The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
18-08-2023
MoD UFO Files
MoD UFO Files
NICK POPE
The British Government has declassified and released most of its UFO files. Nick Pope worked on these files, wrote many of the documents in them and – through his hundreds of media interviews – has been the public face of the release program. The following Q&A with Nick Pope gives an overview of the release of the files and is also designed as a quotable resource for journalists and academics (see especially the quotes at the end).
How much material has been released?
228 files and around 60,000 pages of documentation have been released. This is in addition to a number of UFO files that had already been released under the old Public Record Act, the best-known provision of which was the so-called 30-year rule, which said files could be considered for public release 30 years after the date of the most recent document contained in them.
Why were these files released?
There were three reasons. Firstly, the French Government released their UFO files in 2007, setting a precedent that would have been difficult for us to ignore. Secondly, the MoD hoped this would generate good PR about the Department’s commitment to open government and freedom of information, while helping to dispel rumours of a cover-up. But the third and biggest reason was that the MoD devised this as a means of dealing with the huge number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests the Department was getting on UFOs. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, there were many months when the MoD got more FOIA requests on UFOs than on any other subject. The workload involved in responding to them on a case-by-case basis was huge. But once the decision had been made (in 2007) to release the files proactively, all future FOIA requests could be dealt with simply by saying that the Department was in the process of releasing the material. In this way, new FOIA requests would not require a substantive answer, because “information intended for future release” is one of a number of FOIA exemptions. Similarly, once all the files have been released, pretty much all FOIA requests on UFOs can be dealt with by a statement saying that all information held on the subject is available at the National Archives.
How exactly did the release take place?
Firstly, all of the material had to be scanned-in, so it was available electronically. The MoD then had to redact the files. That is, they went through them word by word and blacked out anything still classified, or anything covered by any of the other exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act. Then, the unclassified/declassified files were transferred to the National Archives. This was a slow and time-consuming process, so the files were released in separate batches. The first batch was made public in May 2008 and the final files were released in 2019.
The National Archives video in which Nick Pope makes the official announcement about the release of the first batch of the British Government’s UFO files
I’ve seen one or two ufologists claim they were responsible for the file release. Is there any truth in such boasts?
No. Such claims are either dishonest or incredibly naïve. Hundreds of people made UFO-related FOIA requests. Writing in 2006, on the MoD’s website, the Under Secretary of State for Defence, Tom Watson said this: “There is a real and enduring interest in Unidentified Flying Objects. By far the most popular topic of FOI requests has been UFOs, followed by recruitment enquiries, enquiries from staff, and historical events such as World War Two, the Falklands conflict and the Balkans. Recent freedom of information releases on UFOs have attracted media interest from as far away as Japan”. This was the main factor that led the MoD to decide to transfer its UFO files to the National Archives, so it’s insulting to the hundreds of other members of the public, journalists and ufologists who lobbied MoD on this issue and made FOI requests, if any individual ufologists dishonestly try to take credit for this.
So what’s actually in the files that have been released?
Let me start by saying what’s not in the files: there’s no ‘spaceship in a hangar’ smoking gun that’s going to prove we’re being visited by extraterrestrials. If we have such a thing, I’m afraid they didn’t tell me! Now, as to what’s in the files, it’s a mixture. Firstly, there are policy documents, setting out how those of us charged with researching and investigating UFOs viewed the phenomenon. These papers set out the MoD’s strategy on the issue, so to speak. Secondly, there are the sighting reports themselves. This category is a mixed bag, because obviously the vast majority of sightings turn out to be misidentifications, so people have to wade through a lot of bland one or two-page reports of what are obviously aircraft lights or Chinese lanterns, before they get to the better material – it’s a classic example of the old saying that “the best place to hide a book is in a library”! To add to the frustration, the MoD’s investigations didn’t often generate the paper trail researchers would like. Thirdly, there are the public correspondence files. Fourthly, there are files showing how the subject was handled when raised in Parliament.
If there’s no ‘smoking gun’, what do the files show, taken collectively?
What’s readily apparent from a detailed study of all this is that the MoD was telling Parliament, the media and the public that the UFO phenomenon was of “no defence significance” and of limited interest to the MoD. However, the files show that behind the scenes, the subject was obviously taken more seriously than we let on, with many of the cases self-evidently being of great defence significance – e.g. when UFOs were seen in close proximity to military bases, were encountered by RAF pilots, or were tracked on radar by fighter controllers or air traffic controllers. Those of us working on this subject often found ourselves having to employ an Orwellian ‘doublethink’ in our handling of this issue.
Do the files cover other mysteries too?
The UFO files inevitably include some alien contact/alien abduction accounts, as well as some material on other mysteries that some people believe are linked to the UFO phenomenon, such as crop circles and animal mutilations. And occasionally – mainly because there was nowhere else in government to send such material – the UFO project received reports of ghosts seen at military bases, and approaches from psychics, offering to undertake ‘remote viewing’ for the MoD. The last batch of files that was released even contained some papers relating to interest in anti-gravity and gravity modification research expressed by MoD scientists. I wasn’t joking when I referred to MoD’s UFO project as being “the real-life X-Files”.
What has your personal involvement been with the release of these files?
Having worked on MoD’s UFO project, staff at the National Archives asked me to select some cases that could be highlighted to the media in the run-up to the release. The media could run whatever stories they liked, of course, but inevitably, most times they would pick the ones I suggested. I was asked to ensure that there were cases from all parts of the UK, so as to appeal to the regional press, and to ensure that the material selected catered to a wide cross-section of viewpoints, i.e. picking out some cases that were easy to explain, some that were genuine mysteries, some disturbing cases (e.g. near-misses between UFOs and commercial aircraft) and some of the more amusing cases in the files, such as the man who claimed that his car, tent and pet dog had been abducted by aliens. I was also asked to record a promotional video for the National Archives, drawing attention to the release and talking about it in positive terms. But my biggest involvement in all this was to do literally hundreds of TV, radio, newspaper and magazine interviews on the story (and write some of the features myself) and thus become the public face of the file release project. It was certainly a success and I appeared on a huge range of news programmes, chat shows and radio programmes, including Newsnight, BBC News, ITV News, CNN News, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, Sky News, This Morning, GMTV and Radio 4’s Today programme, to name but a few.
Nick Pope announces the release of another batch of government UFO files, in an interview that was syndicated to the world’s media
What was it like for you on the actual days the files were released?
It was manic! As regard to the practicalities of a “file release day”, two days beforehand, an embargoed press release would be sent out to the world’s media. On a couple of occasions the embargo was broken, but we managed (just) to get the genie back into the bottle. On many occasions, I would be asked to write a feature article for a newspaper. I wrote several for The Sun, but also wrote for The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. Once the embargoed press release was sent out, I would receive requests for short, punchy comments that could be used in newspaper articles (that often ran in parallel to the features I wrote myself), as well as numerous TV and radio interview bids. I’d try to accept as many of these bids as possible, but inevitably, if I was at the BBC studios in White City for a live TV interview at 7am, I wasn’t going to be able to get to the Sky News studios in West London by 7.15am. I partly got around this by trying to stagger things, so that I would do, say, a BBC news interview at 6am, an ITV chat show at 7am and a Sky News feature at 8am. But inevitably, things got hectic and stressful, especially as the BBC, ITV and Sky studios are in different parts of London, and the traffic can be a nightmare. I’m pleased to say that I never once missed an interview, but there were certainly some very close calls. Things got even more hectic as new requests came in all the time, and there were some surreal moments, such as doing a down-the-line interview with a BBC radio station on my mobile phone, while sitting in the back of a courtesy car taking me to my next TV interview. Another way we got around these difficulties was by pre-recording things where possible. Before most file release days I would record a string of ‘to camera’ remarks about the files at the studios of ITN Productions, in Holborn. They would then produce 2 or 3 different news packages, which any media outlets could use. This was particularly useful for US networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox. If people Google “Nick Pope” & “ITN” they can watch a few of these. It became a tradition that after my final interview, usually in the late evening, the courtesy car would drop me off at my local sports bar for a well-earned cold beer.
Nick Pope being interviewed by CNN’s Campbell Brown about his work on the British Government’s UFO project
What was your favourite interview or news feature?
I have several. Newsround and Blue Peter were great fun to do, as was The Alan Titchmarsh Show. One of the most unusual stunts involved my writing a science fiction story based on the files, for the BBC World Service show The World Today. I then had to judge the entries from listeners, who were invited to email in suggestions for continuing the story. I also enjoyed giving a talk about the file release at the Royal Albert Hall, in October 2010.
What’s your favourite story from the files?
It was good to see more papers released on ‘classic cases’ such as the Rendlesham Forest incident and the Cosford incident, though it was unfortunate that some Defence Intelligence Staff files containing documents on Rendlesham had been destroyed. There were also some interesting (and highly disturbing) reports of near-misses between UFOs and commercial aircraft. However, if readers will forgive me for highlighting a somewhat light-hearted story, I rather like the case of the man who placed a 100-1 bet that alien life would be officially confirmed by the Millennium, and then tried to enlist the help of the MoD to support his case against the bookmakers. Sadly, the man lost his bet.
How did you feel, seeing all this material again after so many years?
The whole file release project has been something of a ‘blast from the past’ for me, seeing material that I worked on (or wrote), when I never thought I’d see it again. Bear in mind that when I was working on MoD’s UFO project, the UK didn’t have a Freedom of Information Act, so the assumption was that none of the files I was working on would even be considered for public release until 30 years after a file was closed. So, there were mixed emotions really. I had some feelings of nostalgia, obviously, but also some feelings of pride at a job well done, and some regrets for the inevitable mistakes and missed opportunities.
Have all the MoD’s UFO files been released?
No. Firstly, many UFO files from the 1950s and 1960s were destroyed many years ago, before any decisions were made to retain files on this subject, or release them. Secondly, there are a number of exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, which can exclude from public release material covering such areas as “defence”, “national security” and “intelligence”. Many exemptions in the UFO files are little more than deleting the names and addresses of witnesses, to protect their privacy, but there are cases where other exemptions have been used. The final report of an intelligence study into UFOs, codenamed Project Condign, is a good example of a publicly-released UFO document where a small (but significant) amount of information has been blacked out. Thirdly, and by the MoD’s own admission, Defence Intelligence Staff files on the Rendlesham Forest incident were “inadvertently destroyed”. Similarly, the MoD stated that a ship’s log for HMS Manchester, that might have contained details of a UFO seen during a NATO exercise, was lost after having been blown overboard by a “freak gust of wind”. Gun camera footage of UFOs taken by RAF jets in the Sixties has apparently “not survived”, while a spectacular UFO photograph that had been on my office wall for many years was “mislaid” – along with the negatives. I make no accusations of foul play here, but I can certainly understand the anger and frustration that has been expressed by some people in the UFO community and the conspiracy theory community. And finally, some additional files (mainly public correspondence) have recently come to light and will be published on the UK’s GOV.UK website in 2020.
What has been the reaction of the UFO community to the release of these files?
To be honest, the reaction was a little disappointing. True believers tended to dismiss the release as disinformation: “All the good stuff’s been held back” was a frequent comment. The revelations concerning material that has been destroyed or lost didn’t help, while my central role in publicizing the release project further fueled the fire: “He’s still on the payroll” is a phrase that I often heard from true believers and conspiracy theorists, when they saw me in the media, discussing these files. The reaction from die-hard debunkers was equally disappointing. There was a sneering tendency to focus on the odd case which clearly involved a hoax or an eccentric, while ignoring or glossing over the sightings where the witnesses were police officers, pilots or military personnel, where UFOs were tracked on radar, or where a photo or video was analysed by MoD’s technical wizards, with no evidence of fakery being found. The reasons for these reactions, of course, had to do with belief. Just as fascist and communist regimes are actually very similar, despite the apparent distance implied by phrases like “left-wing” and “right-wing”, so true believers and die-hard debunkers are actually chiseled from the same block, united by their dogma and their conclusion-led approach to the subject. The MoD files played to this, because they told neither group what they wanted to hear. True believers wanted definitive proof of extraterrestrial visitation and a government cover-up, while die-hard debunkers wanted confirmation that all sightings could be explained in terms of misidentifications, hoaxes, delusions, or people who’d had too much drink or drugs. But the files didn’t tell them this – they reflected a more subtle and complex truth about UFOs, i.e. that MoD isn’t covering up proof of extraterrestrial visitation, but that some UFO sightings appeared to defy conventional explanation, with even those of us in government not being aware of the true nature of the phenomenon.
So what happens now? Where do we go from here?
There was massive media and public interest on each of the days that the files were released, and for maybe a day or two afterwards, but memories fade quickly. There’s an old saying in the UK media that today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. Once the dust has settled, the UFO community turns its attention elsewhere. More sightings take place, new stories surface and things move on. MoD’s UFO files are a valuable resource, but in time they will doubtless become little more relevant to the ufological debate as, say, the Project Blue Book archive. In the final analysis, little will change. True believers and die-hard debunkers will occasionally cherry-pick cases, information and quotes that fit their existing worldview – a classic case of what cognitive science calls “confirmation bias”. Ultimately though, true believers will naïvely continue to believe every tall tale they hear, while die-hard debunkers will dishonestly ignore good data, or alter the facts of a case so as to shoehorn it into their pre-conceived views. The irony is that UFO phenomenon itself will endure, as it always has done, oblivious to the views of either faction.
Do you have any final comments to make on the release of these files?
Perhaps I can finish by restating two points I made when the June 2013 file release took place, as they were quoted in most of the media articles about this story. I think they encapsulate things quite nicely:
“I hope people have as much fun reading these real-life X-Files as I had working on them. These documents don’t resolve the UFO mystery but they certainly show how the phenomenon was just as intriguing to the government as it is to the public.”
