It's a regular fact that if you write books, you'll get feedback. And, sometimes, a lot of it. With that said, I thought I would share with you some fascinating UFO cses that you may not have heard of, but which came my way. Operation Bulldog – held in September 1949, and overseen by the UK’s Fighter Command and Bomber Command – was a show of strength to the Soviets. It demonstrated that the West could take swift and decisive action in the event the Russians flexed their muscles a bit too much. And, for good measure, the operation also involved the air-forces of the United States, Belgium, France, and Holland. The Soviets took careful and concerned notice, which was the whole point. It appears it was not just the Russians that kept a beady eye on the military maneuvers. Just possibly, entities from another world did likewise. At the time Bulldog was held, the late J.R. Oliver was a radar-operator at a British Royal Air Force base called Sandwich, which was situated in the English county of Kent. Oliver said: “Even so long ago, it was almost impossible to fly a glider across the [English] Channel without it being plotted. The exercise was structured in such a way that the technical resources and personnel of the defensive screen were stretched to the limit.”

Oliver added that the staff of RAF Sandwich “were fully skilled and right on top of their job. Two watches were kept, A and B, on alternate twelve-hour shifts for the duration of Bulldog.” According to Oliver on one particular night, around midnight, “things had gone slack,” and his group was told it could “take a break.” It was a break that didn’t last for long, as Oliver noted: “Within about fifteen minutes the PBX operator came in, approached the Duty Controller and advised him that Beachy Head radar was passing a plot to us on a large flying object and would we track it?” They did exactly that. It became very clear, and very quickly, that this was no ordinary aircraft. Oliver recalled: “Reaching a position out to sea off the ‘heel’ of Kent, it abruptly turned north and as it approached the Thames estuary we passed it on to Martlesham radar, with whom we had been in contact.”

Oliver offered something remarkable: “Flying at close to 50,000 feet, the air speed of the object we had observed and plotted in accordance with RAF standard procedures was assessed at very nearly 3,000 miles per hour. The general consensus regarding its size, among the very best experienced radar personnel engaged in the operations, was that the object offered an echo similar to that of a large passenger or freight surface vessel, something in the region of 15,000 or 20,000 tons.” In typical British understatement, Oliver said there was “quite a bit of buzz about this.”

Now, let's jump to Puerto Rico and January 19, 1999. On my first visit to Puerto Rico – in the summer of 2004 and with a crew from the SyFy Channel – I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who had a hair-raising encounter in the island’s El Yunque rainforest on one particular, Saturday morning. As the woman picked plantains, she was amazed to see a definitive flying saucer – silver in color and about the size of a large car – silently descend in a nearby clearing. That amazement became trepidation, when a sliding-door on the outside of the craft opened. Trepidation was immediately replaced by sheer terror when, out of the surrounding trees, a fast-running, spiky-headed Chupacabra raced towards the unearthly craft, and jumped inside it! In seconds, the object took to the skies and was lost from view. Despite the outlandish nature of the story, the woman stood by it, even sharing the facts for the Sy-Fy Channel’s film-crew. A brief story, but an amazing one.

On January 25, 1968, secret was revealed. On this specific day, Suzanne Clarke, then of Gallipolis, Ohio was told an amazing story by her father. According to the tale, Clarke’s father decided to come clean on something that he knew of the UFO phenomenon; something amazing and, if true, having a bearing on national security – a major bearing, in fact. Clarke’s father maintained that in 1965, three years earlier, and while employed at NORAD – the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado – he saw, under circumstances that he declined to explain, a series of black-and-white, aerial photographs of three small, large-headed bodies strewn around a desert floor, and which also showed a large amount of silvery, bright debris. The location, Clarke’s father said, was New Mexico, and the photos were taken in 1947. Of course, this strongly suggests the now-famous Roswell affair of 1947 – although, admittedly, Clarke’s father made no reference to Roswell. Clarke was warned by her father not to reveal what he had told her until after his death – which occurred in 1981. Such was the concern, and even fear, in his voice, however, Clarke chose to remain silent until the late-1990s. So far, there has been no knock on the door from the Men in Black.

