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!!!
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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.
22-11-2023
EVIDENCE OF NON-TERRESTRIAL OBJECTS SURVEILLING EARTH COULD BE REVEALED IN NEW RESEARCH EFFORT
EVIDENCE OF NON-TERRESTRIAL OBJECTS SURVEILLING EARTH COULD BE REVEALED IN NEW RESEARCH EFFORT
During the summer of 1954, the United States Air Forcewas on high alert. A pair of mysterious objects had been located in orbit between 400 and 600 miles from Earth, and now officials were in a state of confusion as to what they might represent. Could they be non-terrestrial objects of natural origin, or could they be something else entirely?
A more concerning possibility also lurked in the minds of officials at the time: what if the objects were manmade, and possibly of Soviet origin?
Dr. Lincoln La Paz, then the head of the Extra-Terrestrial Bodies Institute at the University of New Mexico, had been in constant communication with the Air Force about their unusual new problem. For weeks, he shot back and forth between the Palomar Observatory in California and the missile test center at White Sands, New Mexico, until it was finally determined by the astronomer that the objects were indeed natural: they were only meteors.
The story received tremendous attention after it first appeared in Aviation Week, and just days later, a source close to the Army Office of Ordnance Research assured the New York Times that no satellites deemed to be of artificial origin had been detected yet, adding about La Paz’s meteors that “there was absolutely no connection between the reported satellites and flying saucer reports.”
The search for objects in Earth’s orbit had been virgin territory in 1954, and the events in the fall of that year were only a foreshadowing of the kind of public fear yet to come. Once the Soviets actually did launch Sputnik 1 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the early days of October 1957, concerns about a technological gap among Western nations escalated into a full-blown crisis.
The world would never be the same. In the aftermath of the “Sputnik crisis,” the United States accelerated its space-bound efforts, eventually placing its own satellites into orbit, followed by successful manned space missions and, eventually, humans landing on the Moon in July 1969. Today, on any clear night one can look at the night sky and see tiny points of light moving silently along in their positions in orbit, representing objects that range from satellites and the International Space Station, to tiny reflective bits of debris from past space missions that have accumulated in Earth’s orbit steadily over time.
In addition to the satellites we have placed into orbit around our own planet, humans have also sent several spacecraft to further locales, some of which we have positioned around nearby planets like Mars. It seems logical to assume that if there were any intelligent extraterrestrials out there, they might do the same.
This brings to mind an interesting question for modern astronomers: what if aliens have surveilled our planet, either in the past, or even in the present day? If so, how might we detect evidence of their technologies?
(Credit: NASA)
With the amount of debris that clutters the space around our planet today, it would prove difficult to locate any prospective alien probes that may be watching us. Based on current European Space Agency data, there are 5,800 functioning satellites in orbit, with nearly 31,590 debris objects that have been logged and continuously tracked by Space Surveillance Networks.
However, not all objects in orbit around our planet are being tracked. According to current statistical models, smaller space objects between 1 mm and 10 cm could number greater than 131 million.
In short, the orbital area around our planet has become a very cluttered place since the dawn of the Space Age, making it increasingly difficult to search for any possible outliers that might represent evidence of non-terrestrial technological artifacts that might be observing our planet.
That’s why one group of researchers, led by Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and Stockholm University, has undertaken a citizen science effort to search for evidence of such non-terrestrial artifacts in what some might consider an unusual place: data that has already been publicly available for decades.
Prior to the launch of manmade satellites like Sputnik 1 in the late 1950s, Earth’s skies were free of the clutter that hinders modern searches for prospective non-terrestrial objects. According to Villarroel and her team, one way to overcome this problem is by scanning earlier photographic plate projects such as the First Palomar Sky Survey (POSS-1), which is the focus of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project.
“We expect the project to yield many interesting findings over time,” reads a statement on the website of the VASCO Network, “maybe even some anomalous objects and events — could aliens be responsible for any of those?”
“We show that even the small pieces of reflective debris in orbit around the Earth can be identified through searches for multiple transients in old photographic plate material exposed before the launch of the first human satellite in 1957,” the researchers state in the paper’s abstract. According to Villarroel and her coauthors, images depicting what they identify as “simultaneous transients” may hold the key to detecting evidence of non-terrestrial artifacts that may have been lurking in Earth’s orbit since the days prior to Sputnik.
Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and Stockholm University
(Image Credit: Karl Nordlund/Stockholm University)
“About 80% of the very fast bright flashes (glints) in our sky are the result of artificial objects with highly reflective, flat surfaces,” Villarroel recently told The Debrief. These objects, many of them relatively small according to Villarroel, may be found in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth.
“A fast glint like this will look like a star in an image,” Villarroel says, “and sometimes one can see several glints from the same object in an image (or from different ones). Space debris and satellites in geosynchronous orbits can leave multiple glints in an image.
“Multiple glints in sky images is, therefore, a typical signature of artificial objects,” Villarroel says. By looking at some of the earliest photographic plates collected by 20th-century astronomers, the VASCO team thinks they could easily discern the presence of any reflective objects in geosynchronous orbits (GEO) since they would appear as short lines in these photographs, the length of which can be used as an indicator of their speed and position in orbit (satellites at higher GEO altitudes produce fast, transient glints that result from the light they reflect from the Sun).
Of particular interest to Villarroel and her colleagues are the appearances of multiple glints, which may indicate a single object tumbling through space producing a series of flashes as its surfaces reflect sunlight, or possibly even the presence of several objects.
“We propose to look for multiple glints in image data before Sputnik I,” Villarroel told The Debrief. “If such signatures are found in a time when there were no high-altitude satellites, that could imply the presence of Non-Terrestrial Artifacts (NTAs) in orbits around the Earth.”
Although surveying photographic data from pre-satellite times offers obvious benefits to the search for non-terrestrial artifacts, there are challenges for modern researchers using this approach, since multiple glints in older sky survey imagery could be accounted for by a number of other things. These could include defects in the images that produce the appearance of star-like objects which, in fact, may simply be photographic artifacts.
“If one finds multiple glints in an image, we cannot know for sure that the observation is real as some defects might possibly look star-like,” Villarroel says. “And it is difficult to access the original photographic plates to examine the ‘stars’ under a microscope.”
One simple way that Villarroel and her colleagues have proposed to help narrow down any likely anomalies is to search or instances where they appear in a single line.
“The main proposal of the paper is, therefore, to look for an even clearer signature, which is to search for these multiple glints-events that on top of everything, also are aligned along a line,” Villarroel told The Debrief. Unlike plate defects, which could most often be expected to appear randomly across the image, Villarroel says that genuine glints of light detected by cameras, possibly produced by debris or satellites of unknown origin, would produce consistent glints of light along a line in an image.
Villarroel says there are several sources of imagery that astronomers can use for such surveys, many of which are freely available. However, an added benefit of conducting multiple surveys could be that the presence of any anomalies detected in one photographic plate collection, if thereafter found in a separate set of images, could help confirm the presence of a genuine anomaly.
“Many observatories have their photographic plate collections,” Villarroel says. “Finding similar examples of ‘multiple transients’ in other image data sets could help to confirm the effect. Also, we have predicted some shapes and glinting patterns in our recent preprint that one can use to search for the predicted objects in modern datasets.”
Along with her efforts with the Vasco Network, Villarroel is a research team member of The Galileo Project, a scientific effort led by astronomer Avi Loeb aimed at detecting extraterrestrial technological signatures produced by Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs).
“The Galileo project is excellently suited for these searches,” Villarroel told The Debrief.
With decades of imagery now in hand, modern advances in computer imaging and artificial intelligence could prove to be instrumental in helping astronomers make a breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Considering some of the early observations by Lincoln La Paz and other astronomers at the dawn of the Space Age, it would indeed be ironic if it were ever proven that evidence of extraterrestrial technologies had been lurking much closer to home than most would have ever expected.
When asked about some of the intriguing observations that preceded the earliest launch of artificial satellites in 1957, Villarroel says cases from decades ago might indeed be worthy of renewed attention from modern astronomers, especially if the current efforts to analyze photographic plate collections ever turns up anything odd.
“These historical examples would be very interesting for us to look at through the VASCO glasses,” Villarroel says.
Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks.
Alex Dietrich (Ret.) served as one of the nation’s first female strike-fighter aviators as a F/A-18 pilot from 2001-2020.
Yesterday, the President held a press conference on the issue of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) due to a flurry of recent activity.
The nation was captivated by a suspected Chinese reconnaissance balloon floated across the continental United States. This incident prompted NORAD and other U.S. agencies to adjust their radar scans. The filter changes have exposed more unidentified objects, and another three were shot down over the weekend. These events highlight a longstanding domain awareness gap confronting our collective consciousness on three fronts: military defense, aviation safety, and scientific inquiry.
Officials have since disclosed that the Chinese military had previously breached U.S. airspace on at least four other occasions. We are now aware of these earlier incursions due to political and popular pressure to investigate and disclose UAP activity.
“UAP” replaces the antiquated (and stigmatized) term “UFO” to describe “anything in space, in the air, on land, in the sea or under the sea that can’t be identified,” per the FY22 National Defense Authorization Act. The bipartisan-sponsored UAP amendment requires DoD to establish a dedicated UAP program and publish annual unclassified reports to Congress (and thus the public) in the hopes of answering interminable questions.
Are they a threat? Are they natural phenomena? Are they disruptive tech? Should we shoot them down? Who has jurisdiction? If we don’t know what it is, how can we establish who is responsible and pays for the surveillance, response, and subsequent operations? It’s a slippery slope that deters even a hesitant first step toward attempting an answer.
I started asking the same questionsnearly 20 years ago in an F/A-18F flying off the coast of California. My colleagues and I encountered something we could not explain: an anomalous flying object in broad daylight against a clear blue sky and calm waters. Our carrier strike group had been watching anomalous hits on the radar for days. Once airborne, we were vectored and asked to investigate. We merged and visually acquired the object, a matte white oblong shape with no apparent flight control surfaces, visible means of propulsion, or smoke trail. Yet it outmaneuvered us with ease. We communicated in real-time via radio and then debriefed the intelligence team and chain of command back aboard the ship. Another F/A-18F launched and managed to capture video of the object with its forward-looking infrared (FLIR). A screenshot of that video has since become an iconic symbol of UAP encounters.
The Nimitz encounter is one of many. Pilots and credible eyewitnesses on the ground for years have reported and verified objects with unknown provenance and exotic capabilities. It would be irresponsible to suggest that any or all of these reports represent the same tech or are of the same origin. They are, by definition, unidentified. But we do know that collectively these anomalies expose a blindspot in our ability to sense them in the first place, track them in real time, and predict where they might pop up next.
Are UFOs real? Yes. Are they a foreign adversary? Maybe. Are they extraterrestrial in nature? It’s possible. Should we keep investigating? Absolutely.
There are many potential answers to the UAP mystery, and those answers are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Truth is persistent. Whatever is happening here, it will be revealed. How quickly depends on our collective commitment to authorize and resource appropriate agencies who can effectively leverage sensor technology, capture crowdsourced reporting, and mine the collective data.
Despite persistent snickering, anytime the topic of UFOs is broached, NASA has managed to convene a committee of respected high-ranking representatives from the DoD, FAA, and academic institutions for an ongoing UAP study.
The Pentagon’s commitment has evolved from the small Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATIP) program into the robust All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Private industry is rising to the occasion with rapid innovation and agile solutions.
Alex Dietrich in the early 2000s in service with Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41) also known as the “Black Aces”
(Credit: Alex Dietrich).
Enigma Labs is on the leading edge with a mechanism to systematically capture and analyze reporting at scale.
Congress has also made an impressive bipartisan push on the issue, with Senators Gillibrand (D-NY), Rubio (R-FL), Warner (D-VA), Graham (R-SC), Heinrich (D-NM), Blunt (R-MO), and Representative Gallagher (R-WI) speaking out to break the taboo and push agencies to cooperate and take UAP seriously.
The partnership between multiple objective parties, systematic data collection, and careful analytical methods will move us toward reporting and listening, away from ridicule and stigma. We can move the needle away from the unknown and toward the known.
Be vigilant. Stay curious. Look up. We have barely tasted the sky.
Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich (Ret.) served as one of the nation’s first female strike-fighter aviators as a F/A-18 pilot from 2001-2020. She logged more than 1,250 flight hours, 375 carrier-arrested landings, and was awarded a Combat Air Medal for 206 combat missions flown in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). She was also awarded a Bronze Star medal for a boots-on-ground deployment to Afghanistan in 2010. She has since taught leadership, ethics, and critical thinking at the George Washington University, U.S. Naval Academy, and now serves on the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Engineering in Boulder. Dietrich is an advocate for Legacy Flight Academy, a foundation that promotes diversity in aviation, and Wings for Val, supporting women in aviation.
For nearly 18 months, he’s been the first head of the Pentagon’s fledgling office tasked with investigating what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” which military pilots have increasingly reported seeing in the skies.
Kirkpatrick set up an entire system for collecting data, waded through hundreds of reported UFO sightings and batted down whistleblower claims that the government covered up a program to reverse-engineer alien craft. And don’t forget the Chinese spy balloon episode.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, he talked about why he’s stepping down in December and how he sought to “institutionalize the solution for getting at the heart of these anomalies.” The Pentagon has a real interest in deciphering the sharp rise in unidentified crafts spotted by military pilots; if these aren’t aliens, they could be foreign adversaries posing incredibly new threats.
Kirkpatrick, 55, was perhaps the perfect person to lead what’s formally known as the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which was established in July 2022. A physicist who spent decades working in the defense-intelligence arena, he’s open to the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe, having co-authored a hotly-debated paper about alien motherships. But his bottom line is to focus on the science.
“If you are talking with NASA or the European Space Agency, and you’re talking about looking for life out in the universe, it is a very objective, very scientifically sound discussion and discourse,” he said, describing the public discourse. “As that discussion gets closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it turns into science fiction. And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory.”
Part of Kirkpatrick’s work going forward, he added, will be to “raise the level of the conversation” about these unidentified objects.
And yes, we did ask him if aliens are real.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Seligman: You’ve only been in the job less than 18 months. Why are you leaving now?
Sean Kirkpatrick: When I took the job, I promised going in that I would do a year, and we would reevaluate. I have decided to stay on until towards the end of this year because there’s a couple more things I need to finish.
One of those is finishing Volume One of the historical review [required by the law], which really encompasses all of the interviewees that have come in to talk to us. And then laying that out as “Here’s what we’ve been able to prove is true, here’s what we’ve been able to prove is not true,” as a very thorough and objective research product. The legislative requirement for the historical report is not due until June of next year. I decided, because of the desire for more transparency faster, we are doing a Volume One, and then Volume Two will be delivered next year. Volume One covers everything up to about a month ago. Volume Two is going to cover anything new that comes up since we’ve turned on the reporting button on our website.
I deferred my retirement because I was asked to come do this. I set out those goals. It’s been about 18 months. I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.
Seligman: What changes to the office can we expect once you are gone?
Kirkpatrick: It won’t get a new name. They are not going to get a major makeover. The team has done a really exceptional job of setting the foundational stone for the vision I laid out and how we’re going to execute on this. Whoever comes in next, that will be really to execute the rest of those foundational stones and ensure that is projected into the future.
Kirkpatrick: No, these are all expected challenges. The balloon, that’s a very interesting case of the interagency in the U.S. government trying to understand the differences between a known anomalous thing, if you will, and an unknown anomalous thing. Our job is harder than “Hey, there’s a Chinese spy balloon, you know what it is? What is it doing?” That’s not our job. Our job is to understand the unknowns and what could be there. What are the possibilities that threaten us? And how do we get at it? How do I apply technical rigor to go after that “hunt” mission, if you will?
The whistleblowers are an interesting bit. We’ve had greater than 30 people now come in to talk to us. We have investigated every single one of them, every single story, every lead that provided any substantive evidence for us to go after.
David Grusch is a unique instance in that he has refused to come and share any of that information. We still can’t get him to come in. I’ve got five different people who have gone to talk to him to get him to come in. And the answers have always been everything from “We’re not cleared” to “It would jeopardize his whistleblower protections” to “Why can’t we just go get the information that he shared from the IG?” It’s every excuse that I have heard, why not to come in. And that’s been a challenge because now here we are, we’re about to put out Volume One of the historical review, which I believe captures most all of the people that he’s spoken with, but I can’t say that 100 percent because I can’t hear what he thinks he has. If he has evidence, I need to know what that is.
Seligman: What are the biggest accomplishments of your year and a half as the head of AARO?
Kirkpatrick: I laid out a plan about 18 months ago on what we needed to accomplish in order to make this mission area successful and to institutionalize the solution for getting at the heart of these anomalies. That included really several main areas. There was there was an analytic area, there was an operational area. There was a science and technology area. And then there was a strategic messaging or communications information sharing area.
In all of those, I mapped everything that the congressional language asked us to do for the last couple of years and kept a scorecard: These are all the things I needed to accomplish coming into this job.
We have standardized the analytic framework for how we deal with these observations in a very rigorous fashion. We have run that framework successfully now, and are ramping up the number of cases that are being resolved.
Operationally, we have institutionalized how to respond to and mitigate these incidents. We have worked with the Joint Staff and the commands and the combat support agencies and the intelligence community on questions like: When one of these things is observed, how do we get more data? How do we save that data that’s been collected? That was historically a very big problem: That data was not retained. Now data is required to be retained so that we can have something to analyze.
In the science and technology area, how do you look at all of these sensors and ensure that we understand, when an F-35 or an F-22 or ground radar sees an anomalous object, how do we know that’s not a normal object that you just haven’t calibrated against? We’ve run a campaign against those sensors, making sure that we measure each and every one of the unknown objects against them. And we turn those into additional modeling, simulation and training back to the operators so that we can reduce false alarms. The other thing that we’re doing there is a campaign of pattern of life: understanding what is normal, so that you can understand when an anomalous or an abnormal peak and activity occurs.
In the information sharing area: It’s been a long time coming, but we have gotten to the point now where we have a dedicated website. We are pushing material out, it is a living website, there will be updates on a periodic basis.
If I go back to the fundamental definition of a UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] that we had written into law, it is an unknown object that is not initially understood by the sensor or the people observing it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not understandable. It just means that initially when you look at it, you may not understand what that is.
People are subject to optical illusions, sensors are subject to being fooled or spoofed or even just having errors. Understanding what all of that is out in the real world is a very challenging mission space. It is hard to apply science and technology to the real world. It’s easy to do in a lab.
So putting all that together and putting it into an institutionalized space and getting it formalized and getting it into policy and getting it into orders: Those have all been major accomplishments that we set out to do, that I set out to do. And that has been achieved today.
Seligman: Are aliens real?
Kirkpatrick: That is a great question. I love that question. Number one, the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens, right? Because if we don’t prove there are aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard. And that’s not good.
Two, from a scientific perspective: The scientific community will agree that it is statistically invalid to believe that there is not life out in the universe, as vast as the universe is and the number of galaxies and solar systems and planets. That is what part of NASA’s mission is to look for that life. The probability, however, that that life is intelligent and that it has found Earth and that it has come to Earth and that it has repeatedly crashed in the United States is not very probable.
So part of what we’ve been trying to do, and part of what I will continue to do until I’m done, is raise the level of the conversation. Let me explain. If you are talking with NASA or the European Space Agency, and you’re talking about looking for life out in the universe, it is a very objective, very scientifically sound discussion and discourse. As that discussion gets closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it turns into science fiction. And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory.
