UFOs Invade BAS

Photo: EPA/BGNES

21-11-2014 om 23:20 geschreven door peter  

Sorry, "Destroyed"!

16-11-2014 om 22:24 geschreven door peter  

125 Thousand Vs *52.6 Billion

Support Our Film

Knowledge is Power • Spread the Word

The U.S. government has suppressed information about UFO activity at American nuclear weapons sites for decades. Researcher Robert Hastings believes that people everywhere have a right to know the facts and has been speaking out since 1981. His 2008 book, UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, exposed the truth for thousands of readers.

On September 27, 2010 CNN streamed his press conference from Washington D.C. resulting in considerable, widespread publicity. A Google search for the press release announcing the event had as many as 2.7 million results.

But more needs to be done if this public information campaign is to be successful.

Hastings’ nearly-completed documentary film, UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed, will inform millions of people worldwide about longstanding and ongoing incursions by UFOs at U.S. nuclear ICBM sites, sometimes resulting in the missiles malfunctioning. Documents smuggled out of Russia confirm that the Soviets also experienced such incidents.

But the $100,000 budget for the production—donated in 2013 by a supporter who wishes to remain anonymous—is nearly exhausted and an additional $25,000 is needed to complete it. Here is an excerpt:

Will you help bring this important, historic work to the public? Click the button below to make a contribution via PayPal.

14-11-2014 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

MJ-12,Secrecy, UFOs

by STANTON FRIEDMAN

I was out of town at the Travis Walton Sky Fire Summit conference in Arizona and have gotten behind. A number of postings made recently seem to me to be inaccurate:

1. The claim has been made that there really hasn’t been much UFO information covered up. I have, as previously noted, several reasons for saying this isn’t true. Yes, we have 156 pages of NSA TOP SECRET UMBRA UFO Documents “released”(the NSA admitted they had them) way back in the 1980s because of the CAUS legal actions. Dozens of TSU CIA documents were also released. Doesn’t sound like much. Unfortunately the NSA documents were entirely whited out except for one sentence per page because supposedly the rest was Sources and Methods info. The only reason for the “release” was President Clinton’s signing of Executive Order 12958. Implementation was of course delayed. The new EO is 13526.Originally the CIA released no documents above SECRET. It took me 2 years to get the TSU documents usually with only a few words legible per page. All of these are of course roughly 30 years old. Also the NSA HQ told its various offices that if they should receive a request from me, not to handle it in the fashion described in regulations. Instead of replying to me, send the request to HQ, thus avoiding releasing the fact that they had materials. Is there any reason to think there is more data?
2. Surely more was accumulated in the past 30 years. Perhaps more important we have the statement told to me first hand by USAF General Carroll Bolender (and obtained under FOIA by Robert Todd) that UFO reports which could effect National security were not part of the Blue Book System and that if BB was closed, reports which could effect national security would continue to be investigated using the procedures designed for that purpose. Namely JANAP 146 and Air Force Manual 55-11. Note these apply only to the Air Force. To the best of my knowledge none of these have been released
3. Surely the Aerospace Defense command personnel (pilots, radar operators, spy satellite operators)have been made aware of loads of other sightings by personnel working under security. Furthermore we have all the sightings made by Navy (and army)personnel all over the world. The Navy office said they had no UFO information even after I sent them a joint ONI OSI report.
4. It has been claimed that governments aren’t very good at keeping secrets. Let us not forget that old and powerfully wrong notion that absence of evidence is evidence for absence. Good examples of very large scale government secret keeping include the Manhattan District effort to develop atomic bombs involving tens of thousands of personnel and huge classified facilities in Oak Ridge, TN, Hanford ,WA, Los Alamos, NM,etc and the use of 5% of the electrical power in the United States. Let us not forget the Stealth Aircraft Program under Lockheed.. $10 Billion. Let us not forget the more than 10,000 people involved in breaking the German and Japanese communications codes..kept quiet until 25 years after WW 2 ended. At one time Boeing Corp. had a contract with the NRO to improve the architecture of their spy satellites. It was cancelled after many billion dollars were spent.
5. The objection was made that when lots of secrets are kept there is a major impact on society as a kind of reaction. Best example I know is the very widespread release of false and misleading statements about UFOs by the government and media. This is demonstrated by the serious failure of the press and scientific communities to dig for truth about flying saucers. It is demonstrated also by loads of fiction being broadcast and shown, movies about aliens. Official government lies do indeed have an impact..in this case very negative
6. We have been told that academic historians and experts on intelligence have exposed loads of classified information even though they do not have a need to know or appropriate clearance. No need for guys like me to dig into archival files. The Intelligence agencies would very much like for the public to believe that nonsense. Perhaps they could provide us with the NSA,NRO, and CIA UFO files (that we can read) ? Have they revealed much data from the $52.6 Billion spent on Military Intelligence in one recent year..most by CIA,NSA,NRO?
7. Some have complained about the FOI being an inept procedure. I agree but it can be useful. Remember there is no central clearing house. John Greenewald has managed to dig out a ton of data as demonstrated by his Black Vault web site.. I admire his patience and skill. I have been lied to, but also been helped by FOIA people
8. Perhaps people have forgotten the findings of the Senator Frank Church Congressional committee which found in the early 1970s that at least 400 journalists were closely connected to the CIA, some even on the payroll. Many were associated with major media groups including the New York Times, CBS, Time etc. Perhaps it is no coincidence that they haven’t blown the lid off the Cosmic Watergate. Carl Bernstein, Co-Pulitzer Prize winner of 1973 of Watergate fame, had a 25,000 word article in Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. It appears that the public was blissfully ignorant, despite those historians and Intelligence Experts

14-11-2014 om 22:29 geschreven door peter  

1947 "Smoking Gun" Evidence?

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=41&sid=3741410&pid=0&page=1

UFO experts say 'we are not alone'

Journalist Leslie Kean showed photos taken by a government mapping plane in Costa Rica in 1971. (WTOP/Michelle Basch)

WASHINGTON -- UFOs were the topic of a panel discussion Wednesday night at American University, and one of the speakers used the occasion to reveal evidence he called a "smoking gun."

"We have come into possession of a couple of Kodachrome color slides of an alien being lying in a glass case," author and researcher Thomas Carey told the near-capacity crowd in Abramson Recital Hall. 

He's been researching the 1947 Roswell incident since 1991. 

"What's interesting is, the film is dated 1947.  We took it to the official historian of Kodak up in Rochester, New York, and he did his due diligence on it, and he said yes, this filmstrip, the slides are from 1947. It's 1947 stock. And from the emulsions on the image, it's not something that's been Photoshopped like today. It's original 1947 images, and it shows an alien who's been partially dissected lying in a case."

Carey says the being looked like what he thought an alien from the famous Roswell incident would look like. 

"3 and a half to 4 feet tall, the head is almost insect-like. The head has been severed, and there's been a partial autopsy; the innards have been removed, and we believe the cadaver has been embalmed, at least at the time this picture was taken. The owners of the slide -- it's an amazing story. The woman was a high-powered Midland, Texas, lawyer with a pilot's license.  We think she was involved in intelligence in World War II, and her husband was a field geologist for an oil company."

Carey says he plans to reveal the images early next year. 

Another panelist, Dr. Richard Haines, is a retired NASA scientist and co-founder of NARCAP (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena), which provides pilots with an anonymous way to report sightings they can't explain.  

"We're pretty ignorant yet about what we're dealing with. And that's the birth of a science. That's how most sciences begin," he said. 

Haines says NARCAP has collected hundreds and hundreds of UFO cases. 

"Our government is not taking the subject seriously. My role, or mission, if you will, is to bring this to the attention of our aviation world, at the union level, at the airline level and at the government level. I'm finding hardly any difficulty doing that in foreign countries.  I'm having a great deal of difficulty in America, and I don't know why."

Leslie Kean is an investigative journalist, co-founder of the Coalition for Freedom of Information and author of the New York Times bestseller "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record."  

She wrote her first story about UFOs in 2000. 

"My whole life was changed at that point. I was so compelled and so interested and so curious about this UFO phenomenon, because the more I studied it, the more I realized that you couldn't write it off. … It's not like you learn ways of explaining it. You learn more and more about the mystery of it, and the incredible documentation that's out there," she said. 

During her presentation, she detailed several interesting UFO cases, and showed some photographs, including one of a shiny, circular object.

"This is an incredible photograph that was taken over Costa Rica in 1971 by a government plane, a mapping plane, that had a camera strapped underneath the aircraft.  And every 17 seconds it took a photograph of the ground. The dark area is a lake, and ... the lighter area is the land, and over that lake there's a disc-shaped object."

Kean says Chile and France have full-time government staffers who do nothing but seriously investigate UFO cases, and she thinks the same is needed in the U.S.

"I'm trying to make the point that our scientists need to get more involved. In order for that to happen, we need a government agency here that will open the doors to allowing our scientists to engage with this topic."  

The most riveting presentation of the night came from retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Charles Halt, one of the witnesses of a famous series of UFO sightings in England in 1980 known as the Rendlesham Forest incident.  

Halt says he went into the forest to check out a report that a UFO had landed there. He saw three indentations in the ground that were spaced evenly, and a Geiger counter showed abnormally high levels of radiation in the area.

During this investigation, Halt says, he and several other military members saw a flying, oval-shaped object that glowed bright orange and red, and seemed to be dripping like molten metal. 

"We're standing there in awe. I said, 'There's got to be an explanation. Ball lightning, or who knows what.'  It starts to move. It moves towards us.  It comes into the forest.  It's moving through the trees horizontally, bobbing up and down as necessary to miss the trees.  I'm thinking, ‘Oh boy. I wish I hadn't come out here. This is really getting beyond me.'" 

He says they watched it for a few minutes, until something happened. 

"Suddenly and silently, it explodes into five white objects like fireworks, and it's gone." 

Halt closed out his presentation this way:

"If I could leave you with one thing, I'd say keep an open mind, and we are not alone. I can assure you."

Follow @WTOP on Twitter and WTOP on Facebook.              

© 2014 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.

13-11-2014 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

Area 51 Is The Yin To Roswell’s Yang

Desert Companion - Out there

Story by George Knapp

Twenty-five years ago this month, the author opened the door on Area 51. The story could hardly have been stranger had he found the aliens

A buzz was building inside the Kulturhuset, a community center built on Islands Brygge, the historic property on the waterfront of Copenhagen’s harbor. Inside the hall, an audience of more than 120 Danes, Norwegians, Germans and Brits were waiting to hear about a mystery that first surfaced on Las Vegas television 25 years ago. What’s the latest about Area 51, they wanted me to tell them — and whatever happened to that flying-saucer guy Bob Lazar?

Few people know better than I do how outlandish the Lazar story sounded when his tale of a secret Nevada base housing UFOs exploded onto the scene back in November 1989. To this day, it is still a bit befuddling to me that educated professionals, artists, musicians and retirees from all around Europe would gather to hear the latest scuttlebutt about the flying saucers supposedly housed in a secretive facility in the Nevada desert.

The Exopolitics Denmark conference, a two-day gathering in October, wasn’t the first to focus on the subject, and it won’t be the last. Area 51 is known around the world. Every day I receive letters, emails or phone calls from curious people in Ecuador, Iceland, Hong Kong, Russia or other far-flung places asking about Area 51 or the bookish whistleblower who put it on the map.

And that’s exactly what Lazar did. Today, Area 51 is an oxymoron of the highest order — the world’s best-known secret base. It has been mentioned in such blockbusters as The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, an Indiana Jones sequel and Independence Day, in which Earthlings used the base to fight off an alien invasion. It’s been featured in “X-Files” episodes, inspired dozens of books, hundreds of magazine articles, songs, cartoons, poems and business enterprises.

Earlier this year, former President Clinton talked about his interest in aliens and Area 51 on the Jimmy Kimmel show. President Obama became the first sitting president to mention the name of the base — during a ceremony honoring Shirley MacLaine.

Heck, even the Kardashians visited the outskirts of the base for their reality show.

There are several businesses named after Area 51 — a rock ’n’ roll band, a couple of bars, a video game, a fireworks company, jerky stores, inflatable love dolls, a dance troupe, art exhibits and the Las Vegas triple A-baseball team. After my first televised interview with Lazar, the most prominent business in Rachel, Nev., wisely changed its name from the Rachel Bar and Grill to the Little A’Le’Inn, selling T-shirts, posters, Groom Lake wine and Bob Lazar Christmas tree ornaments, along with “Beam Me Up, Scotty” drinks at the bar and Alien Burgers in the kitchen.

The story as told by Lazar has not only persisted but has blossomed, despite overtly hostile treatment by major media outlets and some of the best-known honchos of Ufology. Many of my journalism colleagues have worked their ink-stained panties into pretzel-thick bunches by fretting about the story. Nonetheless, since the saucer stuff burst into the public consciousness, every major media organization, program and paper in the world has, sometimes reluctantly, beaten a path to Area 51’s once-obscure door. The attention has irritated some of my fellow reporters to the breaking point.

The nonexistent military base

"Sometimes I really do regret it.” On the media screen inside the Denmark hall, attendees are intently watching an edited clip of an interview with Lazar. “I almost feel like apologizing to them, saying, ‘I’m sorry. Can I have my job back?’”

It’s far too late for that — assuming he ever had a job out there in the first place. Whatever anonymity Area 51 enjoyed evaporated forever the moment Lazar spoke into a TV camera.

That first interview was broadcast in May 1989. Lazar’s face was hidden and he used a pseudonym, Dennis. He claimed he worked intermittently at a location called S-4, south of Groom Lake, the main facility of Area 51. He said nine aircraft hangars had been built into the side of a mountain, adjacent to Papoose dry lake, disguised to look like the desert floor. Inside were nine flying saucers of alien origin. “Dennis” said the program was controlled by the U.S. Navy and that he and other scientists were taking the saucers apart to figure out how they worked — “reverse engineering,” he called it.

Eight months later, on Nov. 10, KLAS-TV identified Lazar by name and showed his face as part of a series called “UFOs: The Best Evidence.” To this day, it ranks as the highest rated, most-watched local news program ever produced here. Within days, Lazar’s claims had spread to Europe and Japan. TV crews and tabloid outfits flocked to Nevada. Tour buses filled with UFO enthusiasts staked out the deserts of the Tikaboo Valley. The guards, nicknamed “camo dudes,” who patrol the perimeter of Area 51 were overwhelmed by all the attention, and ticked off, too.

Before that first broadcast, the only people familiar with the name of the base were folks who worked there or at the Nevada Test Site, or who lived in one of the remote communities of central Nevada. A few journalists had written bits and pieces about the base in the ’60s and ’70s. Aviation magazines speculated about spy planes that might be flying out of Groom Lake: the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, the gangly and magnificent U-2 and a strange craft rumored to be nearly invisible to radar. Among the handful of Nevada journalists with an interest in the base were two Las Vegas muckrakers, Bob Stoldal and Ned Day, who years later would become my bosses.