May 19, 1986, UFOs invade Brazilian airspace: one of the most notable encounters with not just one UFO, but a squadron of them, took place in the skies of Brazil on May 19, 1986. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report describes the facts: “According to sources, at least 20 unidentified objects were observed by several aircrews and on radar the night of 19 May 86. The objects were first seen by the pilot of a Xingu aircraft, transporting Ozires Silva, former President of Embraer, between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Fighters were launched from Santa Cruz AFB at approximately 2100 hours. Although all three made radar contact, only one of the three pilots managed to see what he described as red, white and green lights. Shortly afterward, radar contact was made with similar objects near Brasilia and three Mirages were launched from Anapolis AB. All made radar and visual contact at 20,000 feet. They reported that they were escorted by thirteen of these discs with red, green and white lights at a distance of one to three miles.” The report comes to an end in a decidedly intriguing fashion: “...there is too much here to be ignored. Three visual sightings and positive radar contact from three different types of radar systems, leads one to believe that something weird arrived over Brazil on the night of 19 May.”

June 14, 2005: Located in the Piney Woods area of East Texas, the Big Thicket has a most apt moniker: it is a huge, 83,000-acre area of woodland. “Dense” barely begins to describe the massive, forested environment, which is home to numerous wild animals, including alligators and wildcats. Running through the heart of the Big Thicket is a long, thin, and incredibly sandy old road called Bragg Road. That’s not what the locals call it, though. To them, it is known as Ghost Light Road. There is a very good reason for this: for at least three centuries, people have reported seeing weird, small balls of light flitting through the trees late at night. But, we’re not talking about anything quite as down to earth as fireflies. These particular lights vary in size from – approximately – a tennis ball to a beach ball. They also exhibit evidence of intelligence: witnesses describe the lights approaching them, even circling them, in what is occasionally perceived as a playful fashion. Such is the interest that the lights provoke in the people that live there, and in visitors too, a historical marker has been erected at the start of Bragg Road and which details the strange story of the lights. I know all this, as I have seen one of the mysterious ghost lights myself, late on the night of June 12, 2005. I was standing on Bragg Road when the approximately basketball-sized light appeared – very briefly. What it was, I have no idea. But, it was there all the same. Now, onto another fascinating case.

Declassified US Government files reveal that on a particular occasion in July 1952 – the very month that Washington, D.C. was hit by a veritable tsunami of UFO encounters – a man named Karl Hunrath complained to his local police department about something very weird indeed. Who knows what the cops thought of it all, but it basically went like this: in the early hours of a Sunday morning in July, someone broke into Hunrath’s home, injected his arm full of chemicals - which rendered him into a distinctly altered state of mind - and proceeded to tell him that he had been chosen to play a significant role in the alien mission on Earth. A very groggy Hunrath could only look on amazed from his bed as the somewhat foreign-sounding – put perfectly human-appearing – alien told him: “I am Bosco. You have been chosen to enter our brotherhood of galaxies.” Typical Space-Brother spiel, in other words.

 The files continue that the suit-and-tie-wearing Bosco advised Hunrath the brothers from beyond were deeply worried by our warlike ways, and so action had to be taken against those dastardly elements of the human race that wanted to spoil everyone else’s fun. There was not to be any The Day the Earth Stood Still-style ultimatum for one and all, however. Nope. The aliens wished to recruit sympathetic humans to aid their righteous cause. Or, more correctly, get someone else to do all their dirty work while they lurked safely in the shadows. And as Hunrath came to quickly realize, he was now one of the chosen few. But there was more. Bosco, via - according to the FBI - “occult techniques,” downloaded into Hunrath’s mind countless megabytes of data on how to build a terrible weapon that had the ability to destroy aircraft; specifically, the aircraft of the US military, who the Space-Brothers viewed as being just about as dangerous to world peace as the dastardly commies. 