We need to change the level of the [public] conversation. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve engaged academia to work on a number of scientific papers that look at the probabilities of these things, and what are the signatures associated with that? So that we can benchmark what we’re doing in scientific proofs and in scientific fact and not hearsay and pointing fingers and government cover ups and conspiracies with no evidence of any of them.
Seligman: Is that why you wrote that paper with Harvard professor Avi Loeb about the theory that UAPs are probes from an alien mothership?
Kirkpatrick: That was the start of that work where we were looking at, if you want to believe these hypotheses, what are the signatures that you would expect to see from that? Because if I don’t see any of those signatures, with any of the data that we see, then that’s not a valid hypothesis. That’s how science works. Right? You have to have a hypothesis. You have to have measurables with that hypothesis, and then your data has to meet it. And you have to lay that out in a peer-reviewed journal so that you have something to pin it against.
Seligman: That paper though with your name attached made it look like you were backing the theory. Is this something that you regret?
Kirkpatrick: That paper was in draft when it was leaked. We hadn’t actually finished that paper and it needed a lot of editing before it went out.
Seligman: It wasn’t leaked. Avi Loeb posted it online.
Kirkpatrick: Well, yeah, he posted it without permission.
Seligman: Do you regret your involvement in that?
Kirkpatrick: No, because it’s the same principle. We are standing up for the facts. We are standing up for the scientific method. And this is how you go about doing it. You either do it or you don’t.
Seligman: What’s next for you?
Kirkpatrick: I have a number of things that I’m exploring right now. One of them for certain is going to be consulting, doing some board work, working with a number of folks across the interagency, the space community, the science and technology and intelligence community as we go forward. I think we’ll hear more in the coming month.
Pentagon UFO boss says strange sightings are either 'aliens' or a foreign power - and he hopes it's extraterrestrials
Pentagon UFO boss says strange sightings are either 'aliens' or a foreign power - and he hopes it's extraterrestrials
'If we don't prove it's aliens,' Pentagon UFO chief Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick said, 'then what we're finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard'
Kirkpatrick - formerly a laser physicist for the CIA - added, 'that's not good'
READ MORE: New analysis of 200ft 'saucer-shaped object' spotted over the Andes Mountains in 2010 finds it is 'a genuine UFO,' not 'a camera artifact'
According to the director of the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, 'the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens.'
The alternative to what would be a literally Earth-changing discovery of extraterrestrial life exploring our own planet would be that a rival foreign power could be 'doing stuff in our backyard,' he said.
Dr. Kirkpatrick's 18-month tenure as AARO's first ever director has been laced with controversy, as expected for a mandate once relegated to the scientific fringe.
According to the director of the Pentagon 's UFO investigation office, physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, 'the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens.' Last July, Kirkpatrick described his national security mandate as helping avoid 'technical surprise'
'I'm ready to move on,' Kirkpatrick told Politico Tuesday, upon official confirmation of his retirement. 'I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.'
Dr. Kirkpatrick added that there remains lingering tasks he hopes to have finished — including AARO's congressionally directed 'Historical Record Report' on UFOs, which is due to Congress in June 2024, over six months after Kirkpatrick's departure.
At a press conference this past Halloween, Kirkpatrick announced a new secure reporting mechanism designed to help AARO investigate claims of alleged highly secretive and potentially illegal US government UFO programs.
'The reporting mechanism is for current or former US government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of alleged US government programs or activities related to UAP [UFOs] dating back to 1945,' he said.
In its annual UAP (i.e. UFO) report, published this past October, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office stated that, 'None of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities'
Ever since UFOs exploded back into public consciousness with a series of New York Times exposes in December 2017, government officials, scientists and devotees have reframed the mysteries as unidentified aerial, or anomalous, phenomena: 'UAP.'
The new name hopes to add caution and reduce preconceived notions as to the true nature these airborne mysteries.
When asked at the Halloween press conference whether AARO has reached out to officials from adversarial foreign nations in an effort to pool UAP data, Dr. Kirkpatrick replied that the concept was a non-starter from a national security standpoint.
'We certainly have not reached out to any adversaries, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which they're adversaries,' Kirkpatrick said.
While AARO's annual UAP report released this October found that 'none' of its hundreds of military UFO cases 'have been positively attributed to foreign activities,' Kirkpatrick expressed concern over telling, but less concrete, evidence.
'I am worried from a national security perspective,' Kirkpatrick told CNN in advance of the report's release.
'There are some indicators that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard,' he said.
Last summer, the AARO chief, who once worked on optical and laser physics projects for America's intelligence gathering agencies, including the CIA, described AARO's national security mandate to ABC News as avoiding 'technical surprise.'
To judge from AARO's own presentations to Congress and NASA's UAP advisory panel, the office has zeroed-in on a series of troubling cases involving so-called 'metallic orb' UAP.
This time last year, a classified 22-page report, compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), described hundreds of unresolved cases, some involving 'orbs' caught on drone cameras that were then seen 'suddenly bolting off the screen.'
Some non-government groups, including OSINT specialists Bellingcat, have offered prosaic explanations for one of these 'orbs' — but Kirkpatrick has openly speculated in a paper with Harvard physicist Dr. Avi Loeb that these UAP could be alien probes.
Despite serious concerns from AARO's soon-to-be-departing director that the solution the UAP mystery might prove to be advanced tech flown by a foreign power, evidence exists that these 'metallic orbs' predate even the Cold War era.
Then too, journalists and investigators suspected it was a wartime anti-radar device from one of America's then-adversarial nations, Nazi Germany.
'It could be that those floating silver balls encountered by American airmen over the Reich are another German attempt to create interference for radio communications,' the AP's wartime radio editor wrote.
'The most common misconception is that [the possible phenomena] are all the same thing and they're all extraterrestrial,' as Kirkpatrick told ABC News last July, 'and neither of those are true.'
Have YOU seen one? The Pentagon reveals what the most commonly reported UFO looks like
But that could finally change following the official release of information from the Pentagon about the mysterious aerial phenomena.
The new Department of Defense document reveals characteristics of the typical UFO, including the colour and the shape, velocity, and flight level
Based on clues from reported sightings, the typical UFO has a round shape, usually described as spherical or an orb, with a white or silver colour, often translucent.
It also has a size of between 3 and 13 feet (1 to 4 metres) and usually travels through the air at a height just below commercial passenger planes.
The universe is so vast, it is unlikely that we are alone.
The universe is so vast, it is near impossible that alien life will ever physically reach us.
UFOs have always turned out to be celestial objects, airborne clutter, and even ground-bound objects.
The government task forces set to examine UFO reports lack the relevant expertise.
Part I of a Series
The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You to Seeis not just a movie, it’s a documentary that utilizes and even teaches critical thinking. It might as well have been called “A Logical Take on UFOs.” Skeptic, and the host of the Skeptoid podcast, Brian Dunning has exposed the truth behind over 900 urban myths, legends, and fantastic stories. It’s a master class on how to engage a logical take. Thus a logical review of Dunning’s new movie is essential.
We Are Not Alone
First, the movie presents a pretty compelling case that we are not alone in the universe. The universe is just too large, there are just too many planets and stars, and the conditions that make life possible are just too common, relatively speaking.* Life very likely exists, if not elsewhere in our galaxy, then elsewhere in the universe. At the same time, however, the same thing that makes alien life so likely—the vastness of the universe—makes it exceedingly unlikely that it will ever visit us. The distances are just too great, and the speed of light (the fastest anything can move) too slow, for life that evolved elsewhere to ever visit us in person. Interestingly, Dunning argues that some alien life likely already does know about us (or will soon); our planet teems with evidence of our existence. He also thinks that we (via a telescope) will likely detect evidence of life on another distant planet soon (within the century maybe). But physical visitation, by advanced biological alien beings, in advanced craft, near or on Earth, is almost statistically impossible.
What Are UFOs?
Why, then, are there so many UFO sightings? If they aren’t aliens, what are they? Dunning points out that there is good data on this: huge collections of UFO reports and what they turned out to be. In all of history, every time a UFO sighting has been verifiable (and not just an unverifiable incredible story, fuzzy video, or blurry photo), it has always, without exception, turned out to be one of three things:
A (misidentified) celestial object (for example, planet, meteor, satellite, rocket, Star Link launch)
A (misidentified) piece of airborne clutter (for example, weather balloons, planes, blimps, birds)
A (misidentified) object on the ground (for example, lighthouses, radio tower lights, grounded objects that look airborne from a plane window because of visual illusions)
Although the data proves this, Dunning goes on to illustrate his point by explaining four of the most famous UFO stories and videos of all time—evidence that believers have claimed to be the most rock-solid proof of alien visitation: The Rendlesham Forest incident, the Ariel School incident, the 1967 Malstorm AFB incident, Jimmy Carter’s UFO sighting, and the Gimel, Go Fast, Tic Tac, and Green Triangles videos. In each case, the explanation falls into one of the three above categories; it is beyond any reasonable doubt, in each case, that nothing extraordinary happened. What’s more, in each case, some illusion, trick of perception, or fault of memory is at play. The explanation was not, and never has been an extraordinary craft—for example, an alien craft, or one vastly beyond our current technology.
Want to prove yourself right? Try to prove yourself wrong
That’s not to say that it could never be, but Dunning rightly points out that a claim that a UFO is an extraordinary craft is an extraordinary claim—and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And when one wants to prove an extraordinary claim, with extraordinary evidence, one must try to falsify the extraordinary claim; you must consider and rule out all the non-extraordinary explanations.
This is one of the most basic rules of both scientific and critical thinking. Because anyone can find some evidence for anything, if you want to prove yourself right, but try to do only that, you inevitably will—even if what you believe is blatantly false. If you want to actually prove yourself right, you must try to prove yourself wrong; only if you honestly try to do that and fail, will you actually have good reason to believe that you are right. This is how scientists protect themselves against self-deception; they'll even invite others to try to prove them wrong.
What the UAP Task Force Needs, But Is Lacking
This brings me to the overarching conclusion of the documentary: the government’s Unidentified Arial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) is not actually up to its stated task. He shows a government official describing the experts that the UAP Task Force has brought on board: academics like physicists and metallurgists. Although that sounds impressive, these are the kinds of experts you would only need if a UFO turned out to be a spectacular craft (that was recovered). But since in the entire history of UFO sightings this has never happened, the task force is stacked with the experts that it is least likely to need.
What it needs is experts who can rule out the, historically and statistically, most likely explanations: celestial bodies, airborne clutter, and ground-bound objects. You need a host of (observational) astronomers, experienced personnel who are experts at looking at the sky and identifying what is in it. You need UFO skeptics,** who have spent their lives falsifying claims that UFOs are aliens; critical thinkers who know all the trip-ups that lead people to faulty conclusions. And you need NTSB air crash investigators—mainly because they know best what kind of illusions and faulty perceptions lead pilots, and the rest of us, astray. The task force doesn't seem to have them.
In Part II of this series: The possible criticism of the documentary.
Notes:
To be fair, most of the universe is inhospitable to life. However, the conditions that led to life on Earth are not unique to Earth. As Dunning puts it, “Those same conditions have been happening on rocky planets throughout the universe since the beginning of time.”
UFO enthusiasts, Dunning observes, won’t like this; they’ll claim the presence of skeptics will bias the conclusions. But a true quest for knowledge always invites skepticism; that viewpoint must be represented. Again, to prove something true, one must honestly try but fail to prove it false.
UAP Makes Three Changes In Direction Near Sun, UFO Sighting News.
UAP Makes Three Changes In Direction Near Sun, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 27, 08:30:07
Location of sighting: Earths Sun
Sun camera: LASCO C3
I sent a message to NASA on X platform (formerly Twitter) today asking them if they can explain this unusual object. I wrote...Hey @NASA @NASAJPL @NASAKennedy Whats up with this UAP changing directions three times in the span of a few seconds on Sun imager LASCO C3? Can you give us a zoom in image of this craft? UFO Sighting News. In space, an object that doesn't have any propulsion system or external forces acting upon it will generally continue to move in a straight line at a constant velocity, following Newton's first law of motion (the law of inertia). This means that without any propulsion or external influences, it will not change its direction on its own.
If they answer I will let you know. But this UAP makes three course corrections in a few seconds time. That means it's intelligently controlled. Therefore, it's an alien ship.
In every war there are often lesser known experiences floating about beyond the typical tales of fighting and heroism. Here in the background of all of the conflict and death often lurk outlandish accounts of something strange going on, something perhaps even more frightening than the enemy. Strange things in the sky have long been said to loiter around places of war, going all the way back to ancient times, but this is far from just in the realm of superstition and the ignorant of the past misunderstanding common celestial phenomena, and here we will look at some of the stranger cases of these things congregating to war all the way up into modern times.
Starting from World War I we have the spectacular time the Red Baron supposedly shot down a flying saucer. The so- called Red Baron was the German ace pilot Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, who was both renowned and feared for his unrivaled flying skills, often considered to be “the ace of aces” and racking up at least 80 air combat victories over his wartime carreer. In the book UFOs of the First World War, by Nigel Watson, there is a curious account that seems to show that human pilots were not the only ones the Red Baron hunted down and engaged. The story goes that as he was flying over the Belgian trenches in the spring of 1917 with fellow pilot Peter Waitzrick, the Baron spotted an unidentified object that was described as “an upside down silver saucer with orange lights” hovering in clear blue skies. After a moment of awe, fear and wonder, the Red Baron opened fire upon it, and Waitzrick, who reportedly saw the whole incident, described what happened next as follows:
We were terrified because we’d never seen anything like it before. The Baron immediately opened fire and the thing went down like a rock, shearing off tree limbs as it crashed into the woods.
But wait, it gets even weirder still. As they passed over the wreckage, two humanoid figures were supposedly seen to climb out of the otherworldly wrecked craft and scurry off into the trees, after which they were not seen again. Waitzrick would keep the whole bizarre story to himself until 80 years later, in 1999, when he would tell the world about it. There are certainly some suspicious aspects of the whole tale, not the least of which is that Waitzrick chose to come out with his amazing experience after 8 decades of silence to The Weekly World News, which many readers will recognize as perhaps not the most trustworthy of news publications. Also, the planes they were piloting were claimed to be Fokker triplanes, which is odd since these planes would not be used in the war until some months after the alleged event, in August of 1917. Perhaps Waitzrick just didn’t know anyone who would take his story seriously and didn’t know any better so it just happened to be that the Weekly World News picked it up, and perhaps with the planes his memory after nearly a century was not what it once was, but one thing he seems to be quite sure of is that the infamous Red Baron shot down a UFO, saying:
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Baron shot down some kind of spacecraft from another planet and those little guys who ran off into the woods were space aliens of some kind.
Other UFOs encountered during World War I are the so-called “Flaming Onions” which were typically described as glowing green balls that would zip around, do flips, other aerial maneauvers, and very often chase aircraft, easily outpacing and outmaneuvering them but not actually ever attacking them in any way. This strange phenomenon was purportedly seen throughout the war by both sides of the engagement, and it always terrified those who experienced it. One theory as to what the Flaming Onions were is that they might have been flares fired by the Germans, but flares typically do not actively chase aircraft and seasoned pilots can usually recognize flares as such. They remain a curious unexplained mystery of the war.
Besides spaceships and weird lights, another baffling aerial phenomenon reported during World War I began with a very strange sighting made by a Lieutenant Frederick Ardsley as he was on a morning patrol in northern France on January 9, 1918. As he flew along, another biplane of the same make and model as his own positioned itself next to him, and when he looked to see who was in the cockpit he was surprised to see a beautiful woman with long flowing blonde hair blow him a kiss and do a Can Can dance in her cockpit before swiftly flying away. Ardsley attempted to chase the mysterious pilot, but she was reportedly a far superior pilot and was able to easily lose him. Unbelievably, the mystery woman would show up at other times during the war and engage German pilots, usually easily beating them and shooting them down, and sighted by both pilots and civilians alike. Some reports even say that her plane was impervious to bullets or that she would vanish into thin air. She came to be known as “Lady Sopwith” or “The Valkyrie,” and became legendary. No one knows who she was or whether this is all just another wartime myth.
If alien forces are somehow attracted to war, then considering that World War II is one of the greatest and most massive wars of all time it is perhaps no surprise at all that they should be drawn there as well. On the evening of November 27, 1944, a Lt. Fred Ringwald of the U.S. Air Force was riding as an observer on a night operation over the Rhine Valley, just north of Strasbourg on the French-German border when he saw something in the sky that was not supposed to be there. There over a hill in the distance were eight to 10 of lights in a row, glowing fiery orange, and when he pointed them out the pilot and the rest of the crew saw them too. They checked with Allied ground radar, but they registered nothing. As they decided whether to engage, the lights then simply vanished. It was completely baffling to them, as these lights had not been any known aircraft they were familiar with and defied any rational explanation, and they decided to keep it to themselves.
Ringwald and his crew were part of a U.S. Air Force unit called the 415th Special Operations Squadron. Formed in 1943, it was tasked with carrying out missions in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, and then later in northwestern Europe during World War II. As the name suggests, they were mostly involved in nighttime operations and missions, which made them especially likely to notice strange lights in the skies around them. Although Ringwald’s crew stayed quiet about what they had seen on that mission, they would soon learn that other flights from their unit were starting to see something similar in the sky, in particular over the German-occupied Rhine Valley. Pilots were coming forward with stories of strange lights, usually red, orange, or green following them, or even flying parallel to their planes to pace them. They were reported as typically cigar-shaped, with no wings or visible propulsion system, and very maneuverable and fast, as well as often flying in formation of up to 10 of them and never showing up on radar. These mysterious lights had a habit of seeming to toy with the pilots, before suddenly tearing away at breathtaking speed or simply vanishing into thin air, and no one had any idea of what they were. One baffled airman would give a good representative account when he said:
I was flying and there was an object next to me. I couldn’t get rid of it, I slowed up, it was there. I sped up, it was there. I would dive, it would be there. I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. I turned to the port side and they turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping up with me. I called. Nothing on radar.
These objects defied all explanation, and there were whispers that they were not of this planet. Sightings began pouring in from all over the European Theater of war, and it was looking more like the War of the Worlds than World War II. Before long these mysterious glowing craft were being called "Foo Fighters," which is a silly name that came from the comic strip Smokey Stover, in which the main character had the catchphrase “Where there’s foo there’s fire.” Considering the reliability and experience of these witnesses, on top of the sheer number and consistency of reports, the military launched an investigation into the phenomenon. At first they suspected that the Foo Fighters were some sort of top secret German weapons, but the rabbit hole got deeper when they learned that enemy pilots were seeing the same thing and they also realized that the objects never actually seemed to attack or act in a threatening manner. After a full investigation there was no official conclusion reached. Theories include that these Foo Fighters were enemy tech, some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, or just combat fatigue and the pilots seeing things, but their true nature remains unknown.
Interestingly, over in the Pacific Theater of Operations of the war pilots there were also reporting bizarre things in the sky. In this case, rather than glowing objects zipping about doing aerial maneuvers, pilots typically reported “balls of fire” hanging in the sky, often just hovering there before shooting off or vanishing. Once again, theories were thrown around that these were just some kind of Japanese weapon, but as with the Foo Fighters of Europe they never seemed to attack and the enemy fighters were seeing them as well. Although the terms UFO and flying saucer had not yet been coined, both the Foo Fighters and the Pacific balls of fire would have certainly fit the bill. Aliens or something else? The answer remains lost to the mists of time.
