Facts about UFOs that will blow your mind and change how you see the sky

Written by Ivan Petricevic

From Pentagon videos to Cold War memos, the record shows how officials logged and studied unexplained sightings.

For most of the 20th century, official talk of unidentified flying objects was easy to dismiss as rumor, hoax, or tabloid fuel. That posture has weakened in recent years as governments have released more material, including military footage and archives that show how agencies tracked reports they could not immediately explain.

The modern term in the United States is “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, a label used to avoid the cultural baggage attached to “UFO.” Even with that shift, the core issue remains the same: objects or lights reported by credible observers, sometimes with sensor data, that were not identified at the time.

Declassified U.F.O. documents, with limits

Public statements have often emphasized that governments were not treating UFOs as evidence of extraterrestrial craft. Yet declassified collections show sustained bureaucratic attention to reports, especially when officials worried that sightings might reflect foreign technology, misidentified military activity, or gaps in air defense.

The CIA’s “UFOs: Fact or Fiction” collection summarizes the scope of what it has posted from its files, including the agency’s own historical review, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFO’s, 1947–90”. The agency frames the material as an archive of what was collected, not a conclusion about what was seen.

In Britain, The National Archives’ UFO reports guide describes how sightings were received and handled over decades, again without endorsing extraordinary explanations.

The Pentagon’s videos, formally released

In April 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense posted a statement confirming the release of three Navy videos that had already circulated widely. The department said it had authorized release of the “historical Navy videos” to “clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos.” The statement is available from the Department of Defense release page.

The footage, recorded by Navy aircraft sensors, is often described as showing objects moving in unusual ways. The videos are evidence of what the sensors captured and what pilots discussed in the moment, not a definitive identification of what the objects were.

Not all high-profile cases come from defense files. One of the most argued-over examples is the STS-75 “tether” episode, tied to the STS-75 mission in 1996. During the flight, the mission’s tethered satellite system was disrupted, and video recorded bright points that some viewers describe as disc-like objects near the drifting tether.

The basic mission facts are straightforward, and NASA’s summary makes clear the tether was lost and the mission continued gathering data. What the bright points represent has been debated for years, with proposed explanations ranging from imaging artifacts and debris to more exotic claims. The underlying event is real; the interpretation is not settled by the video alone.

The Pentagon studied “exotic” technology concepts

Declassified documents also show how UAP discussions intersected with defense research culture, where unusual reports can be treated as potential intelligence problems. A key paper trail involves the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, commonly known as AATIP.

A 2009 Defense Intelligence Agency memo about Senator Harry Reid’s request to protect the program under special access procedures can be read in the DIA’s FOIA reading room as “Senator Harry Reid’s Request to Put the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AAITP) under Special Access Protection”. The document anchors a core fact that often gets blurred in public debate: senior officials did support a structured effort to study unusual aerospace reports, and they discussed how to handle sensitive methods and findings.

That does not establish that any recovered “craft” existed, or that any material was reverse-engineered. It establishes that the topic reached high levels and was treated, at least by some officials, as worthy of protected research channels.

An Antarctic episode in the record

Among the most specific documents in the text is a 1965 letter describing unexplained lights witnessed at Antarctic research stations. Dated October 22, 1965, it includes this passage and must be read on its own terms, as a contemporaneous report:

“On the July 12 this year, the British Antarctic Survey Base on Deception Island (62° 59′ S, Long. 60° 34′ W) reported the following, which I quote as requested:

‘Argentine base (on Deception Island) observed a moving colored light on June 7th, 20th, and July 3. Chilean base (also on Deception) made similar observations on the latter two dates.

Flickering red-green-yellow light observed from British Base 2300 Z July 2 die north; it had moved in two waves quickly from the west then reversed along the course for a short distance before returning again to the north where it remained stationary for about 20 minutes.’

I should comment that our people in the Antarctic did not consider the important event enough to comment until asked. I requested information because of pressure from the B.B.C., N.B.C., and the Press, who acted on a news report put out from Argentina.

Yours sincerely,
V.E. Fuchs.”

The CIA archive, in the agency’s words

The CIA has posted thousands of pages tied to UFO-related reporting and internal handling of the issue. In its own description of the collection:

“This collection catalogs C.I.A. information on this subject from the 1940s through the early 1990s.”

That line appears on the agency’s UFOs: Fact or Fiction collection page. The volume reflects how often reports crossed analysts’ desks, even when many entries were unresolved, secondhand, or never validated.

Older reports, from broadsheets to colonial diaries

Long before jets and radar, strange sky events were recorded in language shaped by the times. One of the most cited examples is an illustrated broadsheet from 1561 describing what later writers recast as a UFO “battle” over Nuremberg. The event is commonly referred to as the 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg, and the woodcut is often attributed to Hans Glaser, a local artist and printer, as discussed by The Public Domain Review’s overview. The report quoted in the text reads:

“In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates, and in the country – by many men and women.

At first, there appeared in the middle of the sun, two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise, there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.

In between these globes, there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.

These all started to fight among themselves so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides; thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun.

Besides, the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the Earth with immense smoke. After all this, something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows…”

(Source: Colman S. Von Kevicsky, “The Ufo Sighting Over Nuremberg in 1561” Official Ufo January 1976. Translation by Ilse Von Jacobi.)

In North America, a frequently cited early account comes from Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, discussed in History.com’s account of the 1639 episode. Such reports show continuity of human experience, not continuity of explanation: before modern astronomy and aviation, unusual atmospheric events were often described in religious or martial terms.

Hot spots, air-raid scares, and radar nights

Modern reporting is also shaped by simple geography and population: more people watching the sky tends to produce more reports. The National UFO Reporting Center’s California index illustrates the scale of self-reported sightings in one large state, though that database is not a verified catalog of confirmed events.

The text highlights several famous U.S. incidents from the mid-20th century. The “Battle of Los Angeles” in February 1942 is well documented as an air-raid alarm and anti-aircraft barrage. The California State Library’s historical note, “The Battle of Los Angeles,” summarizes the episode and the scale of the firing. Later official histories attributed the trigger to war nerves and a weather balloon.

