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August 11, 2008

Londra Toplum Postasi

UFO

by Fazile Zahyr

The sighting of a UFO this week has excited the Turkish media with pictures appearing in both tabloid style and more serious broadsheet papers this week. The flying object was spotted in the Karakopru area of Sanliurfa province towards 4am on Wednesday morning. Filmed by an amateur videographer the strangely glowing hexagonal ball of light hovered in the sky emitting red, green and white lights and moved both fast and erratically. After fifteen minutes it disappeared without a trace. As of yet no official explanation has been offered as to what it might be although internet comments vary between lauding a genuine sighting of a 'Green Fireball' phenomenon, non believers claiming the object is just a star filmed under magnification and the more cynical believing that these are American spy planes monitoring Turkey's border with Syria.

This is not the first instance of a UFO sighting in Turkey. They occur regularly with recent ones in Konya in March 2007 in the early evening which lasted on and off for a week and Istanbul on January 4th when people in the Yenibosna area of Istanbul saw a spinning circle with glowing white lights in the sky. The head of the Turkish Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Centre Haktan Akdog(an claimed in August that in the last few months the number of sightings in Turkey, as in many other countries, has been increasing.

The largest concentration of sightings in Turkey and perhaps the best documented occurred between 2001 and 2002. This spate of sightings seem to have been triggered by the extraordinary events of June 7th 2001. Ten rural guardsmen from the village of Dondurmaz in Adyaman province were watchmen for the night. All of them claimed to have seen a bright light in the shape of a large circular 'tray' the size of a house glowing in the sky. They watched as it flew off in the direction of Ulubas, mountain and then winked out of existence.

When the men reported to their commander their statements were taken seriously and the governor of Adyaman province, Halil Isik, had them seperated and individually questioned. Not only did their accounts tally up but when asked to draw pictures of what they had seen all the sketches were uncannily similar. Mr. Isik felt the event was serious enough to send a report with the details to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and also informed Haktan Akdog at the Sirius organisation. By the 13th of June in the same year Sabah newspaper was leading with the headline 'Everyone searching for UFOs' in a story that detailed how in Usak locals had stoned an alien, in Gaziantep the police had videoed a UFO and that people all over the country were phoning in reports of strange occurrences to their local jandarma.

The reports continued in a slightly hysterical atmosphere well into 2002 and included an event in Gebze on the 31st of May 2002 where a UFO was visible and circling with projecting lights for over an hour. This was followed by Aksam newspaper printing the story on 1st June 2002 of Saffet Sap, an electronic technician from Beykoz, who managed to video a flying object like a black bug with seven or eight legs. Later in the year on the 9th of November Hurriyet newspaper ran the account of four commercial pilots from different planes who had all seen UFO's in the same patch of sky on the same day at the same time.

Haktan Akdog of Sirius seems to be a recurring figure in Turkish UFO lore commenting freely on each event and insisting on the importance of Turkey to alien life. His motives however may not just be scientific, he is also the owner of the Istanbul UFO museum that opened in 2002 (riding on the back of these multiple UFO events) and any extra interest in aliens will also encourage punters through the door of his museum. He also runs the museum as a fairly successful franchise, of the six UFO museums in the world three are in Turkey (Istanbul, Denizli and Goreme in Cappadocia) and his website www.siriusufo.org advertises for further partners to open other UFO branch museums. It is his clearly stated intention to open UFO museums all over Turkey to 'further the knowledge of the Turkish people and to attract tourists'. His organisation provide all the necessary materials and installations so each museum is a de facto copy of the first. Whether they are lucrative or not is not mentioned but when the Goreme museum opened in 2006 Hurriyet newspaper reported that they had 5000 visitors in one month alone. Apparently it was especially popular with the Japanese.

Whether extra terrestials exist or not is much debated but recent advances in science make the chances seem more likely. Animals known as extremophiles thrive in earth environments previously thought not to have been able to sustain life. From microbes found living without oxygen in volcanic fissures two miles down in deep ocean trenches to water bears (aka tardigrades) that can survive temperatures from nearly absolute zero to 303ºF and even live in a vacuum like that found in space. These minute living things have upended the understanding of what is needed for the survival of life.

Previously scientists has worked on the assumption that both oxygen and liquid water were key factors in sustaining life but now it sems that these are only important to some types of life. The 'rare earth' theory is falling out of favour to be replaced with the idea that life is adaptable and that the question that needs to be asked is what kind of environment other than our own might sustain living things. The chances of intelligent life with the technology to communicate is slimmer, it is possible that such worlds have been and gone. I.f life of this sort exists now they, like us would have the technology to recognise that earth is an 'interesting' planet and worth investigating. So why aren't they here? Some would say they are and the report of flying objects above Karakopru on Tuesday was a clear indication of just that.