Acting on a tip from a former CIA pilot and Area 51 watcher named John Lear, Day and Stoldal broke a big story about the existence of the stealth fighter, which, they reported, had been developed and tested at Area 51. Federal lawmen hauled Day in for questioning about the source of his information. Stoldal was nabbed by military security on the outskirts of the base. In the early ’80s, when they hired me to work at KLAS-TV, they told me intriguing stories about the ominous military base known by many names — The Ranch, The Box, The Watertown Strip and, best of all, Dreamland. By then the base had vanished from maps of the Test Site. The government began to pretend it didn’t exist, even though it had been acknowledged by the military as early as 1955 and had been photographed by Russian satellites. It became readily apparent that intelligence agencies and the military were flat out lying to the public, and, as lies go, it wasn’t very convincing.

'There is no delusion'

In Copenhagen, I told the audience that it no longer matters to me whether anyone believes Lazar’s wild tale. (That’s almost true.) For years after the story broke, it was a burning priority for me to try to convince the public — and my skeptical colleagues — that the story was legitimate and true. Not anymore.

These days, I focus on explaining why we took the story seriously in the first place, why we put our credibility on the line and how the tale subsequently took on a life that no one could have imagined. Like it or not, the Lazar meme is alive and well.

“Look, I’m not out there giving UFO lectures or producing tapes. I’m not in the UFO business,” Lazar told me in an interview recorded this year at my home. “I’m trying to run a scientific business, and if I’m The UFO Guy it makes it really difficult for me. It is to my benefit that people don’t believe the story. So when somebody says that they don’t believe my story, I say, ‘Great. Pass it around. I don’t want you to believe it because it makes life difficult for me.’”

These days, he owns a scientific supply company in Michigan. He doesn’t grant interviews and has done his best to put the whole episode behind him. He makes an occasional exception for me, mostly because of the strange road we have traveled together and the wars that have been fought in the odd little universe of Ufology.

“Look, I know what happened is true,” Lazar says. “There is no doubt. Period. There is no delusion.”

“Bob wouldn’t go to the trouble to make up a story to lie to people and then perpetuate that lie,” adds his close friend Gene Huff, a Las Vegas real-estate appraiser. “I mean, he lives in his own world and doesn’t care what people think. Bob has no idea who won the Super Bowl last year, or the World Series. He’s busy doing scientific stuff in Bob Lazar World and would not waste his time perpetuating a lie about UFOs.”

When KLAS decided to pursue Lazar’s claims, we spent eight months looking into his background and the larger story about UFOs at Area 51. On the surface, Lazar seemed an unlikely person to bring into such a sensitive program, assuming such a program exists. He likes machine guns and hookers, builds jet-powered cars, operated an outlaw fireworks spectacular and flies a skull-and-crossbones flag over his house. Hardly the profile of a stuffy government scientist. What’s more, the claims he made about places he worked and the school he attended could not be verified.

But instead of scaring us away from the story, the lack of records is what hooked us. Lazar said that prior to S-4, he had worked as a physicist on classified projects at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. The lab told me it had no record whatsoever of Lazar. After I found a lab phone book listing his name, and a front-page Los Alamos newspaper article that named him as a lab physicist, Los Alamos still denied having any records. A headhunting company confirmed to me that it had hired Lazar to work at the lab and would send me copies of his records — but then clammed up, refusing to return phone calls or respond to letters, later denying it ever told me that it had the records.

I interviewed four people who had personal knowledge of Lazar working at Los Alamos on classified projects, and I even took a tour of the lab with Lazar as my guide. Something was clearly wrong with this picture. Later, after Lazar got into legal hot water, I asked Nevada Rep. Jim Bilbray for help tracking down Lazar’s employment records. The congressman’s office said it was stonewalled by several agencies and had never seen anything like it.

The second thing that hooked us was Lazar’s knowledge of how things worked at Groom Lake. He says he spent very little time at Groom itself, but he knew, for instance, that a company called EG&G handled hiring. (Lazar claimed he had been sent to EG&G on a recommendation from physicist Edward Teller, whom he had met at Los Alamos.) Lazar knew that employees were flown to the base in unmarked planes or driven to Groom on buses with blacked-out windows — all true. He told us he had been interviewed by a guy who might have worked for the FBI as part of a background check for his security clearance. The agent’s name was Mike Thigpen. As it turned out, Thigpen was a real person, but he worked for something called the Office of Federal Investigation, which conducts background checks on people hired to work at the former Test Site. That part of Lazar’s story turned out to be true.

We also confirmed the existence of a location called S-4 on the Nellis range. There had been no references anywhere to such a place, but the public affairs office at Nellis confirmed to me that S-4 was a location at which the Air Force “tested certain equipment.” (If you ask them today, they will tell you they are “unable to find any such designation on any maps” of the range.) How did Lazar know it existed?

The most important information Lazar had was the location and time of test flights of the saucerlike craft. Three weeks in a row, he escorted a group of people out to the desert east of the Papoose range, and they witnessed a glowing saucer-shaped object rise above the mountains and perform dramatic maneuvers. One of the sightings was captured on videotape. I interviewed each of the people who went along, and they told me the same story. Again, how did Lazar know? There had been no reports of aerial activity at Papoose. To this day, the official story is that the government has never had a facility at that location (even though satellite maps show a road leading from Groom Lake to the spot where Lazar says the hangars were located). As an aside, earlier this year, a UFO researcher found images on Google Earth that appear to show the outline of what could be nine hangar doors on the side of Papoose dry lake.

After an inconclusive result on one polygraph test — the examiner thought Lazar was too frightened — he easily passed a second test, administered an ex-cop named Terry Tavernetti, who quizzed him about his core claims. No attempt at deception was detected. Not long after we reported Tavernetti’s findings, his office was burglarized and the charts from Lazar’s test were stolen.

Yet another reason we gave Lazar the benefit of the doubt is that we found witnesses to back up at least parts of his story. I’ve interviewed more than two dozen people who worked at Groom Lake at various times from the 1950s through the ’80s who have told me they saw saucerlike craft being tested or stored or taken apart in the vicinity of Area 51.

Most telling of all are those witnesses who were subsequently visited and threatened by various Men In Black types. Six people who offered to tell me their stories say they were visited immediately afterward and ordered to keep their mouths shut. If it had happened only once, I wouldn’t think much about it. But these six people were solid citizens, not UFO nuts. One woman says she her life was threatened. Another man says he was warned about imprisonment if he talked. What this told me was that someone was listening to my phone calls. In the days before Edward Snowden’s revelations, before we took for granted that the government is listening to every call and reading every email, this knowledge really pissed us off. Years after the story broke, I spoke to two former spooks who admitted that their job was to follow me, Lazar, Lear and Huff to see who we met or spoke to, at our workplaces, homes or bars. If Lazar’s tale was baloney, why were we being followed?

Nonetheless, my approach to the Lazar material changed in the mid-’90s, for a couple of reasons. One is that I was concerned that I had crossed into advocacy instead of merely reporting on it. The fact is, it became personal. So many weird things happened during those first few years, things that are hard to explain if you weren’t there.

  Second, I reluctantly came to realize that I would never be able to prove Lazar’s claims, no matter how many witnesses came forward to verify parts of his story. The folks who run Area 51 are simply better at this stuff than I am, and were always able to deflect stories about what goes on there. So I changed my focus to merely explaining how the story played out and why I remained interested over the years.

Amazing and ridiculous

In the years since the stories broke, I’ve read the most amazing and ridiculous things about Area 51 and the saucer stories in local and national publications. Quite a few articles have poked fun at the story or at me. I’ve been the subject of at least three terrifically funny editorial cartoons in the Review Journal — all three now hang on my bathroom wall. The RJ media critic speculated that people were “rushing home at night to see my UFO reports” because they wanted to see the moment when I finally went “bull-goose loony on the air.” One columnist bestowed on me the title of “grand mullah in the church of cosmic proctology.”

  Some of this stuff was pretty funny, but it bothered me that so many journalists had made up their minds about the Area 51 stories without ever doing a bit of work on it or without interviewing any witnesses. They seemed to know ahead of time, perhaps through psychic visions, that the story was bunk. To my mind, that isn’t how journalism is supposed to work.

The most troubling failures by my colleagues has been their willingness to accept whatever stories are promulgated by the Air Force or CIA, as long as the end result is to poke fun at crazy UFO buffs.

In the years since the Lazar story broke, I’ve met scores of men who worked at Groom Lake on classified projects who have told me they never saw any saucers, and I believe them. But those same men have told me they would see co-workers in the chow line every day and never know what they were working on because they couldn’t talk about it. They were reportedly ordered to lie about their work to their own spouses.

The other explanation that has been swallowed by those who don’t want the story to be true is that maybe the tale told by Lazar is part of a disinformation plot, devised by the CIA or Air Force, as a way to distract attention away from something else flying around out there.

If that was the plan, it was a miserable failure.

As a result of the saucer tales, tens of thousands of people have made the trek out into the desert to watch the skies. Media crews are out there every week. Congressional investigators have asked tough questions. No one at Groom Lake ever wanted this much attention, regardless of what they are doing these days.

Critics of the story, or of Lazar, are welcome to laugh at it all they want. But the fact is, the debate is effectively over. Area 51 is now permanently carved into the public consciousness. Area 51 is now the yin to Roswell’s yang, and the UFO stories are never going to be divorced from the base itself.

The UFO crazies won the battle. Long live Area 51.

Read entire issue online: Nov 2014 Issue

{http://www.desertcompanion.com/index.cfm}

12-11-2014 om 22:34 geschreven door peter  

Mister Spock No Sub 4 Mr. O'Brien?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUr9xrDEhVQ

12-11-2014 om 21:33 geschreven door peter  

THE UFO “WHY?” QUESTIONS

The star 55 Cancri has the most confirmed planets so far of any other (excluding the sun). NASA Art

4th Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference
Las Vegas, NV
November 10-12, 2006
by Stanton T. Friedman

ABSTRACT

have been fortunate enough to lecture (usually “Flying Saucers ARE Real”)   over 700 times in 18 countries. My audiences, mostly college and professional   groups, seem to have no problem accepting the detailed factual data that I   present leading to my conclusions that SOME UFOs are alien spacecraft and that   the subject of flying saucers represents a kind of Cosmic Watergate. But what   seems to be of most concern, judging  by the Question and Answer sessions, are   the “WHY?” questions. Why would saucers crash? Why would aliens visit Earth?   Why doesn’t the government tell us what it knows? Why would aliens not land on   the White House lawn or at the United Nations? Why would people fake MJ-12   documents? Why do you say SETI stands for Silly Effort To Investigate? Why have   you kept at it for 39 years? Why hasn’t the government taken you out? Perhaps   my answers will help the reader answer his “WHY?” questions, or lead to more   such questions.

   THE UFO “WHY?” QUESTIONS 

    1. WHY have you concluded that the evidence is overwhelming that Earth is   being visited by intelligently controlled Extraterrestrial Spacecraft?

    The simplest answer is that it is the only conclusion merited by the enormous   amount of evidence. In my lectures I review 5 large scale scientific studies   and ask after each one how many have read it. Typically fewer than 2% have read   any. I note the 5000-plus physical trace cases that Ted Phillips has collected from   over 70 countries. In these people see a craft land and then take off leaving   behind various markings on the soil such as burn circles, landing gear marks,   small footprints, dried out rings of soil, etc. These are not crop circles   where normally no saucer is seen. About 1/6 of these cases involve reports of   small beings. I refer to the more than 1000 abduction cases that have been   investigated by  Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack, and Raymond Fowler and the   Betty and Barney Hill case as recorded by John G. Fuller. I review the   outstanding work by Marjorie Fish clearly indicating that Betty’s star map   makes sense and provides information not previously known to us. Furthermore, I   have spent time at 20 archives, had a security clearance for 14 years, and find   it perfectly obvious that crucial data has been withheld and many government   people have lied with regard to UFOs. Saying some UFOs are of ET origin, of   course, doesn’t answer other questions such as WHY are aliens coming here, WHY   haven’t I seen one, where are they from, etc., etc.

   2. WHY don’t the aliens, if they are real, just land on the White House lawn   and say “Take me to your leader.”?

Obviously I don’t speak for any aliens. However, let us note three facts:

A. The White House is in a forbidden flying zone. Our response to intruders   in such zones is to take immediate action to escort the intruders away or shoot   them down. As far back as the summer of 1952 when, in July, UFOs did fly over   the White House, orders were given to military interceptors to shoot down UFOs   if they don’t land when instructed to do so. This is described in detail in   Frank Feschino Jr.’s new book Shoot Them Down.  Major General Roger Ramey   proclaimed that interceptors had been scrambled hundreds of times without any   luck. As an indication of the zeal of pilots, I have heard of at least 7   specific cases in which the UFOs zapped attacking earthling aircraft. Tim Good   in his new book Need to Know recounts similar cases. I am working on a claim   by a pilot that UFOs took out 20 of our planes in Europe in the early 1950s.

   B. It may come as a surprise to many Americans, but the President of the   USA doesn’t speak for Planet Earth. After all who elected him World President?   Certainly not the billion people from India or the 1.3 billion people in China.   Obviously the UN also does not speak for Planet Earth, either.

   C. Normally, negotiations only take place between roughly equal parties.   Surely it is not difficult to see that aliens have technology far in advance of   earthling technology. Their vehicles are clearly faster, more maneuverable, and   have access to huge space carriers (mother ships) with lord-knows-what   capability. They have no reason to negotiate when they can already do what   they please.

   3. WHY in the world would aliens want to come here if, as you have claimed, we   are a primitive society whose major activity is clearly tribal warfare?

   Answers to this question depend very much on one’s picture of the local   galactic neighborhood and of the situation on our planet. The SETI cultists   seem to think we are the Crown of Creation and that there may be “as many” as   50,000 civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy, which has a few hundred billion   stars. It is almost 100,000 light years across which, according to Frank Drake,   means there may be another civilization “only” 1000 light years away. This   would, of course, make us very special as one of the elite civilizations. I   think that there are probably many advanced civilizations within our local   neighborhood on planets around some of the 2300 stars within 54 light years,   especially the 46 that are very similar to the sun. The driving fact here is   that we have only had fancy technology for perhaps 100 years. But the earth is   about 4.5 billion years old and has been suitable for life for well over a   billion years.