In July 1952, radar operators and pilots reported targets over Washington. The National Archives’ Project Blue Book history explains how the Air Force organized its system for collecting and evaluating UFO data that same year, in part to address public concern and possible national security implications.

The Rendlesham Forest incident in December 1980 remains one of the most cited cases involving U.S. Air Force personnel in Britain. The UK’s National Archives summary notes the role of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, and the underlying document is commonly known as the Halt memo, a short report that became the main official record of the episode.

Speculation, and what can be checked

A few claims in the text point to documents said to be written by major historical figures about “Relationship with Inhabitants of Celestial Bodies.” That is a serious allegation, and it is not supported by the major archival sources cited above. Without a reliable, primary archive reference, it should be treated as unverified.

Churchill’s interest in life beyond Earth, by contrast, is grounded in known material. The rediscovered essay “Are We Alone in the Universe?” and the quote included in the text have been reported and analyzed by outlets including Smithsonian Magazine, which places the line in context of Churchill’s broader engagement with science.

Taken together, the record shows something more modest than the folklore: a long paper trail of sightings, a smaller set of cases with military sensors and formal releases, and an enduring gap between “unidentified” and “identified as extraordinary.” The sky can produce real data and real confusion at the same time

{ https://curiosmos.com/category/unsolved-mysteries/ }

Key Takeaways

If you like to peruse the internet for strange, puzzling extreme phenomena — and to be honest, who among us doesn't? — you may already have come across the Batagaika crater. It's a massive, growing hole in the landscape of Siberia that's inspired even serious-minded scientific publications to resort to supermarket tabloid-style terminology such as the Doorway to Hell and the Gateway to the Underworld.

First spotted in the mid-1960s by surveillance satellites that were classified, the Batagaika crater has grown over the past 60 years from an insignificant gully to a massive tadpole-shaped depression that covers 200 acres (81 hectares) and stretches 2/3 of a mile (1 kilometer) in length and is 164 feet (50 meters) deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

1. What Is the Batagaika Crater?

Bataiga megaslump is seen here compared to Meteor Crater in Arizona, which measures 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) across and about 600 feet (180 meters) deep. The size of the asteroid that produced Meteor Crater is likely to be about 100 to 170 feet (30 to 50 meters).  Wikimedia/(CC BY-SA 4.0)

One key to understanding the Batagaika crater is to understand that it isn't actually a crater. That's a term reserved for bowl-shaped holes in the ground that are caused by the impact of meteorites (like the Chicxulub crater), volcanic eruptions, or either a natural or man-made explosion of some sort.

Instead, the batagaika "is a retrogressive thaw slump, the largest in the world in fact," explains Roger Michaelides, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. His areas of expertise include permafrost, the term for soil or rock and ice that stays frozen for long periods of time, which is often found in Arctic regions such as Alaska, Greenland and Siberia.

"Retrogressive thaw slumps belong to a class of terrain types called thermokarst that occur in areas underlain by permafrost," Michaelides says in an email.

While a non-scientist might assume that the "perma" in permafrost means that it stays frozen permanently, Michaelides says that isn't necessarily the case.

"With rising air temperatures across the Arctic, permafrost can thaw, and when it thaws it can result in dramatic changes to the landscape," he says. "In areas of ice-rich permafrost, permafrost thaw induces melting of ground ice, which causes the ground to subside and form irregular depressions in the ground surface. Some of these depressions can fill with pooling water and form thermokarst lakes, and sometimes the initiation of thermokarst can result in large gashes and slumps of ground as permafrost continues to thaw and become unstable. That's more or less what happened with the Batagaika crater."

3. The Science of the Batagaika Crater

The foal carcass of the ancient horse that lived on the territory of Yakutia 42,000 years ago was discovered in the Batagaika crater.  Mammoth Museum of North-Eastern Federal University

In one way, the growth of the Batagaika crater is a gift to science. "As this permafrost thaws, it also reveals a treasure trove of paleontological information in the form of fossils from the last ice age and potentially older," Michaelides explains.

In 2018, for example, scientists found the remains of an extinct baby horse, with well-preserved skin, hair, tail and hooves that died 42,000 years ago. That specimen yielded the oldest sample of liquid blood ever found, according to Live Science.

But the massive slump also is a potentially worrisome environmental omen.

"As permafrost thaws, methane, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases previously bound within the frozen permafrost can be released into the atmosphere," Michaelides explains. "This in turn can set off a positive feedback loop of its own. Rates of methane release from degrading permafrost are difficult to quantify, particularly over broad regions, but advances in satellite remote sensing may someday soon enable this type of analysis on regional and Arctic scales."

4. Thaw and Release of Carbon

The Batagaika crater covers 200 acres (81 hectares) and stretches 2/3 of a mile (1 kilometer) in length and is 164 feet (50 meters) deep.  Alexander Kizyakov, Lomonosov Moscow State University

Thawing of permafrost on such large scales not only can yield fossils and preserved remains, like the baby foal, but it also can expose bacteria, carbon and other matter encased in ice for centuries. And that's not a good thing.

"As the crater grows, material that has been frozen and inaccessible for 650,000 years is being exposed. This includes organic matter and carbon," Cadieux says. "It is estimated that permafrost soils hold at least twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does."

Why that's potentially so bad is because microorganisms break down this newly exposed organic matter and release methane and carbon dioxide. If that were to happen slowly and steadily, 220 billion tons (200 billion metric tons) of carbon could be released in about 300 years. But if the permafrost thaws abruptly, it could increase the current permafrost carbon projections by 50 percent, Cadieux explains.

The Arctic has already warmed by almost 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit, (more than 3 degrees Celsius). That's three times faster than the rest of the world. As the air warms, it heats up the ground and thaws more permafrost. Some studies suggest that the sudden collapse of thawing permafrost in the Arctic might double the warming of the planet from greenhouse gases.

There's also the possibility that the Batagaika crater's growth could cause local ecological problems as well, such as further loss of forest, added stress on wildlife and changes to hydrology, Michaelides says, while cautioning that this is not his area of expertise.