“These are the real-life X-Files. Most UFO sightings had conventional explanations, but a small percentage remained unexplained. These included cases where UFOs were seen by police officers, chased by pilots and tracked on radar. Whatever you think about UFOs, the release of these files shines a light on one of the most intriguing subjects ever studied by the British Government”.
Military experimentation has led to the development of some otherworldly aircraft over the years, some of them still being in active use today.
Via airandspace.si.edu
Ever since the 1950s, when reports of UFOs began taking hold, the official line from the Pentagon has been that several are just military aircraft. Conspiracy buffs may claim these are just excuses, but the fact is that several experimental military aircraft used over the years are, in fact, outlandish enough to be mistaken for a flying saucer or otherworldly craft. Many were simply experimental models that could never be flown for real even when tested.
Other aircraft are notable for not only being in production but used for years. They stand out looking like some sort of advanced space fighter jet, while others have designs that defy the conventional idea of aircraft engineering.''
Seeing these in flight, it’s little wonder someone might mistake them for an aircraft from outer space. These ten amazing military aircraft look straight out of a sci-fi movie and little wonder some might spark the UFO buffs nicely.
10. Martin X-24B Lifting Body
Via NASA
One of the key training ships for NASA, the X-24B improved on the design of the X-24A and really did look like some sci-fi “drop ship” ready to fly. As it happens, that’s exactly what happened as the X-24B was launched from a B-52 before igniting its rockets for a landing.
Via Military Factory
It allowed pilots to test near zero-gravity conditions and master unpowered reentry and landing. It was also a cool-looking vehicle designed to fly fast and get a good landing, but it still stands out as an amazing ride for the actual space program.
9. North American X-15
via airandspacemagazine
The U.S. military had a fondness in the 1950s for “lean and mean” aircraft and the X-15 was a prime example. Looking like a missile with small wings, it set a record of Mach 6.7 at nearly 20 miles up, the world record for the highest speed recorded by a manned crew.
Via: aircraft.gabes.us
In fact, those pilots qualified for astronaut status before the space program got going. Thanks to that performance and its great design (plus how it could be dropped from a bomber), the X-15 qualified as close to spacecraft as a regular jet could get.
8. Vought V-173
Via airandspace.si.edu
If any U.S. aircraft could have helped spark the UFO crazy, it was “the Flying Pancake.” Created as an experimental program in World War II, the Vought V-173 was nothing but a huge disc-shaped body lifting the small cockpit up and the large propellers at the front making it odder.
via Pixdaus
The near-vertical takeoff aspect was revolutionary for the time and the craft made nearly 200 test flights. While it couldn’t get into full production, the sight of the V-173 taking flight over an airbase no doubt pushed a lot of flying saucer reports over the years.
It’s nice when an aircraft is self-explanatory in its name. The Douglas X-3 looks just like its title, a stiletto ready to jab its way anywhere. It’s historic as the first use of titanium in major airplane components and its amazingly thin construction added to its appeal.
Via Reddit
The Stilettos frame looks just like a rocket ship from a 1950s movie, so little wonder it could be mistaken for the real thing. It never got to full production as it failed to reach Mach-1, but Lockheed used it as the basis for the F-104 Starfighter to show the Stiletto made its mark.
6. McDonnell XF-85 Goblin
Via Wikimedia
Even for something nicknamed “the Goblin,” this was a weird excuse for an aircraft. A “parasite fighter,” it was designed to drop from the larger Convair B-36 bomber and then take off for fast attacks. It had to be small to fit but still bizarre with its squat nose and looks more like a kid’s toy of what a fighter jet should be.
Via Reddit
As it happened, the jet couldn’t match the combat requirements needed so the project was canceled, although it would inspire future ideas for a drop-craft beyond a sci-fi vehicle.
It never got past testing, but this French attempt at a VTOL craft has to count as an aircraft looking more like it’s ready for a flight to the moon. It looks more like the front half of a larger plane cut in two, with the strange tube-like shape adding to its fun appeal.
Via Reddit
That it appears to be rolling on wheels like a shopping cart before takeoff is weird, yet it was promised to launch fast and maneuver off its triangular winglets. They could never crack it, so it was ended after a few test flights but marked an aircraft only the French could create.
4. SR-71 Blackbird
Via Airspacemag
If anything speaks to how fantastic the Blackbird is, the X-Men comics still have the team using it as their primary craft. One of the fastest aircraft of its time, the Blackbird was designed to avoid surface-to-air missiles and harder to catch on radar with its speed and unique construction.
Via: Lockheed Martin
It can roll past some modern aircraft with ease and the fun design seems straight out of a comic book. Put it in a dark night and the Blackbird can confuse more than a few folks about its earthly origins.
3. RQ-3 Darkstar
This Lockheed Martin craft always catches the eye due to its unique design. The unmanned aerial vehicle was meant to avoid radar detection but canceled after some test flights due to not being aerodynamically stable as well as too expensive.
That wing design may have been a factor with one wing for longer than the other (it would vary between models) with the bulging central part appearing pretty otherworldly. While not confirmed to have been put into actual production, the Darkstar is still a pretty weird sight.
Seriously, looking at the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk looks like something out of a lower-rate Star Wars knock-off but still a standout craft. While not quite a full “stealth” fighter, it did boast great speeds, heavy armoring and a design that seemed ready to make a trench run at the Death Star.
That fancy cockpit is amazingly cool and the armament backs it up in a top performance. While semi-retired today, the Nighthawk can still tear it up in the daytime as an aircraft ahead of its time.
1. B-2 Stealth Bomber
Via: Northrop Grumman
From the moment it rolled out in 1989, the B-2 Stealth Bomber was seen as something from another world. While not as truly “invisible to radar” as hoped, the B-2, in various incarnations, stood out with that massive wingspan and unique design that looked like some otherworldly fighter plane.
via USAF
It’s little wonder it got mixed up for a UFO over the years as that huge wingspan always caught the eye. It’s ironic a plane meant to avoid detection could never stop getting eyes on it constantly.
Top Secret Aircraft? Or, Are They Alien Spacecraft? Maybe They're Both
Top Secret Aircraft? Or, Are They Alien Spacecraft? Maybe They're Both
Nick Redfern
There's no doubt at all that it's hard to make the difference between UFOs and high-tech military craft, We'll begin with a near-legendary craft that went by the name of the Aurora. In the early 1990s, rumors began to circulate among the aviation world that a highly secret, futuristic aircraft was being flown out of Area 51 – and under distinctly covert circumstances. The reportedly large, black-colored, triangular-shaped aircraft which could fly at incredible speeds, could outmaneuver just about anything else on the planet. It was rumored to be known as the Aurora. Officially, at least, and according to the U.S. Government, the Aurora does not exist and has never existed. But, that was once said about Area 51, too. So, with that in mind, we need to tread cautiously when it comes to official proclamations of the controversial type. The story began – publicly, at least – in March 1990. That was when the well-respected magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology covered the story. They revealed that the term “Aurora” had appeared in the 1985 U.S. budget – and had possibly appeared by mistake, which makes sense if the program was so highly sensitive that its existence had to be denied at all costs. And talking of costs,
it was rumored that around $455 million had been provided to those working out at Area 51 on secret, futuristic aircraft. AW&ST suspected that Aurora was a codename for multiple kinds of aircraft that were both radical in design and technology. Other investigators, though, concluded that Aurora referred to just one type of aircraft. AW&ST learned that by 1987 the budget had soared to in excess of two billion dollars. Bill Sweetman is one of the leading figures in the field of aviation and someone who took a deep interest in the Aurora saga. His books include F-22 Raptor, Inside the Stealth Bomber, and Soviet Air Power. And, then there is his 1993 book, Aurora: The Pentagon's Secret Hypersonic Spyplane. Of the Aurora, Sweetman says: “Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago.”
This was all very interesting for those who follow the world of exotic aircraft, such as Bill Sweetman and the staff of Aviation Week and Space Technology – and it still is of interest to them. But, where was the evidence for the existence of Aurora? Was there any evidence? Yes, there was. And it came from a highly credible man with an impeccable background. His name: Chris Gibson. It was in the summer of 1989 that Chris Gibson had what can accurately be termed the encounter of a lifetime. An engineer with an Honors degree in geology and someone who’s worked focused on oil-exploration, Gibson was also attached to the U.K.’s Royal Observer Corps. The work of the ROC – which closed down in December 1995, after seventy years of work to help protect the United Kingdom from attack – required its volunteers to keep a careful watch on the skies above and what was flying in those same skies, too. As luck – or fate - would have it, and at the time when the Aurora program may very well have been compromised, Gibson was working on an oil rig in the North Sea. The name of the rig was the Galveston Key. It was August 1989, specifically, when one of Gibson’s colleagues, a friend named Graeme Winton, who went to university with Gibson, excitedly told Gibson to come with him to the deck. There was something Winton needed to show him.
A startled and amazed Gibson caught sight of something incredible in the skies above. A pair of General Dynamics’ F1-11 aircraft were shepherding a very strange-looking, completely black aircraft. And, a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker seemed to be fueling it. It was in the form of a triangle. For a moment or two, Gibson pondered on the possibility that what he and Winton were seeing was the F-117 stealth fighter. But, the design was clearly wrong. And the aircraft was significantly larger than the stealth fighter. Gibson knew this, as the four aircraft were not flying high; in fact, they were fairly low. Gibson was completely and utterly stumped by the strange appearance of the plane. It was something he had never seen before. Gibson said: “We discussed what to do about it but decided that if it were reported through official channels, it would be at best rubbished, at worst lead to trouble. Having signed the [British Government’s] Official Secrets Act I didn’t want to jeopardize my position in the recognition team [of the Royal Observer Corps], so I kept my mouth shut.” Gibson did, however, contact Bill Sweetman, who found the encounter to be of extreme interest. Gibson added: “It is the only aircraft I have ever seen that I could not identify.”
That the Aurora – which it almost certainly was – was seen over the North Sea, off the east coast of England, is intriguing, because a series of encounters of a near-identical kind were reported over mainland U.K. in March 1993. In between the time that Gibson had his encounter midway through 1989, the Aurora had a new nickname in the UFO research community: the Flying Triangle. Although, it’s important to note that more than a few researchers believed that the FTs were extraterrestrial in origin. Of one thing that pretty much everyone was in accord with, was that the Flying Triangles and the Aurora existed. But were they ours or “theirs?” Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, namely, the Aurora. It was one single wave of encounters in the U.K., in early 1993, which ultimately led senior military and defense personnel to liaise with their American counterparts to try and determine, once and for all, if the FTs are the Aurora or if they have extraterrestrial origins.
Now, some words from Nick Pope. And a fascinating case from the 1990s. Long-since retired from the MoD, Pope reveals his role in – and his knowledge of – the March 1993 UFO encounters over the United Kingdom: “I arrived at the office at about 8.30 a.m. or 9.00 a.m. on the morning of March 31, 1993, and my telephone was ringing. I picked it up and there was a police officer on the other end making a UFO report. Now, he was based in Devon and told me an account of an incident that had taken place in the early hours of that particular day when he and a colleague who had been on night patrol saw a triangular-shaped UFO at fairly-high altitude. He said that the motion was fairly steady and that there were lights at the edges with a fainter light in the middle.To me, this was already a description that was becoming quite familiar both from one or two reports that I’d received at the Ministry of Defense over the years and from my own study and research into the UFO literature. In other words, I was aware that this was a commonly reported shape for a UFO.”
Pope continued: “I was also quite pleased to get a report from a police officer. I won’t say that it was rare, but it was slightly unusual to have reports from trained observers like police and military. I would say that, of the reports I received in my time at the UFO desk, less than five per cent came from, collectively, pilots, military officers and the police. I had spoken, socially, to numerous Royal Air Force pilots who’d had personal sightings, but who had never reported them for fear of ridicule.“But that police report was very much the first of many that came in that day and over the next week or so. When taken together, the sightings described took place in a range of times – the earliest was about 11-11.30 p.m. on the evening of the 30th and the latest was about 1.45 a.m. in the early hours of the 31st.” What was it precisely that made the police officer’s report stand out? “He said to me: ‘I’ve been on night patrols for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.’ Well, reports such as this came through thick and fast over the course of the next week or so; more and more reports came in from police stations, the public and local RAF stations. In fact, I would say that the total number of reports easily exceeded one hundred.”
It is clear from what Pope has to say that there were three reports in particular that stood out more than any other – the first of which concerned a family based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, who had viewed a remarkable aerial vehicle near the sprawling forest that is Cannock Chase. Pope reveals the facts: “This report was brought to my attention by the Community Relations Office at RAF Cosford [Shropshire]. The report had come direct from the family and sounded particularly interesting because, unlike some of the other sightings, this one was of an object flying at very low level. There had been a family gathering and several members of the family were out on the drive – really just saying goodbye to their relatives who were about to drive off. Suddenly, this large, triangular-shaped craft flew over them very, very slowly. This was a flat triangle, with a light in each corner and a larger light in the direct centre of the underside of the craft.” In fact, not unlike the report filed by the police reports from Devon?
“Exactly. But there was something else that I’d come across in my investigations that was also present in the Rugeley case,” says Pope. “This was a low-frequency humming sound coming from the UFO; a humming that they actually described as being quite unpleasant. Imagine standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert and almost feeling the sound as well as hearing it – that was the effect that they reported. Well, they were so excited and overwhelmed that two of them leapt into the car to give chase! “As they did so, they came to a point where they thought the UFO was so low that it must have come down in a nearby field. Well, they parked the car, jumped out and looked around. But there was absolutely nothing there; the UFO had gone.” The night’s activities had barely begun: “The two most significant reports began at RAF Cosford shortly after the encounter at Rugeley. This was definitely the highlight and was one of the best sighting reports I received in my entire posting. The report itself came from a guard patrol at Cosford. They were on duty manning entrance points, checking the perimeter fence and such like. All the members of the patrol saw the UFO and, again, the description was pretty much the same as most of the others. In this case, though, the UFO was at medium-to-high altitude.”