    Just  down the street, 39.4 light years away, we find a pair of   sun-like stars, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. These are only an 1/8 of a light   year apart from each other, but are a billion years older than the sun. In   other words, there has been a great deal of time for other civilizations to   establish themselves. Having an easily observable neighbor nearby would provide far more incentive for the development of interstellar travel than we have out   here in the boondocks. My view is, per a fine analogy from physicist Beatriz   Gabo Rivera, that we are like the gorillas in a nature preserve in Africa who   know nothing about what is going on outside the preserve. I think aliens have   been traipsing around the neighborhood for a very long time indeed. I think it   is hilarious that Dr. Seth Shostak, one of the noisier SETI guys, says there is   nobody at ZR 1 or ZR 2, because they were listened to by a Southern Radio   Observatory 10 years ago. One would think he knows what equipment and frequency   alien communicators way ahead of us would use, and that they are trying to   attract our attention, which is totally absurd.

   Answers also depend greatly on how difficult it is to travel within the   neighborhood. If one is a SETI cultist noting (as on the terrible Peter   Jennings, Feb. 24, 2005, TV mockumentary) that our fastest spacecraft is the   Voyager probe and that it would take 70,000 years to get to the nearest star,   trips would be very uncommon indeed. A much more realistic approach is to note   that Voyager hasn’t had a propulsion system on it since it left Earth. It   is coasting, helped by some cosmic freeloading. Can we estimate the time it   takes to cross the ocean by throwing a bottle in? Can we tell how long it would   take to fly from New York to Los Angeles by putting a feather in the air? It   took Charles Lindberg 33 hours to cross the Atlantic. The Concorde did it in   just a few hours. The space station goes around the entire earth in 90 minutes.   Electromagnetic signals take 1/7 of a second to circumscribe the earth.

   Remember, we have just started on our technological kick. Think back to 1900.   Note no TV or radio or microwaves or nuclear power plants or satellites or DNA   testing or lasers or computers or airplanes or rockets or nuclear weapons or   transplanted organs. I am convinced that, unless we   stupidly destroy ourselves, there will be a time when star travel is not   considered any more far out than crossing the Atlantic on a 747 is today. I   recently flew nonstop from Newark, New Jersey, to Hong Kong, China, in less   than 17 hours. Nuclear submarines circumnavigate the globe without surfacing.   Obviously there are those who think star travel is impossible. If that were   true, which it isn’t, obviously nobody could be coming here from the stars.

Think of all the people going through O’Hare Airport in a year and the   huge variety of reasons for travel. To get the ball rolling, here are some   reasons for coming here. I am sure the reader can think of more:

  A. Graduate students doing their thesis work on the development of a primitive   society, on a planet where, amazingly, there is no planetary government, and where   there are many different languages; on various strange biological specimens, or on   genetic variations  of the intelligent beings.

   B. Broadcasters with weekly shows such as “Idiocy in the Boondocks.”

C. Mining engineers similar to those who went to California and the Klondike   and Australia for gold, or to Texas and the Middle East for oil. As it happens,   the earth is the densest planet in the solar system, so would be expected to   have more of the rare but very important very heavy metals such as gold,   uranium, rhenium, platinum, tungsten, osmium, etc. These are all much denser   than lead. We know from studying star spectra that they are rare. They also   have very special properties.

D. Mining engineers extracting more common metals from the nodules on the bottom of   the ocean and from the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. We have been talking   about doing this. Obviously war is much more important than ocean mining to us,   so we build nuclear submarines to stay in the depths of the ocean carrying   their multitude of nuclear tipped missiles. There are also abundant supplies of   so-called rare earths, many used in the electronics and nuclear industries. It   should not be forgotten that a century ago the primary use for uranium was to   prepare yellow glazes for pottery. Zirconium and titanium were essentially   worthless. Now nuclear navies use zirconium based alloys because of their   splendid nuclear and anticorrosion properties. Titanium is used in aircraft   like the SR-71 because of its high strength and low density.

   E. Operators of refueling and rest and relaxation centers on the back side of   the moon or in the depths of the ocean or in the asteroid belt.

   F. Visitors checking on old colonies established by their ancestors.   Perhaps there were many different ones which might explain why we have black,   brown, red, yellow and white races.

   G. Jailers. This may be a penal colony on which aliens dropped off their bad boys and   girls and that is why we are so nasty to each other. Georgia and Australia were   first settled by convicts. Letting the convicts go bother other civilizations   who, unlike us, have learned to live peacefully, may be a no-no in the galactic   rule book.

   H. Vacationers. This may be a recreation center. Notice how many people visit Hawaii and Las   Vegas and Orlando. If the travel wasn’t easy, how many would venture forth to   see Mickey Mouse or gaming tables or surfing beaches?

   I. Specimen gathererers for ET zoos and aquariums. We are still   finding new specimens.

   J. Local galactic horticultural societies collecting specimens for   their displays and genetic cross breeding.

   K. Medical researchers. They may have to evaluate the genetic material of loads of   specimens to find genetic defects or super-special genes. There are a number of   conditions whose frequency in the population is quite small (for example, only one person   in 14,000 has hemophilia) so many specimens must be checked.

   L. Honymooners. Perhaps this is the honeymoon capital for this corner of the neighborhood.   Special rates for a week on Earth… side trips to the moon and Mars…

M. Cartographers. Local neighborhood maps may describe, for example, the   equivalent of English coaling stations in the 19th century.

   N. Sports enthusiasts. There may be special excursions to observe various such events. Don’t   forget that a World Championship Chess match was held in Iceland.

   O. Scouts seeking the best site for a new amusement park in the solar system.

   P. Weapons inspectors. If we make the eminently reasonable assumption that every advanced   civilization is concerned about its own survival and security, than we would   expect that our development of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the means for   delivering them in the local neighborhood would be of great concern. Clearly   after World War II it should take less than a century for us to master fission and   fusion and other new technologies to allow us to take our brand of   friendship/hostility… out there. Thus, a logical reason to visit is to   quarantine us until we develop a technique for learning to live at peace with   each other. No galactic federation new-member committee would allow us to join.   Too primitive.I suspect that the SETI cultists think they would be welcome   guests. Not very likely.

   Q. Producers. Having worked on a lot of motion picture documentaries at many locations, I   would suggest perhaps some visitors are planning epic fiction and factual   movies for film companies at home… shooting on location hither and yon.

    4. WHY is the government not   telling what it knows?

   Are they afraid of War of the Worlds panic? I hardly   think so. After all, New Jersey was being destroyed by Martians. What could we   do against them? Panic was not inappropriate.  First we have to recognize there   is a Cosmic Watergate and a long history of government lies about UFOs such as   I described in Ref. 1, which lists lies from the FBI, CIA, USAF, NSA, etc.   Some want to insist that (A) governments can’t keep secrets, and (B) the real   secret is that they don’t know what is going on and can’t admit that either.

    I disagree with both. A few examples of secret-keeping that have leaked out: The   Manhattan Engineering District employed 130,000 people to develop the atomic   bomb at a cost of several billion dollars in total secrecy during World War II. The   Allies broke the German code during World War II and had 12,000 people working at   Bletchley Park in the UK intercepting, decoding and translating German military   communications. If the secret had come out, the Germans would have changed   their codes. There was really nothing in public until 25 years later despite   the obviously great improvements in technology. We also had broken the Japanese   military codes — again in secret. With regard to B, note that the military   agencies have monitoring systems that provide far more information than we   civilians can obtain — and in secret.

   The Naval Research Laboratory finally admitted in 1995 that it had launched a bunch of Corona electromagnetic intelligence satellites to monitor Soviet radar   and communications systems starting in 1960, after 12 secret failures. The   first one that worked provided more data than all the previous secret U-2   flights that preceded it. The Soviets knew about the U-2, but dared not admit   that they couldn’t do anything about it. The American people had not been   informed. Similarly the Soviets had shot down a number of military   reconnaissance aircraft probing Russia, North  Korea, and China causing the   loss of 166 crew members. Their families were lied to: unfortunate accident,   crashed at sea, etc. It was not until 2001 that the USA had a meeting with families   of the crew members that they were told what happened, even though most of the   losses occurred in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Medals were distributed.   William Burrows tells the story in his book By Any Means Necessary (Ref. 2).

   The National Reconnaissance Office first admitted in 2005 that it had launched   7 Poppy satellites between 1962 and 1971. Their function was to conduct very   sophisticated monitoring of electronic and radar installations on Soviet ships.   Thousands of people were involved.

    So yes, indeed, secrets can be kept. The annual US Black Budget is estimated at   30-40 billion dollars. That is a lot of secrecy.

     So WHY keep UFOs secret?

  A. All major countries and many terrorist groups would   very much like to duplicate the flight technology of the saucers. They can   literally fly circles around our vehicles, move at very high speed, make right   angle turns, move straight up and down — typically with little noise, no visible   engines, no exhaust. They would make wonderful weapons delivery and defensive   systems. Since we have recovered wreckage at least as early as 1947 (see   Crash at Corona, Ref. 3) we would have set up a highly classified project   (call it Operation Majestic 12 as described in my book TOP SECRET/MAJIC (Ref.   4)) to try both to evaluate the wreckage and to obtain measurements of flight   characteristics using airborne and spaceborne and earth-based radar sets,   cameras, electromagnetic sensors, and other instrumentation. Surely governments   have very much more sophisticated instruments and observation platforms than do   private individuals. The key rule here is that one can’t tell one’s friends   without telling one’s enemies. It appears that there have been many UFO crashes   including ones overseas (Varginha, Brazil, for example). There is a long   history of countries gathering and evaluating crashed vehicles of their   enemies. This does not require a conspiracy; everybody has the same self   interest concerns.

   B. Each country worries about its enemies determining the secrets of saucer   technology before they do and must be concerned about how to defend against new   vehicles and also how to learn what the other guy has already learned. Soviet   spies at Los Alamos apparently shortened the time it took the Soviets to test   their first A-bomb (1949) by at least a year.

   C. What if an announcement were made, by highly trusted individuals around the   world, such as the Queen and the Pope, saying that indeed SOME UFOs are ET   spacecraft? Here are some things I believe would happen:

   (1) Church attendance would increase.

   (2) Mental hospital admissions would increase.

   (3) The stock market would go down; uncertainty is always the enemy.

   (4) Based on my more than 600 college lectures, the younger generation, which,   unlike me, was never alive when there wasn’t a space program, would push   for a new view of ourselves as EARTHLINGS instead of as Americans, Canadians,   Greeks, Peruvians, etc. Many would think that would be great. But I know of no   government on Earth that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to   the planet (where it belongs) instead of to individual national governments.   Nationalism is the only game in town. I believe that alien visitors — they may   be our landlords, for all we know — think of us as earthlings even though,   because of our military traffic, they would be well aware of different ruling   groups in different places.

   D. A small group of religious fundamentalists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson   come to mind) have already loudly proclaimed that UFOs are the work of the   devil and there is no other intelligent life outside Earth. What an insult to   the notion of an all powerful GOD! They would be up the creek without a   religious paddle if an announcement were to be made. They have had a great deal   of political clout.

   E. Making an announcement would require that governments admit they have been   lying through their teeth for decades. I don’t know of any government that   wants to do that.

   F. If an announcement were carefully made without the scare mongering of “War   of the Worlds”, a lot of people would think that surely, aliens, who can come   here, must be far more advanced technologically than are we, since we can’t go   out there. This would strongly suggest that soon there would be new methods of   energy production, air and ground transport, computers and communication   systems, i.e. economic chaos. We are not very good at large scale economic   changes in a hurry. Think of the Soviet Union which, at our strong demands, had   democracy, elections, freedom, capitalism. On the average, except for the high   price of oil, are Russians better off today than they were 17 years ago??

   G. Because I am convinced that military pilots in many countries have been   disintegrated or “disappeared” by UFOs, I think governments would all be very   resistant to telling their citizens that we tried to attack UFOs and they   returned the favor — only they succeeded. The head of the American Rocket   Society in 1952 took President Truman to task for the attack orders. Frank   Feschino Jr. (Shoot Them Down) has gathered hundreds of reports of supposed   airplane crashes in the USA and overseas in the early 1950s. Three military   pilots, each of whom flew over 100 missions in Korea where they had to deal with   marauding MIGs, crashed when they came back home. That seems very suspicious   to me.

5. WHY would saucers crash?

Usually this is accompanied by a comment that it   makes no sense that a sophisticated vehicle coming from many light years away   could possibly crash.   Please note that the vehicle could have come from a   base on the back side of the moon, in the asteroid belt, on Mars or some alien   “coaling station” in the local neighborhood. I once did 25 college lectures in   35 days in 15 states. I was gone all the time from when I left home until I   returned rather than going back and forth to home after each lecture.

  A. In the first place, there are many indications that what crashed at   Roswell and in the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico in early July, 1947,   were small Earth excursion modules rather than the interstellar, very large   vehicles (space carriers? mother ships?) which would have brought them to Earth   just as our large aircraft carriers carry 75 or so small airplanes whose mode   of propulsion is distinctly different from that of the carrier.

   B. Secondly, when we examine major efforts by the Transportation Safety Board   to determine the cause of aircraft crashes, we often find, after much effort,   that it was simple unexpected things ranging from loose bolts, to ingested   birds, to faulty wiring, to pilot error, to ice in the wrong place. It could   have been very high atmospheric electricity levels because of storms or the   great dryness of the desert air. Or unexpected high altitude hail. We know a   radar set was on over at White Sands because of an impending rocket launch and   the fact that it used vacuum tubes. This was a tracking radar pointed North.   Crossing the beam might have led to a small hiccup in the control system for a   magnetoaerodynamic propulsion system leading to a collision and subsequent   collision of the lead saucer and its wingman’s saucer. Perhaps a US   military rocket launched in the neighborhood might have inadvertently homed in   on a saucer. Perhaps there was a momentary loss of attention when the Trinity   highly radioactive site, at which the first atomic bomb was tested, was noted.   We certainly have no reason to believe that aliens never make mistakes, or   never run into the unexpected. Some day perhaps the government will release the   report that was undoubtedly written as to the causes of the crashes. Just   because we don’t have that report, it doesn’t mean the event   didn’t take place.

   6. WHY haven’t you seen a flying saucer?

   I have no idea, though I have mostly   lived in cities and am watching for traffic rather than looking to the skies. I   check my audiences after my lectures and find that typically 10% have seen one,   which covers many decades. Only 10% of those were reported. I have never seen   Tokyo either or had polio or HIV. I know people who have seen Tokyo, had polio,   or HIV. I spent many years chasing neutrons and gamma rays. Never saw one of   them either. They are also real.