Moving on to the Korean War, fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953, we have a case that has largely remained confined to the shadows of history, and which supposedly involved a whole regiment of men who seem to have come under attack by forces from beyond this world. A very bizarre account from the Korean War emerged in January of 1987, when John Timmerman, of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), sat down for an interview with a former U.S. Army private first class (PFC) by the name of Mr. Francis P. Wall, who had a most unusual tale to tell. Wall had been deployed with the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 'Easy' Company, and in May of 1951 they were operating outside of Chorwon, in an area known by the military as the Iron Triangle, on a mission to reach a small village in the mountains. The village in question was in an area marked to be bombarded with artillery fire, wiped off the face of the earth, and Wall and his men were there to make sure that any innocent civilians were properly warned of the impending rain of fire. Indeed, the air was already reverberating with the thumps and booms of shells hitting, the dark of night occasionally lit up with flashes in the distance. Wall and company had made their way to a steep slope overlooking the village and the fiery flowers of artillery airbursts painting the scene with fire, and that was when they saw something they could not explain up there in the air in the middle of this war ravaged scene. Wall would say of this:
We suddenly noticed on our right-hand side what appeared to be a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So we noticed that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning. We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed. But then this object approached us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It's hard to distinguish the size of it; there's no way to compare it. The light was pulsating. This object approached us.
The men were understandably very unsettled by this point, as the object was obviously not one of theirs, nor any known aircraft any of them had ever seen before, and they radioed the situation in to their superiors, requesting permission to open fire on it. Why they would think that their rifles would do any good when they had just witnessed it casually make its way through artillery explosions is anyone’s guess, but the permission was granted and Wall claims that he would then open fire on it with his M-1 rifle loaded with armor piercing bullets. He claims that he hit the object several times, hearing the pings of the bullets against what sounded like metal, and the bullets seemed to have an effect on it where the artillery had not, apparently damaging it and causing it to exhibit some strange behavior. Wall would say:
Now why would that bullet damage this craft if the artillery rounds didn't? I don't know, unless they had dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once, briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might crash to the ground. Then, a sound -- we had heard no sound previous to this -- the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That's the way this thing sounded.
This was where things would get pretty harrowing, as according to Wall the craft unleashed some sort of a retaliatory attack on them. The craft allegedly emitted a kind of ray or beam that came in pulses, and which they could see aiming at them “like a searchlight.” When the ray swept over them the men found themselves overcome with a tingling, burning sensation, and while it didn’t seem to be causing any visible damage they could feel it penetrating through their skin and the pain was enough to make them scramble for cover, scurrying in a panic into their bunkers, where the attack seemed to continue. Wall describes the terrifying and otherworldly scene thusly:
So the company commander, Lt. Evans, hauled us into our bunkers. We didn't know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I'm in my bunker with another man. We're peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45-degree angle, that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that was the end of it.
Unfortunately for Wall and the others, this seemed to be far from the end of it, as over the next few days they would begin to develop an array of debilitating physical symptoms, including disorientation, memory loss, headaches, stomachaches, nausea, and extreme weakness that was potent enough that some of them had trouble even walking. Doctors who examined them could find no reason or cause for these symptoms, the only evidence that anything was wrong being an unusually high white blood cell count that could not be explained. Despite nothing really officially being wrong with them, the men were nevertheless all physically ill and suffering from something, and it was widely assumed by them that this was the doing of the beam that UFO had fired at them. According to Wall, many of them continued to suffer from ill health for years after the encounter, with him saying that even to that day he had frequent bouts of disorientation, memory loss, weakness, and difficulty putting on weight.
In later years it has been speculated that the men were probably suffering from radiation sickness, but there have been plenty of other ideas by those who have heard of this rather obscure case. One idea is that the Soviets or even the Chinese had been carrying out covert military experiments in the remote region testing anti-gravity technology and sonic weaponry, and indeed this has been used as an explanation for many of the dozens of other UFO sightings made during the Korean War. Of course there is also the notion that this encounter was exactly what it looks like, being an attack by an actual UFO, perhaps having been present in the region observing the combat for inscrutable reasons, and it has even been suggested that the craft did not mean to launch a fatal attack, but to merely disorient and immobilize them, hence the fact that that they did not suffer any severe injury or death.
Then again, maybe this is all hallucinations and the result of trauma, tiredness, and stress in the war-torn environment. It could even just be a tall tale conjured up by Wall himself, as he is the only official witness, and although he claims that 25 other men witnessed this event none of these others seem to have ever been tracked down and independently interviewed. Just about the only thing known for sure is tht he was indeed a soldier in the Korean War in the area specified on the date specified, but after that no one knows. Although he swore an oath that his story is true, in the end we are really left to take the word of one witness. So was this just war time hallucinations, Soviet or Chinese experiments, or an actual attack by an otherworldly UFO? It is quite likely we will never have a concrete answer, and that this will just remain another curious account lost in the fog and history of warfare.
By all accounts it seems that troops in the Vietnam War were also absolutely plagued by UFO activity, and some of the most spectacular reports of alien encounters that seem to have occurred during the Vietnam War have to do with actual military engagements with UFOs. One such incident allegedly occurred on June 15, 1968, along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam, where a patrol boat known as PCF-12, commanded by a Lieutenant Pete Snyder, was on a routine night patrol near Cua Viet. At 12:30AM, PCF-12 reportedly received a frantic distress call from another patrol boat in the vicinity, PCF-19, claiming that they were being attacked by unidentified lights they were calling “enemy helicopters,” which seemed odd because the North Vietnamese enemy were not known to utilize combat helicopters at the time.
Snyder ordered the PCF-12 to head for PCF-19’s position to offer assistance, and they as they closed in reported spotting in the sky two circular bright lights immersed in a “strange glow” hovering over PCF-19’s position. As they approached, one of the strange lights reportedly emitted a bright flash of light, after which PCF-19 exploded in a cascade of water and flying debris. Directly after the destruction of PCF-19, the two enigmatic lights were described as rapidly accelerating away towards the sea as PCF-12 scouted the area for any possible survivors of the carnage they had just witnessed. Two wounded men were found and recalled that the two UFOs had been trailing them for miles along the river. The survivors then claimed that they had decided to fire upon the threatening, mysterious objects, and that was when one of them had issued a piercing blast of light to obliterate the boat. At first it was thought by officials that the PCF-12 had been the victim of an enemy missile fired from shore, but a later AP dispatch from Saigon would quote a military spokesman as having attributed the loss of PCF-19 to an “unidentified object,” and not enemy coastal batteries or missiles.
The PCF-12 continued its patrol up the river and were soon approached by the same two unidentified lights, which took up positions hovering on the port and starboard sides around 300 yards away and 100 feet above the water. PCF-12 called in to headquarters to try and get an idea of what they were dealing with, but were met with the response that there were no aircraft in the area at the time. Realizing that these craft were not friendly, Snyder ordered his men to open fire on the lights, which apparently did little to faze or even slow them down, and PCF-12 began to retreat at full speed as the two mysterious aircraft tailed and stalked them, flickering in the night the whole time. Second engine man Jim Steffes would later claim that he got a good look at the craft and described them as having “a rounded front like an observation helo,” and what looked like “two crewman sitting side by side.”
Strangely, although no weapons could be seen mounted on the unidentified aircraft, PCF-12 nevertheless found itself being fired upon. Steffes remembered seeing tracer rounds piercing up into the night from the nearby base Point Dume, with their targets being what he said were other far-off blinking circular lights whizzing about in the sky above. Eventually, a group of Phantom F4 fighter jets arrived to converge upon and chase off the strange lights that were plaguing PCF-12 out to sea, leaving the crew to wonder what in the hell had just happened.
At roughly the same time, another very strange incident was unfolding out in the South China Sea with an Allied ship of the Royal Australian Navy, the HMAS Hobart, which was patrolling near Tiger Island, about 20kms off Cap Lay and reported sighting up to 30 unidentified slow-moving lights hovering in the night sky near their ship, which were at first thought to be Russian-built M-14 ‘Hound’ helicopters, but upon closer inspection it could be seen that they were not. US 7th Air Force Phantom fighter-bombers were sent to engage, supported by generous anti-aircraft fire from the ground. The lights flew out to sea as they were pursued by the fighters, which fired upon them mercilessly along with several other military ships in the area, which unfortunately contributed to the friendly fire incident in which a U.S. swift boat was sunk by missiles, killing 5 of the 7 crew.
The HMAS Hobart was prepped for battle when the radar room detected an incoming unidentified aircraft coming in fast with no identification number to mark it as friend or foe. Word soon came in that the craft was “friendly,” but it was then that a missile struck the ship to kill one and injure two others, followed by a barrage of two more missiles. Whatever the craft was swiftly fled the scene before it could be shot down. In the meantime, F4 jets scrambled about firing upon the lights, joined by a hail of anti-aircraft fire from the ground, with attempts to communicate with whoever was onboard the mystery craft going unanswered. Eventually, the lights floated off and the fighter pilots were ordered back to base. The following morning, a complete search of the area turned up not a single shred of wreckage of an enemy helicopter, or any other enemy aircraft for that matter, despite the intense fighting that had occurred. The complete and utter lack of any wreckage of any aircraft was baffling considering that these enemies had come under such resistance and been met with so much concerted, relentless fire. The Royal Australian Navy News would later confirm:
No physical evidence of helicopters destroyed has been discovered in the area of activity nor has extensive reconnaissance produced any evidence of enemy helicopter operations in or near the DMZ.
There was little confidence among the men engaged in the incident that the aggressors had been “enemy helicopters” as was at first claimed. After all, if that were the case they should have been decimated by the potent retaliatory force displayed upon their arrival and attacks. There was also no trace whatsoever of helicopters at the time in the area before or during the incident and no wreckage afterwards. A skipper aboard the Hobart during the baffling engagement would later claim that it was certainly not enemy helicopters, expressing his doubt of such a theory by saying:
Neither before nor after the incident … was there any report by any of the ships of a helicopter being there [around Tiger Island]. Now having said that, the captain of one of the American ships told me later at Subic Bay that he thought there were helicopters there, but the fact is he didn’t report, and if he believed there was a helicopter … it was his duty to report it at the time, but there was no report.
Whatever the lights were that caused so much chaos continued to be sighted sporadically for months afterwards along the DMZ, furtively skirting around the area, wandering back and forth over the line, and baffling those who saw them. They were often sighted by radar roaming up and down the coast, and apparently no one could quite figure out what they were. They appeared on radar to be low, slow moving objects just like helicopters, but often there would be no visible confirmation or they would not look at all like helicopters. They were also prone to just disappearing into thin air, and jets scrambled to intercept the objects would arrive to find nothing there. Troops on the ground would sometimes witness the lights appear and disappear out of nowhere, and in one such case American artillerymen reported seeing a group of mysterious lights along the Ben Hai River, but when they had opened fire on them the objects had suddenly vanished as if they had never been there at all. At no point did anyone report seeing an actual helicopter, and the strange objects were always described as moving lights, often hovering erratically or moving in sudden bursts of speed inconsistent with a helicopter.
The origin of the strange lights remains unknown to this day. There were theories at the time that somehow a misreading of radar signals had occurred, which had then made other friendly vessels appear to be slow moving flying blips, or that the North Vietnamese had more helicopter power than had been previously assumed. In the end the official explanation was that it was all due to atmospheric disturbances or possible enemy helicopter activity, coupled with panicked friendly fire, and there have also been theories that it was all due to bird flocks or even insect swarms, but does any of this really match up to what occurred? Would trained Navy and fighter jet personnel go to engage such mundane phenomena? What hit the Hobart? Indeed what attacked the PCF 12 and 19 at precisely the same time? If there were enemy helicopters involved where was all the wreckage, why were they never successfully shot down, and wouldn’t these trained men know helicopters when they saw them? It is also strange that an enemy helicopter would so brazenly venture over the heavily defended DMZ, and it would be strange that they should fly around with their lights on all of the time for hours on end. In the case of the Hobart it seems obvious that this was some sort of concerted attack, but by who or what remains open to debate and speculation.
It is interesting that these reports make mention of “enemy helicopters,” as this was a term used so often to describe any unidentified lights in the sky in Vietnam that it became sort of a code word for “UFO,” regardless of any relation the object had to an actual helicopter, becoming sort of a catch-all phrase for anything weird in the sky. The fact that the Viet Cong were not known to use helicopters made it a perfect way to explain discreetly when men were seeing something in the sky that shouldn’t be there. On October 16, 1973, the USAF Chief of Staff, General George S. Brown, gave a press conference in Illinois where he addressed this terminology to some extent when asked about UFOs in Vietnam, saying:
I don’t know whether this story has ever been told or not. They weren’t called UFOs. They were called enemy helicopters. And they were only seen at night and they were only seen in certain places. They were seen up around the DMZ [demilitarized zone] in the early summer of ’68. And this resulted in quite a little battle. And in the course of this, an Australian destroyer took a hit and we never found any enemy, we only found ourselves when this had all been sorted out. And this caused some shooting there, and there was no enemy at all involved but we always reacted. Always after dark.
Another comment on the matter was made by a patrol boat captain by the name of Bill Cooper, who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. During a UFO conference in Los Angeles in 1989, Cooper would say of his own experiences:
After about five months I was sent up north to the DMZ, to a place called Qua Vieaf [perhaps Qua Viet] on the Tacan [sic] river …. It was while there that I discovered that there was a tremendous amount of UFO and alien activity in Vietnam. It was always reported in official messages as ‘enemy helicopters’. Now any of you who know anything about the Vietnam war know that the North Vietnamese did not have any helicopters especially after our first couple of air raids into North Vietnam [during 1965]. Even if they had, they would not have been so foolish as to bring them over the DMZ, because that would have ensured their demise.
Another American ship was not directly attacked, but nevertheless allegedly had a very intimidating and threatening encounter with an Unidentified Underwater Submersible, or USO. In 1974 the ammunitions ship the USS Kilauea was operating in the Indian Ocean along with a destroyer and a carrier, and the witness claims that one evening at around 9PM he had been on deck with two friends looking up at the brilliant array of stars in the night sky. Their attention was drawn to the eerie beauty of the shifting light trails formed by phosphorus algae in the wake of the ship in formation in front of them, yet as they watched this light display of nature something else began glowing in the depths, becoming brighter and brighter until it became a blinding orange/yellow ball just under the surface. The mysterious blazing orb then spectacularly burst forth from the water to arch right over the top of the destroyer, just missing smashing into it, before crashing back into the ocean on the other side and sinking back into the dark depths. The witness would say of the puzzling, frightening incident:
We all just stared at each other with our mouths open. We could not believe what we saw, but I asked friends of mine who were on watch on the bridge if they saw it and they all did. There was nothing ever reported that I know of though and we just quit talking about it. I bet the destroyer got a good look at it. It went right over the bridge of that ship and it was big. Maybe 150 to 200 feet in diameter. That was my big encounter.
It is all a very intriguing peek into some of the more mysterious aspects of these wars. Such tales lurk beyond the known history of these conflicts, hiding in the cracks and shadows and invisible, lost to the mists of time save for the few who are willing to share their bizarre tales. What went on out there in the skies above all of the fighting? What were these troopers and pilots dealing with? Were these cases some sort of experimental aircraft, the stresses of combat playing tricks on the imagination, or something altogether more bizarre? The true answers have been buried by history and lost to the mysterious shadows of history.
Hints of a government coverup, compelling eyewitness accounts from airforce officials, a spacecraft purportedly hovering through trees and landing; the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident has it all when it comes toinstances of the unexplained.
Here's a look at some of the standout witness statements, and what experts have said about the 1980 incident which has been dubbed "Britain's Roswell".
Do you believe the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident is a real case of extraterrestrials landing on Earth? Have a read and let us know what you think.
al sightings occurred in the early hours of December 26, 1980
It is now almost 40 years since the UFO incident at Rendlesham forest. Understandably, the facts are murky as contradictory accounts have emerged in the years since the incident took place.
Sections of the U.S. Air Force were stationed at the airbase when the incident occurred, including eyewitnesses that, to this day, claim they saw an extraterrestrial craft in the forest in the month of December 1980.
3. It is one of the few officially documented UFO sightings where witnesses claim to have seen a craft land
Nick Pope, who was a Ministry of Defence employee from 1985 to 2006, and who wrote a book titled 'Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World's Best Documented UFO Incident', described the incident with the following words:
“This was not some vague ‘lights in the sky’ sighting – the UFO actually landed.”
4. U.S. Air Force officer John Burroughs described agitated animals and red and blue lights near a farmhouse
One of the men asked to investigate the strange blue, red, orange, and white lights coming from the forest was, John Burroughs. In a witness statement, published in 1981, he said:
"The woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises... You could see the lights down by a farmer’s house [on the forest's edge]... We climbed over the fence and started walking toward the red and blue lights and they just disappeared."
5. Officer Jim Penniston's witness account describes a craft made from "smooth, opaque, black glass"
USAF officer Jim Penniston, who was with Burroughs during the incident, described seeing a craft covered in hieroglyphic-like characters. He said the following:
“I estimated it to be about three meters tall and about three meters wide at the base. No landing gear was apparent, but it seemed like she was on fixed legs. I moved a little closer... I walked around the craft, and finally, I walked right up to the craft. I noticed the fabric of the shell was more like a smooth, opaque, black glass.”
6. Indentations on the ground and high radiation levels were recorded the next day
The morning after the incident witnessed by Burroughs and Penniston, indentations on the forest floor were spotted, as well as damage to the trees in the area where the lights had been seen.
Radiation levels recorded at the site of the indentations were also reported to be unusually high.
7. Colonel Halt recorded a running commentary during the second UFO sighting at Rendlesham Forest
On December 27 1980, two nights after the first reported incident, United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt was ready. Known as a pragmatic character, Halt set out to disprove the wild theories doing the rounds at the RAF bases. When more lights were spotted, he took his tape recorder and joined a military patrol group.
The resulting audiotape has since been declassified by the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence. It is now public domain, and can be listened to here:
During the recording, in which he mentions objects and lights in the sky, as well as a red orb floating near the ground, Colonel Halt says:
“It looks like an eye winking at you... Here he comes from the South, he's coming towards us now... Now we're observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. This is unreal."
The recording is considered today to be one of the most valuable pieces of evidence from the Rendlesham Forest incident.
8. Burroughs and Penniston, the first two witnesses, suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
In the Encounter in Rendlesham Forest book, Penniston wrote: “I left the forest a different man… I was in awe of the technology and yes, a knowing that it was not an aircraft which could have been manufactured in 1980 or even now.”
Both Penniston and Burroughs have since suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, The Telegraphreported in 2015. In recent years, Penniston has claimed that the craft telepathically transmitted binary code into his brain.
9. Numerous eyewitness statements emerged following the incident
Burroughs, Penniston, and Col. Halt have been the most vocal in saying they believe what they saw was extraterrestrial in origin, but they are not the only eyewitnesses.
Sgt. Adrian Bustinza, a security police commander who investigated the incident at the time, said: “When I arrived [at the scene], it was going in and out through the trees and at one stage it was hovering.”
10. Some eyewitnesses claim not to have seen any UFO
Another witness, Ed Cabansag, described seeing, "a glowing near the beacon light, but as we got closer we found it to be a lit-up farmhouse. We got to a vantage point where we could determine that what we were chasing was only a beacon light off in the distance."