July 5, 2008

Bristol Western Daily Press (UK)

Growing Belief That The Truth Is Out There...

The Ministry of Defence began to release its UFO files. A near- miss was reported between a UFO and a police helicopter. UFOs were filmed by soldiers over a military base. UFO stories made front page news in the press and a new documentary series is being screened on TV.

So what's going on? Is any of this linked and does it help answer that fundamental question: are we alone?

This story really starts on May 14 this year, when the Ministry of Defence began a four-year programme to release its entire archive of UFO files. The MoD has been investigating UFO sightings since the Fifties, not because the department believes in little green men but because the RAF and the MoD want to know about anything flying in British airspace - intruders are more likely to be Russian than Martian.

To date, the MoD has received more than 11,000 UFO reports. Some of the older material has been available for some time, but it is releasing all its UFO files because it receives more Freedom of Information Act requests about UFOs than for any other subject.

The National Archives set up a website to host the first batch of files and the release made national and international news. Within a week, the National Archives had recorded nearly two million downloads. Clearly, there was huge public interest in this subject. The irony of this was that much of the 2,000 pages of documentation was comparatively mundane, consisting of one or two-page sighting reports, most of which were clearly generated by people misidentifying aircraft lights, bright stars and planets, satellites and meteors.

This interest was closely followed by two sensational new UFO encounters. In the first, late on the evening of June 7, three soldiers on guard duty at Tern Hill barracks in Shropshire sighted several UFOs over the base.

Regarding this as much as a security incident as anything else, one soldier, Corporal Mark Proctor, used a mobile phone to film the objects. Afterwards, they reported the incident up the chain of command and a report was duly forwarded to the MoD, where the episode is currently being investigated and the film footage analysed.

Somewhere along the way, someone tipped off a national newspaper about this and passed it a copy of the film. It ran the story on the front page, under the headline "Army spot UFOs over Shropshire".

A few hours later, in the early hours of June 8, a police helicopter was preparing to land at RAF St Athan in Wales. Suddenly, the crew of three saw a UFO pass close to their aircraft. Media reports of what happened next vary. One report states that a chase took place, with the crew only breaking off pursuit when they ran short of fuel and realised they stood no chance of catching the UFO.

A later report denied any chase took place. The shape of the UFO is also the subject of some confusion. The initial report stated that the object was disc-shaped, while a later statement issued by South Wales police confirmed that a UFO had been sighted by the crew, but the incident was clearly being played down.

"In today's skies there are a large number of aircraft which come in a range of different shapes and sizes," a police spokesperson commented. The MoD is still investigating, with rumours of secret prototype aircraft and Government cover-ups further muddying the waters.

These two high-profile sightings and the associated media coverage led to many other people coming forward to report their own sightings. And in an age when many people carry mobile phones with the facility to take photos and videos, many of these people had the footage to back up their claims.

The national newspaper I mentioned earlier has run further UFO stories over the past few days and its website now hosts a variety of photos, videos and other UFO stories. Other newspapers have also run UFO features as people contact them in increasing numbers, perhaps emboldened by the positive media coverage and thinking it less likely that they'll be disbelieved or ridiculed.

UFO fever is at an all-time high. I've seen most of the footage. Some is fairy obviously attributable to so-called Chinese lanterns - miniature hot air balloons let off in groups and used increasingly at weddings and other occasions. But some footage seems more intriguing.

As if all this wasn't enough, there's a new Channel Five documentary series focusing on the UFO mystery. Entitled Britain's Closest Encounters, the first episode in this four-part series was broadcast on Wednesday and featured the extraordinary story of the Berwyn Mountain incident, sometimes dubbed "The Welsh Roswell" - Roswell being the American town where UFO enthusiasts believe that a UFO crashed in 1947.

The Berwyn Mountain case took place on January 23, 1974. Some locals near the Berwyn Mountains in Llandrillo reported lights in the sky and an explosion. Police and mountain rescue teams launched a search, fearing an aircraft had crashed, but nothing was found.

Believers suggest an alien spacecraft crashed and that the government covered this up. Sceptics argue that meteors, coupled with an earth tremor known to have taken place at the time, explain the mystery.