   7. WHY do you say SETI stands for Silly Effort to Investigate?

    Frankly I find that there is very little science behind the SETI effort. It is   assumed that there are civilizations using communication technologies similar   to ones we have developed to try to attract our attention. It assumes there is   no colonization and no migration and that nobody is coming here. They assume   that because it takes less energy to send signals than to travel, that nobody   is traveling. Of course nobody flies from Newark to Hong Kong because the   Internet and telephone is cheaper! Hah. It is all fancily dressed hogwash. They   could easily be thousands or millions of years ahead of us. An AM radio   doesn’t pick up FM signals. A German General just before the start of   World War II in Europe noted (see Ref. 2) that the Brits were building a whole   array of tall (more than 200') towers with cross pieces which he figured had to   be part of a radar net. The Graf Zeppelin slowly moved parallel to the array   and listened and found no signals. The frequency being used was 10 times higher   than what the Germans were using and they fortunately were never aware of how   well their planes were being tracked.

   If civilizations, with a great deal of common heritage and similar background   and access to similar science, can’t correctly predict the technique to   be used by similar people a few hundred miles away, why assume we can   second-guess aliens? They persistently say there is no evidence for UFOs, but   always avoid dealing with the large scale scientific studies. Check their   references. Look carefully at the Drake Equation, their Holy Grail. We have no   way to determine the lifetime of a civilization, or the fraction of planets that   have intelligent life or that develop technology. We have data on one   “civilization” on one planet in one solar system. Real scientists   don’t extrapolate or interpolate from one data point. The SETI people omit   colonization and migration which could greatly lengthen the life span of a   civilization. That is pseudoscience, no matter how many degreed professionals   are involved. Admittedly, their job security is dependent on nobody   coming here…

8. WHY hasn’t the government taken out Stan Friedman, if what he is saying   about a Cosmic Watergate and overwhelming evidence that we have visitors   is true?

    Obviously I don’t speak for the government. I am careful in what I say, and I   don’t break the law in seeking classified data from people with clearances. I   may be doing exactly what they want, that is, preparing the public for the date   when the great secret is released. I have never had an unlisted telephone   number. It is in my books and on my website. All those lonely drives to Roswell   would provide plenty of opportunity. My answering service is instructed to give   out my travel information to callers. Frankly, I can’t live my life looking   over my shoulder. Some have suggested I was too well known and that a sudden death   would be suspicious…

9. WHY would people fake a bunch of MJ-12 documents?

   I am not a psychiatrist, but I would suggest to enhance status;

to think “Gotcha”; or to disinform the public so that the fake   documents would be an excuse for labeling such genuine documents as the   Eisenhower Briefing Document, the Truman-Forrestal Memo, and the Cutler-Twining   Memo as frauds. Or, perhaps, might it be to be able to claim that the   proponents are stupid or are disinformation specialists? The same old tired   false anti-MJ-12 arguments keep being put forth despite the fact that I have   demonstrated that they are nonsense. The Majestic 12 article in Wikipedia is   loaded with false and misleading claims. For example, in the 5000-word   afterword in TOP SECRET/MAJIC 2nd Edition (2005), in   “Update on Operation Majestic 12” (see www.stantonfriedman.com), in   “Roswell and the MJ-12 Documents in the New Millennium” (Ref.5),   and in my “Review of Case MJ-12” also on my website I demolish the   anti’s and show that other MJ-12 documents are fraudulent. Remember, one of the   key rules for debunkers is “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind   is made up.” Another is “Do your research by proclamation,   investigation is too much trouble and the public won’t know the   difference.” I distinctly showed that at least seven of the supposed   MJ-12 documents provided to Timothy Cooper are emulations of real documents   published in books and generally available. They were retyped, much handwritten   material was Xeroxed or scanned, and the two were combined. And there were   often factual misstatements. Deuterium is not light hydrogen. Sandia   is in New Mexico, while General Spaatz was not in New Mexico on   July 7, 1947 (I found his flight log and a newspaper article and desk calendar   indicating he was in Port Aransas, Texas, fishing).

   Some of the statements from the phony emulations were repeated in other   documents which means the latter ones were also phony. I have been told that   when good information is leaked, bad is put out so as to confuse things and imply the   real ones are phony: guilt by association. It is interesting that Colonel   Richard Weaver, author of the grossly misleading USAF Book The Roswell Report:   Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (see Ref. 5) had as his military   specialty “Disinformation.” He provided the fiction.

   10. WHY have you kept at it since reading Ruppelt’s book in 1958 and giving   your first lecture in 1967?

   I enjoy being on the stage and the very   enthusiastic response I get from my audiences, especially from the technical   societies. I am pleased when people tell me that they decided to teach a course   about UFOs, after hearing me talk. I can think of no subject more important to   the future for my children and grandson than the notion of an earthling   orientation in the hope of helping stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.   What is more exciting than alien visitations and government cover-ups? I   believe I bring a unique background to my presentations:

  A. So far as I know I have worked on more cancelled high technology classified   programs than anybody and so can deal with those silly “It would violate   the laws of Physics” arguments. Not many have worked on nuclear   airplanes, or in general on fission and fusion propulsion systems.

   B. Because I worked on many classified programs and have visited 20 archives, I   am in a better position than most to deal with the silly “Secrets   can’t be kept” notions.

   C. Because I have probably had to answer about 40,000 questions at lectures and   on talk shows and in classes, I have been forced to think about the questions   such as the “WHY?” questions, more than most.

   D. I was very fortunate to be able to find that my memory was good and reliable   (at least until recently) and I could give acceptable answers in a hurry. Being   on debate teams in high school probably helped a lot. I have been very lucky,   first to have worked on so many leading edge classified programs, and second to   be able to provide so many presentations to attentive audiences.  

Stanton Friedman

Contact me (fsphys@bellaliant.net)
www.stantonfriedman.com 

REFERENCES

  1. Friedman, Stanton T. “Government UFO Lies.” MUFON 2005 Conference   Proceedings and at <a href="http: www.stantonfriedman.com?="">www.stantonfriedman.com.

    2. Burrows, William E. By Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in   the Cold War New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001. 399 pp.

   3. Berliner, Don, and Stanton T. Friedman. Crash at Corona Marlowe &   Co., (Paraview Special Edition) 2004. 227 pp. $17.00 including S&H   from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958. Autographed by STF.

    4. Friedman, Stanton T. TOP SECRET/MAJIC 2nd Edition. Marlowe & Co.,   2005. 296 pp. $17.00 including S&H from UFORI. Autographed.

    5. Weaver, Colonel Richard L. “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the   New Mexico Desert.” US Government Printing Office, 1995 (about 1000 pp.).  

12-11-2014 om 21:22 geschreven door peter  

Aircraft Carriers In The Sky

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released this artist’s rendering to show its vision for a future aircraft carrier in the sky, capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft while in flight. (DARPA image)

The Pentagon wants an airborne aircraft carrier to launch drones

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released this artist’s rendering to show its vision for a future aircraft carrier in the sky, capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft while in flight. (DARPA image)

In the 2012 movie “The Avengers,” Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the rest of the gang flew on a massive aircraft carrier that carried dozens of planes through the air and disappeared from plain view with the help of a cloaking device. The idea that the U.S. military could develop something similar is still seen as far-fetched, but this much is true: a Pentagon agency has just launched a new effort to develop an airship sure to draw comparisons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring whether it would be possible to turn an existing plane into a flying fortress capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft. Doing so would extend the range of drones that gather intelligence and perform other missions while saving money and limiting the risks pilots take, DARPA officials said Sunday.

“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,’” said Dan Patt a DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.”

Unlike the Avengers’ heli-carrier, DARPA’s sky-carrier would likely use a plane like the B-52 Stratofortress bomber, B-1B Lancer bomber or C-130 Hercules cargo plane, according to a request for information released by the agency on Friday. Companies, universities and other organizations interested in participating must submit ideas by Nov. 26 and include “system-level conceptual designs,” including a feasibility analysis.

DARPA also left open the possibility “missile-based approaches” to launching drones in its request for information, and says those interested should provide a sense for how many drones could be launched.

It’s not the first time that the U.S. military has dabbled with sky-carriers.
In the 1930s, for example, the U.S. Navy launched Sparrowhawk biplanes from helium-filled rigid dirigibles built by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Company.

The two airships that launched planes, the USS Akron and USS Macon, both experienced catastrophic crashes. The Akron crashed in 1933 off the coast of New Jersey, killing 73 of 76 men on board, according to the Navy Historical Center. The Macon crashed two years later off the coast of California. Most of the service members on board survived, but the dirigible sank “effectively ending the Navy’s controversial, and trouble-plagued, program of rigid airship operations,” Navy officials said.

More recently, the Air Force investigated whether it could use a 747 jet as an aircraft carrier, commissioning a report from Boeing. The defense contractor sketched a concept in which part of the plane would be hollowed out, and “micro-fighters” would be developed to fit inside, according to briefing slides later released by the military.

12-11-2014 om 20:59 geschreven door peter  

Penetration

Stanford Scientists Observe Man Travel Out of His Body and Into Space – What He Saw Was Remarkable

A fascinating article from collective-evolution.com:  NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft was launched into space in 1972. It was the the very first spacecraft to fly directly through the asteroid belt and make observations of the biggest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. It was also able to obtain close up images of the planet, something that scientists had never had access to before. (1)

Prior to the flyby of Jupiter by Pioneer 10, the CIA and NSA in conjunction with Stanford University were involved in what was called “Remote Viewing.”
Remote viewing can be defined in multiple ways. It’s the ability of individuals to describe a remote geographical location up to several hundred thousand kilometers away (sometimes even more) from their physical location.(2)(3)(4)

A gentlemen by the name of Ingo Swann was able to successfully describe and view a ring around Jupiter, a ring that scientists had no idea existed. This took place precisely before the first ever flyby of Jupiter by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which confirmed that the ring did actually exist. These results were published in advance of the rings’ discovery. (2)

The successful viewing of the ring by Ingo came after scientists observed him identify physical objects in hidden envelopes that were placed a few hundred kilometers away.

“Successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the [remote viewing] phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. The CIA even participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. CIA personnel generated successful target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges.”(2) -Harold Puthoff, PhD, Stanford University

“To determine whether it was necessary to have a “beacon” individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if perhaps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist.” (2) – Harold Puthoff, PhD, Stanford University

It’s remarkable to think about these extended human capacities, and what we are capable of. At the same time it’s sobering to think about how all of this information isn’t emphasized, and always kept classified and hidden from the human race. It makes you wonder what other information out there remains classified that we don’t know about yet, and what other truths the remote viewing program has uncovered.

The Above Information Was Documented. Here’s What Wasn’t.

Here is a quote from Ingo’s book Penetration, where he goes into detail about phenomenon that was not documented in the literature cited throughout this articles.

“It’s one thing to read about UFOs and stuff in the papers or in books. It is another to hear rumors about the military or government having an interest in such matters, rumors which say they have captured extraterrestrials and downed alien space craft. But it’s quite another matter to find oneself in a situation which confirms everything. I found towers, machinery, lights buildings, humanoids busy at work on something I couldn’t figure out (on the back side of the moon)”

The information now available in the public domain regarding the government experiments with remote viewing were declassified in 1995, but who knows how much of the program’s information remains classified. Ingo had expressed that the program was shut down because it was one of the biggest threats to government secrecy.

It’s quite remarkable that this information was kept secret for over 20 years. Prior to 1995, the public had absolutely no idea that this type of thing was going on, it was a special access program, part of the black budget, which still today deals with projects and information the human race knows nothing about. You can read read more about the black budget HERE.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” –
Nikola Tesla

Science has indeed studied non-physical phenomenon, for a very long time.
Unfortunately, much of this science has been locked up within the classified world, and the remote viewing program (one of many) is a great example of that.

10-11-2014 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

Founder Of Skeptic’s Society Rattled After Witnessing A Paranormal Event (Michael Shermer)

10-11-2014 om 23:42 geschreven door peter  

Flim Flam Extolled!

The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

                 James Randi in front of a painting done by his partner, the artist José Alvarez.  

Credit Jeff Minton for The New York Times                                                 

A few minutes before 8 o’clock one Sunday evening last July, around 600 people crowded into the main conference hall of the South Point casino in Las Vegas. After taking their seats on red-velvet upholstered chairs, they chattered noisily as they awaited the start of the Million Dollar Challenge. When Fei Wang, a 32-year-old Chinese salesman, stepped onto the stage, they fell silent. Wang had a shaved head and steel-framed glasses. He wore a polo shirt, denim shorts and socks. He claimed to have a peculiar talent: from his right hand, he could transmit a mysterious force a distance of three feet, unhindered by wood, metal, plastic or cardboard. The energy, he said, could be felt by others as heat, pressure, magnetism or simply “an indescribable change.” Tonight, if he could demonstrate the existence of his ability under scientific test conditions, he stood to win $1 million.

The Million Dollar Challenge was the climax of the Amazing Meeting, or TAM, an annual weekend-long conference for skeptics that was created by a magician named the Amazing Randi in 2003. Randi, a slight, gnomish figure with a bald head and frothy white beard, was presiding from the front row, a cane topped with a polished silver skull between his legs. He drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. The Challenge organizers had spent weeks negotiating with Wang and fine-tuning the protocol for the evening’s test. A succession of nine blindfolded subjects would come onstage and place their hands in a cardboard box. From behind a curtain, Wang would transmit his energy into the box. If the subjects could successfully detect Wang’s energy on eight out of nine occasions, the trial would confirm Wang’s psychic power. “I think he’ll get four or five,” Randi told me. “That’s my bet.”

    

The Challenge began with the solemnity of a murder trial. A young woman in a short black dress stood at the edge of the stage, preparing to mark down the results on a chart mounted on an easel. The first subject, a heavyset blond woman in flip-flops, stepped up and placed her hands in the box. After two minutes, she was followed by a second woman who had a blue streak in her hair and, like the first, looked mildly nonplused by the proceedings. Each failed to detect the mystic force. “Which means, at this point, we are done,” the M.C. announced. With two failures in a row, it was impossible for Wang to succeed. The Million Dollar Challenge was already over.

Stepping out from behind the curtain, Wang stood center stage, wearing an expression of numb shock, like a toddler who has just dropped his ice cream in the sand. He was at a loss to explain what had gone wrong; his tests with a paranormal society in Boston had all succeeded. Nothing could convince him that he didn’t possess supernatural powers. “This energy is mysterious,” he told the audience. “It is not God.” He said he would be back in a year, to try again.

After Wang left the stage, Randi, who is 86, told me he was glad it was all over. For almost 60 years, he has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity, and no one had ever received a single penny.

But he hates to see them lose, he said. “They’re always rationalizing,” Randi told me as we walked to dinner at the casino steakhouse. “There are always reasons prevailing why they can’t do it. They call it the resilience of the duped. It’s with intense regret that you watch them go down the tubes.”