The Ministry of Defence has claimed that the lights came from the nearby Orfordness lighthouse — more on this in section 16. It also stated that the event posed no threat to national security, and was, therefore, never investigated as a security matter.
11. In 1983, a U.K. newspaper ran a front-page story which stated, "UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK, And that's OFFICIAL"
In the following years, as accounts about the Rendlesham Forest incident were released, the press started to respond to the growing public interest around the events
In 1983, the News of the World ran a front-page story which proclaimed: "UFO LANDS IN SUFFOLK, And that's OFFICIAL."
12. Statements from radar operators have recently corroborated Colonel Halt's claims
As recently as 2015, the then-75-year-old Col. Halt announced that he had obtained written statements from radar operators at RAF Bentwaters and nearby Wattisham airfield that an unknown object was, in fact, tracked at the time of the incident.
As per the BBC, Halt claimed they had not wanted to come forward until after they had retired from their military roles.
"I have confirmation that (Bentwaters radar operators)... saw the object go across their 60 mile (96km) scope in two or three seconds, thousands of miles an hour, he came back across their scope again, stopped near the water tower, they watched it and observed it go into the forest where we were," said Col. Halt.
13. Today, there is a 'UFO Trail' set out for forest trekkers
In 2005, due to the public interest in the UFO incident, the Forestry Commission used Lottery proceeds to create a trail in Rendlesham Forest. They called it the "UFO Trail".
In 2014, the Forestry Service commissioned an artist to create a sculpture, that was placed at the end of the trail, based on drawings made by eyewitnesses of the UFO.
14. In 2015, a dog walker posted a fresh video of UFO footage from Rendlesham Forest
There have been more incidents of unexplained lights and UFOs in the United Kingdom and Rendlesham Forest since 1980.
Only five years ago, a dog walker posted the above video of bright moving unidentified lights in the sky above Rendlesham Forest, filmed alongside an RAF helicopter.
15. There is a story about incredibly futuristic technology secretly installed at RAF Bentwaters
Daniel Simpson, director of The Rendlesham UFO Incident, a fictionalized account of the story filmed on location in Rendlesham Forest, told The Telegraph the following story:
"I recently heard a very interesting story of a guy that went up to the Bentwaters airbase and, because it’s privately owned, some of those buildings are rented out to people. A company up there wanted to have their internet sorted out and this guy dug down and – he was a telecom guy – he came back and he was sheet white. He couldn’t believe it.
"He said he’d just come across these cables, two-foot down, and they were cables delivering such a powerful internet connection – but they were cables from 1980... They were from 1980 and yet they were so in advance of what we’ve even got now. I’m told that all the time what we get [technologically] is much behind what they [the military] actually know."
16. Recent claims suggest the Rendlesham Forest incident was a 'revenge' hoax by the SAS
In December 2018, Dr. David Clarke, a British UFO researcher, reported a claim that the incident was set up by the SAS as a revenge plot on the USAF. According to the story, in August 1980, the SAS parachuted into RAF Woodbridge to test security at the site.
The USAF detected and captured the SAS troops, who were subsequently interrogated, beaten up, and reportedly even called "unidentified aliens." As a form of revenge, the SAS devised their own prank version of an alien event.
"....as December approached, lights and colored flares were rigged in the woods. Black helium balloons were also coupled to remote-controlled kites to carry suspended materials into the sky, activated by radio-controls," The Telegraphexplains in an article about the purported hoax.
17. One original proponent now believes it was an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) that was seen at the site
Jenny Randles was one of the first journalists to report on the incident. She also co-authored the first book on the case in 1984, Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy.
In 2010, Randles suggested that a UAP, an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena of unknown origin, might be responsible for what eyewitnesses experienced.
"Whilst some puzzles remain, we can probably say that no unearthly craft were seen in Rendlesham Forest," she explained. "We can also argue with confidence that the main focus of the events was a series of misperceptions of everyday things encountered in less than everyday circumstances."
18. Some UFO skeptics believe the sightings were caused by a meteor and atmospheric distortions
As science writer and UFO skeptic Ian Ridpath explains, on the night of the incident, the British Astronomical Association Meteor Section reported that "an exceptionally brilliant meteor, termed a fireball by astronomers, was seen over southern England. It is shown that this fireball is most likely what they saw and that nothing landed in Rendlesham Forest."
Some skeptics have also suggested the lights seen in the sky may have been bright stars distorted by atmospheric and optical effects, a common source of UFO reports.
19. Others have suggested the sightings may have been caused by the nearby Orfordness lighthouse
According to the witness statements from 26 December, the flashing light seen from the forest lay in the same direction as the nearby Orfordness Lighthouse. Timings on Halt's audiotape also suggest that the light he saw flashed every five seconds — the same flash rate as the lighthouse.
As Daniel Simpson countered to The Telegraph, “the lighthouse theory is rubbish. Lighthouses don’t fly down into forests, split up into five different lights and zap off into space at Mach-3. They don’t move through the trees and get mistaken by up to 20 witnesses from the United States Air Force.”
20. There have been suggestions of a government cover-up
Colonel Halt, who recorded the audiotape commentary during the second incident, has gone on record saying that he believes what he saw was of extraterrestrial origin and that the incident was covered up by the U.K. and U.S. governments.
The Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, is adamant that the Rendlesham Forest incident was of no threat to national security, and therefore, hadn't merited a full investigation.
21. Details continue to emerge as "Britain's Roswell" earns iconic status
Academic David Clarke argues that Rendlesham Forest, which now has an iconic status amongst UFO enthusiasts, is passing into legend. And it's not about to be put to rest — new witnesses have emerged as recently as 2016 and 2019, one of which describes a glowing "reddish ball", and a new documentary called Capel Green is in the works.
With a lack of any satisfying conclusive evidence on either side, skeptics and proponents will continue to debate the matter, and compare it to the Roswell UFO incident in 1947. What do you believe?
The Rendlesham Forest "UFO" Affair: It's Weirder Than You Can Ever Think
Nick Redfern
In the final days of December 1980 multiple,strange encounters and wild incidents occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. And across a period of three nights, no less. Based upon their personal encounters, many of those who were present believed that something almost unbelievable came down in the near-pitch-black woods on the night of December 26. Lives were altered forever – and for the most part not for the better, I need to stress. Many of those who were present on those fantastic nights found their minds dazzled, tossed and turned – and incredibly quickly, too. Those incidents involved American military personnel who, at the time it all happened, were stationed in the United Kingdom. Their primary role was to provide significant support in the event that the Soviets decided to flex their muscles just a little bit too much – or, worse still, planned on hitting the proverbial red button and ending civilization in hours. Maybe, even in minutes.
Reportedly, those U.S. personnel who were in the area and helped to protect the U.K., came face to face with something much stranger than the likes of a crashed Soviet satellite, a secret Stealth-type plane that malfunctioned and went off-course, or something similar to today’s drones – all of which have been suggested as potential candidates for the whatever-it-was that landed four decades ago. Some, though, are absolutely certain that unearthly entities were encountered: aliens from another world. Confusion was all around. With that in mind, here's the original document that started everything:
(Nick Redfern) The Rendlesham Forest Affair of 1980: Still an Enigma
"1. Early in the morning of 27 Dec 80 (approximately 0300L) two USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.
"2. The next day, three depressions 1.5 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter were found where the object had been sighted on the ground. The following night (29 Dec 80) the area was checked for radiation. Beta/gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens were recorded with peak readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed by the depressions. A nearby tree had moderate (0.05–0.07) readings on the side of the tree toward the depressions.
"3. Later in the night a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It moved about and pulsed. At one point it appeared to throw off glowing particles and then broke into five separate white objects and then disappeared. Immediately thereafter, three star-like objects were noticed in the sky, two objects to the north and one to the south, all of which were about 10 degrees off the horizon. The objects moved rapidly in sharp, angular movements and displayed red, green and blue lights. The objects to the north appeared to be elliptical through an 8-12 power lens. They then turned to full circles. The objects to the north remained in the sky for an hour or more. The object to the south was visible for two or three hours and beamed down a stream of light from time to time. Numerous individuals, including the undersigned, witnessed the activities in paragraphs 2 and 3.
"Charles I. Halt, Lt Col, USAF, Deputy Base Commander"
It’s fair to say that when it comes to UFOs, Rendlesham Forest is right up there with the Roswell “UFO crash” of July 1947. It’s no wonder at all that the case has become known as “Britain’s Roswell.” Not because anything actually crashed in the forest – it was described as being much more like a touch-down – but because of the widespread visibility and notoriety that surrounds the case. The December 1980 encounters have been the subjects of countless prime-time television documentaries on both sides of the pond, and of more than a few books, too. Mostly, the authors behind those same books take the view that extraterrestrials really did come down in picturesque Suffolk – and not on just one occasion. More than a few of the military personnel involved have come forward to tell their stories of what happened. Some of them are sure they had encounters with extraterrestrials. For them, no other answer can be considered. What if, however, there are other explanations for what happened decades ago? And what if that explanation, if revealed, would prove to be even more controversial than the notion that extraterrestrials really manifested within our very midst? The ramifications for the field of Ufology could be – and likely will be - immense. The fact is that Rendlesham is downright weird. As you'll see.
There may be another aspect of the Rendlesham Forest legend that prompted the people behind the experiments to choose that particular area of woods for their tests. Rendlesham Forest has a long history of ghostly encounters. Witchcraft and occult-based rites and rituals have been performed late at night in those dark woods. So-called “Alien Big Cats,” or “black panthers,” as they are mostly named, have been seen roaming through the woods on more than a few times. One of the earliest, credible cases on record is that of Jimmy Freeman, whose close encounter with a big cat occurred while driving past Rendlesham Forest late one night in the mid-1970s. While the precise date has been lost to the inevitable fog of time, the details are as fresh in the mind of Freeman today as they were on the night the incident occurred.
(Nick Redfern) Porton Down: a Secret Facility That Played a Key Role in the Forest Incidents
Given the fact that the encounter had occurred around 11:15 to 11:30 on what was a dark, cloudy and slightly misty night, Freeman was driving slowly and had his lights on full-beam as he negotiated the dark and winding roads. As a result, when something large and shadowy charged across the road in front of him, Freeman could not fail to see the creature for what it was. Long, sleek and black in color, Freeman is in no doubt that for a split second or two he had a brief sighting of a huge cat. Today, he says firmly: “If I live to be a hundred, I will tell the same: Rendlesham Forest has big cats.” On a cold winter’s afternoon in 1983, the then-soon-to-be-married Paul and Jane Jennings were blissfully strolling through those woods when they were terrified by the sudden manifestation in front of them of what Jane would describe succinctly as “a big black dog.” She elaborated that the pair had been walking along a pathway when, on rounding a bend, they came face to face with the phantom beast – something that prompted Jane to intriguingly add: “It was almost like it was waiting for us.” Far more shocking, however, was what happened next. Suddenly, the beast began to flicker on and off for four or five times, then finally vanished, literally, before the Jennings’ eyes amid an overwhelming smell that reminded the pair of burning metal. Not surprisingly, the terrified couple fled for the safety of their car and fled the area. The U.K.’s “phantom black dogs,” as they are popularly known, prompted none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes – to write his classic novel, The Hound of the Baskerevilles.
Rendlesham Forest, as well as the Suffolk locales of West Wratting and Balsham, is reportedly home to an even more diabolical beast than the phantom black dog. It is a creature that has come to be known locally as the Shug-Monkey. Described as being a bizarre combination of giant dog and large ape, the creature is said to strike deep terror into the hearts of those souls unfortunate enough to cross its path. And you thought that UFOs were the strangest things to be found in Rendlesham Forest, right? Wrong. It’s a magnet for strange phenomena – and it has been for a long, long time. It is, however, Rendlesham Forest’s UFO connection that has made those woods world-famous. In many respects, it doesn’t really matter if you are a believer or a disbeliever in supernatural phenomena, such as large and mysterious cats, ghostly hounds and a weird ape-like beast. The important thing to note is this: Rendlesham Forest has a reputation of being distinctly creepy for reasons that go far beyond UFOs and aliens, as you have just seen. If you wanted to run a secret project in an area of English woodland, then what better place could there be than Rendlesham Forest? The answer is simple: there is no better location. Here’s why: Those who do believe in the paranormal will likely say that tales of mysterious creatures seen in the woods only serve to reinforce the idea that aliens landed at Rendlesham – which is almost certainly what the people that concocted the experiments were counting on.
After all, the renowned expert on all-things supernatural, John Keel – noted most of all for his 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies - came to believe that Bigfoot, UFOs, aliens, the Djinn, the Loch Ness Monster and more mysterious entities were all inter-connected. Using an area of woods – for nefarious reasons - that already had a reputation for being drenched in unearthly phenomena, would amount to perfect planning. When the “UFOs” put in their appearances at Christmas 1980, it was just another addition to the already-bulging collection of tales of the unknown that came from within Rendlesham Forest. And, because of the eerie reputation that the woods had (and still have), no-one was thinking about secret experiments of government agencies. It was in January 2001 that the then-retired - and now late - British Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, decided to get into the Rendlesham Forest controversy. Having had an interest in UFOs for decades, he used his considerable clout to try and figure out what occurred in 1980. It was hardly an easy task for Hill-Norton to achieve. Of specific interest to Hill-Norton were the claims of a connection to the activities of the Porton Down staff. He wanted to know “whether personnel from Porton Down visited Rendlesham Forest or the area surrounding RAF Watton in December 1980 or January 1981; and whether they are aware of any tests carried out in either of those two areas aimed at assessing any nuclear, biological or chemical hazard.”
Hill-Norton got a response from the government he had dutifully worked for. It was not, however, the reply that he hoped for. The reply came from Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean. She spoke on behalf of the MoD, who provided nothing but a concise comment that didn’t really advance the investigation into the case at all. The baroness said: “The staff at the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) Chemic and Biological Defense (CBD) laboratories at Porton Down have made a thorough search of their archives and have found no record of any such visits.” It has to be said that government agencies – and their fawning lackeys – can be extremely careful about what they say and how they say it. It should be noted that Baroness Symons never said that there was no Rendlesham-Porton link. What she said was that no evidence of such a connection had been found. That’s a very different thing, altogether. Playing things carefully and tactfully provides government personnel with a perfect “get out clause,” in the event that additional information might later surface that shows the earlier claims to have been erroneous.
One of those who had a fascination for the Rendlesham Forest mystery was the Admiral of the Fleet Peter John Hill-Norton, Baron Hill-Norton. From 1971 to 1973 he held the position of Chief of the Defense Staff. Having heard of the curious rumors revolving around HM Prison Highpoint North, Hill-Norton was determined to get to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, Hill-Norton’s attempts to pry open the can of worms failed miserably. It was on October 23, 1997 that Hill-Norton brought up the issue in the U.K. government’s House of Lords. The response he got was this: “Lord Hill-Norton asked Her Majesty’s Government whether staff at Highpoint Prison in Suffolk received instructions to prepare for a possible evacuation of the prison at some time between 25 and 30 December 1980, and, if so why these instructions were issued.” Lord Williams of Mostyn provided a response that only served to muddy the waters even more: “I regret to advise the noble Lord that I am unable to answer his question, as records for Highpoint Prison relating to the period concerned are no longer available. The governor’s journal is the record in which a written note is made of significant events concerning the establishment on a daily basis. It has not proved possible to locate that journal.”
As I’ve stressed, government personnel are very careful when it comes to making statements on sensitive topics. Lord Williams did not deny the story that a major evacuation was almost initiated in late 1980. Instead, he simply said that the logbook for that particular period could not be found. And that was the end of it. Hill-Norton was deeply frustrated by the take-it-or-leave-it response that was dished out to him. You might wonder why someone like Hill-Norton – who was the Chief of the Defense Staff for two years – would not be told the full, true story. The answer is actually quite simple: Hill-Norton retired in 1977, three years before the Rendlesham Forest incident even occurred. And it was two decades after his retirement that he demanded answers concerning HM Prison Highpoint North. Hill-Norton – despite his influential and powerful standing in the government and the military in the 1970s – was long out of the loop by the time George Wild had got the ball rolling in the 1980s. By then, Hill-Norton no longer possessed what is known in government as a “need to know.” Or, in Hill-Norton’s position, a lack of a need to know.
(Nick Redfern) Who Knows the Truth?
Now, to more bizarre activity at Rendlesham Forest: our story moves on from HM Prison Highpoint North to another strand of this curious part of Rendlesham. It’s a story that Georgina Bruni found herself involved in. Bruni confided in me that she had a source of information on the prison connections and who held a significant position in the U.K.’s Special Branch – which, in 2005, was merged into the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13). Counter Terrorism Command now performs the roles that Special Branch previously performed. According to what Georgina was told, one of the other prisons primed for evacuation was HM Prison Blundeston, which is located thirty-nine miles from Woodbridge. Opened in the early 1960s, it once housed around five hundred prisoners. In 2013, an announcement was made by the Home Office that the jail was to be closed no later than 2014. Bruni’s Special Branch whistleblower informed her that the other jail was HM Prison Hollesley Bay. The U.K. government’s HM Prison & Probation Service says of the facility: “Hollesley Bay opened on this site as a Borstal in 1938. From that year and until 2006, the prison managed an 1800 acre farm on which the care of both crops and livestock, delivered employment for the prisoners. Today the establishment is an outward looking modern institution which holds sentenced adult males from 18 years and upwards without limit. The farm has gone, and a focus on resettlement and reducing re-offending is at the heart of our agenda. The establishment has developed a strong reputation in successfully preparing life sentenced prisoners for their final release.” It should be noted that HM Prison Hollesley is barely eight miles from the village of Woodbridge.
The year 2000 was when Georgina Bruni’s important discoveries about Porton Down and Rendlesham Forest appeared publicly - in her book You Can’t tell the People. I know from speaking to Georgina on many occasions, though, that she had been working on her book for several years prior to its publication. Did someone in government (who knew that Georgina’s revelations would ultimately surface, even if it was still a couple of years down the line) decide that certain action had to be done to try and diffuse what Georgina had unearthed about the Rendlesham Forest-Porton Down connection? Was a plan initiated to encourage the idea, via the media and the world of on-screen entertainment, that there were real ties between Porton Down and aliens? That would have been much more preferable than having an enterprising journalist discover that the real story of UFOs and Porton Down was actually driven by classified tests designed to determine just how much fucking the human mind could take. Or, in some cases, couldn’t. The people behind the operations may have come up with something very much like a scenario I have conjured up: “If we can’t hide the truth of Porton Down’s secret experiments in Rendlesham Forest, and we can’t stop the publication of Georgina Bruni’s book, then let’s swamp and distort the truth with incredible tales, whistleblowers, TV shows, and novels.”
On top of all that, there's Jim Penniston: The year 2000 was when Georgina Bruni’s important discoveries about Porton Down and Rendlesham Forest appeared publicly - in her book You Can’t tell the People. I know from speaking to Georgina on many occasions, though, that she had been working on her book for several years prior to its publication. Did someone in government (who knew that Georgina’s revelations would ultimately surface, even if it was still a couple of years down the line) decide that certain action had to be done to try and diffuse what Georgina had unearthed about the Rendlesham Forest-Porton Down connection? Was a plan initiated to encourage the idea, via the media and the world of on-screen entertainment, that there were real ties between Porton Down and aliens? That would have been much more preferable than having an enterprising journalist discover that the real story of UFOs and Porton Down was actually driven by classified tests designed to determine just how much fucking the human mind could take. Or, in some cases, couldn’t. The people behind the operations may have come up with something very much like a scenario I have conjured up: “If we can’t hide the truth of Porton Down’s secret experiments in Rendlesham Forest, and we can’t stop the publication of Georgina Bruni’s book, then let’s swamp and distort the truth with incredible tales, whistleblowers, TV shows, and novels.”
