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.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
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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.
I-Team: Crossing the line into Area 51 gets caught on camera
LAS VEGAS -- A tour bus carrying visitors to the edge of the top secret Area 51 military base has done something that many people have only fantasized about doing. It crossed the line and entered the base.
The driver and his four passengers learned a quick lesson about how serious Area 51 is about its boundary and its security. And the entire incident was captured on video.
In the 25 years since I-Team reports first put the once unknown base on the map, tens of thousands of curious people have trekked out to take a peek.
A few strayed over the line, on purpose, and were quickly scooped up. As far as we know, this is the first intrusion caught entirely on video and it nearly caused the tours to be shut down.
Area 51's years in obscurity ended in 1989 when news reports about classified projects at the Nevada base set off a stampede of UFO seekers, aviation watchers, and media. The base is still a favored location for classified military projects, so security is justifiably tight.
Motion detectors, high-tech cameras, the ominous cammo dudes and warning signs, which declare deadly force is authorized. The signs themselves have become photo ops, the money shot for guided outings like those operated for 15 years by Adventure Photo Tours.
“Some of them are just curious. They don't know what it's about. Others believe they have been abducted. Other people believe they are aliens and they want to go back out there to hopefully get back home. We get all kinds of people,” Adventure Photo Tours co-owner Donna Tryon said.
Tryon says the typical tour includes stops at main shrines of Area 51 lore: the ET highway sign, the Little A'le'inn, and the holy of holies, the very edge of the base itself.
But there is one thing the tour most certainly does not include.
“Our guys make it a point to tell the passengers that, you know, you can't go over that line, and if you step over that line, you're on your own,” Tryon said.
But on May 28, it happened to driver Denis Ryan and his four passengers, all of it recorded, inside and out. The video shows Ryan and group having a good time, zipping toward the edge of 51.
At precisely the wrong moment, one of the tourists asked Ryan a question about sports books. It was just enough of a distraction that he blew right past the warning signs, and kept on going.
After 45 seconds or so, Ryan started looking around, wondering where the cammo dudes were.
Less than two minutes after crossing the boundary, the passengers inform Ryan that a white truck is right on their tail.
“A gentleman in full military garb gets out. The one on the passenger side, he had a fully automatic rifle,” Ryan said.
Ryan says the military men told him he had crossed the line and was trespassing on a military installation.
Inside the vehicle, the tourists, a couple from the UK and a mother and son from the East Coast, thought it was all part of the tour, actors playing their part.
“They said they would let the company know, ‘you took us the extra mile.’ They thought it was part of the whole process,” Ryan said.
They soon learned it was no act.
“I apologize for this. Those are the Men in Black,” Ryan told his tour.
After Lincoln County deputies arrived, the driver and passengers were pulled out, cited for trespassing, and given court dates.
The projected fine: $650 apiece and a misdemeanor conviction. Co-owner Will Tryon contacted Lincoln County District Attorney Dan Hogue and tried to get the out of state passengers off the hook.
“We were afraid they would issue a bench warrant for these people, turn good tourists into criminals,” Will Tryon said.
But Hogue wasn't budging. He suspected it was done on purpose.
The company decided that if the citations stuck, they would close down the tours to 51, which would be a blow to the fragile rural economy.
What the DA didn't know until the I-Team contacted him is that the incident was on video. One look at video, and the expressions on these faces, and the DA knew it wasn't intentional. The driver has to pay but the passengers don't.
Driver Denis Ryan is now barred for at least two years.
Lincoln County has an arrangement with Area 51. It handles all trespassing cases. The DA told the I-Team that while tourism dollars are important to the county, so is the base, which generates a lot of tax revenue.
After the I-Team told him about the video, the DA agreed to drop the charges against the passengers, but on one condition: that no video recorded by the van's forward camera be made public. That camera recorded cammo dudes coming from the other direction.
The "Illusion" of "Investigative Journalism" -- Reporter writes on "Why I Left 60 Minutes"
The "Illusion" of "Investigative Journalism" -- Reporter writes on "Why I Left 60 Minutes"
Hi all:
I have a brother (vehemently dismissive, but also very ignorant, of UFOs) who works as a programmer for a Belgian newspaper publishing company. He told me that journalists hardly ever check the stories they get from the various wire services with which the newspaper company has a contract. They just copy paste, translate and slightly redact the stories because there is no time for fact searching as they always have a deadline to catch. And since the newspaper publishing companies have agreements with these news services, they will understandably swallow whole their news reports. British journalist Nick Davies wrote an excellent book "Flat Earth News" (2009) which deals with the lies, the distortions and propaganda in the worldwide media.
What bothers me most about prominent journalists is their arrogance pretending to be in the know of all that is important in the world and thus what is real and what isn't. In June 2007 I attended a farwell lecture by a Belgian believer turned diehard debunker (who, by the way, told me in private that he liked my thoughts and postings re UFOs but said I was in the wrong camp). After the lecture he was interviewed by a female journalist (the press onlypaid attention to this retiring debunker) and after finishing her interview she came and sat next to me. So, I seized the opportunity to asked her if she knew anything about UFOs and she said no. She said that UFOs do not exist and are nothing more than a belief. So, here we have a journalist drawing conclusions about a topic she knows nothing about without ever having studied the relevant data. Journalists should base their statements on facts. She clearly stood out because of her gross ignorance. She said it wasn't her job to report accurately about the UFO phenomenon, she was just there to interview this retiring debunker. In other words, she was just carrying out an assignment from her employer. And an article about UFOs is always an eye-catcher especially in the summer time.
“We don’t do stories about issues, we do stories about people.
In other words, for today's journalists UFO's are an "issue" and thus not a "story." The story is "people" – thus the vast emphasis on colorful UFO kooks and nutballs. In other words, journalism is entertainment not factual investigation and reporting on important issues.
Another way to look at it is that journalists do not regard UFO’s as events – which would imply reality – but as experiences of people – who are then chosen according to sensational or entertainment value.Wackjob people can have experiences they “believe” are real, without society via its journalistic representatives endorsing their reality.It’s tongue-in-cheek reporting.
Since the entire field of journalism in America takes its cues from theNew York Times and Washington Post all it takes is a few well-placed phone calls by key US Government officials to buddies atNYT andWP to derail serious UFO investigative reports forever (note Charles Lewis' story of how that worked so well on a non-UFO subject with60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt who instantly jerked Mike Wallace like a puppet on a string). Do that every decade or so and UFO's are locked out of society because the tone and the agenda have been set by influential people who have been quietly approached. No vast conspiracy. Just a few key people with close friends in the defense and intelligence communities.
Note that this requires virtually no budget.A few phone calls or a couple off-hand conversations in a bar don’t cost a thing to federal agencies and would barely even be worth a memo for the files.Journalists are just conferring with trusted sources “on background” or “deep background” and it does not matter who initiated the contact – the effect is the same.UFO’s are marginalized as a freak, untouchable subject.
The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That’s not what I saw.
Ernest Hemingway famously said that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” He was talking about the novelist, I suppose. But his dictum applies to the investigative journalist, in spades. It is the born reporter who insistently, even masochistically, clings to the notion that things are not what they outwardly seem and pursues the hidden truth in any situation even when other people prefer to ignore it. For most people this simply is not normal human activity
Imagine discovering that a paid FBI informant may have actually killed a civil rights worker during one of the most famous civil rights marches in U.S. history? Or that a top county public school official had put 23 of his relatives on the payroll, sexually harassed female employees and separately had informed the parents of handicapped students that their children couldn’t attend school. Or uncovering the fact that the most famous divorce lawyer in America had been literally raping his clients. Or that the (then) biggest savings and loan fraud in the U.S. was actually an inside job, in which a banker had allowed his financial institution to be defrauded as he received millions of dollars from the perpetrators. Or that a presidential campaign co-chairman had helped teach white supremacist groups how to develop a militia capacity. In Washington, D.C., especially in Washington D.C., an investigative reporter’s shit detector must be mighty.
I’ll admit it takes a strange sort of zeal to spend months or years on a single subject, to accept rejection by scores of sources, to weather threats—everything from the very real possibility of being thrown from a second-story window to being stalked outside my hotel room to million-dollar lawsuits and almost universal calumny—all in dogged pursuit of obscured information. Despite having spent a lifetime with this peculiar form of affliction, I’m sure I can’t fully explain it.
But when I embarked on this profession, I was in many ways prepared for all that—for the threats, the lawsuits and the general hostility. That was just the cost of doing business. What I didn’t foresee, what floored me and frustrated me, was that sometimes the biggest obstacles in the pursuit of what Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth” came from the inside—from my bosses and my bosses’ bosses who, despite their professed support, had no real interest in publishing the hardest-hitting stories.
*******************************************************************************************************IIn October 1977, a few weeks before I turned 24, after a brief make-or-break meeting with the reporting unit’s leader where I pitched half a dozen potential national investigative stories that apparently resonated with him, I was hired as a “reportorial producer” for a fledgling “Special Reporting Unit” at ABC News. This was my dream job.
Over my six-and-a-half years at ABC, I investigated everything from attempted presidential assassinations to unsolved crimes from the civil rights era, from prospective Supreme Court nominees to FBI misconduct, from Washington corruption scandals such as ABSCAM to the 1980 presidential campaign. I remain proud of my work during these years, which provided my continuing education about the United States and the world, about national and local politics and news gathering, about internal corporate machinations and duplicity, about truth and airbrushed truth (and the best techniques for distinguishing the two).
Yet over time, the work was becoming enormously frustrating. The Special Reporting Unit was disbanded after a year, and I was reassigned within the ABC Washington Bureau. Independently, I had begun to conclude that, generally speaking, network television news (in that pre-Internet age) was disconcertingly tethered to the front-page news judgment of the nation’s most respected newspapers. When I would propose exclusive stories up the ladder, for example, I would frequently receive notes back saying, “I haven’t read this in the New York Times” as the rationale for not pursuing them.
It became painfully apparent over time that network television news was not especially interested in investigative reporting, certainly not to the extent or the depth of the best national print outlets. In fact, the most trusted man in America around this time, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, had told Time magazine something in 1966 that still rang true more than a decade later: that “the networks, including my own, do a first-rate job of disseminating the news, but all of them have third-rate news-gathering organizations. We are still basically dependent on the wire services. We have barely dipped our toe into investigative reporting.”
Gradually, television’s daily editorial insecurity vis-à-vis the older print world and its own tepid commitment to enterprise journalism caused me to conclude that all three major networks were mostly interested in the illusion of investigative reporting. Breathless, “exclusive” coverage of the latest government report (preferably ahead of the other networks), replete with “revelations” and “findings”—all unabashedly piggybacking on the investigations of others, official reports by inspectors general or congressional committees, criminal or civil court records—could create the aura of an aggressive news organization, for much less money (and fewer libel suits) than actually doing the original reporting. I found it sobering to realize that the news organization I worked for didn’t consider the work of finding the actual truth about a complicated situation economically efficient or even necessary.