Pope makes an important observation: “Remember that these witnesses were people who see in a normal course of business all sorts of aircraft activity, meteorites, fireballs and so on, and they considered it absolutely out of the ordinary.“They didn’t make a standard report: what they did was to submit an actual 2-3 page report which went up their chain of command and then the report was forwarded on to me. In that report, they stated that the UFO passed directly over the base and that this was of particular concern to them. They made immediate checks with various Air Traffic Control radar centres but nothing appeared on the screens. It was this factor that made them particularly keen to make an official report. This was at around 1.00 a.m.” Whatever the origin of the unknown vehicle, it appeared that its activities were far from over. “They noticed that this Flying Triangle was heading on a direct line for RAF Shawbury, which is some twelve to fifteen miles on. Now, the main concern of the Cosford patrol was to alert Shawbury that the UFO was coming their way; but they also wanted confirmation that they weren’t having a mass hallucination. “They took a decision to call Shawbury and this was answered by the Meteorological Officer. You have to realize that at that time there was literally just a skeleton staff operating, so the Met. Officer was, essentially, on his own. So, he took a decision to go outside, look in the direction of RAF Cosford and see what he could see.
“Sure enough, he could see this light coming towards him and it got closer and closer and lower and lower. Next thing, he was looking at this massive, triangular-shaped craft flying at what was a height of no more than two hundred feet, just to the side of the base and only about two hundred feet from the perimeter fence.” Bearing in mind the fact that the Meteorological Officer at RAF Shawbury could be considered a reliable witness, and someone well-trained in recognizing numerous types of aerial phenomena, was he able to gauge the size of the object? Pope said back then: “Very much so: military officers are very good at gauging sizes of aircraft and they’re very precise. His quote to me was that the UFO’s size was midway between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Now, he had eight years’ worth of experience with the Royal Air Force, and a Met. Officer is generally much better qualified than most for looking at things in the night sky. And there were other factors too: like the family in Rugeley, he heard this most unpleasant low-frequency hum; but unlike their experience, he saw the craft fire a beam of light down to the ground. He felt that it was something like a laser beam or a searchlight. The light was tracking very rapidly back and forth and sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base.
“He also said – and he admitted this was speculation – that it was as if the UFO was looking for something. Now, the speed of the UFO was extremely slow – no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, which in itself is quite extraordinary. As far as the description is concerned, he said that it was fairly featureless - a sort of flat, triangular-shaped craft, or possibly a bit more diamond-shaped. But if all the descriptions had been identical I would have been surprised.” Perhaps the most eye-opening and revealing aspect of the RAF Shawbury encounter was the way in which the object made its exit, as Nick Pope reveals: “He said that the beam of light retracted into the craft, which then seemed to gain a little bit of height. But then, in an absolute instant, the UFO moved from a speed of about twenty or thirty miles per hour to a speed of several hundreds of miles per hour – if not thousands! It just suddenly moved off to the horizon and then out of sight in no more than a second or so – and there was no sonic boom. Well, of course, when I received this report and the one from Cosford, I launched as full an investigation as I possibly could.” As Nick Pope now makes abundantly clear, that investigation proved to be extraordinary, to say the least.
"Even though it was fairly obvious to me that there were a number of things that this object was not, I still made the checks anyway to try and eliminate absolutely every possibility." Pope also noted: “I had a feeling that this one was going to go right up the chain of command.” He was not wrong. “Checks were also made with various Air Traffic Control Centers, with Air Defense experts and Air Defense radar systems; and although at one point we thought we had caught the UFO on radar, it eventually turned out that there was nothing. After these checks were made and we were able to establish that the UFO hadn’t been caught on radar, the Royal Air Force was quite interested. There isn’t really a corporate view on UFOs; it really does go down to the belief of the individual. But, enough people realized that there was something exciting and out of the ordinary going on and they, too, got caught up in all that excitement.” Initially, suggestions were put forward that all of the sightings were simply the result of a satellite re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere: “I spoke to the Space Information Officer at RAF Fylingdales; this is the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Centre. They’ve got very powerful space tracking radar that can pick up and track all sorts of objects at orbital heights. Now, they raised the possibility that we were looking at the re-entry of one of the Russian Cosmos satellites.
“Contrary to what some people have said, however, Fylingdales were very unsure as to whether or not the satellite would even have been visible from the U.K. at all during that time. But even if there was a re-entering satellite in the skies, it certainly couldn’t explain the very close encounter at RAF Shawbury. Don’t forget, too, that a satellite burn-up is very much like a meteor shower with a few tracks of light flashing across the sky. In this sighting, however, it was a case of one military base actually reporting to another and saying: ‘It’s coming your way…’ So this rules out a satellite burn-out.” Pope then took his investigation to another level. “My next step was to get a map and plot out the various locations where the UFO – or UFOs – had been seen. Well, that didn’t work out. I was confronted with a map of haphazard sightings all around the country. There was certainly a concentration of sightings in Devon, Cornwall, South Wales and the Midlands. But there were also sightings from Southampton and Yorkshire; and I knew that there were reports from Ireland, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe. And these were just the tip of the iceberg .“One interesting point that then occurred to me was that we were dealing with activity on exactly the same night – but three years later - to a very famous wave of sightings of very similar craft seen over Belgium. And my favorite theory about this or at least an idea I floated about – was that this was a deliberate move on the part of whoever was operating the craft.”
Pope explained his line of thinking: “For example, if the media had got a hold of this, it would have been too late to get it in the newspapers on March 31; so, the earliest date that the story could have run would have been April 1 – April Fools’ Day! Again, a little indicator, perhaps, of an intelligence and possibly even some form of humor.” Of course, it could be argued that this would serve as excellent cover if the Flying Triangle that was seen near RAF Shawbury was a terrestrial aircraft (albeit a distinctly secret one) as opposed to something extraterrestrial. Pope acknowledges this. “We decided that we couldn’t ignore the various rumors that were doing the rounds about a supposed Top Secret aircraft developed by the U.S. Government and called Aurora - or, indeed, any hypersonic and/or prototype aircraft operated by the Americans.“There had been persistent rumors in the aviation world and amongst the UFO lobby that the SR71 Blackbird had been replaced by a hypersonic aircraft code-named Aurora and that that was what the Flying Triangles really were. I was well aware that there had been some interesting stories about visual and radar sightings around certain air bases; however, I hadn’t put much store in these rumors – not least because there had been some very definitive denials from the Americans.
“I know there’s a lot of cynicism about government and the military. And although officialdom may refuse to answer a question and may sometimes give a misleading answer, outright lying is incredibly rare. And when it does occur, if it’s uncovered it almost certainly leads to resignation.“But with the March 1993 sightings – and in spite of the denials from the Americans that they were responsible for the Flying Triangles – we did contact them to make inquiries. This was because they have the responsibility pertaining to the U.S. presence in Britain. Those inquiries bore absolutely no fruit at all. The Americans said: ‘No. We can shed no light at all on the UFO sightings that have led to your inquiry.’” Pope is able to disclose, however, that the liaison with the Americans was not without its moment of intrigue. “If anything,” he now relates, “there was an interesting little hint that the Americans, too, were seeing these Flying Triangles over their territory. As we were making our inquiries, they turned the question around and wanted to know if our Royal Air Force had a triangular-shaped, hypersonic prototype aircraft of some sort. So, presumably, the Americans were having Flying Triangle sightings, too.“But this was interesting, in light of the fact that the Americans supposedly got out of UFO investigations back in 1969 when the Air Force’s Project Blue Book closed down. Of course, you may not officially be in the UFO game, but you are certainly going to be aware of – and take an interest in – reports of structured craft in your airspace. So, essentially, we drew blanks with the Americans.”’
Back to Nick Pope: “Bearing in mind that the Americans had inquired – at an official level, no less – if the British Royal Air Force had in its employ something broadly fitting the description of a Flying Triangle, and we had said ‘No,’ I still felt obliged to address the issue of whether or not the rumors about secret aircraft being flown by us were true. First, from my own knowledge of prototype aircraft, un-manned aerial vehicles and so on, the Triangles don’t fit into the typical pattern, and I’ll explain why. Where we do have such pieces of kit, they’re not tested over the heads of ‘Joe Public;’ they’re tested in a small number of clearly defined ranges and danger areas – mostly out at sea such as the Abberporth Range in Cardigan Bay.” Pope also states on this highly-controversial matter: “You simply do not fly a prototype craft over a military base or over the centre of Rugeley or wherever, and run the risk that someone will either (a) scramble a [Tornado] F-3 [aircraft] to try and intercept it; or (b) take a photograph of it which will end up on the front page of The Sun or Jane’s Defense Weekly. It’s simply not the way that things are done.
“We checked domestically anything that might have been flying. But if we’d have been poking our noses into something that didn’t concern us, the investigation would have been quietly switched off. In fact, the opposite happened. We were making big waves throughout the Royal Air Force, the Ministry of Defense and at an international level. So the domestic secret aircraft theory is interesting but it doesn’t hold water.” Three years prior to the extraordinary events at RAF Cosford and RAF Shawbury, similar objects were seen on repeated occasions in Belgian airspace in 1989 and 1990. In view of this, was any form of approach made to the Belgian military to ascertain their views? “Yes,” says Pope. “I approached the Belgians to get a comparison after their sightings. I phoned the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels and he spoke to one of the F-16 pilots who had been scrambled to intercept a Flying Triangle over Belgium back in 1990. Well, the Air Attaché reported back to me that the corporate view of the Belgian Defense Staff was that they did believe that they were dealing with a solid, structured craft. “Apparently, the word from the Belgians was: ‘Thank God it was friendly.’ If it hadn’t been, it was made clear to me that there was very little that the Belgian Air Force could have done anyway - despite the fact that the F-16 is no slouch.”
With the secret weapon angle disposed of as far as Nick Pope was concerned, what was his next step in the investigation? “There was only one place to go and that was up the chain of command and I briefed my head of division. He was notoriously skeptical about UFOs and generally made no secret of the fact that he thought that it was all a waste of time and resources. But he had been quite impressed by the Shawbury and Cosford events – even to the point of making some attempts to plot the course of the UFO. “In fact, I recall him bounding into the office in a state of some considerable excitement when he thought that he had found indications of a straight-line track. I had copied some of the reports; but what he didn’t have was a batch of reports that had just come in and that painted a totally different picture.“Well, I just thought that this needed to go up the chain of command. The main addressee was the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff; so what I did was to summarize the events on a couple of sides of paper and attach the original reports – the typed report submitted by the patrol sighting at Cosford and my own write-up of the RAF Shawbury sighting. “He took a few days to have a look at all the paperwork and then passed it back down the chain of command with a message that said: ‘This is extremely interesting. It is a genuine mystery but clearly you’ve made all the checks that we could reasonably make and it’s difficult to see how we can take this any further.’ And that was essentially where the matter rested.”
Today, does Nick Pope feel that the assessment of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff was a fair one? “Well, yes and no. I felt extremely uncomfortable that we had a clear breach of the U.K. air defense region; and we had two Royal Air Force bases pretty much being over-flown by a structured craft and yet we had nothing on radar and absolutely no explanation. I applied our own standard line on UFOs and asked myself the questions: Is this of no defense significance? What if the craft had been hostile? What if a bomb-bay had suddenly opened up and it had attacked these bases? If that had been the case, and with the UFO not appearing on radar, the first we would have known would have been when the bombs were falling. So, I came to the conclusion that this was of extreme defense significance.“I’m naturally suspicious of anyone that doesn’t declare their hand. And although there may be some very good reasons for them remaining covert, I think that from a military and defense point of view, you have to say that there is a potential UFO threat.“Personally, I felt that saying ‘Object Unexplained; Case Closed’ was not satisfactory. On the other hand, I had every sympathy with the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff; there was no faulting his logic. What else could he have done? Really, it was an impossible situation.
Centuries-Old Mysteries – Aliens, Church, and Vatican’s Secrets
For millennia, a curious connection between religion and the UFO phenomenon has intrigued humanity. Dive into the realm of religious art, paintings, and tapestries, unveiling the hidden significance of UFO depictions in sacred works. Delve into the Vatican’s possible knowledge on the matter. Has the Catholic Church’s hierarchy encountered extraterrestrial contact? Discover the secrets concealed within ancient traditions.
Stanley Kubrick’s Unseen Magnum Opus: The Deception of a Moon Landing | Unraveling NASA’s Hollywood Illusion
Stanley Kubrick’s Unseen Magnum Opus: The Deception of a Moon Landing | Unraveling NASA’s Hollywood Illusion
When science, skepticism, and conspiracy theories collide
The iconic moon landing on July 20, 1969, by the American Apollo 11 mission, is undoubtedly one of humankind’s most astonishing achievements. Despite this, a persistent school of thought questions the authenticity of this feat, arguing it was an elaborate hoax orchestrated by NASA to outdo its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.
While these conspiracy theories have intrigued many over the years, a careful, scientific scrutiny of these claims paints a vastly different picture. Here, we delve into the core arguments put forth by the moon landing skeptics and evaluate them against solid scientific reasoning.
The Shadow Conundrum
One of the primary arguments skeptics present is the incongruity in the shadows observed in the photographs from the lunar surface. The theory suggests that since the shadows are not parallel, there must have been additional light sources, indicating a staged setting.
This belief, however, overlooks the nature of perspective and the properties of light. In reality, shadows are not inherently parallel. The direction of a shadow depends on the viewer’s perspective. A simple Earth-based example could be a set of parallel lines on the ground appearing to converge at a distance due to perspective. Furthermore, wide-angle lenses used by the astronauts to capture the vast lunar terrain inevitably distort the images, contributing to the perceived shadow anomalies.