{ https://science.howstuffworks.com/ }

A team of Ohio State University (OSU) scientists has revealed a cutting-edge process using an electrically powered high-energy laser that can turn ordinary moon dust into several futuristic materials that can be fabricated into useful tools and materials.

They also added different base materials, such as stainless steel and aluminum-silica ceramics, to the 3D-printed tools and structures made from laser-converted moon dust to determine which materials offered the greatest benefits in terms of strength, simplicity, and durability.

The OSU researchers said their approach could be used by future lunar colonists to create tools, habitats, and other necessary items and structures with only a small amount of material added to the base lunar regolith.

High-Powered Laser and Moon Dust Fused into Different Objects

As procuring actual lunar regolith was impractical, the OSU team started with a simulated moon dust made to match the authentic regolith’s material and chemical composition. According to a statement announcing the process, the team loaded the simulant into a 3D printer and printed rigid, stackable sheets that could be formed into different tools and objects.

To assess the viability of the printed sheets for various manufacturing and construction applications, the research team used a high-energy laser to melt regolith onto a base material, such as stainless steel. This process fused the simulated moon dust to the base material, resulting in a hybrid compost material with unique properties.

Test Reveal Unique Compositions Under Varying Atmospheric Conditions

Because future moon colonists will operate in hazardous conditions, the team tested their moon dust laser fabrication process under various environmental conditions. According to the team’s statement, these tests revealed that the overall quality of a material produced by their approach “depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.”

“Different environments lead to different properties, which directly affect the mechanical strength and the thermal shock resistance of certain components.”

Along with the material’s manufacture and composition, experiments revealed that environmental factors such as oxygen availability and fabrication factors such as laser power can affect the stability of the final structure made from the hybrid material.

“There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant,” explained Sarah Wolff, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios.”

There Are so Many Applications That We’re Working Toward

When discussing potential applications of their high-energy laser-based moon dust fabrication process, the OSU team noted that future lunar colonists will need to be able to build tools and structures using local resources rather than transporting heavy equipment and materials from Earth. They also noted that such tools and structures must be specially engineered to “survive extreme vacuum, dust and thermal environmental conditions.”

“The promise of these technologies would not only save essential mission time but also allow for extended independence as crews travel into deep space,” they explained.

Moving forward, the team is exploring the challenges moon colonists may face when using local resources. For example, their laser uses electric power, which can be generated using solar collectors or other hybrid power architectures.

“There are so many applications that we’re working toward that with new information, the possibilities are endless,” Xu said.

Although the process is designed for future moon colonists, the researchers suggest that their approach could lead to improved, more energy-efficient processes and potentially address material shortages on Earth.

“If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth,” Wolff explained. “To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.”

The study “Laser directed energy deposition additive manufacturing of lunar highland regolith simulant” was published in Acta Astronautica.

• Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

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MUFON  March #5 - eNewsletter 

NATIONS OF THE WORLD UNITED STATES 232 CANADA 17 UNITED KINGDOM 11 AUSTRALIA 5 FRANCE 4 AUSTRIA 3 ARGENTINA 3 GERMANY 3 POLAND 2 MEXICO 2 BRAZIL 2 INDIA2 VIETNAM 2 CZECH REPUBLIC 1 MALI 1 BELGIUM 1 GREECE 1 VANUATU 1 CHILE 1 ISRAEL 1 SWITZERLAND 1 SAUDI ARABIA 1 COSTA RICA 1 ITALY 1 TURKEY 1 AZERBAIJAN 1 PHILIPPINES 1 URUGUAY 1 IRAQ 1 SOUTH AFRICA 1   TOTAL: 305 SHAPE Circle 51 Unknown 31 Triangle 29 Sphere 25 Other 19 Star-like 16 Ova 15 Disc 14 Cylinder 11 Cigar 9 Square/Rectangular 9 Fireball 8 N/A 5 Diamond 4 Bullet/Missile 3 Blimp 3 Egg 3 Chevron 2 Boomerang 2 Flash 2 Tic Tac 1 Teardrop 1 Saturn-like 1 STATES OF THE U.S.A. California 22 Texas 16 Florida 15 Washington 11 Illinois 11 Arizona 11 Missouri 10 Pennsylvania 10 Oregon 9 Colorado 8 Nevada 8 Massachusetts 7 New York 7 Minnesota 6 Ohio 6 Wisconsin 6 Michigan 6 Utah 5 Georgia 5 Idaho 5 Tennessee 4 Connecticut 4 Montana 4 Nebraska 4 South Carolina 4 Virginia 3 New Jersey 3 Indiana 3 Kentucky 2 Alabama 2 Maryland 2 Alaska 2 South Dakota 2 North Carolina 1 Iowa 1 Mississippi 1 North Dakota 1 Kansas 1 Oklahoma 1 Vermont 1 Louisiana 1 Maine 1 DISTANCE < 100 ft 42 101-500 ft 43 501 ft - 1 Mile 43 Over 1 Mile 49 Unknown 27 NO VALUE 14 ERT Most impressively there were 18 Landings, Hovering, or Takeoffs reported, and 33 Entities observed.

{ 

Mystery of ancient cosmic ‘snowmen’ floating in deep space has been cracked

 Rory McKeown

An American student has resolved the longstanding mystery of one our solar system’s strangest objects – cosmic ‘snowmen’ that populate its outer reaches.

Astronomers have long debated why the globular icy objects look the way that they do.

But researchers at Michigan State University now say they have evidence that a surprisingly simple process could explain how these shapes form.

Beyond the turbulent asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter lies the Kuiper Belt, a vast region past Neptune filled with icy remnants from the birth of the solar system.

These ancient building blocks, known as planetesimals, have remained largely untouched for billions of years.

Around one in ten are “contact binaries” – objects made up of two connected spheres, reminiscent of a snowman.

How they formed without being smashed together by violent collisions has remained an open question.

Now Jackson Barnes, a graduate student at the university, has developed the first computer simulation to show how such two-lobed shapes can arise naturally through gravitational collapse.

This is the process by which matter contracts under its own gravity, overpowering forces that would otherwise pull it apart. The research has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Earlier computer models treated colliding objects as fluid-like blobs that quickly merged into single spheres, making it impossible to recreate contact binaries.