The absurdity of this faux-investigative game reached its nadir for me one day when I was asked to follow up on a wire service report about former president Lyndon Johnson. Someone with personal access to Johnson when he was Senate majority leader in the late 1950s had just asserted under oath that he had on more than one occasion given Johnson envelopes of cash. I was explicitly asked to “check it out” for that evening’s news program.
I had only a few hours to confirm the veracity of an allegation of misconduct more than two decades earlier, said to have been committed by a president deceased for more than a decade. Plausible or not, allegations this serious and anecdotal would take months, if not years, of archival research and reporting to investigate, and even then the chances of being able to reach a credible conclusion about what had happened were still very low.
Still, an assignment is an assignment. I gritted my teeth and, at the behest of my superiors, tracked down Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro, who was in t have been more gracious, but we both immediately realized that this was a fool’s errand. In his own meticulous reporting, examining every day of Johnson’s adult life, Caro had not yet scrutinized the time period of these sensational allegations. I sheepishly thanked him and handed in some sort of response to the supremely ludicrous challenge I’d been given
I came away from that poignant, teaching moment vividly aware of the vast difference between fluff and noise masquerading as the serious pursuit of the truth and the real thing. I still tried hard to carve out a professional space where my investigative instincts could flourish. But outside of the network and within the profession of journalism, I was virtually unknown, toiling away in what was essentially a dead-end job
It didn’t help matters that I had the temerity to turn down an investigative producer job for correspondent Geraldo Rivera at the prime-time TV newsmagazine 20/20. The offer was made to me in a one-on-one meeting in New York City by ABC News vice president David Burke. Taking that position would have immediately more than doubled my salary, but I nevertheless politely declined on the spot. When Burke pressed me to explain my decision, I said that I didn’t want to work with Rivera—a controversial showman known for breathless, sensational stories such as (years later) the live unsealing of Al Capone’s secret vault (which turned out to be empty).
Burke was flabbergasted and apoplectic with rage; his face turned red, his neck veins popped, he jabbed a finger at me, and he spewed a string of expletives, along with a line I’ve never forgotten: “You people in [the] Washington [Bureau] are so fucking smug and arrogant. The only reporter at this network with any balls is Geraldo Rivera.” What’s more, he made it emphatically clear that I would never be offered another job at ABC News, and I’ve been told that he went out ofhis way to block any promotions or transfers to other bureaus.
At the same time, to my dismay, I discovered that big-time newspaper editors viewed TV news veterans with great suspicion and distrust. In their view, I had begun my professional journalism career by going to work on the dark side. So with considerable frustration, and with no appealing alternatives, I resigned myself to staying at ABC until a better opportunity came along.
In March 1984, it did. Veteran CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace called me to ask if I might be interested in producing investigative segments for him at 60 Minutes. I had never met Wallace or spoken with him, and I was floored by his unexpected call. Of course, I had followed his network career for many years and was fully aware that 60 Minutes was the highest-rated, most honored network news program in the history of television. Wallace had been one of the two original 60 Minutes correspondents in 1968, earning fame for his unflinchingly aggressive interview style and investigative edge. He’d been assaulted on the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and he’d interviewed the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979—just two highlights from an award-winning, sometimes controversial career. I was excited by the opportunity to work with him. I thought maybe this time would be different.
During my first year at 60 Minutes, I looked into 150 possible stories and wrote memoranda about a couple dozen of them. Yet only three became broadcast segments on the program. I had been hired explicitly to break big, edgy, investigative stories, but I soon discovered that large, original investigations of my own were generally impractical—even at a show famous for its exposés—because of the intense time pressures. So the challenge was to find important, previously investigated subjects that could be told well and further reported on television.
There were other restrictions as well. The dictum at 60 Minutes, as often repeated by founder and executive producer Don Hewitt, was that “we don’t do stories about issues, we do stories about people.” Good “characters” were essential for these morality plays, and without a few of them, there simply would be no 13:30 story—then considered the “ideal” segment length, I had been told
It would be wrong to say that I didn’t find satisfaction in the job. During my roughly five years at the program, I investigated and brought to broadcast numerous segments—most of them of the classic, formulaic, good-versus-evil 60 Minutes genre—about a diverse range of subjects: a corrupt public school superintendent in Appalachia; multimillion-dollar Social Security check fraud by postal employees in San Francisco; art fraud involving Salvador Dali lithographs; and murder inside the worst hospital in America.
But I had also seen things at two networks that had troubled me profoundly: nationally important stories not pursued; well-connected, powerful people and companies with questionable policies and practices that were not investigated precisely because of the connections and the power they boasted.
My last 60 Minutes segment, “Foreign Agent,” featured well-known former U.S. officials and presidential campaign aides from both parties who were cashing in on their political connections by working as lobbyists or investment bankers for foreign entities. One of the latter was former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, at the time the CEO of the New York-based investment firm Blackstone and, more important, one of Don Hewitt’s closest personal friends. The two men were so close that Don would often join Peterson on his company helicopter for Friday-night flights to the Hamptons, thereby avoiding the summertime bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The script we’d written included the line, “For Japan and other foreign interests, finding former U.S. officials to do their bidding is not at all difficult,” accompanied by the image of a Japanese newspaper advertisement with five smiling Blackstone officials, extolling their prior U.S. government service and connections. The translation of the ad read, “If you are thinking about developing a new business or an investment strategy … that will be effective in the U.S., by all means, consult us!”
During the production process, when I showed Mike Wallace the photo I’d had shipped from Tokyo, Mike said, “That’s not our story—you’re not filming that.” And I countered, “Mike, what are you talking about? This is the nut of the story—former officials trading on the prestige of their former positions, trying to make a buck with foreign companies and governments.” Wallace and I had a huge expletive-filled shouting match, toe to toe, our faces close; I refused to back down, and he stormed out. We put the picture in the piece.
The first time Don screened the piece, he quipped, “I guess I’m not going to get any more rides on Pete’s helicopter.” But as the days and weeks wore on, with the piece not green-lighted for air—ostensibly because it was “too long”—I realized that I had no choice but to find some sort of editorial compromise, which was offensive to me then and, quite frankly, still is.
One day, while I was on the phone, Don walked into my office and asked whether I’d found a way to “fix” the piece
“Yes,” I said, and I suggested that we remove Peterson’s name from the script and replace it with the name of another well-known Blackstone official, former Reagan budget director David Stockman. It was a nanosecond shorter—two syllables instead of three—and it solved the unstated, real problem that Don had with the story. Don smiled, said “Terrific,” and left the room, which meant the segment had just been approved for air that Sunday.
I picked up the open phone receiver and resumed my conversation with one of the segment interviewees, Pat Choate, the Ph.D. economist and author who later ran for vice president on the Ross Perot ticket in 1996. I asked Pat, “Did you hear all that?” And he replied, “Every word.”
The substitution of Stockman for Peterson didn’t settle all the problems with the piece. In the days leading up to the broadcast, other prominent people mentioned in the story had been applying personal and legal pressure on Don and Mike, as well as the president of CBS News. So instead of being praised for producing a powerful, important story, I was under siege, being blamed for causing problems. I found myself in an inhospitable environment for original investigative reporting and its occasional consequences—pushback from the powerful (which should be a badge of honor for a reporter), but also spinelessness from my employer about what we had just published. Wallace and I had several venomous arguments that week, none more boisterous or invective-filled than some phone calls in the hours before the Sunday broadcast, in which we literally hung up on each other.
The whole noxious ordeal made something inside me snap. The morning after “Foreign Agent” led the broadcast, in the midst of a four-year contract, with a family to support, a mortgage to pay, and virtually no savings, I quit 60 Minutes.
Producers there usually retire, voluntarily or involuntarily, or die on the job—hardly anyone just up and quits. In a brief phone call from my Washington office to the show’s offices in New York City, I matter-of-factly informed Mike Wallace that I had decided to leave. My announcement came moments after Wallace had called me, somewhat giddy, to say that CBS chairman Laurence Tisch had just phoned him with effusive congratulations about our hard-hitting story the previous evening. It was the best thing he had seen on CBS in years, Tisch had told him, a “real public service.”
Later that morning, I faxed Don Hewitt a three-sentence letter of resignation
Wallace and others at the program later asked my friends and colleagues if perhaps I was having a nervous breakdown. Don Hewitt wanted to know if “this” was all about money; he indicated that my contract could be substantially renegotiated upward, and then I could get back to work.
Of course, my departure had nothing to do with either of these factors. Nor was it driven by any personal animus on my part toward Mike Wallace. Mike was certainly not the easiest man to work with, but I respected him and his enormous contribution to broadcast journalism, and appreciated the opportunity he had given me.
It was a matter of principle. It was simply time for me to leave.
Many people, then and since, have asked me what exactly I was thinking—after all, I was walking away from a successful career full of future promise. Certainly, quitting 60 Minutes was the most impetuous thing I have ever done. But looking back, I realize how I’d changed. Beneath my polite, mild-mannered exterior, I’d developed a bullheaded determination not to be denied, misled or manipulated. And more than at any previous time, I had had a jarring epiphany that the obstacles on the way to publishing the unvarnished truth had become more formidable internally than externally. I joked to friends that it had become far easier to investigate the bastards—whoever they are—than to suffer through the reticence, bureaucratic hand-wringing and internal censorship of my employer.
In a highly collaborative medium, I had found myself working with overseers I felt I could no longer trust journalistically or professionally, especially in the face of public criticism or controversy—a common occupational hazard for an investigative reporter. My job was to produce compelling investigative journalism for an audience of 30 million to 40 million Americans. But if my stories generated the slightest heat, it was obvious to me who would be expendable. My sense of isolation and vulnerability was palpable.
The best news about this crossroads moment was that after 11 years in the intense, cutthroat world of network television news, I still had some kind of inner compass. I was still unwilling to succumb completely to the lures of career ambition, financial security, peer pressure or conventional wisdom.
Just weeks after I quit, I decided to begin a nonprofit investigation reporting organization—a place dedicated to digging deep beneath the smarminess of Washington’s daily-access journalism into the documents few reporters seemed to be reading, which I knew from experience would reveal broad patterns of cronyism, favoritism, personal enrichment and outrageous (though mostly legal) corruption. My dream was a journalistic utopia—an investigative milieu in which no one would tell me who or what not to investigate. And so I recruited two trusted journalist friends and founded the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s first report, “America’s Frontline Trade Officials,” was an expanded version of the 60 Minutes “Foreign Agent” story. Not long after this report was published, President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order banning former trade officials from becoming lobbyists for foreign governments or corporations.
