The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
UFO'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
21-10-2021
Spontaneous Human Combustion: A Burning Mystery
Spontaneous Human Combustion: A Burning Mystery
For some time, people have debated whether or not human beings could spontaneously combust, or burst into flames, without an external heat source. However, over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of such incidents occurring. This phenomenon is called spontaneous human combustion (or SHC) and it occurs when a person supposedly burns to death by a fire believed to have started from within the body of that person. Of the hundreds of accounts on record, there seems to be a similar pattern.
A solitary victim is often consumed by flame, usually inside his or her home. However, the extremities, such as the hands, feet, or parts of the leg, often remaining intact. The torso and head are charred beyond recognition and, in rare cases, the internal organs of a victim remain unscathed.
The room the victim was in usually shows little to no signs of fire, aside from a greasy residue left on furniture and walls. Often there is a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident has occurred.
Historic Cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion
The history of SHC can be traced back to medieval literature and some even believe there are several passages in the Bible making reference to it.
In 1641, the Danish physician, Thomas Bartholin (1616-1680), described the death of Polonus Vorstius in his book Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum , a collection of strange medical phenomena.
Vorstius was an Italian knight, who, while at his home in Milan, Italy in 1470, drank some strong wine and started vomiting flames before bursting into fire. This is considered to be the first recorded account of spontaneous combustion in human history.
In 1673, French author Jonas Dupont, published a book entitled De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, which is a collection of cases and studies on the subject of spontaneous human combustion.
One famous incident from France dates back to 1725, when a Parisian innkeeper was awoken by the smell of smoke and discovered that his wife, Nicole Millet, had been reduced to ashes while lying on a straw pallet, which itself had been untouched by the flames.
All that remained of Madame Millet, a chronic alcoholic, was her skull, a few bones from her back, and lower legs. Wooden items found around her were undamaged. Her husband was charged with murder and initially found guilty.
On appeal, however, the judges agreed with his defense of “spontaneous human combustion,” thanks in part to the testimony of a surgeon named Dr. Claude-Nicolas Le Cat. Le Cat was at the inn when the smell of smoke awoke the house and Nicole’s body was discovered. Her death was later declared to be the consequence of “a visitation of God.”
Spontaneous human combustion became popularized in the 19th century after famous English author Charles Dickens used it to kill off one of his characters in the novel Bleak House . When critics accused Dickens of trying to validate something that didn’t exist, he simply pointed to existing research showing 30 historical cases at the time.
Illustration of the spontaneous human combustion case in Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Common Characteristics of Spontaneous Human Combustion Victims
The topic of SHC received coverage in the British Medical Journal in 1938 when an article by L.A. Parry cited a book published in 1823 called Medical Jurisprudence . It stated that cases of spontaneous human combustion shared several common themes including:
the victims were chronic alcoholics;
they were usually elderly females;
the body had burned spontaneously, but some lighted substance had also come into contact with it;
the hands and feet usually fell off;
the fire had caused very little damage to many other combustible things in contact with the body;
the combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and fetid ashes, very offensive in odor.
Alcoholism seems to have played a heavy role in early references to SHC, partially because some Victorian era physicians and writers believed spontaneous human combustion was caused by it.
The Wick Effect: A Scientific Explanation for SHC
There are several theories as to what causes SHC apart from the above-mentioned alcoholism. These include: flammable body fat, acetone buildup, static electricity, methane, bacteria, stress, and even divine intervention.
The theory explaining SHC which is most approved by science is called the “wick effect.” It likens the body of an SHC victim to a candle. A candle is composed of a wick on the inside surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids. Fire ignites the wick and the fatty wax keeps it burning.
In the human body, the body fat acts as the flammable substance, while the victim's clothing or hair is the wick. A cigarette might set fire to a person’s clothing then split their skin, releasing subcutaneous fat, which in turn is absorbed into the burned clothing. As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing, acting as a “wax-like substance” to keep the "wick" burning. The burning continues for as long as there is fuel available. Proponents of this theory say it explains why victims' bodies are destroyed yet their surroundings are barely burned.
Author and biology professor Brian J Ford offers another explanation for SHC. He says that an acetone build-up is likely at the root of this bizarre phenomenon:
“When a person is ill they sometimes naturally produce traces of acetone in the body, and acetone is highly inflammable. I experimented with scale model humans using pig flesh that had been marinated in acetone; they burn like incendiary bombs. Alcoholism can cause people to produce acetone, as can many diseases. My conclusion is that an unwell individual produces high levels of acetone which accumulates in the fatty tissues and can be ignited, perhaps by a static spark or a cigarette.”
Something that should be taken into consideration is the fact that cases of SHC almost always occur indoors, to lone humans, and often near sources of heat. For example, there are almost no known instances of spontaneous human combustion happening in the middle of the street.
Another point to consider is that the phenomenon only seems to happen to humans, there are no known reported cases of animals suddenly catching fire.
Also, the "wick effect" doesn’t seem to fully explain why the victims remain motionless during the episode of combustion and burning, nor does it provide enough explanation why surrounding furniture is so often unaffected by the fire.
Furthermore, believers in SHC point to the fact that the human body has to reach a temperature of roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,648 degrees Celsius) in order to be reduced to complete ashes, which has been the case with many of the victims found. By comparison, cremating a human body is carried out at a temperature between 1400 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius).
Modern Spontaneous Human Combustion Cases
Cases of SHC aren’t simply the stuff of old wives tales or confined strictly to books of antiquity. For instance, a more modern example took place in Ireland in 2010.
The burned body of an elderly man was found lying with his head near the fireplace of his apartment in a room that had virtually no fire damage. There were no burn marks on the floor, on the ceiling directly above him, or anywhere else in the room. An Irish coroner would later rule that spontaneous combustion was the cause of the death of 76-year-old Michael Faherty.
Another modern case of possible SHC occurred in 2017. The Independent reported that a 70-year-old man suddenly burst into flames “in unexplained circumstances in a London street.” The Fire Brigade’s investigation “found no evidence of an “accelerant” that would have spread the flames” and the man’s death was treated as “unexplained.” Could this be another case of spontaneous human combustion?
Many people believe that there is much about the human body which makes it unique among earthly beings and there are aspects of humans that are still unknown to us. One such feature is the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, which remains an unsolved mystery .
Spontaneous human combustion remains an unsolved mystery.
Recently, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had an entertaining talk with PBS’s Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover about space-related stuff including the current hot topic of UFOs/UAPs. Below you can read the show’s full transcript. He said this among many other things: "Well, I hope it’s ours that is highly secret, because this kind of propulsion that has no wings and doesn’t have an exhaust and suddenly darts from here to there in an instant, covering a distance at speeds that are incredible, I hope it’s ours. But according to our government, they’re telling us it is NOT.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson discusses America’s mission to return to the moon and reach Mars, a new international space race, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings, and NASA’s search for intelligent life in the universe.
The final frontier, this week on ‘Firing Line.’ America has always had a frontier. Now that frontier is upward, and it’s out into the cosmos.
A child of the Florida space coast who became the second sitting member of Congress in orbit.
We have liftoff.
Now Bill Nelson’s been asked to lead NASA into the future. The agenda is ambitious and expensive — put an American back on the Moon by 2024, then on to Mars.
Mars is the goal in the decade of the 2030s.
There’s competition from China and Russia and the space race among billionaires to be the first.
Liftoff as the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon… There’s also a brand-new government report about unexplained sightings in the sky.
Look at that thing, dude.
And it may have raised more questions than answers.
Look at it fly!
What does NASA Administrator Bill Nelson say now?
‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible in part by… And by… Corporate funding is provided by… NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, welcome to ‘Firing Line.’
Thank you so much. I love to talk about space.
You have said that NASA is in your blood. You grew up on the Space Coast and became the second sitting member of Congress to travel into space aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986. But a decade ago, NASA seemed adrift in space. The space shuttle program was ending, and the U.S. had no means of reaching space. Compared to 10 years ago, Senator, where does NASA stand today?
Well, it was specifically 11 years ago that Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and I wrote the bill that put NASA on the course that it’s on, a dual course — one-course commercial companies that NASA would hire, specifically the delivery of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. And then the other course, NASA, to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore the heavens. And that’s the course that we’re on. Now, in that period of time, the space shuttle was coming to an end after the destruction of It was strongly encouraged to shut it down and come up with a design that was more safe for human life. And that’s what we have now. And you will see that in the largest rocket ever will launch at the end of this year. The space launch system with its spacecraft, Orion, on the top.
I’d like to ask you about the SLS space launch system, which is NASA’s enormous launch rocket, a project that you have supported going back to 2011 when you were in the United States Senate. Let me ask you, the office of inspector general says that that project is costing billions more than it was supposed to and is at least two years behind schedule. As NASA administrator, your job now is to keep the project on schedule and within budget. How are you going to do that?
And more recently, it’s just been delayed further because of a protest of the bid that NASA earlier this year had awarded to a competition of the lander, a commercial lander. So that’s another delay of 100 days and then on the basis of what the General Accounting Office decides. So you have these delays. But the fact is, once GAO decides, we’re ready to go, and we’re going to push full steam ahead.
The goal was to launch Artemis in 2021, and then. ultimately, land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024. So is that going to stay on schedule, or will that be delayed?
We’re going with crew in 2023, and then, depending on this competition for a lander in the commercial sector, then that’s going to determine when we actually land on the moon with humans. And that’s what we’ve got to keep on track and we’ve got to try to speed up.
You said you’re ready to go as soon as the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, says so, but in May, they said, quote, ‘The ambitious schedule decreases the likelihood of NASA achieving its goal.’ So what gives? Who’s right here?
Well, that report was actually written on materials and information that they had received earlier that have since been changed. However, space is hard, space is risky. And when you have human life in it, it’s important that you do it right. The entire space program all the way back from Project Mercury, look at all the delays there, after the Apollo 1 fire that we lost three astronauts. They had to redesign the spacecraft. You’ve seen these delays as a result because space is hard.
How confident are you there will be a woman on the Moon in 2024?
Well, don’t hold to that. I’ve said space is hard. That’s the goal. So whenever that is, it will be the first woman and the next man. And in the course of all the landings will also be the first person of color.
So there’s a chance it will be delayed from 2024.
We’ll see. That’s the goal.
Listen, in 1968, astronauts on the first manned mission to the Moon, the Apollo 8, sent back a photograph of the Earth, which gave us a new perspective on our planet, and it even helped propel the environmental movement towards the first Earth Day in 1970. One of your first interviews, you mentioned that climate change would be a top issue for you as the NASA administrator. How will NASA’s new Earth System Observatory help protect the planet?
It’s five missions over the next decade, yet once on orbit, it’s all going to talk to each other as they measure every detail about land, the seas, ice, and the atmosphere. And that is going to give us a three-dimensional picture of the Earth’s environment and what are the changes and what we project in the future. That is already, in the scientific community, is just being greeted with extraordinary excitement. Because if you want to mitigate climate, you’ve got to measure it. And that’s what NASA is going to do.
The Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, which cost a relatively inexpensive $85 million to build and operate, just went on its ninth flight. It was about 1/200th of what the SLS rocket, which hasn’t flown yet, has cost so far. Ingenuity has been so successful that NASA extended its mission for at least another 30 days. Should NASA focus even more on smaller missions like this that it’s so good at?
Well, Ingenuity is the result of a very large mission and a very successful one. We have been putting landers out on Mars since the 1970s. And so the one that is there now is the size of a Volkswagen, the rover. And so they got this idea of attaching this little helicopter to it just to see if a helicopter could fly in an atmosphere that is one percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere. And lo and behold, it worked. And then they said, ‘Well, it’s working so well, let’s try to do some other things.’ And now, after nine times flying, what it is actually, it’s a scout for the rover. So we now have a scout on Mars.
It’s extraordinary to watch. You know, William F. Buckley Jr. spoke to astronaut Alan Shepard in 1973, two years after Shepard walked on the Moon, in a program that was entitled ‘Was It Worth It?’ Watch this.
I think we have the first amount of data back from the lunar surface that’s going to tell us a tremendous amount of the geology of the Moon, its relationship to the geology of the Earth, how the two are related, how we can better determine what’s going on on the Earth. These are the kinds of things that we have to assess in the next five or six years. Now, I can’t honestly say what’s going to be the answer five or six years from now — do we, in fact, want to go back to the Moon again? Perhaps the answer will be no. Perhaps we don’t want to go back for 100 years. If you say, ‘All right, in 1985, automatically, fund $3 billion annually for the second expedition to the Moon,’ I would say I couldn’t give you an honest answer. If you had to force me to make a decision now, I would say no, let’s wait five years.
And would that reasoning apply to Mars?
Oh, I think so, yeah.
Why is now the time to return to the Moon and to go to Mars?
Because in going back to the Moon, we’re going to learn how to go to Mars. Now, as a practical matter, we’re not going to be there until late in the decade in the 2030s, so as we get prepared to go to Mars, first of all, how long is it going to take you? It’s going to take you 8 to 10 months to get there. Once you get there, you’re going to have to stay a minimum of a year because the planets have to come back into realignment where it’s closest so that you can get back to Earth. So we’re going to learn habitats and protection and systems and new technology on the Moon that will enable us to go to Mars and to stay as long as a year in order to be able to get back to Earth.
A year ago, the Pentagon officially released three videos that were already circulating online. The videos were from 2004 and 2015, and they showed unidentified objects on radar, performing in uncharacteristic ways.
My gosh. They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots west. Look at that thing, dude.
The director of National Intelligence has just declassified a nine-page report that is a preliminary assessment of UAPs, unexplained aerial phenomenon, what we all used to call UFOs. Of the 144 UAP reports between 2004 and 2021, only one was identified in high confidence. The other 143 are still mysterious. What did you think of the key findings of that report?
Well, I’ve read that report, and two years ago, in a classified setting in the Senate Armed Services Committee, I talked to the pilots, and they are absolutely convinced that they saw something. They locked their radar onto it, they followed it, and then, all of a sudden, it would move. And it had no exhaust. It had no plume. It had no visible wings or any kind of engines. So we don’t know what it is. But it’s something because, as you mentioned, over 140 sightings and maybe a couple of dozen that are really very specific sightings by very credible sources. And so, what is it? We don’t know. NASA has a program searching for life in the universe. It’s called Space Astrobiology. We’re looking for signs of life on Mars. We’re looking in the project that’s going to Venus now to see is there life in that atmosphere. We also listen in the universe. We have a grant program for people listening in the universe for any kind of intelligent signal. So we don’t know what this phenomenon is, but we sure need to find out.
According to the report, more, quote, ‘scientific knowledge’ may be needed to understand some of the objects. The report reads, quote… Senator, they’re saying that our science is not good enough to understand the phenomena that was observed. I know you say we don’t know what it is, but what do you think it is?
Well, I don’t know. I hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth, because then they have technology, if that’s the case, that we do not have. But the answer to your question is, I do not know.
Do you believe there’s life in another part of the universe?