But using high-performance computing facilities, Barnes’ simulations instead allow objects to retain their strength and settle gently against one another.

Other theories have suggested that rare events or exotic conditions might be required to produce these shapes, but researchers say such explanations are unlikely to account for their apparent abundance.

‘If we think 10% of planetesimal objects are contact binaries, the process that forms them can’t be rare, said earth and environmental science assistant professor Seth Jacobson, the study’s senior author.

‘Gravitational collapse fits nicely with what we’ve observed.’

Contact binaries were first seen in close detail in January 2019, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past a Kuiper Belt object later nicknamed Ultima Thule.

The images prompted scientists to re-examine other distant bodies, revealing that about 10% of planetesimals share the same distinctive shape.

In the sparsely populated Kuiper Belt, these objects drift largely undisturbed and are rarely hit by other debris.

In the early history of the Milky Way, the galaxy consisted of a disc of gas and dust. Remnants of that era persist in the Kuiper Belt today, including dwarf planets such as Pluto, along with comets and planetesimals.

Planetesimals are among the first solid bodies to form as dust and pebble-sized material clumps together under gravity. Much like snowflakes compressed into a snowball, they are loose aggregates pulled from clouds of tiny particles.

Barnes’ simulation shows that as one of these clouds rotates, it can collapse inward and split into two separate bodies that begin orbiting each other.

Such binary planetesimals are commonly observed in the Kuiper Belt. Over time, their orbits spiral closer until the pair gently touch and fuse, preserving their rounded shapes.

The reason these fragile-looking structures survive for billions of years, Barnes explains, is simple chance.

In such a remote region, collisions are rare. Without a major impact, there is little to pull the two bodies apart, and many contact binaries show few, if any, impact craters.

Scientists have long suspected gravitational collapse was responsible, but until now they lacked models capable of testing the idea properly.

‘We’re able to test this hypothesis for the first time in a legitimate way,’ Barnes said. ‘That’s what’s so exciting about this paper.’

He believes the model could also help researchers understand more complex systems involving three or more bodies. The team is already working on simulations that better capture the details of the collapse process.

As future space missions venture deeper into the outer solar system, the researchers say the familiar snowman shape may turn out to be far more common than once thought.

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{ https://metro.co.uk/news/ }

Hacker claims US government has UFO photos and list of ‘non-terrestrial officers’

Josh Milton

A Scottish hacker accused of carrying out the ‘biggest military computer hack of all time’ on the US government has revealed what he found.

Gary McKinnon, 60, rummaged through 97 US army and authorities websites in the early 1990s from his girlfriend’s aunt’s flat in London.

In an interview on American Alchemy with Jesse Michels aired yesterday, McKinnon said he was hunting for evidence of a UFO cover-up.

One low-quality image he saw showed a shape, ‘a big straight kind of silvery line… cigar-shaped object… smooth… no lines’, above Earth.

He said the image loaded line by line as his dial-up internet struggled, explaining: ‘There’s like blackness, then there’s like slowly a hemisphere started appearing, and I’m thinking that’s a planet.

‘This thing looked very smooth on the outside. There were no lines… no screws and bolts and stuff.’

The computer expert said there was a list of ‘nonterrestial officers’

(Picture: Jesse Michels)

McKinnon added: ‘It wasn’t your normal space stuff, so I knew that.’

While scrolling, he alleged that his mouse was suddenly hijacked, saying: ‘They right-clicked, disconnected and boom, that was it. I was cut out.’

He also found a spreadsheet labelled ‘nonterrestrial officers’, referring to something that does not originate from Earth, McKinnon claimed.

He added: ‘It had ship names… and… fleet-to-fleet transfers.’

McKinnon also claimed found testimony from former NASA contractor Donna Hare saying she was shown an image of a disc over Earth.

Such anomalies are scrubbed clean from any images released to the public, Hare said, according to McKinnon.

McKinnon quoted one of her colleagues saying: ‘Well, we always have to airbrush them out before we sell them to the public.’

Nasa has been approached for comment.

Hacking, McKinnon said, isn’t quite being hunched over a computer in a hoodie.

‘I was in my dressing gown up till like four in the morning, smoking weed, drinking beer, just like ride of my life really,’ he said, adding he used a 56k dial-up modem.

McKinnon had spent years interested in UFOs and other space-age tech, like pollution free energy, after seeing an ‘orange light’ in the sky as a child.

Inspired by the Disclosure Project book by Steven Greer, he decided to try to pry open secretive government systems for evidence in March 2001.

McKinnon was arrested by police at his flat in Wood Green, north London, in March 2002, with investigators acting on allegations from the US.

American authorities said that McKinnon hacked into US army, navy, air force, Department of Defense and Nasa computers 16.

This caused £487,000 worth of damage to computers in 2001 and 2002, officials said.

If he was convicted, McKinnon could have spent 70 years behind bars only for an extradition order to be blocked by then-prime minister, Theresa May, on human rights grounds.

McKinnon, known as ‘Solo’ online, stressed he never acted with malicious intent and positioned himself as a truth-seeker. He admitted to obtaining unauthorised access to US government computer systems.

Asked by Michels why he did this, McKinnon said: ‘I wanted it from the horse’s mouth. I didn’t want to just believe.

‘I wanted to know.’

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{ https://metro.co.uk/news/ }

Mysterious never-before-seen egg-like structures found on Mars

 Rory McKeown

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured a series of black and white panoramas at two times of day which were then merged together. Colour was added to help different details stand out in the landscape (Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Cover Images)

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has been investigating the spider-web-like rock formations found on Mars – and found mysterious egg-like structures.

Newly issued images show giant zig-zagging ridges, known as ‘boxwork’, spread across the slopes of Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater.

Some of the close-up photographs reveal small, rounded spheroids scattered across the formations, features not previously seen on Mars.

Over the past eight months, Curiosity has been closely examining these interconnected rocky ridges, which stretch across an area up to 12 miles (20km) wide.

Scientists believe the structures formed billions of years ago, when groundwater flowed beneath the Martian surface, depositing minerals that later hardened into ridges as surrounding rock was eroded by wind.