The day before the challenge, Randi was wandering the halls of the casino, posing for snapshots and signing autographs. The convention began in 2003 in Fort Lauderdale, with 150 people in attendance, including staff. This year, it attracted more than 1,000 skeptics from as far away as South Africa and Japan. Often male and middle-aged, and frequently wearing ponytails or Tevas or novelty slogan T-shirts (product of evolution; stop making stupid people famous; atheist), they came to genuflect before their idol, drawn by both his legendary feats as an illusionist and his renown as an icon of global skepticism.

One fan, in his early 20s, with a thick mop of dark hair, introduced himself with, “So, I read that you spent 55 minutes in a block of ice.”

“A cinch,” Randi replied.

Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson. In addition to offering grants, JREF holds the $1 million in bonds that back the challenge, and pays Randi’s annual $200,000 salary.

Raised as a Catholic, Appaden told me that he discovered Randi in 2010, when he watched the magician in an online TED talk discussing homeopathy. At the time Appaden was a student at a Christian college, struggling with his faith; two years later, during Randi’s first visit to India, he took a 13-hour bus ride across the country to see Randi in person. “It literally changed my life,” he told me, and explained that he now hopes to help teach skepticism in Indian schools.

The magician looked small and frail, lost in the folds of his striped dress shirt, leaning on his cane, but he mugged gamely for every acolyte. For many of his most zealous followers, the opportunity to meet Randi at TAM may be as close as they will ever come to a religious experience. “It’s an obligation, it’s a very heavy obligation,” he said. “I can’t stand one person being turned away and not being given the same attention that others have been given.”

A few days before the conference, I visited Randi at his home, in Plantation, Fla. The modest octagonal house was almost hidden from the street by a lush garden of finger palms, elephant ears and paperbark trees. As we sat upstairs, surrounded by some 4,000 books — arranged alphabetically by subject, from alchemy, astrology, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle to tarot, U.F.O.s and witchcraft — he said that he disliked being called a debunker. He prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. He elaborated: “Because if I were to start out saying, ‘This is not true, and I’m going to prove it’s not true,’ that means I’ve made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to find out.’ That may end up — and usually it does end up — as a complete debunking. But I don’t set out to debunk it.”

Born Randall James Zwinge in 1928, Randi began performing as a teenager in the 1940s, touring with a carnival and working table to table in the nightclubs of his native Toronto. Billed as The Great Randall: Telepath, he had a mind-reading act, and also specialized in telling the future. In 1949 he made local headlines for a trick in which he appeared to predict the outcome of the World Series a week before it happened, writing the result down, sealing it an envelope and giving it to a lawyer who opened and read it to the press after the series concluded. But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded — but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic. Once he understood the power he had over his audience, and how easily he could exploit their belief in the supernatural to make money, it frightened him: “To have deceived people like that . . . that’s a terrible feeling,” he said.      

He turned instead to escapology — as The Amazing Randi: The Man No Jail Can Hold — and feats of endurance. He broke a record for his 55-minute stint encased in ice, and bested the time his hero Houdini had spent trapped in a coffin on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Hotel Shelton in Manhattan. But Randi never forgot the believers, and how susceptible they were to exploitation by those who lacked his scruples. And so, as his reputation as a magician grew, he also began to campaign against spiritualists and psychics. In 1964, as a guest on a radio talk show, he offered $1,000 of his own money in a challenge to anyone who could show scientific evidence of supernatural powers. Soon afterward, he began broadcasting his own national radio show dedicated to discussion of the paranormal. He bought a small house in Rumson, N.J., and installed a sign outside that announced randi — charlatan. He lived there alone, with a pair of talking birds and a kinkajou named Sam. Although Randi had known he was gay since he was a teenager, he kept that to himself. “I had to conceal it, you know,” he told me. “They wouldn’t have had a known homosexual working in the radio station. This was a day when you had to keep it completely hidden.”

During the late ’60s and early ’70s, popular interest in the paranormal grew: There was a fascination with extrasensory perception and the Bermuda Triangle and best sellers like “Chariots of the Gods,” which claimed Earth’s ancient civilizations were visited by aliens. There were mystics, mind-readers and psychic surgeons, who were said to be able to extract tumors from their patients using only their bare hands — and without leaving a mark. Randi continued on his crusade. Few of his fellow illusionists were interested in exposing the way that conjuring tricks were used to dupe gullible audiences into believing in psychic abilities. “Everybody else just kind of rolled their eyes,” Penn Jillette, a good friend of Randi’s, told me. “'Why is Randi spending all this time doing this? We all know there is no ESP. It’s just stupid people believe it, and that’s fine.’ "

Randi kept up his $1,000 challenge — and eventually increased it to $10,000 — but found few takers. Then in 1973, he met the nemesis who would define his struggle: Uri Geller, who had recently arrived in the United States from Israel. Geller was a charismatic 26-year-old former paratrooper who performed mind-reading feats similar to those with which Randi baffled audiences as a young mentalist. But Geller said that his powers were real and also claimed to have psychokinetic abilities: He could bend spoons, he said, using only his mind. His supposed gifts were studied by a pair of parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute, who were persuaded that some of them, at least, were genuine. Randi told me that he met Geller soon afterward. “Very flamboyant,” he recalled venomously. “Very charming. Likable, beautiful, affectionate, genuine, forward-going, Handsome — everything!” His manner, Randi explained, was the key to the techniques employed by Geller and others like him. “That’s why they call them con men. Because they gain the confidence of the victim — and then they fool ‘em.”

Geller provided Randi with an archenemy in a show-business battle royale pitting science against faith, skepticism against belief. Their vendetta would endure for decades and bring them both international celebrity. Recognizing that the psychic’s paranormal feats were a result of conjuring tricks — directing attention elsewhere while he bent spoons using brute force, peeking through his fingers during mind-reading stunts — Randi helped Time magazine with an exposé of Geller. Soon afterward, when Geller was invited to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” the producers approached Randi, who had been a frequent guest, to help them ensure that Geller could employ no tricks during his appearance. Randi gave Carson’s prop men advice on how to prepare for the taping, and the result was a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again. “I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.” But to Geller’s astonishment, he was immediately booked on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

Randi decided Geller must be stopped. He approached Ray Hyman, a psychologist who had observed the tests of Geller’s ability at Stanford and thought them slipshod, and suggested they create an organization dedicated to combating pseudoscience. In 1976, together with Martin Gardner, a Scientific American columnist whose writing had helped hone Hyman’s and Randi’s skepticism, they formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Csicop, as it became known, was funded by donations and by sales of a new magazine, which became The Skeptical Inquirer. Randi, Hyman and Gardner and the secular humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz took seats on the executive board, with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan joining as founding members. Soon Randi was traveling across the globe, often “as the ambassador” of Csicop, Hyman told me recently, “the face of the skeptical movement all over the world.”

In his new role as a paranormal investigator, in books and on TV shows, Randi debunked everything from fairies to telekinesis. But he also stalked Geller around the chat-show circuit for years, denouncing him as a fraud and duplicating his feats by levering spoons and keys against the furniture while nobody was looking. In 1975, Randi published “The Magic of Uri Geller,” a sarcastic but exhaustive examination of the psychic’s techniques, in which he argued that any scientist investigating the paranormal should seek the advice of a conjurer before conducting serious research. The campaign helped make them both more famous than ever. Even today, Geller credits Randi with helping him become a psychic phenomenon — “My most influential and important publicist,” as Geller described him to me.

In 1989, Randi and Geller were booked to appear together on a TV special, “Exploring Psychic Powers, Live!” According to Randi, before the broadcast, Geller pulled him into his dressing room and offered to end the feud. “There’s no way that we are going to make peace until you level with your audiences,” Randi replied. “Until you say that you are a magician like the rest of us, and that you don’t have supernatural powers.” Geller refused. (Geller says he does not recall the incident.) Soon after, Geller brought the first of several libel actions against Csicop and Randi — who, among other things, had characterized him as a sociopath and suggested his psychic feats had been learned from the backs of cereal boxes. Geller’s suits in the United States were eventually dismissed. But the legal costs of fighting the cases were overwhelming, and Randi went through almost all of a MacArthur Foundation grant of $272,000 awarded to him in 1986 for his paranormal investigations. Finally, the struggle with Geller even cost Randi his place in Csicop; when Paul Kurtz told him it had become too expensive to keep going after such a litigious target, and demanded he stop discussing Geller in public, Randi resigned in fury.

Geller, who now lives in a large house beside the Thames River in England, says he long ago put the feud with Randi behind him. He claims to have used his show-business career as a cover for paranormal work on behalf of Mossad and the C.I.A., but he no longer calls himself a psychic. “I changed my title to ‘mystifier,’ ” he told me. “And I love it — because it means nothing.” But Randi’s contempt for him still burns brightly. “He knows he is deceiving these people — individuals, in most cases — and he doesn’t care what damage he does to them,” Randi said. “They depend on the paranormal after they have met Geller, and you cannot talk them out of it. And that has crippled them for life.”

Early one morning last summer, on a visit to Randi’s house in Florida, I drew up outside a few minutes later than we had agreed. Randi, wearing a canary yellow sweatshirt, was waiting at the front door, holding his watch in his hand. “You’re late!” he barked, and it was hard to tell if he was joking. We sat down in the living room to talk, and Randi spent half an hour laboriously adjusting his watch, winding the hands to display the correct date. “I am a little bit obsessed with having the right time,” he said. “I’ve always been very, very, big on knowing what time it is. That’s one of my connections with reality.”

Randi has never smoked, taken narcotics or got drunk. “Because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers,” he once said. “And I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That may mean giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I’m willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world.”

That fixation on science and the rational life — and a corresponding desire to crusade for the truth — has a long history among magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne, who founded a dynasty of English conjurers in 1855 and became a prolific inventor, began his career by exposing fraudulent spiritualists and reproducing their tricks. Houdini turned to debunking mediums in his middle age as his career as an escapologist went into decline. He offered his own $10,000 reward to any spiritualist who could perform a “miracle” he could not duplicate himself. Martin Gardner, whose book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science” is a founding text of modern skepticism, was also fascinated by magic, and became well known for his books explaining how many conjuring and mind-reading tricks rely upon strict laws of probability and number theory. Penn and Teller have since followed Randi down the path of conjurers who have become debunkers.

Randi now sees himself, like Einstein and Richard Dawkins, in the tradition of scientific skeptics. “Science gives you a standard to work against,” he said. “Science, after all, is simply a logical, rational and careful examination of the facts that nature presents to us.”     

            

         Although many modern skeptics continue to hold religious beliefs, and see no contradiction in embracing critical thinking and faith in God, Randi is not one of them. “I have always been an atheist,” he told me. “I think that religion is a very damaging philosophy — because it’s such a retreat from reality.”

When I asked him why he believed other people needed religion, Randi was at his most caustic.

“They need it because they’re weak,” he said. “And they fall for authority. They choose to believe it because it’s easy.”

In the 1980s, Randi turned his talent for deception to debunking the supernatural. He set out to expose New Age channelers, mediums who — on shows and in profitable public appearances — purported to be possessed by ancient spirits. One, JZ Knight, a former cable TV saleswoman, claimed to be the terrestrial mouthpiece of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis who could predict the future.

To show how credulous audiences could be in the face of such claims, in 1987 Randi collaborated with the Australian version of “60 Minutes.” He invented Carlos, a 2,000-year-old entity who, his publicity material stated, had last appeared in the body of a 12-year-old boy in Venezuela in 1900 but had now returned to manifest himself through a young American artist named José Alvarez. He prepared to take Alvarez on a tour of Australia.

Randi coached Alvarez carefully for his role as Carlos, rehearsing him through mock news conferences and TV appearances. He taught him how to squeeze a Ping-Pong ball in his armpit so that his pulse would appear to slow as he became “possessed” — “an old, old thing from Boy Scout camps,” Randi told me. Before the trip, Randi sent out press kits to Australian TV networks and newspapers, filled with reports charting the apparently sensational — but fictional — progress of Carlos across the United States.

Soon after they arrived in February 1988, Alvarez was booked on many of the country’s leading TV shows. Through an earpiece, Randi fed him answers to interview questions and the lines of doomsday prophecies. The climax of his tour was an appearance at the Sydney Opera House, after which the audience was invited to place orders for crystal artifacts, including the Tears of Carlos, priced at $500 each, and an Atlantis Crystal, offered at $14,000. Each proved popular — though Randi’s team never accepted any money for them.

When the hoax was revealed a few days later on “60 Minutes,” the Australian media was enraged at having been taken in; Randi countered that none of the journalists had bothered with even the most elementary fact-checking measures.

Afterward, Randi and Alvarez returned to Florida together, and Alvarez’s reputation as an artist blossomed. For the next 14 years, he toured the Carlos persona around the world as part of a performance piece, appearing onstage in Padua, Italy, and sitting for photographs on the Great Wall of China re-enacting the hoax. In 2002, the work Alvarez created from the Carlos episode was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Meanwhile, the establishment of the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996 allowed Randi to continue his own pursuits with the foundation’s headquarters, a Spanish-style stucco building in Fort Lauderdale, as his base of operations. He created the Million Dollar Challenge and regularly wrote bulletins for the foundation’s website, where the message boards formed an online hub for skeptics worldwide. In recent years, he began making regular podcasts, and he also created his own YouTube channel to discuss everything from Nostradamus to cold fusion. In 2007, during his TED talk taking aim at quackery and fraud, Randi delighted his audience by gobbling an entire bottle of 32 Calms homeopathic sleeping tablets — which Randi speculated was certainly a fatal dose.

Disappointed by what he saw as the media’s indifference to the Million Dollar Challenge, that same year Randi revised the rules and announced a plan to take the challenge to high-profile psychics, including Sylvia Browne, John Edward and — once again — Uri Geller. None of them agreed to participate. He had more success in 2008, when he invited James McCormick, a British businessman, to take the challenge. McCormick had built equipment that could supposedly detect explosives from afar, which Randi recognized was simply a telescoping antenna swiveling on a plastic handle — a dowsing rod. Randi publicly offered the million-dollar prize to McCormick if he could prove that the device worked as claimed. McCormick, who was selling his product to security forces in the Middle East, never responded. But the British Police began an investigation, and last year McCormick was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison, having sold at least $38 million worth of his miraculous device to the Iraqi government.

Photo    

                

Recently, age and illness have begun to slow Randi down. In 2009, following chemotherapy for intestinal cancer, he presented the opening address at TAM from a wheelchair. Earlier this year, JREF’s Fort Lauderdale building was sold, and its reference library and collection of memorabilia were boxed up and relocated to Randi’s home. When I visited, many of the cartons remained unpacked; the portrait of Isaac Asimov that once hung above the fireplace in the JREF library was propped against a wall.

