The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
05-08-2021
USSR General Claimed Soviets Learnt To Attract UFOs & Made A Contact With Them In The 1980s
USSR General Claimed Soviets Learnt To Attract UFOs & Made A Contact With Them In The 1980s
During the cold war, it was impossible to leak information outside the Soviet Union. Due to top-tier secrecy, military officers and personnel never discussed UFOs during the Soviet era. Meanwhile, in the United States, UFO conferences were conducted due to the surge in UFO sightings. After the collapse of the USSR, people came forward to talk about UFOs in Russia, including the officers from Soviet Air Forces. Major General Vasily Alexeyev claimed that the Soviets had made contact with UFOs.
In 1997, Dr. Valery Uvarov interviewed the Head of the USSR’s Flight Safety Service Major General Vasily Alexeyev on the subject of UFOs. Dr. Uvarov is the head of the Department of UFO Research, Paleosciences, Palaeothechnology of the National Security Academy of Russia. Later, the text of the interview was exclusively released in the German edition of MAGAZINE 2000plus in May 2000.
Dr. Valery Uvarov
There is always a doubt over the existence of Major General Alekseyev, but he exists. His identity was confirmed in the book entitled “Russia’s Air Power At The Crossroads” written by Benjamin S. Lambeth. All the research mentioned in this book was funded by the United States Air Force, which makes it the most credible source to confirm this Soviet General’s existence.
During the 1980s, General Alekseyev had been working in the central staff that involved him with the units in the field. From there, he learned about many reports of unexplained phenomena. There were eye-witnesses to the phenomenon and that was reflected in specific documents and the reports of officials. This triggered the Soviet Defence Ministry and other departments to investigate. They sent the experts to the places where UFOs were spotted frequently.
He said that the UFOs appeared often on several military bases or any place where “there is a high concentration of advanced science and, to some degree, danger. Because every nuclear rocket, every new airforce installation represents a breakthrough both in science and in military terms.”
Moreover, he stated that individual officers and commanders who knew about the phenomenon had no official guidelines or instruction on the matter, so they investigated it in their own way.
“I know that in some places they even learned to create a situation which would deliberately provoke the appearance of a UFO. A UFO would appear where there was increased military activity connected, say, with the transportation of “special” loads. It was enough to artificially stimulate or schedule such a move for a UFO to appear,” General Alekseyev claimed.
Additionally, the Soviets learned to make contact with UFOs. According to him, the military personnel would move his hand in various directions which caused the sphere (UFO) to flatten in the same direction.
For example, if you raised your arms three times, the UFO would flatten out in a vertical direction three times as well. In the early 1980s, the Soviets ordered to carry out the experiments using technical devices (theodolites, radar stations, and others), as a result of which the unidentified objects were firmly recorded as instrumental data.
General Alekseyev shared one incredible incident when a team of Soviet scientists and other experts had an encounter with the UFO in the mid-air. They flew to Novosibirsk from Moscow to investigate an air crash. While returning, a UFO accompanied their plane in the air. As a research team, they observed the object, sketched it, and even collected data for scientific analysis.
He understood that the Defence Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and the intelligence services had been studying the UAP/UFOs, but those who were not directly into the investigation had no idea what was going on. He blamed the politics for not letting an open invention into the undefined objects. “I think that politics interfered with science here. Investigation of what was unidentified and not understood was carried out above all to clear matters up,” he said.
General Alekseyev even talked about encounters between UFOs and military personnel. He remembered one incident that happened to two warrant officers outside Moscow. One of them telepathically made a contact with the ship and even was invited inside it, but he refused as he was afraid to enter the spaceship. Alekseyev personally saw the drawings of the ship made by that officer. Soviet General believed that there are higher chances that UFOs are extraterrestrial or belong to other civilizations.
Astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek displays a photo of a fake UFO at a 1966 press conference.
Image: AP
UFOs and the Boundaries of Science
This summer, a defense report and a new Harvard research project have renewed the public’s interest in UFOs. But neither are likely to change many minds.
On June 25 of this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a brief report entitled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” It fulfilled a 2020 directive from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired at the time by Marco Rubio, which ordered the national intelligence director to publish an unclassified, public appraisal of the “potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security, and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP] activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.” The request came partly as a response to news reports that Navy personnel had, in recent years, filed a number of incident reports involving UFOs.
Since 1947, UFOs have been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, enthusiasts, and scientists. But results are always inconclusive.
In the lead-up to the report’s release, both believers and skeptics were abuzz with anticipation. Chatter on social media was lively, and the self-styled crusader for government disclosure about UFOs, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, announced he would run for Congress if the report seemed misleading.
In the end, the preliminary assessment proved a mixed bag. Enthusiasts could be buoyed by the government’s admissions that most reported UFOs were real objects, that only 1 in 144 could be definitively explained, and that fear of ridicule had thus far stymied witnesses and thereby inhibited effective inquiry. Debunkers, on the other hand, could point to the fact that most reports suffered from a lack of “sufficient specificity,” that the overwhelming majority of UAP demonstrated conventional flight characteristics, and that there remained a great many mundane explanations for the phenomena. All sides felt vindicated, all could claim victory.
And so, ambiguity reigns. To anyone familiar with the history of unidentified flying objects, this represents a familiar state of affairs. The first modern report of a UFO took place in Washington State in 1947, and since then the phenomenon has been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, civilian enthusiasts, and scientists. During such moments, it always seems that the riddle of UFOs is about to be solved. But the result is always inconclusive findings and a dispersal of interest, leaving few minds changed and everyone returned to their corners to await the bell for the next round. The seeming effervescence of our current moment notwithstanding, it’s doubtful we should expect anything different this time around.
It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs.
This most recent fanfare surrounding UFOs—or UAP, as those seeking distance from UFOs’ outsize reputation now prefer—began in December 2017, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico all published exposés revealing the existence of a secret government program which, between 2007 and 2012, had investigated UFOs. Then followed viral videos of Navy pilots encountering unusual objects (reported upon in the same outlets); a cable television series on the incidents featuring Elizondo and former Blink 182 band member Tom DeLonge; announcement of the first human-detected interstellar object to enter our solar system (’Oumuamua); and a highly publicized, though admittedly frivolous, attempt to storm Area 51 in Nevada. And in July, astronomer Avi Loeb announced the creation of a new project at Harvard University, called Galileo, that will use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth’s atmosphere. This follows closely on the publication of Loeb’s book Extraterrestrial, in which he argues that ’Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization.
It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs. On the contrary, during the past two decades, public discussion of UFOs has been limited. But interest in UFOs has cycled through a couple of phases of ups and downs. The 1960s ushered in a revival of the supernatural in popular culture that flourished throughout the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties. If you’re old enough—say, over the age of forty—you may still have memories of Leonard Nimoy narrating the occult and mystery TV series In Search Of (1977–82); of listening to interviews with telepathic spoon benders and alien abductees on the daytime talk shows of Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and Phil Donahue; or of browsing through the extensive paranormal section at your local public library or Waldenbooks. New Age philosophy, extrasensory perception, exorcisms, reincarnation, telekinesis, astrology, channeling, psychic healing, cryonics, Satanic ritual abuse claims: UFOs were sucked up into this paranormal wave and boosted by the lively syncretism of it all. The rising paranormal tide lifted all boats.
All this publicity surrounding the supernatural also gave rise to a revival of debunking, with prominent figures taking it upon themselves to call out erroneous claims and expose frauds. In 1976 a group of dedicated skeptics founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), headed initially by philosopher Paul Kurtz and sociologist Marcello Truzzi. At the organization’s inaugural conference, Kurtz expressed worry about the growing number of “cults of unreason and other forms of nonsense.” Noting the popularity of related beliefs in Nazi Germany and under Stalinism, he lamented the fact that “Western democratic societies are being swept by other forms of irrationalism, often blatantly antiscientific and pseudoscientific in character.” Skeptics needed to be decisive. “If we are to meet the growth of irrationality,” he insisted, “we need to develop an appreciation for the scientific attitude as a part of culture.” During the seventies and eighties, a number of well-known personalities associated with SCICOP—including aviation journalist Philip J. Klass, illusionist James Randi, and astronomer Carl Sagan—agreed and assumed the roles of public myth-busters.
Mudslinging over convictions is familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science has often found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts.
Over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects. And it often gets personal. Those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin have dismissed doubters as narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel. Those dubious about the idea of visitors from other worlds have brushed off devotees as naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous.
This kind of mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science too has found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts over the centuries. Venerated figures and institutions have regularly taken it upon themselves to engage in what has been dubbed “boundary work,” asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science.
When scientists engage in boundary work, they are doing something more than saying “this is true” or “that is false.” Instead, they are setting up the ground rules for what will be considered acceptable questions, methods, and answers when it comes to doing science. In essence, they are saying, “this is a question we may pursue in science” or “that is an impermissible way of conducting an experiment.” And there are any number of examples of this in the modern world.
Take psychology, for instance. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a subject that largely fell under the domain of philosophy. Then, during the second half of the century, some scholars interested in psychology took their cue from the natural sciences and started conducting experiments with animals and human beings. In this way, psychology began to establish itself as an independent social scientific field. That status remained contested, however, and psychologists had to defend their claims of being a legitimate science for decades. Boundary work was essential to this mission. So, when prominent researchers such as William James, Frederic Myers, and Eleanor Sidgwick argued that psychical research—the study of the power of mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, and life after death—should be included as part of academic psychology, many practitioners bristled. Experimentalist Wilhelm Wundt, Science editor James Cattell, and Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg were just some of the influential figures to repudiate the phenomena as “nothing but fraud and humbug” and to bemoan research about them for “doing much to injure psychology.” Their judgments eventually won the day and, as a result, parapsychology was shifted from science to pseudoscience.
Boundary work has also been evident in policing the how and what of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When SETI takes the form of astronomers using telescopes to seek evidence of intelligent radio signals and mechanical objects in outer space, it is accepted as a mainstream (though, admittedly, underfunded) academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. UFO investigation has, consequently, been largely privately funded and conducted by committed individuals in their free time.
This stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images, celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment.
When astronomers use telescopes to seek evidence of extraterrestrials, it is accepted as a mainstream academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. This stark divide did not happen overnight.
It all started in June 1947, when a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds near Mt. Rainier. He described their motion to the media as moving like a saucer would if skipped across water, and an enterprising journalist had found his headline: he christened them “flying saucers.” That summer, flying saucers were reported across the United States, and the press began wondering what exactly was going on.
The thought that the objects might have been extraterrestrial visitors did not rank highly on the list of possibilities considered by most people at the time. A Gallup poll published just a few weeks after the Arnold sighting asked Americans what they thought the things were: while 90 percent admitted having heard of “flying saucers,” a majority either had no idea what they could be or thought that witnesses were mistaken. Gallup didn’t even mention if anyone surveyed brought up aliens. Ten years later, in August 1957, Trendex conducted a similar survey of the American public and found that now over 25 percent believed unidentified flying objects could be from outer space.
Three things had happened in the meantime that made this possible. First was media saturation. Newspapers and magazines across the world covered and outright promoted the flying saucer saga, especially after 1949. Then, what had begun as a distinctly U.S. phenomenon soon became a global one, as UFOs began to turn up in Southern Africa, Australia, Europe, and South America. By the mid-1950s, few in the world could say they had never heard of flying saucers.
Second was the rise of flying-saucers-from-outer-space promoters. In 1950, three influential books by pulp and entertainment writers—Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, and Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Flying Saucers—hit bookshelves, each arguing that the overwhelming evidence showed that aliens were visiting, more likely than not in response to the detonation of atomic bombs. The authors provided the model for a new kind of public figure: the crusading whistleblower dedicated to breaking the silence over the alien origins of unidentified flying objects.
Third, some Americans were so curious about the phenomenon that they sought out like-minded others. Inspired by the development of science fiction fan clubs and newsletters in the 1930s and ’40s, enthusiasts beginning in the early ’50s organized local saucer clubs where members could meet to discuss the latest developments. By the end of the decade, some had grown into vibrant organizations, with national, even international followings and monthly newsletters which actively solicited contributions from members about their own sightings and theories.