Now, in the final part of this articlle, it's time to jump back and show people who found the truth of the Rendlesham affair. On the issue of how Ufology learned of the story, there’s no doubt at all that it was the team of Brenda Butler, Dot Street and Jenny Randles that got the ball rolling. They were the authors of the very first book on the mystery, Sky Crash, which was published in 1984. There is also no doubt that without their combined investigations, our knowledge of the incidents would be nowhere compared to where we are today. Possibly, even, without those three persistent investigators the truth behind those incidents would have remained hidden and locked away. Forever? I would not bet against it. That gives you some idea of the depth and determination of Dot, Jenny and Brenda to get the answers.
A bit of background for you on how the story began to surface: Brenda lived not at all far from the forest and had more than a few contacts in the region. Notably, that included friends who were employees of the U.S. military. It wasn’t one hundred percent inevitable that Brenda would hear tales of something strange having taken place just outside the confines of RAF Woodbridge. It was, however, highly likely that such a thing would eventually occur. And as the history books have shown, such a thing did occur. Dot and Brenda were friends and decided to take a deep and careful look at the story. Jenny Randles joined their team soon after, in early 1981. The three were soon hot on the trail of the story – and barely a month after Lieutenant Colonel Halt had put his memo together for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense. And, the three never looked back. It was a story that suggested, just maybe, a spacecraft from a faraway world had come down in the woods. In the world of Ufology, this was a development that could not have been envisaged just a short period earlier. One of the key sources for the story who the three women relied on - and whose unforgettable words galvanized the trio to look ever deeper into the story - was the pseudonymous “Steve Roberts.” Such was the sensitivity surrounding the man and his story, he was careful to mask his real name. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the very early part of 1981, however. Today, we know so much more. That includes the real name of that prime, early source.
Gary Heseltine is a former Royal Air Force Police officer who went on to have a twenty-four-year-long career with the British Transport Police, serving the majority of the time as a detective. Heseltine, who has spent a large amount of time studying what happened in Rendlesham Forest, says: “Surprisingly to this day, many people don’t realize that the mysterious ‘Steve Roberts witness’ has been identified for many years as J. D. Ingles. Ingles was on the base at the time of the incident, a Sergeant in the Reports and Analysis section of the 81st Security Police Squadron.” It was, to a large degree, the words of their source that caught the attention of Street, Butler and Randles. They did a very good, solid job of pursuing the story. It was soon published. Sky Crash makes for fascinating reading. Shadowy characters, Ministry of Defense chicanery, sinister goings-on in the woods, tales of extraterrestrial visitation, and military figures hiding their real names for fear of what might happen to them, were just the start of things. In the weeks and months that followed, the Ministry of Defense proved to be highly close-mouthed when it came to discussing the December incidents with members of the public and the media. No surprise. They were even more cautious about chatting with an energized team of UFO sleuths who weren’t going to give up. That’s Jenny, Dot and Brenda, of course.
In some ways, the MoD was unable to do very much about it, as wild rumors of the startling events were already seeping out. Eventually matters would develop into a chaotic torrent. To demonstrate how incredibly careful and determined the MoD was to try and keep matters under wraps, it was not until April 13, 1983 that an official admission was made to Jenny Randles that a handful of “lights” had been seen in the vicinity of Rendlesham Forest and that remained “unexplained.” That’s right: two years passed before the rumors of something very strange and non-human having been seen in Rendlesham Forest began to unravel in the world of intelligence and the military. Those who were hiding the truth were now in the dangerous position of losing control of the situation. Almost two months later to the day, a copy of Lieutenant Colonel Halt’s memo was declassified in accordance with the laws of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. It was provided to a now-deceased American UFO investigator, Robert Todd. In a June 14, 1983 letter to Todd, Colonel Peter Bent – who, at the time, was the Commander of the 513th Combat Support Group (CSG) – made an amazement statement. He said: “It might interest you to know that the U.S. Air Force had no longer retained a copy of the 13 January 1981 letter written by Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt. The Air Force file copy had been properly disposed of in accordance with Air Force regulations. Fortunately, through diligent inquiry and the gracious consent of Her Majesty’s government, the British Ministry of Defense and the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force was provided with a copy for you.”
It wasn’t long at all before Brenda, Dot and Jenny found themselves in a runaround. Curiously, during the course of an interview with MoD spokeswoman Pam Titchmarsh on August 18, 1983, Randles was told that – contrary to the statement made by Colonel Bent – the Ministry of Defense had not supplied the Americans with a copy of Halt’s memorandum. Notably, Titchmarsh was very wary about discussing the case with Randles, who had made a trip down to London with Street and Butler. “I wouldn’t know,” was Titchmarsh’s uneasy and succinct reply when Randles asked her if the MoD’s “operational staff” had built up their own files on the case. Nevertheless, since a copy of the Halt memo had been released to Robert Todd by U.S. authorities, Titchmarsh was – at the very least - obliged to admit that her department in the MoD (Defense Secretariat 8) did have a copy of Halt’s report on file. Despite that, the Ministry of Defense denied that the events of December 1980 were of any kind of defense significance. It was a stubborn, mule-like stance from which the Ministry of Defense has never, ever wavered. The MoD just loves that mule. Always has, always will.
The Enmyoin Temple in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan is now known colloquially by a different name, said its Chief Monk, Tomonori Izumi: “The Miracle Temple.”
“I don’t know if it was some god or some powerful being in a UFO, but I believe that some invisible power really did come to save us,” said Izumi.
On March 11 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters ever after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused its electrical grid to fail. The simultaneous disasters laid waste to much of the surrounding area, but “miraculously, the temple was untouched.”
“The UFO's came after the explosion. There were so many of them. I was shocked,” said the monk in the fourth episode of the VICE Studio’s Netflix docuseries series Encounters: “Lights Over Fukushima.”
“Radioactive energy was leaking everywhere. I believe the UFOs came to readjust the flood of radioactive energy in order to save us. That's my theory, anyway,” said Izumi.
Just like after the Fukushima disaster, UFO’s have been documented repeatedly around places where humans have spawned nuclear activity. There are “very clear connections” between UFO sightings and nuclear sights “going back decades,” said author Dr. Jensine Andresen.
“My personal view on the basis of over 30 years of very extensive research is that there is an advanced extraterrestrial presence operating basically here on Earth and in the oceans,” she said.
Andresen cited declassified U.S. government reports from agencies like the FBI and CIA about UFO sightings near nuclear sites, saying she had looked at 39 different accounts between the 1940s and 1990s.
“It goes back to the 1930s when the science and research was being done to understand fission. But then it really heats up in the 1940s, in particular, right after the detonation of the two atomic bombs in Japan in 1945. Then it is decisive, it’s conclusive. You see one after another event occurring in proximity specifically to sites associated with nuclear weapons,” said Andresen.
There are numerous cases, she said, listing sightings near Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Laboratories, and other places “where nuclear weapons were stored.”
Another well-known case took place at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in March of 1967. Robert Salas, who worked as a missile launch officer controlling ten nuclear tipped missiles at the time, alleged one day after he received reports from other officers of strange UFO sightings, his missiles were shut down and became “unlaunchable.” He later learned that ten weapons at another nearby site were also shut down “under similar circumstances, very similar circumstances where UFOs were sighted over the launch facilities.” More recently, Salas said that he had briefed the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a unit tasked with resolving credible UFO sightings, on the event.
Andresen said one of the clearest examples of these sorts of activities around nuclear facilities was the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine.
“There was a lot of UFO activity reported there also. At the height of the fire in Chernobyl, the reading was 3000 milliroentgens, which is a unit of ionizing radiation. And right at the height of the fire, many people observed a UFO come, stayed for 3 minutes, shown a light right at Unit 4 and departed,” she said. “They took another reading and it had apparently dropped to 800. Just in a few minutes. That seems like a very conscious attempt to remediate the danger caused by the malfunction there.”
Like the Chief Monk of the Miracle Temple, Andresen also believes that these extraterrestrial beings are trying to help us avoid our own self destruction via nuclear catastrophes.
“I think this is an intelligence that recognizes the depth of human creativity and wants to preserve it. I think this intelligence cares about us. I think this intelligence does not want us to go extinct. That's what I think is really being communicated,” she said. “’We're right here with you. Just open your hearts. Open your minds. We'd like to help you. And, you know, let's get to know one another.’ I think that's really what the message is.”
First on CNN: US is receiving dozens of UFO reports a month, senior Pentagon official tells CNN
First on CNN: US is receiving dozens of UFO reports a month, senior Pentagon official tells CNN
The US government is receiving dozens of reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, each month, according to the director of the office established to investigate the incidents, with the potential for “hundreds, if not thousands” more reports expected in the near future.
The office has received approximately 800 reports of unidentified objects to investigate as of this past April, up from 650 reports in August 2022, Sean Kirkpatrick, who heads the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon told CNN. Nearly all of the new reports refer to objects observed in the air; only one comes from a maritime sighting.
The vast majority are benign objects, such as balloons or drones, but some may be the result of America’s adversaries trying to spy on the US, said Kirkpatrick.
“There are some indicators that are concerning that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard,” said Kirkpatrick, speaking exclusively to CNN ahead of the release of the annual report on unidentified aerial phenomena.
The report, released on Wednesday, said the object sightings may represent an issue for flight safety. Most sightings and observations come from near restricted military airspace, the report found, likely a result from the additional sensors and radars around the facilities.
A portion of the increase in reports comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, which monitors airspace around US airports starting to provide information to the Pentagon.
Pentagon launches 'one-stop shop' website for UFO information and reporting
About half of the reports contain enough data that they can be ruled out as “mundane things,” such as errant balloons or floating trash, Kirkpatrick said, but 2-4% are truly anomalous and require further investigation.
The report said only “a very small percentage” of observations have “interesting” signatures, such as high-speed travel or “unknown morphologies.”
Kirkpatrick’s office has transferred “a lot” of cases to law enforcement for further investigation and, if necessary, counterintelligence. But some sightings could potentially be foreign adversaries spying on the United States, like the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina in February.
The annual report on UAPs, put together by the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said, “Although none of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities, these cases continue to be investigated.”
Asked if the Pentagon could definitively identify a sighting of an unidentified object as belonging to a foreign adversary, Kirkpatrick said that his office is “looking at some very interesting indicators of things, and that’s about all I can tell you.” But the office, which has more than 40 employees and is expected to grow, can’t say that for sure yet.
“There are ways to hide in our noise that always concern me,” Kirkpatrick said, referring to the extraneous readings picked up by US radars and other sensors. “I am worried from a national security perspective.”
But Kirkpatrick could offer few details about why certain reports raised suspicions about foreign involvement.
“It could just be a foreign entity. It could be a hobbyist. It could be anybody,” he said. “And those are the things that we have to look into.”
Huge public interest in UFOs
Ever since the Biden administration established a formal office to investigate reports of UAPs, the subject has garnered massive public attention, fueled by its inextricable link to UFO sightings. A July hearing in Congress on the matter drove the interest even higher, as David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, alleged that the government has covered up its research into the sightings, a claim Kirkpatrick flatly denied.
But Grusch went much further, even as he acknowledged that he had no first-hand knowledge and was only told things by others, asserting that the US government had unidentified alien objects in its possession and the “non-human” pilots of the craft.
Kirkpatrick dismissed the sensational claims, saying he has “no evidence that suggests anything extraterrestrial in nature.”
“If anybody thinks that they know where those things are, they should be coming to talk to us,” said Kirkpatrick. “That’s why we have set up this entire architecture for people to securely come in and talk to us.”
New submissions from public
The Pentagon is preparing for a flood of new reports as it readies two new portals for submissions: one for historical sightings from current or former government employees and contractors and a second for public submissions of new reports.
The portal for historical sightings is set to open sometime in the next month or so, Kirkpatrick told CNN. Its purpose is to validate or refute past reports of unidentified objects, checking them against other reports and cataloging them for possible further analysis.
It is the opening of the public portal, still several months away, that Kirkpatrick says could flood the system with “hundreds, if not thousands” of new reports to sort through. Even so, Kirkpatrick has a plan for his office, which involves a system that will automatically match known objects to public reports, allowing the government to dismiss sightings of identified bodies. But the reports of unknown objects could prove to be valuable, Kirkpatrick says.
“If it’s a foreign adversary and I got 100,000 people with cell phones who can collect it, well now it makes it really hard for the foreign adversary to do anything,” Kirkpatrick says.
Asked if the US government should have created an effort to handle unidentified objects earlier, Kirkpatrick demurred. He said the new office came “probably at the right time for the right reasons.” But in an acknowledgment of the interest and the mystery of the subject matter, he added, “I think the government as a whole – that includes Congress – should have probably addressed some of this years ago in a more directed fashion.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) have been at the center of many modern-day aquatic legends.
2011: Ocean X Crew Discovers Mysterious Object
The sonar blip caught everyone by surprise. It was 2011, and the Ocean X crew – a deep-sea treasure-hunting and salvage organization – were near the Swedish coast in the Baltic Sea, scanning the ocean floor for sunken ships.
At first, the crew believed they had found a long-lost wreckage. However, upon closer review, the sonar image revealed something nobody expected: supposed remnants of a massive disc-shaped object.
Soon, the discovery hit the press and went international. Many speculated it was a natural formation carved from the currents. But others believed it was not natural … and may not be human. Still, nobody knew what lay at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. As a result, it received the distinctive label of “USO.”
What Is a USO?
The acronym stands for Unidentified Submerged Object. In many respects, it is equivalent to UFOs (Unidentified Flying Object). While a UFO is that strange thing spotted in the sky, a USO is its equivalent. The difference, however, is that it is found under the surface of a large body of water.
Eyewitness accounts vary. Many describe a submerged disc moving at great speed. Others mention seeing something stationary and glowing. On rare occasions, some claim to see a USO shoot out from the water and rocket toward the open skies (many of these reports have never been confirmed or corroborated).
In addition, these reports suggest that the USOs come in many shapes and sizes. While the most famous description is that of a saucer, other popular ones are:
Cigar-shaped
Triangular
An orb
While they are not as popular as UFOs are in popular culture, they’ve been at the center of many modern-day aquatic legends. It’s not unusual to hear someone bring up USO with stories about the lost continent of Atlantis, The Bermuda Triangle, or the Dragon’s Triangle in the Pacific.
First Sightings?
When it comes to UFO and USO sightings, the line between myth and history tends to be blurred. Some UFOlogists (those who study UFOs) and paranormal investigators claimed that historical figures such as Alexander the Great and Christopher Columbus witnessed seeing USOs or UFOS. Accounts about Alexander’s sighting are sketchy at best, and it appears that much of the evidence came from a book written in the late 20th century.
The Christopher Columbus account has a longer history. Supposedly, Columbus wrote in his journal of seeing lights emerging from the ocean. He described it as “a small wax candle that rose and lifted, which a few seemed to be an indication of land.”
This account would later be recorded by his son, Ferdinand. In his own manuscript of his father’s voyage, Ferdinand added that it bobbed up and down.
This account, alone, has been the subject of numerous documentaries. One of the first came from the 1978 theatrical documentary, Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle. In a reenactment of the incident, Columbus witnesses, in horror, several USOs splashing down near his ships. Later, he pulls out his journal and starts to describe the event as they ascend from the ocean.
Decades later, UFO Files, a History Channel presentation, had their version of the event. In this case, it claimed he saw lights under the water that rose above the waves, supposedly attached to a saucer.
While compelling as it sounds, there is a major problem to this account; Columbus’s journal hasn’t survived the test time, and his son’s surviving account were second-hand accounts from his father.
With scant evidence, it’s hard to say if this event happened, at all.
Charles Berlitz Brings Back the USO
The late Charles Berlitz was the grandson of a world-renowned language specialist (essentially responsible for the Berlitz language technique and school). Charles, himself, became a gifted linguist. However, his greatest claim to fame had to do with popularizing the Bermuda Triangle legend, which was first mentioned in a few unimpressive articles by Vincent Gaddis during the 1950s and 60s.
Berlitz’s take on the legend took shape in the best-selling book, The Bermuda Triangle (1974). While much of the book focused on mysterious maritime vanishings of boats and planes in the area of the Atlantic Ocean between the island of Bermuda, Puerto Rico and the south Florida coast, he divulged a considerable amount of time speculating on the cause of these mysteries,chiefly, USOs.
Belief in the mystery of the USO needed a “Roswell” moment. And that’s exactly what happened
Later, Berlitz wrote a companion piece, called The Dragon’s Triangle (1989). Also called the Devil’s Sea, this particular area in the Pacific near Japan supposedly had the same type of reputation as the Bermuda Triangle. And, once again, after nearly every mysterious vanishing Berlitz wrote in this book, he interjected the concept that aliens in USOs – possibly those from an underwater realm such as Atlantis may have been responsible.
While the books were popular, they didn’t do much for understanding the mystery behind USO. Berlitz seemingly used USO as a way to explain away any mysteries when he didn’t have any rationale to solve them (it needs to be noted that many of the mysterious vanishings in both the Bermuda and Dragon’s Triangle have been solved. In addition, several researchers debunked the water legends, claiming they were no different from the surrounding areas within the Atlantic and Pacific).
Belief in the mystery of the USO needed a “Roswell” moment. And that’s exactly what happened.
The Shag Harbour Incident
According to eyewitness accounts, on the night of October 4, 1967, an unidentified object crashed off the coast of a small fishing port near the southern tip of Nova Scotia, Canada. Local fishermen and members of the Canadian Coast Guard immediately went to the supposed crash zone. At the time, many believed that a plane may have crashed.
Later, the Canadian government sent more military personals, including a team of divers, to search for the downed “plane”. At the time, they didn’t have much to go on. The eyewitnesses described seeing something between 60 to 80 feet long, adorned with a row of lights, and making a “bomb-like” whistling sound before smashing into the water. Some stated that it appeared that the object “hovered” above the waves before it submerged. At least one captain on a fishing vessel described seeing a huge “yellowish” foam patch at the point of impact.
For several days, divers scoured the area, looking for any debris from the fallen aircraft. They failed to find anything. On top of that, as the Skeptoid Podcast writer Brian Durring pointed out, the original testimony of the witnesses varied. Some saw three lights gently falling to the ocean while others stated there were four. And the report of it making a noise came from one person. Flares or shooting stars? That may have been the case. However, as the article pointed out, there had been several supposed UFO sightings in the area few weeks prior to this incident.
Legend of Shag Harbour Grows
Much like a myth told through oral tradition from one generation to the next, the Shag Harbour Incident account grew to include more details. By 1993, the original accounts were replaced by a conflated version in which divers found and attempted to recover an alien aircraft.
In later retelling, especially the version told by UFOlogist Chris Styles in the 1993 book, Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash, the USO didn’t sink to the bottom. Instead, it traveled underwater for days. Its path took it near a small offshore anti-submarine support facility operated by the US Navy.
More than 20 years after Styles’s version of events became popular, Internet accounts of the event added more to it. These days, The Shag Harbour Incident is portrayed as the most definitive proof of alien contact. In fact, Shag Harbour has been dubbed Canada’s Roswell.