The Missing Stars in the Photos
Another frequently raised point is the apparent absence of stars in the photographs taken from the moon. Skeptics argue that this anomaly indicates a fabricated backdrop used for the staged landing. However, the absence of stars in these pictures is a simple consequence of photographic settings used during the lunar mission.
To capture the lunar surface without washing out details due to the moon’s extreme brightness, the camera’s iris had to be almost entirely closed, and the shutter speed was significantly increased. This setting allowed as little light as possible into the camera, thereby rendering the comparatively faint stars invisible in the photographs.
The Lunar Module and Lack of a Blast Crater
Critics often question the absence of a blast crater underneath the lunar module. In actuality, there is a very straightforward explanation. The module’s engine was switched off about 10 feet from the surface, and it dropped the rest of the way. With no wind on the moon’s surface to disturb it, the dust wouldn’t be flying around, and hence no pronounced crater would form.
The Apollo 11 Sweater and Kubrick Conspiracy
One of the most captivating aspects of the moon landing conspiracy revolves around acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. A theory proposed in the documentary “Kubrick’s Odyssey” posits that Kubrick was enlisted by NASA to film a fake moon landing. This belief gained traction from a video of an alleged confession from Kubrick, which, however, turned out to be a hoax.
In reality, Stanley Kubrick was a self-confessed ‘space nut’ who had a keen interest in the Apollo program and science fiction. Coincidences such as the Apollo 11 sweater worn by a character in his film, “The Shining,” have often been misinterpreted as hidden messages confirming his involvement in the alleged hoax.
While these scientific explanations provide rational answers to the moon landing conspiracy theories, it’s vital to remember the critical role of skepticism in scientific inquiry. Skepticism encourages us to question and explore, driving us to uncover truths and dispel fallacies.
Even as we commemorate the incredible achievement of the Apollo 11 mission, we must continue to question, investigate, and strive for knowledge. After all, every question asked, every mystery probed, brings us one step closer to understanding our universe better.
UFO Whistleblowers: Holding the Keys to Unearthly Secrets or Masters of Misinformation?
UFO Whistleblowers: Holding the Keys to Unearthly Secrets or Masters of Misinformation?
Nick Redfern
If you're into the UFO scene and you take note of whistleblowers, you'll know the name of David Grusch. However, the most infamous of all the UFO whistleblowers was, without doubt, the Falcon. "Who was he?" You might ask. Let's have a look.The Falcon was a man named Harry Rositzke. He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA). Not only that, in the post-Second World War era Rositzke worked clandestinely for the Office of Strategic Services. My good friend Greg Bishop said of the man: "Rositzke, a Brooklyn native, was an expert on the matter of Soviet intelligence, the KGB, and Russia’s programs designed to destabilize the West with carefully crafted propaganda." Rositzke, who died in 2002 at the age of ninety-one, wrote a number of non-fiction books on the world of espionage, including The KGB: The Eyes of Russia and The CIA’s Secret Operations. Rositzke, it’s important to note, did not have a European accent. That revelation adds further weight to the possibility that there may have been competing Falcons; one, Rositzke, an American trying to protect U.S. government secrets. The other? An unknown European character posing as an American official, and using the same alias of the Falcon, and trying to further disrupt U.S. intelligence. With that said, let's see more about the Falcon.
In September 1980, while promoting The Roswell Incident, Moore took part in a number of radio-based interviews around the United States. At the end of one such interview, a secretary told Moore that there was someone on the line who wanted to speak privately with Moore. The voice at the other end belonged to a colonel who was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, which is located in Sarpy County, Nebraska. The man said to Moore, as Greg Bishop tells it in his 2005 book, Project Beta: “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” The colonel desired a meeting. And soon, too. Moore scribbled down the colonel’s number, promising to get back in touch as soon as possible. The proactive colonel didn’t wait for Moore to reach him, however. Instead, he contacted Moore – for a second time. Once again, the man trotted out those same sixteen words: “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” By now, Moore was more than intrigued. A meeting was quickly arranged. The pair was to rendezvous in an Albuquerque restaurant, one which was on Moore’s journey home, for good food and – hopefully - enlightening conversation. The mysterious informant was described by Moore as being elderly and gaunt. Greg Bishop said that the man had a “hint of an Eastern European accent.” From that day on, the wizened old man would become known to Moore as “The Falcon.”
Greg Bishop says that, “…[Moore’s] new acquaintance told [him] that he represented a group of intelligence agents in the U.S. Government who were tired of the secrecy surrounding the UFO subject and were eager to release more accurate information to the public. They wanted to do this through a reputable researcher. He would be given small bites of the story over time, and could do with it as he wished. Would Moore be interested in participating in such a program?” Yes, Moore was interested. Very much so. But, there was the matter of that aforementioned unholy alliance, which Moore knew he would have to enter into; like it or not. He knew that if he didn’t play the game, then his chance of getting to the heart of what Uncle Sam knew of UFOs and aliens – dead, alive or even both - would irreversibly slip out of his grip. So, Moore agreed to do whatever had to be done. And forget the cost. Maybe, even the consequences, too. Everything soon took off: in the early 1980s, Moore found himself periodically on the receiving end of instructions to travel to certain locations around the United States, where he would meet with anonymous, insider-type characters, including, yet again, the Falcon.
On each occasion seemingly highly-classified material on UFOs was handed over to Moore – always in manila envelopes and in various, widespread places. Those locations included a motel-room in upstate New York, and a certain building in the heart of Los Angeles, California. On one occasion, in April 1983, a friend of Moore, Nic Magnuson, picked up a collection of documents for Moore at Seattle, Washington’s Sea-Tac International Airport. The handover was made by “a short, elderly, balding man” who gave to Magnuson a newspaper that contained hidden within its pages one of those priceless manila envelopes. The collective documentation referred to such enigmas as “Project Aquarius,” “MJ12 [an alternative term for Majestic 12],” “communications with aliens,” even to decisions taken by elite figures in the domain of intelligence-gathering to keep the White House firmly out of the ufological loop. A secret that was so astounding that not even the president of the United States could be told the truth? Possibly, yes.
For Moore there was very little doubt the papers amounted to absolute dynamite. If they were true, that is. That was the biggest issue of all: were they genuine? Or, was Moore being used by people in the intelligence community; manipulative characters who were trying to push Moore away from his genuinely significant Roswell research and further down a pathway filled with questionable document upon questionable document? And, still hanging over Moore’s head like the sword of Damocles, there was that part of the deal which Moore had to fulfil if he was to continue to receive regular supplies of those seemingly priceless papers. Moore’s part in all of this revolved around a man named Paul Bennewitz.
An Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist who died in 2003, Paul Bennewitz spent a significant amount of time digging into U.S. Air Force- and National Security Agency-based top secret projects which, from the late-seventies to the early-eighties, were housed at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Bennewitz believed those projects were connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials. They soared across the skies above Kirtland AFB by star-filled, moonlit nights, demonstrating their extraterrestrial invulnerability and power. It’s hardly surprising that, for years, Bennewitz was put under deep surveillance by the U.S. military and a numbers of intelligence services. He was, as a consequence of his digging, bombarded by the murky world of officialdom with a mass of disinformation, faked stories, and outright lies in order to divert him from his research. It worked. In fact, and to Bennewitz’s eternal cost, it worked just too damned well. By the mid-eighties, he was heading for complete mental disintegration.
The intelligence community cared not a bit that Bennewitz thought their secret operations were UFO-related – precisely because the UFO connection was one of Bennewitz’s very own making. There was, however, deep concern on the part of the world of officialdom that by digging into classified activities at Kirtland in search of UFOs, Bennewitz just might inadvertently reveal – to the spies of the Soviet Union, in a worst-case scenario – information and technology that had to be kept secret at all costs, even if those costs included Bennewitz’s own sanity and health. Which, ultimately, they did. And, so, a grim plan was initiated.
U.S. agents learned the essential parts of Bennewitz’s theories from the man himself, by actually breaking into his home while he was out and checking his files and research notes. Bennewitz’s beliefs were astounding and controversial: aliens were mutilating cattle as part of some weird genetic experiment. The E.T.s were abducting American citizens and implanting them with small devices for purposes disturbingly unknown. Those same aliens were living deep underground in a secure fortress below the Archuleta Mesa at Dulce, New Mexico. And everyone was soon going to be in deep and dire trouble as a direct result of the presence of this brewing, intergalactic threat. So, the Air Force gave Bennewitz precisely what he was looking for: confirmation that his theories were all true, and more. This was, however, all just a carefully-planned ruse to bombard Bennewitz with so much faked UFO data in the hope that it would steer him away from the classified military projects of a non-UFO nature that he had uncovered. And, sure enough, it all worked very well. For the government. Far less so for Bennewitz.
When Bennewitz received conformation (albeit carefully controlled and utterly fabricated confirmation) that, yes, he had stumbled upon the horrible truth and that, yes, there really was an alien base deep below Dulce, the actions of the Intelligence community had the desired effect: Bennewitz became increasingly paranoid and unstable, and he began looking away from Kirtland (the hub of the down-to-earth secrets of the NSA and the Air Force that had to be kept) and harmlessly towards the vicinity of Dulce, where his actions, research, and theories could be carefully controlled and manipulated by the government. At this time American Intelligence brought Bill Moore into the secret scheme and asked him to keep them informed of how well – from their perspective - the disinformation operations against Bennewitz were working. In return, Moore was promised – and provided with – data and documents on super-secret, official UFO projects, crashed saucers, dead aliens, and more. That, then, was the nature of the bleak agreement between Moore and the man with the European accent, the Falcon.
All of which brings us to what happened after December 11, 1984, the date on which Jaime Shandera received the ever-controversial Majestic 12 documents. It’s a story as mind-blowing as that of Paul Bennewitz – partly because it was interconnected, as we shall further see. It caused the FBI’s counterintelligence staff to suspect that those same documents were the creations of no less than disinformation agents of the Russian government. In the summer of 1987, Sidgwick & Jackson published Timothy Good’s book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up. It contained copies of the same controversial Majestic 12 documents which had been dropped through Jaime Shandera’s mailbox some three years earlier. According to Good, he got his copies of the pages in March 1987 from “a CIA source.” Good has been consistently cagey when it comes to the matter of how, precisely, he obtained his copies of the files. And from whom, too. Two months after Good’s CIA insider provided him with the documents, the London Observer newspaper mentioned the Majestic 12 documents. The date of the article was May 31, 1987. Written by Martin Bailey it had the lengthy title of “Close encounters of an alien kind – and now if you’ve read enough about the election, here’s news from another world.”
In no time, Moore, Shandera and Friedman chose to release their copies into the public domain, which is hardly surprising, given the fact that word of the Majestic 12 papers was now starting to trickle and circulate outside of the confines of the trio. This was completely understandable: after all, the three had done all of the groundwork, and the very last thing they wanted was to be written out of the story – or, at the absolute least, left marginalized and sitting frustratingly on the sidelines. As an aside, Alice Bradley Sheldon, who very likely wrote the “Serpo” papers back in the late 1960s, killed herself and her husband less than two weeks before the Majestic 12 documents mailed to Jaime Shandera were first publicly referenced – namely, in the pages of the London Observer newspaper. Also, James Jesus Angleton, who was the Chief of CIA Counterintelligence operations from 1954 to 1975, and who was rumored to have been “in the know” when it came to Majestic 12, died in that very same month. Lung-cancer took him on May 11 at the age of sixty-nine.
If the FBI learned anything further about Majestic 12 in the post-1989 period, then that information has not surfaced under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence (specifically on July 22, 1993), Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, which is now in what is termed “closed status.” The title of the file is not something along the lines of “Potentially leaked document” or “Questionable document,” as one might imagine, given the strange story that is detailed in this chapter. Rather, the file title is nothing less than – wait for it – “Espionage.” While we’re admittedly forced to speculate, that one, eye-opening word alone strongly suggests that the Majestic 12 saga really did revolve around those very same components that surface in the pages of this chapter: spies, counterintelligence operations, the Moore-Bennewitz situation, the words of Gerald K. Haines, and the interference of the Russians. And espionage.
One Falcon? Two Falcons? Bogus documents about dead aliens? Russian spies? People dying around the days when the Majestic 12 documents surfaced? What does all of this mean? Well, it means that the world of the whistleblower is a very strange one; a world in which truth, disinformation, counter-intelligence and fabricated material and more all come to the table. So, be careful about what you see and hear.
Clearance Jobs, an organization that defines itself as “the largest career network for professionals with federal government security clearance,” has issued an apparent letter of guidance that also serves as a chilling warning to any industry or government insiders who are considering coming forward as UAP whistleblowers with evidence of their work with non-human craft and their pilots.
The letter, titled “How to Blow the Whistle if You Work With Flying Saucers and Their Alien Pilots,” was issued to all subscribers via email on July 13th and is peppered with well-worn buzzwords seemingly meant to belittle the topic before laying out the dire consequences that likely await anyone who breaks their security oaths to talk about their classified work.
WHISTLEBLOWING SOMETHING GOOD?
After outlining the claims involving the U.S. government’s alleged possession of non-human craft made by former intelligence officer David Grusch, claims which first appeared in a story by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal and published by The Debrief (a story that was later expanded upon to include potential alien pilots of these crafts in an interview with Grusch by Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart that aired on cable news network News Nation), the letter is broken into five segments.
The first, titled “Whistleblowing Something Good,” opens with more loaded phrasing and language, including the second use of the term “space aliens,” which seems to have replaced the classic “little green men” when trying to downplay and stigmatize the topic, before positing a scenario where Grusch’s claims are actually found to be true.
“If it were all true, it would be the most extraordinary event in millennia, with seismic implications for science, philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, technology—everything!” writes author David W. Brown, who is described as a regular contributor to Clearance Jobs. “Nothing would ever be the same again. It would be a unifying force unlike anything since Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.”