I sure do. And let me tell you why. The universe is 13.5 billion years old. We’re even finding now other suns that very likely have planets, that we call exoplanets, circulating around, and we’re looking for signs of one with a habitable atmosphere that would duplicate what we have in our solar system with planet Earth. And so do I think in a universe that is so big that there is another sun in another galaxy, that that sun has planets revolving around it? You bet I believe that. And very likely, if there is, the chemical composition, as all those gases amassed around and formed the planets, the chemical composition could produce life. And that’s what we’re exploring.
Does NASA have a plan, Senator, for what it would do should a UAP turn out to be a space alien?
No, but the first thing we’d want to do is to find out if it’s friend or foe. But, you know, we’re not to that point because we just don’t know what this phenomenon is. I think with all those sightings that you referenced, there’s something there. This is not an optical illusion or a radar blip that’s a mistake. When you talk to those Navy pilots, they’re convinced because they saw it, and they tracked it.
Senator, of course, one of the possibilities is that this is a foreign adversary’s advanced technology or perhaps our own advanced technology that is highly classified. What is the probability that that’s what this is?
Well, I hope it’s ours that is highly secret, because this kind of propulsion that has no wings and doesn’t have an exhaust and suddenly darts from here to there in an instant, covering a distance at speeds that are incredible, I hope it’s ours. But according to our government, they’re telling us it is not.
Well, then you can understand the curiosity that we’re out looking for other life, we believe it’s there, we have unidentified objects flying in our own airspace, but we don’t have a plan for aliens?
Well, I had a wonderful plan when I watched Steven Spielberg’s ‘E.T.,’ and he was a friendly little fella. But we just don’t know. We don’t know what this phenomenon is.
All right. Richard Branson is scheduled to join Virgin Galactic, a space test next week. Jeff Bezos plans to be on board his own Blue Origin spacecraft during the first manned mission later this month. And I know you think that this is a great thing. How does NASA think about itself in the context of private-sector investment in space exploration and its own role?
More power to these space billionaires. Now, they’re not going into orbit. They’re just going on an 11- or 15-minute ride to the edge of space, have about three minutes of zero G, and then come back. You will start to have private astronauts early next year start going into orbit around the Earth. And we will have private astronauts that will come under the tutelage of a professional former astronaut that will visit the space station. So there’s a whole new explosion of new kind of uses of space in the private sector.
SpaceX rockets built by Elon Musk have already been used to power NASA missions. And SpaceX is designing a lunar lander that is intended to take humans back to the Moon. You know, there are some who argue that NASA should stay out of the business of building rockets and that this should be left to the private sector. There is a view that NASA’s role in space exploration should be to set the vision for the country and then partner with the private sector who can do a better job of controlling costs and meeting deadlines. What’s your response to that?
Well, that was the whole theory of the space bill, the NASA bill of 2010, was to have the best of both worlds. Now, always, NASA has depended on the commercial sector. All of our previous flights to the Moon, for example, were all done with private companies, with NASA overseeing them. In effect, you’re having a version of that right now as we’re going back to the Moon with the first woman and the first person of color.
Let me ask you — because China and Russia have announced that they have plans to launch a spacecraft as soon as October to look for ice on the Moon, and they say that they are going to also build a permanent research base at the South Pole of the Moon by 2030, it begs the question of are we entering an age of a new space race, Senator?
Personally, I think we are, because I think the Chinese have a very aggressive space program. Just within the last six months, they’ve landed on Mars. They’re only the second nation to have landed on Mars. Now, we’ve been on the surface of Mars since the 1970s, but they’re the second. Look what they’ve done just a few weeks ago. They now launched a space station, and now they have it occupied with their taikonauts. And this announcement that they’re partnering with Russia, that should give us pause, as well, because Russia has been our partner when they were the Soviet Union in 1975 when we had Apollo-Soyuz. And they have built the International Space Station with us. And my opinion is that they will continue to be our partner on the International Space Station. But we’ve got to watch a new space race with the Chinese government.
Is a space race good for innovation and exploration?
Competition is always good.
The critics would say even with Russia and China teaming up, they really don’t present enough of an existential threat for us to focus as uniquely and singularly as we did on the space race in the ’60s and ’70s.
Well, it depends on how you want to measure that. Do you want, for example, for China, to have them land all of these missions that they’re planning on the South Pole, which is the place where there should be a lot of ice, and, therefore, you have fuel and you have oxygen? They say it’s an international scientific mission. Well, what happens if they suddenly get there, and we’re not there, and they say, ‘No, it’s an exclusive economic zone. You can’t come in’? So you always want to be prepared? I don’t think the United States wants to be second on anything. And I think that’s why you’re seeing the vigorous support of the Biden administration with our space program.
One ‘gee whiz’ moment on the horizon is the launch of the new space telescope that is being advertised as being able to look much closer at the beginning of time. This is the James Webb Telescope. What does NASA hope it might find, Senator?
It’s going to look back in time to the beginning of the development of the universe. As a result, we’re going to find out more about the development. In finding out about that, we’re going to find out how did all of these solar systems occur in all of these millions and millions of galaxies. And so we’re going to be able to determine what happened that we are so fortunate on planet Earth that we had a habitable atmosphere that will sustain life. And by the way, the more and more that we find out about that, we can be better stewards of our own planet and protect the life we have here on this planet.
One final question. Given what we know about the UAPs, when is the right time, Senator, for us to come up with a plan to handle intelligent life that we’re looking for?
Well, we better identify it first. And once we identify it, then we’ll know what to do. We don’t have any idea if suddenly an alien is going to appear. This is still great speculation. But we’re in the search for life out there, and this phenomenon that these Navy pilots have seen, let’s find out about it. What is it? And then we can deal with it.
For all the contingency plans that the U.S. government has on every shelf, in every binder, I would think that we would be more prepared for that possible eventuality than you say that we are.
It is what it is.
Senator Nelson, thank you very much for joining me on ‘Firing Line’ to talk about space and NASA under your leadership.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible in part by… And by… Corporate funding is provided by… You’re watching PBS.
For the first time on camera... Commander Chad Underwood clarifies and informs what happened when he encountered and recorded what is now the most famous modern UFO footage of all-time. Cmdr. Underwood is a badass Navy Weapon Systems Officer from VFA-41 (the legendary Black Aces). He was flying in an F/A-18 Super Hornet - and was responsible for fighting the aircraft. Underwood’s testimony represents the first time in history a military “whizzo” recorded a UFO during operations - and the encounter footage has been confirmed directly by the United States Government as being ACTUAL footage of an Advanced Aerospace Vehicle of unknown origin - a real UFO.
Cmdr. Underwood’s account and footage also represents independent corroborating evidence to accompany the experience of Cmdr. David Fravor - the man who CHASED a TIC TAC shaped UFO with his fighter jet for our military.
The advanced and unidentified craft they observed and engaged that day - was able to outpace & outmaneuver our nation's most advanced war planes. It did in-fact “zoom off” to the left of Underwood’s wing - and it broke the lock on his ATFLIR targeting pod. It had no typical aeronautics or aerospace propulsion signatures - no tail, no wings, no exhaust plumes - and it also was able to Offensively Jam our fighter plane's radar & weapons systems. This is NOT an isolated event - quite the opposite.
Under the circumstances of this encounter - this is considered an ACT OF WAR by the United States Department of Defense. And typically - there are consequences. However - nothing about Cmdr. Underwood’s & Cmdr. Fravor’s experiences - were typical.
What you are about to hear in this interview is important. It has historic value. It’s evidence - of advanced and unknown aerospace vehicles operating in our restricted airspace - with impunity. Displaying instantaneous acceleration and impossible speeds - technology, we simply do not have. If this is not a National Security issue - I don’t know what is. Certainly, this is an existential conundrum - and it’s time we face the UFO reality head on - whatever it might represent.But let’s hear what Commander Underwood has to say about it - after all - he is the man that filmed it… and he was there.
"Some of this might be a little too shocking for us to handle all at once, so they might instead try to ease us into it a bit", physicist Kevin Knuth said. I believe it would revolutionize and rock our world when proven true. However, what’s true at this point is that the evidence is overwhelming that there is a truly unexplained phenomenon which deserves concentrated scientific examination.
Re the issue of G forces, the late nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman told me in August 2006 that “a trained pilot can perform a tracking task while being accelerated at 14 Gs for 2 Minutes, that is an accel of about 300 mph per sec., would be going 36,000 mph at the end of the 2 minutes. One can stand 30 Gs (0-600 mph) for one second and probably much more for shorter times. Colonel Stapp took 43 Gs for 3/4 of a second when his rocket sled slowed down rapidly from 620 mph to zero... eyeballs were sore. The escape rocket on the Apollo Command module would have provided 13 Gs if the module had to be shoved off the top of the Saturn 5 rocket.”
Physicist Takes A Serious Look At Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Courtesy Department of Defense
Screen capture from the 'Gimbal Video' taken aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt near the Florida coast in 2015.
In case you may have missed it, a big news story has been bubbling to the surface. The U.S. Navy confirmed that earlier leaked videos did, in fact, show what they call UAP's or unidentified aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has admitted they've been studying them and recently NASA has announced its own investigation. So it seems as if the government is concerned about the national security threat these phenomena may pose.
Academia has been slow to take up the subject, possibly for fear of ridicule, but even that is changing. Professor Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics at the University in Albany. Among other things, he is a former NASA research scientist at the Ames Research Center.
All the reports consist of reliable eyewitness testimony and, more importantly, corroborating radar data. In the Nimitz case, objects were tracked on radar several times, descending from 28,000 feet, which is about five miles up, down to sea level in about 8.7 seconds. How fast is that? Knuth did the math.
"So those accelerations we estimated were on the order of about 5000 G's, which is 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity, which is really crazy. Our fighter jets can really only handle about 13 G's before the wings get ripped off," he said.
At midpoint on the way down, the craft would have been traveling at approximately 35,000 miles per hour through the air and without a sonic boom. Knuth says he's disappointed there has not been more serious study done by scientists.
"For me, it's a little disconcerting." he said. "We've had 70 years, three quarters of a century where we've had these things flying in our airspace. They show up in military bases. They show up over nuclear weapons sites, and virtually nothing is known about them. And I look at this as probably, I think, eventually when we finally learn what these things are — this is going to be one of the greatest intelligence failures in history," said Knuth.
What does Knuth believe is the most likely explanation of these UAP's? He says it might be reasonable to assume they're built by a government or an aerospace company,"...except for a few important points," he said. "One is the accelerations are really anomalous to the point where it's really not clear how the physics would work in that case. So whoever has been making these things would have had to do not just have one technological leapfrog, but it would be multiple technological leapfrogs. And that would be quite surprising."
He added: "And it would be surprising to have a company or a nation who has this technology but doesn't use it. And more importantly, these things have been observed before. People have been able to fly."
There are skeptics. Some say these sightings are actually low tech drones or even balloons launched by adversaries that are fooling the observers. It's clear, though, that the government is concerned. The director of national intelligence has been directed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to work with the Defense Department to produce a report on UAP sightings by June 25.
Knuth said of the upcoming report, "I expect that there probably will be a public component to the report and the classified component to the report, and the public component will probably leave things a bit up in the air, whereas I would hope that the classified version would actually have more information."
Knuth says if the report hints at anything other than worldly technology, information will be slow to be released.
"Some of this might be a little too shocking for us to handle all at once, so they might instead try to ease us into it a bit." he said.
Senator Rubio's latest statement, regarding the UFO issue.
"These are the facts. The facts are that there are things flying over our military installations. They don’t belong to us. They seem to evidence some technological advancement that we don’t have and have never seen. And they’re not ours. We have no idea who they are. Just the fact that stuff is flying near our military installations in restricted airspace. That’s my view of it. Look, maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for it. Maybe there isn’t, I don’t know. I mean, what if this is, for example, some technological leap that we get surprised by while we’re building aircraft carriers, some adversaries building submarines that can launch small drones that fly at speeds we’ve never seen before with no propulsion, no wings and the like and we didn’t know about it. I mean, that been one heck of a technological leap and a huge strategic surprise. So we have to know what the stuff is, we have to at least try to know what these things are. I’ve never seen one. I’m only going off what dozens of highly trained military pilots, the best pilots in the world who we entrust our national security to, are saying to us, that’s what I’m going off of.
Sen. Marco Rubio On Jan. 6th, John Cena’s “Hostage Video” & UFOs
On Fox Across America with Jimmy Failla, Sen. Marco Rubio gave his takes on a wide range of issues from why he voted against the Jan. 6th Commission, to John Cena’s apology video to why he thinks there should be more investigation into the reports of UFOs near military installations.
“They want to keep that whole story alive. The whole issue is it was a terrible day, a terrible day. What happened should never have happened, it should never happen again. And everyone responsible for all of it, if you went in there and you attacked police officers and you did this and that, you should go to jail. And they are, they’re being prosecuted right now as we speak. The Justice Department has hundreds and hundreds of open criminal investigations. And as part of these criminal investigations, they’re investigating everything and they’re going to find out everything, that’s all there, that’s all been looked at. The Democrats subjected this country to an impeachment trial of a president no longer in office, that it looked at all kinds of evidence and put that all together and put it out there on national television. The Capitol Police Commission has studied the security breakdowns that led to that day. Individual committees in the House and Senate are still looking at this and about things on that day. So this has been widely investigated.”
“What this is in my mind, and everyone should just cut the crap and just admit what it is because it’s the truth. They want a political weapon. What they want to be able to do is have a commission where they can say, I want to speak to Congressman so-and-so. I want to subpoena him for testimony. And somebody will say they have nothing to do with it. Like under what proof? And it’s like, whoa, what are you hiding? Why don’t you come testify? And now that they’ve smeared Congressman So-and-so or at least raise doubts about what they had to do with that day. And that’s perfect because that may help them beat them next year in the election. It’s a complete political weapon and that’s what they’ve designed it as. And Nancy Pelosi is a partisan. She’s a political partisan. She’s not a policy person. She’s driven by winning elections and maintaining power. In many ways, that’s what her job is, I suppose. And it’s just a question of whether she wants to drive that narrative.”
“There isn’t a single movie studio in Hollywood that can produce a movie with a Chinese communist government bad guy. Yeah. You can’t do it because it won’t be distributed in China. And they don’t want to walk away from that market. So that’s how you get John Cena, who by all accounts is a nice guy, doing this basically hostage video last week apologizing for calling Taiwan a country that’s already happening. I’m not saying he’s an evil human being for doing it. I’m just telling you, he didn’t come up with that on his own. I guarantee you someone called him from the studio that’s producing something and said you better get something out there right now because we’re going to get hit at the box office and it’s going to come out of your check or out of your proceeds. They want the movie to be widely distributed in China. They’re making money off of that.”
“These are the facts. The facts are that there are things flying over our military installations. They don’t belong to us. They seem to evidence some technological advancement that we don’t have and have never seen. And they’re not ours. We have no idea who they are. Just the fact that stuff is flying near our military installations in restricted airspace. That’s my view of it. Look, maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for it. Maybe there isn’t, I don’t know. I mean, what if this is, for example, some technological leap that we get surprised by while we’re building aircraft carriers, some adversaries building submarines that can launch small drones that fly at speeds we’ve never seen before with no propulsion, no wings and the like and we didn’t know about it. I mean, that been one heck of a technological leap and a huge strategic surprise. So we have to know what the stuff is, we have to at least try to know what these things are. I’ve never seen one. I’m only going off what dozens of highly trained military pilots, the best pilots in the world who we entrust our national security to, are saying to us, that’s what I’m going off of.”
