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.

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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  

Rendlesham Dramatized

23-10-2014 om 20:29 geschreven door peter  

The Enemies Within … Divide & Rule!

“The Greatest Enemy of The UFO Community is The UFO Community” | MJ-12

By Frank Thayer
The UFO Chronicles
10-19-14

    The greatest enemy of the UFO community is…the UFO community. Such has been said by many, most lately by Scott Ramsey, of prominence in The Aztec Incident. The useful debate in “The UFO Chronicles” including contributions by Alejandro Rojas, Kevin Randle, Stanton Friedman, Barry Greenwood et al., perhaps misses a major point.
First of all, Friedman did the most thorough forensic examination and research into the photographs of the MJ-12 documents, just as he studied the Special Operations Manual SOM1-01. The disinformation question is not whether a particular document is genuine, but rather why these documents came into public view in the first place. Genuine documents are very valuable in promoting disinformation.
Because I teach propaganda, I emphasize that disinformation is a category of the propaganda mission with a specific purpose.
Disinformation is designed to create confusion and to reduce certainty. The original discovery of the MJ-12 documents as a roll of undeveloped black and white film, now connected to AFOSI agent Richard Doty, and received by William Moore and Jaime Shandera must be studied in light of the motives of the government. There was a need to create public uncertainty after Friedman first interviewed Jesse Marcel and the Roswell Incident overcame decades of government suppression to become a reality firmly lodged in modern public
awareness.
Good disinformation requires information credibility and source deniability. So why fabricate information that will easily be disproved over time? The ludicrous crash dummy story about Roswell is one of those, and Donald Menzel’s books on flying saucers, such as Flying Saucers—Myth—Truth—History, are another. The MJ-12 documents, however, and the special operations manual on the other hand “have legs,” in that they continue to persuade students of flying saucer reality and to spark debate.

If the MJ-12 documents or SOM1–1 (the latter proved by Friedman not to have been set in a computer type font) are fake, they required highly placed sources to create them and the deep pocket resources available only to the Intelligence community in order to make the documents credible. It is very expensive to set type and print a manual identical to the military manuals of the day printed by the U.S. Government’s printing office. Disinformation goals could be achieved by supplying carefully chosen original documents and photos of a real secret government publication. Without a pre-emptive strike, eventually MJ-12, by whatever name it was known, would have surfaced, so the back door release of selected documents could muddy the flying saucer water permanently.
Some would say that Doty was a whistleblower trying to alert the public to the reality of flying saucer reality, but experience leads us to believe that he was just doing his job for AFOSI. After all, Phillip Klass, Karl Pflock, Joe Nickell, James McGaha, Michael Shermer, and a coterie of others, have or had a military or intelligence background. Some of their publications are likely, but not proved, to be supported by government funds. Thus, the disinformation function is well staffed and well supported in the United States.

As for AFOSI, The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon (see the entire interrogation of AFOSI with Denver radio station advertising executive George Koehler) shows how seriously the Air Force was in tracking down the leaks of the Aztec flying disc recovery. Even today’s current tracking of Ebola contagion is not as thorough as the Air Force was in 1949–1950 in covering the tracks leading from Aztec. However the disinformation masterpiece was in discrediting Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer in an irrelevant business deal gone bad, and using a Denver courtroom to destroy the credibility of the first published story of a flying saucer recovery.
The MJ-12 documents were not released to the New York Times, as would befit a “Three Days of the Condor” type mission, starring Robert Redford. After all, that would never promulgate such documents, and the Associated Press by policy will not put UFO stories on the wire in most cases. Thus, the release of documents through an ambivalent source was far more successful. The real and the false are carefully blended to reduce certainty. This may be harmless, but in the Paul Bennewitz case, it proved devastating to a man’s life. In this latter case, Richard Doty may have been the agent who helped destroy Bennewitz’s well being, all through AFOSI disinformation.
The argument over MJ-12 will never be concluded, and a large segment of those who study flying saucers will continue to accept the scholarship of Stanton Friedman whose scholarship creates high confidence in the reality of the documents. Most of the naysayers fall back on ad hominem attacks that are the last resort of those who have lost the factual argument.

The character or credibility of Richard Doty, William Moore, Jaime Shandera is of minor importance. The essential reality of the documents, though they are only photographs of documents, must be the only focus of the research, and Stanton Friedman is the only researcher who thoroughly and minutely examined all of the data available in those black and white images. Both the MJ-12 papers and SOM1–1 remain today as credible evidence—and the arguments against them will be advanced as well, even on this even-handed forum. The UFO community, for its part, will continue to ravage its own members and eat its young.

* Frank Thayer is the co-author The Aztec Incident: Recovery at Hart Canyon

22-10-2014 om 11:50 geschreven door peter  

Lockheed announces major breakthrough in nuclear fusion             

Screenshot from YouTube user LockheedMartinVideos

  Lockheed Martin said in a statement released on Wednesday this  week that its secretive Skunk Works division — the unit  responsible for the U-2 spy plane and F-117 stealth jet — has  already applied for several patents related to the high-tech  reactor it has in the works, and expects it to be deployed during  the next decade if interested industry and government partners  sign on to help starting soon.

“Our compact fusion concept combines several alternative  magnetic confinement approaches, taking the best parts of each,  and offers a 90 percent size reduction over previous  concepts,” Tom McGuire, the compact fusion lead for the  Skunk Works’ Revolutionary Technology Programs, said in a  statement. “The smaller size will allow us to design, build  and test the CFR in less than a year.”

According to an article published by Reuters on Wednesday, McGuire told reporters  that Skunk Works has already successfully shown the company can  build a 100-megawatt reactor that measures seven by 10 feet, or  around 10 times smaller than what is currently available. Next,  the Lockheed division wants to have a prototype ready within five  years and then, within ten years, have the unit ready to be  deployed.

“A small reactor could power a US Navy warship,” Andrea  Shalal wrote for Reuters, “and eliminate the need for other  fuel sources that pose logistical challenges.”

The energy created through nuclear fusion can be up to four-times  more powerful that the energy released by fission, Lockheed  claims on its website, and a small-enough reactor like the  one being developed now by Skunk Works could provide enough power  for a town of 100,000 people, according to the contractor.

Screenshot from YouTube user LockheedMartinVideos

“To mimic the energy created by the sun and control it here  on earth, we’re creating a concept that can be contained using a  magnetic bottle. The bottle is able to handle extremely hot  temperatures, reaching hundreds of millions of degrees. By  containing this reaction, we can release it in a controlled  fashion to create energy we can use,” Lockheed explains on  its own site. “The heat energy created using this compact  fusion reactor will drive turbine generators by replacing the  combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the  turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power  for a number of applications.”

If successful, Lockheed’s latest effort “could change  civilization as we know it,” Gizmodo predicted on Wednesday, by giving the world a  portable power source unlike anything already available.

“It’s one of the reasons we think it is feasible for  development and future economics,” Skunk Work’s McGuire told     Aviation Week recently with regards to the reactor’s size.   “Ten times smaller is the key. But on the physics side, it  still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics  will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable  configuration.”

{http://rt.com/uàsa/196276-lockheed-nuclear-fusiàon-reactor/}

19-10-2014 om 20:21 geschreven door peter  

This Will Put A Smile On Stan's Face!