Brown then goes on to note that he cannot think of a single drawback to the government “revealing the existence of space aliens (feudalistic dominance notwithstanding)” before commenting that “If Grusch is sane,” this would mean that he has done a good thing by blowing the whistle.”
“Hiding flying saucers isn’t government wrongdoing, exactly, or fraud, waste, or abuse,” Brown adds with one metaphorical eyebrow raised. “At most, it’s just a little weird. Blowing the whistle on aliens, in other words, is a complete and total positive for all involved.”
Interestingly, this sentence seems in direct contrast to the claims by Grusch that the efforts to conceal and reverse engineer these crafts have been kept from the U.S. Congressional oversight, a clear violation of a number of laws designed specifically to prevent rogue elements of the security state (or any part of government) from spending taxpayer funds on programs not authorized by congress.
In fact, it is specificallythis allegationof those crimes (an allegation found “credible and urgent” enough by the Inspector General (IG) of the intelligence community to open an investigation and also refer Grusch and his claims to the congress members who oversee budget appropriations for secret programs. These moves have spurred members of Congress from both sides of the aisle (not an insignificant accomplishment in today’s political environment) to enact legislation designed to reveal any such misappropriation of funds and associated malfeasance.
SO SAYETH THE LAW
The second section of Brown’s letter, titled “What The Law Has To Say,” strikes a significantly more serious tone, which is in direct contrast to his introduction, opening with a quote from Sean Bigley, credited as “an attorney and ClearanceJobs legal correspondent.”
“The statutes that pertain to whistleblowing all speak to things like violation of the law, gross mismanagement, gross waste of public funds, threats to life or public health—those types of things,” explains Bigley, a comment that seems to perfectly outline the more serious claims of the illegal circumvention of congressional oversight outlined by Grusch in both his legal complaint to the IG and his direct testimony to congressional staffers.
The letter’s author then goes on to outline the legal steps, as told to him by Bigley, that one must undertake if they are planning to blow the whistle on activities inside the government before making a somewhat startling and seemingly ill-informed statement of his own.
“Grusch claims he did all those things,” Brown writes. “The catch is that he has not really exposed any government wrongdoing, which means whistleblowing statutes might not protect him if the government wanted to prosecute.”
“This would fall under what I would call a ‘public good category.’ But under current law, there isn’t one,” Bigley adds.
Fundamentally, the messages from both men seem to overlook or misunderstand the very specific crimes Grusch has alleged–which includes the information about alleged UAP-related programs being illegally withheld from Congress–while also pointing out how any such claims could be trouble for those making them “if the government wants to prosecute,” though without addressing specific protections for such whistleblowers defined last year in language passed into law within the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.
LEAVE THE LIZARD PEOPLE OUT
In the next section, “If Lizard People are not Involved,” Brown lays out a theoretical scenario that could be faced by a potential whistleblower.
“Let’s leave the aliens out of it for a moment,” he writes. “Suppose you are a scientist for the Department of Energy helping to develop some revolutionary carbon capture technology. It uses minimal energy, works in seconds, and turns carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere into a stable, harmless solid.”
“You document your concerns and go through the chain trying desperately to get someone to listen, but no one does. The classification remains,” Brown laments. “So you leak it to the journal Nature (though are careful to protect the parts that can be reverse-engineered by bad guys). The revelation causes an uproar for obvious reasons.”
Brown then goes on to point out the legal Pandora’s Box his seemingly good-intentioned Paul Revere has opened, specifically the legal consequences for them personally.
“Legally, you are on the hook for this,” he writes, “even if you just saved the planet Earth.”
Brown presents a series of possible consequences the suddenly doomed hero may incur, including “being charged for violating the Espionage Act (and) for leaking classified information that could benefit a foreign nation,” to being sued by the government, losing your security clearance, losing your job, and being barred from other government or contractor jobs.
In the following section titled “What Defense Do You Have,” the same attorney is quoted as telling Brown that even such a “positive” whistleblower would have a very hard time in court.
“It is all subjective,” Bigley explains. “Who is to say what is and isn’t for the public good? The government might have a compelling reason to keep such a secret, so the ‘public good’ defense wouldn’t really fly from a legal standpoint—at least not under existing law.”
To this, Brown posits that a strong, positive reaction from the court of public opinion may be enough to save our misguided good Samaritan from the direst of legal consequences before once again quoting Bigley, who says, “But I would not advise anyone to be the test case for that.”
Like the previous sections, the subtext of these comments by both author and attorney is a hypothetical claim of secrecy against the public good, which is agreeably not a crime, instead of the financial and oversight dodging efforts alleged by Grusch that are anything but legal.
In a last-ditch effort to offer his hypothetical whistleblower a lifeline, Brown proposes the idea of jury nullification, the legal concept that even if you have committed a crime, the jury might just let you get away with it anyway. But just like before, Brown quickly dashes his hero’s hopes by reporting that Bigley says he would advise anyone against trying to “roll the dice” on such an outcome.
GOOD DEEDS OR PUNISHABLE OFFENSES?
“Whether you work in the UFO warehouse at Area 52, are the surgeon who handles the alien autopsies, or are the designer of the amazing climate cleaning machine, if your work is classified, you can’t blow the whistle on it for the public good and expect the law to work in your favor,” Brown states in the fifth and final section, aptly titled “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”
“It’s just not a category of protection,” he quotes Bigley as saying, “but it’s one of those things that, arguably, a case could be made that there should be. There just isn’t right now, and I’m not sure how you could create a standard that somebody could even follow.”
Similar to the bulk of the arguments against blowing the whistle layered within the letter, this pair of comments seem to assume once again that one is blowing the whistle for some sense of public good and not for the specifically illegal activities alleged by Grusch, activities which, again, have spurred congress members from both sides of the aisle to investigate them together and motivate the former Inspector General to take up the filing of Grusch’s IG case.
The letter ends with a comment that not only fits perfectly with the title of this particular section but also serves as a strongly-worded warning by Brown that any would-be whistleblower looking to follow in Grusch’s footsteps, even if their testimony were true, the people on whom they are blowing the whistle are not likely not give up without a fight.
“Though your career is over and you are sitting in a jail cell, you are still, ethically, at least, on solid footing,” Brown offers. “Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, your act did the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a matter of deontology, you had a duty to do something so intrinsically good and right. And ultimately, good government should be as transparent as possible and accountable to its citizens. And you can reflect on all this as you decay in a federal penitentiary. Don’t worry, though. You’ve got a heck of a book deal waiting for you on the other side.”
Last month, David Grusch, who studied “unexplained anomalous phenomena” for the DoD, blew the whistle on the U.S. government for hiding partially intact flying saucers and dead alien pilots. He didn’t see the spacecraft. He didn’t see the aliens. But people assure him that they are there, and that there’s been a conspiracy afoot since at least 1933, when one crashed in Italy. The Mussolini government kept it covered up, and somehow the Pope and Allied Forces managed to get it to the United States.
The U.S. government has recovered more such alien hardware. Top men tell Grusch this. Indeed, some have seen “very large, very large, like a football field kind of size” spacecraft. Why would the government hide the existence of alien life? “Feudalistic dominance,” said Grusch.
What more convincing do you need?
WHISTLEBLOWING SOMETHING GOOD
Congress, as you might expect, is on it. Meanwhile, NASA and the Defense Department have denied everything (of course they would). But let’s assume for a moment that Grusch is telling the truth about the people who allegedly told him the truth and that what they saw were indeed space aliens. If it were all true, it would be the most extraordinary event in millennia, with seismic implications for science, philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, technology—everything! Nothing would ever be the same again. It would be a unifying force unlike anything since Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Try as I might, I cannot think of a single drawback to the U.S. government revealing the existence of space aliens (feudalistic dominance notwithstanding). Which means if Grusch is sane, he has blown the whistle on an objectively positive thing in all respects. Hiding flying saucers isn’t government wrongdoing, exactly, or fraud, waste, or abuse. At most, it’s just a little weird. Blowing the whistle on aliens, in other words, is a complete and total positive for all involved, except potentially for the whistleblower.
WHAT THE LAW HAS TO SAY
“The statutes that pertain to whistleblowing all speak to things like violation of the law, gross mismanagement, gross waste of public funds, threats to life or public health—those types of things,” said Sean Bigley, an attorney and ClearanceJobs legal correspondent. He told me that for a whistleblower to be protected, he or she has to reasonably believe that whatever he or she is disclosing falls in one of those protected categories. Moreover, he said, a would-be whistleblower must follow the established mechanisms for how and what they report, which generally involves documenting the issue, following internal procedures, and going unsuccessfully to proper authorities.
Grusch claims he did all those things. The catch is that reporting the existence of aliens doesn’t arguably itself fall under the protected categories, which means whistleblowing statutes might not protect him, if he experienced any internal government or security clearance repercussions. However, any other claims that fall under the protected categories are a different story.
“This would fall under what I would call a ‘public good category.’ But under current law, there isn’t one,” said Bigley. Keep in mind that whistleblower protection laws only cover those who follow the established legal process; it’s not for those who go public.
IF LIZARD PEOPLE ARE NOT INVOLVED
Let’s leave the aliens out of it for a moment. Suppose you are a scientist for the Department of Energy helping to develop some revolutionary carbon capture technology. It uses minimal energy, works in seconds, and turns carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere into a stable, harmless solid.
But the government classified it for some reason (as it does for too many things). Maybe there’s a proprietary process involved, or a fear that terrorists might reverse-engineer the tech for malevolent purposes. But you are convinced that the benefits of revealing the technology greatly outweigh the risks. The planet is getting hotter, and you could save the world.
You document your concerns and go through the chain trying desperately to get someone to listen, but no one does. The classification remains. So you leak it to the journal Nature (though are careful to protect the parts that can be reverse-engineered by bad guys). The revelation causes an uproar for obvious reasons.
Legally, you are on the hook for this, even if you just saved the planet Earth. Among the consequences you might face include being charged for violating the Espionage Act for leaking classified information that could benefit a foreign nation. You could be sued by the government. You could lose your security clearance, obviously. You could also lose your job and be barred from other government or contractor jobs.
WHAT DEFENSE DO YOU HAVE?
Bigley says that such a “positive” hypothetical whistleblower would have a hard time in a court of law.
“It is all subjective,” he explained. “Who is to say what is and isn’t for the public good? The government might have a compelling reason to keep such a secret, so the ‘public good’ defense wouldn’t really fly from a legal standpoint—at least not under existing law.”
Whether it moves the needle in the court of public opinion is another matter entirely, however. If the public response to such a revelation were strong enough, from a pragmatic or political standpoint, the government might shy away from prosecution. “But I would not advise anyone to be the test case for that.”
Another possible outcome is something called jury nullification. “The government might prosecute the whistleblower, and the 12 people on a jury might agree that it met the legal requirements for a conviction, but still refused to convict the person.” Again, he emphasized, he would not advise anyone to roll the dice on such an outcome.
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED
And so it goes. Whether you work in the UFO warehouse at Area 52, are the surgeon who handles the alien autopsies, or are the designer of the amazing climate cleaning machine, if your work is classified, you can’t blow the whistle on it for the public good and expect the law to work in your favor. “It’s just not a category of protection,” said Bigley, “but it’s one of those things that, arguably, a case could be made that there should be. There just isn’t right now, and I’m not sure how you could create a standard that somebody could even follow.”
Though your career is over and you are sitting in a jail cell, you are still, ethically, at least, on solid footing. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, your act did the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a matter of deontology, you had a duty to do something so intrinsically good and right. And ultimately, good government should be as transparent as possible and accountable to its citizens. And you can reflect on all this as you decay in a federal penitentiary. Don’t worry, though. You’ve got a heck of a book deal waiting for you on the other side.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on Twitter, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
For a number of years, the Admiral Wilson UFO document, which previously used to be considered a hoax, has been in the public domain. But as the UFO disclosure pace fastened, the hoax is seemingly turning into an authentic document that author & researcher Richard Dolan called the “UFO leak of the century.” Moreover, to confirm the authenticity of Wilson’s UFO leak, there are two credible personalities: Standford professor Gary Nolan and former manager of Special Projects for Los Alamos Labs, USN Vet, Oke Shannon (his name is mentioned in the document).
Brief Overview of Wilson-Davis Memo
In 2002, after a meeting with former Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, who had been the head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs back in the 1990s, Dr. Eric Davis, a former Pentagon physicist supposedly took a transcript of the conversation.
Somehow, these documents found their way into the public domain after they were discovered in the files of the now deceased Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. These 15 pages of notes describe Admiral Wilson’s discovery of a deeply classified program to study extraterrestrial technology.
During this alleged conversation, Admiral Wilson tells Eric Davis about a series of programs that he discovered hidden deep within the black project’s records of the Pentagon that were actively involved in attempts to reverse engineer a recovered craft that they believed could operate in air, sea, space or perhaps even in other dimensions. The program manager concluded that the craft was not man-made.
Astrophysicist Eric Davis during an interview with New York Post.
The claims have been hotly debated among ufologists but never corroborated. The DIA director at the time, Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson has reportedly denied it all. Numerous national security experts and researchers have also dismissed it as a hoax. (Source)
But one of the other primary individuals cited in the document, astrophysicist Eric Davis has not directly addressed it in public, only fueling suspicions that there might be something to it. And Davis alluded to the possibility of some of the claims contained in the alleged memo as recently as last year in an interview in The New York Times.
Key Witness
Jay Anderson, a founder of Project Unity has recently interviewed Oke Shannon, whose name is mentioned in the documents multiple times. Shannon confirmed that “what was said about him in these notes is accurate, further proving that the conversation between Admiral Wilson and Eric Davis did indeed take place, and they really did discuss the reality that a recovered, non-human vehicle, is being studied in extreme secrecy by a shadowy, quasi-governmental working group that is evading standardized oversight, operating outside of the reservation of government control,” wrote Anderson.
