Air Force Admits Weather Control via HAARP and New Tech

By Susan Duclos

Walker said this is “not an area that we have any need for in the future” and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going. “We’re moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do,” he said. “To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed.”

Many believe HAARP was created and has been used for weather control, with enough juice to trigger hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes and   comments such as this bring about the question of whether conspiracy theorists are more on target than anyone has admitted to date.

This is not the first time a public official has acknowledged that HAARP and weather control is not only possible, but has been and continues to be, used as a “super weapon,” as evidenced by a statement in 1997 by former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, where he said “Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.”

Is it still just a conspiracy theory if public officials admit it is true?

Watch the question and answer session below:

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EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Tells Brian Williams: 'I Was Trained as a Spy'

Edward Snowden, in an exclusive interview with "Nightly News" anchor Brian
Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.

Snowden defended his expertise in portions of the interview that aired at 6:30 p.m. ET on Nightly News. The extended, wide-ranging interview with Williams, his first with a U.S. television network, airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

WATCH: Brian Williams hosts live special with Snowden analysis at 11 p.m. ET

“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden said in the interview.

Snowden described himself as a technical expert who has worked for the United States at high levels, including as a lecturer in a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and undercover work for the CIA and National Security Agency.

“But I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert,” he said. “I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels from — from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.”

Last year, when Snowden began leaking details of NSA spying programs and left the country, administration officials played down his work history, using descriptions such as “systems administrator” to describe his role at the agency.
In June, President Barack Obama himself told reporters: “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”

Snowden told Williams that those terms were “misleading.”

In the Defense Intelligence Agency job, Snowden said, he “developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world.”

“So when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” he said.

The Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed to NBC News that Snowden, as a contractor, had spoken at three of their conferences. Two intelligence sources tell NBC that Snowden worked for the CIA at an overseas station in IT and communications.

The CIA declined to comment on Snowden’s employment or his role at the agency, instead referring to the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, specifically his statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January of this year:

“Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.”

The NBC News interview was conducted last week in Moscow after months of preparation. Russia has granted Snowden temporary asylum.

Williams has described the interview as “months in the making and cloaked in the secrecy of his life as a fugitive living in exile overseas.”

Snowden, now 30, left the government and later worked for private intelligence contractors inside NSA outposts, including in Japan and Hawaii.

Edward Snowden: A Timeline

Weigh in on whether you view Snowden as a #Patriot or a #Traitor.

While working for the contractors, he downloaded up to 1.7 million secret documents about U.S. intelligence-gathering and partnerships with foreign allies, according to U.S. officials, including some that revealed the extent of data collection from U.S. telephone records and Internet activity.

The United States charged him with espionage and revoked his passport. Snowden flew to Moscow but was unable to continue to Latin America because he no longer had a passport.

Among the revelations in the documents taken by Snowden was the NSA’s bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata from U.S. users, spying on personal communications of foreign leaders, and the NSA’s ability to tap undersea fiber-optic cables and siphon data.

Snowden documents also were the basis for three exclusive NBC News digital reports, on Jan. 27, Feb. 4 and Feb. 7, as well as a report on Nightly News, documenting operations by British cyber spies to monitor YouTube and other social media services and to use an array of “dirty tricks” against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers.

Obama appointed a review board that criticized the domestic data collection.
In March the president recommended ending bulk domestic metadata collection, and last week the House passed a bill to end it.

NBC News' Robert Windrem contributed to this report.

Follow NBC News Investigations on Twitter and Facebook.

Exclusive: Found after 500 years, the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria

Shipwreck found off coast of Haiti thought to be one of the most significant underwater discoveries in history

More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti.
It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries.

“All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus’ famous flagship, the Santa Maria,” said the leader of a recent reconnaissance expedition to the site, one of America’s top underwater archaeological investigators, Barry Clifford. 

“The Haitian government has been extremely helpful – and we now need to continue working  with them to carry out a detailed archaeological excavation of the wreck,” he said.

So far, Mr Clifford’s team has carried out purely non-invasive survey work at the site – measuring and photographing it.

Tentatively identifying the wreck as the Santa Maria has been made possible by quite separate discoveries made by other archaeologists in 2003 suggesting the probable location of Columbus’ fort relatively nearby. Armed with this new information about the location of the fort, Clifford was able to use data in  Christopher Columbus’ diary to work out where the wreck should be.

It’s a current re-examination of underwater photographs from that initial survey (carried out back in 2003), combined with data from recent reconnaissance dives on the site (carried out by Clifford’s team earlier this month), that have allowed Clifford to tentatively identify the wreck as that of the Santa Maria.

The evidence so far is substantial. It is the right location in terms of how Christopher Columbus, writing in his diary, described the wreck in relation to his fort.

Read more:Christopher Columbus: His life and legacy

VIDEO: Researchers create turtle-like robot to explore shipwrecks

see : http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/exclusive-found-after-500-years-the-wreck-of-christopher-columbuss-flagship-the-santa-maria-9359330.html

The site is also an exact match in terms of historical knowledge about the underwater topography associated with the loss of the Santa Maria. The local currents are  also consistent with what is known historically about the way the vessel drifted immediately prior to its demise.

The footprint of the wreck, represented by the pile of ship’s ballast, is also exactly what one would expect from a vessel the size of the Santa Maria

Using marine magnetometers, side-scan sonar equipment and divers, Mr. Clifford’s team has, over several years, investigated more than 400 seabed anomalies off the north coast of Haiti and has narrowed the search for the Santa Maria down to the tiny area where the wreck, which the team thinks may well be Columbus’ lost vessel, has been found.

The underwater remains of s flagship (Brandon Clifford)

A re-examination of the photographic evidence taken during the 2003 initial survey of the site by Mr. Clifford and his son Brandon has also provided evidence which is consistent with the vessel being from Columbus’ era - including a probable early cannon of exactly the type  known to have been on-board the Santa Maria.

When Clifford and his team returned to the site earlier this month, their intention was to definitively identify the cannon and other surface artefacts that had been photographed back in 2003. But tragically all the key visible diagnostic objects including the cannon had been looted by illicit raiders.

 “We’ve informed the Haitian government of our discovery – and we are looking
forward to working with them and other Haitian colleagues to ensure that the
site is fully protected and preserved. It will be a wonderful opportunity to
work with the Haitian authorities to preserve the evidence and artefacts of the
ship that changed the world,” said Mr. Clifford.

“I am confident that a full excavation of the wreck will yield the first ever detailed marine archaeological evidence of Columbus’ discovery of America.”

 
 Christopher Columbus (Alamy)

“Ideally, if excavations go well and depending on the state of preservation of any buried timber, it may ultimately be possible to lift any surviving remains of the vessel, fully conserve them and then put them on permanent public exhibition in a museum in Haiti.

“I believe that, treated in this way, the wreck has the potential to play a major role in helping to further develop Haiti’s tourism industry in the future,” he said.

Mr Clifford, who discussed the wreck site with the President of Haiti, Michel
Martelly last year, is one of the world’s most experienced explorers of underwater archaeological sites. He has carried out survey work on dozens of historic wrecks in different parts of the world over the past four decades – and was the discoverer and excavator of the world’s first fully verified pirate shipwreck, the Whydah, back in 1984,  and more recently discovered Captain Kidd’s flagship off Madagascar.

The Santa Maria was built at some stage in the second half of the 15 century in northern Spain’s Basque Country. In 1492, Columbus hired the ship and sailed in it from southern Spain’s Atlantic coast via the Canary Islands in search of a new western route to Asia.