From orbit, the formations resemble enormous spiderwebs etched into the landscape.

Nasa’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of boxwork formations — the low ridges seen here with hollows in between them — using its Mastcam on September 26 (Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Cover Media)

Although they were first identified by spacecraft in 2006, their remote location meant they remained largely unexplored until Curiosity arrived.

For about six months, the rover has been driving across the low ridges, which stand roughly three to six feet (one to two metres) tall, with sandy hollows in between.

The patterns suggest groundwater was present in this region later in Mars’ history than scientists had previously thought, raising fresh questions about how long microbial life might have survived on the planet.

To explain the shapes, researchers believe water once flowed through fractures in the bedrock, leaving minerals behind. These minerals strengthened certain areas, forming ridges, while the surrounding rock without this reinforcement was gradually worn away.

Until Curiosity reached the site, scientists were unsure what the formations would look like at ground level or how difficult they would be to traverse.

As the rover climbed higher up Mount Sharp, which rises about 3 miles (5km) above the crater floor, the layers of rock show evidence of Mars’ changing climate. Higher layers suggest increasingly dry conditions, interrupted by occasional wet periods when rivers and lakes may have returned.

Scientists think that ancient groundwater formed this weblike pattern of ridges, called boxwork, that were captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2006 (Picture NASA/Cover Media)

Tina Seeger, of Rice University, is one of the scientists leading the investigation.

‘Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high,’ she said.

‘And that means the water needed for sustaining life could have lasted much longer than we thought looking from orbit.’

Previous orbital images had shown dark lines running through the spiderweb-like patterns. Scientists had suggested these might be fractures where groundwater once flowed.

Curiosity’s close-up investigations have now confirmed that these lines are indeed fractures.

The rover has also identified small, bumpy egg-like features known as nodules, which are considered clear signs of past groundwater activity.

However, scientists were surprised to find that the nodules were located along the sides of ridges and in the hollows, rather than near the central fractures.

‘We can’t quite explain yet why the nodules appear where they do,’ Seeger said. ‘Maybe the ridges were cemented by minerals first, and later episodes of groundwater left nodules around them.’

These bumpy nodules were formed by minerals left behind as groundwater was drying out on Mars billions of years ago. NASA’s Curiosity rover captured images of these pea-size features while exploring boxwork formations last August (Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Cover Media)

Curiosity has drilled several rock samples from the region, analysing the powdered material using X-rays and high-temperature ovens inside the rover. The results have revealed clay minerals in the ridges and carbonate minerals in the hollows, offering further clues to how the formations developed.

A more recent sample was analysed using a specialised wet-chemistry technique designed to help detect organic compounds, carbon-based molecules considered important to the origins of life.

The rover is expected to leave the boxwork region in March and continue exploring a wider sulfate-rich layer of Mount Sharp.

Scientists hope the ongoing mission will provide further insight into how Mars’ climate evolved billions of years ago, transforming the planet from one with flowing water into the cold, dry world seen today.

 

{ https://metro.co.uk/ }

Declassified UFO files reveal giant glowing sphere over military base that's been hidden for 35 years

• MORE: Mystery as UFO vault with 3.8 million files is wiped clean hours after Trump demands alien docs released

By CHRIS MELORE, US ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR

Declassified documents from over three decades ago have revealed how an encounter with a suspected UFO at the south pole was covered up.

The records unsealed this year by Argentina's Ministry of Foreign Affairs have confirmed an eyewitness account from 1991, when military personnel and civilian researchers in Antarctica detected and then saw a large flying saucer over their base.

Miguel Amaya, a retired Argentine Air Force non-commissioned officer, told UFO investigators in the early 2000s that he was stationed at General San Martín Base, a small scientific and military station on a tiny island in Antarctica in April of that year.

At the start of the polar night, when the sun stays down for months, an alarm went off on the station's riometer, a machine that measures changes in the upper atmosphere.

Despite the three needle pens measuring different heights of the ionosphere, the part of the atmosphere where solar radiation ionizes atoms, all of the needles began drawing the same pattern, which is scientifically impossible.

According to Amaya, outpost personnel claimed that the strange readings could only have been caused by something producing the same energy as a nuclear aircraft carrier or a large city floating over Antarctica.

Hours later, another base member was walking outside during a snowstorm when they allegedly saw 'a huge circle of light' moving slowly and silently right over the building.

The 1991 incident has finally come to light after Amaya claimed he and the other members at General San Martín Base were told never to talk about what they had seen by their superiors.

General San Martín Base, a small scientific and military station in Antarctica used by Argentina 

Over 120 feet of paper was reportedly used during the four-and-a-half hour incident at General San Martín Base, with Amaya revealing that the needles were moving so violently they went off the paper multiple times.

'This equipment started registering normally, but after five minutes, the three indicator needles began to make the same marks, which the engineer explained was impossible,' Amaya said in his CEFORA interview, translated to English.

'At times, these "signals" would cut out, and everything would continue as normal. Then, for periods of ten or fifteen minutes, it would start again, sometimes with such force that the needles would jump off the belt.'

The incredible readings started around 1am local time and carried on through the night. Roughly 16 hours later at 10pm, Amaya said a radio operator from the Argentine Army saw the mysterious craft as he left the base on a walk.

'He noticed a huge circle of light, very dim due to the cloud cover, passing above the base, but still visible, and moving very slowly and silently towards the sea,' Amaya claimed in his testimony.

The meteorological observer noted that by the time the man who saw the UFO could call for the rest of the base to come out and view it, the craft had disappeared.

The three needles on the riometer's graphic recorder were supposed to show independent readings because they measured different aspects of radio wave absorption in the ionosphere, which sits 30 to 600 miles above the surface.

Normally, natural events like solar flares or auroras cause different patterns on each needle, since absorption varies by frequency, with lower frequencies getting absorbed more or at different altitudes than higher ones.

Riometer papers from General San Martín Base in 1991 which recorded a strange atmospheric disturbance over Antarctica

Argentina's Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that nine rolls of records from the 1991 incident still exist and have been stored in the Argentine Antarctic Institute

This means the needles should have been drawing distinct patterns on the night the UFO was allegedly spotted. For example, one might have shown stronger spikes while another showed milder changes if this had been a normal phenomenon.

