Aircraft Carriers In The Sky

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released this artist’s rendering to show its vision for a future aircraft carrier in the sky, capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft while in flight. (DARPA image)

Penetration

Stanford Scientists Observe Man Travel Out of His Body and Into Space – What He Saw Was Remarkable

A fascinating article from collective-evolution.com:  NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft was launched into space in 1972. It was the the very first spacecraft to fly directly through the asteroid belt and make observations of the biggest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. It was also able to obtain close up images of the planet, something that scientists had never had access to before. (1)

Prior to the flyby of Jupiter by Pioneer 10, the CIA and NSA in conjunction with Stanford University were involved in what was called “Remote Viewing.”
Remote viewing can be defined in multiple ways. It’s the ability of individuals to describe a remote geographical location up to several hundred thousand kilometers away (sometimes even more) from their physical location.(2)(3)(4)

A gentlemen by the name of Ingo Swann was able to successfully describe and view a ring around Jupiter, a ring that scientists had no idea existed. This took place precisely before the first ever flyby of Jupiter by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which confirmed that the ring did actually exist. These results were published in advance of the rings’ discovery. (2)

The successful viewing of the ring by Ingo came after scientists observed him identify physical objects in hidden envelopes that were placed a few hundred kilometers away.

“Successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the [remote viewing] phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. The CIA even participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. CIA personnel generated successful target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges.”(2) -Harold Puthoff, PhD, Stanford University

“To determine whether it was necessary to have a “beacon” individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if perhaps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist.” (2) – Harold Puthoff, PhD, Stanford University

It’s remarkable to think about these extended human capacities, and what we are capable of. At the same time it’s sobering to think about how all of this information isn’t emphasized, and always kept classified and hidden from the human race. It makes you wonder what other information out there remains classified that we don’t know about yet, and what other truths the remote viewing program has uncovered.

The Above Information Was Documented. Here’s What Wasn’t.

Here is a quote from Ingo’s book Penetration, where he goes into detail about phenomenon that was not documented in the literature cited throughout this articles.

“It’s one thing to read about UFOs and stuff in the papers or in books. It is another to hear rumors about the military or government having an interest in such matters, rumors which say they have captured extraterrestrials and downed alien space craft. But it’s quite another matter to find oneself in a situation which confirms everything. I found towers, machinery, lights buildings, humanoids busy at work on something I couldn’t figure out (on the back side of the moon)”

The information now available in the public domain regarding the government experiments with remote viewing were declassified in 1995, but who knows how much of the program’s information remains classified. Ingo had expressed that the program was shut down because it was one of the biggest threats to government secrecy.

It’s quite remarkable that this information was kept secret for over 20 years. Prior to 1995, the public had absolutely no idea that this type of thing was going on, it was a special access program, part of the black budget, which still today deals with projects and information the human race knows nothing about. You can read read more about the black budget HERE.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” –
Nikola Tesla

Science has indeed studied non-physical phenomenon, for a very long time.
Unfortunately, much of this science has been locked up within the classified world, and the remote viewing program (one of many) is a great example of that.

Founder Of Skeptic’s Society Rattled After Witnessing A Paranormal Event (Michael Shermer)

Flim Flam Extolled!

The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

                 James Randi in front of a painting done by his partner, the artist José Alvarez.  

Credit Jeff Minton for The New York Times                                                 

A few minutes before 8 o’clock one Sunday evening last July, around 600 people crowded into the main conference hall of the South Point casino in Las Vegas. After taking their seats on red-velvet upholstered chairs, they chattered noisily as they awaited the start of the Million Dollar Challenge. When Fei Wang, a 32-year-old Chinese salesman, stepped onto the stage, they fell silent. Wang had a shaved head and steel-framed glasses. He wore a polo shirt, denim shorts and socks. He claimed to have a peculiar talent: from his right hand, he could transmit a mysterious force a distance of three feet, unhindered by wood, metal, plastic or cardboard. The energy, he said, could be felt by others as heat, pressure, magnetism or simply “an indescribable change.” Tonight, if he could demonstrate the existence of his ability under scientific test conditions, he stood to win $1 million.

The Million Dollar Challenge was the climax of the Amazing Meeting, or TAM, an annual weekend-long conference for skeptics that was created by a magician named the Amazing Randi in 2003. Randi, a slight, gnomish figure with a bald head and frothy white beard, was presiding from the front row, a cane topped with a polished silver skull between his legs. He drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. The Challenge organizers had spent weeks negotiating with Wang and fine-tuning the protocol for the evening’s test. A succession of nine blindfolded subjects would come onstage and place their hands in a cardboard box. From behind a curtain, Wang would transmit his energy into the box. If the subjects could successfully detect Wang’s energy on eight out of nine occasions, the trial would confirm Wang’s psychic power. “I think he’ll get four or five,” Randi told me. “That’s my bet.”

    

The Disillusionist

The Challenge began with the solemnity of a murder trial. A young woman in a short black dress stood at the edge of the stage, preparing to mark down the results on a chart mounted on an easel. The first subject, a heavyset blond woman in flip-flops, stepped up and placed her hands in the box. After two minutes, she was followed by a second woman who had a blue streak in her hair and, like the first, looked mildly nonplused by the proceedings. Each failed to detect the mystic force. “Which means, at this point, we are done,” the M.C. announced. With two failures in a row, it was impossible for Wang to succeed. The Million Dollar Challenge was already over.

Stepping out from behind the curtain, Wang stood center stage, wearing an expression of numb shock, like a toddler who has just dropped his ice cream in the sand. He was at a loss to explain what had gone wrong; his tests with a paranormal society in Boston had all succeeded. Nothing could convince him that he didn’t possess supernatural powers. “This energy is mysterious,” he told the audience. “It is not God.” He said he would be back in a year, to try again.

After Wang left the stage, Randi, who is 86, told me he was glad it was all over. For almost 60 years, he has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity, and no one had ever received a single penny.

But he hates to see them lose, he said. “They’re always rationalizing,” Randi told me as we walked to dinner at the casino steakhouse. “There are always reasons prevailing why they can’t do it. They call it the resilience of the duped. It’s with intense regret that you watch them go down the tubes.”

The day before the challenge, Randi was wandering the halls of the casino, posing for snapshots and signing autographs. The convention began in 2003 in Fort Lauderdale, with 150 people in attendance, including staff. This year, it attracted more than 1,000 skeptics from as far away as South Africa and Japan. Often male and middle-aged, and frequently wearing ponytails or Tevas or novelty slogan T-shirts (product of evolution; stop making stupid people famous; atheist), they came to genuflect before their idol, drawn by both his legendary feats as an illusionist and his renown as an icon of global skepticism.

One fan, in his early 20s, with a thick mop of dark hair, introduced himself with, “So, I read that you spent 55 minutes in a block of ice.”

“A cinch,” Randi replied.

Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson. In addition to offering grants, JREF holds the $1 million in bonds that back the challenge, and pays Randi’s annual $200,000 salary.

Raised as a Catholic, Appaden told me that he discovered Randi in 2010, when he watched the magician in an online TED talk discussing homeopathy. At the time Appaden was a student at a Christian college, struggling with his faith; two years later, during Randi’s first visit to India, he took a 13-hour bus ride across the country to see Randi in person. “It literally changed my life,” he told me, and explained that he now hopes to help teach skepticism in Indian schools.

The magician looked small and frail, lost in the folds of his striped dress shirt, leaning on his cane, but he mugged gamely for every acolyte. For many of his most zealous followers, the opportunity to meet Randi at TAM may be as close as they will ever come to a religious experience. “It’s an obligation, it’s a very heavy obligation,” he said. “I can’t stand one person being turned away and not being given the same attention that others have been given.”

A few days before the conference, I visited Randi at his home, in Plantation, Fla. The modest octagonal house was almost hidden from the street by a lush garden of finger palms, elephant ears and paperbark trees. As we sat upstairs, surrounded by some 4,000 books — arranged alphabetically by subject, from alchemy, astrology, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle to tarot, U.F.O.s and witchcraft — he said that he disliked being called a debunker. He prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. He elaborated: “Because if I were to start out saying, ‘This is not true, and I’m going to prove it’s not true,’ that means I’ve made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to find out.’ That may end up — and usually it does end up — as a complete debunking. But I don’t set out to debunk it.”

Born Randall James Zwinge in 1928, Randi began performing as a teenager in the 1940s, touring with a carnival and working table to table in the nightclubs of his native Toronto. Billed as The Great Randall: Telepath, he had a mind-reading act, and also specialized in telling the future. In 1949 he made local headlines for a trick in which he appeared to predict the outcome of the World Series a week before it happened, writing the result down, sealing it an envelope and giving it to a lawyer who opened and read it to the press after the series concluded. But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded — but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic. Once he understood the power he had over his audience, and how easily he could exploit their belief in the supernatural to make money, it frightened him: “To have deceived people like that . . . that’s a terrible feeling,” he said.      

He turned instead to escapology — as The Amazing Randi: The Man No Jail Can Hold — and feats of endurance. He broke a record for his 55-minute stint encased in ice, and bested the time his hero Houdini had spent trapped in a coffin on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Hotel Shelton in Manhattan. But Randi never forgot the believers, and how susceptible they were to exploitation by those who lacked his scruples. And so, as his reputation as a magician grew, he also began to campaign against spiritualists and psychics. In 1964, as a guest on a radio talk show, he offered $1,000 of his own money in a challenge to anyone who could show scientific evidence of supernatural powers. Soon afterward, he began broadcasting his own national radio show dedicated to discussion of the paranormal. He bought a small house in Rumson, N.J., and installed a sign outside that announced randi — charlatan. He lived there alone, with a pair of talking birds and a kinkajou named Sam. Although Randi had known he was gay since he was a teenager, he kept that to himself. “I had to conceal it, you know,” he told me. “They wouldn’t have had a known homosexual working in the radio station. This was a day when you had to keep it completely hidden.”

During the late ’60s and early ’70s, popular interest in the paranormal grew: There was a fascination with extrasensory perception and the Bermuda Triangle and best sellers like “Chariots of the Gods,” which claimed Earth’s ancient civilizations were visited by aliens. There were mystics, mind-readers and psychic surgeons, who were said to be able to extract tumors from their patients using only their bare hands — and without leaving a mark. Randi continued on his crusade. Few of his fellow illusionists were interested in exposing the way that conjuring tricks were used to dupe gullible audiences into believing in psychic abilities. “Everybody else just kind of rolled their eyes,” Penn Jillette, a good friend of Randi’s, told me. “'Why is Randi spending all this time doing this? We all know there is no ESP. It’s just stupid people believe it, and that’s fine.’ "

Randi kept up his $1,000 challenge — and eventually increased it to $10,000 — but found few takers. Then in 1973, he met the nemesis who would define his struggle: Uri Geller, who had recently arrived in the United States from Israel. Geller was a charismatic 26-year-old former paratrooper who performed mind-reading feats similar to those with which Randi baffled audiences as a young mentalist. But Geller said that his powers were real and also claimed to have psychokinetic abilities: He could bend spoons, he said, using only his mind. His supposed gifts were studied by a pair of parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute, who were persuaded that some of them, at least, were genuine. Randi told me that he met Geller soon afterward. “Very flamboyant,” he recalled venomously. “Very charming. Likable, beautiful, affectionate, genuine, forward-going, Handsome — everything!” His manner, Randi explained, was the key to the techniques employed by Geller and others like him. “That’s why they call them con men. Because they gain the confidence of the victim — and then they fool ‘em.”

Geller provided Randi with an archenemy in a show-business battle royale pitting science against faith, skepticism against belief. Their vendetta would endure for decades and bring them both international celebrity. Recognizing that the psychic’s paranormal feats were a result of conjuring tricks — directing attention elsewhere while he bent spoons using brute force, peeking through his fingers during mind-reading stunts — Randi helped Time magazine with an exposé of Geller. Soon afterward, when Geller was invited to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” the producers approached Randi, who had been a frequent guest, to help them ensure that Geller could employ no tricks during his appearance. Randi gave Carson’s prop men advice on how to prepare for the taping, and the result was a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again. “I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.” But to Geller’s astonishment, he was immediately booked on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

Randi decided Geller must be stopped. He approached Ray Hyman, a psychologist who had observed the tests of Geller’s ability at Stanford and thought them slipshod, and suggested they create an organization dedicated to combating pseudoscience. In 1976, together with Martin Gardner, a Scientific American columnist whose writing had helped hone Hyman’s and Randi’s skepticism, they formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Csicop, as it became known, was funded by donations and by sales of a new magazine, which became The Skeptical Inquirer. Randi, Hyman and Gardner and the secular humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz took seats on the executive board, with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan joining as founding members. Soon Randi was traveling across the globe, often “as the ambassador” of Csicop, Hyman told me recently, “the face of the skeptical movement all over the world.”

In his new role as a paranormal investigator, in books and on TV shows, Randi debunked everything from fairies to telekinesis. But he also stalked Geller around the chat-show circuit for years, denouncing him as a fraud and duplicating his feats by levering spoons and keys against the furniture while nobody was looking. In 1975, Randi published “The Magic of Uri Geller,” a sarcastic but exhaustive examination of the psychic’s techniques, in which he argued that any scientist investigating the paranormal should seek the advice of a conjurer before conducting serious research. The campaign helped make them both more famous than ever. Even today, Geller credits Randi with helping him become a psychic phenomenon — “My most influential and important publicist,” as Geller described him to me.