Over the years, the center was the first news organization to analyze and post online all of the available financial disclosure statements for every state legislator in America, revealing numerous apparent conflicts of interest. It broke the Lincoln bedroom scandal first revealing that President Bill Clinton’s top donors had been rewarded with overnight stays in the White House. In February 2003, weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the center posted secret draft “Patriot II” legislation, and in October it posted all of the known U.S. war contracts in Afghanistan. In the past quarter-century, the center’s reporting has won more than 70 national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Goldsmith Prize and the George Polk award for three separate stories in 2014. Meanwhile, I now teach journalism at the American University School of Communication in Washington, and I am the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the largest university-based, nonprofit newsroom in the United States.
The center did amazingly well, today even becoming a venerable institution—employing 40 people full-time and it publishing scores of investigative stories a year. But it’s frustrating that it was ever necessary at all. Back in 1989 when I started it, major investigative reporting did not seem to be particularly valued by national news editors, whether in broadcasting or newspapers. Instead, they seemed satisfied merely to reactively report on the systemic abuses of power, trust and the law in Washington—from the Iran-Contra scandal to the savings and loan disaster to the first resignation of a House Speaker since 1800. There was very little proactive, original investigative journalism about these or other vitally important subjects, and, equally galling to me, there was smug arrogance and complacency instead of apologetic humility by those in the national press corps, despite their lackluster pursuit of such abuses of power.
And more than two decades later, it’s no better. With a third fewer commercial journalists than 20 years ago and public relations “spinners” now outnumbering professional reporters and editors by 4 to 1, the Center for Public Integrity and organizations like it are more necessary than ever. Fewer commercial news organizations support investigative journalism now than at any time in recent history, and reporters today—especially those who aggressively seek the truths that government, business and other powerful institutions seek to conceal—are arguably more alone, more exposed and more vulnerable to professional and even physical harm than they ever were.
Nick Pope Asks: Does the MoD Still Secretly Investigate UFOs?
ExMinistry of Defence UFO project insider examines the facts
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Author, journalist and TV personality Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. While best-known for having run the UK government’s UFO project, he writes and broadcasts on a wide range of subjects including the unexplained, conspiracy theories, fringe science, science fiction, space, defence and intelligence.
When the Ministry of Defence axed its UFO project in 2009, as part of a wider round of defence cuts, it ended over fifty years of official research and investigation. But has the Department really lost interest in the subject, or are investigations still going on secretly, behind closed doors? There are some intriguing clues.
One of the reasons why the MoD terminated the UFO project was the huge proportion of sightings that turned out to be Chinese lanterns. Added to that, on many occasions the MoD was getting more Freedom of Information Act requests about UFOs than on any other subject. This led directly to the decision to declassify and release most of the MoD’s UFO files, but also to the UFO project being closed, in view of the excessive workload being generated.
However, it seems unlikely that the powers that be would ignore a situation where a military pilot reports a UFO, or where an air traffic controller tracks one on radar. Self-evidently, the government and the military like to know about any activity in the UK’s airspace, but post-9/11, fears of a hijacked aircraft with its transponder turned off mean that unusual radar returns are a particular cause for concern. Sure enough, we know from the media that there have a number of near-misses between commercial aircraft and UFOs in recent years, with several such incidents taking place after the MoD supposedly stopped investigating UFOs. These disturbing incidents have been investigated by the UK Airprox Board, a joint civil-military body which can also include input from the United States Air Force.
So in one sense, the MoD does still investigate UFO sightings, when civil or military pilots report a near-miss between an aircraft and a UFO. It’s just that it takes place on a case-by-case basis, outside of any formally-constituted UFO project. But could there be a more formal effort going on, over and above the UK Airprox Board investigations? One possibility is that such a research effort exists, but that the phrase “UFO” is carefully avoided, so as to make it difficult for Freedom of Information Act requests. Alternative terms might include UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) – a phrase we used at the MoD – or two other terms that I’ve heard people in the aviation community use, on the basis that talking about UFOs isn’t generally good for one’s career: “unusual aircraft” and “unconventional helicopter”. There are doubtless other variations on this theme, along with terms used by radar operators, such as “uncorrelated target” and “bogey”/”bogie”.
A linguistic sleight of hand is unlikely, by itself, to be enough. While I’m sure the term “UFO” has been deliberately dropped by the MoD, a much safer course of action is to contract the work out to a private company. Defence contractors and aviation corporations often have staff with security clearances higher than most people in the MoD, and with the larger companies, the Boards often contain a number of former defence chiefs and other senior military and MoD retirees. Such a situation is useful, because the truthful answer to the question “Is the MoD investigating UFO sightings” would be “No”. Additionally, private companies are outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act
Is there any precedent for outsourcing sensitive MoD UFO work in this way? Intriguingly, there is. In the Nineties I was involved in setting up a highly-classified intelligence study into UFOs, codenamed Project Condign. This was tricky, because we’d consistently told Parliament, the media and the public that UFOs were of only very minor interest, and assessed as being of “no defence significance”.
Disclosure of Project Condign would have made our public line on UFOs look like a lie, so while the ultra-secret Defence Intelligence Staff (part of the MoD) commissioned the study, the work itself was undertaken outside the Department. As an added layer of security, instead of placing a new contract, an existing contract was amended, thus minimizing the paper trail. While the final report was declassified some years ago – albeit with the sensitive material blacked out – many of the working papers and other documents generated during the study have yet to be released, and some are unlikely ever to be released, even in redacted form.
Whether one believes UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, an exotic atmospheric plasma phenomenon that science doesn’t fully understand (a suggestion that came up in Project Condign), a Russian spy plane or drone, or a hijacked aircraft with its transponder turned off, heading for London, we’d be pretty foolish to ignore sound evidence of unusual activity in our airspace, especially if it comes from pilots or radar operators.
So in response to the question of whether the MoD is secretly investigating UFOs, I damn well hope so. Because if they’re not, we’re leaving the UK vulnerable to terrorist attack and espionage … and maybe, just maybe, missing out on making a discovery that could change the world forever.
The government office investigating UFOs in Chile has released an analysis of two high quality photos showing what appear be genuine unidentified flying objects above a remote copper mine. The office, known as the CEFAA (Committee for the Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena), is located within the Ministerial Department of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC), the equivalent of our FAA, under the jurisdiction of the Chilean Air Force. It is responsible for the analysis of selected reports of unexplained aerial phenomena in Chilean airspace, most of them from pilots and aviation personnel.
The photos were taken at the Collahuasi copper mine, more than 14,000 feet above sea level in the Andean plateau in the far north of Chile. An extremely remote location with low oxygen levels and unusually clear skies, the area is desolate and inhospitable. The Collahuasi mine produces copper concentrate, copper cathodes and molybdenum concentrate from three open-pit mineral deposits. (Click here for a map).
Collahuasi lies in the far northeast of Chile, close to the border with Bolivia.
Four technicians - professionals specializing in electricity, electronics, and fluid control - were working there in April, 2013. They witnessed a disc-shaped object which approached slowly and was present for more than an hour, moving around in different positions and hovering at about 2000 feet. One technician took pictures with his Kenox Samsung S860 camera. The strange object made no sound, and eventually moved away towards the East.
The witnesses decided not to tell anybody because of the negative associations they had with UFO sightings, and therefore had every intention of always keeping the sighting private. But some months later, the photographer casually showed the pictures to the chief engineer at the mine, who asked for copies. The engineer sent the images to the CEFAA in February, and provided the agency with information reported to him by the witnesses. He too has requested anonymity.
Chile's meteorological office at the DGAC confirmed that there was an absolute clear sky at that time, and that there was no possibility of lenticular clouds. All other meteorological phenomena have been ruled out by Chilean officials as a possible explanation.
CEFAA officials told me they determined that there were no drones operating near the mine. "People in that zone know about drones," said Jose Lay, international affairs director for the CEFAA. "Fishing companies use drones and they make a lot of noise. This was definitely not a drone." DGAC officials also ruled out any experimental aircraft, planes, weather balloons, or anything else that could explain the incident.
With all conventional explanations eliminated, the CEFAA staff determined that the photos were worthy of analysis. The results of this study, conducted by a leading CEFAA analyst at the DGAC Meteorological Office, was released on July 3rd and is posted on the CEFAA website.
The report states that the witnesses described the phenomenon as "a flattened disc, of brilliant color, with a diameter of 5 to 10 meters [16 to 32 feet]. It performed ascending, descending and horizontal movements in short lengths, about 600 meters above the ground." The witnesses had the impression that the object was under intelligent control.
The first image, enlarged and filtered, shows a solid object reflecting the sunlight, the report states. It adds that the object could be emitting it's own energy as well, due to the high temperature shown in the image (the black area).
The second photo shows the object in a different position in the sky. (The CEFAA does not know the time sequence between the two images.)
The text on this diagram of the enlarged second image indicates lines where very soft rays were reflected from an "extremely luminous half sphere." The analyst concludes that the object "emitted its own energy that does not coincide with the natural sunlight which is also reflected off the object." At noon, the brightness underneath could not have been caused by the sun, which was reflected off the top.
The study concludes that "It is an object or phenomenon of great interest, and it can be qualified as a UFO."
Despite the strength of this analysis, the CEFAA staff recognize the limitations of the Collahuasi case. "The witnesses were not willing to cooperate," Jose Lay told me. "We tried to contact them, and we got no reply. So we treated the material just as we have treated several others of the same or similar nature: we file them for future reference or comparison purposes. That's all we can do in this case."
Retired General Ricardo Bermudez, director of the CEFAA, says "We recognize that this is the determination of only one CEFFA analyst among several. So we still must be cautious." He has called a meeting of the CEFFA scientific committee, composed of high level specialists from laboratories and universities, for next week. Although they are not expert visual photo-video analysts, the opinion of this distinguished group, which supports the work of the CEFAA and assists with investigations when needed, could shed further light on the case.
The South American media has shown great interest in these images. In the US, retired Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee, a well known photo analyst, has this to say: "In the second image there appears to be a very bright hemispherical shape, convex downward... possibly a UFO enveloped in a cloud of vapor." He notes that additional data is needed to determine more, but that it is clear that the object moved "a considerable distance" between the two photos.
"This is clearly not a normal thing seen in the sky (bird, plane, cloud, etc.)," added Dr. Maccabee in an email. "That makes it either the real thing - UFO - or a hoax, and it doesn't appear to be a hoax, although the inability to question witnesses does reduce the credibility. Certainly this case is worthy of further study."
It is indeed unfortunate that the four witnesses have not been willing to speak to the authorities, who could guarantee them anonymity. But even so, these images are important because they were studied by a government agency with access to the pertinent information needed for a proper analysis. That in itself is unusual. I commend the CEFAA for taking on cases such as this. The experts there conducted a serious investigation, and then released the information to the public, with no reservations about acknowledging the possible existence of a UFO, since that is warranted.
