Astronomers and UFOs

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas 

Astronomy is one of the oldest disciplines of science. Many prehistoric monuments are aligned with stars and planets, giving us clues as to the importance of ancient forms of astronomy. As a result, astronomers remain one of the leading groups responsible for the serious investigation of the UFO phenomenon.

Caracol (The Observatory) in Chichén Itzá, Mexico. The lines of this Mayan temple line up with at least 20 separate astronomical events.

(Credit: Daniel Schwen/Wikimedia Commons)

Astronomer UFO Sightings During the Renaissance

Jean-Charles Houzeau portrait from Popular Science Monthly in 1891.

(Credit: Popular Science Monthly)

Hundreds of years ago astronomers were observing objects which can still not be definitively identified. Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck chronicle many reports of anomalous aerial objects throughout history in their book, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. One of these mysterious observations was by the famous astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

In 1672, Cassini spotted a small object close to Venus.  At first he only took note, but did not share the discovery. He then saw it again in 1686 and decided to announce it as a possible discovery of a new moon of Venus. His sightings continued over the next few decades but were sporadic. In 1884, a former director for the Royal Observatory in Brussels, Jean-Charles Houzeau, proposed the idea that the object observed by Cassini  may be another planet. He also named the object Neith, after an Egyptian Goddess. In 1887, the Belgian Academy of Sciences suggested that Neith was just a group of stars near Venus.

In 1686, a much more mysterious sighting was reported by astronomer Gottfried Kirch, the director of the Berlin Observatory. His sighting took place in Leipzig, Germany on July 9 at approximately 1:20 a.m. Kirch said that he saw an extremely bright fireball with a tail that was a quarter the size of the Moon, hovering in the sky for fifteen minutes. He said that people in towns as far as eleven miles away also reported seeing the object. Kirsh explained that eventually the object darted off to the right and left two “globules” that could only be seen by telescope.

Astronomers and Modern UFO research

Cover of the book Wonders in the Sky by Vallee and Aubeck.

(Credit: Tarcher/Penguin Publishing)

UFO sightings by astronomers are often taken more serious than those by the general public, due in part because astronomers are trained to observe and identify astronomical objects and spend a lot of time looking up into Space. Understandably, UFO reports from renowned astronomers helped boost the public’s fascination at the inception of the modern UFO era.

Prior to World War II, UFOs were not as prevalent a topic as they are now. In fact, the term “UFO” was not even coined until the early 1950s during the U.S. Air Force investigation of the phenomenon.  Sightings were abundant in the 1950s, and they often made media headlines. It was at this time that Life magazine put together a compelling story that included the accounts of two well-known astronomers.  The Life article described the first of these men as “one of the U.S.’s top astronomers.” He wanted to remain anonymous for the magazine story, but it was later discovered that this was Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, a leading scientist in the study of meteors.

In the article, Dr. LaPaz described a sighting that he and his family had on July 10, 1947 at 4:47 p.m. He, his wife, and their two teenage daughters were driving from Clovis, New Mexico to Clines Corners, New Mexico, when they all noticed a strange luminous object that hovered in the sky. Instinctively, Dr. LaPaz began estimating distances in order to make calculations about the object, and his entire family followed suit.

Dr. LaPaz described the object as follows:

[It] showed a sharp and firm regular outline, namely one of a smooth elliptical character much harder and sharper than the edges of the cloudlets . . . The hue of the luminous object was somewhat less white than the light of Jupiter in a dark sky, not aluminum or silver-colored . . . The object clearly exhibited a sort of wobbling motion . . . This wobbling motion served to set off the object as a rigid, if not solid body.

Dr. Lincoln LaPaz on the cover of the University of Wichita Alumni Magazine.

(Credit: University of Wichita Alumni Magazine)

Dr. LaPaz’s family watched the object for thirty seconds before it moved behind a cloud. The object reappeared soon after, but they eventually lost sight of it as it moved behind the clouds again. Dr. LaPaz said, “This remarkably sudden ascent thoroughly convinced me that we were dealing with an absolutely novel airborne device.”

Life Magazine, April 7, 1952. The UFO story in this issue included UFO sightings from prominent astronomers, and alerted the public that UFOs was considered by many as a credible issue.

(Credit: Life Magazine/NICAP)

Dr. LaPaz estimated that the object was 20 to 30 miles away and that it was a solid elliptical object approximately 165 to 245 feet long and 65 to 100 feet from top to bottom. He also estimated that it moved at between 120 and 180 mph horizontally and 600 to 900 mph vertically. His family agreed with his calculations. He did not believe that the object was of an astronomical nature, an illusion, a rocket, or a missile.

Later in the article, Dr. LaPaz commented on the mysterious nature of hundreds of green fireballs seen throughout the Southwest, mostly in New Mexico, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. One green fireball incident referred to a sighting of a large fireball seen by over a hundred-fifty people in Arizona in November 1951.

The sightings of green fireballs became so frequent that the U.S. Air Force established Project Twinkle in order to investigate them. Dr. LaPaz was one of the experts that investigated the phenomenon, and he felt that whatever was being seen were not meteorites.

The Life article explained:

[Dr. LaPaz] points out that normal fireballs do not appear green, they fall in the trajectory forced on them by gravity, are generally noisy as a freight train, and leave meteorites where they hit. The green New Mexican species does none of these things. Neither do the green fireballs appear to be electrostatic phenomena—they move too regularly and too fast.

The second sighting by an astronomer covered in the Life article was that of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto. At around 11:00 p.m., while sitting in his backyard in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with his wife and mother-in-law, they all saw an object dart across the night sky. They agreed it appeared to be oval shaped and had a blue-green glow. Tombaugh said it “seemed to trail off at the rear into a shapeless luminescence.” Tombaugh alleged that he also saw what appeared to be half a dozen windows on the front and the side of the craft.

Project Blue Book Report on UFOs and Astronomers

The Life article popularized the UFO phenomenon at the time and exhibited the highly credible nature of some of the witnesses. Its effect on the U.S. Air Force’s official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, was evident in a report put together by their consulting astronomer, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. The report referenced the Life article and may have even inspired it altogether.

A still from Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s cameo appearance on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

(Credit: Columbia Pictures)

Hynek is often considered the father of modern UFO research. He was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University when he began consulting for the air force on identifying UFOs. At the time he began working with the air force he said he thought the topic of UFOs was just a fad and referred to it as “utterly ridiculous.” However, his opinions eventually changed, and he began to take the topic very seriously.

Hynek is infamous for trying to explain away a famous rash of UFO sightings in Michigan in 1966 as an effect of swamp gas. However, he is more fondly remembered for coming up with the close encounters classification system for UFO reports.

In 1952, Hynek began to surmise that there was more to the UFO phenomenon than he had previously thought. In August, he submitted a report to the air force titled, “Special Report on Conferences with Astronomers on Unidentified Aerial Objects.” Hynek had decided it would be valuable to get the opinions of astronomers on UFOs and assist in the air force’s investigation into UFOs.  In order to get the astronomers’ true opinions, Hynek did not tell them he was involved with the air force. He told them he was just a traveling astronomer visiting observatories to talk about scientific issues. He spoke to forty astronomers at various observatories.

Front page of Hynek’s astronomer report in the USAF Project Blue Book files. Click the image to view the entire report in pdf.

(Credit: USAF)

For the most part, Hynek kept the names of the astronomers anonymous, except for those that had already revealed their names in the Life article or had done so to the media in some other fashion. The opinions among the astronomers he spoke to varied. Some thought the topic was a waste of time; others thought that government secrecy on the issue was “stupid.” One astronomer said that if he had seen something he would not tell anyone unless he could remain anonymous and he knew the information was going to a group of scientists for serious research.

Among those who shared their UFO sightings, one had said that he and another astronomer had sighted a group of five “ball-bearing-like” objects moving rapidly during the day. Two years later, he saw a singular similar object. Another astronomer reported that he had seen a light zoom across his field of view that went too fast to be a plane and too slow to be a meteorite. This astronomer pointed out that it is important that scientists do not “fall into the error of believing we understand all physical phenomena.”

Professor Clyde Tombaugh

Tombaugh and LaPaz were also part of Hynek’s report. Hynek reported that besides the sighting Tombaugh reported to Life, he also shared another sighting that took place at White Sands Proving Grounds just outside of Las Cruces. Tombaugh said that while he was looking through his telescope he saw a luminous object traveling from the “zenith to the southern horizon in about three seconds.”

Tombaugh also offered up the use of his telescope at White Sands to help the U.S. Air Force investigate UFOs. He told Hynek that he would just have to ask the general in charge, but Hynek never divulged whether that request was made.

Hynek wrote that he also asked the astronomers about LaPaz’s findings in regards to the green fireballs seen in the Southwest. Many thought the objects were most likely natural objects, but Hynek said questioning revealed that many of them had little knowledge of the details of the sightings. Hynek agreed with LaPaz that given the descriptions and frequency, the green fireball phenomenon did not exhibit characteristics of astronomical objects.

In conclusion, Hynek found that of the forty astronomers he interviewed, five had reported sightings. Hynek noted that this is a higher percentage than the rest of the population. He speculated that this is perhaps because astronomers watch the sky more often, but also noted that astronomers are less likely to misidentify aerial objects.

Hynek observed that the astronomers he spoke to weren’t particularly hostile towards the idea of UFO investigations. He said that when he described the details of the more mysterious reports, they seemed genuinely interested. He felt their “lethargy” toward the subject was mostly due to a lack of good information. Hynek said their biggest fear seemed to be getting branded as questionable scientists as a result of any association with the UFO topic.

Hynek recommended that the U.S. Air Force officially give UFOs the status of a scientific problem and that a group of reputable scientists be allowed to examine sightings. He felt that such an effort would not only lead towards more answers, but also lend dignity to the issue.  He continued to push for serious scientific investigation into UFOs.

The UFO Experience Bookcover

Three years after the air force closed down official UFO investigations in 1969, he published his first book on UFOs, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. In his book, he released his close encounters scale and shared another story on astronomers’ opinions on UFOs.  He recounted the story of a reception at which “several hundred” astronomers were in attendance, and where it was reported that there was a UFO being seen outside making strange maneuvers. He said people laughed and made some jokes as usual, but not a single astronomer went outside to investigate.  His problem with this was that the lack of investigation didn’t exhibit a true scientific inquisitiveness. He quoted physicist and philosopher Erwin Schrödinger who wrote, “The first requirement of a scientist is that he is curious. He should be capable of being astonished and eager to find out.”