In 1989, Randi and Geller were booked to appear together on a TV special, “Exploring Psychic Powers, Live!” According to Randi, before the broadcast, Geller pulled him into his dressing room and offered to end the feud. “There’s no way that we are going to make peace until you level with your audiences,” Randi replied. “Until you say that you are a magician like the rest of us, and that you don’t have supernatural powers.” Geller refused. (Geller says he does not recall the incident.) Soon after, Geller brought the first of several libel actions against Csicop and Randi — who, among other things, had characterized him as a sociopath and suggested his psychic feats had been learned from the backs of cereal boxes. Geller’s suits in the United States were eventually dismissed. But the legal costs of fighting the cases were overwhelming, and Randi went through almost all of a MacArthur Foundation grant of $272,000 awarded to him in 1986 for his paranormal investigations. Finally, the struggle with Geller even cost Randi his place in Csicop; when Paul Kurtz told him it had become too expensive to keep going after such a litigious target, and demanded he stop discussing Geller in public, Randi resigned in fury.

Geller, who now lives in a large house beside the Thames River in England, says he long ago put the feud with Randi behind him. He claims to have used his show-business career as a cover for paranormal work on behalf of Mossad and the C.I.A., but he no longer calls himself a psychic. “I changed my title to ‘mystifier,’ ” he told me. “And I love it — because it means nothing.” But Randi’s contempt for him still burns brightly. “He knows he is deceiving these people — individuals, in most cases — and he doesn’t care what damage he does to them,” Randi said. “They depend on the paranormal after they have met Geller, and you cannot talk them out of it. And that has crippled them for life.”

Early one morning last summer, on a visit to Randi’s house in Florida, I drew up outside a few minutes later than we had agreed. Randi, wearing a canary yellow sweatshirt, was waiting at the front door, holding his watch in his hand. “You’re late!” he barked, and it was hard to tell if he was joking. We sat down in the living room to talk, and Randi spent half an hour laboriously adjusting his watch, winding the hands to display the correct date. “I am a little bit obsessed with having the right time,” he said. “I’ve always been very, very, big on knowing what time it is. That’s one of my connections with reality.”

Randi has never smoked, taken narcotics or got drunk. “Because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers,” he once said. “And I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That may mean giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I’m willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world.”

That fixation on science and the rational life — and a corresponding desire to crusade for the truth — has a long history among magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne, who founded a dynasty of English conjurers in 1855 and became a prolific inventor, began his career by exposing fraudulent spiritualists and reproducing their tricks. Houdini turned to debunking mediums in his middle age as his career as an escapologist went into decline. He offered his own $10,000 reward to any spiritualist who could perform a “miracle” he could not duplicate himself. Martin Gardner, whose book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science” is a founding text of modern skepticism, was also fascinated by magic, and became well known for his books explaining how many conjuring and mind-reading tricks rely upon strict laws of probability and number theory. Penn and Teller have since followed Randi down the path of conjurers who have become debunkers.

Randi now sees himself, like Einstein and Richard Dawkins, in the tradition of scientific skeptics. “Science gives you a standard to work against,” he said. “Science, after all, is simply a logical, rational and careful examination of the facts that nature presents to us.”     

            

         Although many modern skeptics continue to hold religious beliefs, and see no contradiction in embracing critical thinking and faith in God, Randi is not one of them. “I have always been an atheist,” he told me. “I think that religion is a very damaging philosophy — because it’s such a retreat from reality.”

When I asked him why he believed other people needed religion, Randi was at his most caustic.

“They need it because they’re weak,” he said. “And they fall for authority. They choose to believe it because it’s easy.”

In the 1980s, Randi turned his talent for deception to debunking the supernatural. He set out to expose New Age channelers, mediums who — on shows and in profitable public appearances — purported to be possessed by ancient spirits. One, JZ Knight, a former cable TV saleswoman, claimed to be the terrestrial mouthpiece of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis who could predict the future.

To show how credulous audiences could be in the face of such claims, in 1987 Randi collaborated with the Australian version of “60 Minutes.” He invented Carlos, a 2,000-year-old entity who, his publicity material stated, had last appeared in the body of a 12-year-old boy in Venezuela in 1900 but had now returned to manifest himself through a young American artist named José Alvarez. He prepared to take Alvarez on a tour of Australia.

Randi coached Alvarez carefully for his role as Carlos, rehearsing him through mock news conferences and TV appearances. He taught him how to squeeze a Ping-Pong ball in his armpit so that his pulse would appear to slow as he became “possessed” — “an old, old thing from Boy Scout camps,” Randi told me. Before the trip, Randi sent out press kits to Australian TV networks and newspapers, filled with reports charting the apparently sensational — but fictional — progress of Carlos across the United States.

Soon after they arrived in February 1988, Alvarez was booked on many of the country’s leading TV shows. Through an earpiece, Randi fed him answers to interview questions and the lines of doomsday prophecies. The climax of his tour was an appearance at the Sydney Opera House, after which the audience was invited to place orders for crystal artifacts, including the Tears of Carlos, priced at $500 each, and an Atlantis Crystal, offered at $14,000. Each proved popular — though Randi’s team never accepted any money for them.

When the hoax was revealed a few days later on “60 Minutes,” the Australian media was enraged at having been taken in; Randi countered that none of the journalists had bothered with even the most elementary fact-checking measures.

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Afterward, Randi and Alvarez returned to Florida together, and Alvarez’s reputation as an artist blossomed. For the next 14 years, he toured the Carlos persona around the world as part of a performance piece, appearing onstage in Padua, Italy, and sitting for photographs on the Great Wall of China re-enacting the hoax. In 2002, the work Alvarez created from the Carlos episode was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Meanwhile, the establishment of the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996 allowed Randi to continue his own pursuits with the foundation’s headquarters, a Spanish-style stucco building in Fort Lauderdale, as his base of operations. He created the Million Dollar Challenge and regularly wrote bulletins for the foundation’s website, where the message boards formed an online hub for skeptics worldwide. In recent years, he began making regular podcasts, and he also created his own YouTube channel to discuss everything from Nostradamus to cold fusion. In 2007, during his TED talk taking aim at quackery and fraud, Randi delighted his audience by gobbling an entire bottle of 32 Calms homeopathic sleeping tablets — which Randi speculated was certainly a fatal dose.

Disappointed by what he saw as the media’s indifference to the Million Dollar Challenge, that same year Randi revised the rules and announced a plan to take the challenge to high-profile psychics, including Sylvia Browne, John Edward and — once again — Uri Geller. None of them agreed to participate. He had more success in 2008, when he invited James McCormick, a British businessman, to take the challenge. McCormick had built equipment that could supposedly detect explosives from afar, which Randi recognized was simply a telescoping antenna swiveling on a plastic handle — a dowsing rod. Randi publicly offered the million-dollar prize to McCormick if he could prove that the device worked as claimed. McCormick, who was selling his product to security forces in the Middle East, never responded. But the British Police began an investigation, and last year McCormick was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison, having sold at least $38 million worth of his miraculous device to the Iraqi government.