Everyone is curious about the mysterious objects in the sky, but what about the ones in the ocean? Originally posted on ufoholic.com.
The USO Craze Grows
Cable TV and the Internet presented more accounts of USOs. Simply use Google and type in the term and one will get thousands of stories from various sites. As mentioned, documentaries on the subject have made it to the big screen during the late seventies. They’ve also found a niche on the small screen as well.
Here are a few of those accounts found on the Internet and TV:
UFO Evidence.orgpublished an October 2005 account made by a tourist in Kota Kinablu, Sabah, Malaysia. The tourist described a USO rising from the sea, hovering for a moment, and then streaking away to an unknown destination. This occurred within a five-minute span.
The History Channel’s UFO Hunter aired a 2006 segment called “Deep Sea UFO” (later to become a spinoff). Among the most intriguing claim, was about the Catalina Straits, which is between the island and southern California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula. The show’s hosts claimed it was the home to USOs. In addition, they believed these USOs played a part in a World War II incident dubbed the Battle of Los Angeles.
In 2014, Huffington Post, along with a pro-UFO site, Fade to Black reported on a supposed underwater Alien base off the coast of Malibu (eventually, Huffington Post verified it was a natural formation).
Crystallinks.comwent as far to define USOs as being an “advanced type of UFO that can operate in the water and atmosphere.” In addition, it mentioned the USO’s ability to break through ice, as well as supposed documented events from around the world between 1845 and 2014 (the last being the Underwater Malibu Alien Base).
That’s not all. UFOlogists such as Stanton Friedman (who recently passed away), Bill Birnes, and Preston Dennett were frequent guests on shows specializing in UFOs and USOs. In addition, researchers such as US Navy’s Bruce Maccabee and UCLA’s Kathryn Morgan investigated many of the claims from shows such as UFO Hunter and Deep Sea UFO.
With such attention and people backing the USO investigation, one would think compelling information of their existence would emerge.
An Elusive Truth
Despite all the attention, USOs are still more legend than reality. Eyewitness accounts, such as those from the Shag Harbour Incident proved to be contradictory. Moreover, the events in that particular case were conflated with other UFO incidents in the region (not to mention, more unverified details were added over the years).
The prospect that eyewitnesses may have misidentified animals and naturally occurring incidents from USO is a real possibility. Even the historical journals of those that claimed to have seen it, proved to be elusive or nonexistent.
... the mystery still lingers, thanks to the efforts of a repurposed article from 2011.
At this point, USO can be anything. And, in most cases, that’s exactly what they are: something else. Even the Baltic Sea Anomaly (as it came to be known) that the crew of Ocean X discovered proved to be anything but a USO. In this case, a misplacement of sonars on the ship and the falsely identified rock outcroppings may be at fault.
Then again, the mystery still lingers, thanks to the efforts of a repurposed article from 2011. For nearly a decade this particular article was republished with a few new details added from sketchy sites.
The last publishing was in the highly questionable Express.co.uk, which purported that the anomaly was 140,000 years-old. In other words, the Baltic Sea Anomaly is becoming the new version of the Shag Harbour Incident.
A 3-d rendering of the supposed Baltic Sea Anomaly
as it appeared on sonar
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
UFO sightings have long been a subject of fascination and debate, captivating the human imagination for decades. Unidentified Flying Objects, commonly known as UFOs, have sparked countless questions and mysteries surrounding their existence. Are they real? Are they otherworldly visitors, advanced military aircraft, or simply optical illusions? In this article, we will delve into the world of UFO sightings, exploring the facts, the myths, and the science behind these enigmatic aerial phenomena.
The Phenomenon of UFO Sightings
For many, the mention of UFOs immediately conjures images of little green extraterrestrials or mysterious aircraft from other galaxies. These conceptions have been popularized by Hollywood and numerous accounts of close encounters. However, when we talk about UFO sightings, we refer to any object in the sky that cannot be identified by the observer. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re dealing with alien spacecraft; it merely indicates that the origin of the object remains a mystery.
Historical UFO Sightings
UFO sightings are not a recent occurrence; they have been reported throughout history. In 1561, the Nuremberg Celestial Phenomenon startled the residents of Nuremberg, Germany, with strange, otherworldly shapes in the sky. While interpretations differ, this event is often cited as an early UFO sighting. Over the years, countless similar stories have emerged, intriguing and perplexing people across the globe.
Modern UFO Sightings
The 20th and 21st centuries have brought us a plethora of UFO sightings. Perhaps the most famous is the 1947 Roswell Incident, where an unidentified object crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, sparking intense controversy and government secrecy. More recently, the U.S. military declassified and confirmed the existence of videos showing unexplained aerial phenomena, reigniting public interest in UFOs.
The Scientific Approach
While many sightings remain unexplained, the scientific community takes a rigorous approach. Astronomers, meteorologists, and physicists carefully analyze UFO reports. In most cases, sightings are attributed to natural phenomena like weather balloons, atmospheric distortions, or astronomical events. Yet, a small percentage of cases defy conventional explanation.
UFO Sightings in the Age of Technology
In our digital age, almost everyone has a camera in their pocket, leading to an increase in UFO sightings captured on video. Amateur and professional investigators have cataloged thousands of videos and photos, further fueling the mystery surrounding these objects. The internet allows for the rapid sharing of these images, connecting UFO enthusiasts worldwide.
The Future of UFO Sightings
The ongoing debate about UFOs continues to pique human curiosity. With the U.S. government’s recent disclosure of previously classified UFO footage, it’s clear that the phenomenon remains an object of study and interest. While many questions remain unanswered, the search for truth regarding UFO sightings shows no sign of abating.
Video:
UFOs Over Hawaii (FULL DOCUMENTARY)
UFO sightings are a multifaceted and enduring mystery, woven into the fabric of human history. While the majority of sightings can be attributed to mundane explanations, a small percentage challenges our understanding of the cosmos. Whether UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, secret military projects, or atmospheric anomalies, one thing is certain: they keep us looking to the skies, searching for answers to one of the universe’s greatest enigmas.
FBI is 'aware' of American Airlines flight's close encounter with 'fast-moving cylindrical object' over New Mexico at 36,000 feet - but won't confirm investigation
FBI is 'aware' of American Airlines flight's close encounter with 'fast-moving cylindrical object' over New Mexico at 36,000 feet - but won't confirm investigation
The FBI said it was 'aware' of the incident, but would not confirm or deny whether they were investigating
The encounter happened on Sunday as AA Flight 2292 passed over a remote stretch of northeast New Mexico, west of Des Monies, en-route to Phoenix
The flight was travelling at around 460 miles per hour at 36,000 feet
Blogger Steve Douglass said he intercepted a radio transmission from the flight in which the pilot can be heard reporting the encounter to air traffic control
The pilot says the object was a 'long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile' and had passed over the top of the plane at speed
The flight went on to land safely in Phoenix without any further incidents
The state of New Mexico is no stranger to strange encounters, with the city of Roswell reporting one of the nation's most infamous UFO sightings in 1947
The FBI has confirmed it is 'aware' of an American Airlines flight which had a close encounter a fast-moving, 'long cylindrical object' on a trip from Cincinnati to Phoenix on Sunday.
The encounter, which occurred at 36,000 feet above the remote northeast corner of New Mexico, west of Des Moines on Sunday, involved AA Flight 2292, an Airbus A320, according toThe Drive.
The FBI has since been notified of the incident, although they did not say if they were launching an investigation.
'The FBI is aware of the reported incident,' FBI spokesperson Frank Connor told Fox News.
'While our policy is to neither confirm nor deny investigations, the FBI works continuously with our federal, state, local, and tribal partners to share intelligence and protect the public.
'Anyone who is aware of suspicious or criminal activity should contact their local law enforcement agency or the FBI.'
In a radio transmission intercepted by Steve Douglass, who runs the Deep Black Horizon blog, the pilot can be heard telling Albuquerque Air Traffic Control: 'Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us.
'I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing - moving really fast right over the top of us.'
The encounter, which occurred at 36,000 feet above the remote northeast corner of New Mexico, west of Des Moines on Sunday, involved AA Flight 2292
(file photo)
The plane was travelling at around 460 miles per hour at the time.
In a statement to DailyMail.com earlier this week, American Airlines confirmed the authenticity of the audio clip obtained by Douglass.
According to Douglass, no significant military aircraft presence was noted in the area at the time, reported to be just at 1pm local time.
Flight AA2292 went on to land in Phoenix without any further incident.
The apparent encounter shares various similarities with another incident that occurred in the same area just under three years ago.
In that incident, two pilots on different aircraft – a Learjet and an Airbus – reported having close encounters with a mysterious object flying above them.
The sightings occurred within minutes of each other on February 24 in 2018, 37,000 feet above southern Arizona, close to New Mexico.
The pilot of a Learjet 36 belonging to Phoenix Air, with the tail number N71PG, reported the initial sighting, telling Air Traffic Control: 'Was anybody above us that passed us like 30 seconds ago?'
When the dispatcher replied 'no', the pilot laughed insisting it must be a 'UFO.'
'I don't know what it was, it wasn't an airplane but it was - the path was going in the opposite direction,' the pilot went on.
Moments later, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 1095, reported a similar encounter, announcing: 'Yeah, something just passed over us, like a - I don't know what it was. But it was at least two, three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over the top of us.'
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American Airlines Flight 2292's flight path is seen above. The Airbus A320 was making its way from Cincinnati to Phoenix on Sunday
According to The Drive, the incident happened not too far from the sprawling White Sands Missile Range (above), and New Mexico itself is home to a number of military facilities and restricted areas
In the 2018 incident, pilot Blenus Green told local media: 'It was very bright but it wasn't so bright that you couldn't look at it … it didn't look anything like an airplane'
When asked if the object was in motion or hovering, the pilot said: 'Couldn't make it out whether it was a balloon or whatnot. But it was just really beaming light or could have had a big reflection and was several thousand feet above us going opposite direction.'
That pilot, Blenus Green, later told local media: 'It was very bright but it wasn't so bright that you couldn't look at it … it didn't look anything like an airplane. You know, most airplanes, you're going to see some kind of wing surface, some type of a tail, really no matter what type of airplane it is.
'What was weird about it, normally, if you have an object and the sun is shining this way, the reflection would be on this side, but this was bright all the way around. It was so bright that you really couldn't make out what shape it was.'
In Sunday's incident, the pilot's description of a missile-like object matches a number of encounters US Navy Fighter pilots have reported having with anomalous objects off the eastern seaboard over the last 15 years.
Many of such encounters were revealed in a 2019 New York Times report, in which Navy pilots spoke out for the first time about how strange craft would appear in their training airspace, sometimes for days on end – defying known propulsion and aerodynamic capabilities.
The state of New Mexico is no stranger to strange encounters, with the city of Roswell reporting one of the nation's most infamous UFO sightings in 1947
What the pilots aboard AA Flight 2292 may have seen on February 21 remains unclear.
According to The Drive, the incident happened not too far from the sprawling White Sands Missile Range, and New Mexico itself is home to a number of military facilities and restricted areas.
The likelihood that a missile may have 'gone off the reservation' during a test, or any other kind of military exercise, is slim, as procedural practice would mean the pilots would've been pre-notified to any such safety hazard.
Pictured: The FBI's field office in Albuquerque, New Mexico
The incident also occurred near the Mount Dora Military Operating Area (MOA), but again pilots would've been alerted that the airspace was 'hot' – or that military activities were being conducted in the area at that time.
The state of New Mexico is no stranger to strange encounters, with the city of Roswell reporting one of the nation's most infamous UFO sightings in 1947.
DailyMail.com has reached out to American Airlines for comment about potential FBI involvement.
Another of what are considered the “classic” mass UFO sightings in the United States that have made their way into the lore and legends of UAP studies is the event that has come to be known as the St. Clair Triangle sighting of 2000 in southwestern Illinois. It’s also referred to as “the UFO Over Illinois,” the name of a television documentaryreleased later the same year. Other shows and books have featured it prominently. Today The Debrief will look at the lore surrounding this event and compare it to the significant amount of original source data available.
We’ll begin with a brief summary of the details frequently seen in the ufology literature. The tale begins early in the morning on a frigid January 5th, 2000, in Highland, Illinois. 66-year-old miniature golf course owner Melvern Noll was stopping by his business to ensure the pipes hadn’t frozen. Upon exiting his building he saw a brightly lit object in the skies that he would go on to describe as looking like “a flying house with windows on the top and bottom.”
The stunned Noll quickly called the police to report what he had seen. The dispatcher he spoke to forwarded the information to Police Officer Ed Barton in Lebanon, Illinois. Barton initially responded skeptically, asking if the caller had been drunk, but went to investigate as instructed. Observing a bright light in the sky as he drove his cruiser, he closed in on the object before pulling over and exiting his vehicle. He would go on to report seeing a “huge” object in the sky that was triangular, longer than it was wide, with three white lights and one red light. It accelerated away at high speed to the southwest toward Shiloh, Illinois.
Shiloh Police Officer David Martin was on the lookout for the object and reported seeing something very similar before he too claimed that the slow-moving object sped off in the same direction at amazing speed. A third officer in Millstadt, Illinois, Craig Stevens, picked it up and reported it next. He even managed to snap a picture of it with a Polaroid camera. A fourth officer in Dupo, Illinois would later report seeing ‘something’ that might be related. Other civilian witnesses would chime in with their own accounts at later dates, but the object eventually disappeared after more than an hour of confirmed sightings.
Interestingly, musician Sufjan Stevens would go on to write a song about the event:
EXAMINING THE SOURCE DATA FOR MORE DETAILS
One of the larger challenges involved in examining any of these legendary sightings is how much “legend” winds up being inserted into popular reports over the years. Television documentaries and books supporting the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) can tend to focus on the more exotic aspects of a report while downplaying or even ignoring inconvenient anomalies in the data. Similarly, skeptics and debunkers will tend to latch onto inconsistencies while failing to acknowledge some of the more credible evidence. Today The Debrief will look at both with a (hopefully) more critical eye.
Rather than being forced to rely on the potentially fading memories of witnesses or the video simulations provided by video producers, the St. Clair triangle UFO event offers substantial original evidence from the time of the sighting. This trove includes not only transcripts of conversations between dispatchers and police officers, but original recordings of radio traffic and interviews with witnesses conducted shortly after the sighting. These are included in an excellent 2014 documentary from an investigative reporter who collected and released all of the source material.
One of the first areas of evidence to examine is the collection of descriptions of the UFO as originally reported by the witnesses. Some do seem to be consistent while others demonstrate disparities that have been seized upon by skeptics.
Melvern Noll, the miniature golf course owner, described “a flying house with windows in the top and bottom.” This is starkly different than the descriptions offered by law enforcement officials. But it has been suggested that Noll only saw the object for moments with no forewarning at four in the morning in the freezing cold before rushing to contact the police.
THE TESTIMONY OF THE POLICE OFFICERS
Officer Ed Barton in Lebanon, Illinois, at 4:21 am, described a triangular object, “longer than it was wide.” Barton estimated the altitude of the object as being between 1,000 and 1,500 feet. He described seeing three white lights and one red light. The object suddenly sped away, going eight miles in three seconds in the direction of Shiloh, Illinois. It is worth noting that in the original radio traffic recording, Barton describes how he was reaching into the squad car to grab his microphone. When he emerged, the object was far away. He did not actually see it accelerate at exotic speeds.
Shiloh Officer David Martin offered a roughly similar description at 4:23 am. He described it as being an “arrow shape, triangular-shaped object… floating in this sky over this field… with three big bright lights, lighting up the entire sky just beneath the flying object.” He put the altitude at 1,000 to 1,500 feet before the object moved to the far end of the fields “in the snap of a finger, the wink of an eye.” He heard no sound from the object despite having the windows of his cruiser down.
At 4:39 am Millstadt Police Officer Craig Stevens reports that he has an object in sight. “It’s huge.” He describes it as an “arrowhead-shaped object.” Stevens describes the craft as having “three lights to the rear, one in the center and two to either side.” Stevens adds an additional detail, saying that it is “concaved in the rear” rather than a pure triangle. But he also says “in the concave section” there is a strobing white light going side to side. His drawing makes it clear it’s the rear of the craft, not the bottom. He further describes a “red blinking light” that is on the bottom. He estimates that the object is between 500 and 2,000 feet in altitude. The object then “banked” and headed toward Dupo, Illinois.
At that point, Stevens grabbed a Polaroid camera out of his car and took a picture as it flew away. That should have been the most compelling piece of evidence, but sadly it’s not a very good photograph, showing only some blurry lights against a dark background.
One of Officer Stevens’ original polaroid images depicting illuninations purportedly associated with the massive traingular craft he observed
(Credit: Craig Stevens).
Perhaps significantly, Officer Stevens says that he could hear a “low frequency buzzing noise” that seemed to be related to the craft.
At 5:03 am the final purported sighting by a law enforcement official is recorded. Officer Matt Jany is located in Dupo, Illinois, and has been on the lookout for the craft after following the radio traffic generated by the previous sightings. He claims to have spotted the object, but reports that it is “pretty far off” and he was looking at it through binoculars. He thought the lights looked “pretty bright” but it was “hard to tell.”
Officer Stevens is still on the radio and reiterates that the object was “about 500 feet above me and it was huge.” Jany responds, saying that “it’s usually where planes are. It’s not low at all.”
This discrepancy in the perceived altitude ties in with Jany’s description of the lights, at one point mentioning a blinking green light. The other reports only mentioned white and red lights. Green blinking lights (along with red ones) are typical of commercial airliners and are required by the FAA. These factors have led many analysts to conclude that Officer Jany did not see the same craft the other officer described and instead was simply seeing a conventional aircraft flying over the area. This would not be unusual since Dupo is located between the international airports in St. Louis and Chicago and also not far from an Air Force base.
At that point, Jany reports that dispatch told him that Lambert Airport is on the phone saying there is nothing in the area on their radar. This was a reference to Lambert International Airport in St. Louis.
THE AIR FORCE CONNECTION AND RADAR DATA
Some analysts seeking explanations for this event have put forth suggestions that nearby Scott Air Force Base might be involved, launching either misidentified conventional craft or experimental classified aerial vehicles. This is where the source data becomes highly intriguing and may suggest a governmental or military coverup. Two conflicting descriptions of Scott Air Force Base have emerged in previous analyses. One theory describes the base as having a 24-hour, fully staffed control tower, but claims that it was not online due to “an unexplained suspension of operations.” The other says that it’s primarily a hospital base with a small airfield and had no operations at 4 am. The original sources suggest that both of these descriptions miss the mark.
In the documentary linked above, the St. Clair Police radio dispatcher claims to have called Scott Air Force Base and was told they could see nothing on the radar. But later, Scott AFB personnel told a reporter from the Lebanon Advertiser that “Scott Air Force Base has denied any knowledge of the sighting, reporting that it “no longer has radar on the field and that control tower personnel were not on duty at that hour.”
The information supplied to both the police and journalists by Scott Air Force Base is not only contradictory but highly suspicious, to say the least. Also, the claims about the base in previous documentaries are frequently inaccurate, leading to many justifiable questions. First of all, the idea that the base is a small medical facility with limited airfield capability is flatly wrong.