In 1973, Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), an organization of scientists and technical experts. In 1980, they conducted a poll (which included eighteen hundred members of various amateur astronomer associations) and found that 24% responded that they had “observed an object which resisted [their] most exhaustive efforts at identification.”

The Sturrock Report

The U.S. Air Force stopped investigating UFOs based in large part on a study by the University of Colorado in Boulder which was issued in 1969. The study concluded that there was no scientific value in the investigation of UFOs. This report has been dubbed the “Condon Report” in reference to the lead scientist of the investigation, Dr. Edward Condon. In 1970, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AAIA) released its own report that was the result of a multi-year study by one of the organization’s subcommittees. The AAIA disagreed with Condon stating, “[we] did not find a basis in the report for his prediction that nothing of scientific value will come of further studies.” In fact, they suggested further study was warranted.

UFO Enigma Bookcover

In his book, The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence, Dr. Peter Sturrock, a professor of applied physics at Stanford University, noted that the AAIA report made him wonder if perhaps scientists would be more interested in reports by other scientists. He conducted a small survey amongst the members of the San Francisco chapter of the AAIA, and the results were published in their monthly journal in 1974. Of the twelve hundred members responding, 5% said they had UFO sightings.

Encouraged by the results, Dr. Sturrock sought to perform a larger survey and was given permission by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to poll their membership. Dr. Sturrock wrote that he was pleased to receive a 52% response rate, with only a few rude remarks. In fact, the responses were overwhelmingly supportive. Similarly to his previous study, 5% of AAS members admitted having unexplainable sightings.  However, Dr. Sturrock was even more satisfied with the results of this study because they indicated that there was significant interest among astronomers in continued research into the UFO phenomenon.  Sturrock summarized: “Each respondent was asked to state his opinion on whether the UFO problem deserves scientific study: 23% replied ‘certainly,’ 30% ‘probably,’ 27% ‘possibly,’ 17% ‘probably not,’ and 3% ‘certainly not,’ which represents a positive attitude among 53% of the respondents, as against a negative attitude among 20%.”

The high number of positive responses surprised Sturrock, as he was expecting the opposite. He had also asked how the AAS members would like to receive information on this subject, and the response was overwhelmingly through scientific journals. However, Dr. Sturrock and his colleagues always had problems getting their papers regarding UFOs printed in mainstream journals. This contradiction prompted Sturrock to help start a new organization called the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), which publishes a peer-reviewed journal.  Of the dozen or so professors that helped found the SSE, seven were astronomers. The SSE is still going strong with a large membership of doctorates. The organization’s website defines it as “a professional organization of scientists and scholars who study unusual and unexplained phenomena. Subjects often cross mainstream boundaries, such as consciousness, unidentified aerial phenomena, and alternative medicine, yet often have profound implications for human knowledge and technology.”

Astronomers and UFOs Today

Interest in the UFO phenomenon hasn’t been a passing fad, and astronomers continue to show interest in UFO research today. In 2011, Irish astronomer Eamonn Ansbro made news when he claimed that he was tracking UFOs. Ansbro said that he is convinced that what he is tracking are extraterrestrial spacecraft. He has even given lectures on the topic to the French government, and his studies have been published by the European Space Agency. He has named his project the Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (OSETI).

He told his local paper, the Roscommon Herald, “We haven’t proven our discovery to the scientific community yet and don’t have the resources but we can show that extraterrestrial space craft are on specific orbital tracks around the earth.”

Interest in the phenomenon also continues in other parts of the world. Astronomers at Canada’s David Dunlop Observatory in Richmond Hill, Ontario, have been holding lectures on UFOs. The lecturers include astronomers Dr. Ian Shelton and Dr. Tuba Koktay, a husband and wife team, who both worked at the observatory in the past. Dr. Koktay is now a researcher, and Dr. Shelton teaches astronomy at the University of Toronto. Shelton told www.yorkregion.com, “We try to be open-mined and honest, we don’t just dismiss, because we [scientists] don’t know everything.”

The ground of the David Dunlap Observatory.

Closer to home, Dr. Derrick Pitts, the chief astronomer and planetarium director for the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and a nationally renowned astronomer, recently told Lee Speigel of the Huffington Post that he was supportive of serious research on the nature of the UFO phenomenon.

I can speculate about what many astronomers would say if you ask them that question. Many of them would say, “I haven’t seen anything, so I can’t say that they exist. I can’t say that this five percent are alien spacecraft.” But if you ask them in the same breath, “Would you be willing to engage in a research project to figure out what these things are,” I don’t know what that answer would be. I’d say, yeah, let’s find out, let’s take a look at it, because here we have a phenomenon that causes a tremendous amount of interest. Why not try to understand what it is?

Astronomer Derrick Pitts

(Credit: Franklin Insitute)

The notion that astronomers are not interested in UFOs is false. Hynek, the U.S. Air Force’s own astronomer, who eventually became a pioneer in civilian UFO research, probably had it right when he observed that often scientists are just not informed of the important details. Even Dr. Pitts said his interests were piqued when he read the credible and mysterious UFO cases presented in Leslie Kean’s book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.

Historically, astronomers were the leading force behind investigating and reporting on the UFO phenomenon, and they continue to be the driving force into the research into the UFO phenomenon. Their interest adds credibility to the field and demonstrates that there is at least a sliver of interest in UFOs in mainstream science.

• A version of this article originally appeared in Open Minds Magazine Issue 26 June/July 2014.

Popular Posts:

• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• A Survivor at Roswell: The Truth About the One that Walked Away
• Paul Hynek – Project Blue Book and Dr. J. Allen Hynek – January 1, 2019
• Roswell crash site debris may be confiscated by BLM, says researcher
• Jeremy Corbell – The Genesis of “Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers” – November 27, 2018
• The science of proving an object was created by an extraterrestrial civilization
• How US Intelligence Community Insiders Got the Senate’s Attention Regarding UFOs
• George Knapp Hunt for the Skinwalker Interview Transcript
• Unidentified Review: History Series Takes UFOs to a New Level of Credibility

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

2021 UFO Conferences Pennsylvania

Register at www.MUFONPA.com

View this email in your browser

{ www.MUFONPA.com }

2021UFO Conferences Pennsylvania

Register at www.MUFONPA.com

View this email in your browser

Copyright © 2021 Lang Publication, All rights reserved. You were interested in our UFO conferences Our mailing address is: Lang Publication 250 Lancewood Place Greensburg, Pennsylvania 15601 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

{

UFO and secret alien base reports found in declassified U.S. Forest Service documents

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas 

The photograph was taken at about 2:30 pm on September 12, 2015.

It is hard to make out what exactly the object in the image is, but the USFS files did not include a high resolution image. Greenewald says he did inquire if higher resolution images were available, but they were not.

Without better images, this blob of light and shadows could be anything, and is likely a bird in flight. Often vacation photos with weird objects that were not noted at the time of their taking turn out to be birds or bugs that look strange in photographs once they are reviewed back home.

The USFS did not include their response to the UFO photog, or if they responded at all.

UFO Sighting at Yaak Air Force Station in Kootenai National Forest

Following the UFO photos letter and was a copy of an article regarding Yaak Air Base. According to the article, Yaak Air Base was in operation from April, 1952 to July, 1960, as part of a number of stations throughout the country that served as an early warning system during the cold war in case of a potential Russian attack. The base was near Yaak, Montana, in the Kootenai National Forest.

For our purposes, the most interesting paragraph in the article is the last, and in the file provided to Greenewald, is highlighted in yellow.

It reads:

The Yaak Radar Station also had its share of mystery, on Sept. 1 , 1952, Yaak, Montana. 4:45 a.m: Two USAF enlisted men, and three men using AN/FPS-3 radar set. Report visually sighting two small, varicolored lights becoming black silhouettes at dawn, and flying erratically for one hour. The crew at the radar station saw a, “dark, cigar shaped object,” right where the radar had the UFO pinpointed. What these people saw is a mystery to this day.

This is my favorite part of the USFA UFO files. Unfortunately, no further information is provided.

Alien Base Construction in Tonto National Forest

The most sensational claim in the files, and the one picked up by silly UK tabloids, is a report of a secret government installation being constructed that has something to do with aliens. The subject of the report is “Secret govt installation being built in the Salt River Canyon area on the TNF [Tonto National Forest].”

What is scary is that this is not far from my house. However, it does make it less scary for me that I do not believe an alien base was actually built there.

Here is a report regarding the call that was taken by David of the Forest Service on the morning of December 30, 2013 regarding UFOs, aliens and one detached head.

David received a call this morning at the front desk from a male caller reporting the construction of a secret government installation upstream from the Salt River Canyon past Pinal Creek (upstream from Roosevelt Lake). Aliens and at least one detached head are involved.

Caller claims to have seen construction cranes coming out the side of the cliffs, miniature stealth planes and UFOs, aliens and people working together at the site, aliens eating people. He found a severed head and claims to have pictures of some of this stuff.

Caller reported that he is 60, not crazy, and doesn’t do drugs. He said he had already called the “office at the lake,” but he didn’t know if those people were turning the other cheek or maybe those people have been paid off.

David had him leave a message with Bray.

Please let me know if t here are any Talking Points to be developed. I’m sure the Phoenix media will be all over this.

Thanks.

P.S. David and I aren’t doing drugs either.

The only other item in the files was a report in 2012 of a meteor or space junk that landed in George Washington & Jefferson National Forests and caused a fire. It was determined the fire was caused by a lightning strike. The report states, “Witnesses saw flaming space junk or satellite crash land in these mountains [Massanutten Range, Virginia] which may have caused the forest fire of last year: June 24, 2012, at around 1150PM Sunday.”

You can check out the files yourself at TheBlackVault.com.