                

Recently, age and illness have begun to slow Randi down. In 2009, following chemotherapy for intestinal cancer, he presented the opening address at TAM from a wheelchair. Earlier this year, JREF’s Fort Lauderdale building was sold, and its reference library and collection of memorabilia were boxed up and relocated to Randi’s home. When I visited, many of the cartons remained unpacked; the portrait of Isaac Asimov that once hung above the fireplace in the JREF library was propped against a wall.

Randi was all but marooned in the house — he was forbidden to drive while he awaited cataract surgery — and Alvarez had been forced to surrender his driver’s license, after a series of events that began on Sept. 8, 2011. That morning there was a knock on the front door. When Randi opened it, a pair of federal agents stood before him. They asked to speak to Alvarez. Outside, Randi could see two unmarked S.U.V.s blocking the driveway and at least half a dozen agents surrounding the perimeter of the property. When Alvarez came downstairs from his room, the agents explained there was a problem. They wanted to talk to him about passport fraud. They cuffed him and took him out to the car. Randi was left alone in the house, holding business cards from State Department agents, who, Randi said, gave him instructions to wait 24 hours before calling them.

The agents took Alvarez directly to Broward County Jail, where he was photographed, issued a gray uniform and registered as FNU LNU: “first name unknown, last name unknown.” In an interview room at the jail, he told an agent everything: He had fled homophobic persecution in Venezuela and had come to the U.S. on a two-year student visa. He met Randi and knew he wanted to stay with him. But when his visa expired, there was no way to renew it. He said he was given the name and Social Security number of José Alvarez by a friend in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, and used it to apply for a passport in 1987. Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez — who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher’s aide living in the Bronx. FNU LNU said his real name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.

Charged with making a false statement in the application and use of a passport and aggravated identity theft, Peña faced a $250,000 fine, a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and deportation to Venezuela. After six weeks in jail, he was released on a $500,000 bond, and he subsequently agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of passport fraud. At a sentencing hearing in May 2012, the judge considered letters of support from Randi and Peña’s friends from the world of art, science and entertainment, including Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette, as well as from members of charities to which Peña had given his time and work. The judge considered Peña’s long relationship with Randi, and Randi’s failing health. He gave him a lenient sentence: time served, six months’ house arrest and 150 hours’ community service.

But Peña still had to contend with the immigration authorities. After the sentencing hearing, he had been home for five days when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at the door. “Say goodbye,” they told him. Peña assured Randi he would be back that afternoon. He was taken to the Krome detention center in Miami, and remained there while his lawyer tried to find a way of keeping him in the United States. After two months of incarceration, Peña was finally released from Krome on the evening of Aug. 2, 2012, to find that Randi had spent half the day waiting outside the front gate for him. The couple were married in a ceremony in Washington the following summer.

Today, Peña remains on probation and no longer holds any identity documents except a Venezuelan passport with his birth name. United States immigration authorities have agreed not to deport him for now, but he has no formal immigration status in the United States: were he to leave the country, he would be unable to return. Since his arrest, Peña has not entirely shrugged off his former persona. He signs his paintings with the name he has exhibited under for 20 years — but now followed by his true initials, D.O.P.A.

Sometimes when Randi forgets himself, he still refers to his partner as José. Yet exactly how much Randi — the master of deception and misdirection — knew about his partner’s duplicity, and how complicit he may have been in it, is unclear. When Randi first met him in the Fort Lauderdale public library, it seems certain that Peña would have introduced himself by his real name: A profile of Randi published in The Toronto Star the following year describes the magician’s young assistant, named David Peña, struggling through La Guardia Airport with Randi’s luggage. When they traveled to Australia together for the “60 Minutes” stunt, Randi may have been masterminding a deception one level deeper than he ever acknowledged: Deyvi, pretending to be José, masquerading as Carlos, the 2,000-year-old spirit from Caracas. What followed might be the longest-running hoax of The Amazing Randi’s career.

When I asked Randi how much he knew about Peña’s true identity before the federal agents came to his door, he demurred, citing legal concerns. “This is something I don’t think I’d like to get into detailed discussion about,” Randi said. “Simply because it could prejudice our status in some way.”

When he was still a young man appearing in Toronto nightclubs and pretending to predict the future, Randall Zwinge created what he hoped would be his greatest trick. Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words “I, Randall Zwinge, will die today.” Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. “I never got lucky,” he told me.

Since then, Randi has had several brushes with death. But nothing has shaken his steadfast rationalism: neither the heart attack he suffered in 2006, nor the cancer that followed. Nor, for that matter, did a conversation he had with Martin Gardner a few years before Gardner’s death in 2010, when his friend confessed to having chosen to believe in the possibility of an afterlife. “That really surprised me, because he was the rationalist supreme,” Randi recalled. “He said: ‘I don’t have any evidence for it, you have all the arguments on your side. But it brings me comfort.’ ”

Randi told me that he now feels mild trepidation each time he goes to sleep at night, and pleasant surprise that he wakes up in the morning. But he insists he does not need the sort of reassurance that Gardner sought in his own last days. “I wouldn’t have any comfort from it — because I wouldn’t believe in it,” he said. “Oh, no, I have no fear of my demise whatsoever. I really feel that sincerely.”

Most mornings, Randi is already awake at 7 o’clock, when Peña comes in to check on him; sometimes he’s up at 6. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, still,” he told me, “and I’ve got to make use of my viable time.” He is currently completing his 11th book, “A Magician in the Laboratory,” and spends several hours a day responding to emails from his desk in the chaotic-looking office he maintains upstairs. He Skypes with friends in China or Australia once a week. Peña likes to cook, and paints downstairs, beside the framed lithograph recalling the triumphs of the Man No Jail Can Hold. The couple have spent much of the last year traveling to film festivals and screenings across the United States, helping to promote a new documentary about Randi’s life, “An Honest Liar,” which will be released in February. Randi has been surprised by the response. “Standing ovations, the whole thing,” he told me.

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In July last year, Randi came closer than ever to the end. He was hospitalized with aneurysms in his legs and needed surgery. Before the procedure began, the surgeon showed Peña scans of Randi’s circulatory system. “Very challenging, a very difficult situation,” the surgeon told him. “But he lived a good life.” The operation was supposed to take two hours, but it stretched to six and a half.

When Randi began to come to, heavily dosed with painkillers, he looked about him in confusion. There were nurses speaking in hushed voices. He began hallucinating. He was convinced that he was behind the curtain before a show and that the whispering he could hear was the audience coming in. The theater was full; he had to get onstage. He tried to look at his watch, but he found he didn’t have it on. He began to panic. When the hallucinations became intensely visual, Peña brought a pen and paper to the bedside. It could prove an important exercise in skeptical inquiry to record what Randi saw as he emerged from a state so close to death, one in which so many people sincerely believed they had glimpsed the other side. Randi scribbled away; his observations, Peña thought, might eventually make a great essay. Later, when the opiates and the anaesthetic wore off, Randi looked at the notes he had written.