Jay Anderson with Oke Shannon and his wife Linda. Credit: Facebook
Oke Shannon is a US Navy Veteran and a physicist. He was the manager of all Special Projects at Los Alamos National Labs, one of the highest funded and most secretive US Government Research Facilities in the United States.
Below is a transcript of the conversation held between Oke Shannon (OS) and Jay Anderson (JA) discussing the Wilson-Davis Memo: (Source)
JA: I think it’s important that we just get your side of this on the record so I would just like to be able to ask you first of all whether or not you personally know Dr. Eric W Davis.
OS: Yeah! I didn’t work with him day in and day out but I did work with him. I know him fairly well. (Shannon said he got to know Davis through mutual projects and mutual acquaintances.)
JA: Do you personally know Admiral Thomas R Wilson?
OS: Yes I do. Of course, I know of him but I read somewhere that his response was Oke who? and I thought that was kind of funny. I’m sure that my memory of him is stronger than his memory of me because he became a flag officer, and I went off.
JA: Did Admiral Wilson get in contact with you in 2001 or 2002 inquiring into the background and overall trustworthiness of Dr Eric Davis?
OS: Earlier than that. This was in 1999. I got this phone call and it was from Admiral Wilson. He wanted to know was could he trust Eric Davis. I mentioned that YES I believe that Eric Davis was an honorable and conscientious scientist and that he would honor any restrictions the Admiral might put on.
JA: One last question on these notes. I just wanted to kind of get it in a confirmatory statement. So, in these notes that were recovered from Dr. Edgar Mitchell’s estate that are a transcription of an alleged meeting that took place between Admiral Wilson and Dr. Eric Davis. It’s mentioned within the trust a transcript of their conversation that you were difficult to get in touch with at the time you were in poor health due to heart conditions and were not easy to get hold. So this is true in of itself you were struggling with that?
OS: Yeah so it was difficult to get in touch with and I might add to that I’m still difficult to get in touch with.
Credit: Congress.gov
During 2022 US Congress hearings on UFOs, Rep. Mike Gallagher asked Ronald Moultrie, the top Pentagon intelligence official, and Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, whether they were aware of an unverified 2002 document known as the “Wilson-Davis memo.” (Source)
“There’s nothing we can offer or help out with on your request,” a spokesperson for the federal think tank said. As for Moultrie and Bray, they told Gallagher that they were unfamiliar with the Wilson-Davis document. The fact the document was even broached — and then entered into the official hearing record — was shocking to those who have followed the saga.
However, not many would be satisfied with the Pentagon’s response to Rep. Gallagher on the Wilson-Davis leak. There is another expert named Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford Professor who claimed that the documents are “genuine.” He told investigative journalist Ross Coulthart that he knows Eric Davis and that he would not lie. “You know Eric is the kind of character that it’s just impossible for him to lie,” Nolan added.
Nolan asserted that the document was ultimately leaked. “Why would Eric Davis lie about writing something that he never intended to go public in the first place? He was just doing what an intelligence agent does on a regular basis which is write reports of what it is that they’ve been doing,” he said.
Davis, who is now a senior project engineer at the government-funded The Aerospace Corporation, worked on the Pentagon’s secret UFO program AATIP. He also said that some of the materials taken from the found UFOs have so far been unidentifiable. “We couldn’t make [the materials] ourselves,” Davis told the Times. (Source)
Interview with Jay / Project Unity (September 2, 2021)
The Wilson/Davis Notes: The Final Act? (September 6, 2021)
Additional Background
The following documents were “leaked” or uploaded to IMGUR (an image sharing site) on April 19, 2019. However, they did not start making waves within the UFO community, until sometime in the first week of June 2019.
With no provenance, it is unclear if the documents are legitimate, and even if they are, it is even more unclear if the content outlined within is credible. Allegedly, they contain the notes of Dr. Eric Davis, Chief Science Officer at EarthTech International, founded by Dr. Hal Puthoff. They outline a 2002 meeting between Dr. Davis, and Admiral Thomas Ray Wilson, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. During this meeting, many things were discussed including Admiral Wilson stating he was denied access to UFO related information.
It should be noted – this particular story involving Admiral Wilson has been around since at least 2001, nearly two decades ago. It first made an appearance in a lecture by Dr. Steven Greer, given in Portland, Oregon on September 12, 2001. During this speech, according the transcript, Dr. Greer said the following:
“To say that some of these witnesses are terrified is an understatement. You know, I feel like I’ve been the cosmic hand-holder for ten years. I had to go to the Pentagon. I was asked by the head of intelligence for the Joint Staffs, who had an office not far from the section that was blasted yesterday. This admiral, Tom Wilson, who was the J2 position, the head of intelligence Joint Staff and I, met along with one of the Apollo astronauts and a couple of these military witnesses, one of whom has not been recorded because of security reasons–his family were some of the original directors of NACA who saw some of the extraterrestrial bodies brought into Langley way back. He found this out on a deathbed confession from his father. But in this meeting with the Admiral, we [came to a conclusion]based on information I had given the Admiral, which had included some of the code names–you want code names? Project Red Light, Project Looking Glass, Magi Control, Royal Ops, Cosmic Ops. Don’t walk, run to anyone you know who has access and ask them to go into these classified areas and take whatever they can out and hand it to me. We’ll take a walk on the beach, and I’ll take full responsibility for it. I’ve been doing it. I’m a big boy. I’m willing to do it. Nobody has to be identified, because we have concluded the following: None of those projects have legal classification controlling authority. Why? They’ve opted out of the system because they have subverted it. And essentially the head of intelligence Joint Staffs said, “I am horrified that this is true. I have been in plenty of black projects, but when we tried to get into this one,” he was told, and I quote, “Sir, you do not have a need to know.” The head of intelligence Joint Staffs. You don’t have a need to know. Neither did the CIA director, and neither did the President. Who the hell does? Well, a bunch of bureaucrats and corporate and other people who have these projects, and people within the National Reconnaissance Office, NSA, and very compartmentalized islands that are free-standing islands that basically operate as their own sovereign nation. We can prove that they’ve violated the Constitution of the United States. They were operating outside the rule of law, a priori, they cannot hide behind the law by enforcing National Security Act regulations on anything they have. Which means that somebody can haul an entire ET spacecraft out of a place, and I’m asking them to do it, and do it now. We’re ready to roll!”
On July 4, 2008, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, recounted the story during his appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live. The segment is available here:
In August of 2008, investigative journalist Billy Cox contacted Admiral Wilson, who denied many aspects to the rumors. Cox wrote:
“A former high-ranking military intelligence official rumored to have been snubbed in his attempts to obtain sheltered UFO data insists he never even bothered to look for it.
‘Never,’ retired Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson replied Tuesday when asked if he’d ever been barred from retrieving classified material, exotic or otherwise, during his career.”
In July of 2019, I interview retired police Lieutenant Tim McMillan. Armed with his experience and research of Special Access Programs (SAPs) for his article published on THE WARZONE, along with his long career as a law enforcement officer, he weighed in on the Admiral Thomas Wilson leaks.
That segment is available below:
The interview above is an excerpt from a longer interview, available here.
In June of 2020, Cox ran another story denying any involvement in the meeting that allegedly took place with Dr. Eric Davis. Cox wrote:
“The admiral at the center of controversial notes describing his inability to access a classified UFO research program says the documents are bogus. Furthermore, he says the alleged author of those notes, physicist Dr. Eric Davis, never interviewed him.”
In July of 2020, I interview Alejandro Rojas. This is the segment on the Wilson/Davis documents:
The interview above is an excerpt from a longer interview, available here.
You can find the documents below for your own perusal.
Official Statements
In the interest of accuracy and not relying on third/fourth hand hearsay, The Black Vault aims to archive official statements (if any) from key players involved or that surround this story. This is a fresh objective, so there are many blanks, however, I am waiting for additional quotes. As they come in, this page will be updated and posted on social media.
Uncovering the Martian Mysteries: What NASA doesn't want you to know!
Uncovering the Martian Mysteries: What NASA doesn't want you to know!
A NASA scientist was studying images of a region of Mars called "Cydonia" when something caught his eye. He had to take a second to process what he was seeing. He grabbed a magnifying glass. There was no doubt.
Image of a glowing orb hovering above the surface of Mars.
On the surface of Mars, 140 million miles from Earth, was a structure in the shape of a human face.
It was huge; about a mile wide; and showed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Around the Face were pyramids and structures that didn't look natural. They look like they were built... by someone.
The following day, NASA held a press conference. Of the thousands of photos sent back from Mars, all anyone asked about was The Face.
Who built it and why? Is it a message from an advanced civilization now long extinct? Is it a religious artifact? Is it solid like the Great Sphinx? Or could it contain chambers like the Great Pyramid?
Then NASA threw cold water on the speculation. They said there was a second photograph of the area taken shortly after. And that photo showed that the face was nothing more than an optical illusion.
Small problem. That second photo doesn't exist. So why did NASA lie?
This and much other alien artifacts are shown and analyzed in the next video.
Footage shows NASA satellite firing green laser beams to Earth
Footage shows NASA satellite firing green laser beams to Earth
On Sept. 16, 2022, motion-sensing cameras set up by museum curator Daichi Fujii to capture meteors instead caught the laser beams of NASA's ICESat-2 satellite as it passed over Japan. It's the first time the ICESat-2 team has seen footage of the lasers at work in orbit.
The beams were synchronized with a tiny green dot that was briefly visible between the clouds. He guessed it was a satellite, so he investigated orbital data and got a match. NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite 2, or ICESat-2, had flown overhead that night.
ICESat-2 was launched in September 2018 with a mission to use laser light to measure the height of Earth's ice, water, and land surfaces from space. The laser instrument, called a lidar, fires 10,000 times a second, sending six beams of light to Earth. It precisely times how long it takes individual photons to bounce off the surface and return to the satellite.
Now, this is an example of a common laser beam used to measure the height of the ice, water and land surface of the earth from space but it also indicates that they may have the knowledge to use such technology as an energy weapon to shoot laser beams or microwaves from space when it comes to warfare, to carry out a staged alien attack, such as the infamous Blue Beam project or to attack individuals or groups in which people become sick, causing the infamous 'Havana syndrome'.
Solar Warden: Unraveling the Mystery of America’s Secret Space Program
Solar Warden: Unraveling the Mystery of America’s Secret Space Program
The enigma of the Solar Warden, an alleged top-secret space program shrouded in mystery, has captured the imaginations of conspiracy theorists and UFO enthusiasts alike for decades. Stemming from a mix of leaked information, unverifiable whistleblower accounts, and an overarching suspicion of governmental secrecy, the Solar Warden project continues to be a tantalizing puzzle for those seeking the truth about extraterrestrial contact and hidden space programs.
Gary McKinnon: The Man Behind the Revelation:
In the year 2000, a British hacker named Gary McKinnon became obsessed with the idea that governments were covering up the existence of UFOs. McKinnon, a computer expert, decided to dig into US government computers to uncover the truth. The information he claimed to have found was so alarming that it sent the US government into a full-blown panic, leading to a decade-long pursuit to prosecute him.
Gary McKinnon
McKinnon’s Discovery:
Gary McKinnon allegedly discovered evidence of a highly classified space program known as Solar Warden. According to the information he found, this program involved a fleet of spacecraft designed to guard the Earth from potential extraterrestrial threats. Additionally, McKinnon claimed to have seen a list of “non-terrestrial officers” and details of secret space transfers. Although McKinnon has admitted to hacking into US government computers, the specific details of what he saw have never been fully verified.
Some believe that Solar Warden has connections to another top-secret government project called Aurora. Aurora is rumored to be a triangular-shaped space plane that could potentially be linked to the increased sightings of triangular UFOs since the 1980s. Speculations about the existence of Aurora have been fueled by coverage in aviation magazines and alleged sightings by civilian witnesses.
The Controversy Surrounding Solar Warden:
Skeptics of Solar Warden argue that it would be nearly impossible to keep such a large program secret, as those involved would eventually talk. However, some whistleblowers have indeed come forward, claiming to have been part of the secret space program. Individuals such as Laura Eisenhower (great-granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower) and Andrew Basiago have shared their stories, which include accounts of teleportation, time travel, and even armed conflicts with alien species.
Nevertheless, the credibility of these whistleblowers is often questioned, as their stories seem to resemble plotlines from popular science fiction shows and books. Furthermore, some of these individuals, like Corey Goode, have been exposed as frauds when forced to testify under oath.
The Reality of Solar Warden:
The existence of Solar Warden remains a subject of debate and controversy, with only Gary McKinnon’s testimony and the unverifiable accounts of alleged whistleblowers as evidence. The logistics of such a program would require immense international cooperation and secrecy. Yet, the allure of a hidden space program designed to protect humanity from extraterrestrial threats continues to captivate the imagination.
VIDEO:
America’s Secret Space Program and the Alien Connection: Solar Warde
Solar Warden is a captivating and enigmatic tale that highlights the ongoing curiosity and fascination with the possibility of secret space programs and extraterrestrial life. While the truth about Solar Warden may never be definitively proven, the mystery surrounding it will undoubtedly continue to intrigue and inspire those who believe in the existence of UFOs and hidden government projects.
The Gateway Process: Unraveling the CIA’s Secret Space & Time Travel System
The Gateway Process: Unraveling the CIA’s Secret Space & Time Travel System
The United States military has long been in pursuit of creating super soldiers, employing various methods like performance-enhancing drugs, brain implant technology, and even genetic engineering. However, in 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell submitted a groundbreaking report to US Army Intelligence that delved into the world of out-of-body experiences and intelligence gathering. This report, titled “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process,” explored the idea of the Gateway Process, a classified system that enables anyone to travel through space and time using their consciousness.
