their orbits. This idea, proposed in the later 1970s by Thomas Van Flandern, would seemingly have accounted for some of the curious features noted about the planet’s rings.

Notably, Van Flandern had also been an early proponent of the idea that the so-called “Face on Mars” had indeed been a construction of ancient extraterrestrials and other less conventional ideas related to modern astronomy, and following the Voyager 2 probe’s visit to Uranus in 1986, images clearly detailing the Uranian rings seemed to have confirmed their identity once and for all.

Color enhancement of the rings of Uranus, photographed by Voyage 2 in 1986

(NASA/Public Domain).

Today, astronomers believe that the rings are indeed a recent formation, celestially speaking. Sometime in the last 600 million years, the rings are likely to have originated from collisions that broke apart several of its past moons, the particulate remains of which are believed to constitute the faint rings that are visible today.

And yet, astronomers still can’t determine what, precisely, holds the rings in place. An early theory bearing some similarity to that of Van Flandern had involved the presence of so-called “shepherd moons” near each ring which exerted enough gravity to help them maintain their placement. However, by 1986 with the Voyager 2 probe’s visit to the planet, only one pair of shepherd moons were detected around the planet’s brightest ring.

Despite our growing body of knowledge about our solar system and its unique qualities, many characteristics of our planetary neighbors remain mysterious, and arguably, Uranus remains a very special case in this regard.

When it comes to the matter of UFOs, there’s one thing that could solve the entire riddle in a moment. I’m sure you can guess what it is. It’s a crashed UFO and its crew (dead or alive). Over the decades, dozens of claims of such secretly retrieved craft and bodies by military personnel have been made. Unfortunately, no hard evidence of this type has ever been found. No corpses. No ship. Even the world’s most famous crashed UFO story – Roswell, of course – has nothing but testimony and claims to support it. The fact is that we have no evidence that any UFO has ever fallen to Earth and been recovered. Over the years, I’ve pointed out why I don’t believe that any kind of UFO ever crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Like it or like it not, the Roswell event was a top secret military experiment. That’s all. If the “best” crashed UFO case has fallen (as it has) then what does that say about all of the others? The answer is “Not a lot!” With that all said, let us take a look at some more reports of what have become known as “UFO crash-retrievals.” Let’s begin with the Aztec, New Mexico totally-non-event of March 1948.

Much of the story was pushed and prompted by a notorious character who was well-known to the FBI: Silas Newton. At its website, The Vault, the FBI says of Newton: “Silas Newton (1887-1972) was a wealthy oil producer and con-man who claimed that he had a gadget that could detect minerals and oil. He was cited as an authority in Frank Scully’s book Behind the Flying Saucers, a work that claimed to report on several UFO crashes in the area of New Mexico. In 1950, Newton said that a flying saucer crashed on land he leased in the Mojave Desert; however, he revised his claim in 1952, saying he never saw a flying saucer but had only repeated comments he heard from others. These files detail the FBI’s investigations into Newton’s fraudulent activities between 1951 and 1970 [italics mine].”

The so-called “FBI Hottel memo” that allegedly revealed a cover-up of the Aztec UFO crash, but that was just nonsense.

How about the 1953 Kingman, Arizona case? Over the years, the case has surfaced time and again – with several researchers believing that the case had merit. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now. The story of the crash of an alleged UFO in May 1953 – on the fringes of the town of Kingman, Arizona – is one of the most controversial of its kind. But, how many people really know how the “crashed saucer” saga began? I thought today I would share with you just how the whole thing took off, so to speak. The genesis of the story can be traced back to early February of 1971. At the time, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham were two new and enthusiastic UFO investigators who were digging into a truly sensational story that, if true, strongly suggested intelligent life existed outside of the confines of our own world. These amazing revelations came from a man named Arthur Stansel, who was a good friend of Young’s family and who claimed to have had personal, firsthand knowledge of a crashed UFO and alien body recovery near Kingman on May 21, 1953.

If you read the early, 1970s, material on the Kingman “case,” you’ll see that Stansel (while wasted on drinks, I should stress, and now dead) changed his description of the shape of the “UFO.” One minute it was small and shaped like an aircraft fuselage. Then, he altered it to the shape of a classic Flying Saucer. Make your mind, man. U.S. Air Force files demonstrate that in the same precise time frame of the Kingman crash – specifically, during the Atomic Energy Commission’s Upshot-Knothole tests that Arthur Stansel played a role in – the military was secretly test-flying drone aircraft in the Nevada/Arizona area with monkeys on board. While the image of an unmanned drone aircraft packed with a crew of monkeys flying across the deserts of the Southwest might sound laughable and bizarre in the extreme, official papers establishing that such tests were indeed undertaken have surfaced.

The papers were released into the public domain via the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, and are housed at the United States’ National Archives, where they can be viewed and studied by the general public and historians – which I have done. A document titled Early Cloud Penetration, dated January 27, 1956, and prepared by the Air Research and Development Command at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, states in part: “In the event of nuclear warfare the AF is confronted with two special problems. First is the hazard to flight crews who may be forced to fly through an atomic cloud. Second is the hazard to ground crews who maintain the aircraft after it has flown through the cloud…In the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, monkeys were used so that experiments could be conducted on larger “animals nearer the size of man. QF-80 drone aircraft were used, their speed more nearly approximating that of current operational aircraft.” There’s no doubt that the Kingman “UFO crash” was born out of rumors of what really happened: the crash of an aircraft with a poor, little monkey on-board. Now, there’s the “Spitsbergen” controversy.

If there are two things we can say for sure about reports of alleged crashed UFOs, it’s that (A) there are a hell of a lot of them; and (B) many are highly controversial in nature. And one of those cases that falls firmly into category B is alleged to have occurred off the coast of Norway on the island of Spitsbergen in mid-1952. It’s a case that a few UFO researchers accept as being genuine, but that a great many believe to be nothing less than a complete and outrageous hoax. There’s another possibility too, however: that the story was a deliberate, government-created “plant” to confuse the truth about tales of UFOs crashing to earth, whatever that truth might really be. By far the most intriguing aspect of this saga, however, came from none other than the National Security Agency. From the NSA I obtained a translation of a 1960s Russian media article on the UFO subject. Contained within the article, I was interested to see, was a passing reference to the Spitsbergen incident, which stated:

“An abandoned silvery disc was found in the deep rock-coal seams in Norwegian coalmines on Spitsbergen. It was pierced and marked by micro-meteor impacts and bore all traces of having performed a long space voyage. It was sent for analysis to the Pentagon and disappeared there.” This was certainly a new slant on the case; but what really caught my eye was the National Security Agency’s reaction to the mention of the Spitsbergen story. Instead of dismissing the matter as a hoax, a still-unidentified NSA agent circled the paragraph of the article referencing Spitsbergen, and wrote in the margin the intriguing word “PLANT” in bold capitals. In other words, someone in the NSA knew that the case was not real: it was a bit of well-placed disinformation to worry the Russians into thinking America had a crashed high-tech UFO (or more than one…) on its hands.

In conclusion, the following needs to be noted: all of the cases above are well-known in Ufology. Also, each and everyone of them are (a) problematic and (b) total garbage. Flying monkeys, the wild claims of an alcoholic storyteller, a government plant, and the words of a shady businessman watched by the FBI for his many and varied illegal activities: those are the real stories. It’s not looking good for Ufology. This tells us something about Ufology when, despite the fact that none of these incidents ever happened, they’re still considered “the real deal” by so many in the subject.

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