Ex-Mormons give their take on"The Book of Mormon" musical
LAS VEGAS -- The hit musical "The Book of Mormon" now playing at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts downtown, had a special group in its audience this weekend. They call themselves "The post-Mo's", meaning, post-Mormons, people who have left the church for one reason or another. More than 80 post-Mo's made the trip from heavily-Mormon Utah to see the production in a city that isn't exactly known for its restraint or modesty. The post-Mo's say they weren't trying to make a statement by seeing the show in a city known for its tolerance of so-called sin. Their primary mission was to have fun and to be with like-minded people. But the theme of the musical has a special resonance for them because of what most of them endured when they decided to split with the church. Las Vegas, it turns out, proved to be a soothing balm for wounds that are still open. “The Book of Mormon” has been a smash hit everywhere it's played. It tells the story of two young Mormons sent on a soul-saving mission to Uganda, which is the set-up for a brutal skewering of Mormon teachings that has been described as vulgar, blasphemous, and gut-busting hilarious. “We bought the sound track when we were still believers,” Tom and Kristen Evans said. For several dozen Utah residents, the show was the central impetus for a bus trip to Mordor, or rather, Las Vegas. They call themselves the Post-Mo's and wear T-shirts to prove it. Note the logo with a bite out of the apple. The post-Mo's did what other tourists do here, they danced in clubs, jumped off the Stratosphere, smoked cigars, took photos with Penn and Teller, but the focus of the trip was the musical at the Smith Center. “It is representative of what we used to be,” post-Mo Doug Saderfield said. “I left because I don't believe it anymore and can make a happier life for my family outside of it,” post-Mo Rachel Goss said. The LDS church is the fastest growing religion in the world, and in Utah, it is omnipresent in family life, employment and government. Leaving the church is tough to do. “Lonely, ostracized. And you don't want to talk to family about it. It's like coming out if you're gay. You don't know how your family will react,” post-Mo coordinator Josh Kaggie said. “Family relations are very hard because your siblings don't want you around their kids for fear you might corrupt them with your ideas of the world,” post-Mo member Stuart Lindsay said. Brothers Zed and Kyle Griffiths are now both post-Mo's. Zed left five years before Kyle. “When he left the church, I was one of the siblings trying to get him to come back,” Kyle Griffiths said. “The church isn't just church. It's also social and family and it can be employment,” Zed Griffiths said. For a Utah Mormon to leave the church is comparable to entering the witness protection program, Newsweek wrote, which explains why a post-Mormon website created just a few years ago now gets 10 million hits per month. The bus trip post-Mo's used a Facebook page to coordinate and celebrate their Las Vegas jaunt. It is where they posted photos taken inside the Smith Center, which tolerates no photos at all. Religion in general takes it on the chin in the show, but the lyrics that got the post-Mo's laughing hardest were Mormon-specific. “We sure were laughing at the little things you catch,” post-Mo member Steve Holbrook said. “It is incredibly insidious, like the worst song for Mormonism is ‘I Believe.’ You don’t realize it because it's so happy,” Kaggie said. Church honchos in Utah are not fans of the show but have reacted with restraint and savvy. They've spent millions to market their message to fans of the musical, including three full-page ads in the program here, with the line: “You've seen the show--now read the book.” Whether it is the jungles of Africa or the hot streets of Las Vegas, Mormon missionaries endure much for their faith. These post-Mo's can relate because they once did it too. They describe their own split with the church as being more like a relationship that simply didn't work out rather than an ugly divorce. “The play gives anod to everyone--believers, doubters,” one post-Mo said. “It's a great message: Everyone can be who they want to be and create the world a better place,” post-Mo John Goss said. The organizers of the bus trip say they initially figured they would have to come to Las Vegas to see the show because there is no way it would ever be allowed to play in Salt Lake City, a city which is almost a character in the musical. However, it turns out; “The Book of Mormon” will land in Utah next year. It continues at the Smith Center through July 6 but tickets are scarce.
Following Alejandro Rojas’ recent articleabout MJ-12 at Open Minds, which discusses the fraudulent nature of the affair, I decided that the time was right to begin reposting summaries of my own, 1980s-era investigations into the matter. In brief, I was one of the first persons to expose the disinformational aspects of MJ-12, involving now-retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI or OSI) agent Richard Doty, whose infamous duping of Linda Moulton Howe and other gullible members of ufology is now legend.
But the origins of MJ-12 were more complicated than that, involving the fraudulent actions of now-disgraced ufologist Bill Moore, whose almost-certain forging of certain “documents”, to serve his own financial motivations, were co-opted by OSI in the furtherance of the overall scheme to mislead (misdirect) researchers and the public regarding government interest/disinterest in UFOs.
Another researcher, Barry Greenwood, together with the late Bob Todd, discovered early on that Moore had made highly-incriminating statements, and engaged in highly-incriminating actions, which inadvertently exposed the early stages of the hoax. Greenwood is best known for his co-written book Clear Intent, (with the late Larry Fawcett), which examined UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites, among other topics, and remains a standard for rigorous ufological research.
Greenwood has just restatedhis initial MJ-12-related findings, first published in the mid-1980s, as adjunct commentary to a just published summary of the affair by another leading researcher, Dr. Kevin Randle, whose important work relating to the Roswell Incident is well-known.
My own 2009 summationof my 1980s-era findings relating to MJ-12 will also fill-in a few blanks. While Greenwood, Randle and I have different interpretations of some aspects of the still-kicking hoax/disinformation scheme—not to mention the UFO phenomenon in general—we have independently discovered enough overlapping, incriminating, noteworthy facts to warrant this joint presentation.
Alas, Linda Howe’s regrettable willingness to be a doormat for disinformationalists is well-established and ongoing, despite her self-perceived role as Disseminator of Truth in the UFO arena. One only has to review her many wholly unsubstantiated and highly misleading statements about MJ-12 “documents” and “witnesses” at the May 2013 mock congressional hearings to understand that her well-meaning but nevertheless damaging actions have only served those who would mislead, rather than inform, the public about UFOs.
Nowadays, when being a UFO “historian” apparently means that one has participated in one or more of the current crop of trashy UFO “documentaries” on the History and H2 Channels (which in the past aired UFO programming worth watching) it is important to remember that there are actually serious researchers out there, whose work would be considered valid in an investigative journalism or even an academic context. Greenwood’s and Randle’s commentary is required reading for anyone claiming to have an informed understanding of the MJ-12 Affair.
Stan's wife notified me, on Saturday morning, that he had suffered a heart attack on Friday evening. Out of respect and consideration for his family, I had told only a few of the colleagues that he was scheduled to work with in the coming weeks. This morning I received news that it was announced on C2C last night. I spoke to Stanton and he asked me to make the following announcement.
Stanton Friedman suffered a mild heart attack on Friday night. I spoke with him this morning and am very pleased to report that he is feeling strong and chipper. His heart enzymes have declined, so he has turned the corner. He is awaiting a dye test and an echo cardiogram. This will probably occur today or Wednesday, as July 1 is a national holiday in Canada.
He does not presently have access to a public phone or computer, but will reply to email messages when he returns home in a few days. Please do not call his home. Well wishers can send cards to Stan at P.O. Box 958, Houlton, ME 04730. He appreciates everyone's thoughts and prayers.
Stan and I had planned to share a vendor table at the upcoming Roswell UFO Festival and MUFON's International Symposium. Stan will need a few weeks to rest and recuperate, so I will offer his/our books for sale on his behalf.
Breaking news from KGRA Radio tells of a healthwatch for a well-known individual in UFO circles.
American physicist and UFO investigator/author Stanton Friedman suffered a heart attack this weekend [June 28-29, 2014] in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where he lives. According to his co-author Kathy Marden, he's in stable condition and is going to be moved to a larger facility on Monday [June 30, 2014], for possible surgery. We can safely say, Stan won't be attending next weekend's annual Roswell, New Mexico, event. He's also scheduled to travel to the Philadelphia for the annual MUFON symposium in three short weeks, as he, George Knapp and Lee Speigel are scheduled to be on a panel together. Lee will be on the first hour of George Knapp's show tonight at: (1am Eastern) and is expected to comment further on Stanton. From all of here at the KGRA ask everyone to please keep our good friend in your prayers at this time. Source.
Stanton T. Friedman is a dual citizen of the USA and Canada and lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, just across the Maine border from the USA.
I last met Stan in 2013, at a special VIP dinner for speakers at the Experiencers event in Portland, Maine. He was fit, healthy, and joy, as always. This is terrible news, and I wish Stan a full, quick recovery.
A word about the terms "UFO" versus "flying saucer": Friedman has consistently favored the use of the term "flying saucer" in his work, saying "Flying saucers are, by definition, unidentified flying objects, but very few unidentified flying objects are flying saucers. I am interested in the latter, not the former."
Friedman formerly called himself "The Flying Saucer Physicist," because of his degrees in nuclear physics and his work on nuclear projects, according to ufo encyclopedia authors Ronald Story and Jerome Clark.
Stanton Friedman drawing by Nick Shev.
Because Stan is a prolific speaker at UFO-related conferences, his biography is well-known to most in the field.
Nuclear Physicist-Author-Lecturer Stanton T. Friedman received his BSc. and MSc. Degrees in physics from the University of Chicago in 1955 and 1956. He was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist by such companies as GE, GM, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell-Douglas working in such highly advanced, classified, eventually cancelled programs as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and various compact nuclear power-plants for space and terrestrial applications.
He became interested in UFOs in 1958, and since 1967 has lectured about them at more than 600 colleges and 100 professional groups in 50 U.S. states, 9 Canadian provinces and 16 other countries in addition to various nuclear consulting efforts. He has published more than 90 UFO papers and has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV programs including on Larry King in 1997, 2007 and twice in 2008, and many documentaries. He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell Incident and co-authored Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. TOP SECRET/MAJIC his controversial book about the Majestic 12 group, established in 1947 to deal with alien technology, was published in 1996 and went through 6 printings. An expanded new edition was published in 2005.
Stan was presented with a Lifetime UFO Achievement Award in Leeds, England, in 2002, by UFO Magazine of the UK. He is co-author with Kathleen Marden (Betty Hill’s Niece) of a book in 2007: Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. The City of Fredericton, New Brunswick, declared August 27, 2007, Stanton Friedman Day. His book Flying Saucers and Science was published in June 2008 and is in its 4th printing. His newest book Science Was Wrong with Kathleen Marden, was published in June 2010. On July 2, 2010, he was inducted into the Roswell UFO Hall of Fame.
He has provided written testimony to Congressional Hearings, appeared twice at the UN, and been a pioneer in many aspects of ufology including Roswell, Majestic 12, The Betty Hill- Marjorie Fish star map work, analysis of the Delphos, Kansas, physical trace case, crashed saucers, flying saucer technology, and challenges to the S.E.T.I. (Silly Effort To Investigate) cultists.
Stan has spoken at more MUFON Symposia than any other individual.