The Gateway Process
According to Colonel McDonnell’s report, the Gateway Process is a step-by-step guide on how to achieve an out-of-body experience for intelligence gathering purposes. Advanced Gateway participants can not only project their consciousness to a different place but also completely remove it from this reality. This allows them to travel anywhere in the universe and at any point in time.
The idea behind the Gateway Process is based on the concept that our universe is a construct created by our minds. By using the Gateway Process, one can exit this construct and see reality for what it truly is. The 30-page Gateway report was classified, primarily because anyone can learn to do it, and its implications have intrigued researchers and conspiracy theorists alike.
The Absolute and the Universal Hologram
In his report, Colonel McDonnell introduces the concept of the Absolute, an omnipotent and omniscient energy field that exists without boundaries, occupying every dimension, including the time-space dimension where our physical existence takes place. The Absolute, which some might consider synonymous with the concept of God, is responsible for creating the universe and the world we perceive as reality. Our reality, in turn, is a layer on top of other dimensions, all residing within the Absolute.
The idea of the Universal Hologram suggests that the Absolute projects a hologram of itself to attain self-consciousness. This hologram serves as the basis of all creation and reality, and understanding it could help individuals comprehend the nature of the universe and themselves. McDonnell’s report also highlights similarities between the concept of the Absolute and various religious beliefs, citing examples from Hebrew mystical philosophy, Christian theology, and Eastern religions.
The CIA’s Involvement and the Missing Page Controversy
The CIA’s involvement in the Gateway Process has sparked curiosity and debate, especially surrounding the controversy of a missing page from the Gateway report. Despite numerous attempts by the public to pressure the CIA into releasing the missing page, the CIA maintained that they never had it. However, in 2021, the Monroe Institute released the complete report, including the missing page, which discusses the value of the Gateway Process as a tool for self-discovery and understanding the nature of the universe.
The Potential Risks and Benefits
While some individuals who have practiced the Gateway Process report increased self-awareness, creativity, and clarity in their daily lives, others have experienced negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and, in rare cases, psychosis. Although Colonel McDonnell recommended the military pursue the Gateway Process, the potential risks and benefits of the technique remain debated.
The Gateway Process is a fascinating concept that merges science, consciousness, and the potential for time and space travel. While the CIA’s involvement and the classified nature of the Gateway report have fueled conspiracy theories and speculation, the idea of transcending our perceived reality and exploring the true nature of the universe remains a captivating subject for researchers and enthusiasts alike.
Smithsonian Cover-Up: Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon
Smithsonian Cover-Up: Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon
In 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to declare the Grand Canyon off-limits to all timber and mining operations. It would take another 11 years for Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park.
Sensing a final opportunity for adventure, explorer G.E. Kincaid took a boat down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The canyon was rich in minerals like gold, silver and copper and Kincaid wanted to see what he could find before the area was closed off for good.
About 40 miles up-river from the El Tovar Crystal canyon, Kincaid saw stains in the sediment formation about 2,000 feet up. He tied off the boat and got out to investigate.
Kincaid couldn't find a trail, but after a short hike he found something interesting covered in desert brush. Steps. Hundreds of them. Carved in sandstone. Steps that wound their way up to a high shelf on the side of the canyon.
He followed the steps until he came across a cavern entrance. An entrance that was clearly man made.
Kincaid entered the cavern and turned on his flashlight. On the walls he saw writing. But it wasn't English or Native American writing. It was Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics.
Kincaid lifted his flashlight and saw that the tunnel ran far into the distance. He didn't realize it at the time, but this was only the beginning.
Interesting to know that Smithsonian denies the story of the Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon and they came up with the following explanation in an attempt to debunk the story.
Smithsonian: Backstory: On April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette ran the following headline: “Explorations in Grand Canyon; Mysteries of Immense Rich Cavern Being Brought to Light; Jordan Is Enthused; Remarkable Find Indicates Ancient People Migrated from Orient.” The article includes testimony of one G. E. Kincaid who says that he, traveling solo down the Green and Colorado Rivers, discovered proof of an ancient civilization—possibly of Egyptian origin. The story also asserts that a Smithsonian archaeologist named S. A. Jordan returned with Kincaid to investigate the site. However, the Arizona Gazette appears to have been the only newspaper ever to have published the story. No records can confirm the existence of either Kincaid or Jordan.
In the following video 'The Why Files' provides a detailed explanation and analysis on this possible archaeological cover-up.
World Govts Hide 13 Crystal Skulls True Origins, Joe Rogan And Dan Aykroyd Discuss It, UFO Sighting News.
World Govts Hide 13 Crystal Skulls True Origins, Joe Rogan And Dan Aykroyd Discuss It, UFO Sighting News.
Here is a great discussion between UFO researcher Dan Aykroyd and Joe Rogan about how 13 crystal skulls true origins were hidden by the world governments and currency give a german credit for making the fakes and distributing them worldwide. Even though the skulls were found many decades apart and each in a different country, they are continually discredited by the scientists working for the museums which are influenced by the gov to say what they are told to say about them.
Nikola Tesla, who has extensive FBI files visible at the FBI website which state his family was from Venus and came to earth to help humanity, but in turn had to accept human lifespan limits. The FBI documents also state that agents visiting Tesla encountered people who said they were from Venus and came to discuss some of his designs.
"In crystal we have a pure evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and although in spite of everything we cannot understand the life of crystals - it is still a living being." - Nikola Tesla, 1900
All in all, I too have visited the main crystal skull in the British Museum some years ago and can say, it has a presence, and aura around it, you cant see, but you can feel it. There is static energy within it that seems to connect with those around it. 100% alien in origin.
An ancient virus that has lain frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 48,500 years has become the oldest ever revived so far, scientists say.
It is among seven types of viruses in the permafrost that have been resuscitated after thousands of years.
The youngest had been frozen for 27,000 years and the oldest, called Pandoravirus yedoma, has been frozen for 48,500 years.
Although the viruses are not considered a risk to humans, scientists warn that other viruses exposed by melted ice could be 'disastrous' and lead to new pandemics.
The 48,500-year-old virus is a pandoravirus, which infects single-cell organisms known as amoebas. Image A shows the isolated egg-shaped particle of pandoraviruses with a small hole or opening called an ostiole (white arrowhead). B shows a mixture of pandoravirus particles and 'megavirus' particles with a 'stargate' - a white starfish-like structure (white arrowhead)
Pandoravirus yedoma was found in permafrost 52ft (16m) below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia
REVIVED VIRUS TYPES
- Pandoravirus
- Cedratvirus
- Megavirus
- Pacmanvirus
- Pithovirus
'48,500 years is a world record,' Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University in France, told the New Scientist.
Named after pandora's box, pandoravirus is a genus of giant virus first discovered in 2013, and the second largest in physical size of any known viral genus after pithovirus.
Pandoravirus is one micrometre long and 0.5 of a micrometre wide, meaning that it is visible with a light microscope.
This particular 48,500 year-old specimen was found in permafrost 52ft (16m) below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia.
Professor Claverie and his colleagues previously revived two 30,000-year-old viruses from permafrost, the first of which was announced in 2014.
All nine viruses are capable of infecting single-cell organisms known as amoebas — but not plants or animals. However, other frozen viruses could be very dangerous to plant and animal life, including humans.
Some 65 per cent of Russian territory is classed as permafrost — ground that remains permanently frozen even during summer months.
But, as temperatures rise due to global warming, the ground is now starting to thaw out, coughing up animals and objects that have been frozen for thousands of years.
It has even spawned an industry reliant on the wooly mammoth — which went extinct some 10,000 years ago — as hunters go in search of unearthed skeletons so they can extract their tusks and sell them to ivory dealers.
But the discovery of such well-preserved specimens has also given rise to the fear that diseases which the animals may have carried could be unfrozen with them, and, unlike their hosts, may survive being thawed out.
Professor Claverie warned last year of 'extremely good' evidence that 'you can revive bacteria from deep permafrost'.
He even discovered one such virus himself — pithovirus — which, when defrosted from permafrost began attacking and killing amoebas.
While the pithovirus, which had been frozen for some 30,000 years before the experiment, is harmless to humans, Professor Claverie said it demonstrates that long-frozen viruses can 'wake up' and begin re-infecting hosts.
Scientists disagree about the exact age of the Arctic ice cap, the permafrost which surrounds it, and therefore the age of the objects it contains.
Pictured, elongated particle of a pithovirus (1.9 micrometres in length) exhibits a single apex cork-like structure (white arrowhead)
But most defrosted discoveries that have been uncovered so far date from the last ice age, around 115,000 to 11,700 years ago.
In their research paper, Professor Claverie and colleagues say the release of live bacteria or archaea that have remained in cryptobiosis in permafrost for millions of years a potential 'public health concern'.
'The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,' they say.
'As unfortunately well documented by recent (and ongoing) pandemics, each new virus, even related to known families, almost always requires the development of highly specific medical responses, such as new antivirals or vaccines.'
The Arctic is of course more sparely populated than other parts of the world, but Professor Claverie said more people are now going there to mine resources such as gold and diamonds.
Unfortunately, the first step in mining these resources is to strip away the upper layers of permafrost, thus exposing people to viruses.
'How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions (UV light, oxygen, heat), and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate,' the team say.
'But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.'
This nine viruses are detailed further in the new preprint paper, yet to be peer-reviewed, on the bioRxiv server.
Last month, scientists warned that the chance of a virus 'spilling over' to another species increases with the melting of glaciers — slowly moving rivers of ice.
Meltwater from the glaciers can transport pathogens to new hosts, making parts of the Arctic potential 'fertile ground for emerging pandemics'.
KILLER VIRUSES COULD BE RELEASED FROM MELTING ICE IN THE ARCTIC, STUDY WARNS
Glaciers that are melting amid rising global temperatures could be the cause of the next deathly pandemic, a study said.
Scientists investigated how climate change may affect the risk of 'spillover' – a virus jumping to another species – by examining samples from Lake Hazen in the Arctic.
Lake Hazen, seen from above in this NASA image, is the largest High Arctic freshwater lake in the world
They found that the chance of a spillover event increases with the melting of glaciers, as the meltwater can transport pathogens to new hosts.
A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of this 'viral spillover', the experts warn.
'Spillover risk increases with runoff from glacier melt, a proxy for climate change,' say the researchers in their paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
'Should climate change also shift species range of potential viral vectors and reservoirs northwards, the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics.'
What Could Go Wrong?! 48,500-Year-Old Siberian Virus is Revived
What Could Go Wrong?! 48,500-Year-Old Siberian Virus is Revived
The world’s oldest known frozen and dormant virus has been revived in a French laboratory leading many to express concerns about the dangers of bringing to life ancient microbes. The virus was removed from the Siberian permafrost in Russia’s far east and is 48,500 years old, offering proof that viruses are incredibly hardy and capable of surviving indefinitely when they’re preserved in a frozen state.
Melting Siberian Permafrost in a Virus-Filled Pandora’s Box
This particular virus is actually one of nine different types of viruses that have been resuscitated from Siberian permafrost samples in recent years. That includes seven viruses resuscitated for this new study, and two other approximately 30,000-year-old viruses brought back to life by the same team of researchers from other samples taken in 2013. The youngest of these viruses was frozen 27,000 years ago.
As reported in the non-peer-reviewed journal bioRxiv, the 48,500-year-old virus has been named Pandoravirus yedoma , in reference to Pandora’s box. The virus was found in a sample of permafrost taken from 52 feet (16 m) below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in the Russian Republic of Yakutia.
The first-ever pandoravirus was one of the two viruses found in 2013, although that one was of a different type altogether. “48,500 years is a world record,” Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and the lead author of the permafrost viral study, told the New Scientist .
In addition to its age, the other remarkable feature of this pandoravirus is its size. Classified as a type of giant virus, Pandoravirus yedoma is approximately one micrometer long and .5 micrometers wide. This means they can be examined directly under a microscope. It contains approximately 2,500 genes, in contrast to the miniscule modern viruses that infect humans that possess no more than 10 to 20 genes.
Climate change and the resulting thawing of the permafrost could release a mass of new Siberian viruses into the atmosphere.
Climate Change and the Threat of Permafrost Viral Release
Given the disturbing coronavirus pandemic the world has just experienced, it might seem alarming that these scientists are intentionally reviving long-lost viruses previously hidden in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. But they say this research is necessary to evaluate the dangers associated with climate change.
One quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost,” they wrote in their newly published paper. With the thawing of the permafrost, organic matter which has been frozen for as many as a million years is thawing out. One of the effects of this is the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, amplifying the greenhouse effect.
"The other is that “part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” explained the authors in bioRxiv. Only by extracting viruses from permafrost samples and reviving them in controlled conditions, the scientists claim, will it be possible to evaluate the nature of the threat they might pose to human health and safety in a warmer, permafrost-free future.
Since permafrost covers more one-fourth of all land territory in the Northern Hemisphere, this is not an idle concern. The viral load currently locked up in permanently frozen ground is undoubtedly massive, and if it were all released over the course of a couple of decades it could conceivably set off an avalanche of new viral infections in a variety of host species.
None of these victims would be immune to the impact of viral agents that had been out of circulation for tens of thousands of years. Immune systems would eventually adjust, but that might happen too late to prevent a catastrophic loss of life that cuts across the microbial-, plant- and animal-life spectrums.
The 48,500-year-old Siberian virus is a pandoravirus, which infects single-cell organisms known as amoebas.
Immortal Viruses May Be Returning Soon, in Quantities too Astounding to Imagine
Concerns about permafrost melting are not only theoretical. The once-frozen ground has already started to thaw in some areas, and that has allowed scientists to recover frozen and well-preserved specimens of animals that lived during the Paleolithic period.
In recent years the remains of wooly rhinos that went extinct 14,000 years ago have been found, and in one instance scientists recovered a 40,000-year-old wolf’s head that was in almost pristine condition. Wooly mammoth remains have proven especially easy to find in the freshly-thawed soil, so much so that a black-market industry has arisen in which mammoth tusks removed from illicitly unearthed mammoth skeletons are being sold to ivory traders.