After 37 days, Columbus reached the Bahamas – but, just over ten weeks later, his flagship, the Santa Maria, with Columbus on board, drifted at night onto a reef off the northern coast of Haiti and had to be abandoned. Then, in a native village nearby, Columbus began building his first fort – and,  a week later, leaving many of his men behind in the fort, he used  his two remaining vessels to sail back to Spain in order to report his discovery of what he perceived as a new westerly route to Asia  to his royal patrons  - King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

A leading American maritime archaeologist, Professor Charles Beeker of Indiana University, who accompanied Mr Clifford’s recent reconnaissance expedition to Haiti and who also carried out an underwater visual assessment of the site, says that it “warrants a detailed scientific investigation to obtain diagnostic artefacts”.

“There is some very compelling evidence  from the 2003 photographs of the site and from the recent reconnaissance dives that this wreck may well be the Santa Maria,”

“But an excavation  will be necessary in order to find more evidence and confirm that,” said Professor Beeker who is Director of the University of Indiana’s Office of Underwater Science.

The investigation into the wreck is being supported by the American TV network, the History channel, which has secured the exclusive rights toproduce a major television programme on the subject.

UFO accounts are journalists' stuff of dreams

Bill Wickersham is an adjunct professor of peace studies at the University of Missouri.

Stanford Physicist: We Have Physical Evidence Of UFOs!

 

Are human time travellers from the year 8100 making complex pictures in English fields? The complete Woodbridge UFO binary code of 16 pages, and its possible relation to “crop circles”  

by Horace Drew

Are human time travellers from the year 8100 making complex pictures in English fields? The complete Woodbridge UFO binary code of 16 pages, and its possible relation to “crop circles”  

A well-documented series of UFO contacts, near the Woodbridge and Bentwaters RAF bases in southeast England during December of 1980, has received much attention both from mainstream sources (see www.telegraph.co.uk or www.youtube.com or www.youtube.com) and from paranormal researchers (see www.youtube.com or www.youtube.com or www.youtube.com or www.youtube.com). Ostensibly, contact was made on the ground between a landed UFO and several dozen servicemen from the US military, who were guarding nuclear weapons at a nearby RAF base, as well as with several British policemen.  

The British public in 1980 were not told that US nuclear weapons were being stored in their country, despite strong opposition from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (see www.cnduk.org/about/item/437).
These weapons were intended to be used as a threat against Russia, if it invaded Poland to stop the new Solidarity union movement. Nor were the British public told about a series of UFO contacts on the very base which was storing those nuclear weapons, over three nights in December of 1980 (see  www.ufoevidence.org  or www.dailymail.co.uk).
Today the British public have not been told the truth about “crop circles”, except being encouraged to ridicule them.  

Sketches of the landed UFO

Sketches of the landed UFO, including strange symbols on its side, were made by US servicemen Jim Penniston and John Burroughs (see www.hyper.net/ufo/rendlesham.html).
Other sketches were made by US serviceman Larry Warren (see www.amazon.com or Larry_Warren ). The commander of the base at that time was Colonel Charles Halt, who investigated and made an audio cassette tape of the incident (see www.youtube.com).  Later the entire case was studied by Nick Pope formerly of the MOD (see www.nickpope.net) and Linda Howe, a science reporter from the USA (see www.earthfiles.com ). Our best images of the sketched UFO and symbols on its side are shown below: 

We have also shown photos (lower part) of Colonel Charles Halt, Jim Penniston, John Burroughs and Nick Pope (going from left to right). Some witnesses said that “time moved more slowly” in the vicinity of that landed UFO.
One might ask why no direct photographic evidence is available? Apparently some of the attempted camera images came out “fogged”, while other films were confiscated by the US military. If there is direct photographic evidence, then it has not been made publicly available.  

A long binary code was supposedly transmitted by electronic telepathy from the landed UFO to Jim Penniston 

One of the most interesting aspects of this UFO contact was the putative reception of a long message in binary code by Jim Penniston, when he touched certain symbols on the side of the landed craft. He “saw” thousands of consecutive zeros and ones in his mind, through some form of electronically directed telepathy. After returning home, he felt a need to write them all down on paper, and did so on 16 pages of a small notebook (see www.youtube.com). 

Little or no significance was attached to this long series of zeros and ones until 2010, when a meeting was held to mark the 30^th anniversary of the Woodbridge UFO case. Penniston apparently did not realize it could be some kind of “code”. Indeed, computer codes did not enter the awareness of a typical person on Earth until after the year 2000. Most people still do not know about them today, although they appear regularly in crop pictures!  

The first five pages of that binary code were released for public inspection in 2010, while its remaining eleven pages were not released until April 15, 2014, with the publication of a new book called “Encounter in Rendlesham Forest" by Nick Pope, Jim Penniston and John Burroughs
(see www.amazon.com/ or www.therendleshamforestincident.com ). A full translation of the binary code from eight-bit ASCII into English was provided there. Yet given the potential significance of this code for science, I thought it would be important to translate the entire binary code again from first principles, in order to check every detail. Also I wished to learn whether it might have any
relevance to the mysterious origin of “crop circles”? 

The complete Woodbridge binary code of 16 pages, translated from
eight-bit ASCII into English  

Sixteen annotated pages of this binary code are shown in Appendix 1 below, for computer experts to study. Its overall translation in an independent sense is summarized in the slide below:  

It seems to be the kind of message which would be given out by a team of human scientists from our future, who are/will be engaged with exploring their past (or our present). Might we call them “chrononauts”? The message starts with a series of general phrases: 

EXPLORATION OF HUMANITY. CONTINUOUS FOR PLANETARY ADVANCE. FOURTH COORDINATE CONTINUOUS. 

“Time” is the fourth coordinate of (x, y, z, t).  

Near the end of the message it says: 

ORIGIN 52 0942532 N (north latitude) 1 3131269 W (west longitude) 

ORIGIN YEAR 8100. 

These same “latitude, longitude, year” values were also given near the start of the message. Although two small parts of the message remain unclear, these three numbers seem to have been transmitted accurately, and can be relied upon to tell us where (or when) the UFO occupants come from. In other words, the Woodbridge UFO occupants seem to be time travellers from our distant future on Earth. They come from the year 8100 (possibly AD), and from a latitude-longitude somewhere in southern England. There is some question about longitude “West” versus “East”, which will be discussed further below.  

Next in the middle of the message we can see the word “BEFORE”, along with six other sets of precisely defined latitudes or longitudes on Earth. No decimal points were encoded anywhere. Yet all of those “BEFORE” coordinates show six digits past the decimal point in a self-consistent fashion.
Two “ORIGIN” coordinates show seven digits past the decimal point, again in a self-consistent fashion.  

Another phrase is “EYES OF YOUR EYES”, which could be the assigned name for this scientific exploration effort. Perhaps a few time travellers have been sent back in time to see the past for themselves, while everyone else on Earth (6000 years from now) will be watching their results? It would be of interest to learn which places on Earth they decided to travel to “BEFORE” they visited RAF Woodbridge-Bentwaters in 1980, and indeed we will show all six historically significant places below.  

Questions about origin: where do they come from on Earth in the distant future?  

The “ORIGIN” for those time travellers seems to be none other than Woodbridge, England about 6000 years from now:  

It would be impossible for both latitude and longitude coordinates from the binary code to match the town centre of Woodbridge to six digits past the decimal point, if this were not the case. 