“I am Bosco and that will be its name, too,” boomed the alleged alien, in reference to the device that he wanted Hunrath to not just build, but also deploy. Far too stunned and drugged to move, Hunrath could only watch in a mixture of befuddlement and shock as Bosco then turned on his heels and left for his – one might be inclined to assume after an experience like that – flying saucer. There was no amazing “Beam me up, Scotty”-type exit for Bosco, however. For an alien, Bosco had a very down to earth means of making good his departure: he pulled back the curtains of Hunrath’s bedroom-window, clambered out, and vanished into the depths of the early morning blackness of Hunrath’s front-yard! The curious encounter ended as weirdly as it had begun. There's no doubt it was a classic "Contactee" case.

One particularly fascinating scenario for the sudden appearance of UFOs in the Earth’s skies was brought to the attention of officialdom by a little-known, but well-respected, source. His name was Edwin M. Bailey. In the summer of 1947, Bailey was living in Stamford, Connecticut. At the time, he was working in the Physics Division of the American Cyanamid Research Laboratories on West Main Street. In the 1970s, the American Cyanamid Company was one of the United States’ top 100 manufacturing companies. Its output included antibiotics, vaccines, industrial chemicals, pesticides, and acrylic plastics. Far more notable is the fact that at the height of the Second World War, Bailey worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not only that, the specific branch of MIT to which Bailey was assigned was the Radiation Laboratory. It was a body that played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb, under the overall control of the Manhattan Project. On top of that, Bailey had graduated at the University of Arizona.

The FBI recorded in its files the following: “Bailey stated that the topic of ‘flying saucers’ had caused considerable comment and concern to the present day scientists and indicated that he himself had a personal theory concerning the ‘flying saucers.’” As to the specific nature of that theory, it was, to say the least, grim. The FBI noted: “Bailey stated that it is quite possible that actually the ‘flying saucers’ could be radio controlled germ bombs or atom bombs which are circling the orbit of the earth and which could be controlled by radio and directed to land on any designated target at the specific desire of the agency or country operating the bombs.” Disturbing, to say the least." Indeed!

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

A few days ago, I made a mention here at Mysterious Universe of the creature known as the Owlman - something that is close to Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA. But, I only made a brief review of it. Today, though, I'm going to take a bigger and deeper study of the winged phenomenon. In early 1976 the dense trees surrounding Mawnan Old Church, Cornwall, England became a veritable magnet for a diabolical beast that was christened the Owlman. The majority of those that crossed paths with the creature asserted that it was human-like in both size and design, and possessed a pair of large wings, fiery red eyes, claws, and exuded an atmosphere of menace. No wonder people make parallels with Mothman. It all began during the weekend of Easter 1976, when two young girls, June and Vicky Melling, had an encounter of a truly nightmarish kind in Mawnan Woods. The girls were on holiday with their parents when they saw a gigantic, feathery “bird man” hovering over the 13th Century church. It was a story that their father, Don Melling, angrily shared with a man named Tony “Doc” Shiels. I say “angrily” because Shiels was a noted, local magician who Melling came to believe had somehow instigated the whole affair. Or as Shiels, himself, worded it: “…some trick that had badly frightened his daughters.” Shiels denied any involvement in the matter whatsoever. But that was only the start of things.

 Another one to see the Owlman was Jane Greenwood, also a young girl. She wrote a letter to the local newspaper, the Falmouth Packet, during the summer of 1976 that detailed her own startling encounter: “I am on holiday in Cornwall with my sister and our mother. I, too, have seen a big bird-thing. It was Sunday morning, and the place was in the trees near Mawnan Church, above the rocky beach. It was in the trees standing like a full-grown man, but the legs bent backwards like a bird’s. It saw us, and quickly jumped up and rose straight up through the trees. How could it rise up like that?” Two fourteen year old girls, Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, also had the misfortune to have a run-in with the Owlman in 1976. At around 10.00 p.m., while camping in the woods of Mawnan, and as they sat outside of their tent making a pot of tea, the pair heard a strange hissing noise. On looking around, they saw the infernal Owlman staring in their direction from a distance of about sixty feet. Sally said: “It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first I thought that it was someone dressed-up, playing a joke, trying to scare us. I laughed at it. We both did. Then it went up in the air and we both screamed. When it went up you could see its feet!”  Barbara added: “It’s true. It was horrible, a nasty owl-face with big ears and big red eyes. It was covered in grey feathers. The claws on its feet were black. It just flew up and disappeared in the trees.”