19-10-2014 om 20:20 geschreven door peter  

In That Case, I Would Prefer Aliens

Roswell was not aliens - it was the Nazis, according to a German
documentary

The Roswell Incident was reported on July 8 1947 in the town of the same name
in New Mexico.

Initially thought to be the crash landing of a flying saucer, military authorities later said it was a downed weather balloon, but conspiracy theorists down the years have always insisted that the military was covering up an alien
visitation. 

But now a documentary entitled 'UFOs in the Third Reich' claims the incident was linked to testing of the 'Bell,' a copper coloured aircraft three metres in diameter, the core of which was a futuristic propulsion unit using electric particles. 

The documentary screened on the N24 channel claims the craft was the forerunner of the Stealth fighter of today and was crafted by scores of V2 rocket experts who were spirited to America at the end of the war to give the USA the edge over the Soviet Union in rocket technology. 

One of them was allegedly a mass Nazi killer, S.S. general Hans Kammler was head of construction and defence projects´in the Third Reich and as such planned the forced labour factories at Auschwitz and the secret V-2 rocket plants inside Germany. 

The German documentary draws on a vast wealth of archival material. One of the experts is Igor Witkowski, a Polish former journalist and historian of military and aerospace technology. 

In his book, 'Prawda O Wunderwaffe' in 2000, he wrote extensively of the "bell-shaped craft" that was being created by the Nazis, and that Hitler wanted the best scientists and engineers at his disposal. 

German engineer Georg Klein claimed that such designs had been developed uring the Third Reich.

Klein, who went on to have a distinguished postwar career as an aeronautical engineer, said; "I don't consider myself a crackpot or eccentric or someone given to fantasies. 

"This is what I saw, with my own eyes; a Nazi UFO." 

British and American bomber crews, who ranged free in the skies over Germany towards the end of the war to deliver their lethal cargoes, also reported strange sightings over enemy territory when  debriefed back at their bases - now thought to have been test flights of the Bell. 

The programme explores the possibility that the Roswell Incident may have been the crash of another Nazi-era flying saucer known the Schriever-Habermohl model.

Rudolf Schriever was an engineer and test pilot, Otto Habermohl an engineer.

This project was centred in Prague between 1941 and 1943, but the plans for it was taken to America at war's end.

Initially a Luftwaffe project, it eventually fell under the auspices of armaments minister Albert Speer before being taken over once again in 1944 by Kammler.

17-10-2014 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

The Trents … Finally Busted? Dream On!

Special Report: The Trent UFO Photos - the "Best" of All Time - Finally Busted?

Once again, farmer Paul Trent's famous UFO photos from McMinnville, Oregon are a hot topic in UFOlogy. Kevin Randle discussed the photos on his Blog A Different Perspective, and a torrent of comments from researchers followed. Not just frothy opinion, but highly detailed, meticulous comments about the camera angle and position, the weight and size of the hypothetical model, the load on the wires and a possible bend in them, etc. Ultimately this is important, but such matters are unlikely to give us a final answer. There is one thing about this case that everyone can probably agree with: as Randle says, "there are only two conclusions to be drawn about the pictures taken in McMinnville, Oregon.
They either show a craft from another world, or they are a hoax. I do not see a
third possibility."

1950: The Origin of the Photos

On May 11, 1950, farmer Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon snapped two photos of an object that he claimed was a flying saucer (the term "UFO" hadn't been invented yet).  There are inconsistencies in Mrs. Trent's accounts of where her husband was when the object was first spotted, and who went inside to get the camera. They did not immediately tell anyone about the photos, or rush them off to be developed. Instead, the film containing the invaluable flying saucer photos was left in the camera until Mother's Day, so that a few unexposed frames would not be wasted. More general information on the photos is on my web page http://debunker.com/trent.html .

Trent Photo #1 (scan of first-generation print)

After the photos had been developed, a reported who came to interview the Trents found the irreplaceable negatives lying "on the floor under the davenport, where the Trent children had been playing with them."

Trent Photo #2 (scan of first-generation print)

The story first appeared in the local newspaper the Telephone-Register. This led to a sensational national story in the June 26, 1950 issue of Life Magazine, then one the largest-circulation magazines in America.

Life Magazine article. Photos are cropped, removing wires.

William K. Hartmann and the Condon Report, 1968

This analysis attracted a lot of attention from UFOlogists, particularly because of Hartmann's conclusion that 

This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication. 

Hartmann acknowledges, however, that a fabrication is possible:

The object appears beneath a pair of wires, as is seen in Plates 23 and 24.
We may question, therefore, whether it could have been a model suspended from one of the wires. This possibility is strengthened by the observation that the object appears beneath roughly the same point in the two photos, in spite of their having been taken from two positions. This can be determined from irregularities, or "kinks," in the wires. The wires pass between the camera positions and the garage (left). We know from the change in orientation of the object that it moved, or was re-oriented by hand, between exposures. The possibility that it is a model hanging beneath a point on the wire suggests a further test: Is the change in distance of the object in Plates 23 and 24 equal to the change in distance from the wires? Measures of the disk indicate that it is about 8% further away in Plate 24. Measures of the irregularities in the wires indicate that they are further away from the camera in Plate 24. The amount of the latter increase from the wires (measured by the separation of rather ill-defined "kinks") is less certain than the distance increase from the disk, but it is measured to be about 10%. These tests do not rule out the possibility that the object was a small model suspended from the nearby wire by an unresolved thread.
Given the foregoing analysis, one must choose between an asymmetric model suspended from the overhead wire, and an extraordinary flying object

The sole factor suggesting that the object is distant is a measured anomalous brightness on the underside of the object in Photo 1, compared with the brightness of the shaded underside of the oil tank. The assumption is that, in the case of a model, the two shaded regions ought to have about the same brightness. Since the underside of the object is brighter than the underside of the tank, the assumption is that atmospheric scattering is the cause, and hence the object is at a significant distance from the camera

When I read this, I immediately thought of at least one other possible explanation for the anomalous brightness. When observing bright stars or planets in telescopes, we invariably see light scattered by the optical system from
bright objects into adjacent dark areas. The same thing happens in cameras. The technical term for this is veiling glare. The cheaper the optical system, the more light that tends to get scattered, and Trent's camera was a budget model, not professional quality. This is especially troublesome when fingerprints or other smudges accidentally get onto the lens, which certainly happens to me, and probably to most other people.

The significance of this is that while the dark underside of the object is immediately adjacent to the bright sky, the bottom of the tank is in a large, dark area of the photo. Hence one would expect more light from the surroundings to spill over into the bottom of the "UFO" than into the bottom of the oil tank.

I was an undergraduate at Northwestern at this time. I decided to test this hypothesis by photographing a concrete light pole in the daylight, with the top of the pole surrounded by bright sky, while its bottom was against a much darker background. I found a professor who had a densitometer in his lab, and would show me how to use it. I measured a series of photos and, while the top of the pole was only a little brighter than its bottom with a clean optical system, the addition of just a little petroleum jelly to degrade the optical system greatly increased the amount of veiling glare - spilled-over light - in the photos.
UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee has measured the original Trent negatives. He argues that, while veiling glare is indeed present, it isn't enough to account for the anomalous brightness. But even if that conclusion is correct, if any of Hartmann's assumptions are incorrect, the photometry results are meaningless. Among the possible violations of those assumptions:

• If the object is translucent, allowing light from the sky to pass through.
• the object has a mirror surface at the bottom, thus we are seeing a reflection of the bright ground, and not a shaded surface.
• If the underside of an object suspended several feet above the ground from the wires receives much more illumination than that of a tank near the ground, next  to a wall. (I would expect this to be true.)
• 
  

  Very sharply defined shadows in both photos - obviously cast by sun.