This synchronization could only have taken place if a massive, external energy source was directly overhead, overriding the separate signals of the riometer.

An Argentine civilian UFO research group known as CEFORA pushed for the records to be released under the nation’s public information law.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the original paper rolls, which recorded the strange readings over Antarctica, still exist and have been stored at the Argentine Antarctic Institute.

CEFORA interviewed Amaya about the incident prior to going public with his story on a Spanish radio program in 2009.

CEFORA's director, Andrea Simondini, had been fighting to have the official records of that UFO encounter and others released for more than 15 years.

Now that the records have been unsealed, images proving something unexplainable interfered with the base's riometer have been shared for the first time.

'Now we are going to pursue other cases linked to Antarctica,' Simondini told Uno Entre Ríos.

'This is just the first test case we can verify under this method, and it raises expectations for the continued declassification of other files,' she stressed in a statement translated to English. 

In the US, UFO disclosure has also reached a fever pitch, with President Trump ordering Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon to release all documents related to government investigations on the UFOs and extraterrestrial life.

To this point, however, the US has maintained that there has never been any physical evidence found proving that aliens or non-human spacecraft exist.

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On the penultimate day of winter, NASA decided to revise the route of its Artemis program space expedition to the Moon. The revised plans no longer mention landing on the surface of our natural satellite.

Illustration of the Starship spacecraft docked with NASA’s Orion orbital module. Credit: Space.com

The most significant change affected the Artemis III mission, which was planned as humanity’s triumphant return to the Moon since Apollo. Previously, it was assumed that this crew would use SpaceX’s giant Starship spacecraft as a landing vehicle. 

Starship HLS spacecraft on the Moon. Illustration: SpaceX

According to the updated plans, the Artemis III flight will take place in 2027, but the astronauts will remain in Earth orbit. Instead of landing, the mission will turn into a grand technological experiment: the Orion capsule is to dock with commercial landing modules. And here lies the intrigue — these will be spacecraft not only from SpaceX, but possibly also from competitors at Blue Origin.

Starship loses priority

The main reason for this decision lies in SpaceX’s hangars. Despite 11 test launches, Starship has not yet reached Earth’s orbit. The pace of development of the mega-rocket does not suit NASA management, which is accustomed to working to a tight schedule.

The SpaceX Starship refueler pumps fuel into another Starship in low Earth orbit (top), as well as the Orion docking with Starship HLS before landing on the Moon. Illustration: SpaceX

Experts believe that the problem lies not only in technology, but also in strategy. “NASA no longer wants to depend on a single contractor,” explains Don Platt, professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. That is why the space agency is deliberately pitting two giants against each other: SpaceX and Blue Origin, creating healthy competition for a place in history.

New strategy: slow but steady

Blue Origin, founded by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, unexpectedly got a chance to take center stage earlier than planned. Their Blue Moon landing vehicle was being prepared for the Artemis V mission as early as 2030. But now, everything seems to show that NASA wants to test it during Artemis III.

Blue Moon MK1 spacecraft (concept). Source: Blue Origin

The company itself senses victory. In January, Blue Origin suspended its suborbital tourist flights, devoting all its resources to accelerating the development of a lunar module. The company states that this is a deliberate step toward the “national goal of returning to the Moon.”

So now, the first actual landing of astronauts on the Moon has been postponed until at least 2028, when it will be carried out by the Artemis IV mission. Another launch may take place in the same year as part of Artemis V.

NASA has decided to proceed cautiously. The agency plans to increase the frequency of flights, but at the same time standardize the rockets. The more powerful but unproven versions of the Space Launch System (SLS) rockets were temporarily abandoned in favor of the proven Block I configuration.

Get ahead of China

There is a third player in the unfolding race that is making even NASA rush. China plans to land its taikonauts by 2030.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman makes no secret of his true motives: “Competition from our biggest geopolitical rival is getting tougher every day. We need to move faster.” He compares the new strategy to the approach taken during the Apollo program: gradual increase in flight frequency, logic, and standardization. This, in his opinion, will enable America to once again “achieve the nearly impossible” and not concede primacy to Beijing in the new lunar era.

• According to NASA

• Posted in News, Tech
  

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Chilling declassified CIA file reveals aliens committed 'revenge massacre' after UFO was shot down

• READ MORE:  Aliens MUST exist beyond Earth, leading scientist insists

By CHRIS MELORE, US ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR

A bone-chilling document declassified by the CIA has exposed an alleged massacre by aliens from a crashed UFO who turned an entire military unit into stone.

According to the report, Soviet troops shot down a flying saucer hovering over the Soviet military unit in Siberia roughly 35 years ago, and what happened next was truly terrifying.

In the document, summarizing a 250-page top secret file acquired by US intelligence agents, eyewitnesses said five aliens climbed out of their wrecked craft, combined themselves into one creature, exploded in a burst of intense energy, and turned 23 soldiers into solid rock.

One CIA official referred to the shocking battle as 'a horrific picture of revenge on the part of extraterrestrial creatures, a picture that makes one's blood freeze.' 

The agency added that the 'extremely menacing case' proved the aliens who visited Earth possessed weapons and technology far beyond the US government's 'assumptions' - suggesting they were already aware of the aliens' existence.

The unearthed document, declassified in 2000, was recently the topic of the AI or Evil podcast, where host Josh Hooper revealed that two of the soldiers at the UFO crash site actually survived the encounter.

However, the 23 'petrified soldiers' could not be saved. Their remains and the debris from the spacecraft were reportedly moved to a secret research base near Moscow.

An even more concerning detail of the CIA file is the description of the aliens reportedly involved in this massacre, who have been mentioned in UFO reports and sightings for nearly 80 years.

A declassified CIA document revealed details of an alleged battle between Soviet forces and an alien spacecraft, which ended with 23 soldiers dead

During a training mission in Siberia, the Soviet military reportedly shot down a low-flying UFO carrying at least 5 aliens who then turned the soldiers into stone

The subject of the document states: 'Paper reports alleged evidence on mishap involving UFO.'