While there were rumors of additional sightings of the creature in the immediate years that followed, it wasn’t until the summer of either 1988 or 1989 that the Owlman put in an appearance that can be documented to a significant degree. In this case, the witness was a young boy, dubbed “Gavin” by a good friend of mine, Jon Downes (who wrote an entire book on the winged monster, titled The Owlman and Others), and his then girlfriend, Sally. The beast, Gavin told Jon, was around five feet in height, had large feet, glowing eyes, and significantly sized wings. It was a shocking, awe-inspiring encounter that Gavin and Sally never forgot. As was the case in the immediate post-1976 era, a few reports from the 1990s and 2000s have surfaced. Chiefly, however, they are from individuals who prefer not to go on the record - something which has led to understandable suspicions of fakery and hoaxing. But, one could also make a very good argument that going public about having seen a monstrous “birdman” in English woodland would not be the wisest move to make. Today, and getting ever-closer to 40 years since the original encounters occurred, the matter remains the undeniable controversy that it was back then. For some researchers, Doc Shiels is the man to blame. Jon Downes, however, suggests something else – something with which I concur.

Namely, that Shiels – dubbed the “Wizard of the Western World” – has profound knowledge of “magic.” And by that, I don’t mean people pulling rabbits out of hats. We are talking, here, about something far stranger, something ancient, and something filled with swirling mystery. In a review of Doc’s excellent book, Monstrum, I noted: “[Doc’s] is a world filled with a deep understanding of the real nature of magic (chaos and ritualistic), the secrets of invocation and manifestation, of strange realms just beyond – and that occasionally interact with – our own, and Trickster-like phenomenon. Doc’s is also a domain where, when we dare to imagine the fantastic, when we decide to seek it out, and when we finally accept its reality, we perhaps provide it with some form of quasi-existence.” Perhaps Doc, in a decidedly strange way, really did play a role in the formation of the Owlman legend. But, such was the allure of the beast it quickly stepped out of the world of imagination and story-telling, and right into the heart of the real world. And on that last point, be careful what you wish for, lest you unleash into our reality a monster that has no intention of returning to that domain from which it was originally created, imagined, or invoked.Now, we come to another aspect of what I call anomalous owls.

In 2013, I received an email from a woman now living in the English town of Lowestoft, but who previously lived very close to Mawnan – where the Owlman was seen in 1976 - and specifically in the small Cornwall village of Gweek, the distance between which, by car, is approximately six and a half miles. It transpires that in 1998 she had a profound UFO encounter while taking the road from Mawnan to Gweek. It was after 11:00 p.m. and the woman was driving home after visiting a friend in Mawnan. She had barely left the little village when she saw what she could only describe as a UFO, one that appeared at the side of the road – around the size of a large beach-ball and glowing bright orange. The next thing she knew, she was parked at the side of the road, with what she was able to determine was no less than two hours of time unaccounted for. But there was something else: as she came out of her groggy state, she caught sight of a huge owl-like creature, but which had somewhat humanoid characteristics attached to it, too. It was hovering in the air, at a height of around fifteen feet, but was not employing the use of its wings to keep it aloft. Given the fact that this was practically on the doorstep of where the Owlman was seen back in 1976 (and since, too), the idea that the two issues are unconnected is highly unlikely.