There are very distinct shadows on the garage in both photos, although the Trents claimed that the photos were taken around sunset. The problem is that the wall faces east, and the sun is in that position (about 90 degrees azimuth) about 8:20 AM PDT. If the photos were actually taken in the morning, then the Trents were lying about the circumstances of the incident. I found that, measuring the shadows, we can greatly restrict the size of the object casting the shadows. In fact, it is so small that it is almost certainly less than one degree

The angle abc above represents the radius of the illuminating body.
Assuming these measurements, it is the arctangent of .004, which is 0.229 degrees. This matches extremely well with the known average apparent radius of the sun, which is approximately .25 degrees. Even an undetected reduction of 20% in the size of the shadows in the photo, which is highly unlikely, allows the radius of the illuminating body to be no larger than 0.46 degrees (diameter 0.92).

The maximum possible diameter of the illuminating body is thus shown to be less than one degree, and is probably closer to one-half degree. The area of a one-degree circle is less than 0.025% (1/4,000) that of the quarter sky facing the garage wall.

A bright cloud in full sunlight is only about 10 times the surface brightness of the sky surrounding it.[3] Furthermore, during and after sunset, the sunlight in the landscape has traveled a very long path through the atmosphere, and has thus been very evenly scattered and diffused. According to the astronomer M. Minnaert, by about 10 minutes after sunset, the sky and landscape in the east is dull and of uniform hue. Even a half-hour before sunset, clouds in the east assume a dull red color.[4] To attribute the illumination in the photos to a bright cloud, or to a bright hole in the cloud cover, especially after sunset, would require a surface brightness of these remarkable clouds on the order of magnitude of thousands of times that of the surrounding sky, which is inconceivable. It is particularly implausible that such illumination could exist around the time of sunset.

Conclusion: Because of the small maximum angular size of the illumination body and its intense brilliance, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the shadows in the Trent photographs are cast directly by the sun.

Maccabee still maintains that the shadows on the garage were cast by a bright sunset cloud, even though the McMinnville weather station recorded perfectly clear skies at 7:00 PM on May 11, 1950 (the last observation of the day). His illustration of that argument is below. I have seen and photographed such clouds myself, I am not saying that they do not exist. However, look at the board Maccabee sets up to try to replicate the shadow of the eaves on the Trent garage. The board casts a decent shadow for a few inches below the point where it touches the wall, then as the board moves slightly farther from the wall, the shadow quickly fades to invisibility. At the point where the shadow disappears, at the top of the support pillar, the board is only 8 inches or so from its shadow. The end of the eaves on Trent's garage were approximately twenty inches from the wall (I measured this on a building of similar construction), yet the shadows are still sharp and distinct. This is because they were cast by the sun, small and very bright, not a large, diffuse cloud. If Maccabee can find a sunset cloud that can cast sharp shadows of such boards at twenty inches, then I might be prepared to accept his argument.

Maccabee's illustration of a bright cloud casting a shadow at sunset. But the shadow is too diffuse to allow it to be seen when the board casting it is some twenty inches from the wall.

Carpenter's truck mirror, and Trent #2

In 2004, researcher Joel Carpenter (1959-2014) created a website on thMcMinnville photos, making a very good case that the object was directly beneath the overhead wires, and close to the camera. He suggests that the object was a mirror from an old truck. I have restored Joel Carpenter's original McMinnville photos website (fixing only the links), and placed it on the Internet Archive.
One of Carpenter's findings is that Trent's camera was surprisingly close to the ground when the photos were taken. For some bizarre reason, Trent did not stand up but instead crouched down to photograph his UFO. Carpenter explains,

Instead of moving toward the object and shooting the photos from eye level in the unobstructed front yard, he shot the two photos up, from a very low level, from the back yard. For reasons explained above, it seems likely that he actually used the viewfinder on the body of the camera while kneeling. The overall geometry of the positions and the attributes of the camera suggest that he was attempting to frame a nearby object in such a way as to maximize the amount of sky around it and enhance its apparent altitude.

In other words, Trent walked away from where the UFO was supposed to be, and instead walked toward where the presumed model was hanging from the wires, and crouched down close to the ground to make his "UFO" appear distant.
 Since the camera moved a significant distance between Photo 1 and Photo 2, can the two Trent photos possibly be viewed as a stereo pair, to reveal the object's distance? In 2010 an anonymous researcher calling himself Blue Shift did so on Above Top Secret. He writes,

This is another cross-eyed stereo pair. That means you need to back away from the monitor a little bit, cross your eyes, and try to line elements up in each picture until you get them together and in focus. Try it first with the oil tank. That has been shrunk to size and aligned to make it a little easier.
Unfortunately, the two photos were taken some distance apart and with the photo on the right a few steps forward. So it'll take a little practice for you to line up some of the other elements, like the bush by the driveway, the telephone post, and maybe even the far away ridge...
Now just for the hell of it, line up the saucer. It won't be exact, because they're at a different tilt in each photo, but do what you can. Got it?
Now "look up" at the overhead wires. Curiously enough, they line up at the same relative distance as the saucer! That's interesting, don't you think? And if you look around the image, as well as the other available images of the yard -- the ones with the ladder -- the wires are not far away at all, but are actually closer to the camera than the oil tank. So if the UFO saucer lines up at that point, then there's a pretty good chance that the UFO is actually pretty close to the camera, also.
Well, certainly the UFO could have moved and somehow by pure chance managed to get a stereo separation of exactly the same distance and at the same relative angle as the overhead wires. That would be amazingly coincidental, wouldn't it?

The Trent photos as a stereo pair, by "Blue Shift" on ATS. The "UFO" is seen to be small, and relatively close.

In 2013 a group of French skeptics (IPACO) did an in-depth investigation of the McMinnville photos. They began with the usual description of the line of sight to the object in each photo, presumed suspension methods, etc. They concluded that the object is a small model.

More interesting is the second part of the report, completed two months after the first part: Evidence of a Suspension Thread (page 29).
They do not claim to detect the suspension thread directly, but instead statistically:

The basic idea is that if there are traces of a thread in a picture’s pixels, above an object hanging from this thread, and if this trace is « buried in noise » within the sky’s background (noise due to atmospheric diffusion and/or to the digitizing process), it should be possible to increase the signal-to-noise ratio thus uncovering the thread, by summing pixels along columns parallel to the thread.

They concluded, "For the TRNT1 picture, the presence of a negative peak (thread darker than the sky) was clearly observed which matched exactly to the supposed attachment point, with a significant difference of 2,38 sigma, for a tilt angle equal to -11°.... Application of the same method to the second picture TRNT2 provided comparable results, with a tilt angle of -10.29 ° and results of over 2.5 sigma."

 Bruce Maccabee and Brad Sparks have written responses to the French report. Maccabee objects that "Regarding the photogrammetric analysis,  I showed that the sighting lines did not cross under the wires and they did not refute this." This comment is a bit odd, because:

A) nearly everybody else who has investigated the question has come to the opposite conclusion, including William K. Hartmann and Claude Poher. The IPACO report says "The relative position may obviously be considered as nearly constant, which can only be explained, from a geometric point of view, if the object was effectively hanging from the wire OR if its movement between both shots was following precisely its sighting line."