Speaking of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a new series UFO Witness aired on Discovery+ last Thursday
Speaking of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a new series UFO Witness aired on Discovery+ last Thursday
NEW YORK (January 11, 2021) - We are definitely not alone! For more than 70 years, the U.S. government has been documenting sightings and cases of unidentified flying objects. In cooperation with former Project Blue Book investigator Jennie Zeidman, former federal agent and paranormal investigator Ben Hansen reopens case files of some of the most astounding UFO encounters in history, files that have been hidden from the public for decades. In the new series, UFO WITNESS, launching Thursday, January 14 exclusively on discovery+, these findings are finally seeing the light of day.
Zeidman was the last surviving member of the Air Force's top-secret UFO investigation called Project Blue Book, which looked into sightings from 1952 through 1970. She has broken her silence, speaking publicly for the first time about her decades of research - motivated to share her expertise because she believes we've been visited by UFOs before - and fears Earth is under extraterrestrial surveillance. Sadly, Zeidman passed away in April 2020, but she has given discovery+ exclusive access to the files from the chief scientific consultant of Project Blue Book, Dr. Allen J. Hynek, to help continue his investigations.
With unprecedented access to more than 10,000 of Dr. Hynek's case files, Hansen believes the answers to UFOs in America are hidden in the cases of the past. Also aiding Hansen on his quest is Mark O'Connell - an accomplished UFO investigator, Dr. Hynek biographer and member of J. Allen Hynek's Center for UFO Studies. Together, they will uncover the secrets of the past to shed new light on today's freshest UFO encounters.
"UFO Witness" is available on the discovery+ app starting January 14, 2021. The series follows UFO researcher Ben Hansen as he revisits cases originally investigated by Dr. J. Allen Hynek of the Air Force's Project Blue Book. With the help of researcher Mark O'Connell and Hynek's assistant Jennie Zeidman, Hansen compares the archives from Hynek to look for patterns repeating in modern-day UFO cases. See sneak peek at +/- 2:07.
CIA declassifies treasure trove of UFO documents for anyone to download
The CIA has finally made public its records on UFO investigations
A treasure trove of UFO-related documents has been published online by the CIA so that anyone can download a copy of it.
The database contains hundreds of formerly top secret files on what the CIA calls ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs).
The campaign to make the documents public dates back to the 1980s and was spearheaded by John Greenwald Jr. He now operates the website – known as ‘Black Vault’ – where the contents of the dossiers can be downloaded.
Many of the UAPs in the files may be tricks of the light or a misjudgment by a pilot. But some of them became targets investigated by the Pentagon.
‘Around 20 years ago, I had fought for years to get additional UFO records released from the CIA,’ Greenewald told Motherboard on Monday.
‘It was like pulling teeth! I went around and around with them to try and do so, finally achieving it. I received a large box, of a couple thousand pages, and I had to scan them in one page at a time.’
According to Greenwald, the documents are the result of 10,000 Freedom of Information reports. And the government agency made it as difficult as possible for anyone else to get eyes on their findings.
‘The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to use their records in a reasonable manner,’ Greenwald told the site. ‘They offer a format that is very outdated (multi page .tif) and offer text file outputs, largely unusable, that I think they intend to have people use as a “search” tool. In my opinion, this outdated format makes it very difficult for people to see the documents, and use them, for any research purpose.’
Greenwald said there have been thousands of downloads of the files within the first 24 hours of them being made available.
And some of the scenarios described within the documents could have come straight out of The X-Files.
In one case, a small Russian town suffered an explosion ripping the roofs from buildings, blowing apart windows and leaving a 90-foot wide crater. Residents reported seeing a ‘moving fiery sphere’ but the local military concluded it was just an ammonium nitrate blast.
UFO enthusiasts have been attempting to get access to the files for 20 years
(Credits: Getty Images)
Another story deals with a Bosnian fugitive who claimed to have come into contact with aliens.
Yet another file deals with a CIA Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology who ‘exhibited interest’ in a redacted object ‘which was handcarried to his office’.
Interestingly, this information comes just as the Pentagon is expected to release yet more classified UFO documents into the public domain.
In December, President Trump signed a $2.3 trillion Covid-19 relief bill that included an act stating government agencies must publish a report in the next six months.
Attached to the bill was a provision requested by Sen. Marco Rubio who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee to include ‘detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data’ in restricted US airspace.
This provision, attached as a ‘committee comment’, also requests data and intelligence collected or held by the Office of Naval Intelligence.
It means the Pentagon could reveal even more information relating to a highly sensitive investigation government project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
In March last year, the Pentagon piqued global interest in UFOs by releasing three declassified videos showing what it tagged as a UAP.
Astonished navy fighter pilots filmed objects apparently moving at angles and speeds far outstripping any man-made craft.
Navy pilots filmed this UAP travelling faster than man-made craft
(US Navy)
Curiously, the Pentagon released the videos without having any obligation to do so. The trickle of clues has also included pictures of the secretive Area 51 military base, reported on by Metro.co.uk on Thursday, showing a strange triangular shape inside a hanger.
Nick Pope, a British UFO expert who worked for the Ministry of Defence, told Metro: ‘The clock is now ticking on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s demand for a report on the UFO phenomenon from the Director of National Intelligence.
‘A response is due within 180 days of the enactment of the Covid-19 relief bill, because this bill contained the Intelligence Authorization Act, where the UFO requirement was articulated.
‘But the US Department of Defense has known since June of the committee’s request, and the US Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force is probably already working on drafting the response, so we may get it sooner than the late June deadline. This report, important though it may be, is only one part of a wider process.
‘There’s a lot going on and we’re going to see some big UFO stories in 2021.’
British astrophysicist Andrew Pike seemingly postulates in his 700+-page new book ‘The Rendlesham File: Britain’s Roswell?’ that the late December, 1980 Unexplained events in the Rendlesham Forest area were most likely attributable to such rare natural phenomena as plasma or ball lightning and secret microwave technology experiments, possibly involving secret military microwave-powered UAVs or drones, stealthy and triangular in shape.
In that case, I assume, there should be existing classified documentation someplace pertaining to the details (the preparatory measures and the after-evaluation) of this secret test operation. I assume some high-level individuals at the base were briefed on these experiments beforehand and were told to keep quiet? The (deliberate) disinformation campaign set up since then — as raised by retired US Air Force Col. Charles Halt (who was the former deputy base commander and firsthand witness) on the Paracast of May 26, 2013, referring to that effect to the lighthouse stuff, Larry Warren, Jim Penniston, John Burroughs and a fake colonel Wilson — has been part of a continuing effort to keep this microwave experimentation story from leaking out? In what context are we to see the late ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s reply to the late UFO researcher Georgina Bruni: “You must have the facts and you can’t tell the people”?
Why at such an important nuclear-armed base at the height of the cold war? Wouldn’t it be safer to perform or test such exotic experimental technology at remote locations specifically built for such purposes, like Area 51, far away from prying eyes? And why are these specific experiments still under wraps considering we are dealing here with 37-year-old technology? I assume (classified) stealth and UAV technology has greatly progressed since then, and “old" stealth and UAV technology developed over the past several decades have been unclassified and are known now, which I believe can also be applied to “old" microwave-powered or beam-powered propulsion technologies. So what makes this alleged microwave operation which supposedly took place at that base so special then that it cannot be disclosed, 37 years after the facts?
Andrew Pike's postulation tallies with the conclusions presented in the 2006 publicly released 400+-page report of the Ministry of Defence’s three-year secret study, codenamed Project Condign. The report (whose author is still unknown) basically states that it is an indisputable fact that UFOs or UAPs exist, but there is no evidence they have an extraterrestrial source, and within that context references are made to "natural, but relatively rare phenomena” such as ball lightning and atmospheric plasmas as likely explanations for some UAP events. The report also commented on the Rendlesham case: “The well-reported Rendlesham Forest/Bentwaters event is an example where it might be postulated that several observers were probably exposed to UAP radiation for longer than normal UAP sighting periods. There may be other cases which remain unreported. It is clear that the recipients of these effects are not aware that their behaviour/perception of what they are observing is being modified.”
Pike’s position also corresponds with the late arch-skeptic Philip Klass’ assertions which Klass wrote down in his 1968 290-page book ‘UFOs — Identified’. In this book, he advances the hypothesis that some UFOs are generated by atmospheric phenomena such as ball lightning or plasma caused by nearby electrical power lines. However, he candidly admits that "The plasma theory encounters some difficulty in explaining the very loud roar which Zamora said he heard over the sound of his speeding car," although he added, "UFOs are almost invariably described as being noiseless.” Speaking about the April 24, 1964 Lonnie Zamora case, I have noticed that UFO researcher Kevin Randle has recently published a new 288-page book about that fascinating case, ‘Encounter in the Desert: The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro’
The late 1960s remind me of the 1969 publicly released 900+-page 'Final Report of the Scientific Study Of Unidentified Flying Objects' (also known as 'The Condon Report’), a two-year study which was conducted by the University of Colorado under contract to the United States Air Force. Like its British counterpart Project Condign in 2000, this US study basically came to the same conclusion in 1968, i.e. "the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings is the least likely explanation of UFOs”, meaning that they are most likely of conventional origin. I’m not quite sure how this study evaluated such little understood phenomena as plasma or ball lightning as likely causes for UFOs back then. However, within the context of its conclusion, I assume the research team also considered or delved into these areas. As most of you know, the study’s director, Dr. Edward Condon, was very dismissive in his conclusions towards UFOs as being of exotic origin or something of extreme value which could advance scientific knowledge. This report has therefore acted as the Holy Bible for non-believers, while the study itself is actually very acceptive of a truly unexplained UFO phenomenon deserving further scientific study, if one carefully considers or reviews its data. As retired nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman remarks in his 2008 book ‘Flying Saucers and Science (p. 53): “It comes as a great surprise to many that, according to a UFO subcommittee of the world’s largest group of space scientists — the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics — one could come to the opposite conclusions as Dr. Condon based on the data in the report. Any phenomena with 30 percent unidentified classifications is certainly worth further investigation, as the AIAA noted."
Art Campbell’s wife informed me yesterday that her beloved husband passed away on October 28. This sad news really came as a surprise to me. I sent her my deepest condolences on her loss.
My email exchanges with Art Campbell have always been very amicable in nature and I’ll always be very grateful to him for the free documentation he has sent me over the years pertaining to UFOs, in particular to his long research re the alleged July, 1947 UFO crash at The Plains of San Augustin and the associated metallurgical analyses of wreckage which was found at the site. For those of you who didn’t know him, I’ve included a link to his website.
This link to a January 1, 1968 John Keel letter http://www.johnkeel.com/?p=1449 as well as this one referring to John Keel's article "The Flying Saucer Subculture" https://www.scribd.com/.../The-Flyi... recently posted on social media with the following statement: "John Keel considered himself a Fortean, not a ufologist. Mark Pilkington dedicated Mirage Men to Keel and said that he "was first and foremost a story-teller," and his work "knowingly blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction... Keel charged his ideas with the power of myth and so ensured their continued survival long beyond his own lifetime.” In this video from a 1992 Fortean lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOY...), Keel discussed UFOs as being living energy (that sometimes burn witnesses), their hallucinatory nature, and their causing dogs to bark.”
The individual who posted the John Keel open letter finds it a good one and according to another individual this letter still rings true to this day. John Keel’s "The Flying Saucer Subculture" was even described as "an unflinching history of the first two decades of ufology and Essential reading”. As you will see below, I have also included a 2002 article from noted UFO researcher and historian Jerome Clark re the late John Keel as a counterbalance. Stanton Friedman informed me in his May 29, 1998 letter (I didn't have a computer back then) that "John Keel has made so many false claims I can't count them.” And as the late James McDonald observed about Keel, as can be read in Jerry Clark's piece John Keel vs UFOlogy: “you’re not in a particularly strong position to criticize someone like myself for speculating on the UFO problem. I might tick off, but won’t take time to, a pretty long list of your own speculations that are not well supported in your writings. As a matter of fact, it is not your own speculations that I find disquieting, but your practiced style of writing as if you had some deep insights into baffling mysteries that no one else has plumbed. "I simply do not understand you. You just spin one mystery inside another and never get anything across in any concrete terms.”
In the second paragraph of John Keel's article "The Flying Saucer Subculture”, it reads: “An unidentified flying object,” according to Dr. Edward U. Condon’s definition, is “the stimulus for a report made byone or more individuals of something seen in the sky (or anobject thought to be capable of flight but seen when landed on the earth) which the observer could not identify as having anordinary natural origin ..." This observation is flat-out wrong because Hynek said that a sighting report should not become a "UFO" until it has been screened for IFO type conventional explanations by scientifically competent personnel. He severely criticized Condon's definition of a UFO as merely whatever a witness says he/she can't identify, and said that an expert must make that evaluation.
In the thread where these links were posted, Stanton Friedman was described as a “professional UFO lecturer”, a "UFO Superstar” or a “promotor” of false claims like the Marjorie Fish star map, the MJ-12 documents and the Aztec UFO crash hoax "repeating the same false claims in his lectures for decades” and "whose material is stale and tiresome”. My reaction to such accusations has always been that these individuals should debate Stanton Friedman — I even give them his contact address — and present these false claims to him, instead of writing all kinds of silly comments on social media unbeknownst to Friedman. Perhaps they already know they wouldn’t stand a chance when debating Friedman, which reminds me of amateur astronomer and debunker James McGaha who engaged in a two-hour debate with Stanton Friedman at Middle Tennessee State University on January 24, 2004. Friedman won hands down, because he had the relevant facts in hand whereas James McGaha put his mouth in gear without presenting any evidence.
It has been my personal observation that there seems to be so much undeserved hostility towards researchers like Friedman who has been viciously attacked and accused of doggedly standing behind his ETH conclusions for some UFO cases, while there seems to be overly blind acceptance and friendliness towards researchers à la John Keel and James W. Moseley disseminating obscurantism and unreliable, vague and perpetual story-telling and trickery. It's really astonishing to observe that some individuals on social media, notably at UFO Updates’ Facebook page, seemingly prefer to choose the Glenn Becks and the Clowns of UFOlogy or the Fast Writers among UFOlogists with the weirdest mystical ideas about the nature and origin of UFOs — as long as it isn’t a "nuts and bolt" ET - over reliable and clear-headed researchers who have made straightforward observations based on years of personal investigations or based on their knowledge of specific (scientific) areas like e.g. Stanton Friedman and other intelligent, meticulous individuals I know but whom I won’t mention here. Of course, the latter researchers can be wrong or make mistakes, but are they wrong or do they make mistakes all the time? That is a big difference! Any expert in whatever specialised area is subject to mistakes and such. If something is true based on the factual data or evidence gathered through personal investigations, does it become invalid simply by repeating it time after time in lectures? According to some it clearly does. To me, that is rather strange reasoning or logic. Perhaps one of the best tentative but straightforward conclusions made about UFOs, at least to me, is that of the late atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald: "On the basis of the evidence I have examined, and on the basis of my own weighing of alternative hypotheses, I now regard Hypothesis 7 [Extraterrestrial devices of some surveillance nature] as the one most likely to prove correct. My scientific instincts lead me to hedge that prediction just to the extent of suggesting that if the UFOs are not of extramundane origin, then I suspect that they will prove to be something very much more bizarre, something of perhaps even greater scientific interest than extraterrestrial devices” (Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects (p. 5), 1968).