So, by the end of the 1950s, flying saucers didn’t just make news; they had champions who helped make them news. Some enthusiasts, however, believed interest in UFOs needed to be channeled into something more than a hobby or pastime. The Air Force had been conducting its own investigations into the flying saucer phenomenon since 1947. Saucer groups, however, placed little confidence in the military and were especially frustrated by the secrecy surrounding its work. They believed it was time for civilians to seize the day and to begin investigating cases in a more thorough and open manner.
Keyhoe, Leonard Stringfield, Morris Jessup, and Coral and Jim Lorenzen were some of the leading pioneers in this effort. At first, most civilian investigators had to rely exclusively on newspaper and magazine articles for their source materials. By1965, however, the Lorenzens and Keyhoe were directing large organizations (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, respectively) with national reach, allowing them to send members into the field to conduct interviews and examine sites. By 1972 the Lorenzens had put together a manual for field investigators, guiding them through the kind of equipment and procedures to use when going about their work.
The first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers who, though now dismissed, would one day be vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.
In this way, a new field of study was born—“ufology,” as it was dubbed. That first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers—it was not uncommon for comparisons to be made to Galileo—who, though now dismissed by the establishment, would one day find their endeavors vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.
Major scientific associations and most academic scholars saw matters differently. They considered ufology yet another example of a pseudoscience. While some went about publicly debunking its methods and findings, most academics opted to simply pay ufology no heed.
By the mid-1960s, however, a few scientists working at major U.S. universities had reached a different conclusion. They believed that UFOs were genuine physical phenomena that warranted serious scientific study. Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek was one such figure. Hynek was the scientific consultant to the Air Force in its investigations into unidentified flying objects. At first skeptical about the claims of witnesses, he grew puzzled by the growing number of cases that seemed to defy conventional explanation.
In the early sixties, Hynek began holding UFO discussion meetings in his home with interested colleagues—at first from Northwestern, but then from other universities as well. The group included French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who would go on to become a leading voice in ufology. Soon, Hynek was referring to the circle as The Invisible College—a reference to the secretive group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers who had touted experimental research and defied church dogma. The name stuck, and continues to be used to refer to academics who study and exchange ideas about UFOs but do so clandestinely for fear of hurting their careers.
Another ufologist who rose to prominence in the 1960s was James McDonald, an internationally respected atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona. An expert in cloud physics and micrometeorology, he had begun privately looking into UFOs in the late fifties and joined a leading UFO organization. In 1966 he suddenly went public as an outspoken advocate for the position that UFOs were, as he put it, “the greatest scientific problem of our times.” Though a latecomer to the scene, McDonald was a constant public presence, making the case for the scientific study of UFOs in press conferences, public lectures, and TV and radio interviews. He railed against what he considered the Air Force’s incompetence in handling the matter, and he took it upon himself to interview hundreds of witnesses.
Though widely acknowledged to be accomplished and eloquent, many of his fellow scientists found McDonald to be dogmatic and abrasive. So when it was announced in October 1966 that the University of Colorado at Boulder had agreed to serve as the home for a scientific committee funded by the Air Force to study the UFO phenomenon, McDonald was not invited to serve as a member. Like Hynek and Vallée, McDonald instead was asked to consult now and again with the committee, but all three were left out of the group’s day-to-day activities and deliberations.
The project’s director was nuclear physicist Edward Condon, who had spent decades working in and with the government dating back to the wartime Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. His involvement with the military, however, hadn’t stopped him from criticizing it for being too secretive. After the war, he was also a leading voice insisting that civilian authorities be put in control of atomic energy, and he had to face down accusations before the House Un-American Activities Committee on several occasions. Here, then, was a no-nonsense academic, who was not easily intimidated and despised government secrecy. He seemed the ideal choice to head up this first-ever funded scientific study of UFOs by academic researchers.
The Condon Committee began its work in November 1966. Excitement and anticipation surrounded the start of the project. Ufologists, UFO enthusiasts, members of the Invisible College, the Air Force, and the general public all expressed high hopes that the world would finally have an answer to the riddle of the flying saucers. Their enthusiasm was soon quashed. While some ufologists were asked to make presentations before the committee, word inside the Colorado group was that Condon considered the possibility of alien visitors to be preposterous. Disgruntled insiders reported that researchers were being steered toward concluding that the UFO phenomenon had a psychological explanation.
Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”
McDonald was careful to cultivate contacts within the Colorado project. His personal papers, now housed in the archives at the University of Arizona, show that he received surreptitious updates from Boulder on an almost daily basis. As he did, he became more and more frustrated by what he saw as Condon’s attempt to stop any serious consideration that UFOs might have extraterrestrial origins. In early 1968 he, along with several people serving on the Condon Committee, confronted Condon with evidence that he had no intention of conducting a legitimate scientific investigation into unidentified flying objects.
The move outraged Condon, who fired the committee members for dereliction of their duties. McDonald went to the media, finding a journalist at Look to write an exposé chronicling what was portrayed as Condon’s incompetent and imperious management of the project. And with that, all bridges had been burned. Ufologists dismissed the work of the committee even before it had released its report in January 1969. McDonald demanded a new scientific study be conducted. The Air Force formally shut down its UFO task force. And Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”
The Condon Committee’s final report did not mince words. “Our general conclusion,” it stated, “is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge”—this despite the fact that around a third of the cases examined remained unexplained. No one was terribly surprised, least of all people in the UFO community. Rather than settling the matter of UFOs for good, it simply escalated the mutual mistrust between believers and skeptics, between amateur ufologists and academic scientists.
Was the Condon Committee a failure then? At first glance, it would appear so. Without question, it fell victim to the political machinations of bad actors such as McDonald. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if any study at the time could have resolved the matter. If the 2020–21 UAP task force found itself confronted with ambiguities and a lack of information, this was surely even more the case in the 1960s.
And it must be said that both back then and today, there are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve. And fittingly, the decades that followed saw the rise of the UFO as mystery, with increasingly bizarre stories of alien abductions capturing the attention of readers and TV audiences between 1975 and 1995. Yes, there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. But now the floodgates opened, and with them a new generation of UFO advocates.
Chief among them were artist Budd Hopkins, horror writer Whitley Strieber, historian David Jacobs, and psychiatrist John Mack: each came onto the scene in the 1980s and ’90s insisting on the veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped, examined, and experimented upon by beings from another world. The ufology of investigating the nuts and bolts of unidentified flying objects gave way on the public stage to these new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator, therapist, and advocate to their vulnerable charges.
There are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve.
In many ways, it was Mack’s involvement that signaled both the culmination and end of the headiest days of alien abduction. A distinguished Harvard psychiatrist, when Mack began working with and publishing accounts of abductees—or “experiencers,” as he called them—in the early 1990s, he lent the study of extraterrestrial captivity an air of legitimacy it had been lacking. A five-day conference at MIT in 1992 on the alien abduction phenomenon, followed by a book on the subject two years later, brought him the affection of many in the UFO community and the scorn of many of his colleagues. The Harvard Medical School initiated a review of his position; he retained tenure, but after, as review board chairman Arnold Relman later put it, he was “not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore.” Claims of alien abduction have continued since then, but one would have to search far and wide to find a clinician of Mack’s stature who would go on record saying they believed them.
And so here we are a quarter century later, and we are again hearing some rumblings from within the scientific community. Some scientists involved with SETI have publicly called for the interdisciplinary study of UFOs. And now Loeb (another Harvard professor) has announced the Galileo Project. With an initial private investment of nearly $2 million with which to work, the Galileo Project will certainly have access to equipment qualitatively better than what existed in the fifties and sixties. Will this make a difference? Many of Loeb’s colleagues are skeptical about the prospect. If history is any guide, it’s questionable a project like this will succeed in persuading diehard believers and skeptics to rethink their positions.
Photograph courtesy of Michigan Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network
What am I looking at?
Nobody really knows. Unofficially, it’s called Patty’s Triangle because a woman named Patty Blackburn caught it on camera on June 14, 2006, near Lansing. In 24 seconds of video, Patty captured an unexplainable triangular configuration of lights that jerked around the sky. Maybe it’s a military aircraft that nobody’s seen before, or maybe it’s extraterrestrial beings from galaxies far, far away accidentally giving Earthlings a glimpse of themselves while surveilling humankind. Those, it seems, are the two most likely options to longtime aficionados of unidentified flying objects or, as the U.S. government has rebranded them, “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Why are you showing me this particular blur?
Mostly because, as obscured and fuzzy as it is, it’s the best available image of a UFO from a Michigan sighting. Hundreds of sightings are reported each year to the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), but the vast majority are resolved as something of clearly human origin. Patty’s Triangle is among the few that remain unexplained, says Michigan MUFON State Director Bill Konkolesky.
OK, but why should I care about something someone saw 15 years ago?
Because UFOs, once relegated to the province of crackpots, are having a big moment. The federal government, partly prompted by videos shot by U.S. Navy sailors of airborne objects moving in erratic manners that defy the understandings of modern physics, even released a report in June from the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that can be summed up thus:That is, no evidence that E.T. is phoning home but no earthly ideas, either. Of 144 sightings involving military aviators, the task force was able to explain just one — it was a deflatingballoon. The other 143 remain a mystery. The feds have been taking the matter seriously for more than a decade now. Then-Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, secured $22 million for UFO research in 2007, and more recently Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, told 60 Minutes this spring that he wants answers, too. Last year, former CIA Director John Brennan told a podcaster these incidents “could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” And former President Barack Obama sent speculation into hyperdrive by telling TV’s James Corden recently there are “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
Whoa! Obama believes in little green men?
Not exactly. You don’t have to think a slow-moving alien invasion is underway to accept that there’s weird stuff in the air that defies explanation. But many avid ufologists — yep, that’s a legit word — reason that astronomers claim there are possibly millions of inhabitable planets and moons in the Milky Way or other galaxies. “If life happened somewhere else and they’re even just a couple hundred years more advanced than we are, they probably have the ability to visit us,” says Konkolesky, who notes MUFON officially has no position on the existence of extraterrestrial sentient life. Either way, Konkolesky says interest from credible leaders makes the topic “a lot easier to talk about now. Some neighbors and family members who used to treat it with a giggle now ask with sincere interest. It takes a very short time, when you’re a dedicated, sincere UFO investigator, to conclude something really unusual and unexplainable is happening.”
What’s this Konkolesky guy’s deal, anyway?
He’s a 50-year-old father of two who works in the Academic Support Center at Oakland Community College and found a kinship when he discovered MUFON.He’salso a Michigan native who says that as a high school senior in February 1989, he and some buddies saw a blue football-shaped, car-sized ball of light the height of two telephone poles arching over their Chevette. Then it morphed into a display of white lights that “ping-ponged all over the sky,” followed by a red ball of light the size of a full moon. “We all saw the same thing,” he says. “It took a few years for me to find a group that actually investigates such things.”
Are there lots of UFO sightings in Michigan?
Michigan’s MUFON chapter received 2,789 sightings from 2010 to 2020, of which 80 to 95 percent turned out to have easy, earthly explanations, Konkolesky says. In 2019, for instance, a third of the reports turned out to be sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, a stream of thousands of machines floating in a line in low-Earth orbit that aims to provide low-cost internet access the world over. There are four still-unexplained sightings that stand out — a 1953 sighting of disc-shaped objects darting across Lake Superior over the Soo Locks; a cluster of sightings in 1966 in which “many hundreds of witnesses” saw UFOs across southeastern Michigan, capped by a claim by a Dexter man of a landing in his backyard; a 1975 incident in which people at four Air Force bases where nuclear weapons were stored around the U.S., including Wurtsmith in Iosco County, saw a white disc descend for a bit before flitting off; and a 1994 sighting outside Grand Rapids that prompted a flood of calls to 911 and front-page coverage in the Detroit newspapers.
What do I do if I see something?
