https://curiosmos.com/after-encounter-with-massive-ufo-army-veterans-were-told-to-shut-up/
UFO
UFO sightings are ‘frequent and continuing’ – and some cannot be explained, Navy admits.
NASA scientist says space alien search should be more ‘aggressive’
Experts may have been too quick to discount the possibility that alien UFOs have paid Earth a visit.
What a UFO could look like.
Is Earth being visited by space aliens? A lot of people think so, although few of them are scientists. Professional researchers are not easily persuaded by eyewitness testimony, blobby photos or claims that evidence for itinerant aliens has been stashed away by a paranoid government.
Put more succinctly, academia doesn’t put a whole lot of credence in the incessant claims that some of the thousands of UFOs sighted every year are actually alien craft. But at least one scientist has recently gone on record suggesting that the clipboard-carrying crowd should be a little less sure.
That scientist is Silvano Colombano, a computer expert and roboticist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. He was a presenter at a conference about new approaches in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) held earlier this year at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Colombano says the skeptical attitudes of most researchers might be too cramped. They could be throwing the infant out with the bath water.
He cited this example: If you approach your favorite astronomy professor and see what she has to say about interstellar rocketry, chances are she’ll roll her eyes. The energy required to accelerate an Enterprise-size starship to near the speed of light is greater than can be wrung from all the remaining fossil fuel on Earth. Fast travel between the stars is incredibly difficult (or impossible), she’ll say. So forget the idea of little gray guys piloting saucers in our airspace. Their home planet, wherever it might be, is just too far away.
But there’s an assumption here, as Colombano pointed out. Namely, that the aliens are biological, and require a fast transit between star systems to forestall dying en route. This small problem, after all, was the motive for Star Trek’s (fictional) warp drive.
However, there’s a fix for that: Get rid of intelligence that dies. Anyone who’s not a total troglodyte knows that artificial intelligence is on the way. By the end of this century, it’s possible that the smartest thing on Earth will be a machine. Since most star systems are billions of years older than our own, you can be sure that any clever inhabitants out there have long ago relegated biological brains to the history books, and are homes to very smart, and possibly very compact, thinking hardware.
As Colombano says in a new paper, “Given the fairly common presence of elements that might be involved in the origin of life… it is a reasonable assumption that life ‘as we know it’ was at least a common starting point, but our form of life and intelligence may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to our and no longer based on carbon ‘machinery.’”
Well, an obvious advantage of non-carbon machinery is that it needn’t be cursed with a short lifetime (this despite the experience you may have had with your laptop). Truly sophisticated devices can be self-repairing. Consequently, they can go great distances simply because they’re in no hurry to get to their destination.
This has a profound consequence. Earth has been trundling around the sun for more than 4 billion years. Even at the modest speed of a NASA rocket, that’s more than enough time to get to our planet from anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. If the passengers don’t mind spending billions of years in a middle seat, they could to it. Compact machines wouldn’t take much space, and wouldn’t groan at the long transit time.
So, what should we conclude? Clearly, it’s possible that some alien intelligence has decided to come to our solar system and check Earth off its bucket list. Doing so doesn’t violate physics. This might have happened 100 million years ago or a billion years ago, and we wouldn’t know.
But the more appealing thought for many people is that we’re being visited now. Of course, a scientist would consider such a suggestion of interest only if it could be corroborated by observation. Bright ideas are nice, but evidence rules.
So Colombano suggests that massive computers be applied to finding such evidence among the many thousands of UFO sightings. Maybe there’s a gold nugget in all those reports. As Colombano points out, if there’s something to be discovered, we won’t find it unless we look.
The Pentagon Ran a Secret Program to Find UFOs. Should We Expect Aliens?
Sight Unseen
Sightings of aircraft moving at high speeds with no visible signs of propulsion. Objects hovering over the sea without any apparent means of lift. Military operators exchanging nervous messages as they try to make sense of what they are recording. These scenes are part of an unprecedented disclosure from the New York Times, one that outlined details about a top secret Pentagon program devoted to the investigation of UFOs.
Between 2007 and 2012, the United States government spent $22 million of its annual $600 billion defense budget on the so-called Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. This is the first time the Government has admitted the existence of such operations. According to Pentagon spokesperson Laura Ochoa, the programs were terminated because “there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding.”
According to the New York Times, the scheme, now defunded, still exists in a more informal fashion. “The Department of Defence takes seriously all threats and potential threats to our people, our assets, and our mission and takes action whenever credible information is developed,” Ochoa said.
So does this revelation signal the existence of alien life visiting Earth? Is the program just a political pet project? We asked a panel of scientists and analysts to weigh in on the significance (or lack thereof) of this revelation.
Below are their thoughts regarding what the Pentagon’s secret UFO program means in terms of international relations, scientific advancement, the existence of UFOs, and our search for life in the cosmos.
Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute:
The good news is that the New York Times story vindicates the claim that a conspiracy of silence has shrouded the Defense Department when it comes to this phenomenon. Indeed, it seems there really was some activity to look into — the possibility that visitors from light-years away have been sailing our skies. I get the impression that the principal motivation was not to verify (or not) extraterrestrial activity, but to check on the possibility of Russian or Chinese aviation developments.
The bad news for saucer sympathizers is that the investigation doesn’t seem to have come up with any really good evidence. Indeed, if the evidence was obviously convincing, the investigation would have been broadened, not cut back or terminated.
Then there are many other questions one could ask: why give so much of the funding for this project to an individual who has long advocated the point of view that Earth is being visited (and, I note, someone whose background is not science)? What you want – and what the UFO investigations of a half-century ago had – is a body of experts who come to the evidence with open minds.
What’s truly amazing is that, for more than a half-century, some folks have claimed visiting craft are hanging out in our airspace. But the evidence remains debatable, to be generous. On the contrary, when the Spaniards invaded Peru at the beginning of the 16th century, the Inca weren’t still arguing the point 50 years later. They knewthat someone “alien” was afoot in the land. Somehow, the putative extraterrestrials who’ve decided to visit our planet have managed to keep their activities clandestine, and the good evidence secret from everyone but the U.S. government. That’s a tough assignment!
Andrew Siemion, Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley:
My opinion as a scientist is that any objective description of any phenomena should be backed up by evidence and, despite many decades of reports of various UFO and abduction phenomena, we have only personal anecdotes and ambiguous photography. Moreover, astronomers spend their lives looking at the sky with a wide variety of telescopes and techniques, and we have never snapped a picture of a spaceship. For the moment, our searches for radio and laser signals from intelligent life and investigation of astrophysical anomalies (SETI) offer us the best opportunity to detect extraterrestrial intelligence, should it exist.
All of that said, the possibility that, in the past, our solar system could have been visited by an advanced extraterrestrial species, or that we may be visited in the future, is real. We know that intelligent life capable of interstellar travel arose at least once in our Universe, and it might have arisen many, many times.
Trey Menefee, Independent Researcher, Open Source Intelligence Expert, Former Lecturer at the Hong Kong Institute of Education:
I think the US Navy and Air Force have a lot of weird videos and stories to tell. I think the issue is not unreliable narrators, but unreliable interpreters of confusing, conflicting, and otherwise baffling data and presumed facts.
Let’s talk about this NYT story about UFO’s and how awesome OSINT is https://t.co/yUGF18Lgsc
— Trey Menefee (@Comparativist) December 18, 2017
I think the secrecy and closed-door nature of the investigations means that they likely fall victim to the same cognitive traps the Chilean Navy fell into where they didn’t question the ‘priors,’ the assumptions that underpinned their analysis and came to ‘unidentifiable’ conclusions. If the military released all the data, OSINT [Open Source Intelligence] researchers would likely figure what happened better and faster than these classified investigations.
Peter Garnavich, Chair of the Department of Astrophysics and Cosmology Physics at the University of Notre Dame:
As a scientist, I am skeptical of UFOs. They have been talked about since before I was born, yet all we ever have for evidence are grainy images and dubious eyewitnesses. The vast distances between stars and what we know about space travel make these sighting unlikely to be alien life.
As a person, I love the idea of UFOs. They are mysterious and exciting. They embody the science fiction of Star Trek and Star Wars and the idea that humans are worth visiting. So I am not surprised that the defense department had a UFO office, and I am not surprised that they are closing it. Although they could find worse ways to spend that money.
Avi Loeb, Chair of the Astronomy Department at the University of Harvard:
I was surprised to hear about the federal funding of the UFO study. This would make sense if the unidentifiable flying objects are suspected of potentially being a national security risk, used for espionage for example. At any event, they are very likely to be human-made or natural atmospheric phenomena rather than an indication of an advanced extraterrestrial technology.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But all the UFO evidence I have seen was marginal or circumstantial. We are much more likely to find evidence of alien life through our telescopes than through visual reports of pilots.
Was President Obama Warned Off An Investigation into UFOs?
Last month, Obama Advisor John Podesta revealed that his biggest regret since leaving office was “keeping the UFO issue a secret.” Now, a new book by NY Times bestselling author Steve Alten, has blown the lid off those secrets. The author’s source – Steven M. Greer, M.D., the world’s foremost authority on Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) and the same person who provided the extensive briefing to John Podesta on UFOs shortly after President Obama took office in 2009.
Dr. Greer, an emergency room physician who left his medical career to dedicate his life to disclosing the truth about UFOs, also briefed James Woolsey, President Clinton’s first CIA director, along with the heads of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Head of Intelligence Joint Staff, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a select number of Congressmen.