They were indecipherable.  

The Documents Are Fiction … The Group Isn't?

MJ-12: The Only Fiction is The Majestic 12 Documents, Declares, Randle

    I don’t like wasting time on the fictional MJ-12 documents. Clouds of nonsense thrown out, but little in the way of actual documentation. I didn’t mention Dr. Wescott’s impressive academic background because it wasn’t relevant to the discussion… which was that he suggested that he was unable to prove or disprove that Hillenkoetter was the author of the EBD.

We are told that neither the Aztec nor the Plains of San Agustin crash were mentioned because they didn’t get news coverage. What a ridiculous idea, unless we are to believe that the authors of the EBD had to rely on the news media for their leads to these events. But wait, wasn’t there a bestselling book, Behind the Flying Saucers published in 1950 that did cover the Aztec crash, not to mention articles that appeared in the Denver newspapers?…

Or that the El Indio – Guerrero is not mentioned in any news coverage or articles until the late 1960s, but it somehow managed to make it into the EBD.

Or that the El Indio – Guerrero crash is the fatal flaw because it didn’t happen, was conceived in the late 1960s by a man whose military record is also falsified and if that event didn’t take place, then how could it appear in a document for the president in 1952?

Or that the whole date format, that is zero, day, month, comma, year (06 December, 1950) has not been found on any document that is of American creation but that Bill Moore habitually used this format… what an interesting coincidence. Yes, I noticed that Stan did not represent that date as it appeared in the EBD.

And if we wish to talk about writing fiction, which Stan insists on bringing up repeatedly, let’s talk about Gerald Anderson’s “black” sergeant and the validation Stan created for it by inserting that word into an interview of Bill Brazel conducted by Don Schmitt and me and recorded on audio tape… and Bill Brazel’s denial that any of the service members who visited him were black. This was an invention made to corroborate the rapidly failing tales told by Anderson… who did take Dr. Buskirk’s Anthropology class. What did the school officials tell Stan when he spoke with them in 1991? Talk about writing fiction.

And before I forget, I have been to many, many archives, research centers, museums and libraries in my search for the truth. That list is more than 20 such institutions, by the way. Oh, I have held security clearances in both industry and the military and for more than fifteen years held a top secret clearance, but I wonder if these points are relevant when discussing the fraudulent MJ-12 documents.

Please tell us Stan, why you failed to mention Project Aquarius, Bill Moore’s plan to create a Roswell document, or his book written with Bob Pratt and probably Richard Doty called, Majik -12… isn’t that somewhat worrisome? The whole MJ-12 thing laid out in a work of fiction?

As for provenance, those leaking classified material into the mainstream are often identified even if it means prosecution… and with Watergate, Deep Throat was not known to the general public, but Woodward (and I think Ben Bradlee) knew who he was and where he worked or to put a point on it, they knew the provenance of the information. Stan’s ridiculous claim to that the leakers would remain hidden to avoid prosecution is not born out in the history of such actions. They provide the provenance to prove that the documents leaked are authentic… and there is no such verification for the EBD. The trail ends with the fiction created by Bill Moore.

Deep Black Makes Paranoid?

Scientist Photographs Plastic Alien at Area 51

Boyd Bushman of Tucson, Arizona was a retired Senior Scientist for Lockheed
Martin, whose career spanned over forty years. Shortly before he passed away on August 7, 2014, he made what is being called a 'deathbed confession' relating his alleged experiences with Area 51, UFOs, aliens and anti-gravity.

As of this writing, the video has been played well over 1 million times on YouTube. The website of the famous late-night paranormal talkmeister, Art Bell, proclaimed "Dying Senior Scientist Reveals Insider Truth About Area 51, Aliens, UFO’s and Anti-Gravity." Bushman's principal claims, as summarized by Youtube commenter Nuno Reis, are:

• some UFOs and Aliens are stationed at the base.
  
• He explains that from space there is a special flight path to Area 51.
  
• With their advanced technology they can travel much faster than light.
• The aliens who control these ships come from a planet 68 light years from Earth. [and they make the journey of 68 light years in about 45 minutes!!]
  
• The aliens who are working at the base are about 1.5 meters long and up to 230 years old.
  
• They have five fingers, which are 30 percent longer than ours, and five toes, which stuck together.
  
• They have three ribs on each side and three vertebral columns.
  
• The aliens communicate through telepathy.
  
• Finally Bushman reveals that Area 51 is working together with the Russians and the Chinese and their research is mainly focused to anti-gravity.

Bushman also claims that in 1947 a U.S. Air Force pilot shot down a flying saucer over New Mexico, killing several aliens. The military, of course, recovered the craft.
Most interesting are all the photos, supposedly of UFOs and aliens that he claims his friend took at Area 51, using a camera he provided. In fact, Bushman claimed that his camera was given to the aliens, who obligingly took photos out the window during a UFO trip, then returned his camera (although it's doubtful that the aliens, traveling so much faster than light, could actually see anything). Weirdest of all is a "spirit photo" that supposedly shows the ghost of an alien that died.

Bushman holding his alleged photo of an alien

However, as soon as Bushman's video was posted on the popular UFO site The Black Vault, others began submitting photos and even a video of seemingly-identical aliens, albeit plastic ones.

YouTube commenter Eric Oulette provides this photo of a toy alien looking very much like Bushman's.

Another reader submitted this photo of a toy alien purchased at the K-Mart.

YouTube user John Hutchison (JonnOfMars) posted this video showing a toy alien he purchased several years back.
However, not everyone was willing to accept that Bushmann's Close Encounter was of the Plastic Kind. Perhaps the plastic aliens are accurate representations of the real ones? Some have even suggested that the toy alien could be intended as a step toward 'disclosure' of real aliens: "Who knows how and to whom these things are revealed?"

Bushman's involvement with Lockheed Martin has, of course, again raised the old canard that Ben Rich, former director of the Lockheed Skunk Works (developers of highly-classified secret aircraft) supposedly said in at least one of his lectures that "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity... Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do." This quote, however, has never been authenticated.

Researcher Curt Collins goes into such claims in great detail in two postings on his Blog Blue Blurry Lines (First. Second).. In brief, it seems that Rich liked to make jokes about ETs in his lectures to entertain his audience, such as "The Skunk Works has been assigned the task of getting E.T. back home." Anyone taking such comments seriously has completely misunderstood their context.

UFO & SETI Guys, Pack Your Bags! We Are Unique!

We are alone in the universe: Professor Brian Cox says alien life is all but impossible and humanity is 'unique'

• Presenter makes bold claim during BBC documentary
• He says the spark of life on earth billions of years ago was a fluke
• 'We still struggle to understand what happened. It's incredibly unusual' 

By Sam Webb for MailOnline

Published: 08:23 GMT, 27 October
2014 | Updated: 12:41 GMT,
27 October 2014

The biological process which lead to intelligent life on earth was a fluke that is unlikely to have been repeated anywhere else in the universe, claims Professor Brian Cox.