The witness admitted she knew of the Owlman legend. Living so close to Mawnan, it would be more astonishing had she not heard of it. There was little more she could tell me, beyond the facts surrounding the sighting of the curious ball of light, the period of missing time, and the appearance of a “humanoid owl,” as I term it. This particular encounter – which has not been publicized before – set me thinking. What if the Owlman of Cornwall is not a beast of cryptozoological proportions, after all? What if, instead, it is some strange manifestation of the UFO phenomenon, one that is designed to trick the witnesses into thinking they have encountered a large owl, when, in reality, the event was of an otherworldly nature? A screen-memory, in other words. Maybe we need to reevaluate the true nature of the enigmatic Owlman. My reasoning for suggesting this is simple: there are numerous cases on record that link sightings of what are perceived as owls (and sometimes as impossibly large owls) and UFOs together, both in terms of the time-frame and the geographical location. Indeed, Mike Clelland has written an entire, excellent couple of books on this very issue of how and why owls and alien incidents go together, hand in glove.

All of this brings me to two matters that, given the location – Mawnan – cannot be a coincidence. Number One: Liz Randall is a friend of mine who has compiled an excellent, two-volume collection of her writings on all things paranormal, titled From Lyonesse to Alien Big Cats and Back Again. Liz referred me to an article she wrote in 2004 that deals with something that her daughter experienced in 2003 at the church, itself . Liz said, in 2004: “Very early one morning a year ago, in the late summer of 2003, my adult daughter, who lives in Mawnan Smith, Cornwall, had a strange experience. Being a thoughtful neighbor, and not wanting to disturb anyone, at 02:00 a.m. she and a friend had wanted to listen to some music. So she took her car up to the car park of the old local church because it’s such an isolated spot.” Liz continued: “After about ten minutes my daughter and her friend suddenly became aware of a block of blue/white light above their heads. It was pulsating in that it stopped and then started again, for seconds at a time, although it remained stationary overhead. Neither were aware of any missing time, but they also had no idea how long they remained near the churchyard before they went home. And, when they reached home, both were so tired that they simply went to sleep without checking the clock.”

But, things don’t end there. Liz also directed me to the matter of ancient earthworks. Interestingly, ancient earthworks of the type referenced in the paragraph above, are very often the focus of supernatural activity. I know this, as I grew up very near to one in Staffordshire, England. Its name is Castle Ring, which was built during the Iron Age and was home to an ancient tribe called the Cornovii. I can say with certainty that Castle Ring has a long history of encounters with UFOs, Bigfoot-type creatures, spectral figures, and much more. Why? Well, that’s the big question that, unfortunately, eludes us. But what I would say, however, is that I think investigating the Olwman itself – as a solitary, stand-alone mystery – will only allow us to see a small portion of what’s afoot in this particularly mysterious part of Cornwall. In our quest for the truth of the beast, and of the Owlman/anomalous owls/UFO connection too, it is very likely Mawnan itself that we should be focusing on. It may well be an under-appreciated equivalent of one of John Keel’s legendary “window areas,” places where just anything and everything weird can be seen and encountered…

Finally, on the matter of the Owlman, we’ll take a trip to Loch Ness, Scotland – a place we have already visited and which may be home to an extraterrestrial lake-monster: Nessie. Loch Ness, Scotland – a body of water around 22-miles-long – is mostly noted for its legendary, resident monster: Nessie. It’s a fact, though, that Loch Ness has been the site of additional weirdness. Not just for years or decades, but for centuries. Long before Nessie was on the scene, Loch Ness was the haunt of Water-Horses and Kelpies. They were supernatural shapeshifters that would drag people into the deep water, drowning them and stealing their souls. Aleister Crowley (the “Great Beast”) owned a home at Loch Ness. Its name was Boleskine House. Visitors to, and subsequent owners of, Boleskine House talked of strange vibes and of shadowy, supernatural things lurking in the old house. There have been more than a few UFO encounters at Loch Ness. And Nessie-seeker Ted Holiday had a chilling encounter at the loch with a Man in Black. And, there is the matter of a curious owl seen at Loch Ness in 2007.