Scott Air Force base has been in continuous operation since shortly after World War 2. It’s true that they have an impressive medical facility there (the 375th Medical Group), including a fleet of Learjet C-21 twin turbofan-engine aircraft used for medical transport and evacuations which can take place at any hour of the day. They also host a fleet of KC-135 Stratotankers used for in-flight refueling of other aviation assets at any time. These massive planes require a sizable airfield. On top of that, Scott Air Force Base boasts a group of C-40 B/C transports that ferry dignitaries around the globe and are the size of Air Force 1.
The idea that a base such as Scott would have “removed their radar” or not had anyone manning the control tower is implausible in the extreme. So the answers provided to both police dispatchers and local media outlets seem dubious. The responses were also contradictory in two regards. If you had no radar, why would you bother staffing an air control tower? And why would they say they had “nothing on the radar” if there was no radar? The Debrief reached out to the Public Affairs Office of Scott Airfield for comment but received no answer prior to publication.
THE SKEPTICS HAVE THEIR SAY
Debunkers have madespirited attemptsto shoot down this story, raising some interesting possibilities. The most common of these is that all of the witnesses actually misidentified a blimp. It’s true that the location of the sightings was not far from the base of the American Blimp Company, later bought out bythe Van Wagner Airship Group. Blimps are large and very quiet, often equipped with a variety of different types and colors of lights for advertising purposes. Also, the top speed of these blimps is roughly 45 mph depending on the wind, so a blimp could have made it from Lebanon to Dupo in the one-hour and three-minute period when the live reports were recorded.
The main problem with this avenue of debunking is that it’s entirely speculative. As already noted, a blimp could have made that journey and displayed lights that would be considered unusual. Some have spoken with people in the airship industry who agree that it’s plausible. But investigators checked with the American Blimp Company and later Van Wagner and none was able to produce a record of a flight by one of those ships on that date, though one would imagine that all trips by such an expensive aircraft would be recorded.
Further, a blimp could have made the trip in the time allowed if it flew directly to Dupo. But the various witnesses described the craft as slowing, stopping, and changing directions. Also, unless we are to dismiss the testimony of the officers in Lebanon and Shiloh, the craft they observed not only hovered but shot away at a stunning velocity. Blimps are simply not capable of that type of behavior.
CONCLUSIONS
As we have discovered, there are complicated aspects to the St. Clair Triangle sighting, and the legends that have grown around it in books and television programs do not always match the record. For one thing, such shows frequently depicted the “classic” triangle, with one bright white light on each corner of the craft fixed to the bottom and a red light in the center. None of the witnesses described the lights in that fashion. And the original witness, Melvern Noll, described something that sounded entirely different, so some level of skepticism may be warranted.
With that said, the descriptions provided by all but one of the law enforcement witnesses (who likely saw a conventional aircraft) are similar enough in terms of its physical appearance and curious flight characteristics that they are difficult to ignore. Their stories remained unchanged over the years.
The baffling responses from Scott Air Force base do little to discredit the witnesses. While it seems unlikely that such a base would be home to highly classified, exotic aircraft programs, they should have been able to provide corroborating radar data or at least a confirmation that they recorded no targets in the subject area. It is not inconceivable that they had standing orders to never comment on anything UFO-related. This is a pattern the Air Force has adhered to ever since the days of Project Blue Book.
The poor quality of the photograph taken by Officer Stevens is disappointing to researchers, but the fact that it was taken at night on a dated Polaroid Instamatic pointing up at the night sky makes it understandable. Additional electronic data would make the case much stronger, but the inexplicable responses from Scott Air Force Base at least suggest that such may have existed at one point.
In conclusion, the viability of this case rests heavily on the credibility of multiple professional witnesses from different locations who would seem unlikely in the extreme to have cooked up a tale of this sort as a hoax. The lack of electronic signature data is disappointing but perhaps understandable as we already discussed. And the alternative options offered by skeptics do little to explain away the recorded, original observations as misidentified mundane phenomena. As with most of these famous, multiple-witness sightings, the final determination remains in the eye of the beholder. But the available source evidence is compelling and none of the alternate explanations are very satisfying.
Follow and connect with author Jazz Shaw on Twitter:@JazzShaw
Analysis, conclusions, and some alternate explanations included in this article are the opinions of the author and not the official position of The Debrief.
A classified report detailing the Pentagon’s latest findings in its ongoing investigations into unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, has been delivered to Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has revealed.
The 2023 Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena was presented to Congress by the DoD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on Wednesday, October 18, 2023, according to a Pentagon press release issued that same evening.
An unclassified version of the report, required by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022, as amended by the NDAomaly ResoA for Fiscal Year 2023, was also subsequently made available on the website of the All-domain Anlution Office (AARO), the official office within the DoD tasked with investigations into mysterious aerial incursions and other phenomena encountered by U.S. personnel which currently remain unresolved.
Cover page of the 2023 Annual UAP Report, released on October 18, 2023
(Credit: AARO/DoD).
What follows are several of the key findings detailed in the unclassified version of the 2023 Annual UAP Report released late on Wednesday:
291 NEW REPORTS OF UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA
The latest UAP report primarily documents sightings that occurred between August 31, 2022 and April 30, 2023, with 274 of the reports having occurred during this period, and an additional 17 from previous reporting periods dating as far back as 2019, amounting to a combined total of 291 reports.
As of April 2023, AARO has reportedly been reviewing more than 800 UAP incident reports.
The report, while acknowledging the persistence of a “strong but shifting collection bias,” notes that the abundance of UAP reports AARO has received that occurred within restricted military airspace has been tempered somewhat by reports from commercial pilots which show “a more diverse geographic distribution of UAP sightings across the United States.”
However, even the broadening number of reports from commercial aviators AARO has begun to integrate into its dataset still conveys what the report calls a “U.S.-centric collection bias that will grow significantly relative to the rest of the world.”
NO ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS ASSOCIATED WITH UAP INCIDENTS
The report says that none of the reports collected between August 2022 and April 2023 indicated U.S. personnel or other witnesses had suffered any adverse health effects resulting from their unexplained encounters.
“ODNI and DoD acknowledge that health-related effects may appear at any time after an event occurs,” the report states, “therefore any reported health implications related to UAP will be tracked and examined if and when they emerge.”
CONCERNING PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS
Some UAP reports involved objects that “potentially exhibited one or more concerning performance characteristics such as high-speed travel or unusual maneuverability,” the report states, raising concerns over possible flight safety issues that may result from UAP encountered by aviators. While acknowledging such safety risks, the report adds that “none of these reports suggest the UAP maneuvered to an unsafe proximity to civil or military aircraft” or posed any other direct threats to any aircraft or their crew and passengers.
NO EVIDENCE LINKING RECENT UAP SIGHTINGS TO FOREIGN ACTORS
The report also states that none of the UAP reports from the period in question have been directly linked to foreign activities by any U.S. adversaries or other state actors.
BETTER DATA IS NEEDED
Insufficient data from various sensors and other collection platforms “can cause observational misperceptions,” the report adds, noting that as better data is collected over time, “most UAP will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena and significantly reduce the amount of UAP case submissions.”
UAP REPORTING IS INCREASING OVERALL
The report states that reports involving unidentified anomalous phenomena are increasing, primarily due to what it characterizes as “deepening federal relationships and AARO’s ability to incorporate new reports into its adjudication and research process.
290 of the most recent batch of reports involved aerial encounters, while just one occurred “in the maritime domain.” There were no space-based UAP sightings during the recent period, nor were there any incidents involving transmedium phenomena that were observed.
AN ABUNDANCE OF SPHERICAL UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA
Among the most common shapes reported in the recent batch of sightings, about a quarter (25%) involve
Earlier this year during an April 2023 Senate hearing, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Director of the DoD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said at that time that more than half of all UAP reports collected by his Office involved observations of objects characterized as orbs or otherwise spherical objects with white, silver, or translucent coloration.
“That’s what we’re looking for and trying to understand what that is,” Kirkpatrick said during the hearing, shortly before sharing footage obtained by an MQ-9 Reaper Drone in the Middle East in 2022 where a flying object resembling a metallic sphere could be seen passing through the air.
Diagram displaying common morphologies associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena in reports collected between August 2022 and April 2023 (Credit: AARO/DoD).
While more than half (53%) of all sightings provided no details on the shape of the objects that were encountered, 6% of the incidents involved “irregular shapes,” while 4% involved oval-shaped objects, discs and rectangles each comprised 2% respectively, while cylindrical objects and triangles each comprised 1% respectively. An additional 5% of reports involved what were characterized as “Ambiguous Sensor Contact.”
FEWER UAP DISPLAYED LIGHTS
Of the 291 reports from the recent collection period, less than a quarter (21%) possessed lights, while the vast majority (79%) appeared to possess no lights, or at least none were displayed at the time of the observations.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE DATA
Intriguingly, the report also describes the data collection and analysis process as new UAP reports are acquired, noting that “AARO’s analysts scour multiple classified and unclassified databases to identify any existing data on each UAP case,” adding that investigations prioritize “technical sensor information that yields the highest quantity of pertinent, valuable data for review.”
HIGH SPEED TRAVEL AND OTHER ODDITIES
Based on the ongoing analysis of UAP sightings AARO has collected, the report states that “only a very small percentage of UAP reports display interesting signatures, such as high-speed travel and unknown morphologies.” Currently, most of the sightings AARO has collected involve objects that “demonstrate ordinary characteristics of readily explainable sources,” although a lack of data has prevented a large number of cases from being able to be resolved.
Screenshot from a video filmed off the Baja California coast in 2004 depicting unidentified anomalous phenomena famously nicknamed the “Tic Tac” by U.S. Navy personnel who encountered it
(Credit: DoD).
“For the few objects that do demonstrate characteristics of interest,” the report adds, “AARO is approaching these cases with objectivity and analytic rigor.”
SENSOR CALIBRATION TO HELP RULE OUT KNOWN OBJECTS
Known objects, which include balloons, unmanned aircraft systems (UAVs), atmospheric events and other natural phenomena are all being considered in relation to ongoing sensor calibration efforts which are aimed to help rule out such objects or events, and offer future avenues for pilot training and algorithm development.
DECLASSIFICATION OF “FULL-MOTION VIDEOS” AND MORE
Notably, the report states that AARO is “working to standardize and routinize” a declassification process for the release of data and “full-motion videos,” adding that this process had been employed prior the public display of such data during Congressional hearings held earlier this year.
UAP BY AIR, SPACE, AND SEA
Within the report’s Appendix section, a new series of definitions is provided for UAP respective of the domains in which they are observed. These are Spaceborn UAP, defined as “Sources of anomalous detections above the Karman Line (i.e., 100 km above Earth’s mean sea level),” Airborne UAP, which occur “between Earth’s mean sea level and the Karman Line,” and Seaborn UAP, which involve “Sources of anomalous detections at or below Earth’s mean sea level within a body of water.”
Additionally, the report advises that integration between space and maritime domains into AARO’s current analytic efforts would be beneficial, though adding that “Collaboration with Space Force, U.S. Space Command, NRO, and NASA is well underway.”
ONGOING CONTROVERSY OVER UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA
The 2023 annual report arrives amidst widespread public interest in the UAP subject that has ensued since 2017, following a report featured in The New York Times that reinvigorated the debate over mysterious aerial encounters reported by military personnel.
Sandia National Laboratories, one of several U.S. Department of Energy sites where UAP observations have been made in recent years
(Credit: DOE).
“Analyzing and understanding the potential threats posed by UAP is an ongoing collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies,” said Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder in a statement following the release of the unclassified version of the 2023 Annual UAP Report, which appeared on AARO’s official website.
“The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount.”
“We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one,” Ryder added.
There is a UFO/alien controversy surrounding Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where one of three UFOs allegedly landed in May 1971. The incident has been recently discussed by “Moment of Contact” filmmaker James Fox, who says the full video of the UFO landing exists, including the alien entities walking out of the craft.
However, as it is so often in such cases, instead of the government releasing a film of the entire incident to author/filmmaker Robert Emenegger as promised, it only released 8 seconds of this special footage that ultimately made it into the film. Holloman Air Force Base is the United States Air Force base established in 1942 and located six miles southwest of the central business district of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The story begins in 1971 when Emenegger and producer/director Allan Sandler were invited by US intelligence to Norton Air Force Base in California to discuss the significant UFO phenomenon that had occurred previously and create a documentary film about it.
Apparently, Mr. Fox recalls the Holloman incident on Julian Dorey Podcast, published on February 25, 2023. He says that he interviewed Sandler and Emenegger about it and they as well believe the UFO landing film footage exists. He points out this happened not far from Socorro, where Lonnie Zamora had his famous sighting roughly a year prior of a similarly shaped “tic tac” white craft and beings walking around the UFO.
There is no official record of the reason why the US government allowed giving secret UFO footage for a documentary film. It is believed that the administration of President Nixon did it to look strong in the science field for the upcoming 1972 re-election campaign.
Emenegger said that he was promised by the USAF officials to get the authentic UFO landing footage that happened at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1971. It showed the alien visitors emerging out of the craft that met with the US military. Even though Emenegger was skeptical about it, the Air Force assured him that the footage was authentic.
One of the military’s officials named Paul Shartle, who was in charge of the audio-video department, said in a 1988 national television broadcast with Mike Farrell that he had watched the 16mm film of three disc-shaped craft. One of them landed and the others flew away.
“I saw footage of three disc-shaped crafts one of the crafts landed and two of them went away. It appeared to be in trouble because it oscillated all the way down to the ground. However, it did land on three pods, a sliding door open a ramp was extended, and out came three aliens. They were human-sized. They had an odd gray complexion and a pronounced nose. They wore tight-fitting jumpsuits, thin headdresses that appeared to be communication devices, and their hands in their hands they held a translator I was told.”
Robert Emenegger (Right) and Paul Shartle (Left)
Mr. Fox revealed on the podcast that Allan Sandler told him on the phone call that he had seen three discs escorted by a military jet. “He was not sure of the altitude, but he estimated that they were at roughly 10 to 12,000 feet,” Mr. Fox said. He continued: “Paul Shartle (One of the military’s officials at Norton Air Force Base in California who was in charge of the audio-video department) admitted that he had seen it and that it was not of Earth origin.”
Sandler told Mr. Fox that two of the discs peeled away while one wobbled to the ground. He said it was like a leaf floating down from the sky, and it looked like it was in trouble. Mr. Fox said that the wobbling movement was similar to the footage he had seen of a UFO before. He does not think that Allan knew how the UFO hovered. The disc eventually went to the ground.
“He said James, just like in a sci-fi movie, the seamless door opens and out come these beings that had very large noses, slits for mouths, and their eyes were almost like a vertical slit, like a cat’s eye, very, very big. They had… I’m just like… I [Fox] need to make this abundantly clear to your audience. I’m not saying what’s true or what’s not true, or if it happened or if it’s alien or whatever it is. I’m just telling you what I was told by people who saw it, and claimed to have seen it. They came out and they met with the base commanders, and then they either got into a Jeep or were about to get into a Jeep or do something and then the film footage just cuts.”
Emenegger claimed that he personally visited the landing site and inspected the area where the extraterrestrial craft had been stored, and that the US military and the alien visitors had held meetings that lasted for several days.
Additionally, Emenegger’s production team was granted access to highly classified documents at DoD facilities, and they received assistance from military officials who had expertise in UFO-related matters, such as Col. William Coleman of Project Blue Book and Col. George Weinbrenner, who headed Foreign Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Paul Shartle, who showed the footage to Allan Sandler, faced some men in dark suits that showed up from an unknown location and warned him not to speak of the incident. They confiscated the footage, stating that it was not supposed to have happened. Sandler did not inform Emenegger for over 40 years.
Emenegger completed extensive research and film production only to feel cheated when the authorization to use real footage was withdrawn. Despite this setback, he went ahead and released his documentary “UFOs: Past, Present, and Future,” which was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1974. The documentary was groundbreaking because it provided information from the Department of Defense (DoD).
High Speed Test Track at Holloman Air Force Base
The United States Air Force (USAF) required Emenegger to add animated footage of the alleged Holloman UFO landing. According to Emenegger, some frames from the original footage were used during the editing stage with USAF authorization, which was not entirely missing from the frames. The viewers spotted a genuine bright disc coming down slowly in the distance against the backdrop of Holloman’s surrounding landscape.
David Cameron, a UFO researcher, shared in an interview that he was involved in confirming that the Pentagon was not covering up UFO sightings. He recounted the story of the Holloman Air Force Base film, where the government allowed producers to use eight seconds of footage of a landed alien ship in a documentary, but the classified part where an alien got out was removed.
Mr. Fox explains that the point of the story is that there is compelling evidence of an event occurring involving an unidentified object and that there may be film footage of the incident. Despite the existence of this evidence, the story has been overshadowed by other sensational claims, such as secret meetings between President Eisenhower and aliens.
While it is unclear what exactly happened, there is substance to the story and it should not be dismissed outright. However, the addition of other claims has muddied the waters and made it difficult to investigate the case of the president making contact with extraterrestrial life.
The UFO event over Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 2006 is one of the most intriguing UFO sightings in recent history. Despite being unremarkable as far as UFO sightings go, the reaction of the airline and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was anything but ordinary, suggesting some type of cover-up between the implicated authorities.
On November 7, 2006, United Airlines Flight 446 was preparing to depart from O’Hare International to North Carolina when a dozen of airline employees, including mechanics and pilots, spotted a gray and metallic saucer-like object hovering above Gate C17 of the United terminal. The object remained there for several minutes before flying off into the clouds at an unnatural speed. This event was captured in official FAA audio recordings, with a United controller and a colleague discussing the sighting.
The disc was estimated to be at least 22 feet in diameter and hovered around 1,500 feet off the ground, below a heavy cloud cover at 1,900 feet. One grounded pilot announced his sightings over the radio, alerting a taxi mechanic and several other pilots to the presence of the object. At least two grounded pilots were able to lean out of their cockpit windows and see the object in great detail.
The story of the O’Hare UFO incident went almost completely unnoticed until the Chicago Tribune published an article on December 31, 2006, nearly two months after the incident. The story became the highest-hitting article in the website’s history, and other news outlets picked up the story as well.
Jon Hilkevitch, a transportation reporter with the Chicago Tribune, started interviewing the witnesses. Initially, both the FAA and United Airlines denied any knowledge of the event but were forced to admit that this was a lie when an audio tape was leaked to the press that captured a United Airlines radio conversation on the date of the event.
The FAA supervisor identified as “Sue” was asking several controllers at O’Hare if they had seen a flying disc over gate C-17. They initially laughed off the question, but she called back 15 minutes later to confirm that several pilots had seen the disc and that one had captured a photograph of it. Unfortunately, this alleged photograph has never s
The tape also recorded the control tower operators warning outgoing planes of the UFO and advising them to be cautious. Even in the wake of the tape, United Airlines and the FAA continued to brush off the incident. The airline prohibited any employees from discussing the incident with the media.
However, after the Chicago Tribune article compelled them to address the situation, a spokesperson from the FAA claimed that the alleged disc was nothing but the reflection of airport lights off the low cloud cover. However, this explanation was unconvincing, as the sighting occurred in daylight, before any of the airport’s lights were turned on.
Despite the assertions of several credible witnesses, the airline and the FAA declined to investigate the matter further and wrote it off as a rare weather phenomenon known as a fallstreak or “hole-punch cloud.” However, Mark Rodeghier, the director for the Center for UFO Studies Scientific Director, did not accept this explanation and stated:
“It’s an unknown object over O’Hare, and it’s seen by official personnel and does United or the FAA take it seriously? Of course not, they have zero interest because UFOs can’t exist. But how can you not worry about something hovering over an airport after 9/11? It doesn’t make sense.”