You can call the police, the military, or your shrink, as many people do. Or you can contact Konkolesky via mufon.com. Be aware, though, that Konkolesky offers this caveat: “If they’re saying something landed in their backyard, there’s not a lot we can do for them.”
Look up at the stars tonight. Those twinkling diamonds are several thousand light-years away. Our planet is just a grain of sand on a virtually endless beach, a small dot in agigantic galaxy. Is it the only dot with life on it? That’s a question humankind has been asking ever since we started to understand the basics of astronomy thousands of years ago. Now, we’re closer than ever to finding the answer, as an unprecedented crush of ultrapowerful telescopes and interplanetary missions try to trace where else life might possibly exist. Today’s Daily Dose travels to the far reaches of the universe on that search, taking you through the latest breakthroughs and the people behind them. Curious? You should be.
COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE
Age-Old Search
Some 2,500 years ago, two Greek philosophers looked to the sky and wondered if humans were alone in the universe. Today, many scientists believe the question is a no-brainer. For decades, one of the fundamental laws of physics formed the basis of our understanding of life on Earth. The law of increasing entropy insists that energy tends to dissipate instead of coming together: pour ink in water and watch it diffuse. If that’s true for the universe, then the sublime marriage of millions of cells and molecules for the creation of life on Earth could be a low-probability fluke that needn’t repeat itself. But some researchers now believe that the existence of extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily violate that basic law: In fact, they argue, it could be what drives the creation of living beings.
Count the Stars
And then there’s simple math to consider. There are billions of galaxies in the universe, each one home to tens of billions of stars circled by at least a planet each. See where I’m going? From the first astronomer eager to catch audio signals using radio in the early 1900s to the rovers currently exploring Mars, our fascination with outer space has always in part had to do with the hunt for potential neighbors beyond our planet. Sophisticated new tools, including the soon-to-be-deployed largest telescope in history, are capable of exploring the atmosphere of planets trillions of miles away, potentially bringing us within reach of an answer.
Move Over, Mars
While Mars has long been the poster child for out-of-Earth exploration, (it is, after all, the most similar to Earth in many ways), scientists are expanding their horizons. In fact, researchers at Washington State University have already identified more than 20 planets outside our solar system that could sustain life even better than Earth (don’t pack your bags just yet though; they are all more than 100 light-years away). Meanwhile, even as it waits for a robotic rover to deliver Martian samples by the end of the decade, NASA wants to explore one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa. The agency is planning to send a mission to probe Europa’s frozen oceans and volcanoes as early as 2024. Another moon catching everyone’s attention is Titan, Saturn’s largest, where a mission will be launched to analyze liquid methane lakes in 2027.
Not So Fast
But some scientists are urging caution, saying the broadly accepted global guidelines on how to respond to a potential alien encounter are not enough. Physicist Mark Buchanan worries that these new civilizations could be more advanced and powerful than ours. “Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own,” he wrote in The Washington Post in June. On the opposite side is a slightly more eerie argument: If these super smart aliens wanted to kill us all, they would have already done it.
Wait, Are They Already Here?
What if we’re the aliens on Earth? While a recently declassified report on alleged UFO sightings by U.S. navy pilots raised more questions than it provided answers, some prominent scientists have been positing a much more interesting theory: that life on Earth could have actually originated on Mars, making us, well, Martians. How? Life forms when planets cool down and liquid water eventually emerges. Evidence is increasingly pointing to the fact that Mars formed and cooled down before Earth, and that it had methane (an ingredient for the birth of life). Add that to the theory that various forms of life travel across the universe through asteroids and other debris, and you have a hypothesis more credible than distant sightings by pilots that could be explained in part by optical illusions.
Who Are the Aliens?
Scientists have recently discovered more than 2,000 stars from where Earth would be visible when it passed in front of the sun. That means that aliens with powerful telescopeson planets near those stars could actually be looking at us without visiting us on UFOs. The good news? Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, says that if there’s life out there, we currently have a good chance of finding it. “The new large telescopes will allow us to scrutinize the chemical composition of many exoplanet atmospheres,” he tells OZY. “With those tools, we could find life elsewhere within the next 10 to 20 years.”
HOW ARE WE FINDING THEM?
Telescopes
From the moment Galileo Galilei, one of modern astronomy’s founding fathers, pointed his telescope upward in the 1600s, the instrument has been central to our understanding of the universe. It helped early scientists study the surface of our moon and discover Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. Since then, telescopes have evolved in ways the Italian astronomer probably never dreamed of. In 1931, American engineer Karl Jansky’s giant rotating antennas detected the first radio signal from the center of the Milky Way. And more than seven decades later, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope identified thousands of planets that orbit around stars other than the sun between 2009 and 2018.
Best Bet
While China and the European Space Agency — apart from America — are investing in new rovers to explore Mars’ surface, modern versions of the telescope represent our best shot at discovering the truth about possible extraterrestrial life. China recently unveiled one of the largest single dish observatories in the world, so sensitive that it can detect anything from dead stars to hydrogen in distant galaxies. Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to send up the James Webb Space Telescope this year. This $10 billion observatory will work from space, its state-of-the-art technology allowing it to look through the gas and dust that usually obscure the view for other telescopes.
The Future
Telescopes are poised to become ever more sophisticated, with the ability to provide better images of smaller planets located farther away. The Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and the European Extremely Large Telescope (brownie points for original naming) are both due to be up and running by 2025. They promise to deliver images so sharp scientists might be able to identify the fine imprint that molecules leave in the atmospheres of other planets, tracking clues to the possibility of life. Another Harvard University-led project will search for possible technologies aliens might have discarded as junk. Meanwhile, other researchers are developing ultrafast light-driven nanocrafts, similar to the ones aliens could have, to launch toward Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to ours (about 25 trillion miles away) that could potentially harvest life. Why is it so important to search for life elsewhere? Astrophysicist Socas-Navarro tells OZY the answer is simple: “All the life that we know descends from one line. Biology has only one sample to work with in trying to understand life itself and how it originates. It’s like trying to study medicine in a world with only one person.”
THE NEXT GALILEOS
Yuri Milner
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson aren’t the only billionaires locked in a space race. Milner, an Israeli Russian businessman and one of the moneybags behind Facebook and Twitter, founded Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015 and has invested more than $200 million in the search for alien life on Jupiter, Saturn and in the clouds over Venus. The businessman, who was named after the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to venture into space, has always been interested in what is out there. “I think it is only appropriate that we, as a civilization, devote at least some resources to try and ask the biggest existential questions; for example, are we alone in the universe?” he told CTech. But his biggest strength might be his proximity to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who heads a state with one of the world’s most sophisticated space programs at its disposal.
Latinas in Nasa
Latinos represent just 7% of NASA’s workforce, though they constitute 18% of the U.S. population. For Hispanic women, making it to NASA can be as hard as getting to Jupiter. Mexican Ali Guarneros Luna is shattering that glass ceiling, remaking the space agency’s reputation for a new generation. Growing up in Mexico, she read about space missions in an encyclopedia — and was instantly hooked. Then, at the age of 12, she immigrated to California with her mother after an earthquake devastated her native Mexico City in 1985. After high school, she gave up on her college dreams to support her four children. After she finally went back to school and earned two degrees, a professor convinced her to try out for NASA. She now works as part of the Agency’s small satellite technology program, which develops new tools for space missions, and is a top safety expert at the agency. Shooting for the stars has paid off for her.
You
But you don’t need to be a space engineer to satiate your curiosity about possible alien life. All you need is a telescope and a ton of time. NASA is recruiting amateur astronomers keen to observe planets from outside our solar system as they pass in front of the sun. The idea is that mass observation will help build a body of data pointing to the time and frequency at which these planets travel near the sun, allowing more experienced astronomers to know when to point the larger telescopes.
IN POP CULTURE
Fact or Fiction?
If they exist, what do aliens look like? Are they green and cute as in E.T., tall and skinny as in Signs, human-looking like Sally from 3rd Rock From the Sun or perhaps angry and gooey like in Aliens? For decades, popular culture has stepped in where science has been unable to answer questions. Some argue these stories reflect other social fears (think about the many reports of UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 during the Cold War).
Mirror, Mirror
OK, that’s Hollywood. What do scientists say about the way aliens might actually look? That we should look at evolution, and keep an open mind. They argue that the way we humans look is pretty much a result of necessity (two eyes for wide vision, two ears for stereo audio, two legs to stand up and grab things from high up). Each species is different, based on their own evolutionary needs. So aliens can actually look completely different to us. Where we are going wrong is that we are only imagining beings similar to creatures on Earth.
Man on Mars
What if we could combine scientific research with the spectacle of films? A series of cool new documentaries does just that, exploring some of the questions NASA scientists are asking themselves and offering a front-row seat to their findings. Among them is Nat Geo’s Mars, a documentary-style fiction series that takes viewers on a trip over the next few decades as humans settle on Mars. Spoiler alert: It will take more than finding a new habitable planet to rid humanity of its problems.
Portage County Police Officers Pursues UFO In 1966
Portage County Police Officers Pursues UFO In 1966
The 1960s were a swinging time full of free love, way out fashions and television shows where rythmically challenged people that were far too old to pass as the teenagers they were meant to portray danced to the groovy sounds of Hammond organs.
For many this era of peace and love came to an end when the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State in May of 1970. For a handful of police officers in the Kent area, however, the fun and games would come to an end 4 years earlier, on April 17th, 1966.
Things kicked off around 4am when Police Chief Gerald Buchert rushed home, grabbing his wife and his camera in an attempt to verify an odd object in the sky that had concerned citizens of Mantua, Ohio lighting up his phone lines.
He successfully captured a photograph that would later be a wrench in the engine of some very powerful governmental machinery, but the meat of the story would begin an hour later.
At 5:07am on an aforementioned morning Deputies Dale Spaur and Wilber Neff were driving to a hospital near Randolph, Ohio when they came across an abandoned vehicle. Stopping to investigate, Deputy Spaur noticed the car was filled with old radios and electronic equipment.
Stranger, still, was the symbol that Spaur noticed on the side of the jalopy: a triangle with a lightning bolt inside it and the words “Seven Steps to Hell” written above. By the time he read these words it was already too late for Dale Spaur, it seems.
Just as he was inspecting the car, Deputy Spaur noticed a bright light coming from the trees south of his position. Looking closer he observed a large, oval object with a bright bluish white light rising above the trees and moving towards his cruiser. The only sound heard coming from the mysterious craft was described as a “whisper behind a humming.”
At first the men felt they were unable to move, but as the craft took it’s position directly above them, Spaur and Neff summoned the will to jump into the cruiser and radioed police headquarters to descibe what they were witnessing.
The receiving officer, Deputy Robert Wilson, suggested they shoot at the UFO. Spaur declined, saying that seeing the object was like “looking down the middle of hell.” Deputy Wilson then requested they wait at their position while he dispatched a photographer. No sooner had he done so than the strange object began to move on down the road.
Spaur, a former stock car driver, must’ve grunted out an action movie quality “It’s on!” before throwing the cruiser into gear and engaging in hot pursuit of the E.T. and it’s wonderous flying machine.
The two followed the object for 86 miles, across the state line into Pennsylvania, with patrolman Wayne Huston joining the chase in East Palastine. As the chase was crossing into Pennsylvania, Spaur requested that fighter jets be scrambled to intercept the UFO. Shortly after crossing the state line his patrol car began to sputter from lack of gasoline.
Pulling into a gas station in Freedom, Pennsylvania they met Officer Frank Panzanella who had been independently following the craft. While the four officers stood at the gas station watching the object, confirmation came across the radio of the fighter jets deployment.
At that very moment, as if it were listening to the communication, the UFO shot straight up into the blackness of space, leaving the four men, with mouths gaping, wondering what the hell they had just witnessed.
One described it as smashed ice cream cone, another as a bisected football shape and another as a textured satin-like domed object with an antennae. In the end, hundreds of people across Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania reported seeing something in the sky that night.
Does all this sound familiar? Steven Spielberg based much of the first 2/3rds of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” on this incident. Unlike the movie, the officers experiences didn’t wrap up with five little pleasant notes of music, though.
Dale Spaur describing the incident before his fall from grace.