Best-selling author Steve Alten incorporated over thirty hours of private interviews with Dr. Greer into the storyline of Vostok (Rebel Press). Fans of thrillers will be drawn into the story – Vostok is a very real 15 million-year-old sub-glacial lake located beneath two-and-a-half miles of ice in East Antarctica. Incredibly, there is also a magnetic anomaly inside the lake that has baffled experts as to what it could be. Three scientists are selected to venture into this underwater realm in a submersible. What they discover will keep readers frantically turning pages…
But Vostok is much more. The thriller exposes a secret transnational Cabal which draws an estimated $80 billion Black Ops budget from US taxpayers with no congressional oversight. Made up of bankers, oil oligarchs, and members of the military industrial complex, the Cabal has used its influence to improperly seize over 5,100 US patents, many for new energy devices that would replace fossil fuels. As a result, clean free energy systems that would literally transform the planet (and the dominant U.S. macro-economy) have been black-shelved, their inventors threatened… and worse.
According to the author and his source, “presidents Clinton and Obama were both “warned off” pursuing their UFO investigations; Clinton when CIA Director William Colby was murdered after he decided to cross the powers-that-be, and Obama on his trip to Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize when a Scaler weapon blast (an ET technology reverse-engineered decades ago) caused the Oslo night sky to light up with a blue spiral.” Vostok names names, along with the locations of super secret military bases where ARVs (Alien Reproduction Vehicles) are harbored and may one day be used in the ultimate false flag event.
Yes, truth is stranger…and far scarier…than fiction.
Wikileaks Cables Confirm Existence of Extraterrestrial Life.
We’re already halfway through 2013 and the world continues to wake up to the fact that we are not alone in the universe. This year alone we’ve seen a tremendous step forward regarding UFO disclosure. In early May, researchers, activists, political leaders and high ranking military/agency personnel from around the world testified to the reality of the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon in front of several former United States members of congress. To watch an interview with the former 2008 presidential candidate and ex-congressman Mike Gravel (who participated in the hearings) click here. You can watch interviews with all of the senators that participated in the event here.
Prior to the recent hearing on UFOs and extraterrestrial life, we’ve had explosive statements made by NASA astronauts and professors, you can watch some of those statements here and here. Not only has the world heard from all of these credible people, its also been privy to official documentation released by dozens of governments worldwide that outline the reality of the UFO phenomenon. Documents indicate that UFOs are of concern to governments, and they put a significant amount of time, effort and resources into studying them. Apart from governments, agencies like the National Security Agency also released official files regarding UFOs, you can view some of these previously classified documents here.
It’s now a fact that UFOs are tracked on radar, performing maneuvers that defy our idea of physics. Jets are constantly scrambled to take a closer look at them. This is no longer a conspiracy theory, it’s a fact. Release of files began early in 2007 with the UK, among others. Since then they’ve released thousands of pages every year, with the latest ones published in June 2013 made available at the UK’s National Archives. You can view them here.
Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.
—Former CIA Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960.
The UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon is extremely top secret, access to this type of documentation and the deeper truth behind it is almost impossible. CIA directors, presidents and other high ranking officials barely have any access to these programs. That being said, all of the information that’s already out in the public domain is overwhelming. It makes you wonder how far down the rabbit hole this topic goes.
As most of the world today already knows, Wikileaks is an international, online, non-profit organization that publishes secret information, news leaks, and classified material from anonymous sources. They’ve been a tremendous threat to the controlling elite for a number of years, and have gained the attention of major mainstream media outlets worldwide. For the most part, these mainstream media outlets have bashed Assange, pointing to the idea that the release of classified documents is a threat to national security. That’s not true, it’s more like a threat to the truth that the elite try to cover up on a daily basis that would threaten their ability to control the human race.
Since a large amount of official documentation has already been released, documents from the Wikileaks cables shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Assange has already mentioned that there are yet to be published cables that make reference to UFOs. This is no joke, below are quotations taken from official transcripts via the official Wikileak cables.
You can view it here: http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10DUSHANBE82.html
On January 13 Ambassador called on Dushanbe Mayor and Chairman of the upper house of Parliament Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev at his parliamentary office. The Mayor began the meeting with a lengthy discourse on Afghanistan, thanking the United States for its contributions and sacrifices there, and saying that U.S. activities there were very important “as we enter the third millennium and the 21st century.” Ubaidulloev thought the main task there was to build a sense of national identity among ethnically disparate groups, and said the United States was an example for this. He noted that “war is very dangerous”, and said “we know there is life on other planets, but we must make peace here first.
In a platitude-ridden meeting, Dushanbe Mayor Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev said upcoming elections would be free and fair, that contributions to the Roghun Dam were voluntary, and that the losses suffered by the United States in Afghanistan were felt by Tajiks as their own. Ubaidulloev asked for help in getting Tajik students admitted to Harvard University, but effectively declined to help find a new location for an American Corner in Dushanbe. He asserted the existence of life on other planets, caveating this by noting that we should focus on solving our problems on Earth. End Summary.