Owlman, as seen in the Scottish horror film Lord of Tears (2013)

The story involves a Scottish woman who I shall refer to as “Maxine,” and who I met in 2014. On a clear summer day in 2007, Maxine was walking her dog along the hills that overlook Loch Ness when she saw what, from her description, I can only describe as an “alien Grey.” When she first saw it, at a distance of a couple of hundred feet, she assumed it was a young child – chiefly because of its short height. As she got closer, and as her dog froze to the spot, she could see that not only was it not a young boy: it wasn’t even human. Maxine and the Grey stared at each other for just a few seconds, after which it stretched its arms out and, in an instant, transformed into what Maxine described as an impossibly large owl: it was practically man-sized. It immediately took to the skies and headed across the loch at a fast rate. Maxine continue to watch, with astonishment, as the alien-owl thing vanished into the trees on the opposite side of the loch. Maxine is one-hundred percent sure that she did not experience missing time. She does not have any vague memories of being taken aboard some kind of futuristic, alien craft. She is not plagued by graphic nightmares involving extraterrestrials. In fact, she is completely sure that what she recalls is exactly what she saw: a small, alien creature literally shapeshifting into the form of an owl.

Interestingly, since her experience took place, Maxine has come up with an intriguing theory to try and explain and rationalize the situation. She now believes that the Grey aliens have the ability to transform their physical appearances. This, she also suggests, means that the Greys can spy on us whenever, and wherever, they choose, without being noticed for what they really are. If we see an owl, a black cat, a German Shepherd dog – the list goes on – we may actually be seeing something very different: a shapeshifting E.T. using a piece of brilliant camouflage. Whatever you may think of Maxine’s theory (and her experience too), the fact is that there are numerous cases of UFOs and aliens being associated with, and linked to, owls. It's clear that the Owlman is more than just an unknown animal. It's far more than that.

The war in Ukraine is approaching eight months in length and the skies over many parts of the country continue to be filled with planes, drones, missiles … and UFOs. In September 2022, a number of scientists researched the large number of unidentified aerial phenomena over that war-torn country in an attempt to explain them – or at least identify all that can be identified and then ponder over what the rest might be. Secret new technology? Aliens? There was even a rumor early in the war that alien arks were secretly buried in Ukraine and the war was over gaining or retaining possession of them. While that research continues, a noted Harvard astronomer known for his hunts for alien technology and speculations that recent visit by interstellar asteroids from outside of our solar system might actually be extraterrestrial ships – or the remains of them – has weighed in on the Ukraine UFOs. His analysis may surprise you.

“Recently, astronomers in Ukraine reported about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) that fall into two categories: bright and dark. The dark objects with no optical emission were labeled as “Phantoms”. They were characterized by a size of 3–12 meters (10 to 40 feet) and speeds up to 15 km s−1 at a distance of up to 10–12 km (6.2 to 7.5 miles). If real, such objects exceed the capabilities of human-made aircrafts or rockets.”

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Harvard astronomer is Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, the physicist Time magazine named as one of the 25 most influential people in space and the proponent of the theories that the strange cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua’ interstellar object might be an alien ship and that other interstellar objects which crashed into the oceans should be searched for and recovered to prove – or disprove – his theory. In a recent article on Medium, and in a paper published on arXiv, he reiterates that his interests lie in this type of unidentified aerial phenomena as part of his involvement with the Galileo Project at Harvard and conducting scientific searches for evidence of extraterrestrial life and technology – Loeb believes interstellar objects could be autonomous ships with no life forms onboard. However, his fame brings him numerous queries to examine ‘evidence’ of UAPs in videos, and Loeb says that is what happened one day recently when Sean Kirkpatrick, the new head of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) came to Loeb with a favor.

“But last evening I received a special request from a high-level official in the US government to summarize my thoughts on observable signatures of UAP and so this morning I checked the UAP report from Ukraine and wrote a paper about it a few hours later.”

This was not the first request Loeb had received to study the high number of UFOs over Ukraine, and it was precisely that high number that kept him from getting involved. As he puts it in his Medium article, Ukraine is in a military conflict with a lot of human-made activity in the sky creating “noise” that massively interferes with the precise analysis needed to isolate and identify strange objects. However, when the Pentagon calls …

“I concluded that the reported speeds and sizes of the ``phantom’’ objects would have generated fireballs of detectable optical luminosity at their suggested distances, and so these objects could not have appeared dark.”