Upon their return to Ravenna, Spaur and Neff were met with a flurry of reporters. The director of Project Blue Book, General Hector Quintanilla, rushed up from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
His mission, it seemed, was to belittle and discredit the deputies with the brunt of his govrnment-man assholery coming down on Deputy Dale Spaur. In fact, his first words to Spaur were “Tell me about this mirage you saw.”
Quintanilla’s official ruling was that the deputies had confused the planet Venus and the Moon interchangeably for an alien space craft and had foolishly chased the features of the eastern sky into Pennsylvania. Despite being told by Pentagon superiors that he was “in error”, Quintanilla stuck by his analysis.
Even though Spaur was the only officer mentioned in Project Blue Books report, the effects of this ridicule were devastating for all of the policemen involved.
Buchert, who photographed the object, lost 20 pounds in the three days that followed the sighting and afterward maintained “it’s something that should be forgotten…left alone.”
Spaur’s partner, Neff, refused to speak of the incident. His wife said her husband was as white as a sheet for hours after the chase and in a state of severe shock. He told her he would never say another word about flying saucers even if one landed in his backyard.
Panzella was also quiet about the incident and had his phone removed after that morning.
Huston resigned a few months after the experience, changed his name and moved to Seattle to become a bus driver.
As was said earlier, Dale Spaur had the worst time in the aftermath of the sighting. He began disappearing for days at a time and seemingly started to lose his mind. Within two months of following the UFO he flew into a rage and attacked his wife, consequently ending both his marriage and career in law enforcement.
Six months after the sighting he was a broken, lonely and haunted man living in a seedy motel on a minuscule painter’s salary. No matter who he turned to (his family, friends and even the church) he was ridiculed as the man who chased the flying saucer. When he would fall asleep it would only be a few minutes before nightmares of “the Incident” would jar him awake.
Eventually, Spaur moved to Amsted, West Virginia and became a taxi driver. It was during his time here that he was seriously injured when he fell into an abandoned mine shaft during a walk in the woods.
Rushed to the hospital in critical condition, Spaur slipped into a coma shortly after arriving. No one, outside of family, knew of Spaur’s past, though one nurse would end up getting a pretty good idea that his history was anything but ordinary.
He had been in a coma for several weeks and this particular nurse spent a great deal of time sitting with him in hopes of a miracle, until one day when she suddenly ran from the room screaming.
She never described what she saw that day, but refused to enter his room again saying only that he was an alien and possessed by something that was not of this world. Despite his new found lack of company, Spaur did make that miraculous recovery and returned to Ohio where he managed a Lakewood bar until his death in 1983.
Ohioans have reported THOUSANDS of UFO sightings over the past 70 years, including another well-documented sighting that involved multiple police witnesses in nearby Trumbull County on December 14th of 1994.
The U.S. government released to the public some data on UFO/UAP encounters reported by military personnel and commercial airline pilots, but most people believe the data cache is far larger and may never see the light of day – at least in the general public arena. Based on comments and frustrations expressed by current and former members of Congress, that body may not see it either. We know that Great Britain has been much more dedicated to collecting UFO data, but former insiders like Nick Pope express the dame frustration. What about our friends to the great white north? It turns out they have a different problem – but the same frustrating results. What’s the problem, eh?
“Nav Canada essentially has discretionary power over the release of information about this issue. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for anyone seeking a greater understanding of these incidents.”
In a detailed investigation by VICE, Sean Holman, an associate professor of journalism at Alberta’s Mount Royal University and a researcher who focuses on Canada’s freedom of information laws, reveals why it’s more difficult to obtain data on UFO encounters by commercial pilots in Canada – its civil air navigation system – air traffic controllers, flight service specialists and technologists – work for the privately run, not for profit corporation Nav Canada. Founded in 1966, it is paid by the Canadian government to run its air traffic control system. Despite the government being its sole customer, Nav Canada is under no obligation to submit to public scrutiny or respond to public requests for information.
Why not ask us?
That doesn’t mean Canadian UFO data doesn’t exist. According to VICE, Canadian aviation regulations and procedures requires pilots over Canada to immediately alert air traffic controllers of “objects or activities that appear to be hostile, suspicious, unidentified, or engaged in possible illegal smuggling activity” and file a Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings (CIRVIS) report. When it receives a CIRVIS, Nav Canada typically informs the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 21 Aerospace Control & Warning Squadron in North Bay, Ontario, which works with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). 21 Aerospace also files a report to Transport Canada, the federal transportation department. That means the military and the government has files on commercial pilot UFO sightings.
And then?
“Despite these notifications, there’s no indication Nav Canada, Transport Canada, or any branch of the Canadian Armed Forces investigates UFOs outside of initial security assessment. That is, as soon as it’s been determined a UFO isn’t something like a Russian fighter jet or a plane full of drugs, Canadian interest seems to officially end.”
Nothing. UFO investigators know that CADORS (the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System maintains for the public a digital of airline incidents and contains more than two decades of UFO reports from airlines. Unfortunately, the data is basic, preliminary, and not the final report. Besides, it doesn’t appear that UFO reports are investigated anyway.
“This isn’t an era of conspiracy theories and X-Files anymore. The public should have a right to know.”
Sean Holman doesn’t study UFOs … and it shows. This is definitely an era of conspiracy theories and X-files – otherwise, we’d have disclosure on UFOs … even if it’s to say “We don’t know” about more incidents than just the few in the recent US government report.
Kudos to VICE for exposing this Canadian UFO data problem. Perhaps what Canada needs are some rabble-rousing podcasters like Joe Rogan or some late night talk show hosts to have Nav Canada executives on as guests and taunt them into spilling some beans. That would be fun, eh?
SANTA FE, N.M., Aug. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a preliminary report on possible threats posed by UFOs, now known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding any threats. The report provided an overview for policymakers of the challenges associated with characterizing the potential threat posed by UAP while also providing a means to develop relevant processes, policies, technologies, and training for the U.S. military and other U.S. Government (USG) personnel if and when they encounter UAP, so as to enhance the Intelligence Community's (IC) ability to understand the threat.
Dovetailing with the objectives of the ODNI's report, the Genesis 2 Project® (G2P) was established to pursue empirical investigations of forensically-validated UAP recordings and open legitimate questioning into the implications of such technologies on our national security.
Following a briefing of Bill Richardson, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Governor of New Mexico, on its >4-year data collection effort and scientific investigation of UAP, G2P is currently preparing to extend the opportunity for further focused investigation to Senator Marco Rubio, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to aid in protection of our national security. G2P will be sharing still images and videos of the first scientifically-authenticated documentation of UAPs in U.S. airspace, including those captured with infrared technology.
G2P's bona fide scientific approach to the study of UAP relies on the critical first step of digital media forensic analysis, performed by Primeau Forensics. The scientific analyses are carried out according to the methodological standards outlined by the Scientific Working Group for Digital Evidence (SWGDE) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Chain of custody documentation of the evidence (digital files and the image-capturing devices) is strictly maintained, from intake to extraction and handling of the data.
Moreover, in G2P's ongoing efforts to combat the pseudoscience currently being pushed-forward against a valid empirical scientific approach for UAP, they have expanded their scientific team to include a former NASA physicist and a former FBI Special Agent and Forensic Scientist in the Evidence Response Team Unit at the FBI lab. These world-renowned experts enhance G2P's already strong team of principals and associates in the fields of science, security, and technology. All have signed non-disclosure agreements, recognizing the importance of maintaining focus on the integrity of the information itself, as all have carried secret clearances with DOD and/or DOE.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow…UAP activity exists among us. G2P's systematic empirical study will help in solidifying the transition of UAP investigation from entertainment to scientific, while advancing our knowledge of physics and promoting forward-thinking ideas that will benefit science and technology.
David C. Henley: What the government says about UFOs
David C. Henley: What the government says about UFOs
By David C Henley
It was Thursday, June 3, and across America and around the world millions of people were anxiously awaiting the release of a major U.S. government report. “Suspense Builds Ahead of Pentagon Report” headlined a front page article in the Washington Times. “Breathless” was the word used by the San Diego Union-Tribune to describe the emotions of many of those waiting for the much-heralded document.
So what were the disclosures found in the report made public seven weeks ago by the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force in conjunction with the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI? In a nutshell, the report said that there is no conclusive evidence of the existence of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, despite the fact that U.S. military pilots have issued 120 reports of UFO sightings the past several years. As National Public Radio stated, “This could have been the day that finally answered the burning question: Are there aliens out there? Sadly, we’ll still have to wait.” The government report conceded, however, “The very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitely rule out theories that the phenomenon observed by the pilots might be alien spacecraft.” Transplanted into readable English, this means UFOs could, or could not, be flying around in the skies above us. UFO sightings are nothing new. They have been reported for centuries. A CBS News poll released two months ago revealed that 66% of Americans believe there is intelligent life on other planets, an increase of 10 percentage points from a poll taken in 2017. I am one of those who has seen an alien spacecraft, and I also met its four passengers. I previously told no one of my encounter because I figured they might think I had gone bonkers. This column today, then, is my first description of my most-unusual UFO experience that occurred on a cold, rainy and foggy day in January 2002, when I spied the UFO hovering over our house on the southern bank of the Carson River northwest of downtown Fallon. It was about 7 a.m. that morning, and I was en route to our newspaper office on North Maine Street to finish my weekly column that was due that afternoon. As I was backing out of the garage, the UFO landed in front of my car and I came to a quick stop. The UFO was torpedo-shaped, about 30 feet in length, and in a minute or two four women emerged from the craft and waved to me. Too shocked to say anything, I waved back and finally managed to utter a “hello, ladies.” The women were super-friendly, and we shook hands. They appeared to be in the late 20s or early 30s. I didn’t ask their ages because my mother always told me it was impolite to ask a woman how old she is. They were about 7 feet tall, had six fingers on each hand, large round heads, fair complexions, black hair and spoke perfect English with no foreign accent. “Where are you from and what are your names?” I asked. “We are from Galaxy X near the moon and our names are Mae, Fay, Kay and Rae,” responded Mae, the UFO’s pilot. “Why did you stop at my house?” I asked. “Your home looks very pretty and inviting, and it’s on a wide street so we had no trouble parking our craft,” answered Kay. “Why did you come to Fallon,” I then asked. “We’ve heard that Fallon is welcoming to visitors, and we want to go to a big store here to buy lipsticks and blonde hair dye that will make us the only ladies in our galaxy to have red lips and light-colored hair. Where should we go to shop?” continued Kay. I answered that Walmart is the largest store in Fallon, and it carried a large selection of colorful dresses that they also wanted to purchase. The four women wore long, white dresses that resembled wedding gowns which most females in Galaxy X wear, and they said they hoped to look more inviting to the men in their galaxy if they returned home wearing up-to-date American fashions. I told them to park their UFO behind my garage, as I didn’t want it to draw too much attention from the neighbors. The five of us then hopped in my 1998 Ford Explorer and we drove off to Walmart. Once inside, they drew stares from customers and employees, who, nevertheless, were warm and welcoming. The four ladies shopped for more than an hour, buying about a dozen dresses each and enough lipsticks and blonde hair dyes to last several years. Each woman also bought about 20 tubes of toothpaste. “The stuff sold in our stores tastes and smells like kerosene,” Fay said as we piled into the Explorer and drove back to my house. The ladies’ total purchases had come to nearly $1,500, which they paid in bitcoin. When we got home, I asked them to come inside to meet my wife, Ludie, but they said they didn’t have time because they needed to return to Galaxy X immediately to attend a welcome home party. “We also are looking forward to watching our two favorite American TV shows which will air in our spacecraft in a few minutes,” replied May. When I asked her what those shows were, she responded “Bachelor” and “QVC Shopping Show.” Before the women departed, they said they hoped to return someday and bring presents to Ludie and me. We shook hands, they kissed me on the cheek and flew off in their craft heading straight up to the heavens.
David C. Henley is publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard.
In a report submitted to the United Nations in January 1979, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) classified the objects as "UFOs until identified", but said the "prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote".