As to the late James W. Moseley, noted UFO researcher and historian Jerry Clark wrote a critical review in 2002 of Moseley's "Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist" which he co-wrote with the late Karl T. Pflock. Jerry Clark sent me this review "The Trivialist" many years ago. I still have it.
And as to Mark Pilkington and his Mirage Men, Stanton Friedman had sent me his review in 2015 about Pilkington’s poor “research”, which you will find enclosed. He had already sent me his column the year before. Friedman also informed me that those who had attended Pilkington’s lecture at the 2015 IUFOC know how many people left early who were totally unimpressed, adding that many thanked him afterwards for pointing out Pilkington's deficiencies at the end of his presentation.
So it wasn’t just me who thought the late and great John Keel made stuff up…..
JOHN KEEL vs UFOLOGY
by Jerome Clark
[published in Fortean Times 156 (2002), pp. 39-42]
On March 17, 1969, John A. Keel, occult journalist, composed a three-page letter to James E. McDonald, atmospheric physicist. Except for their mutual fascination with the UFO phenomenon and their outsized personalities, it would be difficult to imagine two men less alike. Between them they personified the extremes of 1960s ufology.
One addressing himself almost exclusively to radical ufologists and Forteans itching for an exciting alternative to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) harked back to the 1940s, to Richard S. Shaver and N. Meade Layne, and, even earlier, to classical demonology and supernatural folk belief. The other allying himself with the most conservative ufologists and speaking to his fellow scientists and to elite institutions possessing the wherewithal to fund UFO research and to overcome entrenched resistance to the phenomenon sought to drag ufology out of its marginality and to transform it into a branch of normal science. Barely more than two years later, McDonald would be dead by his own hand, and Keel would live on to write The Mothman Prophecies and other books and to remain an active presence into the 1980s and an enduring influence even now.
It can be fairly said that if McDonald wanted to domesticate UFOs and place them in the mainstream, Keel preferred them so wild and woolly that the ETH would pale into banality by comparison. The whole structure of post-Enlightenment civilization itself would collapse before Keel’s shape-changing ultraterrestrials demons with a fancy new moniker became a generally recognized species. In Keel’s view, McDonald, an accomplished and (at least until he took up UFO advocacy) well-regarded member of the University of Arizona’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, needed educating and not just about the supernatural reality underlying UFOs and allegedly related manifestations: poltergeists, fairies, Sasquatch, Republicans, in short just about anything else not immediately explainable. Keel, using a rhetorical technique that over the years would become wearily familiar, remarked that
“McDonald suffered from a regretable [sic] emotionalism & apparent in many of your public statements.”
Moreover, Keel observed, “You often tend to substitute speculation for facts.”
McDonald was associating with the wrong people, for example the ufologists associated with NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a relatively cautious, pro-ETH private group headed by UFO author and retired U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe). These sorts were buffs who adopted a conclusion before they had any evidence. Keel, on the other hand, drew on extensive field studies and personal experiences, not to mention the valid, independent studies he had conducted outside the buffery sphere of reference. Among other things, he had established conclusively that known poltergeist cases and known UFO waves correlate precisely with each other, thus substantiating Keel’s theory that the poltergeist phenomenon is a UFO effect.
Keel declared that his comprehensive study of all religious traditions proved divine miracles and UFO contacts also to be identical at their root. No specifics accompanied these assertions, though he did urge McDonald to look up recent Keel articles in such august journals as the pulp cheesecake-and-adventure magazine Male and Ray Palmer’s pulp hollow-earth-championing Flying Saucers. On the last of his three pages, he did mention West Virginia contactee Woodrow Derenberger. Highly qualified psychiatrists had given Derenberger a completely clean bill of health. Even more revealingly, one of the doctors involved experienced direct contact himself!
McDonald’s restrained response, written on March 24, observes mildly that
“you’re not in a particularly strong position to criticize someone like myself for speculating on the UFO problem. I might tick off, but won’t take time to, a pretty long list of your own speculations that are not well supported in your writings. As a matter of fact, it is not your own speculations that I find disquieting, but your practiced style of writing as if you had some deep insights into baffling mysteries that no one else has plumbed.”
Writing back with a long letter dated April 2, Keel portrayed himself as the one man who had broken through all the buffery myths and nonsense, conducted not just the field work but the statistical and scientific studies others (such as McDonald, who had only emotional involvement, or NICAP’s obsessive-compulsive paranoid schizophrenics ) had not even thought to try, and found a definite conclusion based upon hard facts.
“The UFOs are transmogrifications. The UFO entities are variations on the age-old elemental types.”
In a much shorter reply McDonald, refusing to rise to the bait, remarked that Keel simply was not making himself clear. When he talked about transmogrifications and age-old elemental phenomena, he wrote,
"I simply do not understand you. You just spin one mystery inside another and never get anything across in any concrete terms."
In a note to himself —McDonald was a compulsive note-taker— he said that he was disinclined to engage in further correspondence.
It was a wise decision. Keel had already declared that the celebrated scientific method has proven to be totally unworkable where UFO investigation and interpretation are concerned.[i] Those who have had access to McDonald’s massive UFO files (housed at the University of Arizona in Tucson) have seen abundant evidence of his commitment to the scientific method.[ii] McDonald, alas, merely a passive observer; could only interview witnesses, weigh testimony, study radar records, consider alternative explanations for sightings, and all the rest. Keel, on the other hand, could actually control UFO events. Once, he claimed, he had conjured up the notion of gillmen, and not long afterwards according to Keel anyway someone actually encountered a gillman. Who, where, or when Keel never let on.
If you believe John Keel, you also believe this: Supernatural gods (ultraterrestrials, hereafter UTs) once ruled directly over the earth but then returned to their abode, the superspectrum (the upper reaches of the electro-magnetic spectrum ), after human beings began to populate the planet. Displeased with the intrusion, the UTs engaged in protracted conflict with Homo sapiens in an effort to resolve this territorial dispute. (Keel does not explain why such presumably superior entities would have to wage the dispute over thousands of years.) The UTs also battled each other, and one group assumed human form so that it could more easily communicate with the Neanderthals, whom it sought to enlist in its physical army.
“The unintended result was sexual intercourse and the creation of the human race as we know it.[iii] This produced strange responses in the offsprings materialized nervous system,” Keel wrote. “Emotions were born. Frequencies were changed. The direct control of the superintelligence was driven from their bodies. They were trapped on Earth, unable to ascend the electromagnetic scale and reenter their etheric world. With the loss of control, they became animals, albeit highly intelligent animals.” [iv]
According to Keel, humanity’s long interaction with the supernatural, as well as the timely intervention of enigmatic, unearthly strangers in the lives of historical personages such as Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X, testifies to the continuing presence of the gods of old, including God, who dwell in the superspectrum. Its manifestations include UFOs and their occupants, monsters, demons, angels, poltergeists, ghosts, and voices in the head.
The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel
“The Devil’s emissaries of yesterday have been replaced by the mysterious men in black,” he stated. “The quasi-angels of Biblical times have become magnificent spacemen. The demons, devils, and false angels were recognized as liars and plunderers by early man. The same impostors now appear as long-haired Venusians.” [v]
“Thus you swallow all but the benign slant of testimony from such notorious characters as George Adamski, Howard Menger, Aladino Felix (aka Dino Kraspedon), and Ernest Arthur Bryant (of the notorious Scoriton episode, in which a reincarnated Adamski returned via spacecraft to rural Devonshire), all contactees of the 1950s and 1960s, all of them with at least to other observers – very serious, some might say fatal, credibility problems.[vi]And then there’s the already-mentioned Woodrow Derenberger and, on the other side of him, Thomas F. Monteleone.”
From November 1966 until he dropped out of sight a few years later, Derenberger, a late-middle-aged sewing-machine salesman, challenged the credulity of even the most slack-jawed with ever more expansive fables of interactions with space people and of jaunts to their home planet, Lanulos ( near the Ganymede star cluster [vii]). Given conservative ufology’s antipathy to contactees, NICAP’s Pittsburgh Subcommittee led a remarkably vigorous, open-minded field investigation into Derenbergers early claims as they were occurring — or, more accurately, evolving — until it arrived at the only conclusion possible: that Derenberger’s yarns owed everything to human invention, nothing to extraterrestrial intervention. A local psychologist drawn into the probe — the one who, Keel told McDonald, experienced direct contact himself! — suffered something of a breakdown, seeing saucers invisible to other family members, meanwhile channeling failed prophecies.
Derenberger’s tall tales figure largely in Mothman Prophecies (1975). Keel, who spent time with Derenberger, rejects any notion that the man was just making it up as he went along. He also cites as supporting evidence the adventures of a University of Maryland student, Tom Monteleone, who claimed also to have met denizens of Lanulos and to have traveled to the home planet, whose inhabitants cavort about it in the nude. Monteleone surfaced after he called a Washington, D.C., radio station on which Derenberger was appearing. As Keel writes in Mothman, Even Woody was surprised by such direct confirmation of his own experiences. After meeting Monteleone personally, Keel determined that Monteleone was privy to subtle details about such things that only true UT encounterers would know about; “thus, I finally had to conclude Tom was on the level.”
Except he wasn’t. Monteleone was, one, a psychology major — that alone ought to have raised a red flag or at least a Keelian eyebrow — and, two, an aspiring (and later successful) science-fiction writer. He had conjured up the story on a lark, as a hoax on a hoaxer. Writing in the May 1979 issue of Omni, he crowed, “I contradicted Mr. Derenberger’s story on purpose, claiming to have seen totally different things on my visit to Lanulos. But on each occasion, he would give ground, make up a hasty explanation, and in the end corroborate my own falsifications. He even claimed to know personally the UFOnaut who contacted me!” [viii]
When these revelations saw print,[ix] Keel did not, no surprise, graciously concede that all those conservative ufologists buffs and cultists in Keelian had been right all along. Keel insisted not only that he had known Monteleone was lying from the start, but that anybody who read what he had written on the subject could see that.[x] Well, not so. To the contrary, Keel had been so wowed by Monteleone’s Lanulosian friend Vadig’s customary farewell “I’ll see you in time” that he cited it as evidence that UFOs come from outside our time frame and [Keel’s italics] “from outside the environment of the known universe.” [xi]
It should be stressed, too, that Keel does not always use the word hoax as the rest of us do, to denote humans fooling, or attempting to fool, other humans. In Keelian, hoaxing more often represents what UTs do to us. Since UTs are virtually all powerful, they can represent themselves as just about anything. Consequently, even the most manifestly preposterous encounter claims are real paranormal events, even if not what they seem to witnesses. Thus, Adamski and Derenberger are telling the truth as they saw it; thus, too, the airship inventors of 1896/97 were disguised UTs (even though practically every sober investigator of the airship period has deduced that such figures did not exist outside the fictions of journalist-pranksters). Thus, anything, and I mean anything, goes.
I have a personal history with Keel, whom I have known since if memory serves early 1967, when Charles Bowen, then editor of Flying Saucer Review, brought us together. We entered into correspondence. I was young, impressionable, modestly read, uncritically minded, and in the fashion of the period susceptible to paranoia. In Forbidden Science: Journals 1957-1969 (1992) Jacques Vallee records the following from his entry of April 3, 1969: “Don [Hanlon] believes that Jerome Clark, a young ufologist from Chicago [sic],[xii] has become so convinced that an extraterrestrial [sic] invasion was imminent that he has been driven close to a breakdown.”
Well, not quite — in April 1969 I was more upset about a break-up with a girl friend than about invading UTs — but it is certainly true that I suffered both an unhealthy degree of fright and an overblown imagination. I was hardly alone. Earlier, in December 1967, I had visited Keel at his Manhattan apartment, where he and a young couple caught up in the excitement were trying on gas masks, anticipating an imminent UT strike on New York City. Reading the correspondence I had with Keel and others back then, I can only cringe at the youthful folly painfully in evidence. At least, I suppose I could say in my defense, I had the excuse of being rather younger than Keel.
In any event, I grew up, and away from Keel, though once he had confided his hope that one day I would be the next generation’s John A. Keel. Though I had thought the parting was amicable, I was wrong. As late as the 1990s, long after our personal interaction consisted in its entirety of no more than the rare pleasant note and the even rarer crossing of paths, he was madly spreading slanders whose subject was lapsed Keelist Jerome Clark. When at last I confronted Keel on the matter, he replied that he was only pointing out the obvious, which is that I… "live in a world of paranoid conspiracies and illiterate misconceptions. To curb this you may need extensive psychotherapy, coupled with drug treatment. You are ill and have been haunted by this illness all your life." And so on. In short, the usual charming way of dispatching critics: they say those things because they’re crazy, in the most clinical sense of the adjective. For good measure, he added the to-me-amusing observation that I have fallen for hoax after hoax. [xiii]
None of this matters much, and my annoyance over this strange little episode passed quickly. Still, besides demonstrating Keel’s often-shown preference for vituperation over reasoned discourse, it underscores his crankiness, in both senses of the word. It’s not that Keel will not lightly abide fools; it’s colleagues he objects to. And come to think of it, why given his medieval-demonologist outlook, his relentless credulity, his charm-challenged anti-intellectualism, and, well, his bad manners — would anybody want to be a colleague of Keel’s?
Contrary to general impression, which is wont to credit him with a more creative imagination than he in fact has, he is not a particularly original thinker. His mentor Meade Layne, founder of the occultish (the uncharitable would say crackpotish) Borderland Sciences Research Associates, got many of his ideas from medium Mark Probert, who channeled teachings from, among others, a 500,000-year-old Tibetan.[xiv] If this is your idea of a reliable source of information, God bless you, but I suspect most of you would elect to look elsewhere. Layne, I might mention, thought the etherians UTs were a generally benign lot. It was Trevor James Constable, a student of Layne’s, who first discerned the dark reality beneath the sunny exterior: The spacemen finally begin to emerge as coteries of unethical invisibles, exerting a psychic despotism over innocent and well-meaning people. [xv]
But Keel has been more widely read, and it is largely through him that ufologists and Forteans, or at least some of them, have plunged into the thickets of occultism and obscurantism, into a realm where words like elemental and superspectrum and ultraterrestrial and transmogrification are actually supposed to mean something.[xvi] Into, in other words, a domain of incoherent theory and dubious data and, finally, numbing irrelevance. If Keel were a humorist like Charles Fort rather than a windmill-tilter like Tiffany Thayer,[xvii] one could smile and shrug it off as an ongoing, offbeat joke. No Fortean, to my knowledge, has ever championed Fort’s sky islands or Ambrose-collectors, knowing that Fort wasn’t championing them, either. But Keel is deadly, gloomily, blusteringly, spittle-spewingly in earnest. Though usually politer and calmer about it, so are the legions of acolytes who since then have dropped a ton of Keelist doctrine on all our heads.