B) The IPACO report based their measurements largely on a map provided by Maccabee.

Sparks objects that 

"These French debunkers have incomprehensibly asserted that the UFO and wires are "black bodies" to which they apply "radiometry" -- which is the science of measurement of heat.  They claim to derive an estimate of distance from this. They apparently have no idea what they are talking about.... They have confused photometry (light measurements) with radiometry (heat measurements from black body heat radiation, thermal emissions)." 

Technically, he is correct.  However Sparks does not consider the possibility that the problem is simply the result of a bad translation from the original French. If you read the paper, it is obvious that they are using the word "radiometric" to mean the brightness of the pixels, and not any supposed heat emitted by the object. Their measuring technique is valid, even though the English description of it isn't. If the "French Debunkers" had substituted the proper word  "densitometric"  for "radiometric", and "dark bodies" (meaning, opaque and not self-luminous) for "black bodies" (which has a very specific meaning in physics), the objection vanishes.

Now, another researcher has weighed in. Jay J. Walter of Phoenix, Arizona, the author of the suspense horror novel Blood Tree, did his own investigation. Working from high-resolution scans of first-generation prints that I sent him (scans now posted on the Internet Archives for anyone to research), he did his own photo enhancement using the venerable program ArtGem. He said that even using a 4.2ghz quad core 64bit processor with 8 gigs of system RAM, he was still getting "out of memory" errors. However, he persevered, and produced the following photos, appearing to detect portions of a suspension thread above the object in both photos. The purported string cannot be seen across its entire length, which is consistent with the French skeptics only being able to detect it statistically. It is significant that Walter and the French team were working with different scans.

Jay J. Walter's possible detection of a suspension string in the first Trent photo, its position illustrated by the drawn-in string in the bottom photo.

Walter's suggestion of a string in the second Trent photo. I had to convert these photos from TIFF to JPG format in order to post them, which loses some details.

Walter's apparent string seen in its proper orientation.

Another of Walter's purported discoveries is what he calls a "logo," an apparently flat area with two holes, where it appears a logo plate might be attached, or possibly even a handle. Is this real, or is it simply  "pareidolia" - seeing a pattern where none exists? Confirmation is needed.

Did something once attach here to the object in Trent photo #2?

Walter suggests that the object in question is an appliance motor shroud, approximately eight inches in diameter. "I think Trent walked to the garage one evening, tied a string to an appliance motor shroud via an old bolt, tossed theshroud over a wire and tied the other end of the string to an anchor near the ground, then took the two pictures.  Logical, practical, and so much less effort for him than other theories.  People just do what they do and Trent wasn't going to go to too much effort just to fool his banker buddy."

But wait - there's more! In the words of UFO researcher Martin Shough on UFO Updates, "I am hearing rumours that certain researchers, one of whom is no stranger to this List, are on the brink of publishing an analysis which they believe is proof of a hoax. I have it on the authority of a third party - a 'usually reliable source'
- that cunning digital enhancement has revealed the presence of a string or wire
support."

I have been in contact with this Mystery Researcher, who has not authorized me or anyone else to reveal his findings. He was planning to write a book exposing three major UFO photo cases as hoaxes, one of course being Trent. However, he says this plan has been abandoned, and he is  uncommunicative about the details of his work. I do not have proof of what he says about the string. However from the seriousness with which he has undertaken other investigations, I am inclined to believe that he has indeed found it.

Do these new findings finally debunk the Trent photos? They would, provided they can be independently confirmed by other researchers, using other high-resolution scans from first-generation prints, or else the original negatives. Until then, people will continue to argue about such matters as the gauge of the wires, and whether the model, if it were a model, would have to be five or six inches in diameter.

16-10-2014 om 14:34 geschreven door peter  

Mr. Trent, Move Over?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEVhJXQ6p1Q

16-10-2014 om 13:40 geschreven door peter  

Did This Former Intelligence Analyst Analyze The Intelligence Properly

Considerations of the Work of James Carrion

Considerations of the Work of James Carrion

By Jack Brewer The UFO Trail 10-3-14

     James Carrion is a writer, researcher and former intelligence analyst. No stranger to the UFO phenomenon, for a while he occupied the hot seat at the Mutual UFO Network. In his latest blog post, he identified what he termed "the smoking gun" of an intelligence operation theorized in his book, 'The Rosetta Deception', available for free on Carrion's blog site of the same name. He recently launched the Rosetta Deception Forum, a message board where you can post questions, discuss the book and share related research.

Possible "ghost rocket" depicted in a photo widely circulated and originally released by Swedish Army, according to Wikipedia

'The Rosetta Deception' contains a substantial amount of cited research focusing upon parts of 1946 and 1947. A series of well sourced events and circumstances are presented that suggest the "ghost rocket" reported sightings over Europe were the results of a U.S.-led deception operation. I suspect Carrion's interpretation is extremely likely to be accurate.
Carrion suggested in his book that motives for the operation included building global distrust for the Soviet Union while the world was speculating who was testing missiles over Europe. The primary objective, however, may have been to crack the Russian diplomatic code. This would have been accomplished in part through a method known as gardening, which involves creating circumstances of interest to enemy spies so that specific key words can be expected to be prevalent in coded messages, thus increasing opportunities to break the code. More complete understandings and context can be gained by taking other relevant circumstances of the era into account, many of which are specifically presented and sourced in the book.
In his latest blog post, Carrion outlined some particular points of his theory and added what he referred to as the smoking gun: A 1946 NYC-initiated strike of communications employees which significantly decreased available methods for Soviet intelligence agents located in the States to send messages safely to Moscow. Carrion reports that a resulting bottleneck of information flow created optimum conditions for American agents to gain access to encrypted Soviet messages. There are specific circumstances presented in 'The Rosetta Deception' in support of the likelihood, including the established and substantial presence at the time of the U.S. allied intelligence community in Stateside media and communications corporations, the very outfits which would have been relied upon.
Those who wish to debate Carrion's perspectives on the ghost rockets were invited to do so. Read more about his challenge, including definitions of standards of evidence and the requirement that an actual theory must be put forth, in his related blog post.

Objectives of Deception
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to accurately understanding intelligence operations, and particularly those that overlap with the UFO community, would be the failure to consider there is no all inclusive explanation. There is more than one reason the IC manipulated circumstances commonly perceived as related to UFOs. The purposes and objectives change from one specific circumstance to the next and cannot be discussed effectively in an overly generalized manner. Particular eras and specific cases should be considered independently of one another.
Consider, for example, a now declassified 1954 CIA memo in which agents were instructed to contemplate fabricating a sensational UFO story. The purpose of the potential fabrication was not in and of itself to deceive the public. The objective, according to the memo, was to divert public attention from Agency involvement in a Guatemalan coup.
If we neglect to seek such documents, we fail ourselves as researchers. We also fail as interested members of the public searching for accurate information.
If we perpetually subscribe to extreme beliefs, to either side of center, we increase the likelihood we are missing important data. That would be the case in arguing the IC was never involved in ufology, as well as limiting our perspectives to the incorrect assumptions that the only objectives must have involved either covering up an alien presence or the polar opposite of deceiving the public into believing aliens are among us. As Carrion suggests in his work and the 1954 CIA memo demonstrates, there are many potential objectives for UFO-related deception operations. Their intricacy would be par for the course, not the exception to the rule.
It appears to this writer that UFO-related deception operations conducted by the IC are reasonably a given.
Their extents, specific circumstances and objectives are yet to be conclusively determined - not their existence.
It is important to understand that we must demand verifiable information in order to draw conclusions. Such conclusions cannot be found in passionate opinions or baseless arguments that go in circles but never reach resolution as is all too often the case within ufology.