This extraordinary tale was also published in the Ukrainian newspaper Holos Ukrayiny on March 27, 1993.

The incident, which a Canadian newspaper believed took place between 1989 and 1990, was only uncovered by the CIA after the fall of the Soviet Union and its 'secret police' organization, the KGB. 

The CIA document explained that the alleged alien craft was flying low and quietly above the Soviet unit while they were engaged in a training mission.

Officials wrote that 'for unknown reasons' the Soviets launched a surface-to-air missile at the UFO, sending it crashing to the Earth near the unit's position.

According to the only two soldiers who survived, when the soldiers approached the craft, the five aliens freed themselves of the debris and came close together near the wreck.

Moments later, the soldiers said the group of aliens 'merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.' In simpler language, the aliens beings somehow morphed into a giant ball.

That's when the new ball-like alien began to buzz and hiss before igniting into a brilliant white light.

The description from the CIA report matches the decades-long description of an alleged race of beings UFO researchers call 'the Greys'

With the soldiers still looking on, the ball of light erupted like a giant flare of energy, turning 23 of the 25 Soviets into 'stone poles.'

The report stated that the only reason two of the men survived was because they were standing in a shaded area at the time of the alien energy blast.

Testing of the soldier's bodies showed the alien flare had somehow changed living tissue into a substance that closely resembles limestone.

The CIA document added that 'a source of energy that is still unknown to Earthlings' was responsible for the blast which fatally transformed the Soviets.

Even in 2025, the science behind such a shocking transformation is still difficult to explain medically and technologically.

According to the Journal of Applied Physics, it is possible to use high-energy radiation or electromagnetic pulses to change normal matter into plasma - a form that's not a liquid, solid, or gas.

In the report, the CIA described the aliens as short humanoids with 'large heads and large black eyes.'

The account matches who UFO researchers, alleged alien abductees, and others who believe in alien life refer to as a race called 'the Greys.'

Their features have become the classic image the public thinks of when discussing aliens from outer space - a small, skinny, grey-skinned alien, with an oversized head and large black eyes with no iris.

The Greys would eventually become linked to the infamous Roswell Incident of 1947, as CIA documents would later suggest that alien beings were pulled from the alleged wreck in New Mexico.

These strange creatures would also go on to represent alien life in countless science fiction shows and movies, including Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Despite their prominent place in extraterrestrial research, this disturbing incident appears to be the first time humans have alleged that these beings could have accomplished such terrifying feats.

 { https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/index.html }

A crashed flying saucer? No, an aeroshell for NASA’s Voyager-Mars program tested in the desert.

(credit: NASA)

All’s well that’s Roswell

by Dwayne A. Day

On February 19, the president stated that he had directed the government to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” In the mid-1990s, political pressure resulted in the release of information and the production of two reports on the so-called “Roswell Incident” of 1947. These reports added substantively to the historical record of Cold War aerospace programs. Hopefully, the new efforts will also be productive in opening up the history.

The infamous “flying saucer” headline in the local newspaper in 1947.

The Roswell Incident

In 1947 there was a report of debris found by a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico. It was soon publicly reported that the Air Force had captured a “flying saucer.” Within a day or so, the military stated that the debris was actually from a “weather balloon.”

In 1994, following political pressure from Congress, the Air Force announced that what had crashed at Roswell was not a weather balloon, but a different kind of balloon, from a top secret program.

Despite the fact that Roswell has now been in the public consciousness for decades (there were even two fictionalized TV series about aliens set in Roswell), it was not until 1980 and the publication of the book The Roswell Incident that the event gained a mass audience. The book by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore alleged that not only had the US government recovered debris from a flying saucer, but it may have recovered “alien bodies.” Sensational paranormal pseudoscientific stories were Berlitz’s bread and butter: he had previously written a book about the Bermuda Triangle (which unfortunately does not exist) and claimed that a US Navy ship had been involved in time travel experiments (which did not happen, but may still have not happened when time travel is invented, or not).

In 1994, following political pressure from Congress, the Air Force announced that what had crashed at Roswell was not a weather balloon, but a different kind of balloon, from a top secret program called Project Mogul. Mogul was an effort to fly microphones to very high altitudes to listen for the sound of nuclear explosions. Scientists believed that the sounds of such explosions could be trapped between layers of the atmosphere and would reverberate over long distances. In the late 1940s, the United States government was concerned that the Soviet Union might develop an A-bomb, and Mogul was designed to listen for the big boom. A big boom eventually happened when the first Soviet A-bomb was detonated in August 1949.

After the initial Air Force revelation about Project Mogul, in 1995 the Air Force published The Roswell Report – Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, a thick book that included documentation supporting the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell incident. On June 24, 1997, the Air Force published The Roswell Report: Case Closed. This second report addressed the claims that bodies had been recovered in the desert, noting that the Air Force had conducted many tests in the desert involving instrumented dummies dropped from aircraft and later recovered on the ground. It also noted that NASA had performed drop tests of various reentry vehicles over the desert, and some of these had saucer shapes. These activities, conducted over many decades, often at an Air Force base at Roswell, could have contributed to the mythology of Roswell and aliens.

The two reports released by the US Air Force in 1995 and 1997 about what happened in Roswell.

Case closed?

Of course, the tinfoil hat-wearing crowd was not convinced, and the term “case closed” only stirred up their bile. There was already a cottage industry of hucksters and grifters willing to take advantage of the true believers, and they had no interest in Air Force or NASA history that didn’t titillate the masses. They held their UFO conferences and sold energy crystals and fold-up pyramids to the faithful, and denounced the Air Force’s explanation for Roswell.

But setting aside the issue of extraterrestrials, the two Air Force reports of the mid-1990s were important contributions to historical scholarship, revealing new and declassified information and documents. Up to the time of the Air Force revelation about Project Mogul, that program had not been acknowledged or even hinted about. For example, historian Curtis Peebles had written a 1991 book The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons over Russia. Peebles shed considerable light on the subject of reconnaissance balloons but had been unaware of Project Mogul. Other historians had been digging into the history of aerial reconnaissance programs and had not uncovered Mogul. The information on Mogul had been sitting in government archives for decades until it was forced into the open. Certainly a few people in the government still knew about it, and some had probably seen the documents, but there was no reason for them to reveal the truth about what happened at Roswell until a government order to declassify and publish that information.