Let me close, however, on a mostly positive note. To the best of my recollection, I have been in Keel’s company three times, possibly four. Even with that limited exposure, I think I can safely testify that there are few more entertaining dinner companions. Though it’s hardly something one would infer from his writing public or private, in restaurants he has a dazzling and wicked sense of humor. I also think Mothman Prophecies is a hugely fun book, even if there are whole chunks of it no sensible human would take seriously for a nanosecond. I hope that the movie based on it is a huge success and that Keel makes a ton of money from it. He deserves to retire in peace. And, if the truth be told, the rest of us deserve to be left in the peace of Keel’s retirement.
i. A New Approach to UFO Witnesses, Flying Saucer Review, May/June 1968.
ii. As well as McDonald’s correspondence with a dizzying range of UFO personalities, from the sane to the certifiable.
iii It is surely pointless to mention here that no living physical anthropologist believes that Neanderthals were the ancestors of Homo sapiens.
iv. Our Haunted Planet (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1971).
v. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
vi. Keel’s explanation for conservative ufologists rejection of claims like these is characteristically ad hominem. In The Flying Saucer Subculture, Journal of Popular Culture 8 (1975), he writes, Interestingly, the hard-core believer [sic] & tends to be over-skeptical & and has an extremely suspicious nature, perhaps because he/she has created an imaginary self-image and constructed the necessary lies to maintain it. Thus they tend to believe that everyone else shares these personality flaws. They often project or transfer their own problems to the UFO witnesses they interview, and many sincere percipients and contactees have been branded liars by UFO enthusiasts who thought they detected their own behavioral problems in them.
vii. Ganymede, of course, is usually thought to be a moon of Jupiter.
viii. Monteleone has his own credibility problems. The Omni confession, devoted chiefly to the ridicule of those foolish enough to believe him, gives the impression that his role as hoaxer was brief and limited. In fact, as late as January 1970, he was making public appearances. In an August 11, 1970, letter to Keel, he stated that the experiences I had with Vadig [his contact from Lanulos] were completely true. This was, of course, long after he had made whatever point he originally intended to make.
ix. Not only in Omni but in a better (and more restrained) piece by Karl T. Pflock; see Anatomy of a UFO Hoax, Fate, November 1980.
x. For example, see Mark Opsasnick’s amusing account in Strange Magazine (Spring 1995). Confronting Keel on his curious assertion that hed always known Monteleone was a fraud, Opsasnick asked, reasonably enough, why, knowing as much, he had still chosen to present it in Mothman Prophecies. Keel snapped, The chapter is about hoaxes! Read the whole chapter! Don’t read one sentence! The whole book says it’s all a crock of shit! Opsasnick notes, I decided to leave it at that. I reread the chapter. It is not about hoaxes. I could only hope that Keel s �statement the published word doesn’t mean anything applies only to this chapter.
xi. The Time Cycle Factor, Flying Saucer Review, May/June 1969.
xii If it matters, I was living in Moorhead, Minnesota, at the time.
xiii. Letter dated March 27, 1996.
xiv. See, for example, Layne’s Mark Probert, Baffling San Diego Medium, Fate, May 1949.
xv. Scientists, Contactees and Equilibrium, Flying Saucer Review, January/February 1960.
xvi. As veteran ufologist Richard Hall once wittily observed (MUFON UFO Journal, August 1977), for all the meaning terms such as these and extra-dimensional, psychical, Magonia, and the like bear, one might as well say that UFOs emanate from the chronosynclastic infindibulum.
xvii. The late James Blish once wrote of Thayer, founder of the Fortean Society, that he advocated almost every imaginable crazy belief. At bottom, he added, every one of these beliefs & turned out to rest on some form of personal devil theory. Cited in Damon Knight’s Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1970).
Stanton Friedman challenged the science fiction community on the existence of UFOs.
Stanton Friedman was like the Perry Mason of the flying saucer world, equipped and ready to defend any statement, destroy any criticism, debunk any myth.
A nuclear physicist, Friedman's background included inside experience working for front-line companies, including General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, and TRW, working on such projects as the development of nuclear flight, fission and fusion space rockets and compact nuclear systems to be applied for space use.
Stanton Friedman's initial involvement came as innocently as many other ufologists—by reading one book. In his case, it was Edward Ruppelt's Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. After many other books, years of research and study, talks with colleagues and others, he decided that, as a scientist, he could conclude that not all, but some UFO's are indeed exploratory vehicles which originated from off the earth.
Data, numbers and logic are the cards in this fact-vs-fiction game, and Friedman insisted that the rules used are straight and consistent. “People ask the wrong questions,” he said. “The question isn't ‘Is every UFO somebody's spacecraft?" The answer is ‘Of course not.’ The real question is, "Are any UFO's somebody else's spacecraft?' and the answer is ‘Yes." It's like asking ‘Is everyone over seven feet tall?" Of course not. ‘Is no one over seven feet tall? Of course not. One can easily get into trouble by asking the wrong question, because then you treat every sighting equally.” One could certainly get into trouble trying to pass off conclusions to Stanton Friedman which had not been thought out.
Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, provided plenty of assumptions for Friedman to knock down. One of the most obvious was Asimov's series of calculations to determine whether there's intelligent life anywhere else in the Universe, which appeared in his book, Is Anyone There? Friedman elaborates:
“He starts by focusing on the unanswerable question of whether or not there are other intelligent life forms in the universe. He accepts a starting number of 640,000,000 Earthlike planets. He whittles this number down by an amazing sequence of assumptions...Earth has had life for about 3 billion years, a civilization for about 10,000 (1/300,000 of its history) and an industrial civilization for about 200 years (1/50 of the time for civilization).”
By dividing 640,000,000 by 300,000 and then by 50, Asimov gets 43 industrial civilizations, and further assumes that there are 21 more advanced than we, believing that we are roughly average.
Isaac Asimov, master of science fiction, speculates about life on other planets in Is Anyone There?
Stanton Friedman vs Sci-fi Writers
The articulate Stanton Friedman took a contrary view: “Asimov doesn't seem to know the difference between calendars which measure time and maps which show the distribution of things in space. Knowing the fraction of available time during which there has been a civilization on earth tells absolutely nothing about what fraction of planets have civilizations now, in the past, or in the future."
This kind of assumption, that Earth is the basis for all assumptions, Friedman thought obscured the issues. Asimov “assumes that nobody got started sooner than we did at having a civilization or at having an industrial one. This is un incredible assumption,” Friedman continued, "especially the solar system has been around almost 5 billion years and there are stars 5 billion years older than the sun...an error of only 1/10 of 1 percent in the 3 billion years would be 3 million years. The discussion also leaves out colonization, migration, the exiling of prisoners, or the dispersal of civilizations by those who started sooner.”
Asimov is only one of the popular science fiction writers Friedman took to task. Arthur Clarke, best known for authoring "2001: A Space Odyssey,” felt that the International Geophysical Year (1958), an extended series of experiments among nations, discouraged much interest because “they never discovered a single flying saucer.” Friedman cautioned Clarke to check the record, noting that one of the best photos of a UFO, the celebrated Trinidad photos, was taken on board a ship that was participating in the International Geophysical Year.
Clarke also used the ballistics missile warning radar system as a defense for why he believed no sightings are real, reasoning that such a sensitive system would surely pick them up. Friedman found this type of comment particularly questionable. “Considering that he was a writer and not a professional scientist or engineer working on radar for NORAD, I cannot believe that he would be on the distribution list for radar UFO reports.”
After laying a scientific framework for examining the data and countering arguments against their extraterrestrial source, Stanton Friedman makes a case for at least some UFOs being alien spacecraft.
Absence of Alien Evidence
One of Stanton Friedman's favorite phrases— “absence of evidence is presumed to be evidence for the absence of evidence”—applied here, as it does to page after page of rebuttal and refutation which he compiled, all addressing the remarks, articles and appearances of science fiction writers. He battled egos as often as errors.
“As writers, surely they didn't or haven't worked on classified government sponsored programs. I worked on classified programs for 14 years and I am certain that secrets can be kept. As I have often noted, 80 percent of the engineers and scientists responding to the question, “Do you think the government has revealed all it knows about UFO's?" said, ‘No’ .” And Friedman's role as “Perry Mason” occasionally put him in circumstances where he tilted against a Supreme Court of scientists. Having a scientific background,” he reminded, “in no way assures that you'll treat UFO's appropriately.”
Indeed, an elder statesman of science, Dr. Lee DeForest, who invented the Vacuum tube, was convinced that, regardless of whatever discoveries were made by man, we would never visit the moon. DeForest made these views known in 1957. Hong Ye Chiu, a NASA/Goddard scientist, had written that, “It is unthinkable that the sun would be favorably selected among the 100 billion stars in the galaxy as the most desired star to visit.” Friedman countered: “Nobody says they think of us favorably, or that this is the most desired star—after all, Chicago isn't my favorite place to visit, but I seem to fly there fairly often.”
Even Dr. J. Allen Hynek, professor of Astronomy at Northwestern University, director of the Lindheimer Observatory and for nearly 20 years scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book UFO study group, did not escape the Friedman scalpel. In answer to Hynek's contention that there is “no possibility" for space travel, Friedman had this to say: “Since fusion is the major source of energy for the earth and is the major source of energy production in the great majority of stars, one would certainly expect all astronomers to be aware of the fact that a combination of the right nuclei can produce vast amounts of energy per unit weight of the materials reacted. If the right nuclear reactions are involved one can produce charged particles coming out the back end of a rocket with more than 10,000,000 times as much energy per particle, as particles can get in the run-of-the-mill, brute force chemical rockets which we are currently using.”
Friedman felt that there was no way of telling just how many visits we received, and whether multiple sightings are all derived from the same visit. A comparison he enjoyed making is one between a mother ship with smaller earth excursion modules and a Navy aircraft carrier with 75 fighter or bomber planes aboard.
UFO Reports
UFO reports are often less accurate because witnesses will usually relate what they've seen, or think they've seen, rather than what they know. Friedman felt that the occupants of spacecrafts were usually humanoids sent to explore earth, and for that reason, had an outward resemblance to figures we would not question. He pointed out that our first being in space was a dog, and then a monkey, indicating to him that what or who is sent on an exploration is not necessarily the brains behind the caper.
The jury may still be out on the final verdict, but a widely-documented, real contact would certainly firm the evidence. What would happen to this planet and its people should this occur? Does the government give any serious thought or planning for this contingency?
“Practically none. I would like to see psychiatrists, religious leaders, psychologists, and god forbid, the military, thinking about what this means. First, we'd have to get over the ego business and recognize we're not the only life in the universe, and probably not the most intelligent.
“Second, I would like people to think what this might mean to religion. I think there's a need to look at the implications of what it means to be an earthling. To me that's the most important consideration. We have no leader. I think we need to recognize that. To them, we do look primitive.”
Two particular areas of concern which Friedman felt could be addressed by anyone interested in the subject, deal with information and access to it. People need to put pressure on the Air Defense Command and other government groups to reveal the highly classified information in their files. Friedman recommended a Centralized UFO Research Facility which anyone in the country could call while observing a UFO. This would tie together local, regional and national sources to record and comment on sightings, beginning with those groups which have been privately conducting this work for years on their own. It would be a 911 for alien sightings. "911, please state the nature of your UFO sighting."
Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show
Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show
Image captionSpotters often drew what they saw and sent pictures to the MoD
The government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show.
Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts.
The papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic".
The files show reports of UFOs peaked in 1996 - when The X Files was popular.
The Joint Intelligence Committee is better known for providing briefings to the government on matters relating to security, defence and foreign affairs.
But the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week.
The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic".
X Files
Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.
"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.
"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."
Reports of sightings of UFOs peaked in 1996 in the UK - when science fiction drama The X Files was popular.
According to the files, there were more than 600 reports in 1996, compared with an average of 240 in the previous five years.
The figures for 1996 show 609 reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, 343 letters from the public to the MoD's UFO desk and 22 enquiries and questions from MPs.
But by 2009, the MoD's UFO inquiry desk -Sec(AS)2 - had been closed down.
The 18 files released on Thursday are the latest to come out as part of a three-year project between the MoD and the National Archives.
Dr David Clarke, a UFO consultant to the National Archives, explained why the papers are being made public now.
Dr Clarke told the BBC: "Since the Freedom of Information Act arrived in 2005, this subject - UFOs - have become the third-most popular subject for people to write to the Ministry of Defence saying 'please could you release this file, or papers that you hold on this particular case'.
"What they've decided to do is to be totally open and to say, 'look we're not holding any secrets back about this subject we've got all these files and we're going to make them available to the public'."
One includes details on "aerial phenomena" prepared for a meeting of the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee in April 1957.
According to a note included in the Red Book, the weekly intelligence survey, four incidents involving UFOs tracked by RAF radars were "unexplained".
'Spaceman'
The documents also include reports of a famous incident dubbed the "Welsh Roswell" in 1974, where members of the public reported seeing lights in the sky and feeling a tremor in the ground.
Other cases included in the files are:
A near-miss with an "unidentified object" reported by the captain and first officer of a 737 plane approaching Manchester Airport in 1995.
A mountain rescue team called to investigate a "crashed UFO" in the Berwyn Mountains in Wales in 1974.
Attempted break-ins at RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire - sometimes referred to as Britain's "Area 51" - the US's secretive desert military base.
The Western Isles incident, when a loud explosion was reported in the sky over the Atlantic in the Outer Hebrides.
The 14-minutes of "missing" film relating to the Blue Streak missile test launch in 1964, believed by some to show a "spaceman".
A gambler from Leeds who held a 100-1 bet on alien life being discovered before the end of the 20th Century, and who approached the government for evidence to support his claim after the bookmakers refused to pay out. The MoD said it was open-minded about extra-terrestrial life but had no evidence of its existence.
The files come from more than 5,000 pages of UFO reports and letters and drawings from members of the public, as well as questions raised by MPs in Parliament.
A UFO sighting was reported in 1973 by at-that-time future president president Jimmy Carter. It didn't attract much attention at the time. I began investigating the case in 1976, when Carter was running for president. However, there was no accurate information available to make it possible to find out what Carter saw. I began making various inquiries, looking for someone who might be able to provide some facts on the case. Finally, someone suggested that I contact Hayden Hewes, director of the International UFO Bureau, who had written a brief piece on the Carter sighting for Argosy UFO [Nov., 1976]. I reached Mr. Hewes by telephone at his home in Oklahoma City, and it was he who provided the first significant lead. When brief press reports appeared during the big UFO flap of 1973 to the effect that Governor Carter had previously spotted a UFO, the International UFO Bureau mailed a UFO sighting report to Carter at the State Capitol in Atlanta. Carter apparently filled out the form in some haste, his handwritten replies brief and not easily legible. He then mailed it back to Oklahoma. Mr. Hewes was kind enough to lend me a photographic transparency of the 1973 report in Carter's own handwriting.