The document is one of a large group of declassified documents regarding "Unidentified Flying Objects" at Archives New Zealand, which came from New Zealand's post at the UN between 1977 and 1982.
In the briefing, DSIR debunks one film of the famous event, but has trouble in doing the same with TV1's footage.
What we learned from the United States UFO Report
The United States released a report on UFOs earlier this year.
"Both Crockett's and TV1's films are highly distorted," the briefing reads.
ADVERTISEMEN
"Crockett's film now considered unmeritous because of visual discrepancies produced by filming through an argosy window. DSIR have actually duplicated Crockett's results by shining a torch light onto the plane's window.
"TV1's film proving more interesting as it was a straight shot free of any distortion produced by filming through glass and plastic.
"However, aberrations are apparent in the film which is making it difficult to analyse. DSIR are now converting the film to computer readout and are hopeful that distortions can be erased."
DSIR said atmospheric conditions could explain false radar readings at the time of the sightings, where both Christchurch and Wellington air traffic control registered signals.
They said the readings weren't consistent with the sightings of pilots, or ground sightings.
"DSIR are not willing to make definite statements yet but their conjecture is that the objects filmed will turn out to be no more than general illumination (possibly produced by Jupiter or Venus) on the horizon.
"The objects remain classified as UFOs until identified. Prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote."
UNCREDITED/AP
UFO sightings have received significant media coverage in recent months. This 2015 image from video provided by the US Department of Defense shows anunexplained object as it soars high along the clouds, travelling against the wind.
Other documents show the lobbying New Zealand received from the nation of Grenada, which wanted the United Nations to "initiate, conduct and co-ordinate research into the nature and origin of unidentified flying objects and related phenomena".
New Zealand was chairing the Western European and Other States Group in November, 1978, when Grenada wanted to table their suggestion, and was not too pleased at the suggestion.
"We are disenchanted with Grenada resolution and would hope that the item can be disposed of without vote," one document reads.
"If put to the vote our inclination would be to vote against."
UNSPLASH
A report to the United Nations in 1979 said the "prospect of extra terrestrial intervention being proved is regarded as extremely remote".
Another document said: "A number of countries who were members of the Outer Space Committee (particularly Austria) were unhappy at the proposal. They felt it would damage the Committee's credibility and divert resources from more imporant work."
New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it shared the opinion of the committee.
"The matter is not appropriate for discussion in a United Nations context.
"We would hope, therefore, that the matter would be disposed of without vote.
"If put to the vote a negative vote would be appropriate though the delegation has discretion to abstain in appropriate company."
Grenada eventually pulled its pursuit of an UFO investigations unit in the UN, at the urging of the United Kingdom.
This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and is republished with permission.
Telescope Mount Assembly at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction. Credit:Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA(CC BY 4.0)
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who doesn’t hesitate to swim in the shark-infested waters of controversy, is proposing a major effort to find aliens in our solar system, perhaps even in our airspace. He has raised $1.7 million in private funding to launch something he calls the Galileo Project, an initiative to bring the rigor of experimental science to ufology.
Loeb’s plan is to use a telescope now under construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, to study interstellar objects that come into our solar system. In addition, the project envisions building a network of small telescopes, in groups of two, that can photograph and determine the distance to anything they see in our atmosphere.
Is this project something to be lauded, or laughed at? Although academe may dismiss the Galileo Project as nothing more than pandering to a gullible public, such prejudice is unhelpful and myopic.
Even critics acknowledge that Loeb has credentials and talent. Nonetheless, he is regarded by some in the astronomy community as a knight-errant, tilting at windmills. That’s largely because of his unorthodox views about the object ‘Oumuamua. Roughly the size of a strip mall, ‘Oumuamua was first seen as a dot on a telescope image four years ago. Its orbit tells us that it comes not from the outer reaches of our own solar system, but from somewhere else in the galaxy. While many astronomers say that ‘Oumuamua is either a comet or an asteroid, eroded and encrusted thanks to its lengthy journey through space, Loeb has suggested that it might be a chunk of alien hardware—perhaps a solar sail.
Clearly, that’s a radical hypothesis. It’s also a rebuff to Occam’s razor. The latter would caution against invoking extraterrestrial engineering when more conventional explanations suffice for understanding ‘Oumuamua.
But Loeb stands by his suggestion, and he’s recently weighed in on another puzzle, one produced by the recently released report to Congress about UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena). This study was the result of a bill passed last December instructing government intelligence agencies to put on the table all they know about UAP (also known as UFOs). In particular, the report was to address the experiences of some Navy pilots who’ve seen and photographed mysterious objects in the sky. That report, delivered in late June, said nothing about alien spacecraft (at least not in the publicly released version), but did admit that of 144 intriguing incidents, the intelligence agencies could explain only one.
So, the Galileo Project is stepping in to say “Enough already.” Let’s try and nail down such enticing phenomena with legitimate science.
The public has been whipsawed by these stories. For seven decades, the UFO believers have been belittled by serious scientists for making extraordinary claims without offering any extraordinary evidence. Now a credentialed researcher seems ready to step in to help.
That will cause some folks to roll their eyes and conclude that Loeb has gone over to the dark side. But that’s too easy. The subject is obviously important, and it should be addressed without preconceived notions or opinions based on the poor UFO evidence of the past.
But while it may be tough for Loeb to find support from his peers, those are the very people who should be grateful for his effort. The SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) community, has so far failed to find either a radio or light signal from other star systems. Yes, this type of SETI experiment is getting faster all the time, and its practitioners (including myself) are hopeful that when a substantially larger number of targets has been scrutinized, an unequivocal alien signal will be found.
But an alternative SETI strategy is to search for artifacts that highly advanced societies may have constructed. That’s certainly a legitimate approach to uncovering aliens, and one that doesn’t rely on a signal reaching us just as we’re looking for it. It also takes note of the fact that the universe is three times the age of the Earth. Consequently, there should be intelligence in the galaxy at a level that is millions or billions of years beyond our own. Maybe that intelligence really does have an interest in sending hardware to other star systems.
So, it’s at least possible that we are being visited, and the Galileo Project says it will perform observations to check that out.
Still, the project is a long shot, motivated by phenomena that only a few scientists think are worthy of study. The feeling among most astronomers is that ‘Oumuamua is simply a well-traveled rock. The three tantalizing videos released by the Navy can be understood by invoking aircraft and balloons. And as for that network of telescopes put in place to record extraterrestrial hardware cruising our cluttered skies … well, the 700 orbiting satellites that already surveil our planet haven’t seen anything that humans didn’t put there.
In other words, none of the phenomena that have spurred the Galileo Project is likely to be the handiwork of aliens.
But is that good enough reason to dismiss Loeb’s exercise? In his defense, one must admit that the road less traveled occasionally leads to something interesting.
Loeb has secured private funding and has the intellectual chops to ensure the project’s scientific rigor. Anyone with lesser credentials would have difficulty getting it off the ground.
Free from the banal consideration of tenure, and with a willingness to ignore side-eye from peers, Avi Loeb is able to bet on a dark horse. As a SETI scientist, I’m grateful that he has the freedom, and the guts, to sidestep the barrier of conventional wisdom and boldly go where few would dare to go.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Telescope Mount Assembly at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction. Credit:Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA(CC BY 4.0)
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who doesn’t hesitate to swim in the shark-infested waters of controversy, is proposing a major effort to find aliens in our solar system, perhaps even in our airspace. He has raised $1.7 million in private funding to launch something he calls the Galileo Project, an initiative to bring the rigor of experimental science to ufology.
Loeb’s plan is to use a telescope now under construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, to study interstellar objects that come into our solar system. In addition, the project envisions building a network of small telescopes, in groups of two, that can photograph and determine the distance to anything they see in our atmosphere.
Is this project something to be lauded, or laughed at? Although academe may dismiss the Galileo Project as nothing more than pandering to a gullible public, such prejudice is unhelpful and myopic.
Even critics acknowledge that Loeb has credentials and talent. Nonetheless, he is regarded by some in the astronomy community as a knight-errant, tilting at windmills. That’s largely because of his unorthodox views about the object ‘Oumuamua. Roughly the size of a strip mall, ‘Oumuamua was first seen as a dot on a telescope image four years ago. Its orbit tells us that it comes not from the outer reaches of our own solar system, but from somewhere else in the galaxy. While many astronomers say that ‘Oumuamua is either a comet or an asteroid, eroded and encrusted thanks to its lengthy journey through space, Loeb has suggested that it might be a chunk of alien hardware—perhaps a solar sail.
Clearly, that’s a radical hypothesis. It’s also a rebuff to Occam’s razor. The latter would caution against invoking extraterrestrial engineering when more conventional explanations suffice for understanding ‘Oumuamua.
But Loeb stands by his suggestion, and he’s recently weighed in on another puzzle, one produced by the recently released report to Congress about UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena). This study was the result of a bill passed last December instructing government intelligence agencies to put on the table all they know about UAP (also known as UFOs). In particular, the report was to address the experiences of some Navy pilots who’ve seen and photographed mysterious objects in the sky. That report, delivered in late June, said nothing about alien spacecraft (at least not in the publicly released version), but did admit that of 144 intriguing incidents, the intelligence agencies could explain only one.
So, the Galileo Project is stepping in to say “Enough already.” Let’s try and nail down such enticing phenomena with legitimate science.
The public has been whipsawed by these stories. For seven decades, the UFO believers have been belittled by serious scientists for making extraordinary claims without offering any extraordinary evidence. Now a credentialed researcher seems ready to step in to help.
That will cause some folks to roll their eyes and conclude that Loeb has gone over to the dark side. But that’s too easy. The subject is obviously important, and it should be addressed without preconceived notions or opinions based on the poor UFO evidence of the past.
But while it may be tough for Loeb to find support from his peers, those are the very people who should be grateful for his effort. The SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) community, has so far failed to find either a radio or light signal from other star systems. Yes, this type of SETI experiment is getting faster all the time, and its practitioners (including myself) are hopeful that when a substantially larger number of targets has been scrutinized, an unequivocal alien signal will be found.
But an alternative SETI strategy is to search for artifacts that highly advanced societies may have constructed. That’s certainly a legitimate approach to uncovering aliens, and one that doesn’t rely on a signal reaching us just as we’re looking for it. It also takes note of the fact that the universe is three times the age of the Earth. Consequently, there should be intelligence in the galaxy at a level that is millions or billions of years beyond our own. Maybe that intelligence really does have an interest in sending hardware to other star systems.
So, it’s at least possible that we are being visited, and the Galileo Project says it will perform observations to check that out.
Still, the project is a long shot, motivated by phenomena that only a few scientists think are worthy of study. The feeling among most astronomers is that ‘Oumuamua is simply a well-traveled rock. The three tantalizing videos released by the Navy can be understood by invoking aircraft and balloons. And as for that network of telescopes put in place to record extraterrestrial hardware cruising our cluttered skies … well, the 700 orbiting satellites that already surveil our planet haven’t seen anything that humans didn’t put there.
In other words, none of the phenomena that have spurred the Galileo Project is likely to be the handiwork of aliens.
But is that good enough reason to dismiss Loeb’s exercise? In his defense, one must admit that the road less traveled occasionally leads to something interesting.
Loeb has secured private funding and has the intellectual chops to ensure the project’s scientific rigor. Anyone with lesser credentials would have difficulty getting it off the ground.
Free from the banal consideration of tenure, and with a willingness to ignore side-eye from peers, Avi Loeb is able to bet on a dark horse. As a SETI scientist, I’m grateful that he has the freedom, and the guts, to sidestep the barrier of conventional wisdom and boldly go where few would dare to go.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
In October 2019, U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor, who was the subject of a New York Times articleabout his 2004 UFO sighting, discussed a spooky new sighting a fellow pilot revealed to him after they were both out of the Navy.
According to Fravor, the eyewitness was a former pilot of the MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy version of the Marine Corps’ CH-53E Sea Stallion, based at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, on the island of Puerto Rico. Twice while recovering spent practice munitions out of the water, the pilot spotted a weird underwater object.