This explanation did not stand up to reason too, as journalist Leslie Kean soon discovered. Hole-punched clouds form, when ice crystals from higher clouds fall down through a lower cloud shelf, punch a hole in it, and evaporate in the warm air below, only forming in below-freezing temperatures. The air at the altitude of the sighting on the day in question was 53 degrees Fahrenheit, which was above freezing.
Despite the FAA’s lack of interest in the O’Hare UFO incident, an independent investigation group called NARC conducted their own research. The team of former NASA scientists, pilots, meteorologists, and aerospace engineers, among others, prepared a 154-page report that confirmed the presence of a physical object over O’Hare. The report stated that the object’s maneuvers could not be explained by conventional means and advised the FAA to launch their own investigation. However, to this day, the FAA has not acted upon this recommendation. (Source)
Joe Abegg, Captain at United, says “The employees that I talked to about the sighting accepted it as real.”
“There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon. We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down,” said Richard Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The reaction of the airline and the FAA in the aftermath of the incident suggests some type of cover-up between the implicated authorities. The airline prohibited its employees from sharing the details of the incident, and the FAA provided unconvincing explanations for the UFO sighting, such as the reflection of airport lights off low cloud cover or a misidentified weather phenomenon. These explanations were quickly debunked by journalists and independent investigators.
Jon Hilkevitch emphasized how unusual it is for the FAA to ignore such a significant UFO sighting. The FAA has launched investigations for far less extraordinary incidents, such as spilled coffee pots and airport aisles. This lack of interest in the O’Hare UFO incident raises questions about the extent of government involvement in hiding the truth about UFOs from the public.
The taxi mechanic described Chicago’s O’Hare UFO as follows:
“The craft appeared to be hovering right below the ceiling of the cloud cover (about 700 or 800 feet). The cloud ceiling that day was 1900 feet. The top of the craft was clearly outlined as a very dark gray material, but the bottom and the edges of the craft were hazy like when you see the mirage-like surface of the road on a hot day.
The other interesting observation was that after the craft accelerated straight up (observed by other witnesses), there was a hole punched in the clouds. The hole in the clouds was about the same size as the unidentified craft. It looked like a cookie cutter hole stamped out of dough ‘very similar in size’ to the craft. The hole stayed for a little while and then dissipated into the overcast clouds. The sighting lasted about 20 minutes from the time of the first radio call to the time when the mechanic and witness parked the Boeing 777 that he was taxiing across the airport.”
Reddit user Buddy_Felcher describes what he saw during the 2006 O’Hare Airport UFO sighting:
“I was working at American Airlines as a ramp service clerk at O’Hare when that thing came. I saw it, and only one other coworker saw it as well. And nobody believed me even after other airline workers said they saw it too. Until I heard other people saw it everyone had me convinced I was crazy…
Have you ever seen the movie flight of the navigator? That’s what it sort of looked like but also kind of like it was a chrome bubble of air or like the way invisible people in movies look when it’s raining on them. I only saw the latter part of it being there, the guy I worked with said it was solid grey at first and then changed to what I saw.” (Source)
In the unending expanse of the cosmos, Earth holds secrets that have perplexed and fascinated humans for centuries. As we race towards the future, pushing the boundaries of what is scientifically possible, we find intriguing clues from our ancient past suggesting that we may not be alone in the universe.
One of the most riveting stories from history dates back to 1946, with the expedition called Operation High Jump led by the renowned Admiral Richard Byrd. This mission, considered the largest Antarctic expedition at that time, has been mired in mystery. Whispers of an aerial battle involving advanced flying craft and encounters with extraterrestrial beings suggest an incredible and almost unbelievable narrative. Adding more intrigue to the tale, a 2018 satellite image captured what appeared to be a contrail stretching from the North to the South Pole. The sheer speed necessary to leave such a trail hints at technology far beyond our current capabilities.
This is not the only tale that nudges us to reconsider our understanding of human history. The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical computer found in the Aegean Sea, dates back to 200 BC. This device, which was used to predict astronomical events, stands as a testament to the advanced technological capabilities of ancient civilizations. It was so advanced that it’s likened to finding a jet plane in King Tut’s tomb! Such anomalies make one wonder: was the knowledge of our ancestors influenced or even given by extraterrestrial beings?
Jumping from the ancient to the ultra-modern, science is on the brink of creating wonders with nanotechnology. Imagine microscopic robots, a mere 244 atoms across, swimming through our bloodstream, repairing damaged tissues, healing wounds at unprecedented speeds, and perhaps even reversing the aging process. Such advancements are not confined to the realms of science fiction anymore. The field is advancing so rapidly that it promises not just longer life but perhaps a reversal of the aging process in the foreseeable future.
Could it be that these modern scientific marvels echo knowledge passed down from celestial visitors? The merging of our ancient past and a promising future raises exciting questions. Are we, as a species, evolving to resemble our potential extraterrestrial ancestors? The universe holds its secrets close, but with each discovery, we inch closer to understanding our place in this vast cosmos.
Extraterrestrials from another dimension began visiting a young boy in 1942. These visitors imparted wisdom and guidance to the boy to prepare him to become a great prophet. When he became a man, the extraterrestrials permitted him to snap photographs and record video of their spaceships. And they even whisked him away on time-traveling adventures. At least that is how Billy Meier tells the story of his life.
The case of Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier is one of the most well-known and controversial cases in ufology. Meier claims to have personally interacted with multiple extraterrestrials during his life, taken more than a thousand of the clearest UFO photos, and written word-for-word transcripts of his conversations with these extraterrestrials. He even established a church of sorts, called Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (translation: Free Community of Interests for the Fringe and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies), or FIGU, to spread the teachings of the extraterrestrials. As to where Meier got the nickname “Billy,” according to the FIGU website, the name was given to him by an American woman named Judy Reed: “Eduard Meier, wearing a black hat and a gun belt, reminded her of ‘Billy the Kid,’ the ‘legendary gunman of the Wild West.’”
Billy Meier and his family circa 1980. Image Credit: Wendelle Stevens from “UFO…Contact from the Pleiades”
A Brief Biography
Billy Meier was born in the small village of Bülach, Switzerland, on February 3, 1937. Meier was the second of seven children born to Julius Meier, a shoemaker, and his wife, Bertha. In the book, Spaceships of the Pleiades, author Kal K. Korff explains that, in Meier’s younger years, he “spent his time working various manual labor jobs, dodging truant officers, and having occasional brushes with the law.” Korff alleges that Meier repeatedly found himself in correctional facilities and repeatedly escaped from these facilities. After escaping from the Aarburg correctional facility in Rheinau, Switzerland, Meier reportedly fled to France, where he joined the French Foreign Legion. Only a few months later, Meier deserted the Legion, but then turned himself over to authorities in Switzerland.
After the “transgressions of his youth,” as Korff puts it, Meier traveled extensively through Europe, Africa, and Asia. He performed a variety of jobs to support himself along his travels, including “chicken farmer, grape picker, nail pounder, snake catcher, truck driver, puppeteer, waiter, German tutor, and ship painter,” according to Korff. Along his multi-continent journey, Meier reportedly joined most of the religions of Europe, Africa, and Asia in search of a “belief system acceptable to him,” according to UFO researcher Lieutenant Colonel Wendelle Stevens.
During his travels, Meier lost one of his arms in a gruesome bus accident. On August 3, 1965, Meier was riding in a bus in Iskenderun, Turkey, when the drunk driver of another bus crashed into Meier’s bus. The impact ejected Meier from the bus and crushed his left arm so severely that it had to be amputated.
Billy Meier
Meier, undeterred, continued his travels and relocated to Greece, where he met Kalliope Zafiriou, whom he married in March 1966. The couple moved to Pakistan, where their first child, Gilgamesha, was born. Then in 1970, Meier returned to Switzerland with his family, where, they later welcomed their second child, Atlantis-Socrates, into the world. Their youngest child, Methusalem, was born in 1973. The family rented a farm house in the town of Hinwil in northeastern Switzerland. And while Meier was a skilled farmer, the loss of his arm limited what he could accomplish. He received a small monthly welfare payment from the Swiss government because of his handicap, but to supplement the family’s income, Meier raised chickens and sold their eggs.
In 1974, Meier placed an ad in the German magazine Esotera seeking, “anyone who might wish to form a group for discussing and studying ‘metaphysical’ or paranormal subjects.” People responded to the ad, and a study group was born. It was at one of these meetings where Meier first made the astonishing claim that he was in direct contact with extraterrestrials.
Meier’s extraordinary claims garnered international attention when Swiss UFO researcher Lou Zinsstag sent some of Meier’s photos to Wendelle Stevens in the United States. Stevens went to Switzerland to investigate the case and, as a result, he published, UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades, as well as Message from the Pleiades, a four-volume set of books related to the case. As one of the primary researchers of the Meier case, Stevens’s multi-year investigation played a large part in introducing Billy Meier to the world, as well as the world to Billy Meier.
Meier’s UFO and Extraterrestrial Contact
Meier reportedly saw his first UFO at the age of five on June 2, 1942. He continued seeing UFOs, and the sightings increased in frequency. Meier also began hearing a voice in his head, and later that year, Meier experienced his first alleged physical extraterrestrial contact. Wendelle Stevens described this encounter in his book, UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades:
In November that same year, shortly before his 6th birthday, [Meier] saw a pear-shaped object suddenly drop from the sky, and settle gently on the meadow grass in a woods near their home town of Bülach. An old man took him into the ship and high above Earth, then brought him back to the same meadow and let him out. The ship then shot up vertically at high speed until out of sight.
Meier says that this “old man” who took him for a ride on a spaceship was named Sfath. According to Stevens, Sfath continued communicating with Meier telepathically for a year and half, then returned in his pear-shaped craft to take Meier on another adventure, and “imparted a great deal of knowledge and told of events to come, much of which he did not understand at the time.” The next extraterrestrial to contact Meier was a female named Asket. Meier alleges his contact with Asket began in 1953, and she picked up where Sfath left off. She was apparently responsible for educating Meier, who, according to Kal K. Korff’s book Spaceships of the Pleiades, dropped out of school before finishing the sixth grade. In UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades, Stevens explains Asket’s role in Meier’s life:
It was she who led him through a series of adventures designed to toughen him for the adversity to come. It was she who led him through Africa and the experiences in the French Foreign Legion, the Desert Caravans, the slavers, revolutionaries and bootleggers; into the hands of the pirates of the Arabian Sea, and across the Indian Ocean as a sailor with the freighters to the sub-continent of India.
It was Asket who led Meier to explore many careers, travel the world, and experience as much as possible.
In 1975, Meier began his contacts with Semjase—another female extraterrestrial—with whom he allegedly had more than one hundred face-to-face encounters. Semjase lends her name to the FIGU headquarters in Switzerland—the Semjase Silver Star Center. It was she who allowed Meier to begin photographing her “beamship” and other UFOs.
Quetzal, Ptaah, and Nera are three additional extraterrestrials who, along with Sfath, Asket, and Semjase, are the most commonly mentioned characters in the Billy Meier story. But these are only six out of the dozens of extraterrestrials Meier claims to have met. According to the FIGU website, Meier has had more than nine hundred personal contacts with extraterrestrials.
Pleiadeans, Plejarens, Errans, and DALs
Sfath, like most other extraterrestrials that Meier supposedly encountered, was a Pleiadean—a human being (nearly identical in physical appearance to Earthlings), from the M45 star-cluster known as the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus. But this is not the Pleiades observable by Earth’s astronomers. This Pleiades is apparently, “not within our space-time configuration,” according to author and FIGU member Guido Moosbrugger. In his book about the Meier case titled, And Yet . . . They Fly, Moosbrugger describes that, “Pleiadeans exist in a physical dimension that is shifted a fraction of a second ahead of our space-time configuration and is located approximately 500 light-years from Earth’s prospective—an additional 80 light-years beyond our dimension’s Pleiades star system.”
The Pleiadeans reportedly inhabit many planets, but their home world is a planet called Erra. Meier has referred to people from Erra as Errans; and Pleiadeans, in general, are sometimes referred to as Plejarens, because in their dimension, the Pleiades are known as Plejaren.
But Meier’s alleged extraterrestrial contacts were not isolated to Plejarens. He claims to have encountered extraterrestrials from different galaxies, systems, and universes, including the DAL Universe, which is the alleged home of Asket.In UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades, Stevens states that the DAL Universe is a “counterpart universe to this of our reality.”
The Evidence
Photograph of “Wedding cake” UFO by Billy Meier April 3, 1981.
From his numerous contacts, Meier claims to have taken more than a thousand UFO photos. Stevens, who, at one point, claimed to own the largest private UFO photo collection in the world, stated that Meier’s photos were “the most spectacular photographs” he had ever seen. Meier’s photographs remain some of the clearest UFO photos to date. But the authenticity of these photos is heavily debated. Stevens and the early Meier researchers claim to have had select photos examined by multiple laboratories, proving their legitimacy. In UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades, Stevens states that the tested photos, “have withstood all efforts to positively dispute them.” However, Kal Korff identified many questionable characteristics in the photos, and even challenged Stevens’s purported testing in his booklet, The Meier Incident: The Most Infamous Hoax in Ufology. He points out that the tested photos were low-quality copies and not originals. Korff states that, according to Stevens, the best copies that could be obtained “for the purpose of photographic analysis and computer testing were internegatives which yielded anywhere from second through sixth-generation copy prints.” Korff contacted one of the labs where the Meier photos were supposedly analyzed, which resulted in “categorical denial that an analysis was ever done.” But according to Jim Dilettoso who, along with Stevens, facilitated the testing, there is a reason for the denial:
[We] found many professionals, who under secrecy and non-disclosure agreements tested these UFO pictures. This included Jet Propulsion Laboratory, EG&G, and USNRL. The secrecy was critical. These labs were not generally authorized to perform personal projects, like testing UFO pictures. So when other UFO researchers, hell bent on getting into the case, made inquiries into some of the places we had been, they would, (as agreed,) deny any involvement on their part in testing the Billy Meier UFO photographs.
Photo analysis aside, Korff and other skeptics have suggested that the UFOs in Meier’s photos are simply models. It was not extraordinary in the pre-Photoshop days of the 1970s for someone to hoax a UFO photo by photographing models, Frisbees, hubcaps, and other physical objects. And while some Meier supporters are quick to contend that it would be impossible for a one-armed man to stage UFO photos, Meier himself admits to taking pictures of UFO models. Burned photos of these models were allegedly found in Meier’s trash can by Martin Sorge, who at one time was Meier’s friend. As with many details of the Meier story, there are divergent accounts of this incident. While some accounts claim that Meier’s children created models of the UFOs, other accounts credit Meier with creating the models. In UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades, Stevens explains, “When I asked about the models of the spaceships he readily admitted trying to model them even though they did not come out well. He even tried photographing the models and the result was so bad that he threw the pictures away.”
But a different account is presented by Guido Moosbrugger in And Yet . . . They Fly!:
One day in 1975, Semjase loaned Billy a model of her beamship for a short period to take a few pictures of it and then be returned. On the basis of these snapshots, Billy planned to construct his own model spacecraft, but this plan never came to fruition. A serious mishap occurred to the negatives of these model photographs—they slipped off the office tabletop into a wastepaper basket and were not found until after the entire contents had landed in a fireplace. Kalliope, Billy’s wife, discovered the more or less burned negatives in the ashes and handed them over to one of the group members to be restored, if possible.
It is interesting to note that Billy and Kalliope divorced, and she has since stated in interviews with Korff and Swiss UFO researcher and author Luc Buergin that Meier hoaxed his UFO photos and fabricated the tales of extraterrestrial encounters. However, this contradicts her previous statements that Meier’s contacts were real and that she, herself, witnessed events with Billy.
Select Meier photos have received far more skepticism than others. Among those are photos that Meier allegedly took during his travels through space and time with the extraterrestrials. Some of these photos show dinosaurs that Meier allegedly took on the planet Neber. But some researchers, like the Independent Investigations Group, contend that the dinosaurs in these photos are simply illustrations from a book that was published in 1972 titled Life Before Man, which was written by Zdenek V. Spinar. The illustrated dinosaurs in this book do appear to be identical to the dinosaurs in the Meier photos.
Billy Meier alleged dinosaur image (left) compared to image from “Life Before Man.”
Another highly criticized set of photos purports to show Asket and Nera aboard a beamship. The women in these photos have been identified as Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund, who were members of the Golddiggers—a singing and dancing troupe that appeared on the Dean Martin Variety Show. According to a letter posted to the FIGU website by Meier in May 1998, the extraterrestrial Ptaah informed Meier that the photographs of Asket and Nera were actually of their American doubles. Meier went on to explain that the “Men in Black” had intercepted his film, found look-alikes for Asket and Nera, took pictures of them, and substituted these false images for the originals of the Asket/Nera photos. And, he claims the “Men in Black” performed this same trickery with most of his early photos.
Asket and Nera Billy Meier picture (left) compared to image of the Golddiggers on the Dean Martin Variety Show.
One lesser-known Meier photo shows Meier standing in the middle of what appears to be a ring of fiery light. This picture appears in Moosbrugger’s book, And Yet . . . They Fly!, and is explained to be an “energy belt” of “burning static electricity” emanating from Quetzal’s ship above Meier, which does not appear in the photo. Meier’s arm is extended over his head in the photo, allegedly holding a microphone to record the sound of Quetzal’s ship. Multiple researchers have pointed out that the ring of fire in this photo looks suspiciously identical to steel wool being swung overhead by someone.
Aside from his photographs, Meier furnishes other evidence to corroborate his claims of extraterrestrial contact, including metal samples, and even an extraterrestrial weapon. Meier gave these metal samples to Stevens, and Stevens had these samples tested by various labs. According to Stevens, tests showed that the elements in the samples were “put together in a very unusual way from normal Earth technology,” and that most of the elements studied showed “un-Earthly characteristics.” Dr. Marcel Vogel, a chemist, performed several tests on the metals. But according to Kal Korff, Dr. Vogel says the claims made in Stevens’s book contradict his opinions. According to Moosbrugger, analysis was also conducted by a metallurgist from the University of Arizona who, “examined one of the metal fragments and analyzed it as a simple ‘cooking pot metal’ or cheap cast metal alloy used to produce such things as tin soldiers.”
Meier claims that an extraterrestrial woman, Alena, left a ray gun with him, but cautioned him not to fire it. Unable to resist the temptation, Meier fired the weapon at a nearby fruit tree, burning a hole completely through the trunk of the tree. Meier showed the tree to Stevens, who took photos of the hole in the tree, and examined it with his finger. But to Stevens, the internal wood of this hole did not appear to have been burned.
Billy Meier with the laser gun he allegedly received from ETs, and the hole he says the laser burned into a tree.
Conclusion
The information provided in this article barely scratches the surface of the decades-long Billy Meier story. Meier claims to have much more evidence, including audio recordings, UFO films, and tomes of transcripts from his encounters that are filled with extraterrestrial wisdom. Meier even asserts that, because of his claims, there have been multiple assassination attempts on his life! From this brief overview, it is easy to see why the Billy Meier story is so controversial, and, without a doubt, the most polarizing case in the history of ufology.
A version of this article originally appeared in Issue #4 (October/November 2010) of Open Minds UFO Magazine. Back issues can be found here.
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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.
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