It turns out that the sighting occurred in Leary, Georgia, about forty miles from Carter's home town of Plains, on the evening of January 6, 1969. (Carter mis-remembered the date as sometime on October, 1969, but I contacted the Lions Club headquarters in Illinois, which established the date as January 6). The future president was then the local district governor of the Lion's Club, and had come to Leary to boost the local chapter. While standing outdoors at approximately 7:15 pm, waiting for the Lion's Club meeting to begin, Mr. Carter reported seeing a single "self-luminous" object, "as bright as the moon," which reportedly approached and then receded several times. A reporter taped Carter's exact words in 1973 describing the UFO sighting. Carter said,
There were about twenty of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunch room, and a kind of a green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then eventually it disappeared. It didn't have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar-looking light. None of us could understand what it was. I've never made fun of people who've seen other things of that kind (From the documentary recording Factual Eyewitness Testimony of UFO Encounters, Chicago: Investigative Research Associates, Inc., 1978).
A copy of Carter's hand-written UFO sighting report, that I obtained from Hayden Hewes.
Although Carter reports that "ten members" of the Leary Lion's Club also witnessed the event, attempts to locate ten other witnesses proved fruitless. No one else seems to have paid much attention to the "UFO." While most Leary residents I interviewed did recall Mr. Carter's visit, even those who attended the meeting had no recollection or knowledge of any unidentified object being sighted.
I began making inquiries of various UFO researchers, looking for someone who might be able to provide some facts on the case. Finally, someone suggested that I contact Hayden Hewes, director of the International UFO Bureau, who had written a brief piece on the Carter sighting for Argosy UFO [Nov., 1976]. I reached Mr. Hewes by telephone at his home in Oklahoma City, and it was he who provided the first significant lead. When brief press reports appeared during the big UFO flap of 1973 to the effect that Governor Carter had previously spotted a UFO, the International UFO Bureau mailed a UFO sighting report to Carter at the State Capitol in Atlanta. Carter apparently filled out the form in some haste, his handwritten replies brief and not easily legible. He then mailed it back to Oklahoma. Mr. Hewes was kind enough to lend me a photographic transparency of the 1973 report in Carter's own handwriting.
Mr. Carter reports that his "UFO" was in the western sky, at about 30 degrees elevation. This almost perfectly matches the known position of Venus, which was in the west-southwest at an altitude of 25 degrees, azimuth 237 degrees. It was shining brilliantly at Magnitude -4.3, brighter than anything else in the sky. Weather records show that the sky was clear at the time of the sighting. Given the long history of Venus as "Queen of the UFOs," it seemed that we had the clear solution on hand. I wrote in The Humanist magazine (then edited by Paul Kurtz), July-August, 1977 (p.46)
President Carter's "UFO" Is Identified as the Planet Venus
President Jimmy Carter's widely-reported "UFO sighting," which he made public while Governor of Georgia, was in fact a misidentification of the planet Venus. Several errors of identification within Mr. Carter's report demonstrate that the eyewitness testimony of even a future president of the United States cannot be taken at face value when investigating UFO sightings.
The incident occurred in Leary, Georgia, about forty miles from Plains, on the evening of January 6, 1969. Mr. Carter was the local district governor of the Lion's Club, and had come to Leary to boost the local chapter. While standing outdoors at approximately 7:15 pm, waiting for the Lion's Club meeting to begin, Mr. Carter reported seeing a single "self-luminous" object, "as bright as the moon," which reportedly approached and then receded several times. Mr. Carter reports that his "UFO" was in the western sky, at about 30 degrees elevation. This almost perfectly matches the known position of Venus, which was in the west-southwest at an altitude of 25 degrees. Weather records show that the sky was clear at the time of the sighting.
No other object generates as many UFO reports as the planet Venus. Venus is not as bright as the moon, nor does it actually approach the viewer, or change size and brightness, but descriptions like these are typical of misidentifications of a bright planet. Every time Venus reaches its maximum brilliance in the evening sky, hundreds of "UFO sightings" of this type are made. At the time of the Carter UFO sighting, Venus was a brilliant evening star, nearly one hundred times brighter than a first-magnitude star.
And for the most part, serious UFO researchers accepted this identification. After all, Jacques Vallee, who is certainly no debunker, had written,
No single object has been misinterpreted as a "flying saucer" more than the planet Venus. The study of these mistakes proves quite instructive, for it shows beyond all possible dispute the limitations of sensory perception and the weakness of accounts relating shapes and motions of point sources or objects with small apparent diameters. (Challenge to Science, 1966, p. 110).
The southwest sky as seen from Leary, Ga, at 7:15 PM January 6, 1969. The Bull's Eye shows the calculated position where a barium cloud might have been visible, quite close to Venus. (Sky chart generated using the free open-source program Cartes du Ciel.)
So there the matter stood for forty years. Then just a week ago, an associate of space writer and skeptic James Oberg contacted him, suggesting the possibility that what Carter might have seen was a bright barium space cloud from a NASA rocket, launched to study the behavior of the upper atmosphere. In fact, this possibility was discussed in episode 561 of the popular skeptics' podcast Skeptics Guide to the Universe on April 9, 2016, although neither Oberg nor I was aware of this. I was familiar with such launches, and even saw one in the 1970s when I was living in Maryland. (Frankly, the one I saw was not all that bright or spectacular.)
James Oberg made this map, showing the location of Leary, Georgia, and the path of the rockets.
It turns out that there were in fact two rocket launches from Eglin AFB in the Florida panhandle on the evening of January 6 that might possibly have been seen from Leary. The first one was launched at 6:41 PM, and contained Barium, which would usually appear red. The second was launched at 7:35 PM, and contained Tri-methyl aluminum (TMA), which would appear white or blue. Each would have become visible about 3-4 minutes after launch, and might have remained visible for 30 minutes or more. Carter said that he was "Outside waiting for a meeting to begin at 7:30 PM." If that information is correct, it would seem to rule out them seeing the second launch. However, the cloud that became visible about 6:45 PM might still be visible at 7:15. And that cloud would have been right next to the brilliant Venus!
Supporting the Barium cloud hypothesis are Carter's statements that the object "Seemed to move tow(ard?) us from a distance - Sto(p?) move partially away Return then depart Bluish at first - then reddish - Luminous - not solid.
Against the Barium cloud hypothesis is Carter's statement that the object was "sharply outlined."
More research needs to be done before we can conclude that a Barium space cloud was definitely responsible for this famous sighting. But it seems an intriguing possibility.
André SkondrasIs it true, as some skeptics proclaim, that most UFOs are IFOs caused by the planet Venus, ice crystals, clouds and other atmospheric phenomena? Is this substantiated from the sightings statistics?Bekijk vertaling
André SkondrasI just received a reply from a highly skeptical researcher: "Skeptics and debunkers cannot provide any Venus IFO stats. I challenged a Belgian UFO researcher a few years back and he had nothing, in fact could not even find a single recent case on his UFO reporting group's sighting list." ;)Bekijk vertaling
André SkondrasAnd this highly skeptical researcher went on to say: "The Carter sighting has been nailed as the rocket barium cloud and here we find Sheaffer trying to oppose it with nitpicking and pleas for open mind because it explodes his Venus theory." ;)Bekijk vertaling
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence - NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - Part 1
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence
Don't Just Believe Me, But Do Look At The Evidence. By Paul Dean. Contact: pj_dean@hotmail.com
NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - Part 1
About a year ago, I took the plunge and begun the near-impossible task of ascertaining what role joint US/Canadian North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) has maintained regarding the UFO matter. Sure enough, just as I had suspected, there is a paper trail dating back decades, and much of it makes for rather awkward reading. Furthermore, I have been working with David Charmichael, a brilliant British citizen who has been aggressively asking NORAD, and its parent agency Northern Command (NORTHCOM), one of ten Unified Combatant Commands organised directly under the Secretary of Defence and Joint Chiefs of Staff, for some honest answers regarding the oddities they track on vast radar systems, and other UFO-related matters. Together he and I have discovered much.
For those that don’t know, NORAD, as its current Fact Sheet states, is: “...charged with the missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control for North America. Aerospace warning includes the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles, through mutual support arrangements with other commands. Aerospace control includes ensuring air sovereignty and air defence of the airspace of Canada and the United States.”.
Put simply, NORAD uses myriad primary and secondary radars to build up an integrated, recognised air and aerospace picture, even out into sub-space, of what is flying around about the USA and Canada. NORAD has generally maintained that the only “UFOs” they detect and track are simply strayed aircraft, hostile formations of Russian combat aircraft and such. NORAD do not have any interest, or, any knowledge, of our sort of “UFO” events. Unfortunately for NORAD, however, if one goes by what the contents of their own declassified paperwork says, the overwhelming evidence is that they have not been honest, and this dishonesty has been going on since the 1950’s. But first, let’s see what official concoctions NORAD has come up with over the long years. The Official Stance In a reply letter dated 10th November, 1975, Colonel Terrence C. James, NORAD Headquarters, Ent Air Force Base, to researcher Robert Todd, it was stated: “…this command has no present activity in investigating UFOs, nor does any area of the United States government that I’m aware of.” Another letter from NORAD HQ, dated 28th, November, 1975, also to Robert Todd, said: “We do not undertake investigative measures… …our interests are satisfied in near real time, and no formal documentation is created by this command.” In a 19 December 1995 letter to researcher Dr. Armen Victorian, NORAD’s Directorate of Information clarified their terminology, while distancing themselves, as one would expect, from the core UFO issue: “Historically, the term UFO was used by the Air Force starting in 1947 and ending in 1969 with the shelving of the Project Blue Book. We all know what the term UFO means, we just don’t use it... …The specific term “UFO” is not used by this command even though you could say that this term would equate to Unknown Track Report: either an Uncorrelated Event or an Unknown Track, since an unidentified flying object could be considered either.” These official statements may sound legitimate at face value, but, in fact, they fly in the face of various documents begrudgingly released by the US military over five long decades.
For Restricted Readership Since 1954, the “Joint Army Navy Air Force Protocol 146” (JANAP 146) procedures, promulgated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have issued a series of “Communications Instructions for Vital Intelligence Sightings”, more commonly referred to as simply “CIRVIS”. The timely reporting of UFO’s by militaryand civilian pilots, as well as other professionals, is clearly laid down in these CIRVIS procedures, and, first on the addressing distribution list is none other than the Commander-in-Chief, NORAD (CINCNORAD). For example, the February 1959 version of JANAP CIRVIS procedures, published as JANAP 146(D), states, in part, under the “Information to be Reported and When to Report” section on Page 8: (1) While airborne and from land based observers.
(a) Hostile or unidentified single aircraft or formations of aircraft which appear to be directed against the United States or Canada or their forces.
(b) Missiles.
(c) Unidentified flying objects.
(d) Hostile or unidentified submarines.
(e) Hostile or unidentified group or groups of military surface vessels…”
(f) Individual surface vessels, submarines, or aircraft of unconventional design, or engaged in suspicious activity or observed in a location or on a course which may be interpreted as constituting a threat to the United States, Canada or their forces.
(g) Any unexplained or unusual activity which may indicate a possible attack against or through Canada or the United States, including the presence of any unidentified or other suspicious ground parties in the Polar Region or other remote or sparsely populated areas.” Note, that “Unidentified Flying Objects” is listed as distinct from single aircraft, formations of aircraft, missiles, etc. Below is an image of this page from JANAP 146(D) CIRVIS.
Of even more interest are these two procedural statements, on Page 12:
“c. A post-landing report is desired immediately after landing by CINCNORAD or RCAF-ADC to amplify the airborne report(s).” And, “(1) Post-landing reports should be addressed to CINCNORAD, Ent AFB, Colorado Springs, Colorado, or, RCAF-ADC, St. Hubert, Quebec…” CINCNORAD is merely Commander-in-Chief, NORAD, and, RCAF-ADC is Royal Canadian Air Force, Air Defence Command. Below is an image of the page.
Thus it is established that NORAD, even so long ago, was very much concerning itself with serious UFO sightings made by US or Canadian forces, and any claims to the contrary are absolute nonsense. Now, I can already hear the “But, that was in 1959! What about something current?!”. The 2008 “Air Force Instruction 10-206 Operational Reporting” instruction contains the second most current CIRVIS sightings procedures, which still include “Unidentified Flying Objects” as separate from aircraft, missiles, etc. On Page 36, it is stated, with regards to the addressee of such “vital” reports: “5.3. Submitted To: 5.3.1. Airborne reports: US, Canadian military, or civilian communications facility. 5.3.2. Post-landing reports: Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Cheyenne Mt, Colorado, or HQ Northern NORAD Region, North Bay, Ontario, Canada, whichever is more convenient. If landing outside Canadian or US territories, submit reports through the nearest Canadian military or diplomatic representative or US.” So much for NORAD not being in the US military’s “UFO loop”.
“Unknown Objects” It isn’t just the above mentioned CIRVIS procedures which raise questions. NORAD’s Operational Instruction Index 0-2, coded “RCCOI 0-2” and dated 7th of March, 1978, inventories a number of instructional publications vital to the overall mission success of NORAD Regional and Sector Operations Centers. Page 2 of the index lists a 9th of May, 1977 instruction titled “Possible Unknowns, Unknowns, Special Tracks and Unknown Objects Actions”. The Below the list is imaged.
There a numerous such NORAD indexes that contain references to classified publications., and through diligent research, some of these publications have been released. The above mentioned instruction, coded 55-8, contains a section, on Page 6, titled “Unknown Objects”, and states, on part: “...Unknown object reporting will be accomplished using the same procedures as for Unknown Track reporting. NORAD Form 61 will be used even though such observations may not result in track establishment.”
This makes very clear that “unknown objects” are of concern to NORAD, despite what the United States government has ceaselessly said to the public. The page in question is imaged below.
While these procedural and instructional records are significant, there is far more material which catches NORAD out red-handed being involved with localized and serious UFO events. In my next post, Part 2 of this series, I will be highlighting such material which provides ample evidence that NORAD know far more about the UFO issue than they are prepared to discuss.
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence - NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - PART 2
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence
Don't Just Believe Me, But Do Look At The Evidence. By Paul Dean. Contact: pj_dean@hotmail.com
NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - PART 2
Continuing on from my Part 1 of my series, titled “NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen” I will carry on presenting evidence, in the form of declassified documents, that the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) has been heavily involved in significant, inexplicable and unexplainable UFO events since its formation in 1957. Even when given the opportunity to disclose UFO case and study records to the flawed the University of Colorado’s “UFO Study” (the US Air Force’s final word on the UFO matter in 1969), NORAD managed to stay nearly silent on the matter despite evidence they were sitting on vital, even startling information. I am not attempting here to analysis the actual cases as such. This would not be the appropriate platform to do so, and, much work has been done of these events already. What I am attempting to do is prove NORAD, like so many other agencies, have not been truthful, which is getting seemingly easier every day.