Pope, Penniston and Burroughs suggest in their new book that an “origin”  for those time travellers may lie far out in the Atlantic Ocean, at a longitude of 13 131269 W rather than 1 3131269 W. This seems unlikely, because then the two sets of numbers given for latitude and longitude would not both show seven digits past the decimal point in a self-consistent fashion. The accepted latitude value is 52 0942532 N.  

Still it is strange that Woodbridge, England (the town closest to that 1980 UFO contact) should show a longitude on our Earth today of 1 313127 East, rather than 1 313127 West, as was provided twice in the binary code. No such reversal of “East versus West” appears for any other of the six longitude coordinates given in its “BEFORE” section. 

One possible solution to this problem is that our time-traveller friends come from a “mirror universe”, where many things remain similar to our Earth today (towns, humans), but planetary directions of East and West are reversed. In the science-fiction TV show “Fringe”, they call this parallel universe “the other side”. If this is not the case, then those time travellers may come from a location in southern England at longitude 1 313127 W just outside of Banbury. Again their origin would lie in southern England, close to where most crop pictures appear near Avebury or Silbury Hill (latitude 51 N, longitude 2 W).  

Possible relevance of this new UFO binary code to English “crop
circles”  

This new binary code of 16 pages may provide useful clues, in regard to the origin of those mysterious “crop circles”. First, we can see that certain crop circles seem to encode for the “latitude and longitude” of nearby English cities in similar way. For example a spiral crop picture from Yatesbury on May 30, 2007 seems to encode for the latitude and longitude of Marlborough (not far away) as 51 421 N and 1 722 W:  

Within the empty spaces of that crop picture we can see a number of 1 31312, which is precisely the ORIGIN longitude for Woodbridge in southeast England. Could time travellers from our distant future be creating “crop circles” as directional markers, to help them navigate in their distant past, which is our present?  

Next we can see that some of the symbols, which Jim Penniston noted along the outside of that landed UFO in 1980, match other symbols which appear in crop circles today, for example near Barbury Castle in May of 2011:

Thirdly, many crop pictures have shown the schematic images of curved spacetime geometries (as for “wormholes”), or hypothetical time-travel devices such as “Roman rings”:  

Other crop pictures (shown above at lower right) show the schematic images of “hyperbolic cubes” or “closed time-like curves”. Both of those are thought by physicists today to form a fundamental basis for time travel. 

Finally, a whole host of crop pictures (perhaps twenty to thirty) have suggested a precise foreknowledge of future events, on the part of our crop artist friends. Some of them illustrate unexpected astronomical or geological events such as cometary outbursts or paths, stellar novae, solar flares, or periods of major earthquake activity:   

Most of these future-predictive crop pictures are written using subtle mathematical codes, which ordinary members of the public cannot understand. Only advanced scientists could write so many different complex codes. Last year for example, many crop pictures predicted the path of comet Ison around our Sun, while others anticipated two stellar outbursts as Nova Delphinis (on August 14) or Nova Centaurus (on December 1).  

Some crop pictures concerning comet Ison were drawn as long ago as 2009, three years before it was “discovered”. Some crop pictures which predicted the outburst of comet 17P Holmes in 2007 appeared during the summer of 2005, two years before it happened.  

Other future-predictive crop pictures predict important events in human history. There was no prediction of the events of 9-11-2001 in crops, but then at Crabwood in 2002 they wrote in eight-bit ASCII code “much pain but still time”. This dire prediction presumably refers to our not-too-far-off future, say 2020 to 2050. Two crop pictures from 2007 showed the BP company logo and an “oil spill”, to predict what would happen in the Gulf of Mexico during 2010. Six crop pictures from 2010 showed images for “nuclear energy” or even an “atomic bomb clock”, to predict what would happen at Fukushima during 2011. Last summer in 2013 we saw a series of crop pictures which showed “large UFOs flying or landing”, in order to suggest that open extra-terrestrial contact with planet Earth may not be far off.  

There are many prior references to all of the work cited above, but I do not wish to trouble the webmaster with dozens of different links to insert!
Please check these various topics on Crop Circle Connector Research or News using a Google search, or in its Archives for members (1980-2013), and you will learn a lot. Even if you are a professional scientist, and think you know everything already by reading textbooks, you will learn a lot. Did they teach about “iPhones” in schools from classical Rome or Greece? No, and those people lived just 2000 years before us! The crop artists (some of them) seem to live 6000 years in our future. Of course they know more than us.  

Those time travellers visited six different, historically-important places on Earth, before they visited Woodbridge, England in 1980  

An independent translation of the Woodbridge UFO binary code by Jim Penniston is very similar to what we presented above, except for the assigned “origin”:  

He also lists six different locations of past time-travel visits as: Caracol Pyramid in Belize, close to Montezuma’s Castle in Arizona, the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt, Nazca Lines in Peru, Tai Shan mountain in China, and Portara on Naxos Island near Greece. We will now show below where all of those supposed past time-travel visits seem to have occurred. 

Caracol Pyramid in Belize (a Mayan construction): 
 

Just north of Montezuma’s Castle in Arizona (a north
American native construction):  

The Giza pyramid complex in Egypt:  

Nazca lines in Peru:  

Tai Shan mountain in China:  

Portara on Naxos Island near Greece:  

Do time travellers from our distant future really exist? Very possibly, unless the entire Woodbridge UFO contact (witnessed by 30 US servicemen) and this long binary code are both elaborate hoaxes. This huge body of witness testimonies and physical evidence seems too much to be a hoax. If those servicemen were “crazy”, then why were they assigned to guard nuclear weapons? 

The Cambridge offices of Professor Stephen Hawking do not seem to be on their list 

Those human time travellers list their origin as southern England in the year 8100, yet they did not include nearby Cambridge University on their list, of six historically important attractions from Earth’s past. How shocking!
The university offices of Professor Stephen Hawking, who does not believe in time travel, did not even rate a mention. Hawking concluded several years ago that time travel is impossible, partly on theoretical grounds, and partly because he organized a “party” for those hypothetical time travellers, and no one showed up (see www.dailymail.co.uk). 

If you were a time traveller, could you safely change the past, or would you only “observe”? 

Human time travellers have been a favourite theme in many works of science fiction, starting with H.G. Wells in the 19^th century. More recently, a popular science-fiction TV show called “Fringe” included time travellers from the year 2600 AD as “Observers”. In the plot of that TV show, a human society living six hundred years from now sends twelve representatives back in time, in order to observe important events from our era. Those twelve exploratory scientists were given code names “January” to “December” for the twelve months of a year.  

One of those twelve time travellers called “September” is a keen Observer, and accidently changes the past when he rescues a man (Walter) and his son (Peter) from an icy lake. Later he is called upon by the other eleven to fix the damage which he has done to time, or to “restore balance”. He therefore contacts an open-minded scientist from our era (Walter) to ask for his help. 

Walter is distrustful, because he imagines that September will take his son away again, in order to restore the original timeline. He pleads with September: “You know the future. Tell me how I can save my son from dying?”  

September replies: “There are things that I know, but there are also things that I do not. Various possible futures are happening simultaneously. I know them all, but cannot tell you which one will come to pass. Every action causes ripples, with consequences both obvious and unforeseen.” 

We do not know the science of time and history yet in 2014 AD, but can be pretty sure that other humans from our distant future on Earth may know this difficult and arcane science. Whether they choose just to observe, or alternatively to change our present (their past), is an open and interesting question. They seem to draw “crop circles” in our fields, but for what purpose? Simply for navigation among various possible pasts or parallel universes? Or to change how humans of our era think and behave?  