Popular Posts:

• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• Tom DeLonge strikes UFO gold
• Montana and military involvement with UFOs
• Paul Hynek – Project Blue Book and Dr. J. Allen Hynek – January 1, 2019
• Jeremy Corbell – Upcoming Documentary on The Skinwalker Ranch – May 15, 2018

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

How US Intelligence Community Insiders Got the Senate’s Attention Regarding UFOs

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas

When they couldn’t get credible data regarding UFOs in front of the Secretary of Defense, two intelligence insiders hatched a plan to get the world to pay attention and succeeded.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has requested that the Director of National Intelligence organize research into Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP – aka UFOs) and provide a public report on what has been done thus far. It is an extraordinary move that further legitimizes a topic that has historically been relegated to mythological stories like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. However, the public did not know that there were those in the US military and intelligence communities who took the issue seriously and wanted more to be done to figure out what those UFOs are.

“We have an intelligence community for a reason, partly to support our military, partly to avoid strategic surprise, and the intelligence community was failing on both counts,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon told OpenMinds.tv in a recent interview. “The intelligence community was completely unresponsive, completely dropping the ball. I mean, it could be Russian, it could be Chinese, it could be something else.”

Mellon served for ten years as a Staff Director of the SSCI. From 1998 to 1999, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, and from 1999 to 2002, he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

In a recent interview for a documentary called The Phenomenon, Mellon says his professional interest in the topic of UAP began with a request by astronaut Gordon Cooper.

Cooper was a part of the famed Mercury Seven, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. He claims to have had two UFO incidents. The first was in 1951. He claims his squadron of jet fighters chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. He also claimed that in 1957 a crew he managed at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. He reviewed the film and reported it. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. He never saw the film again.

According to Mellon, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, tasked him to investigate the matter.

“Astronaut Cooper had spoken with the President,” Mellon says in The Phenomenon. “At a cabinet meeting, he raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”

“The Air Force colonel that I spoke with got very frustrated, and when I asked him what happened to all of these records,” explained Mellon. “He said, ‘Well, that was all cleaned up or thrown out to save space.’ Something like that. It sounded ludicrous, but that’s what he told me.”

Mellon’s interest in the UFO topic was the focus of an article in The Huffington Post in May 2016 titled Is There a UFO Cover-up? A Government Insider Speaks Out. The article was written by Leslie Kean and was about Mellon joining a group of scientists interesting in developing a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA.

Kean was also one of The New York Times authors, along with Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, who broke the news in December 2017 that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who claims he retired to get more attention to what he felt was important information regarding UFOs. He also claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day.

Along with Elizondo’s claims, The New York Times article also included two videos allegedly showing infrared camera footage from F-18 fighter jets of unidentified aerial phenomenon. Although Elizondo was the one who got those videos cleared for release, he has maintained he was not the source of the videos for The New York Times.

As featured in a recent Vice article, and covered by blogger Danny Silva, in a sneak peek clip for The Phenomenon (seen below), Mellon admits he was the source for the videos. He claims, “I received the videos, the now-famous videos in the Pentagon parking lot from a Defense Department official. I still have the packaging.” 

“This is a case where somebody bent the rules a little bit, and they did so for the larger good, and we’re absolutely all better off because of it,” Mellon continued.

Mellon says he was never a part of AATIP. In our OpenMinds.tv interview, he revealed that he believed it was some time in 2017 that he discovered AATIP’s existence. Although he did not say how he came to be aware of AATIP, Mellon says he was surprised when he found it.

“I was surprised because I was involved in, I had my hand in pretty much all the spooky stuff when I was there,” says Mellon. “There didn’t seem to be anything going on in this particular topic. And it was something that I had always been interested in. So, I was surprised to see they had anything organized at all.”

Mellon quickly offered his support to Elizondo, who was trying to get his findings regarding UAP encounters, such as the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group encounter featured in The New York Times article, to the Secretary of Defense. 

“What motivated me to a great degree, and Lou, I was outraged, just outraged, that these military pilots were not getting more support,” explained Mellon. “As a member of the intelligence community and somebody who cares about national security, I was appalled and determined to see if I could do something to help fix that problem.”

The problem was that the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) did not want to escalate the issue.

“People were still afraid to touch it and afraid to let the secretary even be exposed to the issue,” says Mellon. “They were afraid that even a mere briefing for him would somehow taint him or compromise is his Sterling reputation.”

“What I tried to do was introduce Lou to some very senior people in the department that I knew that I had connections to who were very close to the secretary of defense,” Mellon recounted. “I tried to help him. They worked through the system first, and some meetings were held, and more briefings were held and so forth, but ultimately they proved impossible to get this in front of the secretary. “

This was the point at which Mellon and Elizondo began to consider more drastic measures.

“When that didn’t pan out, ultimately, Lue faced the choice between essentially, living with an inadequate program or throwing in the towel or going public to try to inform the public and Congress and help make something happen.”

Resigning and going public was the route Elizondo chose. But before leaving, Elizondo and Mellon hatched their plan.

“We had a strategy from the outset and a plan before he even left,” said Mellon. “We discussed what that would look like, and we’ve been executing on that ever since.” 

Elizondo and Mellon began to approach journalists with their UFO videos, documents, and data. In an interview on Open Minds UFO Radio, Politico’s Bryan Bender says he was approached in the middle of 2017 and was able to confirm AATIP’s existence with his sources “on the hill.”

In a separate Open Minds UFO Radio interview, Kean says she was invited to a meeting with Elizondo held on October 4, 2017, “arranged by some of Elizondo’s colleagues” who knew her.

“I went down and went to Washington, and we spent three or four hours together,” says Kean. “I was shown the videos that were eventually released with our story. And just given, you know, told all about Harry Reid, was shown documents about Harry Reid’s involvement and just the story was kind of laid out for me at this meeting.”

“I realized at that point that it was a New York Times level story, given the documentation that was available for the program and for the people involved and everything else,” Kean continued. “And so that’s how it all started.”

While Kean and Bender worked on developing their AATIP stories, the world was introduced to Elizondo on October 10, 2017, with the launch of Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (originally TTS/AAS, now referred to as TTSA). The announcement was launched with Kean’s article in The Huffington Post titled Inside Knowledge About Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Could Lead To World-Changing Technology. TTSA also held a press conference hosted by DeLonge featuring members of the team, including Elizondo and Mellon.

“I was especially curious to meet Luis Elizondo because he ran a program at the DOD involving the study of anomalous aerial threats,” Kean wrote in the article. “Luis had resigned this position literally the day before we met.”

DeLonge received the most press regarding the launch of TTSA, but no one seemed to take notice of the guy who claimed he ran a UFO program despite the government telling us for decades they had no interest in the topic.

Then, on December 16, 2017, The New York Times and Politico published their articles on AATIP, and the story went global. Elizondo, Mellon, DeLonge, and witnesses to the Nimitz UFO encounter, including jet fighter pilot and wing commander David Fravor, were inundated with interview requests throughout 2018. On March 9, 2019, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Mellon titled The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care? In 2019, it was announced TTSA and AATIP would be featured in a History Channel program called Unidentified.

But a significant milestone came for Elizondo and Mellon when the Navy admitted they took UFOs seriously and announced new guidelines for reporting them. The story was broke by Bender for Politico in an article titled US Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

“Since our show Unidentified started, since The New York Times article appeared, my op-ed in The Washington Post with another video and so forth, that first of all, engaged the Navy and required the Navy to own up to the fact that this was real,” says Mellon. “They couldn’t any longer deny it. When they had active-duty pilots and others going on the record, that also then led to the briefings for Congress.”

An article by Bender regarding Senate briefings on UFOs was published in June 2019, titled Senators get classified briefing on UFO sightings. Unidentified featured Elizondo and Mellon taking witnesses to Washington D.C. for briefings.

Mellon’s op-ed suggested, “Congress should require an all-source study by the secretary of defense while promoting research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability.”

TTSA posted suggested verbiage for such an effort, and their ideas did not go unnoticed. The Senate took action.

Bender broke this story on June 23, 2020, in an article titled Senators want the public to see the government’s UFO reports. It was a tweet by Steve McDaniel, founder and lead software developer of Sky Hub, who discovered the SSCI UAP request in an SSCI exploratory committee report, that alerted blogger Danny Silva to the matter. He wrote a blog that caught Bender’s attention, and Bender informed the world.

“Ultimately, this reporting requirement is a recognition that there is something going on with national security ramifications,” says Mellon. “It’s a forcing function that hopefully will force the executive branch to get its act together and pool all the intelligence, regardless of which stovepipe it’s in, which organization has it, and establishes some accountability and forces them to take a position in black and white, as opposed to just giving some briefings.”

In less than three years, Mellon and Elizondo’s strategy has resulted in the US government admitting they take UAP seriously, reversing their decades-long denials of the fact, and the Senate Intelligence committee taking notice asking for more information.

“It’s a tremendous step forward,” said Mellon. “Regardless of what the phenomenon turns out to be in the end. At least now we can have some faith that a serious effort is going to be made to hold and analyze the data, probably implement a new collection strategy… So it has a lot of potential ramifications, all of them positive.”

The news has been ablaze with UFO headlines, and behind all of this was the hidden hands of TTSA’s Mellon and Elizondo.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that that report requirement would not be in there, wouldn’t exist if we had not been engaged in bringing witnesses forward and advocating this and writing about it and so forth,” explains Mellon. “Also, this is my old committee. I worked on that community for over a decade. I still know people on the hill, so there are some people there who are still there from when I served. And, because we worked together and are friends and I don’t abuse the privilege, they were willing to take my calls and listen to what we had to say. And so, I think it wouldn’t have happened without us.”

It’s hard to argue with that point of view. But Mellon also claims that all he did was get the information into the SSCI’s hands. They took it upon themselves to determine whether the data they were presented with warranted further action.

“It was largely just because the senators and staffers have been kept in the dark,” says Mellon. “Once they got the information, I think that sort of naturally led them to a place where they recognize that they need to get more information. There’s some important unanswered questions here.”

Popular Posts:

• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• Tom DeLonge strikes UFO gold
• Montana and military involvement with UFOs
• Paul Hynek – Project Blue Book and Dr. J. Allen Hynek – January 1, 2019

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed

Posted by: Philip Mantle

In October 2017 a curious post appeared on the facebook page of ‘Art Bell’s Midnight In The Desert Feat Heather Wade’. It showed an apparent daylight scene of a ‘UFO’ in the desert with a helicopter hovering overhead. The text to accompany the photo read: “I’ve been holding on to these pictures for 10 years and it’s time I showed someone. I took pictures of this thing in July 2007 on out radar test range in the Mojave Desert. I’ve always been nervous to show anyone but here you go.”