“Unidentified Flying Objects” Take, for example, a 10th of April, 1964 information relay message found in the US Air Force’s (USAF) Project Blue Book records. The document highlights and summarises the contents of previous information moving around US Air Force Headquarters (USAF/HQ), USAF Air Staff, and the National Military Command Center (NMCC). In the subject line there are three very familiar words: “Unidentified Flying Objects”. Under this, two pieces of sectioned information state: “NMCC, NORAD advised that there were 6 to 12 unidentified flying objects at 30 miles East of Merced, California. Radar picked up 12 objects at altitudes 60,000 ft., 90,000 ft., and higher elevations. F-106’s were scrambled at Castle Air Force Base. There were no results because of high altitudes. They are checking the possibility of sending U-2’s.” And, “Objects were following a 60 mile race-track pattern. F-106’s were flying a 90,000 ft. altitude.Pilots locked on to some of the objects but could not keep the lock. NORAD said they were sending 2 more XXXXX aircraft with pilots in pressure suits.”
The case was later dismissed by the USAF as one mere weather balloon. Whether that conclusion is accurate has been debated ad nauseam, but for the purposes of my study it is interesting to note that NORAD is mentioned not once, but twice, in the message text. Specifically, “NMCC, NORAD advised that there were 6 to 12 unidentified flying objects...”and “NORAD said they were sending 2 more XXXXX aircraft with pilots in pressure suits.”. So, for NORAD to state – as they did throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s – that they had no interest or “records held” relating to unidentified flying objects is clearly deceptive. Below is an image of this record.
Another record, dated September 10, 1972, and sent from 22 NORAD Region Headquarters, (22NRHQ) North Bay, Ontario, Canada to both the Canadian Forces Headquarters (CFHQ) and the National Research Council (NRC) is an unclassified telex discovered in the Canadian Archives, along with dozens of others like it. It details an object seen visually, and, tracked on radar by two tower operators at North Bay Airport, which is connected to Canada’s NORAD Operations Headquarters. Described visually as “one object flashing red and green lights, speed very slow to 300 knots at 4000 to 6000 feet estimated”, the report then gives the following further description: “Visual sighting correlated with a North Bay terminal radar return at 340 degrees, six miles. Object appeared to turn in tight circles or hover for approx. 15 minutes and then lose altitude steadily with flashing lights becoming dimmer until visual contact lost at 0345Z. Radar contact lost prior to visual contact.” Below is an image of the telex.
Aside from the obvious fact that NORAD, again, is mentioned in what can only be described assome sort of UFO event, two interesting issues are raised here. Firstly, the message reads “UNLCAS” in the security classification line – meaning “unclassified”. In other words, the contents of the message are not security or intelligence sensitive. From this, one can’t help but wonder what sort of material is held in NORAD records which are classified. Apparently there are many. Secondly, it is interesting to note that the telex was sent from NORAD, not to NORAD – further rubbishing the assertions that they have not one scrap of interest in odd aerial incidents.
In another Canadian telex, again sent from 22NRHQ to the CFHQ and NRC, dated 4th July, 1972, states that Captain Sorefleet and Captain Drury, stationed at Canadian Forces Base Bagotville, Quebec, reported one “white oval” while flying in a fighter jet at 35,000 feet. The description indicates a“small red tail”. This, of course, could be a meteor sighting. However, the telex finally states “observed for 2 minutes about 40 miles”. Whatever the object was, it was clearly unidentifiable enough that the pilots wished to report it, and NORAD was part of that process.
The page is imaged below.
These events occurred in 1972, only 2 years after the Secretary of the USAF famously claimed that no US military agency, which includes NORAD, will continue the reporting, or receiving of reports, of UFO events, and, that: “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.” But did the US Department of Defence – especially the commands dealing with air defence and air warfare – really accept this? Do we have any evidence that the above statement is complete rubbish barely fit for the trash bin?
Who’s Got Their Stories Straight At Air Force Headquarters This Week? In 1979, research Robert Todd had the USAF release some of the documents related to the closure of Project Blue Book – the USAF’s 17 year study (one of three such study’s) into the UFO phenomenon. One of the documents was a 20th October, 1969 memo known as the “Bolender Memo”. Signed by Brigadier General Carrol H. Bolender, Deputy Director of Development, USAF, the second page of the memo contains two passages which depart radically from the USAF’s above mentioned statement that no UFO event reported or investigated was a threat to national security. Those passages are: “Moreover, reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.” And, “However, as already stated, reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.” Below is an image of the page in question.
The Bolender Memo, quite simply, admits that some UFO reports can, and do affect national security. This flies in the face of what the public were being told. Also, the memo indicates that Project Blue Book was never supposed to receive the most alarming, security-vital UFO reports, and, specifically, such reports were being made using the “Joint Army Navy Air Force Protocol 146(E)”(JANAP 146E) system or “Air Force Manual 55-11” (AFM 55-11). In fact, at this time Project Blue Book, and the University of Colorado’s flawed “UFO Study”, was only receiving reports filed using “Air Force Regulation 80-17” (AFR 80-17). This raises awkward questions. For example, if Project Blue Book staff were not getting a chance to evaluate the most sensitive UFO reports submitted by USAF airmen and other military professionals, then who was? As I highlighted in my Part 1 of this series, the USAF and NORAD were in fact at the receiving end of UFO reports made using JANAP 146E’s “Communication Instructions for Vital Intelligence Sightings” (CIRVIS) procedures. UFO reports made using AFM 55-11, using the “Air Force Operational Reporting System” (AFOREP), were likely occurring too. America’s political leaders have not been told about all this, even when they have asked specific questions. In a reply letter to Senator Patty Murray, dated August 25, 1993, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Shubert, USAF, stated: “As information, the Air force began investigating UFOs in 1948 under a program called Project Sign. Later, the program's name was changed to Project Grudge and, in 1953, it became known as Project Blue Book. On December 17, 1969, the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book... ...As a result of these investigations, studies, and experience, the conclusions of Project Blue book were: 1) no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security…” Again, compare this with the contents of the Bolender Memo: “…reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.”.Since the public and Congress did not, and do not, know about this JANAP 146 and AFM 55-11 business, the impression can be easily given, as it was to Senator Murray, that the USAF had then, and have now, no reason to take whatsoever the UFO matter seriously. Below is an image of the USAF letter to Patty Murray.
The above examples are only a handful of quite contradictory pieces of information that have managed to find their way out of NORAD, and the wider US military. I have countless more on file. Thousands. Why are we consistently finding that the press, the public, and even politicians were, and still are now, told one thing, but, in classified documents, meant for very restricted readership, the exact opposite is stated? Recently, retired USAF Colonel Charles Halt, who was Deputy Base Commander of the Bentwaters Air Force Base during the famous Rendlesham Forest event, stated: “I’ve heard many people say that it’s time for the government to appoint an agency to investigate. Folks, there is an agency, a very close-held, compartmentalized agency that’s been investigating this for years, and there’s a very active role played by many of our intelligence agencies that probably don’t even know the details of what happens once they collect the data and forward it. It’s kind of scary, isn’t it?” Should we brush these sort of comments aside? Maybe not. He may just be confirming what government documents have been telling us all along.
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence - NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - Part 3
UFOs - Documenting The Evidence
Don't Just Believe Me, But Do Look At The Evidence. By Paul Dean. Contact: pj_dean@hotmail.com
NORAD And The UFO Smokescreen - Part 3
This blogpost is the third in a series which aims to link, through official and documented record, the UFO matter with the huge North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD). For over 50 years, NORAD’s stance on so-called “UFOs” – and I don’t mean merely stray aircraft – is that they know nothing, see nothing and hold nothing on record. However, myriad US military documents prove that NORAD has not been entirely honest. In this post I will highlight two especially unusual occasions where they were certainly involved. But, beforehand, if my readers need to catch up, I have linked is Part 1 and Part 2.
UFOs Are Tracked On NORAD Systems: And That’s Fact Now down to business. A little known fact concerning the infamous Japan Airlines sighting in 1986 is that NORAD almost definitely played a role in the extraordinary event, completely aside from the FAA and even the USAF. For those that do not know about this case, I will only briefly summarise it. On November 17th, 1986, Japan Airlines (JAL) cargo flight 1628 was flying at nearly 900 kilometres an hour over Alaska. Just after sunset, the three crew witnessed a series of UFO encounters that last for 31 minutes, and, the entire fiasco was watched on both FAA primary radar, and, USAF primary radar. The case made headlines around the world. In 2000, John Callahan, Chief of the FAA’s Accidents, Evaluations and Investigations division confirmed the seriousness of the event, and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency and the President’s Scientific Staff. He also came forward with more FAA evidence, on top of the hundreds of pages of official documentation already released. NORAD’s involvement has been overlooked in this case, I believe. At the heart of the matter, we know for an absolute fact that both the primary radar at the FAA’s Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center (AARTCC), and the primary radar at the USAF’s Elmendorf Air Force Base Regional Operations Command Center (ROCC) picked up “surge primary returns” next to the JAL flight. As these returns were being watched on the screens, the crew were discussing with the FAA, over radio, the worrisome traffic they had around them. It’s a classic radar-visual case, pure and simply. The actual voice tapes of this event are available, and one can actually hear the gravity of the situation in the voices of the pilot, as well as those of the air traffic controllers at FAA AARTCC and USAF ROCC. The important thing here is that there may have been, in some no-doubt complex way, a third set of air traffic controllers, using a third system, watching the event. In the official FAA voice tape transcript the USAF’s ROCC controller says, at 5:38:51: “Ah, I’m gonna talk to my other radar man here has gotta, he’s got some other equipment watching this aircraft.” The passage of speech is somewhat broken, but he clearly says “my other radar man here” and“some other equipment”. Considering it is a USAF controller who was talking, one can’t help but question who “my other radar man” could be, and, what “other equipment” was “watching” the UFOs around the JAL flight? It turns out it was probably NORAD. Elmendorf Air Force Base had, in the 1980’s, a more classified system operated by NORAD, which complimented the USAF hardware. The two merged in Year 2000, but, back in 1986, NORAD’s presence wasn’t exactly advertised at the time of the JAL 1628 UFO sightings. In fact, when one reads that dismal FAA paperwork on the incident, even the USAF’s involvement, let alone NORAD’s, was barely mentioned, despite the fact that they were watching the same thing on their screens, and stating such to the FAA controllers and the JAL pilots. Whatever the exact situation, speculation that NORAD was involved in this event is strengthened when one reads a particular FAA document from the FAA’s JAL 1628 report. After one of the post-landing interviews between the JAL crew and FAA Special Agents James Derry and Ronald Mickle, Special Agent Derry wrote a one page statement. The final paragraph states: “Upon completion of my discussion with the crew, I called Captain Stevens (Duty Officer to NORAD) and asked if he had any questions other than what I had asked. He said he had no other questions, but they also showed two targets on radar (one was JAL). He stated that they would give all data to Intelligence in the morning. I then asked Bobby Lamkin by phone if the Air Force was holding the data and he said yes” Below is an image of this document.
NORAD On Alert Another incident where NORAD paperwork connects them, very strongly I might add, to serious UFO events, is the extraordinary October-November, 1975 “over flights” of a dozen US military bases by unknown aircraft, variously described as mundane helicopters right through to totally unfamiliar and oddly performing craft that appeared repeatedly on ground-based radar and utterly eluded USAF authorities for weeks. These events were highlighted in Barry Greenwood and Lawrence Fawcett’s game-changing 1984 book “Clear Intent”, later published with the title “UFO Cover Up: What the Government Won’t Say”. I will not even attempt here to give an overview of the wave of UFO activity that occurred at that time. What does need to be said though is that hundreds and hundreds of pages of official documents were released from nearly two dozen commands and agencies within the US military throughout 1976 to 1983. Barry Greenwood and Robert Todd accessed most of them, and Barry fondly tells me how stunned he was – time after time – that such raw intelligence and front-line reporting was being furnished to him. These researchers cannot be thanked enough for their work.
Amongst those piles of gold, was a four page release of “incident” summaries extracted from both the NORAD Command Directors Log and the 24th NORAD Region Senior Director’s Log. The time period for released material was from the 29th of October to the 10th of November, 1975. The actual documents were released to researcher Todd Zechel on the 4th of October, 1977. Despite the fact these are quite well known, I wish to highlight some of the contents, and provide imagery of the offending pages. The first page details various worrisome intrusions by “unknown helicopters” over Loring Air Force Base, Maine, Wurtsmith Air Force Base, Michigan, and Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana – all of which maintained mission-ready nuclear weapons.
See below.
The stakes are raised on page 2 of the release where the 24th NORAD Region Senior Director's Log (Malmstrom AFB, Montana) The most alarming incident summaries are probably: “7 Nov 75 (1035Z) - Received a call from the 341st Strategic Air Command Post (SAC CP), saying that the following missile locationsreported seeing a large red to orange to yellow object: M-1, L-3, LIMA and L-6. The general object location would be 10 miles south of Moore, Montana, and 20 miles east of Buffalo, Montana. Commander and Deputy for Operations (DO) informed.” And, for the actual word “UFO”, “7 Nov 75 (1429Z) - From SAC CP: As the sun rose, the UFOs disappeared. Commander and DO notified.”
On page 3, the continuing NORAD summaries mention the term “UFO” five times, plus radar tracks of “unknowns”, “objects”, plus the inspection of such events by fighter jets, which met with failure.
The page is imaged below.
The final page summarises a continuation of similar events that kept plaguing nuclear-weapon equipped bases along the US-Canadian untill mid-November. One piece of text, which brought Minot Air Force Base into the spectacle states:
“10 Nov 75 (1125Z) - UFO sighting reported by Minot Air Force Station, a bright star-like object in the west, moving east, about the size of a car. First seen approximately 1015Z. Approximately 1120Z, the object passed over the radar station, 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet high, no noise heard. Three people from the site or local area saw the object. NCOC notified.”
Finally, this 4 page NORAD release was finalised with some interesting statements which eluded to more material that related to the over flights of these bases, and, thus, Todd Zechel's FOI request. The text indicates that more documents of NORAD providence are in existence, but that they are not fit for release to the public due to legal exemptions. Specifically: “2. HQ USAF/DADF also forwarded a copy of NORAD document for a review for possible downgrade and release. We have determined the document if properly and currently classified and is exempt from disclosure under Public Law 90-23, 5 USC 552b(1).” These pages were signed off by one Colonel Terrance C. James, USAF, Director of Administration. The USAF and NORAD run administrative and functional operations hand-in-hand, thus, a USAF Colonel was able to clear this material for release. Also, aside from the above releases, there were actually a great deal more documents of NORAD providence, or, that mentioned NORAD, released to the likes of Barry Greenwood, Robert Todd, Lawrence Fawcett, Todd Zechel and others in that extraordinary period of FOI openness. In one, which Barry Greenwood has on file, the Commander-in-Chief of NORAD sent a four-part message to various NORAD units on November 11, 1975 summarizing the events: “Since 28 Oct 75 numerous reports of suspicious objects have been received at the NORAD CU; reliable military personnel at Loring AFB, Maine, Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, Malmstrom AFB, Mt, Minot AFB, ND, and Canadian Forces Station, Falconbridge, Ontario, Canada have visually sighted suspicious objects.” Regardless of who released what, clearly any NORAD Log Extracts that contain the phraseology like “UFOs”, radar tracks of low-flying “unknowns”, “objects” and “unknown helicopters” indeed fall within our area of interest. NORAD, as well as other US military branches, stated that these incidents were “isolated”, but even the most bone-headed skeptic would not accept that. In my next blog post I will be discussing more about NORAD's capabilities and mission, and the current and ongoing efforts by myself and UK researcher David Charmichael to get to the bottom of how NORAD currently handles the UFO matter. Stay tuned.