An increased awareness of their scientific program among many members of our human race could cause a change in time and history. Yet there is a powerful movement to deny its existence from government authorities. There is also an irrational contempt of the crop circle phenomenon from leading physicists, who should know better. Where will all of this strange activity lead next? I don’t know. “The past is prelude”. 

Red Collie (Dr. Horace R. Drew) 

P.S. I would like to thank Linda Howe and Bill Chalker for their help.
Also I would like to thank the time-traveller Sarana (Sirona) who acted kindly toward my family in 1999. If she is reading this, I hope that we will meet in the future (your past, ha, ha).

Alien Life Discovery Could Happen Within 20 Years

Curious about whether there is life beyond Earth? The answer should come within 20 years, astronomers told members of a Congressional science committee on Wednesday.

A three-way race is under way to learn if life exists elsewhere in the solar system or beyond, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with the California-based SETI Institute, said during a hearing before the House Science and Technology Committee.

So far, most efforts -- and funding -- to find extraterrestrial life have focused on Mars and potential life-bearing moons in the outer solar system.

13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

“At least a half-dozen other worlds (besides Earth) that might have life are in our solar system. The chances of finding it, I think, are good, and if that happens, it’ll happen in the next 20 years, depending on the financing,” Shostak said.

A second initiative scans the atmospheres of distant planets for telltale signs of oxygen or methane, gases which, on Earth, are mostly tied to life.
These searches likewise could yield results in the next two decades, Shostak added.

The third project hunts for technologically advanced aliens that are sending radio or other signals out into space. The idea behind the Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is to eavesdrop on signals that are deliberately or accidentally leaked from another world.

Top 10 Places To Find Alien Life

“That makes sense because in fact even we, only 100 years after ... the inventionof  practical radio, already have the technology that would allow us to send bits of information across light years of distance to putative extraterrestrials,” Shostak said.

Humans’ first television broadcasts, including “I Love Lucy,” and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” have passed 10,000 stars, noted SETI hunter Dan Werthimer, with the University of California, Berkeley.

“The nearby stars have seen 'The Simpsons.' If we’re broadcasting, maybe other civilizations are sending signals in our direction -- either leaking signals the way that we unintentionally send off signals, or maybe a deliberate signal,” Werthimer told legislators.

“The fact that we haven’t found anything means nothing,” Shostak added.
“We’ve only just begun to search.”

Mack the life, and maybe a film

John Mack is back.

Dr. Mack, a decorated Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant and controversial biography of T.E. Lawrence, suffered a silly and ignominious end: While visiting London in 2004, he stepped off a curb, checking for traffic over his left shoulder. A speeding driver struck him from the right, killing Mack more or less instantly.

At the time he was at the apogee of his fame, or the absolute nadir of his self-abasement, depending on whom you talked to.

Mack had achieved notoriety by investigating “experiencers,” men and women who claimed they had been abducted by aliens traveling to earth on spaceships. “These people are not lying, and they are not crazy,” he declared. Mack wrote a best-selling book, “Abduction,” appeared on “Oprah,” and became the target of a secret Harvard Medical School investigation into his activities.

Now Hollywood filmmaker Denise David Williams wants to make a feature film about Mack, using materials that his family has so far kept hidden from view: an unpublished manuscript about the Harvard investigation; a full transcript of the secret inquiry; and Mack’s complete archive of interviews with purported abductees.

Williams spent over a year partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Productions, but left, she says, “when the direction they wanted to go veered too far from [my] vision of the film.” Now she’s trying to raise $1 million by crowd-sourcing on the Internet, a long shot, but not an impossible task. The recent “Veronica Mars” movie siphoned up $5.7 million in 30 days.

Mack is hard to parse. I met him a few times and, like many psychiatrists, he had an almost hypnotic ability to bend you to his will. I never took much stock tales. To me, the experiencers seemed like serial s pretty much what the world thought, too.

Mack thought otherwise, and he radiated an infectious curiosity about the world that was hard to resist. Harvard’s hysterical overreaction to his work made for great copy, and was a permanent blot on the university’s reputation. Mack quickly learned who his friends were, as colleagues trooped before Dr. Arnold Relman’s ad hoc committee to denigrate him.

Dr. George Vaillant was a rare defender, as was Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who opined: “There is an establishment at Harvard; angels — yes. Extraterrestrials — no. There’s a lot of harrumphing that goes on: ‘We don’t want to be identified with this kind of science.’ ”

After the Harvard inquiry blew over in 1995, there were some hints that Mack may have fine-tuned his thinking. “I can see now that I had to a large extent created my problem with the literalness that I had treated the encounter phenomenon in the 1994 book,” he wrote in a manuscript excerpt published by Vanity Fair. “It is possible that in some cases people are taken bodily into spacecraft. However, the question is more subtle and complex.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Rediger knew Mack at the end of his life. “By the time I knew him, he believed that he had been misunderstood by the public and by Harvard,” Rediger says. “The culture focused on the exterior manifestations — the flying saucers, and so on. His private beliefs were much more sophisticated.
It was like he was exploring a new terrain but lacked a map. It was confusing for him and confusing for many who knew him.”

Ten days before Mack’s death he told a colleague, “If anyone asks, tell them I’m not crazy.” I’m not sure if we will ever know.

British MOD still witholding secret UFO documents.

Speaking to the Sedona MUFON section meeting on Friday May 16, Burroughs surprised the audience when he presented first results of his analysis of a declassified British MOD document, along with the stunning revelation that the MOD——despite the wide-spread perception that they've turned all classified UFO documentation over to the British National Archives——is still maintaining at least six major UFO/UAP Policy Papers, along with other documentation as classified, including a paper on Defence Policy and UFO's. The last is presumably a clear refutation of the MOD stance that UFOs, or at least UFO reports, are 'not of Defence Significance', however since it remains classified, there is no way to know.

Burroughs' two hour presentation included a brief review of the recently published book by St. Martin's Press, 'Encounter in Rendlesham Forest', co-authored with fellow USAF security officer Jim Penniston and former MOD UFO desk administrator Nick Pope; a discussion of the 'Sedona coordinate', a location specified by one possible decoding of retired Technical Sergeant James Penniston's controversial binary data, and details of Burroughs' struggle with the VA to acquire his complete service medical records, some of which have since been classified by unknown components of the US DOD.

The presentation fit together a number of pieces of an increasingly complex puzzle about what actually happened in the waning days of December, 1980 in a forest outside Joint Base RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge, a key front line Cold War US airbase in East Anglia. It also offered a novel possible explanation of the mysterious classification of his missing medical data, beyond the ongoing scandal of VA lack of treatment of veterans that recently forced the head of the VA to resign.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

The timeline of events Burroughs recounts is telling

In June, 2000, the MOD shifted the titles of its public information Policy Papers, replacing the term 'UFO' with 'UAP' in order to throw investigators using the FOIA process to find UFO documentation off the trail.
This served to mask documentation from public access on the basis of a technicality.

In December, 2000 the MOD commissioned a Top Secret Technical Memorandum 55/2/00 in 2000, which was intended to provide the pretext for closing down the MOD UFO desk. That Memorandum included a Key Recommendation that:

Subsequent to the internal release of the Technical Memorandum, the UK MOD shut down the public UFO reporting desk and began a process of transferring all of the UFO reports to the British National Archives.

According to a statement by MOD spokesman Dr. David Clarke in a June 21, 2013 video, Britain's Ministry of Defence revealed a new batch of UFO files for sightings which occurred between 2007 and 2009, the final release of such files from Britain. The implication was that the MOD had come clean. The video is attached to this article.