We Have Seen the Enemy...
It has been said that propaganda is sometimes aimed at the media with the ultimate intention of influencing politicians and global leaders. If taken from that perspective, confused and misinformed members of the public might be viewed as little more than relatively inconsequential byproducts of some deception operations, at least to the powers that be.
Another way of looking at that would be to consider the IC may not be as responsible for the runaway beliefs attached to UFOs as much as the UFO community sometimes took a nudge and did the rest largely on its own. Among our biggest challenges as a community in search of accurate answers continues to be ourselves, or at least a segment of our community.
There is a leading segment of the UFO community that chronically seeks to perpetuate mysteries rather than solve them. They seek no prosaic explanations, and scrupulously avert from them at virtually all costs to logic and rationality.
Some of the mysteries that find their ways into UFO circles may indeed one day prove to be groundbreaking and of great interest. The vast majority will most certainly not.
It was not the IC that single handedly turned the "ghost rockets" into a supposedly alien-related cultural phenomenon that became perpetuated for over half a century. Neither was a Pentagon think tank solely responsible for such a large number of questionable UFO stories evolving into never ending sagas of mythical proportion. We did that on our own.
I recommend checking out the work of James Carrion. I think it is worth the time and attention. He operates the blogs 'The Rosetta Deception' and 'Follow the Magic Thread'.
Join and participate at his recently launched message board at Rosetta Deception Forum.

12-10-2014 om 22:42 geschreven door peter  

Oct. 9, 1989 Vs Nov. 9, 1989

Why ‘Aliens’ ‘Landed’ in Russia 25 Years Ago

By Lily Rothman
time.com
10-9-14

They had small heads and wore silver overalls, apparently

     
Extra-terrestrial contact has already been made — at least if you believe a report that ran 25 years ago Thursday, on Oct. 9, 1989, in the Soviet press agency TASS.

On Sept. 27 of that year, according to the official report, tall three-eyed aliens with small heads showed up in the city of Voronezh, arriving in a shiny ball (or, alternatively, a “banana-shaped” object) and bringing with them their robot. ”Scientists have confirmed that an unidentified flying object recently landed in a park in the Russian city of Voronezh,” an Associated Press translation of the report read. ”They have also identified the landing site and found traces of aliens who made a short promenade about the park.” They left behind them “two pieces of unidentified rocks,” made of a substance that “cannot be found on Earth.”

When pressed, TASS stood by the report. In fact, the agency could add more details a few days later, the New York Times reported. For example, aliens were wearing “silvery overalls and bronze boots.” . . .

12-10-2014 om 22:15 geschreven door peter  

My Final Call, Stan!

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Kevin Randle's Final Word on The Matter?

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Kevin Randle's Final Word on The Matter

By Kevin Randle The UFO Chronicles © 10-9-14

     When you resort to suggesting that the lack of provenance is a silly argument—that is the point where I bow out. This is going nowhere and I have a book to complete rather than say the same things over and over to you so that you can ignore them.
I will respond to one item. I have a letter from Dr. Winfred Buskirk dated August 30, 1991, in his own handwriting that says, "Anderson was in my Anthropology class the 1st semester, then, according to his transcript, took a French class the second semester." I had avoided using this until now because those who supplied the information were still employed by the Albuquerque school system and could have gotten into trouble. Now that situation has worked itself out.
I also have a letter dated August 8, 1991, again written in Buskirk's own hand that says, "Now - at Albuquerque High he was enrolled for a semester of Anthropology. This was a course I taught in the fall, so he must have taken it in 1957 - 1958 and, I presumed passed it with credit (I failed no one if I could help it.)... You will probably want to call Mrs. [left the name out to protect the innocent], .[second name left out] and [third name left out] for a verification." This I did, but after Anderson called the school to demand that they release no information about him, I kept this to myself.
Here is the interesting part of that letter by Buskirk, "They [the names that I had removed] had been contacted by Friedman, and both had referred him to her... But Friedman has not contacted her." The question is, did you ever contact her and what did you learn? Did she tell you the same things that I learned?
Once again, I have the letters in hand and there is even my handwritten note of a telephone number for one of these people whom I did call. He said that he was looking at the transcript as we talked. By the way, Anderson did, in a letter to me, confirm some of the information that camefrom those sources. He's dead in the water on this, and I have the proof.
I have noticed that he misinterpreted my comments about Peter Tytell and attempt to switch the conversation from the EBD and the Truman Memo to that nutty NSA document you carry around. You don't seem to get that I talked to Tytell, so I might answer that as well... or I might not. I do have a book due here and this is now taking too much time. I don't think there are many out there who are buying these arguments anyway.

12-10-2014 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

Dr. Menzel, The Work Of CI Spooks, Stan?

MJ-12: The Hoax That Quickly Became a Disinformation Operation

By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 10-10-14

      Stan Friedman and I once had a brief face-to-face debate about the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents, as I was helping him move his luggage from his hotel room to the lobby, to await the taxi to the airport, following the III World UFO Forum in Curitiba, Brazil in June 2009, at which we both spoke.
One of those documents, the key Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD), purports to be a Top Secret report to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, in which the Roswell Incident—the recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—is outlined for the soon-to-be new chief executive.
Along with this earth-shattering news, Eisenhower is told of the existence of a Top Secret group, the Majestic 12 or Majik 12, a “Research and Development Intelligence” operation whose 12 members oversee basically everything related to the case.

After I pressed him on the point, Friedman actually agreed with me that the obscure elements in the EBD—which he publicly claims prove its authenticity—could have been researched by counterintelligence personnel, military or civilian, and planted in the “document” to lend it an air of legitimacy. This includes the mention of UFO skeptic Dr. Donald Menzel as a member of MJ-12—whose covert relationship with the National Security Agency was only exposed after the EBD was made public—as well as other items.
In other words, if the MJ-12 affair is a disinformation scheme involving a counterintelligence group, and not just a simple hoax—as I maintain—the arcane aspects of the Eisenhower Briefing Document (and Cutler-Twining Memo and Truman-Forrestal Memo) that Friedman holds up as evidence of their authenticity, might instead be explained by the spooks who created them having done their homework. If their task was to muddy the waters, so to speak, certainly they would have been allowed access to various relevant historical materials that would have assisted them in the creation of passable forgeries.
As one of the first investigators of MJ-12, who helped expose its bogus origins—together with Barry Greenwood, Kevin Randle, and the late Bob Todd—I have detailed information about the early manifestations of the caper. My widely-circulated March 1, 1989 paper, “The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments” is available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/hastings.htm.