I have had my share of coincidences. I believe I had one again just recently. This weekend I received a message from Robert Hastings informing me of his Tribute article re the late Terry Hansen at the UFO Chronicles website, which I shared with you. Terry's sudden passing is really sad news. However, when I looked at my library I noticed that Robert Hastings' 2008 book "UFOs and Nukes" and Terry's 2000 book "The Missing Times" happen to be side by side. And near the end of Vallée's 2011 TED presentation dealing about general relativity, quantum mechanics, the Missing Child, the physics of energy and information, the concept of time (as a dimension) and coincidences, Jacques said something about libraries showing a picture of one. And talking about libraries, especially mine, I have just noticed that Jacques Valléé's 2010 book "Wonders in the Sky" which he co-wrote with Chris Aubeck and Jonathan Margolis' 2013 book "The Secret Life of Uri Geller" are also side by side. Jacques mentioned Uri Geller in his presentation. In fact, Jacques' book is between the Uri Geller book and the 2003 kids book "What Really Happened in Roswell" written by Kathleen Krull. A wondrous tale, don't you think, but one which is very real. I thought it was worthwhile sharing this factoid. ;) Enjoy his presentation!
Kind regards.
André
TEDxBrussels - Jacques Vallée - A Theory of Everything (else): The Missing Child
Tribute to the late Terry Hansen - The Journalist Who Exposed Mainstream Media Involvement in the UFO Cover-Up has Died
Tribute to the late Terry Hansen - The Journalist Who Exposed Mainstream Media Involvement in the UFO Cover-Up has Died
By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 6-27-14
News of the sudden and unexpected death of journalist Terry Hansen arrived only yesterday and I am still processing the implications of this tragic loss. Although relatively few persons with an interest in UFOs know his name, Hansen contributed greatly to our collective understanding of the crucial role the American “elite” media has played in helping to perpetuate the official secrecy surrounding the phenomenon, originating with the U.S. military and intelligence community.
As I wrote in my book UFOs and Nukes, “Hansen [has written an] excellent book, The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up, which I highly recommend to anyone wishing to better understand how the type of information contained in my own book could have been successfully kept from the American people—scientists and laypersons alike—for so long. In fact, I put Hansen’s book on my short list of ‘must-reads’ as far as the official government cover-up of UFOs is concerned.”
One review of the book on Amazon (by “duncanives” summarizes its content this way:
In The Missing Times, Terry Hansen provides a clear, documented history of the relationship that exists between the national media and the United States Government, particularly on issues of national security...Hansen details how our military and intelligence communities are in the business of shaping public opinion and reaction through information management. How incompetent would they have to have been not to recognize the national media as an indispensable, efficient tool for their goals?
Mr. Hansen details the exact mechanisms by which the government exercises their influence over the national media with chilling clarity, right down to CIA infiltration...Through historical review, Mr. Hansen demonstrates how the press follows a government line when it comes to issues of secrecy and national security.
What happens when we insert UFOs into this equation? The answer is a perfect fit; the national media treats UFOs exactly as it does other subjects deemed to be of great national security importance and secrecy. This fact is skillfully demonstrated through an examination of UFO incursions over nuclear missile silos near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Unidentified objects could enter and leave restricted airspace with impunity.
Such incidents have obvious national security implications. Widely reported in the local media, these astonishing and well-documented incidents were ignored by the national media until much later. Could the media have been influenced by a government that, despite their protests to the contrary, knows full well that UFOs are a national security issue?
Mr. Hansen...seems to be calling his fellow citizens not to believe in UFOs, but to be skeptical about what the national media, as a front for the government, tells us about them...The Missing Times is written with clarity and journalistic integrity. It is not a hastily-written UFO book full of anecdotes and fuzzy pictures. It is objective reporting of the undeniable relationships between the government, the media, and you.
It is also one of the most heavily footnoted books I have ever read, providing proof of the depth of research that went into it. If the Pulitzer Prize were given for merit, quality, insightful analysis and , journalist Terry Hansen would have one on his bookshelf right now.
That sums it up nicely. At my urging, Hansen finally made his now out-of-print book available as an e-book, which may be purchased here (see below). Demonstrating his intent that it be widely read, he altruistically decided to only charge $2.99 for it.
Terry Hanson’s courageous pioneering work will stand the test of time and, in the near-term, hopefully inspire a renewed, zealous integrity among mainstream journalists, who view themselves as champions of truth and the public’s right-to-know, while at the same time wittingly or unwittingly supporting government objectives—including the Viet Nam and Iraq wars, among other tragic missteps—by superficially covering, or spinning, or not covering at all, key national security-related subjects, including UFOs.
If Hansen’s findings illustrate anything, it’s that one of the biggest stories in history—the U.S. government’s cover-up of the UFO phenomenon—deserves objective, serious, respectful examination by members of the elite media. Yes, those few who buck the trend, and bravely follow Hansen’s lead on credible UFO investigation, may risk being disinvited to the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner, among other repercussions, but they will finally be serving those who count most—the American public, and other humans everywhere.
Dr. Jacques Vallee, a French-American computer specialist with a background in astrophysics, once served as consultant to NASA's Mars Map project. Jacques Vallee is one of ufology's major figures - and also its most original thinker. Vallee, who holds a master's degree in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, was an early scientific proponent of the theory that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships. His first book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Henry Regnery, 1965), argued eloquently that "through UFO activity … the contours of an amazingly complex intelligent life beyond the earth can already be discerned." In Challenge to Science - The UFO Enigma (Regnery, 1966) he and Janine Vallee (who is a psychologist by training, with a master's degree from the University of Paris) urged the scientific community to consider the UFO evidence in this light. But by 1969, when he published Passport to Magonia (Regnery), Vallee's assessment of the UFO phenomenon had undergone a significant shift. Much to the consternation of the "scientific ufologists" who had seen him as one of their champions, Vallee now seemed to be backing away from the extraterrestrial hypotheses and advancing the radical view that UFOs are paranormal in nature and a modern space age manifestation of a phenomenon which assumes different guises in different historical contexts.
" When the underlying archetypes are extracted," he wrote, "the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries … religious miracles… and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts."
In The Invisible College (E.P. Dutton, 1975) Vallee posits the idea of a "control system." UFOs and related phenomena are "the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged." Their ultimate source may be unknowable, at least at this stage of human development; what we do know, according to Vallee, is that they are presenting us with continually recurring "absurd" messages and appearances which defy rational analysis but which nonetheless address human beings on the level of myth and imagination.
"When I speak of a control system for planet earth," he says, " I do not want my words to be misunderstood: I do not mean that some higher order of beings has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by psychic entities we might call angels or demons. I do not propose to redefine God. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power…."
Vallee is also coauthor, with J. Allen Hynek, of The Edge of Reality (Regnery, 1975). A resident of the San Francisco area, he is completing a book which further develops his theories concerning UFO phenomena.
We have talked together at some length about his beliefs. The following interview is a report of these conversations:
Clark: Since the great autumn 1973 sighting wave public attitudes about the UFO phenomenon seem to have changed dramatically, to the extent that society may be entering a pivotal period in its perception of the problem. What do you think will happen now?
Vallee: First, I expect increased government and scientific attention to it. More researchers will be pursuing the physical evidence aspects, conducting much more sophisticated investigations of traces left at landing sites and so on. The people moving into the field now are good physicists and good engineers who know what they are doing and who are convinced it is time for them to get involved. At the same time I expect that public opinion will change also. Initially it probably will move strongly toward the extraterrestrial explanation. Most people see only two ways to look at the problem - either it's all nonsense or we're being visited from outer space. The current spate of movies, books and magazine articles is going to push people toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis. After that I expect a backlash effect may push them in the other direction. I don't know where that's going to leave scientists who want to do research.
Clark: You say that scientists are entering ufology in search of physical evidence. But is there physical evidence? And if there is, are they going to find it? What happens if they don't?
Vallee: If I were speaking for them I would say, "Jerry, it's premature to ask those questions." One doesn't know the answers until one really looks - and so far nobody has looked very seriously. So far the people who have looked have been military types searching for enemy craft or direct threats to national security. Or they've been superficial investigators, dedicated civilians with good training but limited time and limited resources. But you're asking me what I think. I think there are physical data. They are very, very interesting. They may contain a message. My inclination is to look at the message both in a physical sense and in a symbolic sense, but that's because I'm an information scientist and not a physical scientist. I look for the meaning behind the object. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Recently Paul Cerny investigated a case in northern California in which two older persons saw a UFO take off. Afterwards they saw a sort of ring on the ground. Within the ring they found some molten metal and a pile of sand. Obviously here is physical evidence. Two tangible things - the molten metal, which turned out to be brass, and the sand. I took some of the latter to a geologist friend who knows about and. He said it was highly unusual because it did not contain quartz and it was not stream sand or beach sand or residue from mining or anything else. It seemed to be artificial sand created from grinding together stones of different origin. Well, to a physicist that may not mean too much. It's an indication of something that turns out to be absurd. We can put it alongside other cases of physical traces and then we may start looking for patterns which might lead us to a better understanding of the modus operandi of whoever's doing all this. In that sense, yes, there is physical evidence. But if you mean physical evidence in the sense that we're going to discover somebody's propulsion system from it, I would have to say I don't expect that to happen.
Clark: Can we infer from the existence of physical evidence, then, that there is a physical cause?
Vallee: If the UFO phenomenon had no physical cause at all, there would be no way for us to perceive it because human beings are physical entities. So it has to make an impression on our senses somehow. For that to take place, it has to be physical at some time.
Clark: So in other words there is such a thing as a solid, three-dimensional flying saucer.
Vallee: No, I didn't say that. That may or may not be true. I don't think there is such a thing as the flying saucer phenomenon. I think it has three components and we have to deal with them in different ways. First, there is a physical object. That may be a flying saucer or it may be a projection or it may be something entirely different. All we know about it is that it represents a tremendous quantity of electromagnetic energy in a small volume. I say that based upon the evidence gathered from traces, from electromagnetic and radar detection and from perturbations of the electromagnetic fields such as Dr. Claude Poher, the French space scientist,has recorded. Second, there's the phenomenon the witnesses perceive. What they tell us is that they've seen a flying saucer. Now they may have seen that or they may have seen an image of a flying saucer or they may have hallucinated it under the influence of microwave radiation, or any of a number of things may have happened. The fact is that the witnesses were exposed to an event and as a result they experienced a highly complex alteration of perception which caused them to describe the object or objects that figure in their testimony. Beyond there - the physical phenomenon and the perception phenomenon - we have the third component, the social phenomenon. That's what happens when the reports are submitted to society and enter the cultural arena. That's the part which I find most interesting.
Clark: Before we go into that, let's clarify your views on the nature of the physical aspect. When I asked you if there was such a thing as a solid, three-dimensional flying saucer, I was thinking in these terms: Let's suppose that somebody says he has seen a UFO, the bottom part of which was flat and circular. He says he saw the object come down, settle on the soil and then fly off again, leaving a flat circular impression. Doesn't that clearly suggest the presence - at least for the duration of the sighting - of a solid object whose physical structure was more or less as the witness perceived it?