This seeming act of transparency was apparently a ruse, as FOIA requests by Burroughs have revealed two further versions of the truth.

One MOD response to a FOIA request admitted to the existence of the crucial
high-level policy papers. Two of the policy papers, covering the periods of 1971-76 and 1996-2000, respectively, are titled 'UFO policy', while three more covering the periods of June-Dec 2000, Dec 2000-March 2004 and   March 2004 are titled 'UAP policy'.

A subsequent MOD response to a follow up request further admitted the existence of a total of 18 unreleased UFO/UAP documents, including one titled 'Defence Policy Issues UFOs'.

"It's no big surprise, I guess, that the MOD is lying about transparency," Burroughs said in a phone interview from his Sedona home. "It's always a cat-and-mouse game with these agencies to get them to admit anything of substance about this subject."

It's now clear that MOD Scientific Memo 55/2/00 was designed to take a page
out of the USAF playbook and provide a pretext for shutting down the MOD UFO report desk, a minimal public relations effort. The tactics mirror the process by which the USAF shut down acceptance of civilian UFO reports, with the refinement that a Top Secret memorandum limited in distribution to 7 copies was used in place of a public commission report.

A HISTORY OF EXTRACTION

In 1966, astronomer J. Allen Hynek in an off-the-cuff conjecture during a hastily arranged press conference, made the regrettable remark that lights observed in Michigan by over 100 witness which had garnered considerable media attention might be attributable to 'Swamp Gas'. It was a historic gaffe making Project Blue Book a laughing stock and triggering then Michigan
Congressman Gerald Ford, the House Republican Leader, in whose district the
sightings had occurred, to call for a congressional hearing on the subject.

That hearing took place on April 5, 1966 under the aegis of the House Armed Services Committee (89th Congress, 2nd Session).

In October, 1966, in the wake of the Swamp Gas incident and the initial hearing, the Air Force selected Dr. Edward U. Condon and the University of Colorado for a UFO research contract to do a study on the Blue Book project, the USAF's largely ceremonial public relations effort to accept and file UFO reports.

A subsequently leaked memo written by staff member Robert J. Low to university officials on August 9, 1966, indicated that the conclusion of the report was a forgone conclusion before it ever began. The memo read in part:

The Condon Committee effort was supported by a second Congressional hearing on July 29, 1968 under the aegis of the House Science and Astronautics Committee. That hearing included Dr. Hynek, the head of the Astronomy department at Northwestern University, Dr. James E. McDonald, Senior Physicist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, University of Arizona, Dr. Carl Sagan, Dept. of Astronomy, Cornell University, and Dr. Robert L. Hall, Head, Dept. of Sociology, University of Illinois-Chicago among others.

It was the last serious effort at formal government sponsored discourse on the subject. To this day, many, including UFO reality advocate Stanton Friedman view U of A Physicist McDonald's testimony as the best prepared and presented set of unexplained cases ever presented.

Predictably, Condon's summation announced that there was no need for the USAF to maintain effort on Blue Book, despite the contents of the actual report, which includes a number of significant cases labeled 'Unexplained'. As a result, the USAF shut down the project and got out of the business of accepting UFO reports.

The MOD followed the same pattern over four decades later, commissioning a
Top Secret report rather than a sham public accredited investigation that would recommend the shut down of the largely ceremonial MOD UFO report acceptance desk, and, having changed their terminology in advance an in accordance with the key recommendation, did exactly that.

"The memorandum itself is a masterpiece of bureaucratic double-speak," Burroughs stated in a press release accompanying the presentation, "You have to know what you are looking for and understand what is actually being stated."

The plan worked fairly flawlessly, as the MOD Technical Memorandum was largely overlooked by the UFO research community due in large part to the obscurity of wording and the intertwining of excess but relatively useless technical data on the reports, along with vague discussion of 'rare, but natural weather phenomenon.'

This tactic mirrors the content of a press conference held at the Pentagonin 1952 in the wake of the spectacular July sightings over Washington, DC of groups of as many as 7 UFO's of the form of silver saucers of phenomenal performance.

Air Force Director of Intelligence General Samford did make the oft-quoted statement that "However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of sighting reports], in the order of twenty percent of the reports, that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things."

Samford issued a series of confusing statements discussing weather phenomena, but when pressed by reporters, admitted late in the conference that:

The properly confused press duly reported that the USAF felt that the Washington sightings were do to radar reflections resulting from temperature inversions, something the radar operators would later refute, although that was under-reported.

In 1956, Gen. Samford was appointed director of the National Security Agency, a posiction he held until his retirement in late 1960.

DIGGING DEEPER

While self-styled experts such as David Clarke either overlooked or disregarded the significance of the material in MOD 55/2/00 — Clarke would later take a position on MOD staff as a public analyst, Burroughs notes — Burroughs dug deep into the document and discovered some surprising results.

To start with, the MOD admitted there is a real phenomenon, not a weather aberration at the root of the sightings reports data.

"That Unidentified Aerial Phenomena exist is indisputable. Credited with the ability to hover, land, take-off, accelerate to exceptional velocities and vanish, they can reportedly alter their direction of flight suddenly and clearly can exhibit aerodynamic characteristics well beyond those of any known aircraft or missile -- either manned or unmanned."

This follows similar admissions by the USAF and France.

In a 1947 memo to then chief of staff Curtis LeMay, General Twining stated
that:

"These are but a few examples of confirmation that the phenomenon exists and the root cause is something beyond known human engineering capabilities," Burroughs maintains.

The choice of wording is not accidental.

Confirmation of the existence and nature of the phenomenon, Burroughs says, is a crucial and important conceptual distinction from 'Disclosure' of the facts, whatever they may be, as called for by Disclosure advocates.

"Disclosure is a political impossibility." Burroughs maintains, quoting again the COMETA report which concluded in part that:

"Confirmation trumps Disclosure," says Burroughs, 'in two respects. First of all it is politically workable. Secondly, it has already occurred."

Public acceptance of the confirmation of the phenomenon has the crucial attribute that it allows the maintenance of 'the orderly functioning of the body politic', a phrase at the heart of the 1953 Robertson Panel report, which was commissioned in the wake of the Washington, D.C, in the summer of 1952. That report was the impetus for a comprehensive program of public indoctrination that lasted for decades.

SYSTEMATIC DISINFORMATION

On one hand, the CIA, under the aegis of 'Project Mockingbird' co-opted the US national media (a transgression of their mandate not to interfere in US internal affairs) and began a campaign to reduce the UFO sightings reports problem to a socially unacceptable topic, the framework of which was recounted in 'The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America' by Hugh Wilford.

On the other hand, the CIA quietly funded the National Enquirer and soon the tabloid, which included a patently ridiculous UFO story amid juicy gossip and other low-brow entertainment, was a fixture at every supermarket checkout stand in America. This was documented in Terry Hanson's book 'The Missing Times'.

The combination worked, and soon thoughtful, serious discussion of the UFO topic was socially taboo, the subject reduced to the derogatory memes of 'little green men' in 'flying saucers' studied by people wearing 'tin-foil hats.' This social engineering produced a toxic atmosphere and relegated the UFO research community to a journalistic ghetto of belief driven obscurity.

In recent decades, a frontal assault on this circumstance has been mounted by a number of Disclosure advocates, who demand nothing less than a Presidential admission of 'an extraterrestrial presence on earth'.

Not only is this a political impossibility — the UFO topic is the electrified 'third rail' of American politics, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich discovered in a 2007 presidential candidate's debate — but it assumes as somehow a priori the exact nature of what would be 'disclosed'.