Not only do these cables raise an eyebrow, but a statement given by Julian Assange himself raises the need for further inquiry. The audio on the video is delayed. What points to this interview being real? For one, if you can read lips it’s not hard to follow. Secondly, it sounds exactly like Julian. Thirdly, multiple mainstream media outlets (Telegraph, CBS news and more) published the original version of the video which was taken down immediately. One of the mainstream media outlets was Forbes, you can view that poorly written article here in which you will see access to the video has been cut off. Articles written by major media outlets are usually very poor, and do their best to ridicule the subject of UFOs. The original version had perfect audio, the same sound and was in the same setting.
I have said in passing there is information about UFOs in Cablegate. And that is true, but these are only small passing references. Most of the material concerns UFO cults, and their behaviour in recruiting people. For instance, there is quite a large cable, which we’ll try and release in the next few days, concerning the Raelians, a UFO cult which has a strong presence in Canada and was of concern to the U.S. ambassador in Canada – Julian Assange
It’s not surprising that that the U.S. ambassador in Canada was concerned with this group. High level agencies are also concerned with abductees and ET contactees. Their mail is stamped in a special way, they are constantly surveyed by army intelligence, phone tapping and are also confronted by ‘men in black’ (intelligence officers). Agencies that are active in the UFO phenomenon keep close tabs on UFO/extraterrestrial activity outside of their sphere of influence. That being said, again, it’s no surprise that the U.S. ambassador had an interest in this ‘UFO cult.’ Anything extraterrestrial would be a concern to the elite, as they are the ones active in the cover up.
We are living in an extremely unique time, our world has become much more transparent than ever before. One aspect of multiple realizations is the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon, but it seems to branch into every aspect of our reality depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Our perception of life on other planets largely comes from external sources like television programming. As a result, many are filled with fear when giving thought to this subject. Hopefully as we move through the shift in consciousness the planet is currently experiencing, fear will dissipate as it will no longer serve the human race. This is undoubtedly one of the largest realizations in human history. The only thing that goes beyond it, in my opinion, is the realization of humanities infinite potential to create a new experience from a place of peace, love, co-operation and understanding.
“There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been visiting us for a very long time. That their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic western point of view. That these visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO phenomenon.” – Dr Brian O’leary, Former NASA Astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor (source)
“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time” Apollo 14 Astronaut (source # 1) (source # 2)
“Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after. It is ironic that the US should be fighting monstrously expensive wars, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on black projects which both congress and the commander in chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.” –
Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defence Minister (source)
There is nothing to be afraid of.
Much Love
Sources:
World UFO Day: Another Reason To Over Hype Flying Saucers And Aliens.
In case you hadn’t heard, today is World UFO Day. Or it’s at least one of several flying saucer holidays claiming to be the the biggest day of the year for out-of-this-world celebrations.
The shadowy group that’s dubbed July 2 as World UFO Day has a website explaining what they say is the true meaning of the special day.
But check the history books and see that World UFO Day used to be celebrated on June 24 as well as July 2. The first date refers to the day in 1947 when private pilot Kenneth Arnold ushered in the modern era of flying saucers when he claimed to have seen nine high-speed pie plate-shaped objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington.
The second date, July 2, stems from the close proximity to the day in 1947 when something fell from the sky and crashed on a ranch outside of Roswell, N.M., sparking rumors that eventually grew into an urban legend claiming it was an alien spaceship and its crew. Nobody knows the exact date that the object crashed, but it’s generally known to have happened in early July 1947.
In an effort “to eliminate any confusion,” the World UFO Day Organization declared July 2 as its official day of celebration.
But if you’re looking to extend the festivities, there’s the upcoming annual Roswell UFO Festival, taking place on July 5-7.
According to World UFO Day Organization’s site “World UFO Day is the day dedicated to the existence of Udentified Flying Objects. The first World UFO Day was celebrated in 2001.”
Wait! “Udentified” Flying Objects? Perhaps this is a celebration of something new in our culture.
The promoters of the July 2 bash say it should be dedicated to raising awareness about “the undoubted existence of UFO’s and with that intelligent beings from outer space.” The site goes on to state: “Also this day is used to encourage governments to declassify their knowledge about sightings throughout the history.”
For them, World UFO Day encourages UFO believers to party, party, party, wear alien T-shirts, eat ET cupcakes, watch the skies and try to spot strange flying objects and even, simply, watch alien and UFO movies together.
If you do, indeed, choose to pay homage to UFOs today, here’s our gift to you — a round-up of HuffPost Weird News’ favorite UFO stories this year.
UFO Citizen Hearing Reveals Shocking Testimonies
On May 3, pilots and former law enforcement officials give electrifying testimonies at the Citizen Hearing On Disclosure. A former U.K. police officer testified on behalf of law enforcement personnel who’ve had UFO encounters. Former Canada Minister of National Defense Paul Hellyer who made headlines claiming that, “UFOs are as real as the airplanes flying overhead,” elaborated on his more recent ET education, claiming that he learned that at least four species had visited Earth. Read more of the shocking witness statements.