What concerns scientists about this development is that potent infectious agents may be hiding dormant inside these well-preserved ancient animal remains. It is notable that the 27,000-year-old virus found in this new study was not removed from the lake bottom sample, but was instead extracted from frozen mammoth excrement taken from a different permafrost core.
Needless to say, ancient viruses released from thawed animal hosts would be more likely to evolve into something threatening to humans than a virus that specifically attacks microbes like amoeba.
Winter landscape and frozen lake in Yakutia, Siberia.
The Hidden Danger of Ancient Bacteria and Viruses in the Thawing Permafrost
In their research paper, Professor Claverie and his colleagues emphasized how dangerous ancient bacteria and viruses could be to present-day life forms of all types. Even if frozen in deeper levels of permafrost for millions of years, they could become active again should the permafrost disappear.
In comparison to outbreaks from modern viruses, “the situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” the French scientists wrote. “As unfortunately well documented by recent (and ongoing) pandemics, each new virus, even related to known families, almost always requires the development of highly specific medical responses, such as new antivirals or vaccines.”
The Arctic regions of the planet are largely free of permanent human settlers. But the researchers point out that more people are visiting the planet’s coldest regions than ever before, mainly to harvest valuable resources like oil, gold and diamonds that are present in abundance in these previously under-explored areas. In strip-mining operations the upper layers of the permafrost are actually torn out intentionally, meaning that viral exposures during such operations may be unavoidable.
“How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions (UV light, oxygen, heat), and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate,” the scientists concluded. “But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.”
Other scientists have warned of the dangers of viruses being released in the Arctic through the melting of glaciers, which is yet another possible side effect of global warming. This could expose animals and humans to flowing rivers of glacial meltwater that could carry pathogens to new areas further south.
Whether any of these worst-case scenarios come to fruition remains to be seen. But even a small amount of melting, regardless of the cause, could be enough to release some potentially hazardous viral agents into the global environment, where billions of vulnerable people live.
Top image: Colony of microbes, representational image.
According to experts, there’s been a lot of non-human activity in Antarctica that’s not being reported. This clip explores the topic of alien invasions and lost civilizations.
Just about everyone has heard of Area 51, the famous "secret base" that might or might not be holding aliens - and that may be alive or not. There is, however, something strange about Area 51 - and at other top secret facilities, too. As you'll see now. From 2003 to 2009 I lectured at Ryan Wood's annual UFO Crash-Retrieval Conference, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. As is so often the case at such conferences, an attendee came up to me at the 2008 event with a very strange story to tell. Aged around thirty he said that his now-retired father had worked out at Area 51 in the early 1980s, specifically in the development of Stealth technology for military aircraft. The guy said that on several occasions, in the 1990s, he had asked his father about the rumors of crashed UFOs and dead aliens held at the secret base. His father said that the only thing he knew about aliens at Area 51 came from watching TV shows. Indeed, he told his son that he had never seen any evidence at all of alien-related activity at Area 51. But, there was one strange event that the man was willing to share with his son - and which was then shared with me. The story told to me was that on one occasion in January 1981, a pedal bike was found deep in a remote part of thevast amount of land that is collectively known as Area 51. Yes, a bicycle. The highly-sophisticated sensors that are carefully placed all around the facility had picked up the sudden presence of something not far from one such sensor. So, a security team was quickly sent out to investigate. It was that team, I was told, which found the bike. But, there was something very strange about the bicycle: it was extensively damaged - as if it had plummeted to the ground from a great height.
(Nick Redfern) The world's most secret base
Had it fallen from an aircraft? Probably not! It's a fact that unauthorized flights over Area 51, and in the immediate vicinity, are treated very seriously. Any such event over the base would have resulted in drastic (maybe even deadly...) action. And, of course, the base would likely have gone on lock-down. Even NASA's astronauts have almost found themselves in trouble for photographing the facility from space. The guy who shared the story with me said that the finding of the bike was a matter of deep concern: how had it got there? Where was the rider? Who was the rider? Why did the bike look like it had fallen from a great height? There were no answers. As a result, the investigation was finally closed down. Quiet and concerned discussion of the weird affair apparently continued for quite some time though, among those who had heard of it. The whole thing, the man told me, became a bit "of a legend." No doubt!
Now, let's move onto the U.K.'s Porton Down facility. It's located in the English county of Wiltshire. Its overwhelmingly-classified work focuses to a very significant degree on exotic viruses, chemical-warfare and biological-warfare. Although work at Porton Down originally, and secretly, began at the height of the tumultuous First World War, it was not until the dawning of the 1940s that the installation became the central hub for British interest in, and concerns relative to, the expanding realms of chemical- and biological-warfare. From 1946 onward, one year after the successful defeat of Nazi Germany, Porton Down’s work began to focus more on the defensive – rather than chiefly offensive – aspects of such issues, and in 1957 the installation was duly christened the Microbiological Research Establishment. By the late-1970s, a decision was made to place the MRE under the control of a civil body. As a result, significant reorganization duly occurred: on April 1, 1979, the MRE became the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research. Then, in 1995, it was absorbed into the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency. Six years later, there was yet another change: DERA split into two organizations, a private body called QinetiQ, and the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, a body steeped in official secrecy, as a result of the fact that it is an arm of the Ministry of Defense. After that, the facility became known as DSTL, Porton Down.
All of which brings us to a very strange story. Jonathan Downes is the director of the U.K.-base Center for Fortean Zoology. But, it's not just strange creatures like Bigfoot, Nessie, and Mothman that have attracted Downes' attention. It's the issue of Crop Circles too. For years, there have been rumors of classified, military/government investigations into the Crop Circle phenomenon in the U.K. Downes publicly stated something that may have had a bearing on those same rumors. He said, in 2000: "I am aware that midway through 1996 on land adjacent to the Government’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire, a Crop Circle was found. When it was first seen, the circle was still in the process of being formed and had actually been surrounded by both troops and police who had cordoned off the area." I have heard variations on this very odd story over the years, suggesting that an intricate formation was indeed found within the grounds of Porton Down in the mid-90s. Whether it was the work of fence-jumping circle-makers of a very human mind, or the work of something much stranger, is very much still open to debate. Of course, if the formation really was forming as the police and the military watched on, then that effectively rules out a human connection.
(Nick Redfern) A Crop Circle and Porton Down - a strange connection!
It’s a fact that most people who have studied the claims of Bob Lazar focus their attentions on what he had to say about the UFOs allegedly held at S-4, as well as his statements concerning Element 115. There is one issue which doesn’t get the attention that it really should. It’s a part of Lazar’s story which takes things down a path that is filled with disturbing revelations involving the afterlife. One of the many briefing papers that Lazar said he read at S-4 stated that the aliens refer to us, the human race, as what we would call “Containers.” But, containers of what? Well, that’s where things get really controversial. Lazar told KLAS-TV’s George Knapp “religion was created so we have some rules and regulations for the sole purpose of not damaging the containers.”
There followed an awkward conversation which saw Knapp pressing for answers, and Lazar almost squirming because of the nightmarish nature of the story. That’s hardly surprising, because the claimed big secret is that the aliens have an interest in the human soul. Worse, though, they allegedly use the human soul in a way that the U.S. Government doesn’t fully understand. Or, that the government does know, but does not know how to tell the world the awful truth. One of the theories is truly terrifying: that the aliens “feed” on the human soul, on our life-force. In this scenario, the earth is a farm and we are the cattle. On our deaths our souls are reaped and the life-energy sustains the aliens. Far out? Definitely. But, Lazar stands by what he read in those briefing papers. The soul angle has led some UFO researchers to believe that the aliens are actually nothing of the sort. Rather, the theory is that they are high-tech demons! What a story! And, what about the alien that Lazar saw at the S-4 base. Or didn't.
One of the lesser known aspects of the Bob Lazar controversy is that which suggests he just might have seen an alien entity at Area 51 – a live one, no less. The story gets very little publicity, but it’s fascinating in the extreme. The issue of aliens – alive, dead or both at Area 51 -first surfaced from Lazar in early 1989. When asked about that specific matter by George Knapp, Lazar quickly shot down the question in an awkward fashion and changed the subject. Later, though, in what was a private, rather than public, interview, Lazar opened up a bit more. What he had to say was brief but amazing – if true, of course. According to Lazar, “I walked down the hallway at one time I was working down there, and there were these doors – the doors that go to the hangar are smaller than the doors in the corridors and have a 9-inch or 12-inch square window with little wires running through it, just about head level. And as I was walking by, I just glanced in and I noticed – at a quick glance – there were two guys in white lab coats, facing me towards the door.”
Lazar then got to the heart of the matter: the two men were looking down at a small, humanoid figure with long arms, seemingly talking to it. Although Lazar only saw the entity for a second or so, he was in no doubt about what it appeared to be. I say “appeared” because Lazar himself wondered if this was some kind of set-up. He said of this possibility: “Maybe they stuck a doll in front of these guys and made me walk by it and look at it, just to see what my reaction would be.” Such a thing is not at all impossible, as the following brief, but notable, comment from Lazar makes clear: “They play so many mind games there [italics mine].” While enthusiastic UFO researchers may dearly want to believe that living aliens are at Area 51, Lazar’s carefully worded statement suggests we should exercise restraint on this issue – at least until, or if, further vindication comes along.
How about a strange story that came out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, USA? History is made in many and varied ways. For “Harry Palmer” it occurred deep below Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio in the 1980s. I know this, as Palmer contacted me on a dark September 2014 night to share a very strange story – and after reading my 2012 book, The Real Men in Black. As Palmer revealed, he had debated for weeks as to whether or not he should take the plunge and speak to me. On the one hand, he wanted to get my opinions on what it was that he encountered. But, on the other hand, he was somewhat concerned about the possibility of his revelations causing “troubles” – specifically with Uncle Sam. It was around 11:00 p.m. when we started chatting and it was well into the early hours when we finally wrapped things up. I spent the entire time on my back, stretched out on the couch and listening carefully. Although Palmer was somewhat hesitant at first, he soon gained his wits and opened up. What follows is a summary of the strange and sinister experience found himself in, more than a quarter of a century earlier.
Wright-Patterson AFB is a highly secure military installation that has a reputation for allegedly being the home of a number of well-preserved – and some not so well-preserved – corpses of dead aliens, presumably recovered from more than a few UFO crashes. Many UFO skeptics ignore or write-off such claims. Harry Palmer knows better. It was a winter’s night in 1988 when Palmer was ordered to report to one particular building on the base that he had never previously been in, one which was connected to a certain weapons-storage area. On doing so, he was met by three very pale men dressed in dark suits; they directed him to a door which, when opened, revealed a large elevator on the other side. Silently, the black-clad trio motioned him into the elevator. He quickly realized he was descending – and to a fairly deep degree. He was then ushered into a corridor, which had a large vault-like door at its end. One of the three men opened it, and in a strange high-pitched voice, ordered him into the vault. The same man pointed at a large container – perhaps nine feet in length and five feet in width – and ordered Palmer to take a look inside. He did as he was told and was shocked – to the point of feeling nauseous and clammy – by the sight of a badly damaged body of what he, Palmer, could only guess was an extraterrestrial: the head was large, the eyes were huge and black, and the severed torso was skinny.
(Nick Redfern) Dead aliens at Wright-Patterson or a very strange test of national security?
In seconds, Palmer was forcibly taken from the room, then taken to yet another room, and then ordered to sign a document that effectively said that if he ever spoke of what he saw he would be prosecuted to the extent of the law for violating U.S. national security. After signing the document, a deeply worried Palmer was taken back up the elevator and unceremoniously left there to make his way back to his normal place of work. Clearly, this affair makes no sense at all – unless someone was playing weird mind-games with Palmer, although for what bizarre reason one can scarcely guess. After all, why even show him the body in the first place? His work at the base had zero to do with UFOs. The whole thing, I told Palmer, seemed like some bizarre theatrical event, but for whatever purpose was anyone’s guess. Palmer agreed. There was a curious afterword to this particular story: the very day after Palmer contacted me, he received four hang-up phone calls in the early hours of the morning. It was something which led him to regret sharing his experience with me, as he admitted, when he called me back the following night. That I told him hang-up calls in the dead of night – and specifically in relation to UFO issues - were typically attributed to the Men in Black, didn’t really help him to relax. How could it?
“Don’t use my real name if you publish this,” a worried Palmer said, before hanging up with not even a solitary “goodbye.” Yep, another weird night in almost a lifetime of them. After speaking with Palmer for the second and final time, I had to wonder what, exactly, a group of clearly non-human MIB were doing in the depths of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on that mystery-filled night in 1988. Were they working alongside the military? Have the MIB infiltrated the U.S. Government? If so, which side is in control? Is anyone in control? It was questions like these that made me wonder just how weird the MIB issue really was – and still is. And how weird those bases are, too!
Nikola Tesla's Terrifying Invention Has Just Been Revealed In Old Documents Nov 2022
Nikola Tesla's Terrifying Invention Has Just Been Revealed In Old Documents Nov 2022
We idolize our tech heroes in this era of technological obsession. The leaders of the technology sector are treated like rock stars, and their announcements of cutting-edge technology are heard by billions of people worldwide. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, who held nearly 300 patents and was in charge of such ground-breaking technology as the alternating current, was one of the first tech icons.
Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American engineer and physicist made numerous advances in the generation, transmission, and use of electric power. He invented the first alternating current motor and pioneered the development of AC generation and transmission technology.
Despite his notoriety and respect, he never succeeded in turning his innumerable inventions into long- term financial success, unlike Thomas Edison, his main rival and former employer. In this video, we’ll tell you about Nikola Tesla’s last message and his prediction to future generations revealed in old documents.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.