Whatever is known about the phenomenon in the bowels of the US security state is inextricably bound up with justifiably classified information, as the COMETA  report notes.

Burroughs credits the concept of Confirmation to Las Vegas space and housing
entrepreneur Bob Bigelow, who made an articulate assessment of the situation in a rare public appearance on George Knapp hosted Coast to Coast AM radio show in March of 2013.

Bigelow said in part:

WALKING EVIDENCE

Finally, Burroughs presented a detailed correlation between statements in MOD Memo 55/2/00, a 2010 paper by physicist Hal Puthoff, PhD, and a 2003 paper by Jaques Vallee and Eric Davis prepared for Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS).

The extremely short version of this set of correlations is that observations by witnesses to Rendlesham and Burroughs' own life-threatening heart problems are consistent with the effects predicted by Puthoff's avante-guarde propulsion theoretical paper, which describes a means of engineering space-time to achieve faster than light speed without violating the terms of General Relativity.

Puthoff's paper, published in the peer reviewed Journal of the British Interplanetary Society is avant-guarde theoretical, and thus the correlation Burroughs describes hinges on the ultimate engineering of the Puthoff Drive and measured effects.

But if Puthoff is correct, John Burroughs exhibits the effects of a prolonged and close encounter with a form of blue-shifted EM radiation consistent with a propulsion field capable of interstellar travel.

The implications of that are obvious.

Finally, the British MOD report itself states that:

Add to that the fact that Puthoff's theory of spacetime engineering would result in the paper's words:

According to some accounts, Burroughs actually entered the object of unknown origin on the first night.

Both serviceman's watches were 45 minutes out of sync with clocks on the base after the incident.

The MOD report goes on to state:

Burroughs includes the following statement in a media briefing PowerPoint presentation developed from his Sedona MUFON Lecture:

One of the responses to Burroughs' extensive FOIA request efforts admits that the MOD holds no information on the kind of radiation known to cause his heart condition. That information was not included in Burroughs' medical service records, portions of which have been deemed Classified by the US DOD.

Taken as a whole, it's clear that John Burroughs did not encounter a rare weather phenomenon in the Rendlesham Forest. Rare weather phenomena don't cause time to be slowed, nor do they induce specific life-threatening medical issues in the observer's heart.

Further proof of the nature of what he did encounter is probably locked in his DNA and in the portions of his service Medical Records, which someone at the
DOD has seen fit to Classify so as to deny access to the Veteran's Administration.

"Why would they do that," Burroughs wonders instinctively, part of his law enforcement training, "unless something very important and very sensitive is included in my medical records?"

Confirmation of the true nature of the UFO/UAP phenomenon (as if more was needed) stands as a very likely explanation of what that sensitive something might provide.

This article is copyright © 2012 Larry D. Lowe and can not be copied to in its entirity to other websites or email lists without author's written permission.

Permission is granted to include short extracts of this article on websites and email lists with a link to this original work.

link: http://www.ufohastings.com/articles/has-the-british-ministry-of-defence-released-all-of-its-ufo-files

Cambridge Physicists Find Wormhole Proof

What's the Latest?

Physicists at the University of Cambridge have found a theoretical foundation for the existence of wormholes, which are tubes that connect two different points in space-time. If a piece of information or physical object could pass through the wormhole, it could open the door to time travel or instant communication across enormous distances.
"But there's a problem: Einstein's wormholes are notoriously unstable, and they don't stay open long enough for anything to get through." In 1988, physicists reached the conclusion that a kind of negative energy called Casimir energy could keep wormholes open.

What's the Big Idea?

The theoretical solution reached at Cambridge has to do with the effects of quantum energy, which tells us that even vacuums are teaming with waves of energy. If you imagine two metal plates in a vacuum, some waves of energy would be too big to fit between the plates, meaning that the space-time between the plates would have negative energy. "[U]nder the right circumstances, could the tube-like shape of the wormhole itself generate Casimir energy? Calculations show that if the wormhole's throat is orders of magnitude longer then the width of its mouth, it does indeed create Casimir energy at its centre."

Read more at New Scientist

Rendlesham: Ministry of Defence officer ridcules UFO  claims

UFO expert and former Ministry of Defence investigator, Nick Pope

Tom Potter

Never mind ‘Britain’s Roswell’, the mystery that unfolded in a forest clearing near the Suffolk coast in late December 1980 has become the most significant UFO case in history, according to a former government investigator.

Nick Pope spent three years as the Ministry of Defence’s UFO desk officer between 1991 and 1994. Since then, one series of events has remained for him a constant source of intrigue, resulting in the publication of a new book Encounter in Rendlesham Forest - written with US airmen John Burroughs
and Jim Penniston.

Now an author and UFO commentator, Mr Pope contends that what the two servicemen witnessed at the East Gate of RAF Woodbridge was a controlled landing and take-off, “not just lights in the sky”.

He also ridicules popular claims that the apparition was caused by the glow of Orfordness Lighthouse, and disagrees with speculation of a nuclear mishap which was covered up.

Despite a classified UK intelligence study revealing “several observers were probably exposed to UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) radiation”, Mr Pope says the US government will not acknowledge that the incident occurred.

Now based in California, he said: “When I joined the MoD’s UFO project, it soon became clear that Rendlesham was the single case that was still generating not just public interest, but also interest from the media, and indeed Parliament.

“I went through all the theories in great detail. I have no agenda in writing this book, except for trying to help John (Burroughs) and Jim (Penniston) unlock their medical records, which they have faced trouble obtaining. These two main witnesses have health issues which they attribute to radiation from the UFO.

“If British intelligence suggest they were irradiated, maybe there is something tosay what kind of radiation.

“I think Jim and John have been vindicated by some of the things we have turned up. They feel very bruised by how they have been treated over the years.”

Mr Pope thinks that the key to solving the mystery may lie in what he believes was vital evidence removed from the airbase and flown to Germany by a USAF general.

The material in the book is largely based on government documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, or released as part of the UK government’s declassification of UFO files.

But Mr Pope says that some UK intelligence files relating to the incident were “inadvertently destroyed”, but added: “Maybe there is someone out there with a smoking gun and maybe it will turn up.

“The book does not conclude it was extra terrestrial or that it was time travellers. We drew no definitive conclusion. It would have been dishonest to push our own theory. Previous authors had an answer before they had an investigation. We had no such approach.

“However, we are able to eliminate theories like the lighthouse or a nuclearaccident cover story.

“In a sense it’s frustrating that we went through all the theories - sceptical and exotic - and can’t accurately say what it was. It’s still a mystery.

“I think this case is better than Roswell. It’s crazy for the UFO community to say Roswell is its flagship case. Rendlesham has displaced it.”

Nick Pope on Orfordness Lighthouse:

“I have been to the forest half a dozen times and satisfied myself that, from the places witnesses saw the UFO, it’s clear the lighthouse is not visible.

particularly from the testimony of Colonel Halt (a witness who gave taped evidence following the second night of sightings) - that one of the ways they estimated the position of the UFO was by taking a bearing off the lighthouse.

“One of the most compelling things - and a factor which comes up in other UFO incidents - is the narrow beam of light was directed at the feet of the deputy base commander and his team, and into the weapons storage area.”

Nick Pope on ‘Missing evidence’:

“In 1967, defence ministers made a decision that all UFO files be made public - but we found that some files at the MoD were “inadvertently destroyed”. Worse than that, the destruction slip, which would have explained why they were destroyed, was itself destroyed.