Terminally Ill Man Hosts UFO Conference
In a dying man’s race against time, hosting and sponsoring an international UFO conference was at the top of his bucket list. On June 29 and 30, while suffering from terminal multiple myeloma, a cancer that attacks bone marrow, Kent Senter arranged for 12 speakers with wide ranging backgrounds to put on the Symposium On Official And Scientific Investigations Of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. “I just want to get the word out that there’s another side to this — it’s not just all kooky and alien head dolls,” Senter said.
Stonehenge UFO Photo Among Final Release Of U.K. X-Files
On June 21, the final batch of UFO files was released by the U.K. National Archives. It covered the work of the Ministry of Defense’s UFO desk from 2007 to November 2009. Among the 25 UFO files of 4,400 pages is a photograph taken of a possible UFO over Stonehenge. “The one over Stonehenge is totally unconvincing,” said David Clarke, a UFO historian and the official spokesman for the U.K. National Archives. Read on for more reports of UFO sightings and why the U.K. UFO desk was finally closed down in 2009.
UFO With S-Shaped Fin Photographed Over Castle
On May 25, literally faster than the eye could follow, an unusual object zipping over the Muiderslot Castle in the Netherlands was accidentally photographed by a mother and daughter visiting the landmark. Corinne Federer, the woman who photographed the object, said, “I’ve been shooting for quite some time and I’ve seen other stuff in the news, but I’ve never seen anything [like this] with my own eye.”
Scientologists Get Sarcastic Apology After Pilots Spot UFOs Over Church
On June 18, we published a story that has it all: UFOs spotted by pilots of three commercial jets, radar confirmation of the UFOs from air traffic controllers, reports that the UFOs were close to the U.K. headquarters of the Church of Scientology, and a sarcastic apology to the church from a tabloid.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com
NASA Hints at Possible Life on Mars .
This week NASA announced that its analysis of rock dust suggests there could have been life on Mars. We’re talking microbes. They can’t come right out and spill the beans about alien life because there’s that incident in Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947 that’s had the federal government tongue-tied ever since.
Two months ago I went to Roswell. The place means one thing to me — UFO cover-up. Start with a debris field on a New Mexico ranch, add another location with part of a craft and dead aliens, toss in the U.S. military in a nuclear arms race with Russia immediately after WW II, and generals see a technology that renders our complete arsenal obsolete. The Pentagon starts defecating bricks to the cadence of “this can’t be happening!” Suddenly, it isn’t happening, not officially. That’s the Roswell Incident in a nutshell.
I left Austin, Texas, on a sunny and cold morning, stopped for breakfast at the German Bakery in Fredericksburg, then drove all day to Roswell, crossing the railroad tracks into town as night fell. The funeral home on South Main looked like it had been there since the aliens were hauled into town. The International UFO Museum a few blocks farther on was hard to miss. A crashed flying saucer was embedded in its southeast corner. Somebody here wanted to believe.
Next morning, I ducked around the embedded UFO and entered the museum under a theater marquis proclaiming “UFO Museum.” After watching the first 10 minutes of the movie Roswell, I moved on to read newspaper reports from 1947 and affidavits from the 1990s of people who, nearing life’s end, wanted to tell what they witnessed years ago but were then too afraid to say.
The newspapers reported how troops from Roswell Army Air Field secured a debris field on a remote ranch northwest of Roswell and collected all the foreign material. At a second location they recovered an intact portion of a craft, along with three or four bodies, and hauled everything back to base. Col. William Blanchard, base commander, told his public information officer to notify the press they’d recovered a crashed “flying disc” and were sending it to higher headquarters. They loaded it all onto a military aircraft and flew it to Ft. Worth, Texas.
When General Ramey of Ft. Worth got involved, the “flying disc” morphed into a “weather balloon.” End of story. It was simply a mylar balloon for carrying instruments to detect Soviet A-bomb tests. Col. Blanchard and his men just goofed in claiming they recovered something as otherworldly as a “flying disc.”
The odd thing about all this, other than the flying saucer and dead aliens, was Col. Blanchard. We’re not talking about a Kentucky colonel whose expertise tended toward fried chicken. Col. Blanchard commanded a bomb group, the 509th, the only atomic bomb group in the U.S.
Recovery of a flying saucer wasn’t an everyday announcement in 1947. Who would run way out on that limb to seize a “Doh!” moment? I looked up Col. Blanchard on my iPad.
He arranged and supervised the atomic bomb mission on Hiroshima and was the backup pilot for that bomb drop. In 1946, he commanded the bomb group involved in the Bikini atoll atomic bomb tests. Afterwards, he went to Roswell to command and train the 509th atomic bomb group.
Then came that flying disc snafu. But Col. Blanchard’s career didn’t crash and burn. He trained the crews of USAF’s first intercontinental atomic bomb group. Eventually he rose in rank to become Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force as a four-star general. I want to believe Col. Blanchard knew better than to publicly tell General Ramey where he could put his “weather balloon” story.