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In the first incident, the pilot saw a "dark mass" underwater as he and his team retrieved a flying practice drone. The pilot described the object as a “big” mass, “kinda circular,” and he was certain it wasn't a submarine. In the pilot’s second sighting, a practice torpedo that the pilot was sent to recover was “sucked down” into the depths of the ocean in the presence of a similar underwater object. The torpedo was never seen again.
Elsewhere in the interview, Fravor reveals that a 79-year-old woman contacted him after his sighting went public. The woman explained that her father, a naval officer, was at one time based at the naval station in San Francisco in the 1950s. When she was a child, her father showed her a telegram that stated unidentified objects had been sighted going in and out of the water at a now forgotten set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The woman’s father told her, “We get these all the time, and it’s always in the same area.”
A BQM-174 high performance target drone similar to that recovered according to retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor.
DAN KITWOODGETTY IMAGES
These sightings are similar to Fravor’s own sighting. According to the retired Navy pilot, the only reason he had seen the now-infamous "Tic Tac" UFO was because it was hovering above a mysterious larger object that was sighted underwater. Fravor describes the object as cross shaped and approximately the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner. He has further described the water above it as though it were "boiling" or "frothing," and said the object disappeared after it caught his attention.
United Airlines 737-924 airliner.
ICON SPORTS WIREGETTY IMAGES
In 1970, biologist Ivan Sanderson published the book Invisible Residents. Sanderson, a noted student of unusual phenomena, devoted the book to sightings of what were later called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. Sanderson catalogued scores of reports of USOs:
On the 19th of April, 1957, crew members aboard the Kitsukawa Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, spotted two metallic silvery objects descending from the sky into the sea (original emphasis). The objects, estimated to be ten meters long, were without wings of any kind. As the hit the water, they created a violent turbulence. The exact location was reported as 31° 15’ N and 143° 30’ E.
Sanderson also reports an incident that reportedly took place off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1963 during an anti-submarine warfare exercise.
The maneuvers were conducted off Puerto Rico in the Atlantic some 500 miles southeast of the continental United States. All reports seem to agree that there were five “small” naval vessels concerned, but in more than one account the aircraft carrier Wasp is stated to have been the command ship…
A sonar operator on one of the small vessels, otherwise listed as a destroyer, reported to his bridge that one of the submarines had broken formation and gone off in what appeared to be pursuit of some unknown object. This operator did not, of course, know if this was a “plant”, since the maneuvers they were engaged in were exercises designed to train personnel in detection of enemy craft...However, this operator’s report was not all within the limits of any such simulation,. Trouble was that said subaqueous object was traveling at “over 150 knots”!
USS Wasp in 1964.
U.S. NAVY VIA NAVSOURCE
According to Sanderson, “no less than [13] craft,” including anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft, tracked the high-speed, unknown object. Furthermore:
It is said that technicians kept track of this object for four days, and that it maneuvered round about, and to depths of 27,000 feet.
USS Wasp was indeed an anti-submarine warfare carrier in 1963 and served in the Atlantic Fleet until decommissioning in 1972. Unfortunately, Sanderson doesn't provide any sourcing for the incident nor is there any other information about it posted on the internet.
The National UFO Recording Center maintains a database of sightings reported to the NUFORC, both by email and hotline. There are many reports of UFO-type objects seen coming out of or going into the ocean.
Off the coast of Half Moon Bay, California, an eyewitness reported that in 2007 she observed three UFOs while aboard the cruise ship Dawn Princess (renamed in 2017 Pacific Explorer.)
“After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water surface… They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering, but didn’t disturb the water below them. Just as they went out of my sight, the left one (toward the bow) splashed down into the water and disappeared."
The cruise ship Dawn Princess, Western Australia, 2013.
JAMES D. MORGANGETTY IMAGES
One report logged in April 2019 states that an object resembling a “small white boat” flew up out of the water near Imperial Beach, California, “at about [500] feet.” The object promptly “flew south at a very high rate of speed.”
Whatever USOs are—figments of the imagination, mechanical malfunctions, secret government craft, or even the work of extraterrestrials—there's a long history of sightings. Fravor’s anonymous helicopter pilot is just the latest in a long line of mysteries.
UFO Leaves Aviation Authority Clueless As Blue Spaceship Passes Hawaii
UFO Leaves Aviation Authority Clueless As Blue Spaceship Passes Hawaii
Some people spotted a blue unidentified flying object (UFO) in the skies of Hawaii on Dec. 29, 2020. Several residents reported to have seen the blue spacecraft in the sky and that it had eventually landed on the sea. Another white light, according to eyewitnesses, took the same direction as the blue UFO and then vanished into the sea. They were taken aback by what they saw that they dialed 911. But they were still "at a loss" for words when officers arrived.
A few moments after, the Freedom of Information Act requested the Federal Aviation Administration to elucidate the mystery sighting. However, aviation authorities unveil that they are entirely unaware of the sighting. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, no planes were in the region when locals saw the mysterious object in the sky.
John Greenewald of Black Vault asked for the FAA's report on the incident via a Freedom of Information request. He received a response on Apr. 12. Authorities said that they are still "at a loss" to identify the UFO.
As the Hawaii sighting continues to confuse people, some internet users claim that these sightings may be genuine evidence of alien life. According to these alien hunters, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations from deep space have been visiting Earth in UFOs for hundreds of thousands of years, and governments and space agencies such as NASA are well aware of alien life.
A few weeks ago, Former Israeli space security chief Haim Eshed suggested that alien presence on Earth is possible. Eshed also confirmed that world forces such as the United States and Israel are collaborating with extraterrestrials. He also hinted that a galactic union may exist. According to the former space security chief, there is a deep underground base on Mars where aliens and humans collaborate.
"The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet," Eshed said. Former President Donald Trump knew the extraterrestrials' presence, according to Eshed. Trump, Eshed mentioned, was "on the verge of disclosing" facts. However, he was asked not to do so to avoid "mass hysteria."
Nobody beli eved him until he grabbed a cellphone and recorded the phenomenon.Shutterstock/Dennis van de Water
They will look for evidence of technologies crafted by intelligent alien civilizations.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Are there intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations capable of building technologies that can travel between the stars? An international research project is poised to find out.
The Galileo Project, helmed by a multi-institutional team of scientists led by Avi Loeb, a professor of science in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, will seek and investigate evidence that could represent defunct or still-active "extraterrestrial technological civilizations," or ETCs, project representatives said in a statement released on Monday (July 26).
The project will analyze data from astronomical surveys and telescope observations, and design new algorithms using artificial intelligence (AI), in order to identify potential interstellar travelers, alien-built satellites and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), according to the statement.
"Science should not reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences that are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry," Loeb said in the statement. "We now must 'dare to look through new telescopes,' both literally and figuratively."
Loeb, who is also director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has previously suggested that the oddball cosmic object 'Oumuamua — which passed by Earth in 2017 and was widely identified as a comet or asteroid — was an example of alien tech. 'Oumuamua was visible only briefly before it continued on its journey to distant stars, and its flattened, cigarlike shape and erratic motion stymied many astrophysicists; Loeb was one of several scientists who proposed that the object could be a type of spacefaring equipment made by extraterrestrials, Live Science previously reported.
"We can only speculate whether 'Oumuamua may be explained by never-seen-before natural explanations, or by stretching our imagination to 'Oumuamua perhaps being an extraterrestrial technological object, similar to a very thin lightsail or communications dish, which would fit the astronomical data rather well," Loeb said.
'Oumuamua was our solar system's first interstellar visitor (that we know of, at least), but that doesn't mean it'll be the last, and one of the Galileo Project's research branches will focus on developing strategies for finding and tracking such objects, from space and from ground-based telescopes. Other project research areas will include searching for small ETC satellites that may be observing Earth, and analysis of UAP sightings.
UAPs — also known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs — are of particular interest now, following the recent release of an unclassified report by the Pentagon describing UAP sightings by members of the military, Loeb said. Of the 144 UAP sightings between 2004 and 2021 that were documented in the report, just one was identified with "high confidence" — as a deflating balloon. The rest remain unexplained, Live Science reported.
"Rigorously validated" evidence
The Galileo Project, not to be confused with Rice University's Galileo Project (an online resource for information on Galileo Galilei's life and work) likewise takes its name from the pioneering Italian astronomer, who lived from 1564 to 1642. Galileo used telescopes of his own design to observe celestial objects, leading to astonishing discoveries such as lunar craters, Saturn's rings and the four moons of Jupiter, according to a biography by Live Science sister site Space.com.
Galileo's observations and research also confirmed the then-controversial hypothesis of 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus: that Earth — and all the solar system's planets — orbited the sun, rather than everything rotating around Earth. Should the Galileo Project discover "rigorously validated scientific evidence of extraterrestrial technology," the impacts would reshape scientists' perception of the cosmos, much as Galileo's discoveries did centuries ago, project representatives wrote in the statement.
Whether or not the Galileo Project will definitively settle the question about intelligent extraterrestrials' existence (and their purported technological prowess) remains to be seen. But actively searching for such physical evidence greatly improves the chances of finding the first examples of alien tech, according to the statement.
As the project's namesake Galileo wrote in "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" in 1632: "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered — the point is to discover them."
AT SEA - JANUARY 18: An F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter aircraft descends to land on the flight deck ... [+]
GETTY IMAGES
After weeks of media speculation about the U.S. government’s potentially revelatory recent report on so-called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) —- which your grandparents likely called flying saucers and your parents likely called UFOs (unidentified flying objects) —- the report itself was frustratingly inconclusive.
Arguably, its most interesting admission was that “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.” The report primarily covered UAP incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2021 and concludes that most UAP reported probably do represent physical objects and a limited number appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics.
Whether these phenomena are the result of technologies wholly of this earth remains unclear, however. That’s a mystery that won’t be settled anytime soon, but here are several points to consider.
—- Astronomers are far from experts on the UAP-UFO phenomena
Astronomers are quite adept at observing and analyzing everything from passing near-Earth objects to galaxies forming near the dawn of time. But they are no more equipped to make educated judgements about potential alien spacecraft operating within our atmosphere than proverbial pig farmers in Iowa.
Such discussions are best left to the professional aerospace community as well as atmospheric scientists. The people who actually work day-in and day-out designing and building all manner of flying vehicles —- from drones to hypersonic weaponry. And the people who have spent their lives researching earth’s meteorology and atmosphere.
Astrobiologists and astronomers are really not the right people to turn to with such questions. Yet continually, the mainstream media does just that.
—- If they are not ours and they represent some sophisticated surveillance technology from one our potential adversaries like Russia or China, then we are in bad shape.
That would mean that Russia and China are much further along than anyone could have dreamed. But given the power-hungry nature of their past and present leadership, surely, this technology would have already been used to basically subdue any nation they choose.
—- Why the sudden interest in publicizing this phenomena?
Why release 15-year-old gun-camera footage of bizarre objects now? Especially, when through the decades the U.S. military has never had any qualms about keeping secrets. Is this sudden UAP concern merely a disinformation smokescreen to provide cover for new technologies of which even our own fighter pilots are unaware?
—- Full disclosure. I’ve never seen a UFO nor a wayward alien.
I’d rather run across a pack of angry rattlesnakes than to ever come face to face with extraterrestrials. Consider the miserable fate of this continent’s own indigenous populations. Time and again, when primitive societies have come into contact with a civilization that is more technologically advanced, the outcome is mostly catastrophic.
—- The idea that technological civilizations a minimum of 10,000 years ahead of us could not have found a way to circumvent the laws of physics to get here in record time is unfathomable.
We earthlings do little or nothing to research interstellar propulsion. This is a subject that I’ve covered for the past 25 years and less is being done to research advanced propulsion technologies today than a quarter century ago. This is obviously not a priority for any of the major space agencies.
But even $500,000 to facilitate the research of refereed papers probing the possibilities of how to make a warp drive that doesn’t violate Einstein’s axiom about the speed of light would help. Give some postdoctoral researcher a $10,000 grant to take time to write a paper that would then be submitted to a refereed astrophysics and/or applied physics journal. If someone would even donate $100,000 to generate ten such papers per year, then you would start to see real progress in out-of-the-box propulsion technologies.