Vallee: Not necessarily. We have evidence that the phenomenon has the ability to create a distortion of the sense of reality or to substitute artificial sensations for the real ones. Look at some of the more bizarre close encounter cases - for example the incident from South America in which one man believed he had been abducted by a UFO while his companion thought he had boarded a bus which had suddenly appeared on the road behind then. It is conceivable that there is one phenomenon which is visual and another which creates the physical traces. What I'm saying is that a strange kind of deception may be involved.
Clark:In other words the physical traces are placed there as ostensible confirmation of what the senses perceived?
Vallee: Yes. It's comparable perhaps to the strategic deception operations of the British during World War II to fool the Germans. They created artificial tank tracks in the desert and in other ways simulated the passage of large armored divisions. They even caused dust storms to perpetuate the illusion, which the Germans found very convincing indeed. In the UFO context that might explain cases such as the one in California I mentioned earlier, in which the "physical evidence" left in the wake of the UFO appearance really seemed to have no clear, unambiguous connection with the perceived "object."
Clark: What do you think happens during the "UFO experience?"
Vallee: We don't know. There is no question that something happens. It seems as if an external force takes control of people. In the close encounters people may lose their ability to move or to speak; in the abduction cases, which are the most extreme example, they gradually enter into a series of experiences during which they lose control of all their senses. Do they experience what they think they experience? Suppose you, an outside observer, had been there. What would you have seen?
Clark: I can think of several cases which might suggest I would have seen the same thing they saw. To cite an example, one of the famous Venezuelan humanoid encounters of late 1954 was independently observed by a doctor some distance from the scene.
Vallee: Yes, I'm familiar with that incident and similar ones. But that doesn't alter my point. The doctor may have experienced the object as "real" but we don't know what the nature of that reality is. We know there are objects that contain a lot of energy in a small space. What do we know about what happens to the human brain when it's exposed to a great deal of energy? We know very little about that. We don't know much about the effects of electromagnetic or microwave radiation on the brain, nor about the effects of pulsating colored lights on the brain. The research into that is just beginning. What we do know is that you can make people hallucinate using either lights or microwave or electromagnetic energy. You can also make them pass out; you can cause them to behave strangely, put them into shock, make them hear voices or even kill them.
Clark: Is there any way to penetrate to the reality of the experience, for example through hypnotic regression?
Vallee: I'm not sure that what we learn under hypnotic regression is useful. Hypnosis is really a delicate technique and some of the people in our field who are using it are doing more harm than good. If the hypnotist doesn't have medical training - and most of these people have no medical training - the results may be disastrous for the witness. But if the hypnotist does have medical training and doesn't have any knowledge of the subject, he may ask the wrong questions. I think that may have happened in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill. The hypnotist was extremely skilled but was not especially interested in UFOs and didn't know the background of the problem.
Clark: What can we do, then?
Vallee:I'm not saying that hypnosis has no role to play in UFO investigation, nor that it can't be helpful under certain circumstances when percipients are blocking from their memories something they have seen or experienced. The thing I really want to emphasize is that the investigator's first responsibility is to the witness and not to the UFO phenomenon. The average witness is in shock because he's had a very traumatic experience; what he's seen is going to change his life. Your intervention, the very fact that you're talking with him about it, is also going to have an effect on him. Now he may say to you, "I need help to understand what I saw," but in fact he needs more immediate help as a human being who is deeply troubled by a very disturbing experience. Unfortunately this element has been neglected. The more UFO investigators try to appear "professional," the more they ignore that human aspect - and by extension their own ethical obligations. I want to convince my friends in UFO research that whenever we have a choice between obtaining interesting UFO data and taking chances with the life of a human being, we should forget the UFO data. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are alternatives to the use of hypnosis. These involve putting the percipient into a state of relaxed revery or free association. There are several techniques that are equally as effective as hypnosis in bringing out the hidden details but are must less harmful. Investigators really haven't made use of these yet.
Clark: What do you think of the abduction cases?
Vallee: Again, I'm interested mainly in their symbolic contents. Let me explain what I mean. We live in a society that is oriented toward technology, so when we see something unusual in the sky we think of it in physical terms. How is it manufactured? What makes it tick? What is its propulsion system? We tend to assume that the physical phenomenon is its most important aspect and that everything else is just a side effect and much less important. But perhaps we're facing something which is basically a social technology. Perhaps the most important effects from the UFO technology are the social ones and not the physical ones. In other words the physical reality may serve only as a kind of triggering device to provide images for the witness to report. These perceptions are manipulated to create certain kinds of social effects. If that's true, then the abduction cases are quite revealing. I am not concerned with how many switches there were on the control panel or whether the percipient felt hot or cold when he was inside the flying saucer. Those questions may be totally irrelevant because maybe that person never actually went inside the object. But the report is extremely important for its symbolic content. It can help us understand what kinds of images are coming through. One might illustrate the difference in this way: An engineer observing a computer would want to look at the back and open up the boxes. He would want to take a probe and examine the different parts of the computer. But there is another way of looking at it; the way of the programmer, who wants to sit in front of the computer and analyze what it does, not how it does it. That's my approach. I want to ask it questions and see what answers I get. I want to interact with it as an information entity. In the case of the abductions I think we're dealing with the information aspect. I came to that conclusion because abduction cases, in close encounter cases in general, what the witness is saying is absurd.
Clark: What do you mean?
Vallee: I don't mean simply to imply that the account is silly. I mean it has absurdity as a semantic construction. If you're trying to express something which is beyond the comprehension of a subject, you have to do it through statements that appear contradictory or seem absurd. For example, in Zen Buddhism the seeker must deal with such concepts as "the sound of one hand clapping" - an apparently preposterous notion which is designed to break down ordinary ways of thinking. The occurrences of similar "absurd" messages in UFO cases brought me to the idea that maybe we're dealing with a sort of control system that is subtly manipulating human consciousness.
Clark: But how do you prove that one is operating in a UFO context?
Vallee: I've always been unhappy with the argument between those who believe UFOs are nonsense and those who believe they are extraterrestrial visitors. I don't think I belong in either camp. I've tried to place myself between those two extremes because there's no proof that either proposition is correct. I've come up with the control system concept because it is an idea which can be tested. In that sense it's much closer to a scientific hypotheses than the others. It may turn out that there is a control system which is operated by extraterrestrials. But that's only one possibility. There are different kinds of control systems - open ones and closed ones - and there are tests you can apply to them to find out what kind of control system you're inside. That leads to a number of experiments you can do with the UFO phenomenon, whereas the other interpretations don't lead you to anything. If you're convinced that UFOs are extraterrestrial, then about the only thing you can do is to climb to a hilltop with a flashlight and send a message in Morse code. People have tried that, I know, but it doesn't seem to work very will! The control system concept can be tested by a small group of people - you don't need a large organization or a lot of equipment - and you can start thinking about active intervention in the phenomenon.
Clark: How could I prove to my satisfaction that there is a control system in operations?
Vallee: If you think you're inside a control system, the first thing you have to look for is what is being controlled and try to change it to see what happens. My friend Bill Powers proposes the following analogy: Suppose you're walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you're like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you've found a control system. My point is that you can't be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that's exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don't mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers.
Clark: But what do you mean?
Vallee: I hesitate to be too specific. I'm speaking, as I'm sure you understand, of the attempted manipulation of UFO manifestations. It's a pretty tall order. We're assuming that there is a feedback mechanism involved in the operations of the control system; if you change the information that's carried back to that system, you might be able to infiltrate it through its own feedback.
Clark: How does one go about investigating UFOs, taking into consideration the possible existence of a control system?
Vallee: You should work outside any organized UFO group. Also you must be very careful about the types of instruments you use for your analysis. For example, I have become increasingly skeptical of the use of computers in UFO research. We're losing a great many data because of a certain situation that is developing: The field researcher will spend a lot of time and money investigating a case. Typically he will write it up in an excellent 10-to-20-page report; then he'll send it to his superiors in the organization, assuming that they are going to put it on the computer and that in this way it's going to add to some great body of knowledge. But it doesn't. Investigators should understand that their reports go absolutely nowhere. They end up in a drawer somewhere, they are never published, and they're quickly forgotten. All that's left in the computer is a bunch of codes and letters and numbers on magnetic tape somewhere and that's the end of that. For another thing you don't want to go around chasing every UFO that's reported. If a sighting gets a lot of publicity, you should stay the hell away from it. Instead you should go after cases that you select yourself, ones that have received very little publicity and you've heard about through personal channels. There are plenty of those and they are surprisingly rich in content. You should take your time investigating them. Get involved with the people as human beings. And then you have to become part of the scene, getting as close as you can to what's happening especially if it continues to happen.
Clark: Are you suggesting that the investigator should attempt to experience the phenomenon himself?
Vallee: Yes, I think that's sound scientific practice.
Clark: But isn't that rather dangerous - in the sense that there's a real risk the investigator, even if he is emotionally stable and intellectually sophisticated, might be overwhelmed by the experiences involved?
Vallee: Yes, there are dangers. Witness what happened to Morris Jessup or to Jim McDonald. But I think that now we're more aware of what the dangers are. Once you realize the phenomenon may be deliberately misleading, then you can use certain safeguards. I'm not saying that safeguards are always going to work. There is an element of danger you really can't avoid. There's no way to do that kind of study just by reading books. It's a little bit like the study of volcanoes. You can learn a lot about them by watching them from a distance but you certainly learn a lot more when you can be right there - even if it's somewhat risky.
Terry Hansen, Noted Journalist & Author of 'The Missing Times' Has Died
By Frank Warren The UFO Chronicles 6-26-14
It’s with great sadness that we report the passing of Terry Hansen, journalist, researcher and author of one of the most influential books re Ufology, "The Missing Times / News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up." Terry’s wife Jessica conveyed to Robert Hastings, that he died “quietly, in his sleep, Friday late evening or Saturday early morning. He had a massive coronary and the doctor said he felt no pain at all. It was instant.” She eloquently added:
“He was the most honest person with the greatest sense of integrity I have ever known. My first impression of Terry was one of nobility of spirit and he never let me down He had a lot of wonderful adventures the last few years of his life and I am so grateful for that.”
Our condolences to Jessica and the Hansen family, may he rest in peace.
"I would take it straight to the president". Fact Or Folklore?
"I would take it straight to the president". Fact Or Folklore
From the 1969 Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Section 1 - Conclusions and Recommendations - Edward U. Condon (p.5): "... if we came across any evidence whatever that seemed to us to indicate a defense hazard we would call it to the attention of the Air Force at once."
"I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism...