The presenter and scientist blames a series of 'evolutionary bottlenecks' for the lack of extraterrestrial life on other planets, despite there being a mind-bogglingly vast number of them in the galaxy.

Humanity miraculously overcame them in a chance binding of two single cells merging somewhere in the mists of time, he said.

'There is only one advanced technological civilisation in this galaxy and there has only ever been one - and that's us. We are
unique.

'It's a dizzying thought. There are billions of planets out there, surely there must have been a second genesis?'

But we must be careful because the story of life on this planet shows that the transition from single-celled life to complex life may not have been inevitable.'

He made the claims in an episode of BBC's Human Universe, adding that yet another freak occurrence - the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs - allowed mammals and ultimately humanity to dominate the planet.

On the subject of the genesis of complex life, he added: 'We still struggle to understand how this happened. It's incredibly unusual.'We're confident this only happened once in the oceans of the primordial earth.Life here did squeeze through.' 

Scroll down for video 

Last month scientists claimed that our best chance of finding alien life is not looking for living animal organisms but rather plant life.

Two astrophysicists have said we should be looking at exoplanets for signatures of chlorophyll, which plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

And they say this could be done by a future telescope planned by Nasa to study habitable exoplanets.

If there are no aliens, humanity will never have to face the nightmarish xenomorphs of Alien (left), nor the benevolent E.T. from Speilberg's hit film

Sir Attenborough and Prof Brian Cox switch off analogue (archive)

 

Princeton University astrophysicists Dr Timothy Brandt and Dr David Spiegel made the suggestions in a paper called 'Prospects for detecting oxygen, water and chlorophyll on an exo-Earth.'

They say that it might be possible to detect signatures of water, oxygen and chlorophyll on an alien planet.

One hundred million worlds in our galaxy are able to host alien life, according to a 'conservative' prediction by Nasa.

And the space agency claims that we will be able to find that life within the next 20 years, with a high chance it will be outside our solar system.

During a public talk in July in Washington, the space agency outlined a roadmap to search for life in the universe using a number of current and future telescopes.

'Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?' said former astronaut and Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden during a talk in Washington.

'I would venture to say that most of my colleagues here today say it is improbable that in the limitless vastness of the universe we humans stand alone.'

The latter would be the most difficult of the three but, if found, would be a pretty clear indicator that a distant world has plant life.

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It Was …………. Spiderman*!

The day UFOs stopped play

24 October 2014
Last updated at 00:31 GMT By Richard Padula BBC World Service Sport

Sixty years ago a football match ground to a halt when unidentified flying objects were spotted above a stadium in Florence. Did aliens come to earth? If not, what were they?

It was 27 October 1954, a typically crisp autumn day in Tuscany. The mighty Fiorentina club was playing against its local rival Pistoiese.

Ten-thousand fans were watching in the concrete bowl of the Stadio Artemi Franchi. But just after half-time the stadium fell eerily silent - then a roar went up from the crowd. The spectators were no longer watching the match, but were looking up at the sky, fingers pointing. The players stopped playing, the ball rolled to a stand-still.

One of the footballers on the pitch was Ardico Magnini - he was something of a legend at the club and had played for Italy at the 1954 World Cup.

"I remember everything from A to Z," he says. "It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.

"We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked."

Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee's match report.

Among the crowd was Gigi Boni, a lifelong Fiorentina fan. "I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight," he says. His description of multiple objects differs slightly from Magnini's.

"They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars.
They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked."

La Nazione's headline reads: Glass fibres fall on Tuscan cities after globes and flying saucers pass by. Lower headline: The sighting over Florence (with a photograph, now lost, of the UFO).

Boni has spent many years reliving that day in his mind. "I think they were extra-terrestrial. That's what I believe, and there's no other explanation I can give myself."

Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, still sprightly in his 70s, agrees. "In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real."

The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria - there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence.

Another man who relishes the chance to speak about that day is Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy's National UFO Centre. He has written many books about UFOs and his home in the centre of Florence is stuffed full of alien memorabilia, posters of old Italian B-movies, framed newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs of blurry flying saucers.

"The players and the public were stunned seeing these objects above the stadium," Pinotti says.

"At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course now we know that is not so - but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked withanything we know on Earth."

He's also intrigued by the material that fell from the sky - what Magnini describes as silver glitter.

"A wave of flying saucers over Italy," reported the
Domenica del Corriere three years later. With thanks to the Fondazione Corriere della Sera for the use of material from their historic archives.

A sketch of UFOs over the stadium by Silvio Neri

"It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this 'angel hair'," says Pinotti.

"The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates." As a 10-year-old-boy he witnessed this phenomenon himself. "I remember, in broad daylight, seeing the roofs of the houses in Florence covered in this white substance for one hour and, like snow, it just evaporated.

"No-one knows what this strange substance has to do with UFOs."

Variously described by witnesses as similar to cotton wool or cobwebs, the substance was hard to collect because it disintegrated on contact - but some people were determined to find out what it was.

One of them was a journalist at the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, the late Giorgio Batini. In 2003 he told an Italian television programme, Voyager, how on that day he received hundreds of phone calls about the sightings. From the offices of La Nazione in the centre of town his own view of the sky was blocked by the Cathedral, so he went up to the top of the newspaper's building to see what everyone was talking about. The 81-year-old recalled seeing "shiny balls" moving fast towards the dome of the Cathedral.

Batini ventured out to investigate. He came across a wood outside the city that was covered in the white fluff. He gathered several samples by rolling them up on a matchstick, and took them to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. When he got there he found that others had done the same.

The lab, led by respected scientist Prof Giovanni Canneri, subjected the material to spectrographic analysis and concluded that it contained the elements boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and that it was not radioactive.
Unfortunately this did not provide any conclusive answers - and the material was destroyed in the process.

A sample of the mysterious "angel hair" was photographed for the newspapers

Could it have come from a UFO? "It's an absolutely silly idea. Science totally rejects this idea," says US Air Force pilot-turned-astronomer James McGaha. From the Grasslands Observatory in South Eastern Arizona he has spent more than 40,000 hours staring at the night sky. Not to mention the additional hours he's spent in the cockpit of US fighter jets.

"You know the whole UFO phenomenon is nothing but myth, magic and superstition, wrapped up in this idea that somehow aliens are coming here either to save us or destroy us," he says.

In McGaha's view, the whole spectacle, "angel hair" and all, was nothing more than migrating spiders.

"When I looked at this case originally I thought perhaps it was a fireball, a very bright meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. They can be cigar-shaped with pieces breaking off. But it became fairly apparent that this was actually caused by young spiders spinning webs, very, very thin webs.