—- Don’t forget that in 1910, vaunted Harvard University astronomer William Henry Pickering declared that transatlantic airplane travel was something “wholly visionary…”.
Thus, my advice is not to turn to the professional astronomical community for answers about whether or not aliens could visit us or whether we will eventually be able to visit the aliens. I think both are possible, but if we want to get out beyond our own solar system, then we are going to have to start taking interstellar propulsion more seriously than we have in the last half century.
It took six decades after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight before the first private commercial entity was able to send its founder into sub-orbit in his own spaceship. I applaud Richard Branson for doing so, but I’m astounded that this wasn’t done in 1980. I’m continually at a loss for why humanity is so backward and unimaginative in its thinking.
—- If interstellar travel is truly not possible, perhaps there is an advanced civilization that is already in our solar system and they originated here.
Astrobiologists go on forever and a day about the possibility of complex life evolving in oceans underneath the frozen surfaces of Europa and Enceladus. If such putative life evolved and became truly intelligent and technological, then perhaps they found a way to dig out of their frigid home oceans and develop a civilization that could build spacecraft. Admittedly, this sounds far-fetched. But, if so, perhaps they’ve been visiting earth for thousands of years, even though they still call these moons of Saturn and Jupiter home.
—- We also need to drop the assumption that a longlived civilization will inherently be altruistic.
Although our presence is likely known to anyone with half a brain within thirty light years of Earth, I’ve never been one to advocate making active contact via radio signals intentionally sent into the cosmos. The idea that our relatively primitive hundred-year-old technological society would somehow benefit from an encounter with sentient creatures from parts unknown is shocking and misguided. For the same reason, i would not thrash around like some sort of maniac in shark-infested waters.
As for me, I personally don’t have a dog in this hunt. To paraphrase Jill Tarter of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute who I first interviewed three decades ago, if our civilization ends up being the only technology-bearing species in the cosmos, that’s a philosophically humbling result.
But I don’t expect us to be the only spacefaring civilization in the cosmos. The views from any number of remote mountaintops in northern Chile are simply too thick with stars to bet against astrophysics and evolution.
Filmmaker Reuben Langdon spoke to RT about how the government is controlling the messaging around the new information around UFOs to keep justifying its bloated military budget and terrify Americans.
For my ninth birthday, my brother got me a telescope. In rural Northern Wisconsin, on my family’s farm, I would look at the stars across the night sky with no light pollution to block the waves of patterns webbing across the dark. Michael, my older brother, patiently set up my telescope and showed me the constellations and told me their ancient names; we would also wonder about possible other worlds and UFOs.
The first time I could find the constellations on my own, I was lit up and forever transfixed by stars. My brother explained the history, “This is the Ursa major and Ursa minor, the bears, the protectors.” I looked up at him, strong and tall, Michael, like the bear constellation, was my constant protector until his death took him somewhere beyond the stars.
Recently, international media began reporting more and more stories about Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings, following the release of American government information relating to secret projects on the subject. For a long while, UFOs weren’t taken seriously by mainstream media, they featured them only as clickbait for ‘cranks’ on the internet. But now, as more and more credible people have come forward with their experiences, a shift has occurred in public perception.
There was a movement for the American government to release under the Freedom of Information Act documentation relating to projects involving UFOs. Former Navy pilots and civilians have since come forward for interviews about what they witnessed in the skies and the way the military chose to conceal sightings of the advanced technology demonstrated by UFOs. Yet, for all the supposed transparency there was a message of fear creeping into the narrative.
As the American empire always seeks to justify its bloated weapons spending to the tune of trillions of dollars, the sudden release of these CIA documents seems at best suspect and at worst diabolical with a view to blaming the presence of this unrecognized technology on Russia or China. Unfortunately, instead of seeing the opportunity to expand awareness for humanity the framing of the new information became one with a thread of distrust and war.
In the words of filmmaker and actor Reuben Langdon, the corporate media gives us
“fear porn.”
He added:“The people doing the work (researching UFOs) seem to have the best of intentions. It comes down to the media and forcing their hand. We have a media that is so focused on the negative news with very few positives. A lot of the researchers in the field have trouble to even bring forth the information. Like, Chris Mellon who said, first we have to have the conversation and unfortunately many will not listen unless it has that negative spin.”
Reuben began his career as a stuntman and has featured in Hollywood blockbusters including Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as numerous video games, and became interested in UFOs following an experience he had while filming the James Cameron sci-fi epic. For over a decade he has been researching extraterrestrial phenomena amongst other things and entered a successful documentary making career.
Is the CIA controlling the messaging around this using the media to justify some other agenda? As we hear more stories about the phenomenon, the American government defaults their messaging to fear.
Several years ago, Reuben was involved in a citizen congressional hearing including former members of Congress discussing the history of UFOs and the coverup by the American government. Several high-ranking military intelligence figures shared information at this mock hearing to show what a real investigative Congressional hearing could be like if it were ever allowed. The hope was that it would raise enough awareness to force a public inquiry.
One of the highlights was watching the late Senator Mike Gravel demand that information that was hidden from the public by the US intelligence about UFOs and the history be released for everyone. As I discussed this project with Reuben Langdon, he described what it was like to coordinate the emulated hearing, quite unique in its approach.
He added: “I disagree with projecting fear with the UFO stories. It is an approach to get it in the media but not my approach to this phenomena. The national (American) media seems to be about selling fear and scaring as many people as possible because… fear sells.…”
One of the biggest challenges regarding the UFO coverage is getting it to be taken in a serious way at all. Reuben described the challenge of bringing forth information.
“I think that the Government may see this as an opportunity to put forth their agenda which is one of control of power…taking a bird’s eye, how it is approached by media… be prepared for false flags in the media, like an alien invasion.… We can choose to support people with a fear based narrative or support people with a non-fear based narrative. There is no reason to be in fear, if you are aware of it.”
Reuben had also made a documentary exploring alternative energy sources and the inventors who created them. The documentary was ultimately rejected by top executives for distribution. Undaunted, Reuben outlined how with his own equipment he embarked on the journey of two seasons of his show, Interviews with Extra Dimensionals, which ended up being a top show on the network GAIA. Reuben’s tenacity is driven by a curiosity based on his own personal experiences.
He said:“To some it may seem like the end of the world when in actuality it is humanity waking up to our true potential. The realization we are sovereign, independent beings that can create our own reality and not rely on others to do it for us.”
Reuben’s new project is a film about the adventurer F.A. Mitchell Hedges (the man Indiana Jones character was based on) and the crystal skull. It was discovered in the 1920’s at a Mayan temple, by his daughter. Reuben explores the mystique surrounding the object and its larger meaning to those who believe it has spiritual powers.
He added:“There seems to be an interaction between sacred spots and different places on the Earth, that indigenous hold in sacredness. The feature is setting up Hedges’ research and work. The film will also uncover the legend about the possibilities that there are 13 skulls around the Earth and if all found the legend says, humanity will enter a new era.”
The Crystal Skull is thought by some to be similar to an ancient computer that holds some sort of sacred knowledge like the Akashic records and other information available from ancient civilizations. People show up from all over the world to simply sit in the presence of the Crystal Skull to experience its power and report mystical attunement with multi-dimensional realms.
I imagine my brother Michael’s delight at watching the unfolding of all this new information. Near the end of my brother’s life, Michael gestured vaguely one night at the sky, took my hand in his and looked at me intently. Too weak to form all the words, I looked into his eyes and he turned his head upward to the night sky. I nodded and understood. “Look for me in the stars, I am with you.”I imagined him saying,“I will always be here to protect you. I love you.” Tears rolled down his face slowly as I kissed his hand.
Michael instilled in me the gift of wonder for discovering more about the Universe. I remain open and curious. Even now, I look up at night as I still search the same familiar constellations, I look for my protector, my brother, his smile now hidden somewhere behind the stars.
I am encircled with the thought of all the possibilities.
As Reuben Langdon suggests, “Instead of fear, why not be curious?”
“Mysterious lights” on the Moon: extraterrestrial presence? (Video)
“Mysterious lights” on the Moon: extraterrestrial presence? (Video)
At the end of last year, in Indianapolis, astronomers filmed the moon and were surprised to discover that an object of unknown origin was floating near the Earth’s satellite.
A few months ago, Bruce, from the channel “Bruce Sees All”, offered us some amazing images of an intelligent object that was entering the far side of the Moon.
Years observing the moon to find oddities and inexplicable phenomena that do not have any logic for the knowledge of many scientists.
Recently, Dr. Robert Jastrow, the first chairman of the NASA commission , even called the moon the planet’s Rosetta stone, which means that it is on the moon or within the moon that the answer to the mystery of the origin of life on Earth.
“This means that perhaps we came from the same place on this rock.”
“As soon as people got the first telescopes, back in the 18th century, already at that time on the Moon, some kind of activity was constantly being observed, and it is clear that it was inhuman, that they were flying past the bottom of the moon.
In recent years, many inexplicable phenomena associated with the Moon have accumulated .
Recently, in the context of the Moon, incomprehensible lights were seen again, this time green and at other times as white and bright as the moon itself.
Astronomers around the world are lost in conjecture, they are trying to analyze incomprehensible flares and grasp some system, but they have not found a rational explanation.
One thing is clear, in the celestial body closest to Earth there is a certain technical device to generate intense light. and where it is located .. hard to say.
They can be both stationary beacons and installed in mobile machines or aircraft of some terrestrial or extraterrestrial space force. What do you think? Watch the following video for more information.
One area of the greater UFO phenomenon that doesn’t seem to get as much attention as others is that of what are called USOs, which stands for “Unidentified Submersible Objects” or also “Unidentified Submarine Objects.” In such cases we have strange craft traveling beneath the waves through the water, and at other times seen to spectacularly enter the water or erupt from beneath, suggesting that these things are just as at home in the sea as they are in the skies above us. Here we will look at a collection of such exceptionally weird cases, pointing at an underseas dimension to the UFO phenomenon that has largely been ignored, but which has been gaining greater attention in recent years.
Our first odd report comes from 1947, off the coast of Malta. In June of that year, a fishing vessel was about 20 miles off the southern coast, engaged in the routine business of pulling in their nets. As the nets came up, one of the crew alerted the others to something strange bobbing about out on the water’s surface, which appeared to be what they described as a “black submarine” floating about in the waves. It was an unsettling enough sight that the crew finished hauling in their nets and went about starting up the engines to get out of there, and at that moment there was a bright flash of light from the anomalous black shape. This light was bright enough to illuminate the object and the surrounding vicinity, showing it to be smooth, black, and metallic, and there were also small figures now visible upon it, which seemed to be wearing some type of apparatus around their waists and were described as “little men.” As the frightened fishermen looked on, these diminutive figures, described as about the size of 10-year-old children, seemed to scramble into the craft, after which it began to glow so brightly that they could barely look directly at it. The object then quickly submerged and disappeared under the waves to not be seen again.
There are several similarly strange cases of UFOs entering or exiting the ocean from the 1970s. One of these comes from a reader submitted report to the site UFO Casebook, and apparently transpired in January of 1971 off the coast of Puerto Rico. The witness claimed that he frequently surfed, and that he and other surfers would often see strange things beneath the waves, glowing objects that would shoot about through the water at high speeds. One particularly interesting account would happen one morning, of which he says:
On one occasion, around 6.30. A.M. that is the best time to surf by the way, several silver-colored objects came out of the water about half a mile from where we were waiting to catch a wave. These objects were round and hovered in one position, then they took off straight up at a speed that I cannot explain, but they disappeared so fast it was incredible. About a half hour later, the objects came back, I think it was around 6 or 7 of them, and went into the ocean. We never reported it to anybody, we just thought it was a military practice or other things that we did not know about. This all happened in the year of 1971, January, I do not remember the exact date. I am only reporting this one event but we had many more sightings of this kind since we surfed in the west coast of Puerto Rico. By the way, this event happened in Rincon in a beach known to surfers as Tres Palmas, and there were about 8 to 10 surfers that day.