The Placard of the Roswell Slides: The Final Curtain
The Placard of the Roswell Slides: The Final Curtain
Special Rush report from The Roswell Slides Research Group The Roswell Slides second biggest mystery was the content of the placard on the alleged alien body. Several statements were made about it, some contradictory:
The Roswell Slides and the Truth by Anthony Bragalia
This ‘placard’ is not very evident in the video grab image. However, it has been enlarged by experts and the writing, in red ink, is handwritten, not typed, as would be found in a biological display in a museum.
Tom Carey was interviewed about the Roswell Slides on the March 22, 2015 episode of Jaime Maussan’s Contacto on Tercer Milenio TV. Carey said that experts have been able to read some words on the placard on the case and that, “debunkers will be disappointed.”
Tom Carey and Don Schmitt were interviewed, of the show's expert presentations, Schmitt said:
This will be part of the event, part of the program in May, that all of these analytical reports, all of the analyses, all of the main experts as well as the photographic experts who examined- there’s a placard, very fuzzy, that can not be legibly read by the naked eye, yet we’ve had everyone from Dr. David Rudiak, to Studio MacBeth, even the Photo Interpretation Department of the Pentagon, as well as Adobe have all told us that it’s beyond the pale, that it cannot be read, it is totally up to interpretation.
So, we truly feel we have performed due diligence; we have done everything we can to substantiate and prove what is contained within these slides, whether it is something of a human malady or something truly extraordinary. https://youtu.be/fQyAVrFnTos?t=1h24m2s
During BeWitness, it was announced that despite the work of a number of experts, the placard could absolutely not be read.
The slide with the placard was visible, and the writing was evident, if unclear.
News coverage, claiming the placard could not be read,
"We couldn't make anything clearly out of the placard...several others, who did not have much luck." - Adam Dew
"Nobody could read anything decisively in the placard, unfortunately. I am sure people will make attempts to do this going forward..... " Adam Dew
He was right, and most of the placard has now been read.
A member of The Roswell Slides Research Team used a newly acquired source image of the placard seen in front of the body. By manipulating the commercial software, SmartDeblur, he managed to significantly clear up the blurred text. Other members offered suggestions and helped narrow down the actual words.
There is little doubt that this is the true and correct text.
The other 3 lines of the text are somewhat hard to read, some words more than others.
It seems to say something like:
MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY
At the time of burial the body was clothed in a xxx-xxx cotton
shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of these small cotton blankets.
Loaned by the Mr. Xxxxxx, San Francisco, California
The entire effort only took hours, quite a difference from the claimed “years” of research that the Maussan camp claimed. Because the Slide hucksters haven’t released proper high resolution scans of the slides, our work was made more difficult. We could probably get clearer results from better images.
The mystery of the placard is solved, and so is the nature of the body in the case. A boy, from Earth. The question then, becomes, how was this not discovered by the experts examining the case in the years of investigation? More details and proper credits to follow in updates. The placard is just a part of the story. The Roswell Slides Research Group
I will reserve judgement re the recent Mexico live event, because I haven't seen the broadcast yet. However, allow me to make a personal observation re the presented "Roswell" slides. Based on everything what has been said prior and after the televised Mexico event, I assume that there is common agreement that the slides are real and depict a real 1940s event captured on late 1940s Kodachrome film. There has only been serious doubt whether the slides have anything whatsoever to do with the July, 1947 Roswell incident. The question I have been asking myself is whether the researchers involved -- or anyone else for that matter -- have made the investigative effort to determine at which "museum" the picture might have been taken, that had such a "being" on display, apparently lying next to a "gorilla" or "ape" head, apparently also equipped with a caption card. It would seem reasonable to assume that there must be some official body which holds historical 1940s records of "weird" and "freaky" museums in the US or abroad. It would seem rather odd to me at least that there wouldn't be more pictures of this particular "museum" and this particular "being" with an "ape" head apparently lying adjacent to it. If one could find relevant evidence to that effect, that would put this matter to rest for always I guess, as has e.g. been done with an indepth investigation into the mid 1990s alien autopsy film, which had also been heavily debated on prior and after the televised presentation and dismissed as a fraud or an autopsy of a deformed human being by "experts". The investigation ultimately led to the participants involved in the hoaxing of this autopsy film. Now, there is common agreement that this footage is a hoax because of the unmasking of the main leading actors.
May 7, 2015 3:59 PM EDT - At a conference in Mexico City, UFO specialists presented what they said were never before seen photos of a purported alien body from the 1947 Roswell, N.M., crash.(Reuters)
EXCLUSIVE: Alien Roswell Slides▬Be Witness Extraterrestre de Roswell y Diapositivas 05/05/2015 - YouTube
Dr. Clarke, Glad You Included "Access To Top Secret Material"
Hi all:
Allow me to make the following tentative observation(s): Even if these slides portray the real deal, viz. showing an "alien" recovered somewhere in New Mexico in the late 1940s time frame), access to the real deal (= the real bodies), if it exists, -- most likely classified as Top Secret material -- will be almostimpossible to outsiders. As long as this hard evidence isn't official public property, the secret will be safe within the hands of the alleged secret keepers (if they exist) whoever and wherever they may be. As I have said before, I believe evidence re UFOs presented will only become generally accepted fact if it will bear an official stamp of approval from the US Government. As long as this doesn't happen, every bit of evidence presented by the UFO community will be disregarded and mocked unless, of course, "they" show up in such a manifest way that it can't be denied any longer. And in the absence of such (officially approved) hard evidence, I'd like to add that one should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's my personal belief that the discussions re the Roswell slides have predominantly been negative. Why not focus on the good and positive aspects as well? It seems some are so filled with negativity re everything that has to do with Roswell or comes out re Roswell that this negativity seriously seems to cloud their judgments, leaning towards an attitude of outright bias. I assume that doing real investigations -- instead of lazy armchair work -- involves taking risks and exploring every nook and cranny ... and as the saying goes, "you win some, you lose some"! Better luck next time! And always keep your spirits up! ;)
The Roswell incident is UFOlogy’s Holy Grail and the industry that has grown up around it never sleeps.
Alien Autopsy mark 2: coming to your internet browser soon! (credit: UFOevidence.org)
On Tuesday, 5 May the world may, or may not, be rocked to its foundations when the showmen behind the latest chapter in the Roswell saga unveil two colour slides that supposedly show “an unusual body in a glass case”.
The creature has a small thin body with a large head so, hey presto, it must be an extraterrestrial. And as experts have concluded the Kodachrome film was definitely exposed in 1947 it may – or may not – show one of the aliens whose flying saucer crashed in New Mexico and was recovered by the US government.
Up to present only tantalising glimpses of the images have been released, via a YouTube ‘teaser’, to fuel the bandwagon as it rolls towards Mexico City, where the images will be revealed in the presence of UFO pundit Jaime Maussan.
Internet flame wars are raging between those promoting the images as the fabled ‘smoking gun’ and skeptics who have annoyingly poked wide gaping holes in the story.
In his teaser sports writer Adam Dew, who appears to be the custodian of these images, says they were found inside a box containing 400 old slides that turned up in Sedona, Arizona during 1998.
The box may (or may not) have belonged to geologist Bernard Ray and his wife Hilda Blair Ray, who was an attorney and amateur pilot. The couple travelled widely and their photographs include images of celebrities such as Bing Crosby, Clark Gable and General Eisenhower at public events in the late 1940s.
But even if this is true there is absolutely no evidence that the Rays had any political or intelligence connections that would have allowed them access to Top Secret material. The one flimsy connection with Roswell is that Bernard was a president of the West Texas Archaeological Society and may have visited New Mexico in 1947-8.
Dew says that he is ‘not making any claims’ but then goes on to state the creature appears to be between 36-40 inches in length, its head is larger than its torso and it has ‘some unusual features’.
Sceptics have pointed out these features do not prove the creature is an extraterrestrial. It could equally show the body of a child with hydrocephalus or indeed the remains of an ancient mummy of the type stored in assorted museums across North America and Europe. Jose Antonio Caravaca, for example, says the ‘alien corpse’ has remarkable similarities to a child’s mummy discovered in Egypt in 1856 that is now at the Smithsonian in Washington.
But why let such awkward problems stand in the way of such a good story? Dew says that logic tells him ‘…it’s probably nothing but I just can’t shake the thought that maybe…just maybe…it’s something’.
Even so, some of the UFO industry’s biggest proponents have dismissed the slides as having nothing to do with Roswell. Stanton Friedman has said he’s going to observe the dog and pony show from a safe distance because he doesn’t “want to appear to add legitimacy by my presence in Mexico City”.
Robert Hastings has gone further, saying the slides are "….likely to become one of the most embarrassing missteps in a seven-decade-long effort by ufologists to gather and publicize data pointing to the reality of the UFO phenomenon and its probable extraterrestrial nature’.
5 May 2015, the day that some claim will change the world forever, is exactly 20 years since the hoaxed footage of the ‘Alien Autopsy’ was first shown to a hushed gathering of UFOlogists, journalists and others at the Museum of London.
The UFO myth just goes on repeating itself. I suspect the Roswell slides will be the Alien Autopsy II. As such the warning given to those fooled by Ray Santilli’s original autopsy footage in 1995 applies here: caveat emptor
US Navy invents bulletproof glass from clay that could revolutionise screens and lenses
Researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory have invented Spinel - a new bulletproof transparent material far more durable than glass(US Naval Research Laboratory)
The US Navy has invented a type of transparent material that is far more durable than glass and could revolutionise smartphone screens, laptop screens and camera lenses to make them more rugged.
The material, known as Spinel, is made from a special type of synthetic powdered clay and is bulletproof. The US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been researching it for the past 10 years.
"Spinel is actually a mineral, it's magnesium aluminate," said Dr Jas Sanghera, who led the research. "The advantage is it's so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion."
Spinel can also be moulded into virtually any shape you like and unlike conventional bulletproof glass, which is created by combining alternate layers of plastic sheeting and glass together, Spinel does not block the infrared wavelength of light.
This means the material is suitable for use on camera lenses, for example, a camera carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as well as smartphone screens or even for head-mounted face shields.
The hot press used by the researchers to create Spinel using sintering rather than a crucible(US Naval Research Laboratory)
NRL developed a new technique for making transparent Spinel using a process called sintering, which is commonly used in 3D printing, whereby a layer of crystal particles are pressed together. Since this is different from the way glass is made, if the Spinel is subjected to damage, it will only chip, as the crack is deflected by the hard crystals in the material.
The researchers found a press was more effective than using a crucible, as when materials are melted at a very high temperature to create the crystals, the molten material reacts with the crucible, causing materials with a large amount of defects.
The researchers hope the material can be applied to protect naval technology, such as the windows on its laser weapons, like its portable anti-drone laser system. Spinel would also work well as a transparent armour for military vehicles and even as a protection for sensors on space satellites.
The technology has been licensed to a company that has been able to make Spinel in larger quantities to suit any application and the NRL now plans to share its production method with the rest of the US defence industry.
"You could leave these out there for longer periods of time, go into environments that are harsher than what they're encountering now, and enable more capabilities," said Sanghera. "It's a game-changing technology."
Affordable Star Trek-like transparent aluminum could protect phones, windows, and lenses
Researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have announced a breakthrough in the construction of spinel, also known as transparent aluminum. The substance is named after an iconic scene in Star Trek, in which Enterprise’s Chief Engineer hands over the chemical formula for an advanced 23rd-century building material to a manufacturing company in 1980s San Francisco.
Spinel — chemical formula MgAl2O4 is an extremely hard, durable substance with a Mohs Scale rating of 8.0. Sapphire glass, which we’ve previously discussed, has a Mohs rating of 9, just below diamond, with its rating of 10. Spinel’s refractive index can be lower than sapphire’s, depending on the exact characteristics of the material — a trait which could make it better than sapphire for screens.
“Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate,” says Dr. Jas Sanghera, who leads the research. “The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.” As a more durable material, a thinner layer of spinel can give better performance than glass. “For weight-sensitive platforms — UAVs [unmanned autonomous vehicles], head-mounted face shields — it’s a game-changing technology.”
Up until now, the research that’s gone into spinels has relied on small-scale manufacturing that could build pieces up to eight inches in diameter. That’s more than large enough for testing applications, but it’s not nearly large enough for many of the most useful test cases. The NRL team thinks transparent aluminum could have military applications, since spinel is transparent to infrared light. It could also be used in hostile environments like deserts and oceans, where the environmental conditions are extremely hard on modern glass.
According to the NRL, they’ve already worked with one unnamed company to extend manufacturing from 8-inch test wafers to 30-inch plates. They also discovered it’s possible to shape the material while it forms. This opens the door to using spinel as a shield for the leading edge of a plane wing or as part of a drone. Bulletproof glass is another possibility — current bulletproof glass is up to five inches thick and made from layers of both plastic and glass. Using spinel could drastically reduce the size and weight of the shielding while providing equivalent protection.
Obviously such announcements must be taken with a grain of salt. Sapphire glass was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and while it’s true that you can buy at least one phone that sports a sapphire screen (a Kyocera model), sapphire hasn’t taken over the market the way some originally predicted. Instead, Apple’s sapphire supplier went out of business amid allegations of poor treatment and bad blood.
I wouldn’t look for spinel to be adopted by the smartphone industry in the near-term future. But if military and industrial applications prove themselves, we may see more corporations adopting the material for consumer devices in 5-10 years.
De Amerikaanse Navy heeft een transparant materiaal ontwikkeld dat veel sterker is dan glas en volgens ingewijden een revolutie zou kunnen betekenen voor de productie van beeldschermen voor laptops en de lenzen van camera's. Het materiaal heeft de naam Spinel meegekregen - dezelfde naam werd trouwens in een aflevering van Star Trek gebruikt om een chemische formule voor een onverwoestbaar bouwmateriaal aan te duiden- en wordt gemaakt uit synthetische klei.
Het Amerikaanse Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) zou een tiental jaar hebben gewerkt aan de ontwikkeling van het materiaal, dat onder meer bestand is tegen de erosie door wind of regen en bovendien kogelwerend blijkt te zijn.
"Spinel is niet alleen veel sterker dan glas en dus ook beter bestand tegen ruwe en vijandige omgevingen, maar kan bovendien ook in nagenoeg elk mogelijke vorm worden gegoten," merkt onderzoeksleider Jas Sanghera op.
"In tegenstelling tot kogelwerend glas, dat uit verschillende lagen materialen is opgebouwd, heeft Spinel geen impact op de inval van het licht. Daardoor is het materiaal ook geschikt voor een gebruik in onder meer camera-lenzen. Bovendien zou ook een belangrijke gewichtsbesparing kunnen worden gerealiseerd."
Het Amerikaanse leger ziet voor het materiaal vooral toepassingen waarbij Spinel zou kunnen worden gebruikt in laser-wapens of als bescherming voor de sensoren van ruimte-satellieten. Ook kan het materiaal worden toegepast om militaire voertuigen beter te beveiligen. (mah)
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 71 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
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