Dawkins subsequently claimed his views had been taken out of context and misrepresented:
In the age of the internet it is easier than ever before for us to check if a quote is genuine, but most people won't make the effort. This enables the sexy headline which just happens to be wrong to travel further, faster, and stick around for longer than the rather more mundane truth. Ironically, this is something Dawkins has himself addressed in detail with his theory of memetics. In fact, this isn't even the first time this has happened to Dawkins.
Another famous scientist whose alleged views towards fairy tales are often quoted is Albert Einstein, to whom the following quote is often attributed:
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
Unlike in the case of Dawkins, we can't ask Einstein to confirm the authenticity of a quote above. Like so many famous quotes, this quote is in fact, folklore:
"You can find this item all over the internet, on blogs, tumblrs, quotation sites, and those captioned images that have come to be known as “memes.” Sometimes it’s a bare quotation, other times it’s embellished with physical details of the gestures Einstein made or what he looked like at the time.
Because of the quotation’s popularity, and because of its association with folklore, members of the AFC staff have been asked more than once about whether Einstein really said this. Our analysis suggests that the story is itself folklore. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue; Einstein may well have said this, or at least something similar to this. But it does mean that the story circulated for many years, probably orally as well as in print, and then came to be passed around on the Internet, from the early days of Usenet to the current environment of Facebook and other social networks. As a result of this oral, print, and electronic transmission, the story of Einstein advocating fairy tales resembles other folk stories: it exists in multiple versions that vary in their details. And, interestingly for those who love both folklore and libraries, the story initially appears to have circulated primarily among librarians."
I must admit, that I was for a few minutes taken in by the many original news reports on Dawkin's misrepresented views on fairy tales. Even though I am nearly a month late to the party, the incorrect news reports are still circulating above reports explaining what actually happened. So what is the moral of the story from the fairy tales incident? What I'm taking away is nothing to do with fairy tales, but rather, I think the lesson here is that we should question every quote we come across that isn't straight from the horse's mouth. Whether it is in the Telegraph or the Daily Mail (in fact, definitely if it is in the Daily Mail) or whether it is transposed on top of the face of Einstein on an internet meme. Just because a quote has been shared a hundred thousand times on Facebook and has appeared in the most highly regarded newspapers in the world, it may well still be false.
Image Credit: Adapted from artwork from the Organ Museum
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Rare Footage of interview with Budd Hopkins “Intruders” on UFO Alien Abductions
Rare footage of interview with Budd Hopkins, and abductees: Debbie Tomey and Dorothy Wallace. Also interviewed is abduction hypnotist Dr.Gotlieb. Budd Hopkins (June 15, 1931 – August 21, 2011) was a prominent figure in alien abduction phenomena and related UFO research and writer of the “Intruders” (Book and Movie).
The woman named Kathie Davis in the book "Intruders" by Budd Hopkins was in actuality Debbie Tomey. Budd changed her name to Kathie in the book to protect her identity. In the next video, this is the first time Debbie "comes out" to the public with her real name. This video was filmed approximately three years before the movie (1992) came out, which was also called "Intruders". The Dini Petty Show was a very popular talk show in Canada in the late '80s and '90s. This was filmed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and aired on Sept 14, 1989.
Video courtesy of the official Henry McKay UFO Archives. Henry McKay is the man in the suit sitting behind Dini Petty on the left side, next to the women wearing the blue dress on the right side behind Dini.. At 26.44 the camera does a close-up of Henry. Henry McKay was a pioneer UFOlogist, and was the very first Director of MUFON for Canada. He was also one of the first modern-day UFO investigators to specialize in physical traces associated with UFO landing sites and close-range UFO sightings. His work was mentioned in the book "The Philadelphia Experiment". He was an electrical engineer with the Air Force. He was also on the Board of Directors for the "North American UFO Federation" (headed by Richard Haines), was an associate of CUFOS, and also investigated for NICAP. He was good friends with Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He also gave a briefing at a hearing to the "Royal Commission of Electric Power Planning" in regards to UFO related power disturbances
Onderwerp: Condon: "I would take it straight to the president".
Datum: 16 Jan 2013 21:45:14 GMT+01:00
Dear colleagues.
Few days ago, I have been finally connected with the phone line and Internet connection at this new flat where I recently moved. So I will be again more active online.
One gem from archives:
Here is one historical detail that happened during Condon Study. It wasdescribed in classic book "UFOs-Yes-Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong"byDr. David Saunders (member of Condon Committee that was later fired becauseof the Low Memo affair).
It was always presented that Condon's study of UFOs was a transparentproject where public will finally get what it wants for its money. It is well known that Condon was a very negative towards affirmative possibilities of UFOs. However, confronted with the speculation that UFOs could be explained as ETH, he quickly changed the official image in that conversation. Even this speculative example by Condon shows that interpretation of the UFO data - that was not on the negative path - immediately enters within National Security limitations. It was a lost battle of public transparency from the beginning. If we apply such a formula from the governmental point of view and data availability to Condon itself and his review group, implications can be copied in the same way.
Saunders explains: "Condon was willing to speculate, though, on what would happen if the Project ever did find evidence to support ETI. In -this unlikely event, he said, either he would put the evidence in his briefcase and take it straight to the President, or we would write a report to the Air Force and let them decide what to do with it. In either event, we would not have honored our commitment to make a public report that told it like it was. Apparently, in Condon's mind, that commitment could be honored only if we were writing a negative or noncommittal report."
End of paste.
Scanned page is in attachment (near the end of left page).
Yesterday I saw on VTM News a news report about a six-fingered Brazilian family afflicted with a genetic condition, known as polydactyly. This reminded me of the 1995 alien autopsy film.
De Brazilianen zijn in de ban van een familie die zes vingers per hand hebben. Brazilië kan dit jaar een zesde wereldbeker voetbal winnen en die zes vingers zien ze als een gunstig voorteken. De meeste familieleden zijn geboren met polydactylie, een afwijking waardoor je meer vingers of tenen hebt dan normaal.
Doctor, What Is Wrong With Me? Mr. Washington Post, You Are Suffering From The David Susskind Syndrome.
Doctor, What Is Wrong With Me? Mr. Washington Post, You Are Suffering From The David Susskind Syndrome
Hi all:,
From Stanton Friedman's 2008 "Flying Saucers and Science", Chapter 10: The Press and Flying Saucers - pp. 250-251: "I don't know why the Washington Post and the New York Times have been not only negative, but also guilty of poor journalism. My best suggestion is that both have been suffering (along with others) from the David Susskind Syndrome, a medical condition I derived from my interactions with TV talk show host David Susskind. ... I have come to delineate the Susskind Syndrome this way: Susskind and everyone else would acknowledge that, if aliens were visiting Earth, and the government was covering it up, it would be a big and important story. But because he and other bright but clueless intellectuals such as Dr. Carl Sagan and Dr. Isaac Asimov take great pride in knowing about the important stories, and haven't known anything about flying saucers, then they must not be real. Anyone who thinks they are must not be very bright, and doesn't understand that secrets couldn't possibly be kept from such smart people as Susskind, et al. Right? Absolutely wrong."
From Terry Hansen's 2000 "The Missing Times", Chapter V: Editing History - Discrete contacts - pp. 173-174 (The late Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. John Mack about the differences in coverage he witnessed both in regional and national news media:
"The sense I get from the local news media, and also from many radio stations, is that they're reporting it straight," ... "it's newsworthy, and UFOs are interesting, and they take it on." Whereas the ... elite newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post, even the Boston Globe here, it's as if they have some kind of influences looking over their shoulder ... I don't know what those might be, whether those are the senior editors or corporate people [who] don't want to offend commercial interests or scientific interests or feel they have to protect the status quo philosophically, or scientifically - I don't know. I just know that there tends to be more of a snide or ridiculing attitude, or dismissal altogether. And that can go to extreme lengths. "
Book review: ‘Encounter in Rendlesham Forest’ a look at a UFO by Nick Pope
And so, another book on UFOs. Have we not yet reached the saturation point? Rehearsed all the possible pros and cons?
Nick Pope, the primary author of “Encounter in Rendlesham Forest,” insists that this case is different: It’s definitive. He’s wrong. But that doesn’t mean the book is without its charms, offering, perhaps, an answer to the question: Why more flying-saucer books?
The Rendlesham Forest incident — known in UFO circles as Britain’s Roswell — occurred in the days (and nights) after Christmas in 1980 in a wooded area of England between two military bases then occupied by the U.S. Air Force. Pope recounts the events briefly, covering the narrative in the first 90 pages. According to him, his co-authors, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston, both then with the Air Force, investigated mysterious lights in the forest. Burroughs was on patrol and had seen blue and red flashing lights. He and a superior drove out through the gate and saw a white light, too, which seemed to advance on them. They returned to the base.
Just after midnight, Penniston joined the two men, and they drove out again. Initially, they thought a small plane might have crashed. Instead, they and a few others who joined them came across something else altogether. In a small clearing, “there was a silent explosion of light.” In its aftermath, they could see “a small, metallic craft,” about nine feet high and nine feet across. “The craft was roughly triangular in shape” and either hovered or rested on a tripod. It was decorated with blue and white lights as well as heiroglyphic-like markings. Penniston approached the thing and touched it, and then it sped off at an “impossible” speed.
When the lights returned two nights later, deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt and a team that included Burroughs investigated. They didn’t see a craft, but Halt found what he thought was the original landing site and noted that nearby trees had been abraded. Measurements suggested that the radiation level was higher than that of the surroundings. Subsequently, the witnesses were debriefed by other members of the U.S. government, reports were sent up the chain of command, and British officials investigated but were unimpressed by what they saw.
‘Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World's Best-Documented UFO Incident’ by Nick Pope, John Burroughs, and Jim Penniston. (Thomas Dunne)
The story leaked out over the coming years, becoming more urgent after the principals retired from the military and spoke more freely. Burroughs and Penniston both developed health problems that they traced back to those events in late December 1980 and the radiation to which they were exposed. The Department of Veterans Affairs, though, has seemed to block access to their medical records.
Hard evidence in support of the story is lacking. The gauge used to measure the radiation had settings too coarse to detect the small changes attributed to it — a shortcoming that Pope notes only evasively. There is no record of an unidentified craft being sighted by area radar. Penniston took photographs of the craft, but the film could not be developed. Halt made an audio tape of his investigation, but it is unremarkable. Pope gives no citations, so there is no way to know the provenance of the reports and memos he discusses.
Instead there are unwarranted conclusions and a welter of unrelated anecdotes. Most of one chapter is written by Burroughs and Penniston’s lawyer, who gives a cursory summary of attempts to obtain their medical records. The failure to release them provides all the evidence Pope needs to say that the documents must be classified. There is no conclusion as to what occurred on those winter nights almost 34 years ago. Penniston and Burroughs are of the opinion that a government is behind the event, using talk of UFOs as a cover. Halt thinks the craft came from outer space. Pope is more coy but seems to favor the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
The witnesses, military personnel though they were, turn out to be untrustworthy. The quotations in the book attributed to Halt show him to be something of a crank, insisting that in the debriefings witnesses were “subjected to mind control efforts using drugs and hypnosis by British and American authorities.” Penniston’s story has changed dramatically over the years; he now says that he spent 45 minutes in close communion with the craft and that, when he touched it, a binary code was downloaded directly into his brain. He remembered the transmission only after hypnosis.