My curiosity peeked I dropped the post of this message whom I shall call Keith Bradshaw (real name on file) a note in a private message asking for more details. Checking the next day the post had been removed but Keith did reply to my private message. Keith made it clear from the beginning that he was worried about releasing these photos as they had been taken illegally and he regretted posting one of them on facebook. It did however tell me that there were taken at China Lake in California at about 11.30 am.

Over the next several days Keith and I exchanged numerous private messages on facebook and he eventually told be the back story behind the taking of the photos in question. He also sent me five photographs in total. Here is what Keith had to say:

KEITH’S STORY

I grew up in a town called Ridgecrest which is a U.S. Naval base in the Mojave Desert. As a kid it was very easy to get onto the base and everyone in town had passes that would allow you through the gates to get to school, swimming pools, the movie theatre etc. Everyone knew someone who worked on the base so you would get to know where the different parts of the base were. They had the bombing range and the radar range. I grew up with a kid who after High School joined the Navy. After he retired he moved back to town and got a job working in the civil service on the base monitoring radar. He said it was the world’s most boring job but he did tell me about interesting things that went on out there. Things like them having jeeps and tanks scattered all over the desert and then flipping a switch and they all would disappear. Turns out that’s what fiber optic camouflage does. People would talk about unbelievable things that turned out to be true. Planes would come from all over the world to use the radar test range out there. I have pictures of that too. Planes with markings from other countries. While I was in between jobs in 2007 I went back to town to visit some of my old friends.

While I was in town I stopped by this friend’s house and after a few drinks he started telling me how that week he had been monitoring a flying saucer. When I asked him how he knew that’s what it was he told me- first of all, in all the years he had been doing that job he never had two generals and three other men with top security clearance recording and watching everything he did. He explained how it was very simple. There were two signals on the radar screen. One would appear very low in altitude, go up to a certain higher altitude and then click off. There would be a countdown for a certain amount of time- five; four, three, two, one and then it would click back on. When this happened the first time the people in the room got very excited. The object on his screen would lower in altitude until it was no longer on the radar, move to a different position and repeat the same thing over and over at different altitudes. All the while the other signal on the radar screen would remain constant.

Curious as to what it was he was monitoring he asked around. People that he knew who physically worked on the radar range and would see what was out there told him that believe it or not it was a flying saucer. They described it as being shiny like a mirror and smooth like glass all over inside and out. It had no doors or windows only a hole cut in the top (I got the idea that the hole had jagged edges like it was cut with something) they described the inside as only having three small seats surrounded by a bird nest of fiber optic cable. The seats were molded out of the floor rather than attached to the floor. This thing was one piece with no seams anywhere.

Keep in mind that description is just a rumour as to what it was like. He didn’t actually see it himself he was just told that’s what it was. Being in between jobs and having nothing to do the next day I made my way out there. ( I’m not telling you how I was able to get there but I will say I walked a very long distance) as I got closer I could hear a helicopter so I peeked up over a hill and down in the small valley below sure enough I could see this silver disc out there. There were a few tan-colored trailers and other military vehicles on the North End of the valley. This thing would wobble along close to the ground very unstable. I don’t believe anyone could have been riding on the inside but got the idea that helicopter was remotely controlling it.

It was very wobbly as it moved along close to the ground and then it would freeze in position, go up to a certain height and sit there for a few minutes perfectly still. It made no noise that I could hear over the helicopter. It would go back down and wobble to the next position. It looked like whoever was controlling it was having fun with it sometimes because they would do little tricks with it.

Like one edge would be pointing towards the sky and then it would do a U-shaped flip to where the other edge was pointing towards the sky then back down and wobble along the valley floor close to the ground to its next position.

At first I was too afraid to take any pictures but then it got really close to me so I started snapping some photos figuring that if I was going to be caught I might as well have some pictures. I also took a short video but then to save space on my camera I started deleting the blurry pictures. I spent maybe 10 minutes total watching this thing. I then turned around and got out of there as quickly as I could. I took my shirt off thinking the color of my skin would blend in with my surroundings better than the color of my white shirt. About halfway back I got scared and hid the camera in the desert.

That night I went back over to my friend’s house and when I told him what I had done he laughed in disbelief until I told him the path this thing followed from the North-West side of the valley to the South-East. When he realized I was telling the truth he got very angry and threw a plastic cup at me. He basically chased me out of the house telling me never to go get those pictures. I let them sit there for two days and then went back and got the camera. When I looked at the pictures there was no video and I realized that what I thought was a blurry picture was actually a blurry video that I deleted. I still kick myself for that one every time I think about it. A few years later I went back to town and ran into him at Walmart and he pretended he didn’t even know me. This is someone that I have known my whole life. We went to school together and played on the same Little League baseball teams.

I’ve been holding on to these pictures ever since. That is all there is. Sorry it’s not more exciting. I really don’t know how you would write an article about it. “

KEITH’S ALLEGED UFO PHOTOGRAPHS

Well, an interesting story and interesting set of alleged UFO photographs. Of course you cannot just take the photographers word for it that the photographs are what he says they are. With this in mind I sought out a number of people who could undertake analysis of these photographs. The first was Jason Gleaves in the UK and this is his full and unedited report with comes complete with five computer photographs highlighting the points in his report.

ANALYSIS IMAGE REPORT BY JASON GLEAVES

Metallic Disk Shaped Object Captured Near the U.S. Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake, California, U.S.

I was asked by Philip Mantle if I could conduct my own analysis on five interesting UFO images captured of a Disk Shaped Object (metallic in appearance) which appeared to be stationary appropriately 50-60 feet above a desert environment (location unknown at this point). Also in another image a helicopter (HH-1K Iroquois, helicopter (“Huey”) is also captured in flight above the right side of the object and appears to be passing slightly behind (speed unknown).

First appearance the images looked authentic but with technology of today and software (photoshop etc) you really can’t rely on image authenticity, no matter how good it looks.

More detailed enlarged and enhanced images of the metallic object appear to show sunlight and consistent reflections on the body of the object, plus in one of the images a dark oval shadow is clearly seen directly below the object again consistent where a shadow would be (without actually seeing where the Sun location/position is in relation to the object, it’s always difficult to give a more accurate Sun-object-Shadow location). I also produced a twin layer image overlay of two separate images (taken from approximately the same position/location) to see if the object had moved from its original position, I aligned the two images, to the best of my ability with similar reference points (background mountain range and cloud formation, horizon). Upon viewing the final enhancement of the overlay the Disk Shaped Object is clearly seen in two different positions, both at slightly different altitudes and one further away in relation to the other regarding their relevant positions within the two separate photographs.

A few days passed and a more detailed report and witness statement emerged giving the sighting location as (U.S. Marine Corps Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California, U.S.) this is also consistent as to the type of military helicopters reported and documented being operational in that region, and similar to the Helicopter captured in the images.

Analysis by Jason Gleaves @Ufonly (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Ufonly YouTube) I am Ex-Royal Air Force, BAE Airbus division, I contribute on numerous UFO pages and have carried out Photo/image/video footage analysis on UFO’s and anomalies for many ufologists within our community worldwide.

ANALYSIS BY DR BRUCE MACCABEE

Another and perhaps more well known expert in the analysis of alleged UFO photographs is Dr Bruce Maccabee in the USA. Bruce is well known for his work on analyzing alleged UFO photographs. Dr Maccabee received a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and then at American University, Washington, DC, (M.S. and Ph.D. in physics). In 1972 he began his career at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, White Oak, Silver Spring, Maryland; which later became the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division. Dr. Maccabee retired from government service in 2008. He has worked on optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) and Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) using high power lasers.

ANALYSIS/DISCUSSION

My immediate impression was that the orientations of the main rotor and tail rotor blades were very much the same. What would the chance of getting the same orientation in two pictures probably many seconds to minutes apart? See the pictures A and B below. Using the position change of distant land features I estimate that the camera pointing direction has rotated to the right by about 9 degrees (based on an assumed angular picture width of 35 degrees). The UFO has also moved to the right about 7 degrees and the helicopter moved about 11 degrees to the right. The helicopter image in B is nearly the same as in B, but the pictures are not identical.

PICTURE A

PICTURE B

The helicopter is about 10% farther from the camera in B and there is a helicopter body rotation to the left of some (10 or so?) degrees.

The lack of blur of the main rotor blades plus the nearly identical rotor blade orientation suggests a hoax with a model helicopter. The nearly identical position of the tail rotor blades also suggests a hoax but the blur of the tail rotor blades argues against a hoax unless one used a model with a rotating tail rotor. Note that the blur width of the edges of the tail rotor increases in going from the center (axle) outward to the end. This is exactly what one would expect of a rotating blade and is exactly what appears to be missing from the images of the main rotor blades.

PICTURE C

A “fast shutter” (very short exposure time) can “stop” a moving object so that it moves very little during the exposure time. Therefore, if one could establish that the exposure time was short enough to effectively “stop” the motion of the main rotor while not being fast enough to “stop” a much faster tail rotor, one could explain this situation. How fast would the shutter have to be? That depends upon the rotor rate and radius (distance of the end from the axle). Consider, for example, a rotor rate of 360 revolutions per minute or 6/sec, The outer end of the rotor travels at 6 x 2 pi radians per second = 37.7 radians/sec. Assume a radius of 15 ft. The outer end of a blade is traveling at 37.7 x 15 = 565 ft/second = 6,786 inches/sec. Assume the blade is 1 ft wide at the outer end. To avoid noticeable motion blur the blade should move less than 1/10 its width or less than about 1 inch during the shutter time. So, what is this shutter time needed to register the image of the blade without noticeable blur? The answer is (1/6786 sec/inch) x 1 inch = 0.000147 seconds, much faster than any typical video camera shutter.

This analysis raises questions: (1) the near identically of the image of the helicopter in two separated-in-time frames suggests a “set up” (hoax)’; (2) the lack of blade image smear suggests very fast shutter or hoax; (3) the tail rotor blur suggests real event because difficult to hoax the blur that increases with distance from the center; There appears to be a faint slightly dark shadow under the UFO in Picture A which is not in Picture B (consistent with real) and there is only the barest hint of a shadow under the UFO in Picture B that is not there in Picture A (consistent with real.