Similarly, although the information in the Case Closed report did not reveal any highly classified programs, it was revelatory. It shone a light on obscure areas of aerospace research that had been overlooked by many historians, like high-altitude drop tests. The report included photos of NASA Voyager-Mars and Viking aeroshells that had been tested in the desert. It also included photos of other unusual balloon-carried research payloads, including Discoverer satellite reentry vehicles. Very few people had ever paid attention to the history of aeromedical research and testing during the Cold War, but the report demonstrated that many such tests had been performed for decades.

The Air Force reports on Roswell revealed testing NASA did of aeroshells for future Mars missions, like Viking.

(credit: NASA)

Sunshine days

The 1990s was an era of increased openness about Cold War era activities, sometimes resulting from presidential direction, sometimes from congressional direction, and sometimes at the initiative of senior government officials. The existence of the National Reconnaissance Office was revealed in 1992, and following executive order 12951 the CORONA reconnaissance satellite program was declassified in 1995. In a December 1993 press conference, Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary announced the largest declassification of information in the Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) history. That included acknowledging many nuclear tests, as well as nuclear weapons accidents during the Cold War. Additional major declassifications were announced at openness press conferences in June 1994 and February 1996. For example, in 1996 DoE released a complete inventory of US production, acquisition, use, and distribution of plutonium from 1944 to 1994.

The CIA began declassifying millions of pages of documents on Cold War operations. These included an official history of the U-2 reconnaissance program as well as (in coordination with the National Security Agency) revealing the Venona communications interceptions of the 1940s. CIA documents revealed details of what the US Intelligence Community knew about Soviet missile and space programs. One example was an early effort to “kidnap” a Soviet spacecraft during an international exhibition in the early 1960s to examine it. This author was the first to discover and report on the CIA operation after uncovering a newly declassified CIA publication in the National Archives. The CIA also created a declassification program that released millions of pages of documents as part of the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST). Much of our current understanding of intelligence collection about Soviet weapons systems is due to the work done for CREST. That effort was highly productive into the early 2000s, when it was curtailed and the number of documents being declassified annually dropped dramatically. As a result, we have very good understanding of many aspects of the Cold War up until the early 1970s, but after that the historical record is much thinner.

The 1990s were the beginning of a new era of revelations about historical American air and space programs. Certainly, much remained classified, but much more was revealed than in previous decades. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were the beginning of the end of this period of openness. Government agencies retrenched, new bureaucracies and layers of secrecy were created, and new politicians and government leaders had far less interest in revealing past secrets. Whereas CORONA was declassified in 1995, the follow-on GAMBIT and HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite programs were considered for declassification in 1997, but this ultimately did not happen until 2011. Today, official government declassification efforts are underfunded, meager, and sporadic.

The truth is out there… and so are the lies

It has long been known that when the U-2 spy plane began flying in the mid-1950s it was regularly being reported as a flying saucer at high altitude, and the government did nothing to dispel those stories. But the government’s involvement goes beyond simply not correcting the false stories to creating its own false stories. In June 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US government had actively used disinformation to conceal highly classified aerospace programs. (See “Pentagon Fueled UFO Mythology, Then Tried Coverup,” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2025, print edition.) As the government was investigating reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (the modern euphemism for UFOs), a retired Air Force colonel admitted that in the 1980s he had taken doctored photos of flying saucers to a bar in the Nevada desert and given them to a bartender to put up on the walls. This was to help obscure the fact that the Air Force was testing stealth aircraft nearby. Somebody who saw an F-117 flying in the dark might tell the story to somebody else who would say that it resembled the flying saucer photo in the bar. People would chase aliens instead of secret aircraft.

Other officers who were assigned to a highly classified program office were shown a photo of what they were told was an alien craft, part of a project called Yankee Blue, and told that it had provided the government with antigravity technology. They were ordered to never mention it again. But this was actually a joke, a long-standing hazing ritual within the secretive community. In spring 2023, the Secretary of Defense sent out a memo ordering the practice to stop immediately, but by this time hundreds of people retired, and in the active duty military, believed the government had inherited technology from aliens. Distrust and misinformation was now firmly embedded into the secretive culture.

The Journal also recounted a disturbing story about a 1967 incident that had been reported as an alien “attack” on an ICBM command post in Montana by a glowing reddish-orange oval. What really occurred was a highly classified test of a system to determine if missile command complexes were vulnerable to Soviet electromagnetic pulse attacks. The test identified significant security vulnerabilities, and that information was so sensitive that it was highly classified for half a century, even though one Air Force officer in that command post believed it was aliens.

Some of my own research has hinted that misinformation was part of the fielding of the first operational near-real-time reconnaissance satellite in December 1976, the KH-11 KENNEN. A cryptic note in a declassified history indicates that the Soviet Union did not realize the satellite was capable of reconnaissance until summer of 1978. But I have also heard that an Air Force officer, possibly without official sanction, was deliberately spreading disinformation about American satellites during this period.

Two years ago, Peter Merlin published Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51 (see “Review: Dreamland”, The Space Review, December 4, 2023.) It is an exhaustive history of secret projects developed at the Groom Lake airfield. But it also essentially stops by the early 1980s, even though the Groom Lake facilities expanded significantly in the following decade. What went on in those big new hangars? Throughout the 1980s there were rumors of other aircraft being tested there, and one retired test pilot confirmed that he flew something during the 1980s that remains classified. Maybe the story of the “Blackstar” air-launched spaceplane had some basis in truth (although I have my doubts: “Six blind men in a zoo: Aviation Week’s mythical Blackstar,” The Space Review, March 13, 2006). Maybe that colonel giving out photos of flying saucers to protect projects at Groom Lake was seeking to hide something other than the F-117 stealth fighter. Maybe we’ll now learn.

But probably not.

We’ll have to wait and see what, if anything, is declassified from this new order. So keep watching the skies, but don’t hold your breath while doing so.

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