I spent most of my time with the newspaper reports and photos. There was some UFO artwork but my kids would not have found it text worthy. There was a diorama like ones in the Smithsonian showing daily life of tribal people, only this one has a flying saucer and life size aliens standing on desert terrain looking around with expressions of consternation and where-the-hell-are-we? An exhibit booth with a glass window had a life size alien on a gurney like it was wheeled out of theAlien Autopsy video for viewing and a possible ID. If the blob, Mr. Spock or the green, female exotic dancer from the pilot episode of Star Trek were there, I missed them.
In the gift shop I picked up a t-shirt and some postcards and stepped out onto Main Street. It felt like I’d walked onto a movie set from the past. We are the new Amish and don’t even know it. The America before me reflected little if nothing of the quantum leaps in science and technology our government and defense contractors must have developed from studying crashed UFOs. We have fossil fuel, earth-bound technology and get around by shifting gears when we should be shifting dimensions. At Area 51, they probably are.
I felt like I was living on the poor side of the tracks in a parallel universe where we enjoy yesteryear’s technology today. With our hybrid cars, flatscreen TVs, smartphones and GPS devices, we think we’ve hit the jackpot of hi-tech. If ET’s great-grandmother found our stuff under her Christmas tree, she’d throw it in her dumpster, stamping her feet all the way there and back.
People in the UFO community say UFO/ET disclosure is right around the corner. From Roswell, I figured that corner must be on Mars.
I was ready for Mr. Scott to beam me up and spill the beans on alien life but it just wasn’t happening. Is Martian rock dust the best NASA can do? No photos of ET retirement communities on the Red Planet? No rest areas on the Moon?
Looking For UFOs? Try These Techniques To Prepare For A Close Encounter.
So you think you can just waltz into an open field tonight and little green men are going to come to you, huh?
You’re wrong. In fact, you need the right tools to capture UFOs — whether alien in nature or not — if you want anyone to actually believe your epic story. Luckily, HuffPost Weird News has compiled that list for you. Here’s what you need on your UFO hunt tonight:
- Warm clothing (depending on your location)
- A good pair of binoculars
- A good, reliable camera (duh!), capable of actually capturing night images
- Fellow eyewitnesses and some snacks (in case it’s a long stakeout)
- Information from a database that can guide you to possible UFO hangouts
The database may be the best thing you could consult if you want any heads up on where UFOs are most often seen, thereby increasing your own chances of capturing that elusive million-dollar image.
According to the website IT World, there are several database sites used by UFO seekers to help triangulate possible hotbeds of activity of unidentified flying objects. It’s not unusual to find locations where eyewitnesses claim to see UFOs several days or nights in a row.
The National UFO Reporting Center
This database displays UFO reports according to event date, state, UFO shape and date posted. For an excellent look back in time, the site offers reports stemming from the 1950s and brings sightings right up to date. You can call a special hotline to report something if it occurred within the past week. And there’s also an online UFO report form you can fill out. The site doesn’t claim to validate the information in the reports, and that “Obvious hoaxes have been omitted.”
*U* UFO Database
This is a very interesting database created over a 20-year period by UFO researcher Larry Hatch, who made it clear that his site is not a UFO reporting center. “The site is here to show the results of a long research effort, an attempt to find clues or patterns in sightings data,” he writes. And he’s very specific about presenting data on “flying saucers, disks and spheres… wingless fuselages, cloud cigars, cylinders, flying triangles, deltoids, diamonds and other odd shapes.” He also wants people to know that he doesn’t catalog “new-age, religious miracles, spiritual or cult events; Bigfoot, chupacabras, bogeymen or cryptozoology in general; no pyramids or faces on Mars, no crop circles or other forteana unless directly UFO-related.” *U* UFO Database provides excellent regional and world UFO maps and statistics. Of particular interest is his section on Thematic UFO sightings.
According to AboveTopSecret.com, while Hatch dropped out of contact with the UFO community several years ago due to health problems, his site contains “18,552 carefully filtered UFO events, distilled from hundreds of books, major journals, catalogs, correspondence and other sources. [The] scope is worldwide, for all dates from antiquity to the present.”
UFOdb.com
The UFO Sightings database specializes in pictures and videos, offering a variety of viewing and analysis tools to maximize your UFO footage viewing experience: “Speed control, Reverse play, Viewing filters, looping and more,” as described on the site. There’s also a UFO picture zoom magnifier and Google map that shows where the UFO sightings occurred. To help in your own search for possible places where UFOs might show up, the site includes “a synopsis, date, country, region, city, latitude and longitude” of previous locations of sighting reports.
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
In addition to a database of the most recent sighting reports and locations from the last couple of days, MUFON — the 3,000-member worldwide UFO investigation organization — is dedicated to studying UFO sightings and offers directions on how to correctly record or videotape a UFO encounter, something sorely lacking in the overall quality of many UFO images or videos posted on the Internet. The MUFON site also has an extensive UFO reporting form that you can fill out and post as a way of sharing your experiences with many people around the world.
You now have a variety of choices to help map out where you might want to go for a potential UFO encounter, and information on what to bring to record the experience. Good hunting.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2013/03/16/looking-for-ufos-tools_n_2886226.html
Two New Reports on the Chilean “UFO” Videos Produce Conflicting Results.
Two new studies on the controversial video tapes from the El Bosque case in Chile have just been released. Richard Haines, chief scientist for the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) and Bruce Maccabee, retired Navy physicist, performed independent, meticulous analyses of the tapes.
For necessary background on this case, please see my previous articles: March 2012 with Ralph Blumenthal, and April 2012. I will not be repeating information here from these two posts but will assume everyone has read them.
Last June, I went to Santiago partly to seek further resolution on this case. General Ricardo Bermúdez, Director of the CEFAA, told me that the objects did not appear to be bugs, “but we can’t be 100 percent sure; it’s still under investigation.” During my second visit to the CEFAA office in September, the general informed me that the case is now being put to rest, but it remains unsolved.
Haines and Maccabee worked with the two best videos for their studies. I learned during my first meeting with CEFAA staff that due to circumstances beyond their control, the other five videos are no longer in the CEFAA’s possession. Therefore I was not able to view them nor can they be made available to others, as the CEFAA would have preferred. However, the two tapes which have been analyzed are by far the clearest tapes; the others were on cell phones and of poor quality.
It is both intriguing and puzzling that the two scientists disagreed about the most crucial question in this case: Did the same unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAP, appear on two separate cameras? If the exact same UAP was filmed by the two cameras 20 to 30 feet apart simultaneously, then we would know the object was large, distant and not a bug. Haines concluded that the two cameras captured the same UAP in one sequence, while Maccabee concluded they did not.
“This investigation was carried out with the hope that at least two videos would provide image data that would allow for a triangulation and subsequent calculation of distance and size,” Maccabee states in “Analysis of ‘UAP’ Images in two Videos Obtained During the El Bosque Air Show of November 5, 2010.” Triangulation requires that the same object be filmed at the same time by observers at separate locations; without this, the distance to the object cannot be estimated and therefore its actual size cannot be determined. “Unfortunately, the two most promising videos did not show the same object at the same time from two locations,” Maccabee concludes.
He analyzed only the UAP images that appeared during the Halcones fly by, the first planes to take off during the event at the Air Force base. These included footage of the approach of the Halcones, and their departure into the distance, which is where Haines discovered a “temporal coincidence” (the same UAP in two videos at the same time) and Maccabee determined that the images were different. “My analysis does not preclude the possibility that there might have been a temporal coincidence at some other time but I am unaware of such a coincidence,” he says.
Maccabee’s sometimes technical report includes section headings such as “Relative sizes and distances of the UFO if there were no motion blur,” “Apparent motion of the object,” and “Estimate of the distance traveled during the time between frames.” His analysis of frames from one section includes calculations of possible distance-size-speed relationships “ranging from insect size and speed to “saucer” size and (great) speed.”
He points out that some of the dark on the bottom of the two best images of the object may be due to the camera’s electronics reacting to the presence of a bright top portion. “Video cameras often create a dark ‘reaction’ to a very bright, small object in the field of view,” he explained in an email.
Maccabee concludes that the objects are not anomalies. “Without further information that would show the objects were distant and hence large, it must be considered most likely that the objects were small and nearby such as insects.” In a recent email he explained that “Since I could not accomplish a triangulation of any of the objects I analyzed, I have to accept the scientifically conservative conclusion that the objects I studied could have been small and nearby.”
Haines takes a different position, as shown in his 108 page report titled “The El Bosque Video Case: A Preliminary Study of Anomalous Objects in Active Airspace.” His analyses consisted of plotting the trajectories of as many different UAP as he could find as well as enlarging and enhancing the UAP images from selected frames. “That at least one of these UAP was not a flying insect near the cameras is supported by analysis of video images of the same UAP recorded by two separated cameras,” he writes.
And further, he explains that “the relatively short ‘flight’ durations, high angular velocities and high-speed changes in direction and small angular size of the UAP, recorded during seven of the ten airplane formation fly-overs, help explain why no one saw them at the time; these characteristics would appear to qualify these UAP as anomalous; they cannot be explained in prosaic terms.”
Haines states that “NARCAP’s interest in this case lay mainly in aviation safety” and it is for this reason that he conducted the study. He suggests that these UAP could have presented a risk to flight operations, but acknowledges that without knowing for sure whether they possessed finite mass it is not possible to say.
Many provocative questions are posed at the end of his paper: Why were there more UAP appearances associated with the fly-overs of certain types of airplanes than others? What are their energistic characteristics? What mechanism(s) guided their movements? What caused their changes in shape within very short periods of time?
The contradictory element of these two new studies, and the questions they raise about the nature of the UAP depicted in the videos, adds to the increasing complexity of this case. This material has proven itself worthy of scientific scrutiny, initially in Chile and now in the United States, and as been given a great deal of attention. And how encouraging it is to see high-ranking military officers, scientists and aeronautic specialists in Chile recognizing the existence of the “UFO phenomenon” and taking it seriously! I have observed this firsthand and talked to many of these officials in person.
It is in the well-established tradition of science that research results differ sometimes, and debate follows. The issues usually get ironed out over time – although with this case, that may not happen.
The controversy surrounding this case has centered around whether the object(s) could simply be bugs. It seems that if they are not some kind of anomaly, or “UFO,” they are likely bugs. There are not many other realistic alternatives.
Maccabee has deduced that these objects most likely are bugs. “Lacking conclusive proof that a flying insect could not make an image such as recorded on the video, one may conclude that the ‘anomalous phenomena’ images were, in fact, images of insects,” he writes. Others have put forward the same position on various internet blogs.
As I mentioned in my previous article, entomologists in the U.S. with knowledge of Chilean insects stated fairly uniformly that it is impossible to determine whether the objects were bugs; there was nothing in particular that would lead them to conclude that they were. Most thought it was unlikely. While in Chile, I talked to two independent scientists who believed the object(s) may be insects, but who also said we can’t know for sure. And of course, none of them were photo experts.
I was curious: If indeed this were a bug, which species would it most likely be? Perhaps by observing the candidate in flight, we could see if it resembled the objects in question, particularly the two still images that show a consistent shape in two different parts of one video. This would not be a “scientific” process…but it could be interesting.
The clearest images of our dome-shaped UAP in the El Bosque videos show no such wing sheathes. Would the sheathes show up in a video of this bug two feet from the camera moving at 12 mph? Perhaps the tiny wings would be moving too quickly to show up…but the sheathes do not move at all. Should they be visible?
Furthermore, if you look at the body of the ladybug in flight, it looks elliptical and rather soft, since it has no shell covering it. It doesn’t look much like the dome-shaped bug that we see sitting on a leaf or crawling.
I sent Elgueta the links to some videos of ladybugs in flight, and asked him to comment on the fact that the flying bug does not look like the domed “thing” in our video. First he reiterated that it is impossible to say if they are bugs or not. “We estimate that no experienced entomologist regardless of what country can give a definite answer about these images.”
Regarding specifically the videos of the flying ladybugs, he made the astute observation that these videos, “made with short focus in centimeters scale, cannot be compared with others made in a different scale. Perhaps, you can make new technical studies with videos that can be equivalent concerning speed, focus, lighting and distance.” Maybe this is the next step if anyone wants to continue this exploration.
Haines makes some interesting observations as to why he believes at least some of the El Bosque objects are not bugs, even beyond his conclusion that the same UAP appears on two cameras 20 to 30 feet apart. He includes an image of an actual insect, dark and blurred, taken from one of the El Bosque videos. I recall quite a few bugs on this footage near the camera that looked like blurred, black blobs.) “Virtually all of the UAP images reviewed in this report were in sharper focus than was this alleged insect suggesting that they were all at a distance greater than the hyperfocal distances of these cameras!” Haines writes.
On the question of whether all the UAP could have been insects, Haines states that “on balance, the answer is very likely no.” He offers a host of reasons why: “Because of the linearity of their flight, their high angular velocity, their occasional spontaneous and unexpected appearance within a video frame, their apparent trajectories relative to the different airplane formations, their almost consistent oval shape and nearly horizontal orientation, their lack of any color other than gray and white and perhaps most importantly, for one UAP at least found in Figures 8 and 11, its relatively large distance from the two cameras.”
“Nevertheless,” he concludes, “this hypothesis must be left unanswered at this time.”
And after all this, what is the final position of the CEFAA on this case? I received this official response to that question: “After hearing from the entomologists who have looked at the images, we at the CEFAA agree that these photos do not show anything which allows for the conclusion that they are bugs. But since we are unable to identify the objects in the videos, the case remains unsolved. We are posting on our web page diverse analysis and opinions on this case, to allow each interested person to draw his/her own conclusions.”
Along with the two new American reports, the CEFAA web page includes four Spanish studies which also provide conflicting results. Marcelo Moya, a Chilean photo analyst, affirms that “the object that caused a commotion because of its brightness would with a high probability correspond to the flight of an insect, the hypothesis being it is a fly or a botfly (the latter being a bigger size) that passed by the focus of the camera.”
However, Carlos González Sasso, a photo expert from the DGAC Air and Space Museum in Santiago, states that the image of the same object shows something metallic, “a defined geometry, not being an object of biological origin, with an inclination that suggests ascending forward movement, this being reinforced by a flash of clear light at the base.”
I commend the CEFAA for working so hard on this case with experts from many branches of the Chilean government, and for making whatever information they could available to these scientists. It’s not clear what these videos show. At this point, each of us can form our own opinions about something that science cannot determine, or we can simply accept that we will likely never know.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com
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