Need to know camera type, settings etc. This might be a real event, but have to explain helicopter imagery

After spending some time analyzing the available testimonial and pictoral evidence and considering the actions or activities of the object in question I conclude that there is not enough evidence to prove that the object was not simply an unusually shaped drone operating under control of the person(s) flying the helicopter.

ANALYSIS FROM TOBIAS LINDGREN

Tobias Lindgren

FIRST ANALYSIS

Now I have analyzed the pictures.

First I want to say that I have doubts if the object is really physical. It can be computer generated. As well as lack of basic data such as picture metadata, observation site, time, date, cardinal direction, and duration. If the unidentified object is physical, the following applies:

Roughly calculated distances in the picture. The references there are is the helicopter and the shrubs in the foreground. The helicopter is a Bell UH-1Y Venom, which is 17.8 meters long. The shrubs in the desert are about one meter high.

With these measures I can find out that the helicopter is about 20 times farther away from the photographer than the shrub. If the object is at the same distance as the helicopter, it has a diameter of about 6 meters and 12 meters if it is twice as far as the helicopter, but to me it is not likely. Accordingly I estimate the object was very close to the camera at the time the picture was taken.

If the object is at the same distance as the first bush, it is about 20 cm, but my assumption is that it is closer than that, less than half the distance from the camera to the shrubs, and then it will be less than 10 cm in diameter. The object’s reflected color on the underside shows only sand and ground colours, which is only to be seen between the bushes and the camera, no green from the vegetation. Same effect in the first picture without the helicopter. The dark spot on the ground, which my brain interprets as a shadow from the object, and the object itself is merely an unfortunate coincidence and has no relation, but creates the illusion of a long distance. The real shadows are aimed at the sun, and hard to spot.

However, the most crucial fact for the object to be placed close to the camera is the big sunflower / highlight that is on the object. The size of such is proportional to the distance.

Conclusion: High hoax factor. No obvious connection with the China Lake Naval Base, except for a similar environment. ”Photoshop” or physical object less than 10 cm. Such a small object could be a toy.

SECOND ANALYSIS

Hi.

The reason for the late answer is that we have just had our annual field investigation course in UFO-Sweden. It takes all of our time in October. Strange and interesting story, I have to say. Here we also see the risk of not having all the information.

It may be easy to believe that the previous analysis was poor and insufficient, but with the information available, the result will of course will come afterwards. What makes a person get so scared that you hide the pictures for ten years? No, I do not think the military is so stupid that they fly in an open space with a “flying saucer” if they want to keep it secret. It may be the total opposite instead which is to draw attention. But it may be to be all very conspiratory. Visually, I still think it does not feel right. The object (UFO) is blurry in a way that the rest of the pictures are not, and that tells me that something is not what it seems. It can still be, as I said before, that the object is so close to the camera that it is out of focus. Had the object been out of focus because of the distance, it should get something like a bit transparent due to atmospheric depth haze in the atmosphere.

I still have no idea what the object could be. Perhaps it might be a radio-controlled “toy” that the military testing, just as written in the witnesses story. The military obviously knows what it is because it’s no coincidence that it looks like it does, if it is not computer-generated images. I draw parallels with a Swedish hoax that went viral on YouTube a few years ago: 

• http://www.ufo.se/index.php/news/home/1563-avsloejad-ufofilmen-som-skulle-lura-vaerlden

If this had happened in Sweden, UFO Sweden would have taken us to the location at “Ridgecrest” and knocked on all doors to look for more witnesses. In recent projects where we did this, it was found that 10 percent of all people had a story they did not mention before.

Regards

Tobias Lindgren

UFO-Sweden

Tobias Lindgren, UFO Sweden and AFU Board Member, born 1972, he lives in Norrköping, Sweden. His interest in UFO study began in the late 1970’s, but only became really active as an ufologist 10 years later. Had been the head of the UFO-Sweden Report Center from 2005 to 2015. In this position, he coordinated Swedish UFO investigations, distributing incoming cases among field investigators. He is now responsible for the UFO-Sweden website. He writes regularly for the “UFO-Aktuellt” Newspaper. He is UFO-Sweden’s image analyst. Tobias is also a skilled computer artist and combines his interests in illustration and computer engineering to illustrate the most recent cases very effectively. He has also studied computer science. mathematics and physics at Linköping University and more recently, visualization and geographic information systems. He is now employed as a GIS engineer at the Swedish Aviation Authority in Norrköping and works with flight information, airplanes and visualization.

As if that wasn’t enough yet more analysis was conducted in Brazil with the help of my colleague Thiago Luiz Ticchetti. The analysis was brief and to the point…

ANALYSIS FROM BRAZIL

We have already analyzed the photos. According to our specialists, unfortunately, they are fakes:

• The reflection of the sun in the object does not correspond with the position of the sun observed in the shade of the vegetation.
• The shadow of the object itself does not match the position of the sun
• The helicopter is real.
• All the images are without EXIF

Ricardo Varela: Researcher at the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), electronic engineer at the Federal University of Brasília, master and doctor in applied computing

Inajar Kurowski: Veterinary doctor, university professor, police officer and criminal expert of the Institute of Criminalistics of Paraná, with specialization in vehicular identification and forensic ballistics. He is also a postgraduate in science methodology and a master’s degree in environmental management. Administrator of specific courses in the area, he became a specialist in examining photos and films of flying saucers

SO WHAT ARE THESE PHOTOGRAPHS?

In an attempt to get to the bottom on these alleged UFO photographs the have been analysed by five different people from around the world. Jason Gleaves from the UK is of the opinion that they are the genuine article. Dr Bruce Maccabee from the USA is not sure whether they are fake or real and the same goes for Tobias Lingren in Sweden. And last but not least Ricardo Varela and Inajar Kurowski in Brazil left us in no doubt that they believe the photographs in question to be fake.

It is therefore my hope and intention that by releasing these photographs here that we may learn more about them. Perhaps other specialists will add their comments to those above or maybe someone will come forward who can offer testimony to either support the authenticity of the photographs or the opposite, show us that they are indeed fakes.

As yet the photographer does not want his identity revealing which is something I have honoured here but I do have his name on file. Perhaps the photographer will offer more information which will allow us to determine one way or the other the authenticity of the photographs. Until then I think it is only fair to say that the jury is still out. Are these photographs fake or genuine? We shall see.

Popular Posts:

• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Florida witness reports rectangular UFO near Tampa Bay
• Robert Powell – USS Nimitz UFO Encounter – October 24, 2017
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• Tom DeLonge strikes UFO gold

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

The Carter Administration’s Attempt to Create a NASA UFO Commission

Posted by: Antonio Huneeus

Forty-three years ago was the last time the U.S. government considered creating an official commission to investigate and report on UFOs. Despite Washington’s efforts to dissuade the public from any interest in UFOs through the 1969 issuance of the University of Colorado’s Condon Report, UFOs continued to appear. Eight years later, with President Jimmy Carter in office, his administration thought the time was right to officially request that NASA look into the phenomenon.

As put by a NASA scientist in a memo issued around the same time, however, “undertaking a formal [UFO] study at this time appears fraught with perils.” Needless to say, the commission was never finalized, and the 1977 deliberations between NASA, the White House, and other governmental agencies are an almost-forgotten episode in the official history of American ufology.

Jimmy Carter, UFO Witness

The inauguration of Jimmy Carter as the thirty-ninth President of the United States ushered a new round of expectations in the UFO community. After all, it could be said he was a member of that community. President Carter, who was a former Georgia governor, peanut farmer, and U.S. Navy nuclear engineer, not only claimed to have seen a UFO but officially reported it. In terms of UFO data, President Carter’s sighting is not an impressive incident, falling into the category of nocturnal light. The sighting would surely be forgotten if Carter had not become the president.

Steven Spielberg mentions Jimmy Carter potentially releasing UFO information in this video.

The first account of Carter’s sighting appeared in October 1973—during that year’s big UFO flap—when dispatches from Georgia quoted the governor’s first statement on UFOs: “I’ve seen one myself.” The story was picked up in the press, prompting the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Maryland to send UFO questionnaires to the Georgia State Capitol. Carter personally filled out both questionnaires and gave permission to use his name as a witness. According to the questionnaires, the sighting occurred “shortly after dark” in October 1969 when Carter and ten other “members of Leary Georgia Lions Club” were “outdoors waiting for a meeting to begin at 7:30 p.m.” The sighting lasted between ten to twelve minutes and the object, located at “about 30 degrees above the horizon,” was described as “about the same size as the moon, maybe a little smaller, varied from brighter/larger than planet to apparent size of the moon.”

President Carter’s UFO story reemerged as he gained prominence during the 1976 presidential campaign. On June 8, the National Enquirer published a short interview with Carter in which he said, “I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one,” adding that “I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky.” In that interview, Carter also made an important promise to the American public: “If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”

Ironically, the only ufologist to really investigate Carter’s sighting was skeptic Robert Sheaffer. The main clue was that Carter claimed to have seen the object while visiting the town of Leary to lecture at the local Lions Club. In his book, The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence, Sheaffer recounts that his effort to locate additional witnesses was difficult, but he was finally able to find one who remembered seeing, “like a blue light or something or other in the sky that night.”

However, Sheaffer soon discovered that there was a problem with the date given by Carter as the date of the sighting. Carter always said that in the sighting occurred in October 1969, but the Lions Club in Leary had disbanded in February of that year. Sheaffer eventually located the official records of the meeting at the Lions Club International Headquarters. The exact date of Carter’s speech in Leary was January 6, 1969, “nine months earlier than Mr. Carter’s recollection had placed it.” Furthermore, after computing the position of the planets for that date, Sheaffer discovered that “Venus was a conspicuous evening star, nearing its maximum brilliance. Venus was . . . at 7:15 PM, at about 25º elevation, in virtually the exact position where Carter had placed his UFO.”

The result of Sheaffer’s investigation was mostly ignored because it robbed the public of identifying the president as a witness to a genuine UFO. Yet, there is a high probability that what Carter saw could have been explained. The visual tricks that Venus can play in the eyes of the beholder have been known for decades by competent UFO investigators like Allan Hendry, who has characterized Venus as “the real champion” of the stars and planets that tend to cause UFO sightings.