“A key document that did survive, dated February 16, 1981, revealed that immediately after the incident, a senior USAF general flew into Bentwaters, was briefed on the incident and took items relating to the investigation back to his headquarters in Germany. The significance of this seems to have been lost over the years.

“The American government’s public position is that they haven’t investigated UFOs since 1969, when Project Blue Book was terminated. If that’s the case, why on earth did this happen?

“I think the missing link could be the file that must have been drawn up by General Gabriel, who flew back from having been briefed about the incident.

“We know he took various documents and the audio recording known as the Halt Tape. We know defence intelligence staff assessed radiation levels as significantly higher than background levels. We spoke to the disaster preparedness officer who went back to the clearing and discovered that the trees facing the landing site were scorched. That physical evidence must have gone back with the General.”

Nick Pope on the Cold War contention:

“Another idea we looked at was this being some sort of exotic test of guard force response. More extreme theories include the existence of holographic technology that can project anything from an alien invasion to the second coming - arguably an extremely useful weapon to cause a base to lay down its weapons and fleem still bound by the Official Secrets Act, and Jim and John are bound by a secrecy oath. Ours is the only book that required security clearance from the British and American government. Both governments are still, of course, extremely sensitive over the nuclear issue. The US stance is to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons.

“Some historians think we came closer to World War Three in December 1980 than perhaps has been acknowledged. The Rendlesham Incident played out over this period of great uncertainty.”

Are these mystery radio bursts messages from ALIENS?

• Scientists are trying to work out what is causing Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)
  
• The strange signals occur for a few milliseconds and come from nowhere
  
• The first was detected in 2007, but only a handful have been seen since
• In April the latest discovery was made, but still the mystery persists
  
• Explanations range from colliding neutron stars to alien signal

By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Published: 16:40 GMT, 16 May
2014 | Updated: 17:45 GMT,
16 May 2014

In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system.

For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars.

However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts(FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages.

FRBs are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

WHAT ELSE COULD THE SIGNAL BE?

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

The first FRB was spotted, or rather ‘heard’ by radio telescopes, back in 2007 - but it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to even agree it wasn’t a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments.

The signal, which lasted just five milliseconds, was named the Lorimer burst after its discoverer, Duncan Lorimer.

The radio emission was so dispersed, experts suggested it must have come from a great distance away, possibly billions of light-years.

But early estimates said there should be 10,000 of these events a day – so the fact that another wasn’t discovered until 2012 was troubling.

This was when data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia suggested it had heard another FRB, along with a handful of others, but the fact that only Parkes had detected the signals had some claiming these were merely instrument glitches.

A recent discovery, in April of this year, of an FRB using the giant radio dish in Puerto Rico confirmed to astronomers that these signals are indeed real – but they’re no closer to finding out an answer as to what they are.

Theories so far include flaring stars, white dwarfs merging, neutron stars colliding and – most intriguingly – alien signals.

‘This extraordinary finding either indicates an as yet unknown or unusual astronomical phenomenon, or it could indicate that this is a vast alien communication network, and the universe is teeming with intelligent life forms,’ says Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual.

‘Every unusual signal from outer space encourages us to wonder if it is from an alien civilisation.

‘Since this signal seems so elusive and hard to interpret then this should be a candidate for further analysis.

‘It would be fantastic if this was an alien signal as the knowledge that we are not alone in this vast universe would have a dramatic impact on our perception of our place in the scheme of things.'

For now, however, FRBs remain very much a mystery.

It will take further studies and observations in future to truly determine where they come from, and what is causing them. Until then, it’s difficult to rule any particular theory out of the window.

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Echoes From the Past: The MJ-12 Disinformation Scheme Still Reverberate   

A spotlight has recently been directed at the UFO-related MJ-12 disinformation ploy originating at Kirtland AFB’s Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) in the 1980s, involving now-retired AFOSI Agent Richard Doty, who forged government documents and engaged in other nefarious actions—under orders, he claims—to direct interest away from bona fide, secret Air Force operations.
Ten months ago, Open Minds’ Alejandro Rojas filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Air Force, in an effort to more fully understand what had taken place. His article about the effort was recently posted at:

I also recommend Barry Greenwood’s excellent article regarding his own findings
on MJ-12, at:

In keeping with disinformation-disseminator Doty’s many false or half-true statements over the years, his current position on what occurred is still intentionally misleading.
s latest spin regarding the reasons underlying the MJ-12 gambit, which I expose at s interactions with the late Paul Bennewitz.
The unfortunate government contractor had stumbled upon, ongoing UFO incursions at the nearby nuclear weapons depository, the Manzano Weapons and, therefore, needed to be neutralized.
The person selected for the job was Richard Doty who, before the first phase of the operation fizzled out in the late-1980s, had also successfully duped cattle mutilation expert Linda Moulton Howe, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, and a host of other persons interested in the secrets the Air Force might hold relating to the Roswell Incident and other aspects of the UFO phenomenon.

Most of the details relating to the overall picture may be read in my Bird Droppings article. Here, however, I will again present a brief summary of the operation involving Doty’s first target, Paul Bennewitz:

Journal of Astrobiology

Print ISSN: ISSN Pending    Online ISSN: ISSN Pending

FREQUENCY: Quarterly

Overview

The Journal of Astrobiology is the peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal which publishes original research papers, review papers, and short communications. Coverage includes all aspects of astrobiology, but is not limited to: astrophysics, planetary sciences, origin of life, search for extraterrestrial planets and habitable zones, life detection in our planetary system and in the galaxy, extreme habitats and extremophiles, astrochemistry, terraforming, space exploration, social, and educational aspects of astrobiology.

Latest Articles

ja - 2014 Volume 1, Number 1

I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up and may not be able to post much here for a while. To hold you until I can get back to making regular posts I'll treat you to this fascinating case related to me by Turkish UFOlogist Esen Sekerkarar, one of the speakers at the UFO Symposium in which I recently took part.

I loved the story of the "Esme Alien" for a couple of reasons (and I can't thank Esen enough for sharing it with me). First, the alien entity is just ridiculously weird; a floating poached egg that is somehow creepy and cuddly at the same time. Second, the reaction of the witnesses is remarkable. Third, in this unique story the UFO and the entity are one and the same! How's that for efficiency?

Ex-Air Force Law Enforcement Agent Says He Hoaxed Major UFO Mythologies

I have been researching UFOs for many years, delving deep into the underbelly of UFO lore, and one name seems to frequently pop up. His name is Richard Doty, and in the 1980s he was a special agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. He claims that while he was there he was tasked with hoaxing documents
and feeding false information to UFO researchers. The Air Force refuses to comment on whether they knew of his activities and whether his claims of partaking in this activity at the behest of his superiors is accurate.

It wouldn't be so bad if his stories of UFO crashes and secret UFO management groups, such as the fabled MJ-12, were not the subject of a large amount of books, movies, video games, television shows, and who knows what else. He says he even acted as a consultant for The X-Files, which is one of the very few tall tales of his that might actually be true.

Doty's story has changed over the years, and some of the details of the stories are conflicting. In frustration with this whole situation, I decided to send the Air Force Freedom of information Act (FOIA) requests to find out more.
I also wanted an official response regarding whether he was ordered to create these hoaxed documents.

At first the AFOSI Public Affairs Chief was very helpful. She expedited my request, and I received some very interesting documents. I was told that when my FOIA request was fulfilled, she would help me find someone I could talk to for an official statement. However, once I got the documents, she would no longer talk to me.