Randi was all but marooned in the house — he was forbidden to drive while he awaited cataract surgery — and Alvarez had been forced to surrender his driver’s license, after a series of events that began on Sept. 8, 2011. That morning there was a knock on the front door. When Randi opened it, a pair of federal agents stood before him. They asked to speak to Alvarez. Outside, Randi could see two unmarked S.U.V.s blocking the driveway and at least half a dozen agents surrounding the perimeter of the property. When Alvarez came downstairs from his room, the agents explained there was a problem. They wanted to talk to him about passport fraud. They cuffed him and took him out to the car. Randi was left alone in the house, holding business cards from State Department agents, who, Randi said, gave him instructions to wait 24 hours before calling them.

The agents took Alvarez directly to Broward County Jail, where he was photographed, issued a gray uniform and registered as FNU LNU: “first name unknown, last name unknown.” In an interview room at the jail, he told an agent everything: He had fled homophobic persecution in Venezuela and had come to the U.S. on a two-year student visa. He met Randi and knew he wanted to stay with him. But when his visa expired, there was no way to renew it. He said he was given the name and Social Security number of José Alvarez by a friend in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, and used it to apply for a passport in 1987. Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez — who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher’s aide living in the Bronx. FNU LNU said his real name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.

Charged with making a false statement in the application and use of a passport and aggravated identity theft, Peña faced a $250,000 fine, a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and deportation to Venezuela. After six weeks in jail, he was released on a $500,000 bond, and he subsequently agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of passport fraud. At a sentencing hearing in May 2012, the judge considered letters of support from Randi and Peña’s friends from the world of art, science and entertainment, including Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette, as well as from members of charities to which Peña had given his time and work. The judge considered Peña’s long relationship with Randi, and Randi’s failing health. He gave him a lenient sentence: time served, six months’ house arrest and 150 hours’ community service.

But Peña still had to contend with the immigration authorities. After the sentencing hearing, he had been home for five days when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at the door. “Say goodbye,” they told him. Peña assured Randi he would be back that afternoon. He was taken to the Krome detention center in Miami, and remained there while his lawyer tried to find a way of keeping him in the United States. After two months of incarceration, Peña was finally released from Krome on the evening of Aug. 2, 2012, to find that Randi had spent half the day waiting outside the front gate for him. The couple were married in a ceremony in Washington the following summer.

Today, Peña remains on probation and no longer holds any identity documents except a Venezuelan passport with his birth name. United States immigration authorities have agreed not to deport him for now, but he has no formal immigration status in the United States: were he to leave the country, he would be unable to return. Since his arrest, Peña has not entirely shrugged off his former persona. He signs his paintings with the name he has exhibited under for 20 years — but now followed by his true initials, D.O.P.A.

Sometimes when Randi forgets himself, he still refers to his partner as José. Yet exactly how much Randi — the master of deception and misdirection — knew about his partner’s duplicity, and how complicit he may have been in it, is unclear. When Randi first met him in the Fort Lauderdale public library, it seems certain that Peña would have introduced himself by his real name: A profile of Randi published in The Toronto Star the following year describes the magician’s young assistant, named David Peña, struggling through La Guardia Airport with Randi’s luggage. When they traveled to Australia together for the “60 Minutes” stunt, Randi may have been masterminding a deception one level deeper than he ever acknowledged: Deyvi, pretending to be José, masquerading as Carlos, the 2,000-year-old spirit from Caracas. What followed might be the longest-running hoax of The Amazing Randi’s career.

When I asked Randi how much he knew about Peña’s true identity before the federal agents came to his door, he demurred, citing legal concerns. “This is something I don’t think I’d like to get into detailed discussion about,” Randi said. “Simply because it could prejudice our status in some way.”

When he was still a young man appearing in Toronto nightclubs and pretending to predict the future, Randall Zwinge created what he hoped would be his greatest trick. Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words “I, Randall Zwinge, will die today.” Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. “I never got lucky,” he told me.

Since then, Randi has had several brushes with death. But nothing has shaken his steadfast rationalism: neither the heart attack he suffered in 2006, nor the cancer that followed. Nor, for that matter, did a conversation he had with Martin Gardner a few years before Gardner’s death in 2010, when his friend confessed to having chosen to believe in the possibility of an afterlife. “That really surprised me, because he was the rationalist supreme,” Randi recalled. “He said: ‘I don’t have any evidence for it, you have all the arguments on your side. But it brings me comfort.’ ”

Randi told me that he now feels mild trepidation each time he goes to sleep at night, and pleasant surprise that he wakes up in the morning. But he insists he does not need the sort of reassurance that Gardner sought in his own last days. “I wouldn’t have any comfort from it — because I wouldn’t believe in it,” he said. “Oh, no, I have no fear of my demise whatsoever. I really feel that sincerely.”

Most mornings, Randi is already awake at 7 o’clock, when Peña comes in to check on him; sometimes he’s up at 6. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, still,” he told me, “and I’ve got to make use of my viable time.” He is currently completing his 11th book, “A Magician in the Laboratory,” and spends several hours a day responding to emails from his desk in the chaotic-looking office he maintains upstairs. He Skypes with friends in China or Australia once a week. Peña likes to cook, and paints downstairs, beside the framed lithograph recalling the triumphs of the Man No Jail Can Hold. The couple have spent much of the last year traveling to film festivals and screenings across the United States, helping to promote a new documentary about Randi’s life, “An Honest Liar,” which will be released in February. Randi has been surprised by the response. “Standing ovations, the whole thing,” he told me.

Continue reading the main story Write A Comment

In July last year, Randi came closer than ever to the end. He was hospitalized with aneurysms in his legs and needed surgery. Before the procedure began, the surgeon showed Peña scans of Randi’s circulatory system. “Very challenging, a very difficult situation,” the surgeon told him. “But he lived a good life.” The operation was supposed to take two hours, but it stretched to six and a half.

When Randi began to come to, heavily dosed with painkillers, he looked about him in confusion. There were nurses speaking in hushed voices. He began hallucinating. He was convinced that he was behind the curtain before a show and that the whispering he could hear was the audience coming in. The theater was full; he had to get onstage. He tried to look at his watch, but he found he didn’t have it on. He began to panic. When the hallucinations became intensely visual, Peña brought a pen and paper to the bedside. It could prove an important exercise in skeptical inquiry to record what Randi saw as he emerged from a state so close to death, one in which so many people sincerely believed they had glimpsed the other side. Randi scribbled away; his observations, Peña thought, might eventually make a great essay. Later, when the opiates and the anaesthetic wore off, Randi looked at the notes he had written.

They were indecipherable.  

10-11-2014 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

The Documents Are Fiction … The Group Isn't?

MJ-12: The Only Fiction is The Majestic 12 Documents, Declares, Randle

    I don’t like wasting time on the fictional MJ-12 documents. Clouds of nonsense thrown out, but little in the way of actual documentation. I didn’t mention Dr. Wescott’s impressive academic background because it wasn’t relevant to the discussion… which was that he suggested that he was unable to prove or disprove that Hillenkoetter was the author of the EBD.

We are told that neither the Aztec nor the Plains of San Agustin crash were mentioned because they didn’t get news coverage. What a ridiculous idea, unless we are to believe that the authors of the EBD had to rely on the news media for their leads to these events. But wait, wasn’t there a bestselling book, Behind the Flying Saucers published in 1950 that did cover the Aztec crash, not to mention articles that appeared in the Denver newspapers?…

Or that the El Indio – Guerrero is not mentioned in any news coverage or articles until the late 1960s, but it somehow managed to make it into the EBD.

Or that the El Indio – Guerrero crash is the fatal flaw because it didn’t happen, was conceived in the late 1960s by a man whose military record is also falsified and if that event didn’t take place, then how could it appear in a document for the president in 1952?

Or that the whole date format, that is zero, day, month, comma, year (06 December, 1950) has not been found on any document that is of American creation but that Bill Moore habitually used this format… what an interesting coincidence. Yes, I noticed that Stan did not represent that date as it appeared in the EBD.

And if we wish to talk about writing fiction, which Stan insists on bringing up repeatedly, let’s talk about Gerald Anderson’s “black” sergeant and the validation Stan created for it by inserting that word into an interview of Bill Brazel conducted by Don Schmitt and me and recorded on audio tape… and Bill Brazel’s denial that any of the service members who visited him were black. This was an invention made to corroborate the rapidly failing tales told by Anderson… who did take Dr. Buskirk’s Anthropology class. What did the school officials tell Stan when he spoke with them in 1991? Talk about writing fiction.

And before I forget, I have been to many, many archives, research centers, museums and libraries in my search for the truth. That list is more than 20 such institutions, by the way. Oh, I have held security clearances in both industry and the military and for more than fifteen years held a top secret clearance, but I wonder if these points are relevant when discussing the fraudulent MJ-12 documents.

Please tell us Stan, why you failed to mention Project Aquarius, Bill Moore’s plan to create a Roswell document, or his book written with Bob Pratt and probably Richard Doty called, Majik -12… isn’t that somewhat worrisome? The whole MJ-12 thing laid out in a work of fiction?

As for provenance, those leaking classified material into the mainstream are often identified even if it means prosecution… and with Watergate, Deep Throat was not known to the general public, but Woodward (and I think Ben Bradlee) knew who he was and where he worked or to put a point on it, they knew the provenance of the information. Stan’s ridiculous claim to that the leakers would remain hidden to avoid prosecution is not born out in the history of such actions. They provide the provenance to prove that the documents leaked are authentic… and there is no such verification for the EBD. The trail ends with the fiction created by Bill Moore.

03-11-2014 om 23:29 geschreven door peter  

Deep Black Makes Paranoid?

Scientist Photographs Plastic Alien at Area 51

Boyd Bushman of Tucson, Arizona was a retired Senior Scientist for Lockheed
Martin, whose career spanned over forty years. Shortly before he passed away on August 7, 2014, he made what is being called a 'deathbed confession' relating his alleged experiences with Area 51, UFOs, aliens and anti-gravity.

As of this writing, the video has been played well over 1 million times on YouTube. The website of the famous late-night paranormal talkmeister, Art Bell, proclaimed "Dying Senior Scientist Reveals Insider Truth About Area 51, Aliens, UFO’s and Anti-Gravity." Bushman's principal claims, as summarized by Youtube commenter Nuno Reis, are:

• some UFOs and Aliens are stationed at the base.
  
• He explains that from space there is a special flight path to Area 51.
  
• With their advanced technology they can travel much faster than light.
• The aliens who control these ships come from a planet 68 light years from Earth. [and they make the journey of 68 light years in about 45 minutes!!]
  
• The aliens who are working at the base are about 1.5 meters long and up to 230 years old.
  
• They have five fingers, which are 30 percent longer than ours, and five toes, which stuck together.
  
• They have three ribs on each side and three vertebral columns.
  
• The aliens communicate through telepathy.
  
• Finally Bushman reveals that Area 51 is working together with the Russians and the Chinese and their research is mainly focused to anti-gravity.

Bushman also claims that in 1947 a U.S. Air Force pilot shot down a flying saucer over New Mexico, killing several aliens. The military, of course, recovered the craft.
Most interesting are all the photos, supposedly of UFOs and aliens that he claims his friend took at Area 51, using a camera he provided. In fact, Bushman claimed that his camera was given to the aliens, who obligingly took photos out the window during a UFO trip, then returned his camera (although it's doubtful that the aliens, traveling so much faster than light, could actually see anything). Weirdest of all is a "spirit photo" that supposedly shows the ghost of an alien that died.

Bushman holding his alleged photo of an alien

However, as soon as Bushman's video was posted on the popular UFO site The Black Vault, others began submitting photos and even a video of seemingly-identical aliens, albeit plastic ones.

YouTube commenter Eric Oulette provides this photo of a toy alien looking very much like Bushman's.

Another reader submitted this photo of a toy alien purchased at the K-Mart.

YouTube user John Hutchison (JonnOfMars) posted this video showing a toy alien he purchased several years back.
However, not everyone was willing to accept that Bushmann's Close Encounter was of the Plastic Kind. Perhaps the plastic aliens are accurate representations of the real ones? Some have even suggested that the toy alien could be intended as a step toward 'disclosure' of real aliens: "Who knows how and to whom these things are revealed?"

Bushman's involvement with Lockheed Martin has, of course, again raised the old canard that Ben Rich, former director of the Lockheed Skunk Works (developers of highly-classified secret aircraft) supposedly said in at least one of his lectures that "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity... Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do." This quote, however, has never been authenticated.

Researcher Curt Collins goes into such claims in great detail in two postings on his Blog Blue Blurry Lines (First. Second).. In brief, it seems that Rich liked to make jokes about ETs in his lectures to entertain his audience, such as "The Skunk Works has been assigned the task of getting E.T. back home." Anyone taking such comments seriously has completely misunderstood their context.

03-11-2014 om 20:46 geschreven door peter  

UFO & SETI Guys, Pack Your Bags! We Are Unique!

We are alone in the universe: Professor Brian Cox says alien life is all but impossible and humanity is 'unique'

• Presenter makes bold claim during BBC documentary
• He says the spark of life on earth billions of years ago was a fluke
• 'We still struggle to understand what happened. It's incredibly unusual' 

By Sam Webb for MailOnline

Published: 08:23 GMT, 27 October
2014 | Updated: 12:41 GMT,
27 October 2014

The biological process which lead to intelligent life on earth was a fluke that is unlikely to have been repeated anywhere else in the universe, claims Professor Brian Cox.

The presenter and scientist blames a series of 'evolutionary bottlenecks' for the lack of extraterrestrial life on other planets, despite there being a mind-bogglingly vast number of them in the galaxy.

Humanity miraculously overcame them in a chance binding of two single cells merging somewhere in the mists of time, he said.

'There is only one advanced technological civilisation in this galaxy and there has only ever been one - and that's us. We are
unique.

'It's a dizzying thought. There are billions of planets out there, surely there must have been a second genesis?'

But we must be careful because the story of life on this planet shows that the transition from single-celled life to complex life may not have been inevitable.'

He made the claims in an episode of BBC's Human Universe, adding that yet another freak occurrence - the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs - allowed mammals and ultimately humanity to dominate the planet.

On the subject of the genesis of complex life, he added: 'We still struggle to understand how this happened. It's incredibly unusual.'We're confident this only happened once in the oceans of the primordial earth.Life here did squeeze through.' 

Scroll down for video 

Last month scientists claimed that our best chance of finding alien life is not looking for living animal organisms but rather plant life.

Two astrophysicists have said we should be looking at exoplanets for signatures of chlorophyll, which plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

And they say this could be done by a future telescope planned by Nasa to study habitable exoplanets.