While Greenwood and Randle believe that a simple hoax, designed to make money, was perpetrated by researcher Bill Moore and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard Doty, I contend the available evidence strongly suggests that the MJ-12 fraud, while originating as a hoax, was quickly co-opted by AFOSI and perhaps other intelligence groups, as a means to disinform/misdirect ufologists and the public-at-large, regarding the nature and extent of the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.
I am fully aware that Stan Friedman will never agree with this scenario—and may claim that our conversation in Brazil never happened—so I am merely going to itemize the following for the benefit of others who have an open mind about the subject:

● According to files donated to MUFON by the late Bob Pratt, the name “MAJIK 12” was assigned to a proposed work of fiction about UFOs, the official cover-up of them, and one intelligence agent’s quest to expose the facts. The novel was to be co-authored by journalist Pratt and researcher Bill Moore, probably with the assistance of Richard Doty.
All of this was discussed some three years before the first supposedly real Majestic-12/Majik-12 “document” surfaced. MAJIK 12 was the book’s working title; IAC, for Identified Alien Craft, was an alternate title. However, at some point, The Aquarius Project was unilaterally selected as the title by Moore. The
terms “Project Aquarius” and “IAC” later appeared in the allegedly real Majestic-12 documents, as did “EBE” for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, another term associated with the proposed fictional work.
● Two years before the MJ-12 documents were released to the public, Moore suggested to researcher Brad Sparks that fake documents relating to the Roswell UFO recovery be created and disseminated, the idea being that military veterans with a knowledge of the event would be enticed to come forward with their stories, thereby breaking the case wide open. Sparks states that he strongly recommended that Moore not do it.
● The undeveloped roll of film containing images of the EDB and Truman-Forrestal (TF) documents was mailed to Moore’s associate Jaime Shandera from Albuquerque, New Mexico, coincidentally the location of Kirtland AFB—where OSI agent Richard Doty worked.
● In April 2009, the late Gabe Valdez, a retired New Mexico State Policeman famous for his cattle mutilation work, told me that fellow state trooper Richard Doty had confessed to him that he had forged “lots” of UFO-related documents while working as an OSI agent. Doty became a New Mexico State Policeman after retiring from the Air Force in 1988.
Doty’s fraudulent “Craig Weitzel letter”, “1977 Ellsworth AFB incident document”, and “Aquarius Telex”—the first document to surface that actually mentioned MJ-12—were exposed in the 1980s. Three fakes hardly constitute “lots” of forgeries. What other “documents” did Doty foist on ufology and the rest of the world?
Gabe Valdez asked me not to tape our 2009 conversation or to quote him publicly; now that he is dead, I feel I can do so.
● In May 2009, I posted various MJ-12-related statements on a blog, at one point referring to Doty as “a government disinformation agent who forged documents.” On May 24, 2009, Doty emailed me, angrily saying, “A simple fact, Mr. Hastings, everything I did during my intelligence days were [sic] sanctioned.”

This is Classic Doty, notorious for his frequent grammatical and spelling errors. I note here that the MJ-12 documents have a number of such errors sprinkled throughout them.
Not that Doty is necessarily a candidate for the forgery of the EBD in particular; its somewhat complex content required a level of sophistication arguably beyond Doty’s rather limited abilities. Instead, higher-level intelligence types, and Bill Moore himself, must be considered to be high on the list of persons who might be
responsible for its creation.
Remember, Moore once told researcher Lee Graham that he was an intelligence operative, and even showed Graham an ID badge that Graham said was “identical” in appearance to the badges shown to him by two members of the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) who had once visited him.

When I published Graham’s comments in 1989, Moore quickly said that he had only been joking with the hapless researcher and that the badge was only a laminated MUFON field investigator’s card. However, Graham remains adamant that the badge he was shown was a genuine government ID card.
But if Doty is not responsible for the creation of the EBD, the ridiculous mumbo jumbo found in the so-called “MJ-5 Memo” is right up his alley. On October 14, 1988, Doty appeared anonymously (back-lit and voice-altered) as “Falcon” on the absurd TV farce UFO Cover-up Live!, together with USAF intelligence officer Capt. Robert M. Collins, who also appeared anonymously as “Condor”. The pair claimed to be high-level intelligence insiders who knew about multiple UFO crashes, live aliens being held captive by the U.S. government, and other such fare.
Apparently the aliens liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music, according to Doty and Collins.
In November 1987, the same Capt. Robert Collins showed Linda Moulton Howe a ring-binder full of MJ-12 documents at his home in Albuquerque. According to Howe, Collins had been “frantically” trying to reach her so that he could present those supposedly important files. The EBD was prominently featured, as was the MJ-5 Memo, together with another memorandum that mentioned the live aliens held at Los Alamos—among other items.

Howe swallowed it all, of course, soon sharing information about the bogus evidence with ufologists and the public, following-up on her earlier “revelations” about alleged secret U.S./alien treaties, underground alien bases, and other such disclosures—all of which had been provided to her by OSI Special Agent Doty.
In 2009, Collins denied showing documents to Howe (and John Lear) at his house in 1987. Fortunately, I recorded my conversation with Howe less than a year after the event and she described the goings-on in detail. A summary of all of this, as well as my telephone transcript, may be read in my Operation Bird Droppings article.
According to his self-written bio at Amazon.com, appearing with a summary of his book, Exempt From Disclosure, Robert Collins is a “former Air Force Intelligence Officer, Capt, O-3 (Chief Analyst/Scientist in theoretical Physics holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance) at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD)...Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, with an extensive background in Aircraft Avionics Systems, Ground Communications, and Engineering Physics (graduate school—Electro-Optics, Plasma, and Nuclear Physics) totaling over 22 years…”
Gee, not a single word from Collins about his appearing on a national television program masquerading as a “high-level intelligence source, code-named Condor” who also “frantically” disseminated disinformation relating to MJ-12.
Summarizing here, in the early days of the ruse, two of the leading proponents for the legitimacy of the now-discredited MJ-12 material were a counterintelligence OSI agent, who later confessed to forging UFO-related documents, and a positive intelligence officer who willingly posed as something he was not—someone having intimate knowledge about various crashed UFOs and captured aliens being held by the U.S. government.
Try as he may, Stan Friedman cannot credibly distance the supposedly “good” MJ-12 documents—EBD, CT, TF—from the “bad” ones that were circulating in the 1980s.
They were all lumped together and presented as equally important and legitimate by two Air Force intelligence operatives—clearly acting as disinformation agents—who were aggressively foisting them on well-meaning but gullible people such as Linda Howe.
Once the shenanigans perpetrated by the Kirtland AFB Cabal were effectively exposed, by Greenwood, Todd and myself, Bill Moore saw the writing on the wall and finally acknowledged much of what we had written.

During his infamous “confession” speech, at the MUFON conference in Las Vegas, on July 1, 1989, Moore said, “Disinformation is a strange and bizarre game. Those who play it are completely aware that an operation’s success is dependent upon dropping information upon a target, or ‘mark,’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it to others as if it were true. Once this has been accomplished, the work of the counterintelligence specialists is complete. They can simply withdraw in the confidence that the dirty work of spreading their poisonous seeds will be done by others.”
Linda Howe and others—including Stanton Friedman—certainly did their part in the game, helping to create a mythology that endures today.
As I wrote earlier, the available evidence strongly suggests that while the MJ-12 Affair began as a legitimate money-making project, involving the writing of a novel, it eventually became a hoax, involving forged documents—with money again being the objective, resulting from various related schemes—before finally morphing into a disinformation ploy orchestrated by intelligence and counterintelligence groups within the U.S. Air Force.