"The spiders use these webs as sails and they link together and you get a big glob of this stuff in the sky and the spiders ride on this to move between locations. They just fly on the wind and these things have been recorded at 14,000 feet above the ground. So, when the sunlight glistens off this, you get all kinds of visual effects.

"As some of this stuff breaks off and falls to the ground, this all seems magical of course," says McGaha. "But I'm fairly confident that's what happened that day."

This theory is backed up by the fact that September and October are the months when spiders in the northern hemisphere migrate - and spectacular spider migrations still make headlines today. But it hasn't convinced everyone.

"Of course I know about the migrating spiders hypothesis - it's pure nonsense. It's an old story and also a stupid story," says Pinotti.

He disputes the spider theory because of the chemical analysis of the "angel hair" samples. Spider silk is a protein - an organic compound containing nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen and oxygen - not the elements reportedly found in the samples Batini and others brought to the university.

Players Ardico Magnini, Ronaldo Lomi and Romolo Tuci
with their fan Gigi Boni (second left), at the ground

Sixty years on, the chances of determining the cause of the incident are slim. "I wouldn't trust any reports of an old and strange event like this unless I'd seen the data," says science writer Philip Ball. He agrees that the elements said to have been observed in the "angel hair" don't seem to tally with the spider theory.

"Magnesium and calcium are fairly common elements in living bodies, boron and silicon much less so - but if these were the main elements that the white fluff contained, it doesn't sound to me as though they'd come from spiders," he says.

So it all remains a mystery. No matter what the scientists say, those who were there are convinced that what they saw was unlike anything on earth.

Romolo Tuci just feels lucky to have been there. His eyes dance excitedly as he remembers that curious day. "I was spell-bound and I was also so, so happy."

Video of spiders ballooning courtesy of Rob Ferber, Little Grove Farm Additional research by Vibeke Venema

Listen again to the Mystery of the Fiorentina UFOs as featured on World Football on BBC World Service.

Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

More MJ-12

First I want to thank Kevin Randle for providing another excellent example of the fictional approach to research. I notice he doesn’t mention Dr. Wescott’s outstanding background, details like having been a Rhodes Scholar, having been the president of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the US, having published almost 400 papers etc (there are 3 pages about him in my final Report on MJ-12). Second I did not use the term proof about his comments. This isn’t a math or physics problem. I arranged for papers to be given him. I would say he provided a preponderance of the evidence.I know of nobody better qualified to evaluate the question of whether RHHas opposed to some hoaxer prepared the EBD. Kevin also doesn’t mention that RHH was not some bungling character. He was an Annapolis graduate, had been the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency 1947-1950 and in late 1952. was head of the 3^rd Naval District in New York. Washington is not far away. We know that Walter B. Smith his successor at the CIA had been directed by Truman to coordinate Intelligence briefings for Ike (see his letter p. E-9 in my Report). I have suggested that Typing would have been done at the CIA.

Several other anti MJ-12 articles have recently been posted. But they seem more like fiction than factual. Lots of scenarios, but little data or evidence. Let me first summarize where I stand. I have been on the story for just under 30 years. I believe I have written more than anyone else and done more digging in archives. I had a security clearance for 14 years and have made many visits to 20 archives. I was lucky enough to have a research grant from the Fund for UFO research. For some crazy reason extremist Milton William Cooper said I worked for the CIA and the grant was actually from them!! In fact the Fund had sent out a questionnaire to see what its members thought needed researching. Majestic 12 was selected and I was asked to submit a proposal, which I did. The money was actually raised mostly from the Prince of Liechtenstein. I wrote a 100 + page report of my findings after visits to various Archives such as the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, The National Archives, the Truman and Eisenhower Libraries, the Harvard and Princeton Archives, etc. I included correspondence between myself and Phil Klass and a copy of his check to me for $1000. for proving him totally wrong about the typeface on the Cutler Twining memo. Typical false reasoning on the part of the MJ-12 debunkers. Because he had all of 9 NSC items done in elite type, he thought it sensible to claim that all NSC memos were done in elite type. Not surprisingly he had never, before or since, been to the Eisenhower Library which had 250,000 pages of NSC material. He had offered to pay me $!00.@ for every item meeting his criteria, .up to a limit of 10. I sent 14. He paid me, but didn’t bother to tell anybody. There is also no Friedman file in his papers at the American Philosophical Society Library despite 20+ years of correspondence. I wrote a book TOP SECRET/MAJIC and many papers and responded to a host of false claims and assumptions.

Most of this goes back a long while. I spoke with family members of all the MJ-members except 1. I spoke in person with General Twining’s pilot, and his daughter and 2 sons, with Admiral Hillenkoetter’s family ,with George Elsey who worked at the Truman library the entire time Truman was there, etc. I had concluded that there are 3, possibly four genuine documents (The Truman Forrestal Memo, The Cutler Twining Memo and the Eisenhower Briefing Document) and a host of phony ones. I believe I have responded to all the anti claims. My focus has been on a host of details that turned out not to be known at the time the documents were received and on a number of fictional claims and a bunch of details that would seem beyond the ken of a hoaxer. For example it was claimed that since the briefing Officer Roscoe J. Hillenkoetter was titled admiral, that proved the document was false because he had only been a rear admiral. The attack neglected to mention that all 6 military guys (2 Army, 2 Navy, two AF) were referred to by generic ranks. Not just Hillenkoetter. Furthermore I gathered documents at the Ike Library proving that was standard practice. A good example was provided by documents written by Brigadier General Andrew Goodpaster (Ike’s Staff secretary) referring to himself as General Goodpaster but signing as Brigadier General Goodpaster. Two archivists supported that view. He always used generic ranks when listing attendees. The claim was interesting fiction.

Here are some other false claims covered in detail in my book, report, and papers:

1. The date format 18 November, 1952 supposedly violates the government style manual and therefore the EBD is phony.I found many examples at Archives of the use of this and several other date formats. This was pre- word processors. False claim.
2. Supposedly the security marking on the Cutler Twining memo of TOP SECRET RESTRICTED was never used by the government until after Ike was out of office. The GAO in its huge report on its search for Roswell Documents noted that they had indeed found examples of this on a number of classified documents even though they had been told (MJ 12) that it was not used. I couldn’t get copies because the documents were still classified. Why would a hoaxer not just use a plain TOP SECRET? False claim.
3. The unsigned Cutler Twining memo supposedly had to be phony because Cutler was out of the country on July 14, 1954. Actually, it would have been a phony if it had been signed or there was an /s/ next to his typed name. Really smart hoaxer

We didn’t find out, thanks to Bob Todd, that Cutler was gone until later. I also found at the Ike Library Cutler’s instructions to James Lay, Exec. Sec. of the National Security Council,” to keep things moving out of my in basket while I am gone.”I also found that Lay met with Ike that day and had a phone conversation with Ike at 4:30PM. George Elsey, White House Aide under Truman, told me after looking at the documents, that of course Lay (who sat next to Cutler at all NSC Meetings) would have prepared a brief memo to General Twining in Cutler’s name. He also could find no problem with the 3 documents or the names of the people on the MJ-12 List.          