Despite all these (very large) holes, the Rendlesham tale remains popular among those interested in UFOs — as Pope’s book shows, with repeated references to television documentaries and magazine stories. Which raises the question: Why?
“Encounter in Rendlesham Forest” is full of paranoia about the government — not all of it, or even most of it, unwarranted. Pope refers to the Iraq war (with its missing WMDs), drone strikes and NSA spying. He also reasonably worries that the U.S. government may be subcontracting the study of UFOs to private enterprise, thus shielding it from Freedom of Information Act requests.
Indeed, much of the story turns on Freedom of Information Act requests and how they made the investigation of the Rendlesham events possible by the Americans (the Brits not so much, at least until they had similar laws). Which points to why these stories fascinate so.
Governments are so large, and the handles we have on them so small, so slippery, that it is impossible to control the leviathan we have created. Pope himself worked for the British government — in a section investigating UFOs — and felt frustrated at his inability to turn others on to the importance of this matter. If even those inside the government cannot control it, what hope those who are only its subjects? Stories about flying saucers allow readers to contemplate these issues on a vast scale. Roswell, after all, occurred in 1947, but it didn’t become a cause celebre until after Watergate.
Carl Jung once famously said that stories about UFOs were a new myth — about lights in the sky. That’s not the whole story, not anymore. Flying saucers are also myths about the mightiness of the expanding states.
Joshua Blu Buhsis the author of “Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.”
ENCOUNTER IN RENDLESHAM FOREST
The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO incident
Published: 13:09 GMT, 11 June 2014 | Updated: 17:48 GMT, 11 June 2014
Last month, Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan unveiled his next science-fiction blockbuster.
Called Interstellar, it envisages a future where travel to other stars is not only a possibility but a necessity, and tasks actor Matthew McConaughey with leading the main mission.
But a Nasa scientist claims such a mission isn’t necessarily just something reserved for science fiction - and has revealed a Star Trek-style ship that could make interstellar travel a reality.
Pictured is an illustration of Dr White's IXS Enterprise, an interstellar ship drawn by artist Mark Rademaker that could be an accurate representation of what the first mission beyond the solar system will look like. The IXS Enterprise is a theory-fitting concept for a faster than light (FTL) ship
Dr Harold White is famous for suggesting that faster than light (FTL) travel is possible.
THE 100-YEAR STARSHIP PROJECT
The 100-year Starship Project is a joint endeavour run by Darpa, Nasa, Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.
Announced in January 2012, the project has an overall goal of achieving manned interstellar travel by 2112.
To do so it is evaluating a number of different techonolgies, including ‘warping’ space time to travel great distances in short time frames at faster-than-light speeds.
The project is also considering building ‘generation ships’ that move slowly but have a self-sustainable long-term population.
To date Nasa has contributed $100,000 (£60,000) to the project and Darpa $1 million (£600,000).
Using something known as an Alcubierre drive, named after a Mexican theoretical physicist of the same name, Dr White said it is possible to ‘bend’ space-time, and cover large distances almost instantly.
This, in essence, would allow a spaceship to travel almost anywhere in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a conventional spacecraft.
The ship in Nolan’s Interstellar movie, as well as those in Star Trek, employ a warp engine.
And, in a series of new renders, Dr White reveals how a real spacecraft dubbed the IXS Enterprise could do the same thing.
The images are based on the artist who created the original look for the famous USS Enterprise ship from Star Trek - Matthew Jeffries.
To make the latest renders Dr White employed the help of artist Mark Rademaker and graphic designer Mike Okuda.
Trailer: Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey
The ship has a number of features that make interstellar travel possible. This includes the two rings surrounding the central spacecraft - these are known as an Alcubierre drive and are used to 'warp' space-time and travel many light years in a matter of days
The engine for Dr White's ISX Enterprise is based on something known as the Alcubierre drive. As shown in the illustration above this stretches space-time in a wave that causes the fabric of space-time ahead to contract while expanding the space behind, theoretically allowing 'faster than light' travel
Although the speed of light is seen as an absolute, Dr White was inspired by Miguel Alcubierre, who postulated a theory that allowed for faster than light travel but without contradicting Einstein.
Alcubierre's theory was published in 1994 and involved enormous amounts of energy being used to expand and contract space itself - thereby generating a 'warp bubble' in which a spacecraft would travel.
Allowing space and time to act as the propellant by pulling the craft through the bubble would be like stepping on an escalator
Despite Dr Alcubierre stating his theory was simply conjecture, Dr White thinks he and his team are edging towards making the realm of warp speed attainable.
This illustration shows Dr White's design in its entirety. Struts around the spacecraft show how it would be directly attached to the rings. At the front is the 'bridge' where the crew would conduct operations on the spacecraft. Towards the back is the cargo area where so-called exotic matter for fuel would be store.
According to Gizmodo, their engine could get to Alpha Centauri in two weeks as measured by clocks on Earth
The process of going to warp is also one that is smooth, rather than using a massive amount of acceleration in a short amount of time.
'When you turn the field on, everybody doesn't go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip,' Dr White said.
However, Dr White admits his research is still small-scale and is light years away from any type of engine that could be constructed into a spaceship like the USS Enterprise.
In Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Interstellar, due for release in November, a team of astronauts undertake a mission beyond the stars to save humanity. To get there they use an Alcubierre drive, shown above in a clip from the film - the same engine envisaged by Dr White of Nasa for his Star Trek-style spacecraft
The ship at the centre of Dr White's IXS Enterprise would need to be small enough to fit inside the rings and it would need to not stick out too much. This is because when the rings are activated they will create a 'warp bubble', and anything outside of this will be cut off when the jump is made, according to Dr White
Look familiar? Dr White's design for the IXS Enterprise bears a striking similarity to the USS Enterprise as seen in various Star Trek TV shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, seen here. In the show this science vessel was used to 'explore strange new worlds' and 'seek out new life and new civilisation'
To make the dream a reality Dr White has laid out a road map with important milestones that will need to be met along the way to achieving true interstellar travel.
This begins with tests on Earth to prove the technology is possible.
These initial experiments are very crude and very basic - but, if proved, there is, in theory, no limit to how it can be applied.
The next step will be to use the warp technology on a spacecraft and complete a short trip to the moon, followed by a trip to Mars.
This would ultimately test the technologies that would be necessary to complete ‘jumps’ beyond the solar system and reach destinations in a matter of months, weeks or even days.
Illustrated here is a previous design from Dr White and Rademaker. This concept had a number of flaws. First, the rings were too thin, meaning they would have needed too much energy for warp travell. Second, part of the ship extends out of the rings, which would have been cut off when the 'warp bubble' was created.
The main limitation is energy - previously it was thought mass equivalent to a planet would be necessary to provide the energy required for a warp jump.
But revised suggestions suggest mass similar in size to a car might be more realistic.
The research has done enough to pique the interest of Nasa and other agencies.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), for instance, is currently carrying out the 100-year-starship project with a view to sending humans outside the solar system at the turn of the next century.
The rings around the spacecraft (shown) would actually shift the surrounding space. The drive would require something known as exotic matter to work, hypothetical particles that violate the known laws of physics (possibly such as dark matter), but as of yet none have been found or created
The main limitation of the concept, (pictured) is energy - previously it was thought mass equivalent to a planet would be necessary to provide the energy required for a warp jump. But revised suggestions claim mass similar in size to a car might be more realistic
Warp travel is the focus of the 2014 movie Interstellar. A scene from the Christopher Nolan film, Interstellar, is pictured here. In the film lead character Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is tasked with joining a team for an interstellar mission aboard an Alcubierre-inspired spacecraft to save humanity.
Nick Redfern’s latest book, subtitled “Suspicious Deaths, Mysterious Murders, and Bizarre Disappearances in UFO History” provides an in depth look at the underbelly of the UFO phenomenon – the history of devilish deeds and felonies of a kind that are almost unimaginable, except they are actual possibilities in most cases and true in all the rest.
Nick Redfern is no slouch when it comes to ferreting out the truth of things; in this case the odd circumstances that underlie UFO events that ufological devotees think they know.
Nick’s 223 page exposé of deaths that have a definite link to the UFO phenomenon and its significant events (or sightings) shows what a real researcher or historian does or is meant to do when examining a portion of human activity – in this case the UFO milieu
There are 18 Chapters, with titles such as this:
From Melting Man to Maury Islan
The Victims of Roswell
Zapped by a UFO
The Microwave Incident
A Deadly Disk in the Desert
Another Adamski and Another Death
Star Wars of the Deadly Kind
A Killer Curse and a Deadly Date
The opening chapter deals with the Maury Island incident of 1947 which is replete with events weirder than any murder mystery: the death of two military men (sent to gather facts and “debris” from a sightings that involved Kenneth Arnold and his near-death) and threats of death to witnesses of a bizarre UFO sighting.
The Victims of Roswell chapter contains information that even obsessed Roswellians have not known or have ignored.
Zapped by a UFO recounts the infamous 1948 Mantell sighting and death with a slant that will make theorists, such as Kevin Randle, livid, as the Skyhook (balloon) explanation seems able to be set aside.
The “suicide” of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1949 is recounted, with information that few know.
Mysterious “heart attacks” of UFO notables, including Blue Book’s Edward Ruppelt, are enumerated.
The CIA’s secret mind-manipulation efforts are detailed, especially the dastardly MKULTRA project(s).
The Tentacles of the Octopus chapter [17] provides a “Six Degrees of Separation” delineation of UFO events and persons related to UFO events that will startle even the most well-read aficionado of UFO lore.
If you want to know what lurks in the nooks and crannies of UFO stories and events you think you know, you have to get this book.
If you pretend to be a UFO maven, you need to get this book.
If you’re a ufological wannabe, you have to have this book in your library
Buying the book won’t make Nick Redfern a wealthy man but it will encourage him and other serious researchers and UFO historians to continue to unearth vital elements in the UFO saga, elements that may eventually explain what UFOs are.
Nick’s book shows how persons intermingled with the phenomenon have often ended up.
It’s not a pretty sight, but it is an intriguing insight into the furtive underside of a phenomenon that has made some do things that are not nice, not by a long shot.
The book is published by New Page Books, a Division of Career Press, Inc., Pompton Plains, NJ. [2014] and sells for $15.99 (paperback).
It can be had from Amazon or Anomalist online and at your favorite brick and mortar bookstore.
(I’m getting a few copies for my UFO compatriots. They’ll be thankful, I’m sure.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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