Today
I am distressed that the MJ-12 debate (actually, debacle) continues to have ramifications 30 years later, perpetually polluting the legitimate UFO research database.
For example, MJ-12 was prominently featured during the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, held in Washington D.C. in May 2013. Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly characterized the MJ-12-related SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual—which directs military personnel how to recover crashed UFOs and dead aliens—as having “stood the test of time”. Hardly!
Military document expert and longtime UFO researcher Jan Aldrich has discovered over 50 factual errors and/or discrepancies in military protocol in the so-called “manual”.
Another high-profile personage in ufology, self-described “historian” Richard Dolan, has repeatedly vouched for the legitimacy of the MJ-12 materials in various UFO “documentaries” on television.

And Robert and Ryan Wood, at their Majestic Documents website, still regularly churn out pro-MJ-12 “evidence” and commentary. As I pointedly said to them, from the podium at the 2012 Society for Scientific Exploration conference, if one is going to have any hope of deciphering the U.S. government’s covert response to UFOs, one must adhere to the fundamental principles underlying academic scholarship or, at least, traditional investigative journalism, to figure out what is real, as opposed to what is not.
In other words, relying only on authenticated documents and vetted witness testimony when evaluating historical developments. In response, the Woods just stared at their shoes and said nothing.
Given that the MJ-12 proponents routinely ignore this valid advice, and spout off incessantly about their supposedly-insightful “findings”, it’s no wonder that the bullshit typed-up by OSI Agent Doty, con artist Bill Moore and, later on, hoaxer Tim Cooper, has only gained ground on the Internet over the years, at least among the less-discriminating members of the public.
At least Cooper has now completely disavowed the MJ-12 2.0 “documents” that he was actively disseminating a few years ago. Oh, you didn’t know about that? See my “Operation Bird Droppings” article addendum.
Regardless, questions about Cooper’s possible role in creating those forged files remain unanswered.
Jeez, what a colossal waste of everyone’s time!
There are legitimate areas in ufology that go begging for attention by qualified researchers. It’s nothing short of pathetic that so much effort has been spent on the MJ-12 Affair, especially when the basic facts about its dubious origins and early machinations have been well researched and publicized for years.
To the reader, I say this: Please do your homework. The facts are indeed available, if one is willing to take the time to discover them. Start by asking yourself whether any “evidence” offered by the MJ-12 proponents would meet the standards of academic or journalistic investigative research. Can even a single MJ-12 “document” be proved to be genuine, by any accepted definition of that word?
Bizarrely, Stan Friedman has recently asserted that provenance—the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object—is not even an issue when it comes to analyzing the MJ-12 documents! Would any academician or investigative journalist dare make such a claim about a disputed document that has mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, if he/she hoped to have any credibility at all after doing so? Of course not!
The great many documents underlying my own UFO-Nukes Connection research can be verifiably traced to a given government department or agency.
Can the MJ-12 proponents honestly make that claim? No, they cannot. All they can offer are their opinions about how it might be possible for these supposed documents to be real.
Whoopee...
For the record, I personally believe that the Roswell Incident—the secret recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—did in fact take place. I recommend a review of the on-the-record statements by the late U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, as presented at http://roswellproof.homestead.com/exon.html.
While having only an indirect knowledge of the incident and its aftermath, acquired from some of the military participants who were involved in the operation, Exon’s revelations are far more insightful and valuable than anything emerging from the MJ-12 fiasco.
Visit Robert's Site . . .


Click on Image To Purchase Robert's Book

See Also:
Operation Bird Droppings
The MJ-12 Saga Continues:

UPDATE
1: Operation Bird DroppingsThe MJ-12 Saga Continues:

An Historical Curio re "MJ-12"

Bird Droppings and MJ-12, Stanton Friedman Responds . . .

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Alejandro Rojas Rebukes Stanton Friedman

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Stanton Friedman Counters

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Kevin Randle Queries Stanton Friedman

MJ-12: Stanton Friedman Fires Back; The Disputation with Kevin Randle Continues ...

MJ-12: Kevin Randle Rails Against Stanton Friedman's Rebuttal

MJ-12: Alejandro Rojas Accepts Stanton Friedman's Debate Challenge

MJ-12: Renowned Ufologist, Stanton Friedman Issues Debate Challenge To Naysayers

More False Claims About Majestic 12

The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 1

The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 2

The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 3

"Appendix A: The Myth of MJ-12" An Annotated Commentary By Barry Greenwood

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12-10-2014 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

You've Been Duped, Stan!

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Alejandro Rojas Rebukes Stanton Friedman

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Alejandro Rojas Rebukes Stanton Friedman

By Alejandro Rojas The UFO Chronicles © 10-9-14

     This is a strange message, because my research is about the origins of the documents. Stanton often expresses his frustration when people he debates have not reviewed his material. However, this message indicates that Stanton has not reviewed my research, which is on the origins of the MJ-12 documents, and how they were released to a group of individual who were involved with an admitted disinformation scandal.
Incidentally, some of these people were also Stanton's research partners. However, instead of discussing this sordid affair to help absolve himself of any association with the scandal, Stanton continues to ignore the scandal even took place. It appears Stanton is trying to do the same thing here. I argue that any full investigation of the case must include the circumstances surrounding how the public came to know of these documents. Something Stanton has not provided.
Stanton has admitted to me that Doty, an agent with the USAF Office of Special Investigations, was the first person to mention the term MJ-12 in a document Doty says was part of a disinformation campaign. He has also admitted that Doty is not to be trusted and has proven to be deceitful. Stanton has also admitted that his research partner at the time, William Moore, is not to be trusted. This was proven to be the case when Moore admitted to being part of Doty's disinformation campaign.
Much of Stanton's research on the MJ-12 documents was prior to anyone knowing Moore was working with Doty. I believe that Stanton is a man of high integrity, and, along with the rest of the UFO community, was a victim of this disinformation scandal.
It must be hard to know one has been chasing a wild goose for years, only to find that their own research partner was involved with setting the goose loose. I can understand that, but ignoring the events do not allow for a sufficient analysis of the situation.
I will be more than happy to discuss with Stanton some of the details of his relationship with the people involved with the disinformation scandal. Details he avoids sharing in public, but are pertinent to the field of Ufology. I would also like to discuss why he feels the fact that the documents were released amidst this scandal have no bearing on their validity. I also would like to discuss with him my view that no matter how long his list is, it does not prove that the documents were not disinformation, officially sanctioned by the government or otherwise.

12-10-2014 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

Near Kin 2 Sputnik

09-10-2014 om 18:19 geschreven door peter  

Time To Throw In The Towel, Kevin!