Future episodes of the series will focus on other UFO incidents, including a wave of sightings from West Wales in 1977 and a case from last year where a commercial airline pilot, Ray Bowyer, saw two massive UFOs in the vicinity of the Channel Islands, with air traffic controllers picking up a target on radar, which they categorised as "unknown traffic."

So where does all this leave us? Extraterrestrials? Misidentifications? Hoaxes? I doubt that we'll resolve the issue. But these recent events have focused our attention on the UFO mystery. And with the new X-Files movie scheduled for release on August 1, many people continue to believe that the truth is out there.

- Nick Pope left the Ministry of Defence in 2006 after a 21-year career. From 1991 to 1994 his duties included investigating UFO sightings. While most sightings could be explained as misidentifications of ordinary objects, some are seen by police officers and pilots and are tracked on radar. He believes that whatever the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, it raises important defence and air safety issues.

March 12, 2008

Londra Toplum Postasi

UFO

by Fazile Zahyr

February 24, 2008

Farmington Daily Times

Aztec To Be Part Of Upcoming Disney Movie

by Lindsay Whitehurst

AZTEC — If Hollywood is like another planet, the Aztec UFO Symposium should fit in perfectly.

The two solar systems will collide when art and logos from the symposium appear on sets of the upcoming Disney re-make Witch Mountain.

"(Aztec) will have a big footprint," Los Angeles-based set decorator Kara Lindstrom said. Slated for a 2009 release, the movie features an alien brother and sister searching Earth for something that will save their planet while avoiding men who would exploit their powers.

In one scene, the pair, who look human, go to a UFO convention in Las Vegas, Nev., and end up on the run. One of the convention booths will be from the Aztec UFO Symposium.

Though it will be one of about 45 booths from UFO powerhouse cities like Roswell and Laughlin, Nev., Lindstrom said Aztec's booth will be two or three times as large as the others.

"They have a lot of art work and a lot of really good stuff," Lindstrom said. "Most conventions are not that visually interesting."

Shooting is slated to start in California in March, and the UFO convention scene shoot is in April. Though only extraterrestrial powers could discern the amount of screen time Aztec will get, its chances look good.

"It's background to an extremely big scene," Lindstrom said. "We'll take a week to shoot this thing." The contact started when Lindstrom found the symposium online. "We sent them T-shirts, cups, mugs, bags, big banners," and entries from the annual art contest, Aztec Librarian Leanne Hathcock said. "Ten years worth of stuff."

The positive, prompt response from the Aztec Library made it one of Lindstrom's favorites.

"I found a lot of people were kind of flakey", she said.

This set will be different from the others she's helped create on movies such as French Kiss and Strange Days because many, though not all, of the sets are from real groups or events.

"It always looks better. You know if something is real or kind of fake," she said. "Real works."

This week, the Aztec City Commission approved contracts giving Flying Winnebago Productions Inc., a company created by Disney for the movie, the right to use photos, images and artwork from the symposium for $2,000.

"Some people pay to have their stuff appear on sets," Hathcock said. Though documentary crews have visited the symposium before, this is the largest amount the library has been paid, Hathcock said.

The movie is a remake of the 1975 film Escape To Witch Mountain about two orphan children with mysterious powers. It was followed by a sequel, Return From Witch Mountain three years later.

The new version stars Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson as a cab driver who advises and protects the children. AnnaSophia Robb, who was in Bridge To Terabithia, will play the sister.

"It's about aliens, but it's a family movie, really quite sweet," Lindstrom said.

The 10-year-old Aztec UFO Symposium is based on a possible 1948 spacecraft crash in Hart Canyon. Dozens of speakers and a few hundred people come each year to hear speakers on all things extraterrestrial and otherworldly.

The library is now accepting entries for the art contest. For more information, call (505) 334-7657.

February 20, 2008

Woodland Hills Daily Breeze

The Great L.A. Air Raid Mystery

by Stephanie Walton

Questions still abound over the Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942.

What was it that showed up on military radar screens the night of Feb. 24, 1942, prompting authorities to order a blackout and unleash an hourlong anti-aircraft barrage?

Could it have been enemy aircraft like those that attacked Pearl Harbor less than three months earlier? Was it just a weather balloon? Might it have been a UFO?

"What have we learned? Not much," said Steve Nelson, curator of the Fort MacArthur Museum in San Pedro, which housed some of the artillaryartillery used to protect the West Coast during World War II.

Decades later, it's difficult to imagine the tension gripping residents of Los Angeles and the rest of California. They were still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor and worried about a similar assault on the U.S. mainland.