The sighting, however, was only one aspect of President Carter’s link to ufology. The other was his campaign promise to release all the UFO data held by the government. Stanley Schneider, assistant to President Carter’s White House Science advisor Frank Press, later admitted to the New York Times that “public interest in this has been brewing for several months, slowly building up . . . It was getting to be more than we could handle.” In fact, so many letter about UFOs were sent to President Carter that Virginia ufologist Larry Bryant eventually published a book on the letters entitled, UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally ‘Round Jimmy Carter’s Promise. One indicator of the campaign’s impact was revealed by U.S. News & World Report in its April 18, 1977 edition. Under the heading of “Official Word Coming on UFOs,” the magazine stated that “before the year is out, the Government—perhaps the President—is expected to make what is described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs . . . based on information from the CIA.”

NASA’s UFO Past

In an attempt to achieve UFO disclosure, the White House had difficulty in developing a coherent policy, and thus, NASA became the logical candidate. Unlike the U.S. Air Force, NASA had never been officially involved in the UFO controversy, although a link between the two surfaced occasionally. Popular UFO articles, books, and movies often displayed UFO photos taken by NASA astronauts, but the great majority of these images were explained by prosaic phenomena such as lens flares, booster rockets, or items ejected from space capsules.

While NASA never officially investigated UFOs, it did produce a few UFO-related documents such as the Kennedy Space Center’s “NASA Management Instruction (KMI 8610.4)” of June 28, 1967, regarding “Processing Reports of Sightings of Space Vehicles Fragments.” The four-page-document signed by the space center’s director, Kurt H. Debus, contained procedures dealing primarily with manmade space vehicles, but KMI 8610.4 added that “reports of sightings of objects not related to space vehicles” were also included: “It is KSC policy to respond to reported sightings of space vehicles fragments and unidentified flying objects as promptly as possible.” The document provided definitions of “Space Vehicle Fragment” and “Unidentified Flying Objects,” and KSC personnel were instructed to “call in unidentified flying object reports to the Patrick Air Force Base Command Post.”

Additionally, NASA’s name appears often in connection with mysterious space crashes such as the one in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965, which later led to a lengthy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against NASA by journalist Leslie Kean. The space agency also appeared as a “forwarding” office in several declassified documents from other government branches.

NASA’s Response to the White House

It was against this background that NASA found itself tasked with official UFO responsibility early on in the Carter administration. That segment of the population that believed Earth was being visited by aliens had not forgotten Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise. The president’s science and technology advisor, Frank Press, became the White House official in charge of the UFO problem, but outside help was sought when the White House became overwhelmed with UFO mail. Press stated in his July 21, 1977 letter to NASA administrator Robert Frosch “that the focal point for the UFO question ought to be NASA.”

“There appears to be a national revival of interest in the matter with a younger generation becoming involved,” wrote Press, adding that “this is a public relations problem as much as anything else.” Press’s problems were twofold: First, the most immediate issue was how to deal with the growing number of correspondence regarding UFOs being received by the White House. Second, Press has to face the substantive issue of whether there was any truth to the UFO phenomenon and he believed that a new “panel of inquiry could be formed by NASA” to review the UFO evidence and “see if there are any new significant findings.”

Subsequent FOIA requests revealed that even before Frosch responded to Press on September 6, 1977 the U.S. Air Force was already meddling in the affair. One of the most significant and prophetic pieces of paper to come out of this period is a four-line letter written on September 1, 1977 by Colonel Charles H. Senn, the chief of the air force’s community relations division. The addressee was another former air force man, Lieutenant General Duward L. Crow, who was, at that time, the assistant deputy administrator of NASA. Along with an enclosed “UFO Fact Sheet and standard response to UFO public inquiries” that Crow had requested, Senn wrote, “I sincerely hope you are successful in preventing a reopening of UFO investigations.” Considering what took place in the ensuing months, when NASA literally turned down an official request from the White House, one does not need to be particularly conspiratorial to see that the air force was not a neutral party in this drama. Before Frosch’s response to Press was sent on September 6, the letter was rewritten twice by Crow.

Bob Frosch’s letter was courteous, but not encouraging. The strategy for responding to UFO inquiries from the public through “form letters” and “information sheets” was discussed, as both NASA and the air force had discovered long ago that it was the most economical method. It obviously had its problems, continued Frosch, such as the lack of a “focal point for technical appraisal of sightings.” No quick action was to be taken regarding the proposed UFO panel or commission, wrote Frosch, “before . . . we should assure ourselves that an inquiry is justified.” His suggestion, therefore, was to name “a NASA project officer to review reports of the last ten years” and “provide a specific recommendation” by the end of the year.

Press’s response to Frosch a week later stated he was “pleased . . . that NASA can handle the public inquiries” so as to “relieve my staff of a responsibility we are not equipped to handle.” Frosch never said in his letter that NASA would handle the mail for the White House; instead, he had only referred to the air force and NASA’s experience in using form letters. Press agreed fully with Frosch that the NASA commission was something that should be weighed carefully and wrote, “I can understand your reluctance to commit the agency to a formal program.” He conceded that it was up to the space agency to review the UFO situation as it best saw fit.

NASA’s review of the UFO question was not a formal study, but an in-house analysis of the options available. The key document is a four-page memo, “UFO Study Considerations,” dated November 8, 1977 written by Dr. Noel Hinners, NASA’s associate administrator for space science. Dr. Hinners considered “the question of what NASA could reasonably do in both the short and the long term,” he wrote in his memo to NASA’s assistant administrator. The scientist went about his task in a straightforward manner, outlining succinctly the current UFO scene which included

• “Widespread interest” with about half of the American population believing “something” exists;
• Interest in forming a “specialized agency” in the United Nations;
• A formal study group being set up by the CNES, NASA’s counterpart in France;
• Several solid private UFO organizations in the USA “with responsible membership”;
• An increase in reports of what Hinners referred to as “the near encounter type”; and
• A wider acceptance within the UFO community of a government cover-up, meaning not only that the Government “knows far more than it has released,” but that it “may even have pieces of UFO hardware in hand.”

Dr. Hinners analyzed the problems facing a NASA UFO review: the “apparent lack of any tangible or physical evidence for laboratory analysis,” and the “absence of any sound scientific protocol for investigating the phenomenon firsthand.” The word “apparent” in the first line is to be noted while the word “absence” in the second line is questionable. After three decades of amateur investigations, by 1977, civilian UFO organizations had achieved a degree of this so-called “scientific protocol.” Other problems outlined by Dr. Hinners were the abundance of “secondary source materials” or “hearsay”; the prejudices on the part of investigators; hoaxes; “the delicate interface,” as Hinners put it, between the government and UFO witnesses; and “the danger of projecting an inaccurate NASA or Administration image.” Dr. Hinners’s conclusion was that, “all in all, undertaking a formal study at this time appears fraught with perils.”

Dr. Hinners presented two choices to NASA. The first option was to reject the White House’s idea for “the Federal government and specifically NASA, to investigate the UFO phenomenon.” As Dr. Hinners opined, this option would give added fuel to the “charges of cover-up” by the UFO community, but it would also avoid “controversy . . . within the science community NASA deals with.” There were budgetary advantages too in keeping the current policy of form letters and not spending extra resources, but Hinners had the intelligence of pointing out that choosing this option “would also be begging the question.”

The second option was for NASA to consider creating a commission to investigate the topic. This option seemed almost identical to the early, positive days of the Condon Committee. Basically, Hinners’s thought was that the commission could request major UFO organizations “to submit their ‘best’ cases,” put “this material into a usable format,” update and revise it, and finally “ask for a peer review.” On the basis of this preliminary study, NASA would decide whether some form of permanent UFO investigative branch should be established. Hinners also recommended something that was later used by Bob Frosch in his final and formal rejection of the commission that, “as a minimum, having gone so far and this publicly, NASA should stand ready to investigate new hard evidence that might come in.”

In late November 1977, the White House decided to go ahead publicly with formally requesting a NASA UFO commission. The wire services carried the story and quoted David Williamson, NASA’s assistant for special projects, saying the agency was “not anxious” to study UFOs. Like Dr. Condon, Williamson appeared to disqualify any existence of UFOs before any official conclusion had been reached. “There is no measurable UFO evidence such as a piece of metal, flesh or cloth,” he said.

When Bob Frosch finally responded to Frank Press on December 21, 1977, nobody in Washington was surprised. The main theme was “the absence of tangible physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis” coupled with the willingness to analyze “any bona fide physical evidence from credible sources” submitted to NASA. Frosch also mentioned the lack of “a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena” as a reason that a study “would be wasteful and probably unproductive.” The shadow of Dr. Condon, deceased since 1974, seemed to pervade this letter. Condon had concluded eight years earlier that science could not be expected to gain anything by studying UFOs. Frosch reached the same conclusion without even embroiling himself in a thousand-page report at a cost of over half a million dollars. After turning down the White House’s request, Frosch left a way out, just in case, writing, “I wish in no way to indicate that NASA has come to any conclusion about these phenomena as such; institutionally, we retain an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity, and a willingness to analyze problems within our competence.”

In 1978, NASA released its revamped “Information Sheet No. 78-1” on UFOs. It stated that other than answering UFO-related mail sent to the White House, “NASA is not engaged in a research program involving these phenomena, nor is any other government agency.” The six-page document was an updated version of the old air force form letter, yet NASA added an interesting paragraph not to be found in the Pentagon’s counterpart: “Reports of unidentified flying objects entering United States air space are of interest to the military as a regular part of defense surveillance. Beyond that, the US Air Force no longer investigates reports of UFO sightings.” In other words, NASA provided an admission that NORAD and the U.S. military still keep an eye on UFOs with possible national security implications. The NASA document quoted extensively from the administrator’s letter about the “bona fide physical evidence” and lack thereof.

It is interesting to see how quickly and effectively the government muzzled this revival of UFO interest. Although numerous FOIA lawsuits were being pursued by researchers, many months and even years would pass before some of these documents were obtained, processed, and publicized. But, the interaction between the White House, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force during this little known episode in President Carter’s administration offers a window into how the federal government deals publicly with ufology. The failed NASA UFO commission attempt by the Carter administration in 1977 is the last time the U.S. government even considered launching a new formal study. Given the current state of affairs in Washington, it’s extremely unlikely that a new effort will be attempted anytime soon, but the phenomenon itself is certainly not likely to go away.