Loeb was puzzled by the “Phantoms” or dark objects reported by Ukrainian astronomers. “Dark” to Loeb means the objects are blocking the background light from the sky. However, the speed the objects appeared to be traveling at should have made them “bright” – an object whose frontal area is 10 square meters, moving at a supersonic speed of 10 kilometers per second, “must create a bow shock in the Earth’s atmosphere and dissipate a mechanical power of 1.5 terra-Watt at an elevation of 10 kilometers” which would “result in fireball of visible luminosity above 150 giga-Watt” and last at least a second. To top it off, Loeb emphasizes that a fireball of that magnitude and duration “cannot be missed.”

If Loeb’s calculations are correct – and who is going to argue with a distinguished Harvard professor – then what caused the dark “Phantom” UAPs witnessed by the Ukrainian astronomers? Loeb has an answer … and it’s one that didn’t please those astronomers.

“The observations of Zhilyaev and his colleagues are original, but the processing and interpretation of the results was done at an inadequate scientific level and with significant errors in determining the distance of the observed objects.”

The observations by the astronomers were made while they were doing their job – watching a meteor shower. Thus, Loeb believes they made errors in their analysis due their lack of familiarity with the non-meteor objects they were seeing. Specifically, they erred in the distance away from their telescopes that the objects appeared to be. Loeb speculated that they were mistaken in judging this distance and, when he simulated the sightings with a distance ten times closer than the astronomers thought, he found that the angular motion of the dark Phantoms on the sky corresponded to a physical velocity ten times smaller or 1.5 kilometers per second, and their size would be 0.3–1.2 meters, not 3-to-12 meters. What would be flying in the sky over Ukraine at those speeds and sizes?

“After correcting the factor of ten overestimate in distance, everything falls into place with the parameters of artillery shells.”

That wasn’t what the astronomers were expecting. Loeb even gave them the benefit of the doubt on one object that differed in size and speed from the rest, but that one turned out to be a satellite. Loeb obviously commiserated with his Ukrainian colleagues trying to conduct astronomy in a war zone, so he saluted them with quote from Oscar Wilde:

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Sadly, the Ukrainian media was not as diplomatic as Avi Loeb towards its own astronomers. The online publication Raketa had this to say:

“Instead of a critical analysis of the observations (possible errors, the adequacy of the models, the accuracy of the post-processing), the authors postulate unjustified conclusions about the characteristics of the observed objects as UAPs. The MAO Academic Council of NASU believes that the above-mentioned B.E. Zhilyaev’s conclusion was hasty and did not meet the professional requirements for publishing the results of scientific research.”

Ouch! It sounds like the author of that article was looking at the gutter instead of the stars.

The ways and means by which we are currently being controlled are many and varied. We have seen how information has been hidden – even denied access to via the Freedom of Information Act. Entire aspects of history are being denied to us. There is, however, yet another way in which we are being controlled: it involves not so much the denial of information, but the destruction of it. There are numerous examples which show the controllers have successfully destroyed certain data that, had it not been relegated to the shredder and the furnace, could have answered key questions about some of the world’s mysteries and conspiracies. Moreover, this has been going on not just in the United States, but all across the planet – which suggests a combined effort on the part of several nations to, essentially, not only hide history but to wipe it off the face of the Earth. Let’s now take a look at a number of perfect examples of this widespread activity of making the past disappear – as a means to prevent us knowing certain things that it should be our right to know about. We’ll begin with UFOs and the most famous case of all: Roswell.

It was in the summer of 1947 that somethings crashed on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico. Whatever it was, it left huge amounts of strange debris across the ranch. There was talk of strange bodies also having been found in the area, thrown out of the craft that exploded on impact. Within no time at all, personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field were on the scene, preventing anyone outside of the military from getting anywhere near the crash site.  Cordons were created and people were warned never to talk about what they had seen. The problem for the military, though, is that the rancher who found the materials, William Brazel, had told fellow ranchers in the area, and friends, about his find before the military was informed – which meant that at least parts of the story were out there before the military’s cover-up began. 