MJ-12 Debate Continues: Stanton Friedman Counters

Kevin:
Thank you for once again demonstrating your illogicality and inaccuracy with regard to the MJ-12 documents. Your basic rule is: Absence of evidence is evidence for absence which is illogical. Let me be specific, though as you know from previous items I have written, I provided a long list of examples. You bring up Willingham again for reasons unknown. I have never said that his story proves anything. Of course I don't have any evidence that there was a saucer crash at el Indio Guerrero. on 06 December, 1950.The document says ..."By the time the search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study." That was a nuclear weapons lab. As you are well aware, I do not have access to classified information about the results of that study or anything else. That surely doesn't mean that there was no study done. I suspect that the search team was there because "the long trajectory" was observed on radar and would also have provided classified information.
You have described the response of Peter Tytel, a noted forensic Documents examiner to whom I had sent a copy of the EBD "it was just perfect because the whole thing of the twelve pages or however many pages it was. Most of the pages were blank pages with just five words written on them like TOP SECRET or Appendix A or something like that." The fact is the EBD was 7 pages (plus the TF memo) and only one (page 7) had just Appendix A on it.
Strangely you did not even include that page in your book. You quoted Tytel's off hand remark that the typewriter was of much later vintage. A full professional evaluation by James Black paid for by Dr. Robert M Wood stated the typeface was from an Underwood Standard from May 1940.
Several authorities claimed that TOP SECRET Restricted was not used during Ike's terms.
The GAO found examples and said so. Blind Luck? The date of the TF was the only day in a many month period when Truman, Bush and Forrestal met. Blind Luck? The hoaxer threw a dart at a dart board and found the one time when Cutler was out of the country so didn't sign the CT or put a /s/. Of course he blindly knew that Menzel would pass muster though nobody else did. He knew to put a period after the date on TF knowing that Bush always did. He knew that James Lay had been instructed to keep things moving out of Cutler's in Basket. George Elsey, who worked for Truman all the time he was President , said Lay would have written the memo for Cutler (after I pointed out Lay's instructions from Cutler and found that there was nothing wrong with the 3 documents, etc., ad nauseum).
Also chose an unusual carbon paper but knew it would eventually pass muster.
Another example is that you claimed truly that nowhere did I find any mention of MJ-12 in Donald Menzel's papers ... no Marginal notes, no oblique references etc. Menzel according to his own words to Jack Kennedy had been connected to the NSA and its Navy predecessor for decades. I have seen no reference to this connection predating my discovery in his papers at the Harvard Archives. You expect him to have left classified notes and information lying around? There were no classified papers there. His secretary assured me that he was very careful about security. Remember that the 156 pages of NSA UFO documents finally released were classified TOP SECRET UMBRA and one could only read 1 line per page.
You are now claiming that Dr. Buskirk claimed that Gerald Anderson was in his anthro class.at Albuquerque High School. I have trouble believing that he did so claim. You will recall that I visited the high school and twice talked by phone to the student whom you claimed recalled Gerald from that class. He denied it even after I sent him and another student a copy of a picture of Gerald from the High School yearbook. Your evidence please—not your wishful thinking.
I have as you know, noted many pieces of data not known to be true until after we received the CT,TF, and EBD . How did a hoaxer know those?? Time travel such as invoked by the USAF when claiming Crash Test Dummies not dropped until 6 years after Roswell accounted for the Body stories?
Why do you falsely claim that I said the TF signature "exactly matches" one on a Truman Bush letter? You made that up. I said "matches" not "exactly matches."
That is as bad as Klass saying Letter 9 times for the TF MEMO and his falsely claiming Pica Type wasn't used at the NSC. He paid me $1000.00 for proving him wrong about that after I provided 14 examples.
Why don't you mention the findings of world class linguistics expert Dr. Roger Wescott who reviewed 27 examples of Hillenkoetter writings including the EBD and 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 any one other than Hillenkoetter himself. This statement holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum of November 18, 1952 ...." You talk about drafts being destroyed. Onionskin copies were all over the place. None of the three is a draft. "Preliminary briefing" is not a draft.
The person who filmed the TOP SECRET MAJIC briefing and distributed the film to a person without a clearance or need to know was guilty of a crime. A hoaxer would have finally said gotcha. Provenance is a silly argument. Want a written confession, too? You have a solid military background, but still falsely claimed that calling Hillenkoetter Admiral (instead of rear admiral) meant the EBD was phony. You asked for another item by him with a signature. There is no signature by RHH on EBD In fact it was the standard practice to use generic ranks as you would have known if you had gone to the Ike Library. It is a lot closer to you than it is to me.
Time to throw in the towel. The 3 items are genuine.

See Also:
MJ-12 Debate Continues: Kevin Randle Queries Stanton Friedman
MJ-12: Stanton Friedman Fires Back; The Disputation with Kevin Randle Continues ...
MJ-12: evin Randle Rails Against Stanton Friedman's Rebuttal
MJ-12: Alejandro Rojas Accepts Stanton Friedman's Debate Challenge
MJ-12: Renowned Ufologist, Stanton Friedman Issues Debate Challenge To Naysayers
More False Claims About Majestic 12
The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 1
The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 2
The Myth of MJ-12: Appendix A –Pt 3

08-10-2014 om 22:31 geschreven door peter  

Let Me Try Again, Stan!

MJ-12 Debate Continues:
Kevin Randle Queries Stanton Friedman

By Kevin Randle The UFO Chronicles © 10-7-14

    
Seriously? You trot out that old chestnut? Do you make the same comments about writing fiction to Bruce Maccabee, Nick Pope or Whitley Streiber or is it just me? Are you following the propagandist rule that if you say something loud enough and long enough someone will believe you?

I notice you continue to dodge the questions. You have no explanation for the lack of provenance. This is a major flaw.

Since you bring up Kaufmann, how about Gerald Anderson? He forged a document and admitted that. You know the diary he submitted about the 1947 event was written in ink that didn’t exist prior to 1973. And he took the class from Winfred Buskirk. How do I know? Because I was able to access the records before Anderson demanded that they be closed and those records proved that Anderson took Buskirk’s Anthropology course. I can say that now because those who helped me have retired. It was the same information that Buskirk received when he called his friends at Albuquerque High School and told me to check it out myself.

The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance. It was based on a possible intrusion of American airspace by an unknown aircraft. It lasted about an hour and had nothing to do with a crash of anything in Mexico. Zechel changed the date of Willingham’s case for that very reason… and you have no idea what sources of information I have been able to tap.

But this second crash mentioned is the fatal flaw because it never happened outside of the mind of Robert Willingham. He invented the tale and this is the only source of information about it, unless, of course, you have something to prove it did happen.

And you haven’t bothered with the altered Truman signature on the memo. You forgot to mention that you approached Peter Tytell, a questioned document expert who told you to wash your hands of MJ-12 because the clues he found screamed hoax. And you know that he has not produced a written report because no one has paid his fee but anyone who talks to him learns the same things about that investigation.

You still haven’t commented on Bill Moore’s idea of creating a Roswell document. Nor have you commented on the original plan being laid out in his book Majik-12. Nor that Moore said the EBD contained disinformation which is, of course, a nice way to say that it filled with lies. And you haven’t mentioned Moore’s “confession” in Las Vegas that has badly damaged his credibility, which in turn, damages MJ-12. (And don’t ask how because it was Moore who provided the EBD to the world.)

No matter how many times you say it, you still haven’t been able to explain some of the major discrepancies. You are reduced to asking how the forger could have known some obscure facts when the answer is simple… blind luck. He also missed on some very big items.

Oh, by the way, drafts of highly classified documents are normally destroyed once the final is completed. They also destroy the notes, the typewriter ribbons and even the blank pages left on note pads to ensure that the information isn’t compromised. Until you can find some actual evidence of authenticity for the MJ-12 documents, these conversations go almost nowhere.

08-10-2014 om 22:15 geschreven door peter