What was in the documents was very interesting and corroborated some of the legend around the Doty affair. The story begins with a man named Paul Bennewitz, who owned a humidity equipment company with contracts with Kirtland AFB. His house and office were near Kirtland, and he believed he was seeing UFOs over a part of the base that housed nuclear weapons. He also believed he was receiving transmissions from the aliens that flew those UFOs. Surprisingly, the Air Force humored him. They sent out Doty and an officer to investigate, but AFOSI decided that further investigation was unwarranted.

A few days later, Bennewitz was allowed to present his evidence to some of the officers and scientists at the base. He wanted a grant to conduct more research, and one of the scientists said he would help Bennewitz fill out the paperwork for the grant.

The documents also state that two U.S. senators from New Mexico had called or shown up at Kirtland to check on AFOSI's investigation of Bennewitz and his E.T. contacts. Apparently, Bennewitz had sought their help. Both times the senators were told there was no investigation.

Doty claims what the senators were told was not true. Doty says he was told to make Bennewitz believe there was an impending alien invasion because Bennewitz was actually observing secret Air Force projects. According to Doty,the Air Force wanted to discredit Bennewitz so no one would figure that out. However, Doty claims that in doing so, he created hoaxed documents that were given to Bennewitz and other UFO researchers, and that he broke into Bennewitz's house and office, some if not all of which is illegal.

I have been able to confirm that Doty did give Bennewitz documents that would make him believe he was under investigation, even though Doty told both senators that this was not the case. Bennewitz eventually checked into a mental health facility due to paranoia. Doty was successful, and Bennewtiz was convinced of the immanent alien invasion. This entire affair is incredibly unscrupulous, and Doty claims he did it all under orders. Doty is now a sergeant with the New Mexico State Police in Grants.

I think the Air Force needs to respond to Doty's claims. I have drafted a letter that I sent to the Air Force asking for a response. I have yet to receive one. I have posted this letter online along with extensive references to my sources and the FOIA documents I received. Take a look and let me know if you agree that the Air Force needs to address this situation once and for all.

To read the documents and watch a documentary with interviews with Doty, visit OpenMinds.tv.

by Bill Chalker

Editor’s Note: This article is a supplement to Bill Chalker’s “Strange Evidence” published in the Spring 1999 International UFO Reporter, which recounts the details of an Australian abduction case that yielded a strand of apparent alien hair suitable for mitochondrial DNA analysis.
The results were surprising, yielding a DNA sequence that was human, though very rare. Here Bill Chalker describes the bizarre experiences of Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his invention of a process that allows scientists to identify a fragment of DNA genetic code and then reproduce it in very large quantities. The DNA procedure described in the IUR article was made possible by Mullis’s discovery.

On a Friday night in April 1983, Dr. Kary Mullis, a biochemist, was driving up to his cabin in Mendocino county in northern California. During that drive to his Anderson Valley cabin Mullis conceived one of the great discoveries of modern chemistry—the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a surprisingly simple method for making unlimited copies of DNA, thereby revolutionizing biochemistry almost overnight. Kary Mullis described his discovery in Scientific American (“The Unusual Origin of the Polymerase Chain Reaction,” April, 1990). He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.

On another Friday night, during the summer of 1985, Kary Mullis drove up to his cabin. Arriving around midnight after driving for about three hours, Mullis dumped groceries he bought on the way, switched on the lights (powered by solar batteries) and headed, with flashlight in hand, to the outside toilet located about 50 feet west of the cabin. He never got there that night. Quoting from his 1998 book Dancing Naked in the Mine Field, Mullis encountered something extraordinarily weird on the way. “...at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed. It seemed to be a raccoon. I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.”

“The raccoon spoke. ‘Good evening, doctor,’ it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, ‘Hello.’ The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house.”

Mullis had no idea how he got there but he was not wet from the extensive early morning dew. His flashlight was missing. He was never able to find it. He had no signs of injury or bruising. The lights of the cabin were still on, along with the groceries on the floor. Some six hours had gone by unaccounted for.
Later in the day he found that an area of his property—“the most beautiful part of my woods”—had inexplicably become a place of dread. A year or so later Mullis exorcised this fear John Wayne-style by shooting the wood up. While his attempt at psychotherapy proved successful it did not help him find out what had happened that night in the summer of 1985. Mullis would become the only known Nobel prize laureate to claim an experience of what might be an alien abduction.

Kary Mullis describes himself as “a generalist with a chemical prejudice.”
Others have described him as “Hunter Thompson meets Stephen Hawking” or “the world’s most eccentric and outspoken Nobel Prize-winning scientist.” It is not easy to dispose of Mullis’s experience as a drug or alcoholic hallucination. For one, he was not affected by either that midnight. Plus, he has not been the only one to have experienced strange events at the cabin.

His daughter, Louise, disappeared for about three hours after wandering down the same hill. She also reappeared on the same stretch of road. Her frantic fiancée was about to call the local sheriff. Mullis had told no one of his experience until his daughter called to tell him to buy Whitley Strieber’s Communion. She was ringing to also tell her father about her strange experience. By coincidence when she rang, Mullis had already been drawn to the book and was up to the point where Strieber reports strange “owls” and little men entering his house.-

In his own book Mullis concluded, “I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened.”

Kary Mullis confirmed all this and more when I spoke with him recently.
Another person encountered a “glowing raccoon” between the cabin and the toilet.
This was a friend of Mullis who did not know of the “raccoon” story and was a
first-time visitor, during a party at the cabin after the announcement of the Nobel Prize win in 1993. This man did not stick around and fled up the hill towards the house. On the way he encountered a small glowing man, which then suddenly enlarged into a full sized man who said something like, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” The man, who was not experiencing a drug or alcohol-induced
hallucination left with a friend without informing anyone. They returned to their hotel at a nearby town. That night the man inexplicably found himself outside in the hotel car park troubled and terrified by the impression he had somehow been back at the Mullis cabin. He and his friend returned the following night to the cabin. The celebratory party was carrying on from the previous night. As the man arrived he was shocked to see the “full-sized man” seen as an enlarging apparition the night before drive up in a car. This was too much for the first time visitor. He left in a panic, holding Mullis somehow responsible for the previous nights events. Sometime later in tears he revealed the full story to Mullis, who identified the man his friend he had seen as his elderly neighbor. Mullis checked with his neighbor and sure enough he had come to the party on the second night, arriving to be seen by the terrified visitor. However he was certain he was not there on the first night, not in person and not lurking as a glowing raccoon or a small glowing man that enlarged into a vision of himself. There is more but that can perhaps wait for another more detailed telling.

Given this sort of activity on his property it perhaps isn’t surprising that Kary Mullis told me he thinks the nature of his experience is even stranger than abducting ETs. Instead he speculates about multi-dimensional physics (a la Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, 1994) at a macrocosmic level, “like anything can god-damn happen and the speed of light is not really the limit in terms of interactions with other cultures or whatever. This stuff about grabbing people or subjecting them to all kinds of experiments—it’s just anthropology at a level
we don’t understand quite yet.” As for PCR testing of biological samples from abductee experiences he indicated, “You might imagine that I thought of that myself. As for instance in ‘you can have some of mine, if I can have some of yours.’” He would like to look at this work, however he feels that the idea of an alien culture needing our DNA to survive is very unlikely and a program on the scale and nature of David Jacobs’s The Threat improbable. Any culture that could conquer the barrier of space-time could have easily conquered the far simpler problems of complex biochemistry and would not need us in the manner described in the grey alien-human “hybrid” agenda theories.