• A version of this article originally appeared in Issue #23 (December/January 2014) of Open Minds UFO Magazine. Back issues can be found here.

Popular Posts:

• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Florida witness reports rectangular UFO near Tampa Bay
• Robert Powell – USS Nimitz UFO Encounter – October 24, 2017
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• Tom DeLonge strikes UFO gold

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

The Carter Administration’s Attempt to Create a NASA UFO Commission

Posted by: Antonio Huneeus  

Steven Spielberg mentions Jimmy Carter potentially releasing UFO information in this video.

The first account of Carter’s sighting appeared in October 1973—during that year’s big UFO flap—when dispatches from Georgia quoted the governor’s first statement on UFOs: “I’ve seen one myself.” The story was picked up in the press, prompting the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Maryland to send UFO questionnaires to the Georgia State Capitol. Carter personally filled out both questionnaires and gave permission to use his name as a witness. According to the questionnaires, the sighting occurred “shortly after dark” in October 1969 when Carter and ten other “members of Leary Georgia Lions Club” were “outdoors waiting for a meeting to begin at 7:30 p.m.” The sighting lasted between ten to twelve minutes and the object, located at “about 30 degrees above the horizon,” was described as “about the same size as the moon, maybe a little smaller, varied from brighter/larger than planet to apparent size of the moon.”

President Carter’s UFO story reemerged as he gained prominence during the 1976 presidential campaign. On June 8, the National Enquirer published a short interview with Carter in which he said, “I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one,” adding that “I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky.” In that interview, Carter also made an important promise to the American public: “If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”

Ironically, the only ufologist to really investigate Carter’s sighting was skeptic Robert Sheaffer. The main clue was that Carter claimed to have seen the object while visiting the town of Leary to lecture at the local Lions Club. In his book, The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence, Sheaffer recounts that his effort to locate additional witnesses was difficult, but he was finally able to find one who remembered seeing, “like a blue light or something or other in the sky that night.”

However, Sheaffer soon discovered that there was a problem with the date given by Carter as the date of the sighting. Carter always said that in the sighting occurred in October 1969, but the Lions Club in Leary had disbanded in February of that year. Sheaffer eventually located the official records of the meeting at the Lions Club International Headquarters. The exact date of Carter’s speech in Leary was January 6, 1969, “nine months earlier than Mr. Carter’s recollection had placed it.” Furthermore, after computing the position of the planets for that date, Sheaffer discovered that “Venus was a conspicuous evening star, nearing its maximum brilliance. Venus was . . . at 7:15 PM, at about 25º elevation, in virtually the exact position where Carter had placed his UFO.”

The result of Sheaffer’s investigation was mostly ignored because it robbed the public of identifying the president as a witness to a genuine UFO. Yet, there is a high probability that what Carter saw could have been explained. The visual tricks that Venus can play in the eyes of the beholder have been known for decades by competent UFO investigators like Allan Hendry, who has characterized Venus as “the real champion” of the stars and planets that tend to cause UFO sightings.

The sighting, however, was only one aspect of President Carter’s link to ufology. The other was his campaign promise to release all the UFO data held by the government. Stanley Schneider, assistant to President Carter’s White House Science advisor Frank Press, later admitted to the New York Times that “public interest in this has been brewing for several months, slowly building up . . . It was getting to be more than we could handle.” In fact, so many letter about UFOs were sent to President Carter that Virginia ufologist Larry Bryant eventually published a book on the letters entitled, UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally ‘Round Jimmy Carter’s Promise. One indicator of the campaign’s impact was revealed by U.S. News & World Report in its April 18, 1977 edition. Under the heading of “Official Word Coming on UFOs,” the magazine stated that “before the year is out, the Government—perhaps the President—is expected to make what is described as ‘unsettling disclosures’ about UFOs . . . based on information from the CIA.”

NASA’s UFO Past

In an attempt to achieve UFO disclosure, the White House had difficulty in developing a coherent policy, and thus, NASA became the logical candidate. Unlike the U.S. Air Force, NASA had never been officially involved in the UFO controversy, although a link between the two surfaced occasionally. Popular UFO articles, books, and movies often displayed UFO photos taken by NASA astronauts, but the great majority of these images were explained by prosaic phenomena such as lens flares, booster rockets, or items ejected from space capsules.

While NASA never officially investigated UFOs, it did produce a few UFO-related documents such as the Kennedy Space Center’s “NASA Management Instruction (KMI 8610.4)” of June 28, 1967, regarding “Processing Reports of Sightings of Space Vehicles Fragments.” The four-page-document signed by the space center’s director, Kurt H. Debus, contained procedures dealing primarily with manmade space vehicles, but KMI 8610.4 added that “reports of sightings of objects not related to space vehicles” were also included: “It is KSC policy to respond to reported sightings of space vehicles fragments and unidentified flying objects as promptly as possible.” The document provided definitions of “Space Vehicle Fragment” and “Unidentified Flying Objects,” and KSC personnel were instructed to “call in unidentified flying object reports to the Patrick Air Force Base Command Post.”

Additionally, NASA’s name appears often in connection with mysterious space crashes such as the one in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965, which later led to a lengthy Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against NASA by journalist Leslie Kean. The space agency also appeared as a “forwarding” office in several declassified documents from other government branches.

NASA’s Response to the White House

It was against this background that NASA found itself tasked with official UFO responsibility early on in the Carter administration. That segment of the population that believed Earth was being visited by aliens had not forgotten Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise. The president’s science and technology advisor, Frank Press, became the White House official in charge of the UFO problem, but outside help was sought when the White House became overwhelmed with UFO mail. Press stated in his July 21, 1977 letter to NASA administrator Robert Frosch “that the focal point for the UFO question ought to be NASA.”

“There appears to be a national revival of interest in the matter with a younger generation becoming involved,” wrote Press, adding that “this is a public relations problem as much as anything else.” Press’s problems were twofold: First, the most immediate issue was how to deal with the growing number of correspondence regarding UFOs being received by the White House. Second, Press has to face the substantive issue of whether there was any truth to the UFO phenomenon and he believed that a new “panel of inquiry could be formed by NASA” to review the UFO evidence and “see if there are any new significant findings.”

Subsequent FOIA requests revealed that even before Frosch responded to Press on September 6, 1977 the U.S. Air Force was already meddling in the affair. One of the most significant and prophetic pieces of paper to come out of this period is a four-line letter written on September 1, 1977 by Colonel Charles H. Senn, the chief of the air force’s community relations division. The addressee was another former air force man, Lieutenant General Duward L. Crow, who was, at that time, the assistant deputy administrator of NASA. Along with an enclosed “UFO Fact Sheet and standard response to UFO public inquiries” that Crow had requested, Senn wrote, “I sincerely hope you are successful in preventing a reopening of UFO investigations.” Considering what took place in the ensuing months, when NASA literally turned down an official request from the White House, one does not need to be particularly conspiratorial to see that the air force was not a neutral party in this drama. Before Frosch’s response to Press was sent on September 6, the letter was rewritten twice by Crow.

Bob Frosch’s letter was courteous, but not encouraging. The strategy for responding to UFO inquiries from the public through “form letters” and “information sheets” was discussed, as both NASA and the air force had discovered long ago that it was the most economical method. It obviously had its problems, continued Frosch, such as the lack of a “focal point for technical appraisal of sightings.” No quick action was to be taken regarding the proposed UFO panel or commission, wrote Frosch, “before . . . we should assure ourselves that an inquiry is justified.” His suggestion, therefore, was to name “a NASA project officer to review reports of the last ten years” and “provide a specific recommendation” by the end of the year.

Press’s response to Frosch a week later stated he was “pleased . . . that NASA can handle the public inquiries” so as to “relieve my staff of a responsibility we are not equipped to handle.” Frosch never said in his letter that NASA would handle the mail for the White House; instead, he had only referred to the air force and NASA’s experience in using form letters. Press agreed fully with Frosch that the NASA commission was something that should be weighed carefully and wrote, “I can understand your reluctance to commit the agency to a formal program.” He conceded that it was up to the space agency to review the UFO situation as it best saw fit.

NASA’s review of the UFO question was not a formal study, but an in-house analysis of the options available. The key document is a four-page memo, “UFO Study Considerations,” dated November 8, 1977 written by Dr. Noel Hinners, NASA’s associate administrator for space science. Dr. Hinners considered “the question of what NASA could reasonably do in both the short and the long term,” he wrote in his memo to NASA’s assistant administrator. The scientist went about his task in a straightforward manner, outlining succinctly the current UFO scene which included

• “Widespread interest” with about half of the American population believing “something” exists;
• Interest in forming a “specialized agency” in the United Nations;
• A formal study group being set up by the CNES, NASA’s counterpart in France;
• Several solid private UFO organizations in the USA “with responsible membership”;
• An increase in reports of what Hinners referred to as “the near encounter type”; and
• A wider acceptance within the UFO community of a government cover-up, meaning not only that the Government “knows far more than it has released,” but that it “may even have pieces of UFO hardware in hand.”

Dr. Hinners analyzed the problems facing a NASA UFO review: the “apparent lack of any tangible or physical evidence for laboratory analysis,” and the “absence of any sound scientific protocol for investigating the phenomenon firsthand.” The word “apparent” in the first line is to be noted while the word “absence” in the second line is questionable. After three decades of amateur investigations, by 1977, civilian UFO organizations had achieved a degree of this so-called “scientific protocol.” Other problems outlined by Dr. Hinners were the abundance of “secondary source materials” or “hearsay”; the prejudices on the part of investigators; hoaxes; “the delicate interface,” as Hinners put it, between the government and UFO witnesses; and “the danger of projecting an inaccurate NASA or Administration image.” Dr. Hinners’s conclusion was that, “all in all, undertaking a formal study at this time appears fraught with perils.”

Dr. Hinners presented two choices to NASA. The first option was to reject the White House’s idea for “the Federal government and specifically NASA, to investigate the UFO phenomenon.” As Dr. Hinners opined, this option would give added fuel to the “charges of cover-up” by the UFO community, but it would also avoid “controversy . . . within the science community NASA deals with.” There were budgetary advantages too in keeping the current policy of form letters and not spending extra resources, but Hinners had the intelligence of pointing out that choosing this option “would also be begging the question.”