4. Several objected strenuously to the surprising notion that debunker Dr. Donald Menzel could have been fully aware of UFOs Roswell, and still be the loudest UFO debunker in the 1950s and 1960s.They objected to my saying he led a double life despite my very surprising discovery in his papers at the Harvard Archives that he was tightly connected with the NSA, CIA, cryptology and many other intelligence activities.. as noted by him to President Kennedy. The critics complained but, so far as I can tell, none went to the Harvard Archives or the Kennedy library. I spent days there and had to get permission from 3 people to see Menzel’s papers. How did anybody know to include him on Majestic 12? They just happened to pick an extraordinary claim that turned out to be true??

5. Some complained that since the EBD says the distance to the Roswell crash site was approximately 75 miles rather than 62 by car or 100 by plane,it was a fraud.. Since when does “approximately” mean precisely or exactly? The Briefing was Preliminary and hardly a guide to how to get to the crash site.

6. Several debunkers claimed vigorously that the documents are phony because all top secret code word documents must (They said) have top secret control numbers. Two archivists (Eisenhower and Marshall Archives) told me this was nonsense. They had many TS docs that did not have Control numbers. I had even published some earlier. False claim.

7. As an example of irrational thinking it was pointed out that I have claimed that there were crash retrievals in the Plains of San Agustin and Aztec. Since none are mentioned in the EBD either, they never happened or it is fraudulent because they aren’t mentioned. There was nothing that said this was a complete picture of crash retrievals. On the contrary, it says it is Preliminary. Neither of these two got news coverage whereas Roswell did.

8. Since the EBD says there was a crash near El Indio-Guerero on 06 December 1950, and I have found no evidence of it, the document must be phony. It also says the burned wreckage was taken to Sandia. I know of no way to gain access to that information since Sandia is a very high security nuclear weapons Lab. False claim. It is certainly not true that absence of evidence is evidence for absence.

9. Robert Hastings has noted that I had agreed in Brazil that it is conceivable that some smart government agent could have done an enormous amount of research to create the documents .I obviously couldn’t prove a negative. Yes, but no one has provided any evidence or facts or names or details establishing that that was the case. I know from all the time money and effort I spent how difficult that would have been and I started with the documents. This, of course, doesn’t explain how somebody knew all the details that weren’t known until well after the documents were received. Psychic??

10. Many have noted that Rick Doty was based in Albuquerque and that the EBD was postmarked Albuquerque. Albuquerque is a large city, the home of Kirtland and Sandia. This proves nothing.Nor does the fact that he was involved in disinformation,

11.I have trouble believing that it is just a coincidence that September 24, 1947, the date of the TF memo, was the only date in an 8 month period that Truman, Bush and Forrestal met together. Or that the CT memo was coincidentally done while Cutler was out of the country and therefore was not signed.. very smart hoaxer. Or that August 1,1950, when W.B. Smith was named to replace James Forrestal on MJ-12 was the only date in the first 10 months of 1950 when Truman met with Smith.. I list a bunch more “coincidences” in my Final Report.

Yes, Rick Doty was involved with false documents re Bennewitz etc. and was the first to mention MJ-12. Where is there any evidence that he faked EBD knowing enough to pass inspection. Has he been shown to have visited the Truman, or Eisenhower or Harvard Archives etc? Klass made all kinds of claims but never went to the Ike Library. Have Greenwood, Hastings, Randle, Rojas been to the Presidential Libraries or the various Archives.? Do they have any idea how much effort I spent trying to show the documents were phony?

Cannot the debunkers recognize that provenance would have revealed the identity of the crime committing informant?.Hoaxers normally do as little as possible to call attention to strange details.. like the offset and different typeface in the numerical portion of the date on the TF, or the absence of signature on TC, or the period after the date on TF.

In short then, fiction is not the same as nonfiction. Research requires facts, data, evidence. Nobody has shown any to establish that the TF,CT, or EBD were fraudulent Scenarios are interesting but not evidence.

I am still looking for a list of reasons that each of the 3 (CT, TF, EBD) are fraudulent. I have shown that a number of so-called MJ-12 documents were indeed false based on Direct evidence. For example in the Book “Wedemeyer Reports” by General Wedmeyer I found three items that were retyped and Xeroxed to keep the hand written portions . Clearly emulations. I found a number of other emulations, proofs of hoaxing. I have yet to see any for the 3 genuine ones.

Stan Friedman

Secret Space Program … And That's A Fact!

Space plane: Mysterious US military plane returns to Earth

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continue.

An unmanned US plane on a top-secret, two-year mission to space has returned to Earth and landed in California.

The aircraft, resembling a miniature space shuttle and known as the Orbital Test Vehicle or X-37B, spent 674 days in orbit around the planet.

It was the unmanned plane's third space flight, but its mission has been shrouded in mystery.

A theory that it was taking a look at China's space lab has been downplayed by experts.

Air Force officials have only told US media the aircraft performs "risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies".

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X-37B - American military spaceplane

• • Mission: Described as a re-usable testbed for new sensors and other space technologie
  • Length: 9m (29ft); Wingspan: 4.5m (14ft); Height: 3m (9.5ft); Mass: 5t (11,000lb
  • Origins: Started as a Nasa project in 1999 before being handed to the
    military in 200
• Cost: The budget line for the X-37B programme continues to be classified
  information
  

The X-37B programme, started in 1999 and is currently run by the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office.

The first plane flew in April 2010 and returned after eight months. The second launched in March 2011 and remained in space for 15 months.

The current aircraft - built by Boeing - uses solar panels for power in orbit, measures over 29ft (9m) long, has a wingspan of nearly 15ft and a weight of 11,000lbs (4,989 kg).

It looks like a mini space shuttle and can glide back down through the atmosphere to land on a runway, just like Nasa's re-usable manned spaceplane used to do before its retirement.

An infrared view of the spaceplane was released in 2012

A fourth X-37B mission is currently scheduled for 2015

A fourth X-37B mission is said to be planned for launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2015.

Europe is to test its own automated space plane technology in the coming weeks.

The IXV vehicle will be launched into space atop a rocket from French Guiana and then make its way back through the atmosphere to splash down in the ocean

 

BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos

The reality is that no-one really knows what this vehicle does. The only credible explanation I have seen is that it is testing technologies that could find their way on to future satellite missions.

If you consider how expensive a satellite mission is - several hundred million dollars - you'd like to be sure that any innovations are going to work straight out of the box.

By flying early prototypes on the X-37B, you can test these technologies so that when you put them on future satellite missions, you can be sure they will deliver.

Nasa recently agreed to give over work space formerly used to service the shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center to the X-37B programme, which tells us this
is a long-term project for the Air Force. Whatever it is they are doing up
there, they deem it to be high value.

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