There was even confusion at the Roswell Army Air Field: before orders were put into place to prevent anyone talking, the press-office at the base issued a statement saying that a flying disc (as UFOs were known back then) had been recovered and was due to be inspected. One such statement, from the media of the time read as follows: ““The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.” 

The military quickly knocked that statement down, claiming that what had been recovered was nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. As for the bodies, the Air Force would not even address that matter until 1997, when they claimed that the bodies were, in fact, crash-test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. It was also in the nineties that the Air Force changed its mind again on what came down on William Braazel’s ranch. It was no longer a weather-balloon, but a Mogul balloon, designed to monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests. In 1993, all of this chopping and changing caught the attention of Steven Schiff, at the time the Congressman of New Mexico – the state in which the Roswell event occurred. Far from happy by what he saw as some kind of cover-up, Schiff approached the Government Accountability Office (at the time, it was known as the General Accounting Office) and asked them to look into the Roswell affair and see what might be found. The GAO was enthused about the idea of looking into Roswell. It was, however, not so much what the GAO found that intrigued them, but what they couldn’t find. As the GAO dug deeper and deeper, they learned to their amazement and concern that every single outgoing message from the old Roswell Army Air Field, from 1945 to 1951, could not be located. The files were gone. All of them. The GAO approached the Air Force and the National Archives for answers. There were no answers. Only puzzles. The National Archives checked their files: no luck. The Air Force came up blank, too. 

Rumors began to surface that when Steven Schiff approached the GAO in 1993, someone who was sitting on the Roswell story quickly realized that the truth of the 1947 incident was now in danger of being compromised, so a decision was quickly taken to have the original papers – wherever they were stored – destroyed. There is a very good reason for that: the GAO is an extremely powerful office of the U.S. Government and certainly had the power and ability to demand access to just about anything it wanted access to. Shredding the old Roswell Army Air Field papers may have been the only way to have ensured that the GAO didn’t get what it and Congressman Schiff wanted. It was just another layer of conspiracy in the quest to understand what really happened at Roswell. The outcome: the GAO concluded the files had been destroyed. Congressman Schiff was irate. The cover-up remained in place.

It’s much the same in the U.K., with the nation’s most famous UFO incident: the landing of an extraterrestrial spacecraft at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980 – an incident which involved numerous military personnel from the nearby Royal Air Force Bentwaters facility. Witnesses saw a strange, roughly triangular-shaped object come down. Strange lights filled the skies over the base, and a huge cover-up was put into place. Attempts to try and understand what happened in Rendlesham Forest have been thwarted by the fact that a sizeable number of official files on the case have been destroyed. 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 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! Can you believe that crap?

Moving onto Australia, in the summer of 2011, the Australian Department of Defense admitted to having, ahem, 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. Rendlesham and Roswell are the two most important UFO cases ever to have taken place. Australia is a UFO hotspot, and sightings are frequent in the area of the US’s Pine Gap signals intelligence facility.”

Strieber later said: “Recently, many of the Rendlesham witnesses have spoken frankly about their experiences, and there is no longer any question but that an encounter between base personnel and an unknown presence took place there. Congressman Steven Schiff, who initiated the General Accounting Office's investigation of the Roswell Incident said to me that the files were illegally destroyed – ‘if they were destroyed.’ I asked him, ‘Do you think they might not have been destroyed?’ He said, ‘We are being told that they were destroyed.’ So the investigation came to an end.”

Unfortunately, what all of this tells us is that it's very difficult for us to find amazing UFO data, but it's very easy for government agencies to shred, burn, or deny the existence of important data. Of course, governments are human, just like us. That means, the day may come when we'll stumble on something that was thought by governments to be hidden away, but that will blow open the doors to more than a few top secrets of the UFO type. Such a thing is not impossible. And, when one door opens, it makes another one easier to open. And so on...And so on...