If there are no aliens, humanity will never have to face the nightmarish xenomorphs of Alien (left), nor the benevolent E.T. from Speilberg's hit film

Sir Attenborough and Prof Brian Cox switch off analogue (archive)

 

Princeton University astrophysicists Dr Timothy Brandt and Dr David Spiegel made the suggestions in a paper called 'Prospects for detecting oxygen, water and chlorophyll on an exo-Earth.'

They say that it might be possible to detect signatures of water, oxygen and chlorophyll on an alien planet.

One hundred million worlds in our galaxy are able to host alien life, according to a 'conservative' prediction by Nasa.

And the space agency claims that we will be able to find that life within the next 20 years, with a high chance it will be outside our solar system.

During a public talk in July in Washington, the space agency outlined a roadmap to search for life in the universe using a number of current and future telescopes.

'Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?' said former astronaut and Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden during a talk in Washington.

'I would venture to say that most of my colleagues here today say it is improbable that in the limitless vastness of the universe we humans stand alone.'

The latter would be the most difficult of the three but, if found, would be a pretty clear indicator that a distant world has plant life.

Share or comment on this article

30-10-2014 om 22:27 geschreven door peter  

It Was …………. Spiderman*!

The day UFOs stopped play

24 October 2014
Last updated at 00:31 GMT By Richard Padula BBC World Service Sport

Sixty years ago a football match ground to a halt when unidentified flying objects were spotted above a stadium in Florence. Did aliens come to earth? If not, what were they?

It was 27 October 1954, a typically crisp autumn day in Tuscany. The mighty Fiorentina club was playing against its local rival Pistoiese.

Ten-thousand fans were watching in the concrete bowl of the Stadio Artemi Franchi. But just after half-time the stadium fell eerily silent - then a roar went up from the crowd. The spectators were no longer watching the match, but were looking up at the sky, fingers pointing. The players stopped playing, the ball rolled to a stand-still.

One of the footballers on the pitch was Ardico Magnini - he was something of a legend at the club and had played for Italy at the 1954 World Cup.

"I remember everything from A to Z," he says. "It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.

"We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked."

Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee's match report.

Among the crowd was Gigi Boni, a lifelong Fiorentina fan. "I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight," he says. His description of multiple objects differs slightly from Magnini's.

"They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars.
They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked."

La Nazione's headline reads: Glass fibres fall on Tuscan cities after globes and flying saucers pass by. Lower headline: The sighting over Florence (with a photograph, now lost, of the UFO).

Boni has spent many years reliving that day in his mind. "I think they were extra-terrestrial. That's what I believe, and there's no other explanation I can give myself."

Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, still sprightly in his 70s, agrees. "In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real."

The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria - there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence.

Another man who relishes the chance to speak about that day is Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy's National UFO Centre. He has written many books about UFOs and his home in the centre of Florence is stuffed full of alien memorabilia, posters of old Italian B-movies, framed newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs of blurry flying saucers.

"The players and the public were stunned seeing these objects above the stadium," Pinotti says.

"At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course now we know that is not so - but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked withanything we know on Earth."

He's also intrigued by the material that fell from the sky - what Magnini describes as silver glitter.

"A wave of flying saucers over Italy," reported the
Domenica del Corriere three years later. With thanks to the Fondazione Corriere della Sera for the use of material from their historic archives.

A sketch of UFOs over the stadium by Silvio Neri

"It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this 'angel hair'," says Pinotti.

"The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates." As a 10-year-old-boy he witnessed this phenomenon himself. "I remember, in broad daylight, seeing the roofs of the houses in Florence covered in this white substance for one hour and, like snow, it just evaporated.

"No-one knows what this strange substance has to do with UFOs."

Variously described by witnesses as similar to cotton wool or cobwebs, the substance was hard to collect because it disintegrated on contact - but some people were determined to find out what it was.

One of them was a journalist at the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, the late Giorgio Batini. In 2003 he told an Italian television programme, Voyager, how on that day he received hundreds of phone calls about the sightings. From the offices of La Nazione in the centre of town his own view of the sky was blocked by the Cathedral, so he went up to the top of the newspaper's building to see what everyone was talking about. The 81-year-old recalled seeing "shiny balls" moving fast towards the dome of the Cathedral.

Batini ventured out to investigate. He came across a wood outside the city that was covered in the white fluff. He gathered several samples by rolling them up on a matchstick, and took them to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. When he got there he found that others had done the same.

The lab, led by respected scientist Prof Giovanni Canneri, subjected the material to spectrographic analysis and concluded that it contained the elements boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and that it was not radioactive.
Unfortunately this did not provide any conclusive answers - and the material was destroyed in the process.

A sample of the mysterious "angel hair" was photographed for the newspapers

Could it have come from a UFO? "It's an absolutely silly idea. Science totally rejects this idea," says US Air Force pilot-turned-astronomer James McGaha. From the Grasslands Observatory in South Eastern Arizona he has spent more than 40,000 hours staring at the night sky. Not to mention the additional hours he's spent in the cockpit of US fighter jets.

"You know the whole UFO phenomenon is nothing but myth, magic and superstition, wrapped up in this idea that somehow aliens are coming here either to save us or destroy us," he says.

In McGaha's view, the whole spectacle, "angel hair" and all, was nothing more than migrating spiders.

"When I looked at this case originally I thought perhaps it was a fireball, a very bright meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. They can be cigar-shaped with pieces breaking off. But it became fairly apparent that this was actually caused by young spiders spinning webs, very, very thin webs.

"The spiders use these webs as sails and they link together and you get a big glob of this stuff in the sky and the spiders ride on this to move between locations. They just fly on the wind and these things have been recorded at 14,000 feet above the ground. So, when the sunlight glistens off this, you get all kinds of visual effects.

"As some of this stuff breaks off and falls to the ground, this all seems magical of course," says McGaha. "But I'm fairly confident that's what happened that day."

This theory is backed up by the fact that September and October are the months when spiders in the northern hemisphere migrate - and spectacular spider migrations still make headlines today. But it hasn't convinced everyone.

"Of course I know about the migrating spiders hypothesis - it's pure nonsense. It's an old story and also a stupid story," says Pinotti.

He disputes the spider theory because of the chemical analysis of the "angel hair" samples. Spider silk is a protein - an organic compound containing nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen and oxygen - not the elements reportedly found in the samples Batini and others brought to the university.

Players Ardico Magnini, Ronaldo Lomi and Romolo Tuci
with their fan Gigi Boni (second left), at the ground

Sixty years on, the chances of determining the cause of the incident are slim. "I wouldn't trust any reports of an old and strange event like this unless I'd seen the data," says science writer Philip Ball. He agrees that the elements said to have been observed in the "angel hair" don't seem to tally with the spider theory.

"Magnesium and calcium are fairly common elements in living bodies, boron and silicon much less so - but if these were the main elements that the white fluff contained, it doesn't sound to me as though they'd come from spiders," he says.

So it all remains a mystery. No matter what the scientists say, those who were there are convinced that what they saw was unlike anything on earth.

Romolo Tuci just feels lucky to have been there. His eyes dance excitedly as he remembers that curious day. "I was spell-bound and I was also so, so happy."

Video of spiders ballooning courtesy of Rob Ferber, Little Grove Farm Additional research by Vibeke Venema

Listen again to the Mystery of the Fiorentina UFOs as featured on World Football on BBC World Service.

Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

30-10-2014 om 22:25 geschreven door peter  

More MJ-12

First I want to thank Kevin Randle for providing another excellent example of the fictional approach to research. I notice he doesn’t mention Dr. Wescott’s outstanding background, details like having been a Rhodes Scholar, having been the president of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the US, having published almost 400 papers etc (there are 3 pages about him in my final Report on MJ-12). Second I did not use the term proof about his comments. This isn’t a math or physics problem. I arranged for papers to be given him. I would say he provided a preponderance of the evidence.I know of nobody better qualified to evaluate the question of whether RHHas opposed to some hoaxer prepared the EBD. Kevin also doesn’t mention that RHH was not some bungling character. He was an Annapolis graduate, had been the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency 1947-1950 and in late 1952. was head of the 3^rd Naval District in New York. Washington is not far away. We know that Walter B. Smith his successor at the CIA had been directed by Truman to coordinate Intelligence briefings for Ike (see his letter p. E-9 in my Report). I have suggested that Typing would have been done at the CIA.

Several other anti MJ-12 articles have recently been posted. But they seem more like fiction than factual. Lots of scenarios, but little data or evidence. Let me first summarize where I stand. I have been on the story for just under 30 years. I believe I have written more than anyone else and done more digging in archives. I had a security clearance for 14 years and have made many visits to 20 archives. I was lucky enough to have a research grant from the Fund for UFO research. For some crazy reason extremist Milton William Cooper said I worked for the CIA and the grant was actually from them!! In fact the Fund had sent out a questionnaire to see what its members thought needed researching. Majestic 12 was selected and I was asked to submit a proposal, which I did. The money was actually raised mostly from the Prince of Liechtenstein. I wrote a 100 + page report of my findings after visits to various Archives such as the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, The National Archives, the Truman and Eisenhower Libraries, the Harvard and Princeton Archives, etc. I included correspondence between myself and Phil Klass and a copy of his check to me for $1000. for proving him totally wrong about the typeface on the Cutler Twining memo. Typical false reasoning on the part of the MJ-12 debunkers. Because he had all of 9 NSC items done in elite type, he thought it sensible to claim that all NSC memos were done in elite type. Not surprisingly he had never, before or since, been to the Eisenhower Library which had 250,000 pages of NSC material. He had offered to pay me $!00.@ for every item meeting his criteria, .up to a limit of 10. I sent 14. He paid me, but didn’t bother to tell anybody. There is also no Friedman file in his papers at the American Philosophical Society Library despite 20+ years of correspondence. I wrote a book TOP SECRET/MAJIC and many papers and responded to a host of false claims and assumptions.

Most of this goes back a long while. I spoke with family members of all the MJ-members except 1. I spoke in person with General Twining’s pilot, and his daughter and 2 sons, with Admiral Hillenkoetter’s family ,with George Elsey who worked at the Truman library the entire time Truman was there, etc. I had concluded that there are 3, possibly four genuine documents (The Truman Forrestal Memo, The Cutler Twining Memo and the Eisenhower Briefing Document) and a host of phony ones. I believe I have responded to all the anti claims. My focus has been on a host of details that turned out not to be known at the time the documents were received and on a number of fictional claims and a bunch of details that would seem beyond the ken of a hoaxer. For example it was claimed that since the briefing Officer Roscoe J. Hillenkoetter was titled admiral, that proved the document was false because he had only been a rear admiral. The attack neglected to mention that all 6 military guys (2 Army, 2 Navy, two AF) were referred to by generic ranks. Not just Hillenkoetter. Furthermore I gathered documents at the Ike Library proving that was standard practice. A good example was provided by documents written by Brigadier General Andrew Goodpaster (Ike’s Staff secretary) referring to himself as General Goodpaster but signing as Brigadier General Goodpaster. Two archivists supported that view. He always used generic ranks when listing attendees. The claim was interesting fiction.

Here are some other false claims covered in detail in my book, report, and papers:

1. The date format 18 November, 1952 supposedly violates the government style manual and therefore the EBD is phony.I found many examples at Archives of the use of this and several other date formats. This was pre- word processors. False claim.
2. Supposedly the security marking on the Cutler Twining memo of TOP SECRET RESTRICTED was never used by the government until after Ike was out of office. The GAO in its huge report on its search for Roswell Documents noted that they had indeed found examples of this on a number of classified documents even though they had been told (MJ 12) that it was not used. I couldn’t get copies because the documents were still classified. Why would a hoaxer not just use a plain TOP SECRET? False claim.
3. The unsigned Cutler Twining memo supposedly had to be phony because Cutler was out of the country on July 14, 1954. Actually, it would have been a phony if it had been signed or there was an /s/ next to his typed name. Really smart hoaxer

We didn’t find out, thanks to Bob Todd, that Cutler was gone until later. I also found at the Ike Library Cutler’s instructions to James Lay, Exec. Sec. of the National Security Council,” to keep things moving out of my in basket while I am gone.”I also found that Lay met with Ike that day and had a phone conversation with Ike at 4:30PM. George Elsey, White House Aide under Truman, told me after looking at the documents, that of course Lay (who sat next to Cutler at all NSC Meetings) would have prepared a brief memo to General Twining in Cutler’s name. He also could find no problem with the 3 documents or the names of the people on the MJ-12 List.          

4. Several objected strenuously to the surprising notion that debunker Dr. Donald Menzel could have been fully aware of UFOs Roswell, and still be the loudest UFO debunker in the 1950s and 1960s.They objected to my saying he led a double life despite my very surprising discovery in his papers at the Harvard Archives that he was tightly connected with the NSA, CIA, cryptology and many other intelligence activities.. as noted by him to President Kennedy. The critics complained but, so far as I can tell, none went to the Harvard Archives or the Kennedy library. I spent days there and had to get permission from 3 people to see Menzel’s papers. How did anybody know to include him on Majestic 12? They just happened to pick an extraordinary claim that turned out to be true??

5. Some complained that since the EBD says the distance to the Roswell crash site was approximately 75 miles rather than 62 by car or 100 by plane,it was a fraud.. Since when does “approximately” mean precisely or exactly? The Briefing was Preliminary and hardly a guide to how to get to the crash site.

6. Several debunkers claimed vigorously that the documents are phony because all top secret code word documents must (They said) have top secret control numbers. Two archivists (Eisenhower and Marshall Archives) told me this was nonsense. They had many TS docs that did not have Control numbers. I had even published some earlier. False claim.

7. As an example of irrational thinking it was pointed out that I have claimed that there were crash retrievals in the Plains of San Agustin and Aztec. Since none are mentioned in the EBD either, they never happened or it is fraudulent because they aren’t mentioned. There was nothing that said this was a complete picture of crash retrievals. On the contrary, it says it is Preliminary. Neither of these two got news coverage whereas Roswell did.

8. Since the EBD says there was a crash near El Indio-Guerero on 06 December 1950, and I have found no evidence of it, the document must be phony. It also says the burned wreckage was taken to Sandia. I know of no way to gain access to that information since Sandia is a very high security nuclear weapons Lab. False claim. It is certainly not true that absence of evidence is evidence for absence.

9. Robert Hastings has noted that I had agreed in Brazil that it is conceivable that some smart government agent could have done an enormous amount of research to create the documents .I obviously couldn’t prove a negative. Yes, but no one has provided any evidence or facts or names or details establishing that that was the case. I know from all the time money and effort I spent how difficult that would have been and I started with the documents. This, of course, doesn’t explain how somebody knew all the details that weren’t known until well after the documents were received. Psychic??