In 1973, we have the case of a UFO that seems to have come down to enter Rainbow Lake, in New Hampshire, in the United States. According to The Derry News, on October 4, 1973, several local residents saw multiple bright objects in the sky over the lake, “yellowish in color,” which hovered over the water. The size of the objects was given as several feet in diameter, and then one suddenly came down to crash into the waves while the other one shot straight up into the sky. The East Derry Fire Rescue Squad was notified, and actually sent a boat to search the lake, but nothing could be found. Whatever the objects were, they were apparently seen by numerous witnesses throughout the area, as the police department would receive a deluge of over 40 calls about them, which were persistent enough in insisting that something had come down into the lake that a team of divers was subsequently sent in.A follow-up report would read:
At the request of Chief (redacted), two divers descended into Rainbow Lake Friday afternoon in an attempt to resolve reports of an unidentified flying object that three witnesses claim splashed into the lake on Oct. 2. The divers swept the silty lake water with powerful searchlights, but their vision was impaired by the murky water, and they could not see more than a few inches ahead at any time. Said one of the divers, “The only way they’re going to get anything out of that lake is if they drag it. Chief (redacted) said he has no plans to drag the bottom and considers the matter closed.
A very weird series of events would play out in 1977 in the vicinity of Mayaquez, Puerto Rico, the country’s third largest city, where there was much talk of two massive glowing objects that would on many occasions enter and exit the ocean. It happened in September of that year, with a report of the two UFOs passing over the city to head out about a half a mile off shore and drop down into the water in a controlled manner. These two objects would on several occasions exit and then enter the water again, all while an estimated one thousand people looked on in astonishment. Many of them were superstitious, and were overcome by an intense terror that the world was coming to an end. One fisherman named Rafael Lopez and his half-brother, Arturo Rivera, were out in their boat that day and got a good look at the object coming down into the ocean, and he would explain:
It just appeared close to us. We didn’t see where it came from. We just all of a sudden noticed it close to us in the water, and when we first saw it, it looked small, and then it seemed to grow very large. In the beginning we weren’t afraid. We were glad because we thought there was another boat coming close to us. Then we realized it wasn’t a boat and we started to get frightened. We were hearing a sound like a cricket screeching. I had the impression it was a cricket inside the boat. I’ve had crickets in the boat before and all you have to do is pound on the sides of the boat and they usually shut up. But as much as we pounded, it didn’t quiet. It kept on making sounds.
As long as we didn’t move, the object stayed steady in the water and seemed to get smaller and then larger. And when it got larger, it got much brighter and then it would change colors. When it would grow brighter, it would get from like yellow to an orange color. Then we got frightened and decided to leave. But the boat had run out of gasoline. We had a little bit of gas in a bottle but we were really nervous by that time. We were trying to get the cap off the motor to put the gasoline in and we couldn’t because we were real nervous. And all this time the object kept getting closer and closer to us and we were getting more and more nervous. We finally got the cap off, and it finally started and we were able to start toward the beach. Once I got to the beach, I wasn’t even able to stand up at first because I was trembling. My whole body was trembling. I was pretty shook up. When I got back to my house, which is very close to the beach, I started to watch the object again. This time it was moving around real fast. It would seem to disappear and reappear again at a great distance from where it had disappeared from, darting back and forth. I’ve been a fisherman for a long time and I’ve been out on that water for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like what I saw that night. In my opinion, it was a UFO, a flying saucer.
Other witnesses were reporting the same thing, with one of the mystery objects coming down into the water. One local by the name of Luis Baez would say of what he saw:
I was playing pool and someone said, ‘Look!’ I came outside with my pool stick and I see this thing. It was something nice to see. It was round looking, like an apple. Nice, round, beautiful. It went toward the beach. I put my pool stick away and went down to the beach and looked. A friend said, ‘That thing that’s waiting over there is not a fishing boat.’ I said, ‘Sure it’s a boat’ and he said, ‘It’s not!’ So then the one that came by overhead was coming down near the other one. They stayed like that for three or four minutes maybe a thousand yards apart. The bigger one, the one that was waiting, tipped on its side and BLOOM! Into the water! The small one stayed for a while. After half an hour or so I went up to the roof of this garage and laid down and watched. I wanted to make sure if it moved or not. And I could see this thing goes up… down… this way to the right, back again and a few times it went this way into the water. You could see the water flashing. It never went all the way down in the water. It did that a few times, it goes up, comes down, moved toward the beach but not too close and it goes back. At one o’clock in the morning I went home to sleep. I have to be up early in the morning. So I slept, went to work and when I come back I asked a few friends of mine what happened to the one that was up there. Well at three o’clock in the morning it disappeared. There were about a thousand people at the beach where he was.
As all of this was going on, police were making sure that no one else headed out onto the water, prohibiting any vessels from going out to investigate. While they were doing this, there would be sightings made by police officers as well, and one of these was Mayagüez Police Lieutenant Cesar Grácia, who would say of his own sighting:
I saw something in the sky that I didn’t know what it was. It was over Highway Two about fifteen hundred feet, a large, lighted ball about six feet in diameter. It was going toward the beach very slowly. I was in the parking lot of the Hilton when they called me from the police department. They told me to go to the beach because a great many people were watching this object. When I got there, the object was already hovering over the water about two or three miles off the beach. There were about five hundred people watching. There are about four public housing areas right there and all the people from the housing areas were there. I saw one light coming down but when I got to the beach I noticed there were two objects in the water, not together but about a mile away from each other. They were hovering over the water, right about at the water level.
Because of the distance I couldn’t tell if it was a few feet over the water or if they were actually touching the water. The first object stayed about an hour but the second one lasted at least four hours. I wasn’t able to stay because I had other obligations, but I was there for quite some time. Later I returned again and it was still going on. And I left once more. When the first one disappeared, I saw it go. When the second one disappeared, I was no longer there. I stopped more than one time that evening for maybe five minutes at a time to watch. I couldn’t say exactly that it hadn’t moved but it was more or less in the same area. There were maybe five hundred people in the area where I was watching and all along the whole coast there were other people watching. A group of officers on duty that night also saw it, between five and ten. We called the Coast Guard but the Coast Guard didn’t come. The answer they gave us was that the police had to verify it first, that if there was a real emergency then the Coast Guard would be dispatched.
Other police officers would see the UFOs as well, and the whole area was experiencing a bit of a mass hysteria at the time. One Police Sergeant Ramirez would describe what he saw as follows:
I saw people gathering along the beach so I stopped my car. I was very curious, not only because there were people there but also because they were looking up. So I stopped and saw the light, which was very bright. When I got out of the car, I saw the object fall into the water, very bright and it like divided. It was pretty high, like an orange-yellow light. I don’t know exactly the size. As it came down it got larger. It was pretty good sized. First one sank into the water. About twenty seconds after, the other one went into the water also. It zigzagged a little before it went down and turned off. That was about nine thirty. I stayed around to keep traffic moving and see what the people were doing in case there was an accident or anything. Word got around and there were over a thousand people watching these things. People came out of their houses to see the view and people came in cars, parked on the side of the street and went to the beach to see what was happening. I stayed until midnight, mostly keeping an eye on the group so there wouldn’t be any problems. The police got many, many phone calls, all night. We called the Coast Guard but they didn’t come. They said it wasn’t an emergency.
There were numerous other reports along these lines, yet oddly the Coast Guard did little to act, and it seems like it was all mostly swept under the carpet. What was going on here and why were these objects repeatedly entering and leaving the ocean? We may never know. In 1990 another strange incident occurred in Turkey on the coast of the Aegean Sea. The encounter was reported by a Mr. Erol Erkmen, who was wreck diving with a friend at a site at 57 meters deep in the Saros Bay at approximately 2 PM. At one point they looked ahead to see a greenish glow in the water, which seemed to be emanating from an orb of light that appeared to be circling them and maneuvering around them. They observed it for around 3 minutes, during which time Erkmen took a photo with an underwater Kodak camera, which the object seemed to realize because it then went dark. Shortly after this, low oxygen forced the two divers to head to the surface. Upon examination, Erkmen would say that his photo had managed to capture a greenish glowing disc-shaped object, although what it is he cannot say.
Finally, we have a recent case from 2012, from Panama Beach Florida in a report filed with MUFON. On July 15 of that year, the witness says she was sitting out on the patio of her beachside residence where she was throwing a party, watching the sunset when she observed something very strange out in the water near the horizon. She explains:
I was sitting on my patio watching the sunset. On the horizon I saw this object that looked like it was coming out of the ocean. I made a comment to my customer to look. No one could figure out what it was. By now there are about 30 people outside looking. It came straight up out over the water very slowly, and made no sound. It was round looking and like it had windows with red lights in the middle and one solid white light under the bottom; they did not blink, but they were bright. When it got over the land it continued for another 7 to 10 minutes. It was almost dark. We wanted to get a picture but no one had a camera. One of my workers did take a picture with his cell phone but it just looked like a light and we could not make it out. Then the object took a right turn and flew for another 3 or 4 minutes, then in matter of seconds it was gone.
The phenomenon of these reports of UFOs entering and exiting the water are far rarer than those of the more conventional type, yet they add a layer of mystique to the lore of UFOs that is very intriguing to say the least. It hints at the possibility that these mysterious objects are not only using our skies, but also beneath the surface of our lakes and seas for inscrutable purposes we may never understand, and it all only furthers the mystery of UFOs in general, pushing it out into the far realms of the odd.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) receives dozens of uncrewed aircraft sighting reports every month. With incident reports coming in from pilots, citizens, and law enforcement officials alike, the FAA’s database of drone and unidentified aircraft sightings runs into thousands of Mandatory Occurrence Reports (MORs) today. So, now, an enterprising online publication is featuring these reports in an interactive map of the United States – thus making it easier for people to zoom into their neighborhood for details or explore hotspots of sightings more intimately.
To create the interactive map, The War Zone’s Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti combed through approximately 10,400 incident reports published online via a number of Excel spreadsheets. The data spans from November 2014 to December 2020.
Now, the FAA doesn’t offer too many details about how the reports are collected, or how they are ultimately selected for the public dataset. What is clear though is that a MOR must be generated whenever a pilot reports “unauthorized UAS activity or authorized UAS activity that is conducted in an unsafe or hazardous manner.”
Exploring the dataset
One of the biggest challenges before the reporters was to assign approximate locations using the city and state information provided in the report because MORs do not contain precise location information. Also, as Kehoe explains:
There are a large number of spelling errors and other issues in the original data, so not all locations have been matched to date. Currently, our mapping system has geocoded 9566 reports. We are working to resolve the location information on the remaining reports.
Nonetheless, you can use the interactive map to search for incidents either by keywords or by filtering a minimum altitude. Also, since drone incidents around strategic infrastructure are of special interest, the authors have marked the locations of active nuclear reactors in the United States on the map to help users better find incidents.
The degree of severity of the incidents in the dataset expectedly varies dramatically, the reporters note, adding:
Many of the reports describe common but nonetheless concerning safety hazards posed by errant recreational drones flown at low altitudes. Buried within the reports are also much more concerning incidents involving aircraft operating near sensitive facilities, such as nuclear installations and military bases, or at highly peculiar, and illegal, altitudes. The reports also vary considerably in terms of the type of aircraft described. Beyond the expected menagerie of commercial and recreational drones, a number of unusual vehicles are mentioned, including some balloon-drone hybrids, and a small smattering of references to what pilots described as UFOs.
Interactive map of drone safety incidents in the US
You can explore the map by either clicking here or on the picture below:
Meanwhile, a summary of some of the most bizarre and interesting cases can be found here. The reporters plan to make updates and improvements to the system over time.
How can I report a drone safety incident to the FAA?
Glad you asked. The FAA now uses NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System to encourage confidential, voluntary, and non-punitive reporting of drone safety incidents. The database not just allows you to submit reports, but you can also view other submitted incidents, hopefully, to learn from the mistakes of others. Colleague Scott Simmie has covered this reporting system in detail here and 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.