The second option was for NASA to consider creating a commission to investigate the topic. This option seemed almost identical to the early, positive days of the Condon Committee. Basically, Hinners’s thought was that the commission could request major UFO organizations “to submit their ‘best’ cases,” put “this material into a usable format,” update and revise it, and finally “ask for a peer review.” On the basis of this preliminary study, NASA would decide whether some form of permanent UFO investigative branch should be established. Hinners also recommended something that was later used by Bob Frosch in his final and formal rejection of the commission that, “as a minimum, having gone so far and this publicly, NASA should stand ready to investigate new hard evidence that might come in.”

In late November 1977, the White House decided to go ahead publicly with formally requesting a NASA UFO commission. The wire services carried the story and quoted David Williamson, NASA’s assistant for special projects, saying the agency was “not anxious” to study UFOs. Like Dr. Condon, Williamson appeared to disqualify any existence of UFOs before any official conclusion had been reached. “There is no measurable UFO evidence such as a piece of metal, flesh or cloth,” he said.

When Bob Frosch finally responded to Frank Press on December 21, 1977, nobody in Washington was surprised. The main theme was “the absence of tangible physical evidence available for thorough laboratory analysis” coupled with the willingness to analyze “any bona fide physical evidence from credible sources” submitted to NASA. Frosch also mentioned the lack of “a sound scientific procedure for investigating these phenomena” as a reason that a study “would be wasteful and probably unproductive.” The shadow of Dr. Condon, deceased since 1974, seemed to pervade this letter. Condon had concluded eight years earlier that science could not be expected to gain anything by studying UFOs. Frosch reached the same conclusion without even embroiling himself in a thousand-page report at a cost of over half a million dollars. After turning down the White House’s request, Frosch left a way out, just in case, writing, “I wish in no way to indicate that NASA has come to any conclusion about these phenomena as such; institutionally, we retain an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity, and a willingness to analyze problems within our competence.”

In 1978, NASA released its revamped “Information Sheet No. 78-1” on UFOs. It stated that other than answering UFO-related mail sent to the White House, “NASA is not engaged in a research program involving these phenomena, nor is any other government agency.” The six-page document was an updated version of the old air force form letter, yet NASA added an interesting paragraph not to be found in the Pentagon’s counterpart: “Reports of unidentified flying objects entering United States air space are of interest to the military as a regular part of defense surveillance. Beyond that, the US Air Force no longer investigates reports of UFO sightings.” In other words, NASA provided an admission that NORAD and the U.S. military still keep an eye on UFOs with possible national security implications. The NASA document quoted extensively from the administrator’s letter about the “bona fide physical evidence” and lack thereof.

It is interesting to see how quickly and effectively the government muzzled this revival of UFO interest. Although numerous FOIA lawsuits were being pursued by researchers, many months and even years would pass before some of these documents were obtained, processed, and publicized. But, the interaction between the White House, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force during this little known episode in President Carter’s administration offers a window into how the federal government deals publicly with ufology. The failed NASA UFO commission attempt by the Carter administration in 1977 is the last time the U.S. government even considered launching a new formal study. Given the current state of affairs in Washington, it’s extremely unlikely that a new effort will be attempted anytime soon, but the phenomenon itself is certainly not likely to go away.

• A version of this article originally appeared in Issue #23 (December/January 2014) of Open Minds UFO Magazine. Back issues can be found here.

Popular Posts:

• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Florida witness reports rectangular UFO near Tampa Bay
• Robert Powell – USS Nimitz UFO Encounter – October 24, 2017
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak
• George Knapp – The Government’s UFO and Paranormal Study: The Skinwalker Ranch – Sept. 18, 2018
• Tom DeLonge strikes UFO gold

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

Somewhere in the Skies: A Young Voice of Truth

Posted by: Diana Pasulka

The second edition of Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, by Ryan Sprague, has been released. This is great news because Sprague’s voice is one of truth and integrity within a field of misinformation and confusion. 

With contemporary culture’s embracing of the reality of UFO events, such as To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) and the Pentagon’s secretive Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), regular features in The New York Times, Sprague keeps the news local and personal. His narrative of UFO events, encounters, and reports are authentic. He interviews regular people who never wanted to see UFOs in the first place and academics and scientists who didn’t want to cover the phenomena. That is what sets Sprague’s work apart from interested parties. He is not selling newspapers. He covers the stories and experiences of people who haven’t been chosen, those who did not want to be pilots or aerospace scientists, but nevertheless have confronted the ineffable and are coming to terms with what that means for them, and for us.

This expanded edition includes updates from almost all witnesses and experiencers from the 2016 edition of the book, digging deeper and seeing how their thoughts or beliefs have changed or evolved. For some, the experiences even continued. Sprague also contributes brand new chapters of UFO cases that have never been made public before.

Sprague’s work is based on the reality of the phenomena and not on the media narratives that circulate about it. This is why I read everything Sprague publishes because I know he embodies the strategy of one of the best researchers of the phenomena: Dr. Jacques Vallee. 

Vallee cautioned researchers to stay away from the media frenzy around UFO events, and instead focus on the local, the personal, and those cases that were not the focus of media, Hollywood, or Netflix. Sprague’s work is authentic. He interviews people who never sought out these experiences but were changed by them in ways that can be compared to religious conversions. They became aware of a universe more varied with life and possibilities than they had known before. Sprague’s work opens this world to us, in accessible and non-politicized language. As stated above, Sprague’s work is a breath of fresh air, and it’s clear that as the phenomenon evolves, so will our understanding of it, through the lens and voices of those who experience it. And Sprague will be there to dissect and try to make sense of these stories, one experience at a time.

• Purchase on Amazon in paperback or E-book and learn more at: www.somewhereintheskies.com.

Popular Posts:

• The disappearance of the UK’s “most spectacular” UFO photo
• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• Mystery in the Southwest: A Look Inside the Infamous Bradshaw Ranch
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Robert Powell – USS Nimitz UFO Encounter – October 24, 2017
• Florida witness reports rectangular UFO near Tampa Bay
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

The disappearance of the UK’s “most spectacular” UFO photo

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas  

“I first came across this story in 1991, when I joined the UFO project,” writes Pope on his website. “A poster-sized enlargement of the best  photo was prominently displayed on the office wall.”

“The X-Files first aired in the UK in 1994 and I acquired the same nickname (Spooky) as Fox Mulder, for obvious reasons,” Nick continues. “Mulder famously had his ‘I want to believe’ UFO poster on his office wall and though uncaptioned, I suppose this was my equivalent.”

The photo showed a picture of a large diamond shaped craft with a jet in the background. When he asked about the photo, Pope was told that they had officially determined the image was real. They estimated the craft to have been 25 meters (over 80 feet) in diameter.

However, if asked, they were instructed to answer, “no definite conclusion had been reached regarding the large diamond-shaped object.”

Pope learned that the object had been photographed on August 4, 1990. Two people had been walking near the town of Calvine in Scotland when they spotted the large diamond-shaped object. They described the object as looking metallic. It sat in one position, hovering silently for several minutes before taking off vertically at, as Pope writes, “a massive speed.”

During the sighting, the witnesses also saw a military aircraft that they thought might be a harrier jet, but they were unsure whether the jet was escorting the craft, chasing it, or whether the jet pilot was even aware of the diamond-shaped UFO.

The witnesses had taken several photographs and sent them to the Scottish Daily Record newspaper. The paper contacted the MoD, and the MoD was somehow able to convince the paper to hand over the photographs along with the negatives.

” The photos were then sent to the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) who then sent them on to imagery analysts at JARIC (Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre). Yet at the time, MoD hadn’t even publicly acknowledged that there was any intelligence interest in UFOs at all,” Pope explains.

“We implied and sometimes stated that we didn’t ‘investigate’ UFOs, but merely ‘examined sightings to see if anything reported was of any defence interest’ – as if the two were somehow different!”

Pope say the MoD was actually very interested in these cases, but often less interested in where the craft came from than what they could learn from it. They had hoped to identify some sort of technology they would be able to appropriate.

Nick Pope, former MOD UFO investigator, at the International UFO Congress.

(Credit: Peter Beste/Open Minds)

Either way, the Calvine UFO photos impressed the UFO desk investigators enough that they hung the poster in the office.

“At one particularly surreal briefing on the UFO phenomenon my DIS opposite number indicated the photo and pointed his finger to the right: ‘It’s not the Americans’, he said, before pointing to the left and saying ‘and it’s not the Russians.’ There was a pause, before he concluded ‘and that only leaves …’ – his voice trailed off and he didn’t complete the sentence, but his finger was pointing directly upwards,” recalls Pope.

The office where the UFO desk was located also housed other non-UFO related projects.

Pope says the reaction of some colleagues who came to visit unaware of the UFO program had amusing reactions to the poster.

Pope writes, “You’d have this surreal moment when they’d stop mid-sentence, stare at it, point and say ‘what the hell’s that?’ – this wasn’t the archetypal distant, blurred UFO photo. This was up close and personal, reach out and you can touch it stuff. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s not one of ours’ was our stock answer to the inevitable question.”

Eventually, around 1994, Pope says his superior determined the craft was a secret American aircraft or drone. Pope says they had already asked the U.S. if the craft or something similar of theirs was being tested over the UK, and were told they were not. Pope believes his boss had decided to support a potential cover-up by the Americans and the MoD and removed the poster. It was never to be seen again.

Although Pope has discussed these photographs in the media and has posted an article on his website, no one has come forward to claim they took the photos. Nor has anyone at the Scottish Daily Record come forth to discuss any involvement. The case remains a mystery.

• You can read more about this sighting and Pope’s work at www.NickPope.net. He can also be heard on several episode of Open Minds UFO Radio.

Popular Posts:

• The disappearance of the UK’s “most spectacular” UFO photo
• Alleged UFO photos over China Lake analyzed
• Bob Lazar Area 51 documentary narrated by Mickey Rourke
• Mystery in the Southwest: A Look Inside the Infamous Bradshaw Ranch
• That’s Classified: Exposing Silver Bullet Technology
• UFO encounter in Alabama
• FAA releases audio and radar data of UFO encounter with multiple pilots over California and Oregon, jets were scrambled
• Robert Powell – USS Nimitz UFO Encounter – October 24, 2017
• Florida witness reports rectangular UFO near Tampa Bay
• Bob Lazar Documentary Sneak Peak

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }