Weird News

World UFO Day: Another Reason To Over Hype Flying Saucers And Aliens.

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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.

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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

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Vivos Survival Shelter: Robert Vicino Says Kansas Caves Could Save Human Race After Apocalypse

After most of the world’s population is wiped off the map by a wayward meteorite or hail of nuclear missiles, the survival of the human race might just depend on a few thousand people huddled in recreational vehicles deep in the bowels of an eastern Kansas mine.

Kansas Survival Caves

That’s the vision of a California man who is creating what he calls the world’s largest private underground survivor shelter, using a complex of limestone caves dug more than 100 years ago beneath gently rolling hills overlooking the Missouri River.

“I do believe I am on a mission and doing a spiritual thing,” said Robert Vicino, who has purchased a large portion of the former U.S. Army storage facility on the southeast edge of Atchison, about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, Mo. “We will certainly be part of the genesis.”

Before it comes time to ride out Armageddon or a deadly global pandemic, though, Vicino says the Vivos Survival Shelter and Resort will be a fun place for members to take vacations and learn assorted survival skills to prepare them for whatever world-changing catastrophe awaits.

Jacque Pregont, president of the Atchison Chamber of Commerce, said some people think the shelter plan sounds creepy or that Vicino has “lost his mind,” while others are excited because they will finally get a chance to tour the property.

Atchison is known as the birthplace of Amelia Earhart and one of the most haunted towns in Kansas, Pregont said, so the survival shelter is likely to add to the town’s tourism draw.

“It’s quirky, and quirky gets attention,” she said.

Recent Hollywood movies have done big business exploring themes about threats to the human race, either through climate shifts, meteor impacts or zombie invasions. And the National Geographic Channel show, “Doomsday Preppers,” documents the efforts of Americans who are preparing for the end of the world with elaborate shelters and plenty of freeze-dried rations.

Paul Seyfried, who belongs to a group that promotes preparing for manmade or natural disasters, said Americans have become complacent ever since the death of John F. Kennedy, the last president who urged people to build fallout shelters.

“There has been no war on our soil in over 100 years, so the horror of war is not stamped indelibly in Americans’ minds,” said Seyfried, a member of The American Civil Defense Association’s advisory board.

Ken Rose, a history professor at California State University-Chico, is an outspoken critic of underground shelters. Though he acknowledged that interest in underground shelters is growing, he called projects like the Kansas facility a “colossal waste of time and money.”

“Some people are just obsessed by this idea,” Rose said. “… Without minimizing the terror threat here today, the threats were much greater at the height of the Cold War. At least then anxiety was based on a realistic scenario.”

The Kansas caverns are 100 feet to 150 feet below the surface and have a constant natural temperature in the low 70s. They are supported by thick limestone pillars six times stronger than concrete and will have blast doors built to withstand a one-megaton nuclear explosion as close as 10 miles away, Vicino said.

Other than being surrounded by more than a mile and a half of 6-foot-high chain-link fence topped with sharp rows of barbed wire, the land above ground isn’t distinguishable from expanses of hills and trees that surround it. The proposed shelter’s entrances – nondescript concrete loading docks tucked discretely into the wooded hillside – are easily defensible against any potential intruders provided there’s not a full-scale military attack, Vicino said.

The Army used the caverns – created by limestone mining operations that started in the late 1880s – for decades as a storage facility before putting them up for auction last year. The winning bid in December was $1.7 million, but financing fell through and the site was put up for sale again.

Springfield, Mo., investor Coby Cullins submitted his winning $510,000 bid for the property in early April, and he immediately started looking for ways to use it. One of his ideas was to lease the land to a company that builds survival bunkers.

Vicino, whose company is based in Del Mar, Calif., said he received an email from Cullins and flew to Kansas two days later to check out the property. Vicino agreed to purchase 75 percent of the complex, rather than lease it, while Cullins retained the rest and is marketing it to local businesses.

The complex consists of two fully lighted, temperature-controlled mines with concrete floors. The east cave, which Cullins owns, encompasses about 15 acres and contains offices, vaults, restrooms and other developed work spaces. The much larger west cave, which covers about 45 acres, is mostly undeveloped and will be converted into the Vivos facility.

The shelter will have enough space for more than 1,000 RVs and up to about 5,000 people. Members will be charged $1,000 for every lineal foot of their RV to purchase their space, plus $1,500 per person for food. That means a person who plans to park a 30-foot vehicle in the shelter with four people inside will pay $30,000 for the space and $6,000 for food.

Actual sales won’t begin until a “critical mass” of reservations are received and processed, Vicino said, which hasn’t happened yet at the Kansas shelter.

Vivos also owns a shelter in Indiana with room for 80 people to live comfortably for up to a year. There, members pay $50,000 per adult and $35,000 per child, so a family with two adults and two children would have to come up with $170,000 to be part of the post-apocalyptic generation.

Purchasers will be required to pay for the full balance before taking possession of their shelter space, though the company has offered limited financing in the past with a sizable down payment.

Vicino says he won’t say specifically where the Indiana shelter or any of his smaller facilities are located because he fears there would be anarchy in the event of a world-changing catastrophe.

And it doesn’t matter who comes knocking at the “moment of truth,” Vicino said, they’re probably not getting in.

“I’ve heard people say, `I will just show up at the door,'” he said. “Our response is, `great, where is the door?’ At our secret shelters, you don’t know where to go, and your cash will be worthless at that time.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

Weird Word Salad: The Terminology of the Unexplained.

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Paranormal investigators say they look for evidence of paranormal activity. That phrase always confounded me. I don’t quite get it. What does it mean when someone says they have evidence of “paranormal activity”? And, how do you know it’s not normal activity that you just couldn’t ferret out?

There is a problem with how the word paranormal is used because it is often utilized in a way that is perhaps not consistent with the original intent.

Language evolves. Let me take a shot at unpacking some of these definitions about unexplained phenomena. See if it makes sense.

“Paranormal” and other terms for strange goings-on have changed over time. The wordparanormal was coined around 1920. It means “beside, above or beyond normal.” Therefore, it’s anything that isn’t “normal” — or, more precisely, it is used as a label for any phenomenon that appears to defy scientific understanding. Ok, right there is a tripping point. Whose scientific understanding? The observer who is calling it “paranormal”? If so, that is problematic as a theoretical physicist sees things a lot differently than a dentist or a police officer. So, it appears too subjective to be precise. Each person may have their own idea of what constitutes “paranormal activity”.

The term “paranormal” used to just mean extrasensory perception and psychic power but, since the 1970s in particular — thanks to TV shows and proliferation of the subject in popular culture — the term expanded in scope to include all mysterious phenomena seemingly shunned by standard scientific study. It was a convenient way to bring many similarly peculiar topics under one heading for ease of marketing. So today, it can include everything that sounds mysterious: UFOs, hauntings, monster sightings, strange disappearances, anomalous natural phenomena, coincidences, as well as psychic powers.

Not everyone agrees that fields of study such as UFOlogy or cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and the like) should be considered paranormal but, if we think about the fact that after all this time, we have yet to document what these things actually are, that isbeyond normal. Therefore, paranormal (arguably).

What appears as paranormal could essentially one day become normal. This has happened before with meteorites and still mysterious but likely explainable earthquakes lights and ball lightning. Or, we might not have developed the right technology or made the philosophical breakthrough yet to provide an explanation for some seemingly paranormal events. Perhaps we may find an instrument that can measure whatever it is that results in “hauntings” of a particular type. (Notice that I didn’t say an instrument that detects ghosts — an important distinction.)

Contrasted with paranormal is “supernatural.” To say something is supernatural is to conclude that the phenomenon operates outside the existing laws of nature. We would call such phenomena miraculous, a result of religious, occult (or magical) forces that are outside of human doings. These forces don’t adhere to boundaries of nature, which are waived. Perhaps the entity decides not to be detectable, for example. When that happens, we can’t test it, capture it or measure it. We just broke science. Our understanding stops if the explanation allows for supernatural entities to suspend natural laws on a whim. We end up with a form of “[Insert entity name here] did it.” Game over.

Paranormal events can appear to be supernatural but that in no way is proof that they are. Some unaccounted for natural explanation can be the cause. There is really no way to have excluded all natural possibilities in an investigation. We just may not have all the information. So to say something is the result of “paranormal” or “supernatural” activity is faulty logic. It can appear to be but you can’t say that it is for sure.

If you look at older anomalistic literature, you’ll find the word “preternatural” — a perfectly cromulent word — in place of paranormal. It’s not used as much anymore but it denotes a situation where the phenomenon appears outside the bounds of what we consider normal. It’s not supernatural, just extraordinary.

An even better word to use for weird natural phenomena — like strange falls from the sky (frogs, fish, colored rain), mystery sounds and lights, odd weather phenomena, etc. (things that might also be called Fortean) — would be paranatural. Events seem beyond natural because they are rare, unusual and we can’t quite pinpoint how they happened, but we need not revoke natural laws to have them occur. It’s similar to preternatural but sounds more modern.

Sorry about the word salad in this post but terminology is rather important for effective communication in order to avoid being misunderstood. These various words reflect the degree to which you want to go beyond observable, experimentally derived evidence. They get progressively LESS likely to be the correct designation: Paranatural -> paranormal/preternatural -> supernatural (which we can’t actually “prove”).

Source: Huffing post

 


 

The Internet: A Superhighway of Paranormal Hoaxes and Fakelore.

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It’s been a hot time for hoaxing thanks to the Internet. With Photoshop, citizen journalism sites, YouTube, and postboards for the latest photo leaks, it is way too easy to send a lie half way around the world before the truth can pull its shoes on.

In this post, I wrote about a busy week in paranormal-themed news. In chatting with a correspondent — Jeb Card, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department of Miami University — over a shared interest in the state of the paranormal today or “occulture,” we got to talking about the state of hoaxing.

Make no mistake, hoaxing has always been around. Hoaxers have been trying to fool people by displaying their special skills (scams) or stupendous stories since the beginning of civilization, I think. But there is a particular history of hoaxing in occulture. Lately, it has gotten more frequent (or we sure notice it more), more absurd (to outdo the last one) and more involved (because the payout can be big while the scrutiny greater).

There are many famous hoaxes from this scene. It’s hard to say if it’s more common now than in the past. Some of the hoaxes, notes Jeb, have been very influential in the creation of popular folklore. Big ones have defined UFOlogy: Roswell and the Men in Black. Not everyone would conclude these are deliberate hoaxes — there is a grain of truth to them — but they went way out of control and now there are hoaxed videos, documents and tales based on these events that never happened the way the lore says it did. Stories like that, which have taken on a life of their own as if they were true, are called “fakelore.”

The Bigfoot field is trampled over with fake footprints, stories, casts, photos and videos. It can’t be denied that the majority of Bigfoot stories are unbelievable, without supporting evidence, or obvious hoaxes. Every new bit of Bigfoot “evidence” these days makes us roll our eyes and say “SERIOUSLY!?” This reputation is damaging to those who truly believe something is out there to be found. The credibility of Bigfoot researchers scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The history of hoaxes colors this topic deeply when we realize that the seminal story of “Bigfoot,” Ray Wallace’s trackway, was revealed to be a hoax.

Actually, the same can be said for the Loch Ness Monster. The iconic Nessie photo — the long-neck arching out of the rippling water — was hoaxed.

A longtime follower of the occulture fields, Jeb says he can’t think of a time when these communities weren’t awash with simultaneous and multiple hoax accusations. Today, I post some of the latest ridiculous news stories on Doubtful News, but some are too intelligence-insulting to even mention. I can’t waste time on them. The Internet rewards even cheap hoaxes with website hits from the curious. Many sites gain popularity doing just this, collecting the latest mystery tomfoolery and telling you to decide for yourself.

Hoaxes of old lasted a very long time. If the infamous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is a hoax (as several have espoused), then it’s one of the best because people are STILL fighting about it 46 years later! The Surgeon’s photo mentioned above lasted almost 70 years. The Wallace wooden footprint maker wasn’t revealed widely until he died. The Majestic UFO documents are still believed by many to be genuine as we saw it come up in the recentCitizens Hearing on Disclosure.

Even when the real story is exposed, the fakelore lingers, with adherents still clinging to belief. A modern monster, birthed by the Internet that continues to live despite being utterly demolished is the chupacabra, the alleged goatsucker, a monster from Latin America. Ben Radford‘s book Tracking the Chupacabra was a clean takedown of this folklore and pop-culture-derived beast. But, the critter continually morphed its way into the global consciousness evolving as needed to serve as the scapegoat for whatever fear arose in the public’s mind.

Hoaxes today can be as low-budget as a guy in a ghillie suit walking through the woods at a distance filmed with a smart phone, to professional artists rendering impressive CGI special effects particularly with UFO hoaxes on YouTube. Really spectacular stuff. Too spectacular to be real or the whole city would have noticed!

We also have the problem of marketing hoaxes for products, movies or TV shows, in particular. Some universities even ask students to hoax for a class project with the crowd-sourced grading as to how far it can go.

Today money can come out of hoaxing. There are pay-per-view outlets, special memberships sold, funding solicited for “studies,” merchandise and book sales that mean big bucks to those who can milk the public for a little while and steer clear of fraud charges. Also, with an online community of people who share a belief in a questionable phenomena, there may be a misplaced sense of trust and hope. Those who are emotionally invested in the idea of Bigfoot, let’s say, will want to support a potentially groundbreaking new project that will prove to everyone they aren’t crazy in their quest.

Does the ease of the Internet give people incentive to hoax? That’s undeniable. People do it just to see how far they can get, how many YouTube views, what media outlets cover it. As Jeb says: “The Internet removes the gatekeepers, the filters between the potential hoaxer, and the mark. Your fake Bigfoot doesn’t need to be good enough to get on [the TV] news and then filter down. It just needs to be good enough that someone will share it.”

Jeb cites the TV show Ancient Aliens as an example of a successful brand that has captured public interest no matter HOW absurd the ideas presented. On “reality” TV shows, viewers lose perspective that they are watching an edited, at least partially scripted, entertainment device. It’s not actual scientific research.

The occulture scene gets decidedly more unhealthy as money, greed, quest for notoriety and lack of scruples allow the sensationalist speculation and outright hoaxers to keep right on fooling everyone, time and time again. There’s a sucker born every minute.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

 

New Book Suggests UFOs Still a Government Secret.

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real-ufoThe subject of UFOs remains a non-issue for most people until they see an unidentified object in the sky. But since most people have never seen one, the question “Are there UFOs or flying saucers from other planets?” has very little relevance except as the punch line of jokes.

Military and commercial air pilots are perhaps the best and most credible witnesses to come forward in recent years. A groundbreaking new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, by Leslie Kean, has been called “the most important book on the phenomenon in a generation.”

The preferred replacement term for UFO among credible sources is UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, meaning (as defined by NASA senior scientist Richard Haines), objects “which do not suggest a logical, conventional flying object and which remain unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence.”

Many objects in the sky are misidentified as UAPs — from weather balloons, the planets Venus or Mars, to satellites and ice crystals. Kean reports that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained.” The author advocates a kind of agnosticism when it comes to UFOs. Skepticism helps, Kean says, because “the UFO debate fuels two polarities, both representing untenable positions,” meaning the two camps of believers and total debunkers.

Major General Wilfried De Brouwer headed the Operations Division in the Belgian Air Staff and helped investigate a rash of sightings over Belgium in 1989. For two years hundreds of people in Belgium saw what Kean describes as “a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights.” The craft moved at a snail’s pace and made no noise but could accelerate instantly. The situation was so serious that Belgium’s defense minister, Guy Coeme, asked De Brouwer to handle the sightings. The consensus then was that something was invading Belgian airspace. During his investigation, De Brouwer interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses.

One of De Brouwer’s interviewees, Colonel Andred Amond, a former director of military infrastructure for the Belgian Army, reported seeing a craft flying close to the earth while driving with his wife. Colonel Amond filed a report as well as drawings of the object to Coeme. Suspicions that the wave of UAPs were American B-2 or F-117 military aircraft engaged in a secret mission over Belgian territory were quickly dismissed by the U.S. Embassy in Brussels.

De Brouwer, in his investigation, describes what two police officers saw: “…They described a dome on the upper structure with rectangular windows, lit on the inside.” There were two crafts, one of which was “emitting red light balls.” These same policemen encountered one of the crafts sometime later, but by that time the craft was “immobile and silent, but it suddenly transmitted a hissing sound and reduced the intensity of the lights.” Both officers then saw a red light ball exit from the center of the craft, proceeding along vertical and horizontal paths until it eventually disappeared. De Brouwer reports that a total of thirteen police officers reported seeing “the craft at eight different locations in the vicinity of Eupen.”

“Of the approximately 2,000 reported cases registered during the Belgian wave, 650 were investigated and more than 500 of them remain unexplained,” De Brouwer writes.

In 1982, Portuguese Air Force pilot Julio Guerra was flying solo in a DHC-1 Chipmunk at about 10:50 a.m. when he noticed an airplane without a fuselage flying below him. “It didn’t have wings and it didn’t have a tail, only a cockpit! It was an oval shape. What kind of airplane could that be?” he recounts in his essay, Circled by a UFO.

When Guerra steered his plane to the left in order to follow the object, “the object climbed straight up to my altitude of 5,000 in under ten seconds.” Guerra recalls that the object stopped in front of him, “at first with some instability, oscillations, and a wavering motion, and then it stabilized and was still.” He reported a metallic disc with two halves with a brilliant band around the center. For a few moments the object seemed to engage in a game of show and tell, flying at incredible speeds in left-leaning elliptical orbits.

Guerra called the tower and reported the object, but was told it was a weather balloon. Eventually he was joined by two other Air Force pilots who saw the same object. “It came toward me and flew right over me, on top of my aircraft, and stopped there, like a helicopter landing but much, much faster, breaking all the rules of aerodynamics,” Guerra wrote.

At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on the afternoon of November 7, 2006, Kean reports, “For about five minutes, a disc-shaped object hovered quietly over the United Airlines terminal and then cut a sharp hole in the cloud bank above while zooming off.” On January 1, 2007, the story was front page news in the Chicago Tribune. Numerous people saw the disc: pilots, terminal managers and UA mechanics. Kean reports that even “pilots waiting to take off opened the front windows to lean out and see the objects for themselves. There was a buzz at United Airlines.”

Unfortunately, the many witnesses of the O’Hare disc opted to remain anonymous, afraid for their job security, and Kean reports that the FAA “tried hard to ignore the incident despite its safety implications.” The FAA later went on record explaining the incident as the result of “bizarre weather,” something Kean calls a lie because she was able to listen to the airport tower tapes from when the disc was first spotted. “Official distaste for dealing with the UFO phenomenon is entrenched to the point of being not only counterproductive, but possibly dangerous,” Kean concludes.

In 2007, commercial airline pilot Ray Bowyer and his passengers saw two large UFOs while flying over the English Channel. The plane was cruising at 150 mph and headed to Alderney, England from Southampton.

“Both objects were of a flattened disk shape… they were brilliant yellow with light emanating from them,” Bowyer reported. After calling the tower, Bowyer says that the passengers began to notice the objects and ask about them. “I decided not to make any announcement over the intercom so as not to alarm anyone, but it was obvious that some were getting concerned…the two identical objects were easily visible without binoculars.”

In September 1976, a war of the worlds of sorts occurred in the city of Tehran, Iran, when an unknown object began to circle the city at a very low altitude. Iranian Air Force General Parviz Jafari (now retired) was a major and squadron commander then and was one of the pilots charged with pursuing the object. “It was flashing with intense red, green, orange, and blue lights so bright that I was not able to see its body. The lights formed a diamond shape.” Jafari attempted to fire at it when he says, “my weapons jammed and my radio communications were garbled.” Then he noticed “a round object which came out of the primary object,” which he says came at him at intense speed, “almost as if it were a missile.”

“I was really scared,” he reported, “so I selected an AIM-9 heat-seeking missile to fire at it.” Not only was Jafari’s weapons control panel out but his instruments and radar were as well. The object was headed straight towards him but at the moment of projected impact it disappeared, reappearing behind him.

Last year, I interviewed Levittown, Pennsylvania resident Denise Murter, who grew up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. In July 2008, the former Optical Lab supervisor had an experience that changed her life.

“It was in the middle of the night and I was asleep with my husband and our dog. Suddenly our Yorkie was growling. I thought somebody broke into our place. He wouldn’t stop growling so I figured I’d better get up and see what’s going on. I figured since I was up I’ll take him out to go potty, so I took him out back and a light caught my eye. I thought it was the moon, but it was a craft overtop a treetop to the left of my backyard, about 1,000 feet in the air. I was staring at it trying to figure out what it was. It wasn’t a helicopter because there was no noise, everything was absolutely silent and you could see these three giant white lights underneath this thing in the sky.”

Murter watched it shuffle across the sky. “You’d blink and it was in another position,” she said. When it finally did disappear she went back to bed but couldn’t sleep.

One month later, the craft was back. Murter’s little Yorkie woke her up again at 3 a.m. She went out back, and saw the object much closer to her this time, a little distance above the trees. “I got my camera but every time I took a picture the camera kept going off.”

The craft returned for a third visit, only it was much closer to Murter’s house this time. “It was a little off to the right when it began dumping stuff on two trees. It was during the month of July and the stuff looked like snow.”

Radnor, Pennsylvania resident Jennifer W. Stein, an independent documentary filmmaker, founder and director of Main Line MUFON, says reports of UFOs have not gotten adequate coverage in the United States. “We are entertained to death in this country,” she said. “In terms of getting the news especially on the UFO phenomenon, we are much more hushed. And our files are much more closed than other countries. Russia has been much more open. In Tehran, Iran, in 1976, there was a huge UFO event that made world news and it was all over the front page of the newspapers in Iran… that would not have happened here in the United States. It would be hushed immediately, as it was in the Roswell case. Roswell was our 1976 Iran,” she added.

The story behind Roswell is that an alien craft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 and that alien bodies, the size of children, had been recovered. Stein believes that by the time the newspapers were printing the Roswell story in California, Washington had already been in touch with them and stated that it was a weather balloon. The newspapers then recanted and had the original story killed.

Stein says that every American astronaut that has gone up into space has seen UFOs, including astronaut Edgar Mitchell who founded Noetic Sciences in 1973.

She believes that Americans are as sheltered from the truth as the Soviet Union was in the Iron Curtain, Cold War days. “There is filtered news in the United States. The government is aware that we are not alone in the universe.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

 

‘Sirius’ Documentary Reveals DNA Test Results On Ata, The ‘6-Inch Alien’.

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r-ATAHUMANOID-large570The mummified remains of what looks like a 6-inch space alien has turned “Sirius” into the most eagerly awaited documentary among UFO enthusiasts.

The findings, however, might come as a disappointment.

In early publicity, filmmakers claimed the documentary would reveal that the DNA of the creature with an oversized alien-looking head couldn’t be medically classified.

In fact, the film, which premiered Monday in Hollywood, features a scientist who concluded the little humanoid was human.

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human — closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born,”said Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University‘s School of Medicine in California.

“The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human,” Nolan, who performed the DNA tests, explains in the film.

“Sirius” focuses on the remains of the small humanoid, nicknamed Ata, that was discovered in Chile‘s Atacama Desert 10 years ago and has, literally, gone through different hands and ownership since then.

The film also explores an ongoing grassroots movement to get the U.S. government to reveal what it reportedly knows about UFOs, extraterrestrials and the availability of advanced alternative energy technologies that could greatly benefit everyone on Earth.

The primary force behind “Sirius” is Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) andThe Disclosure Project.

One odd thing about the Ata controversy is how it came to the recent attention of the American public.

Early in the documentary, Greer refers to Ata as an extraterrestrial being, explaining how it was found in the Atacama Desert and “we don’t know how it came about.” That seems strange because HuffPost recently reported on the well known history of little Ata since its discovery 10 years ago and subsequent moving from hand to hand, ending up in Spain.

Early PR for “Sirius” referred to the “paradigm shifting physical evidence of a medically and scientifically analyzed DNA sequenced humanoid creature of unknown classification.” This fueled rumors, speculation and more than likely, the hope many people had that, finally, a real alien creature had been discovered and proven to have non-human DNA.

But now that the film is available to everybody, and DNA analysis shows that Ata was human, was that early PR hype about the humanoid a bit premature?

“My interest, frankly, is to disprove that it’s anything unusual or anything paranormal,” Nolan said prior to beginning his DNA study of the small portions of Ata he was allowed to work with. “I would like to prove that this is human [and] just an interesting mutation. In every situation with scientists, your reputation’s at stake. I have every expectation that even doing this is going to lead to some ribbing from some of my colleagues.”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

NASA Hints at Possible Life on Mars .

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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?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

 

Our Nostradamus Age.

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We are living through a new Nostradamus age, full of dire tidings. Bloggers and cable specials are connecting Nostradamus’s predictions to Hurricane Sandy, the Mayan calendar, and cataclysmic events on December 21, 2012. There are more than three dozen Nostradamus applications for the iPhone alone.