10. Many have noted that Rick Doty was based in Albuquerque and that the EBD was postmarked Albuquerque. Albuquerque is a large city, the home of Kirtland and Sandia. This proves nothing.Nor does the fact that he was involved in disinformation,

11.I have trouble believing that it is just a coincidence that September 24, 1947, the date of the TF memo, was the only date in an 8 month period that Truman, Bush and Forrestal met together. Or that the CT memo was coincidentally done while Cutler was out of the country and therefore was not signed.. very smart hoaxer. Or that August 1,1950, when W.B. Smith was named to replace James Forrestal on MJ-12 was the only date in the first 10 months of 1950 when Truman met with Smith.. I list a bunch more “coincidences” in my Final Report.

Yes, Rick Doty was involved with false documents re Bennewitz etc. and was the first to mention MJ-12. Where is there any evidence that he faked EBD knowing enough to pass inspection. Has he been shown to have visited the Truman, or Eisenhower or Harvard Archives etc? Klass made all kinds of claims but never went to the Ike Library. Have Greenwood, Hastings, Randle, Rojas been to the Presidential Libraries or the various Archives.? Do they have any idea how much effort I spent trying to show the documents were phony?

Cannot the debunkers recognize that provenance would have revealed the identity of the crime committing informant?.Hoaxers normally do as little as possible to call attention to strange details.. like the offset and different typeface in the numerical portion of the date on the TF, or the absence of signature on TC, or the period after the date on TF.

In short then, fiction is not the same as nonfiction. Research requires facts, data, evidence. Nobody has shown any to establish that the TF,CT, or EBD were fraudulent Scenarios are interesting but not evidence.

I am still looking for a list of reasons that each of the 3 (CT, TF, EBD) are fraudulent. I have shown that a number of so-called MJ-12 documents were indeed false based on Direct evidence. For example in the Book “Wedemeyer Reports” by General Wedmeyer I found three items that were retyped and Xeroxed to keep the hand written portions . Clearly emulations. I found a number of other emulations, proofs of hoaxing. I have yet to see any for the 3 genuine ones.

Stan Friedman

26-10-2014 om 22:24 geschreven door peter  

Secret Space Program … And That's A Fact!

Space plane: Mysterious US military plane returns to Earth

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to
continue.

An unmanned US plane on a top-secret, two-year mission to space has returned to Earth and landed in California.

The aircraft, resembling a miniature space shuttle and known as the Orbital Test Vehicle or X-37B, spent 674 days in orbit around the planet.

It was the unmanned plane's third space flight, but its mission has been shrouded in mystery.

A theory that it was taking a look at China's space lab has been downplayed by experts.

Air Force officials have only told US media the aircraft performs "risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies".

Continue reading the main story

X-37B - American military spaceplane

• Mission: Described as a re-usable testbed for new sensors and other space technologie
• Length: 9m (29ft); Wingspan: 4.5m (14ft); Height: 3m (9.5ft); Mass: 5t (11,000lb
• Origins: Started as a Nasa project in 1999 before being handed to the
  military in 200
• Cost: The budget line for the X-37B programme continues to be classified
  information
  

The X-37B programme, started in 1999 and is currently run by the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office.

The first plane flew in April 2010 and returned after eight months. The second launched in March 2011 and remained in space for 15 months.

The current aircraft - built by Boeing - uses solar panels for power in orbit, measures over 29ft (9m) long, has a wingspan of nearly 15ft and a weight of 11,000lbs (4,989 kg).

It looks like a mini space shuttle and can glide back down through the atmosphere to land on a runway, just like Nasa's re-usable manned spaceplane used to do before its retirement.

An infrared view of the spaceplane was released in 2012

A fourth X-37B mission is currently scheduled for 2015

A fourth X-37B mission is said to be planned for launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2015.

Europe is to test its own automated space plane technology in the coming weeks.

The IXV vehicle will be launched into space atop a rocket from French Guiana and then make its way back through the atmosphere to splash down in the ocean

 

BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos

The reality is that no-one really knows what this vehicle does. The only credible explanation I have seen is that it is testing technologies that could find their way on to future satellite missions.

If you consider how expensive a satellite mission is - several hundred million dollars - you'd like to be sure that any innovations are going to work straight out of the box.

By flying early prototypes on the X-37B, you can test these technologies so that when you put them on future satellite missions, you can be sure they will deliver.

Nasa recently agreed to give over work space formerly used to service the shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center to the X-37B programme, which tells us this
is a long-term project for the Air Force. Whatever it is they are doing up
there, they deem it to be high value.

{http://www.bbc.co.uk/}

26-10-2014 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

A Secret Near-Space Operation Was Begun 3 Years Ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/science/alan-eustace-jumps-from-stratosphere-breaking-felix-baumgartners-world-record.html?_r=0

ROSWELL, N.M. —  A well-known computer scientist parachuted from a balloon near the top of the stratosphere on Friday, falling faster than the speed of sound and breaking the world altitude record set just two years ago.

The jump was made by Alan Eustace, 57, a senior vice president of Google. At dawn he was lifted from an abandoned runway at the airport here by a balloon filled with 35,000 cubic feet of helium.

For a little over two hours, the balloon ascended at speeds up to 1,600 feet per minute to an altitude of more than 25 miles. Mr. Eustace dangled underneath in a specially designed spacesuit with an elaborate life-support system. He returned to earth just 15 minutes after starting his fall.

“It was amazing,” he said. “It was beautiful. You could see the darkness of space and you could see the layers of atmosphere, which I had never seen before.”

Mr. Eustace cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device and plummeted toward the earth at speeds that peaked at 822 miles per hour, setting off a small sonic boom heard by people on the ground.

Photo    

                

“It was a wild, wild ride,” he said. “I hugged on to the equipment module and tucked my legs and I held my heading.”

He did not feel or hear the boom as he passed the speed of sound, he said. He performed two slow backflips before a small parachute righted him.

His technical team had designed a carbon-fiber attachment that kept him from becoming entangled in the main parachute before it opened. About four-and-a-half minutes into his flight, he opened the main parachute and glided to a landing 70 miles from the launch site.

“To break an aviation record is incredibly significant,” said Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, who viewed Mr. Eustace’s ascent. “There is an incredible amount of risk. To do it safely is a testament to the people involved.”

Mr. Eustace’s maximum altitude was initially reported as 135,908 feet. Based on information from two data loggers, the final number being submitted to the World Air Sports Federation is 135,890 feet.

The previous altitude record was set by the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from 128,100 feet on Oct. 14, 2012.

Photo    

                

Mr. Eustace was carried aloft without the aid of the sophisticated capsule used by Mr. Baumgartner or millions of dollars in sponsorship money. Instead, Mr. Eustace planned his jump in secrecy, working for almost three years with a small group of technologists skilled in spacesuit design, life-support systems, and parachute and balloon technology.

He carried modest GoPro cameras aloft, connected to his ground-control center by an off-the-shelf radio.

Although Mr. Baumgartner was widely known for death-defying feats, Mr. Eustace describes himself as an engineer first with a deep commitment to teamwork. He pilots his own Cessna twin-engine jet and has a reputation in Silicon Valley for thrill-seeking.

“Alan is a risk-taker with a passion for details,” said Brian Reid, a computer network specialist who has worked with Mr. Eustace.

After he decided to pursue the project in 2011, Mr. Eustace was introduced to Taber MacCallum, one of the founding members of the Biosphere 2 project, an artificial closed ecosystem built to explore concepts such as space colonization. Mr. Eustace had decided to pursue a simpler approach than Mr. Baumgartner’s.

He asked Mr. MacCallum’s company, Paragon Space Development Corporation, to create a life-support system to make it possible for him to breathe pure oxygen in a pressure suit during his ascent and fall.

Photo    

                

Mr. Eustace said Google had been willing to help with the project, but he declined company support, worried that his jump would become a marketing event.

James Hayhurst, director of competition at the United States Parachute Association, who verified the record, described the venture as “legitimate science.”

“I think they’re putting a little lookout tower at the edge of space that the common man can share,” he said.

Mr. Eustace said he gained a love of space and spaceflight while growing up in Orlando, Fla., during the 1960s and 1970s. His family crowded into a station wagon to watch every launch from Cape Canaveral (known as Cape Kennedy during some of that time). A veteran aircraft pilot and parachutist, he worked as a computer hardware designer at Digital Equipment Corporation for 15 years before moving to Google in 2002.

Mr. Eustace said that his technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life-support system during the three-year development phase. Many of the redesigns were the result of technical surprises.

For example, he discovered that in order to control his suit, he was required to make movements that were exactly the opposite of the control motions made by a conventional parachutist. Left movements must be made for rightward motion, for instance, and upward movements for downward motion.

The stratosphere becomes warmer at higher elevations, and the suit designers had to figure out how to keep Mr. Eustace sufficiently cool at the top of the stratosphere, because there is no atmosphere to remove the heat.  His suit did not have a cooling system, so it was necessary to make elaborate design modifications to keep dry air in his helmet so that his face plate did not fog.

In order to keep from overheating, Mr. Eustace kept his motions to a minimum during his ascent, including avoiding moving his arm to toggle a radio microphone. Instead, he responded to ground controllers watching him from a camera rigged above his suit by slightly moving one leg to acknowledge their communications.

26-10-2014 om 00:58 geschreven door peter  

Here Is Your Speech, President Obama

Roger Wescott, Roscoe Hillenkoetter and MJ-12

By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 10-19-14

      Although I really don’t have time for this, meaning more nonsense about MJ-12, Stan Friedman has complained that I, and Barry Greenwood and Robert Hastings, have ignored the report by Dr. Roger Wescott, who examined the Eisenhower Briefing Document to determine if it had been written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter. There is nothing to say that he had been the author, no real reason to assume that he was, except that he had been the Director, Central Intelligence Agency, but this seems to be the belief.
To me this is a ridiculous exercise simply because, without additional information, that question cannot be answered.

Here’s what we know. Wescott was a linguistics professor at Drew University and Stan wanted him to try to determine if Hillenkoetter had written the EBD. Along with the EBD, he gave Wescott some twenty-seven samples of what he believed to be Hillenkoetter’s writings. I’ll explain that “believed to be” in a moment.

Wescott, in his first analysis said, “In my opinion, there is no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter himself.”

Okay, not exactly a ringing endorsement, but certainly doesn’t eliminate Hillenkoetter as the author. But then, in his book on MJ-12 (oh, I suppose I could be petty and not mention the title… Top Secret/Majic) Stan wrote, “Some people are upset that Dr. Wescott didn’t make a positive statement that his work proves Hillenkoetter wrote the briefing. Obviously, no such statement could be made.
Somebody working for the CIA, for example, could have read Hillenkoetter’s papers and simulated his style.”

Seriously? You’re saying that someone could have simulated Hillenkoetter’s style? You’re saying that no matter how valuable Wescott’s analysis might be, it would never prove that Hillenkoetter wrote the EBD… then what is the point of even bringing him in to the discussion in the first place?

Wescott, in a letter in the July/August 1988 International UFO Reporter, wrote, “First, it’s clear that I’ve stepped into a hornet’s nest of controversy. Since I have no strong conviction favoring either rather polarized position in the matter, I may have been a bit rash to become involved, even as a somewhat detached consultant, in what amounts to an adversary procedure. On behalf of those who support the authenticity of the memo, I wrote that I thought its fraudulence unproved. On behalf of its critics,
I could equally well have maintained that its authenticity is unproved. Whatever the probabilities of the issue, inconclusiveness seems to be of its essence.”

There is an additional problem here. Wescott was a NICAP special advisor in the late 1960s. He was familiar with the world of the UFO. It might be suggested that his analysis wasn’t that of a disinterested third party, and while he might not have had a dog in the MJ-12 fight, he knew something about UFOs.

Wescott’s analyses are not all that impressive. They are best described as he said himself as “inconclusive,” which means that Wescott’s analyses proved nothing and certainly are not supportive of the conclusion that Hillenkoetter wrote the EBD.

Now, here’s what I meant by those documents were “believed to be” written by Hillenkoetter. At the time the EBD was written, Hillenkoetter was a high-ranking military officer in a position of great responsibility. Are we to believe that he actually wrote all these sample documents himself, or is it more likely he turned to an aide, a secretary, a staff officer to actually write the various documents? In other words, Hillenkoetter said, “I need a briefing (or whatever, just insert your own sort of document in here) on (insert the situation here) and have it to me by Friday.”

This means that while Hillenkoetter might have provided the initial information, would have reviewed and edited the document, he didn’t actually write it. I can’t tell you how many times I was given information and told to put it together for a report or briefing for a higher ranking officer.
While in Iraq, I was involved in a white paper in which I interviewed a number of generals, took documents created by operations officers and combat commanders, to create a single document which was authored by that higher ranking officer. Or, to put it bluntly, there were so many of us involved that no one author’s voice came through.

Sure, you all are thinking that MJ-12 was classified much higher and access to the information would have been available to far fewer people. But the overall concept still holds.
Hillenkoetter would have assigned the initial work to some other officer, and while it might only have been one or two others, the point is, those one or two others would have been responsible for the first draft of the paper.
Hillenkoetter would have reviewed it, and knowing how these things work, would
have made alterations to it, but the overall voice would not have been his.

And before I have to hear that this was so highly classified, that there just wouldn’t have been those others involved, are we really supposed to believe that Hillenkoetter typed the thing himself. Regardless of the classification, there would have been underlings involved in the process. Think of the Manhattan Project here. Weren’t there many involved who weren’t physicists or scientists who took care of all the various documents that were created in the process of making an atomic bomb? They might not have had access to everything, but in each compartment, they would have been those responsible for all the paperwork.

So, even if you stipulate that Hillenkoetter is the author of the EBD, he probably wasn’t the writer. That was done by someone else (and let’s not forget about all those tabs which would not have been written by Hillenkoetter but by others considered experts in those specific topics).

This explains why I, and most of the rest of us, ignore what Wescott had to say. First, he suggested his analysis was inconclusive. Second, even though there were all those samples offered of Hillenkoetter’s writing style, they were probably written by someone else. And third, the same can be said of the EBD. The initial drafts probably weren’t written by Hillenkoetter, but probably by someone at a lower level which would have altered the “voice” and made it impossible to determine if Hillenkoetter was the author.

Or, to be blunt, all of this is an exercise in futility. None of it proves anything and our best course is to just ignore it as one more failed proof that MJ-12 is authentic.

And before anyone asks, there is no evidence that the EBD is anything other than a fraud, written by someone who had a specific agenda, and that agenda was not to brief Eisenhower.

25-10-2014 om 01:06 geschreven door peter