As the winter solstice approaches, commentators decry all of this as superstitious drivel and fear-mongering. In truth, while certain mass media play their part, Nostradamus’s words continue to resonate in our day (as they have since the 1500s) because they ease anxieties and provide meaning when the authorities on which we rely — government, schools, or churches — seem powerless or unreliable. What Nostradamus’s presence says about our era may be disconcerting, but it is neither surprising nor catastrophic.

Michel Nostradamus was born in Provence in 1503 as a notary’s son. An itinerant physician and plague doctor, he began selling horoscopes and writing annual almanacs. In 1555, he published the Prophecies, a collection of 942 four-line poems known as quatrains. Contemporaries deemed his verses incomparably enigmatic and dark (he predicted the end of the world for 3797). They also gave these verses credence and made Nostradamus an international celebrity.

Nostradamus died in 1566, but his posterity proved long lasting.  One reason for this staying power is that, unlike other soothsayers, Nostradamus neither founded a social movement nor attached himself exclusively to any religion or party. His quatrains did not belong to anyone, which meant that they belonged to everyone. This has enabled people to marry his verses with other predictions or even the Mayan calendar.

Having come of age with the printing press, Nostradamus was also an early media entrepreneur. He provided his publishers with droves of predictions that contained few dates but plenty of place names. Written in Old French, his quatrains proved easy to connect to innumerable historical events. Over the centuries, they have made their way into newspapers, radio, movies, and series such as the History Channel’s “Countdown to Apocalypse” (whose Nostradamus special premiered in late November).

In one respect, these media have used Nostradamus to dangle images of gloom, all the more so in recent decades. The sheer number of quatrains has made it easy to fashion new scenes of horror and transform the Renaissance doctor into a prophet of doom.  Without any religion, political school, or intellectual current to object to such uses, Nostradamus has become a brand in our mass culture.

But there are other reasons why the Nostradamus phenomenon (as we may call it) has continued to flourish.  Vivid and cryptic verses such as “Battle, death, defeat: the cross most disgraced” have long captured and named the flux and confusion of the world, expressing what people felt but could or dared not put into words. During the Renaissance, it was famine, disease, and vicious religious wars; today, it is recession, terrorism, and climate change — an accumulation of threats suggesting the end of all things.

Nostradamus’s dark verses dramatize the just and sometimes catastrophic violence of our world and the sorrow that punctuates the human condition. They tell readers that they are fragile being but also draw them into a wondrous universe in which they can connect with broader forces and other people while tapping a vast range of emotions, from awe to bewilderment to terror. Readers can feel the tremors while remaining at a remove.

Some people have accordingly read Nostradamus and uncovered a mesmerizing spectacle about their own world. Others, in contrast, have found depictions of the future. By pinpointing events to come, the quatrains can provide a sense of control during uncertain times. Even if the forecasts are scary, they can help people adjust to new situations and chart a course of action. It is easier to tackle apparently specific threats than it is to battle diffuse perils. It is also more awe-inspiring to contemplate the fragility of human civilization than it is to confront personal troubles on one’s own.

Finally, the quatrains have been used to situate wars or natural disasters within a historical chain of catastrophic events. They restore the span that has been broken asunder by crises and also tell contemporaries that they are living through epochal events rather than mere emergencies. Their pain is real and logical given the magnitude of what is going on.

And so, alarming as these predictions may be, they have not caused apocalyptic frenzies. Instead, when change seems to come ever faster and the authorities on which we rely appear ineffective, some people are drawn to all-powerful forces, even if these forces are unsettling and leave little room for personal responsibility. Other people use these verses to alleviate uncertainty, infuse their world with meaning, peep into the immensity of time, and gain a sense of history in the making. They may even include Nostradamus within the personal spiritual frameworks that they create on their own. Quatrains that have lasted without institutional support are ideal for such patchworks.

Ultimately, the Nostradamus phenomenon warrants our attention, not because it depicts our future, but because it mirrors present contradictions. In our day, it depicts an era caught between media sensationalism and thirst for meaning, an era that yearns for collective protection as well as individual participation, an era seeking more knowledge as well as relief from too much knowledge.

These free-floating predictions thus help us perceive deep-seated yearnings that hover below the surface, just out of our view. Nostradamus did so during the Renaissance — and his words continue doing so today. This is why the Mayan calendar will come and go but the quatrains are bound to endure. Living in a Nostradamus age, it turns out, is not the end of the world.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com