Their fears were realized on Feb. 23, 1942, when a Japanese submarine surfaced and fired on an oil production facility near Santa Barbara. Reports circulated that the sub then headed south, in the direction of Los Angeles.

According to historical accounts by the California State Military Museum, U.S. naval intelligence issued a warning on Feb. 24 that an attack was expected in 10 hours, but the advisory was later lifted.

Then, early on Feb. 25, radar picked up an unidentified target 120 miles away from Los Angeles.

At 2:15 a.m., anti-aircraft gun batteries were alerted and were ready to fire minutes later.

At 2:21 a.m., the regional controller ordered a blackout. Information centers were flooded with reports of enemy planes "even though the mysterious object tracked in from the sea seems to have vanished," the museum's Web site said.

At 2:43 a.m., planes were reported near Long Beach and one coastal artillery colonel spotted "about 25 planes at 12,000" feet over Los Angeles.

At 3:06 a.m., a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire.

Reports of what happened afterward vary.

"Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes," the museum's Web site states.

Among those anti-aircraft batteries responding were the crews at Fort MacArthur who, according to veterans' reports, fired about seven rounds of 3-inch shells from guns mounted on the upper reservation, near where the Korean Friendship Bell stands today, Nelson said.

The number and type of aircraft reportedly seen over various parts of the Los Angeles area widely varied from one to 220 and from airplanes to balloons to a blimp.

Some eyewitnesses said that there were no planes.

And some people, in later years, have claimed that the objects were UFOs.

"Although reports were conflicting and every effort is being made to ascertain the facts, it is clear that no bombs were dropped and no planes were shot down," the Western Defense Command said in a Feb. 25, 1942, Associated Press story.

Those conflicting reports included the military.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced that as many as 15 aircraft, "possibly piloted by enemy agents," had flown over Los Angeles the morning of Feb. 25, according to an Associated Press report.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said that "reports reaching him indicated the incident was a false alarm and that extensive reconnaissance had disclosed no evidence of planes," the same story said.

Whether an enemy aircraft flew over American soil, there were several casualties due to blackout conditions.

One occurred in Long Beach, where a police sergeant driving to headquarters was killed in a head-on collision with another driver, who had just come off duty at a shipyard.

Another death was attributed to a heart attack. A third man died of injuries suffered when he walked into an automobile while trying to catch a Pacific Electric train in heavier than normal morning traffic after the all-clear was sounded.

Despite the uncertainty over the cause of the events, public officials praised the efficiency of civil defense officials, air raid wardens and anti-aircraft batteries in response to the perceived threat.

Daily activities resumed after the all-clear was signaled at 7:21 a.m. although not without some glitches.

Newspaper reports noted pupils absent from school and employees late to work that day while others went hunting for souvenirs - anti-aircraft shrapnel.

stephanie.walton@dailybreeze.com

January 2, 2008

Wall Street Journal

What Kucinich Saw: Witnesses Describe His Close Encounter

by Michael M. Phillips

The 2008 presidential race has raised many questions about the candidates' personal histories. Will Barack Obama's past drug use preclude a White House future? Will Christian conservatives forgive Rudy Giuliani his two divorces? Will voters forgive Hillary Clinton for forgiving Bill?

And what exactly did Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich see hovering above actress Shirley MacLaine's house 25 years ago?

This fall, Ms. MacLaine revealed in her new book that the Ohio congressman had seen a UFO and felt "a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." In a Democratic presidential debate in late October, Mr. Kucinich acknowledged seeing something airborne that he couldn't identify and then defused the issue with a joke about opening a campaign office in Roswell, N.M., the capital of unexplained sightings.

Since then, the long-shot candidate has refused to elaborate on the experience.

Now, after keeping quiet about the incident for a quarter of a century, the two people who say they were at Mr. Kucinich's side that evening have come forward to describe an event which they say left them convinced that there's intelligent life in outer space.

"At no time did I feel afraid, even though I felt very small," says one witness, Paul Costanzo. "I sensed that I was in the presence of a greater technology and intelligence."

The close encounter, says Mr. Costanzo, took place in September 1982 at Ms. MacLaine's former home in Graham, Wash. -- an expansive estate on a ridge above the Puyallup River, with a view of Mount Rainier.

The 61-year-old Mr. Kucinich, who declined several requests to comment for this article, had been the wunderkind mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s and had met Ms. MacLaine through Bella Abzug, the late New York congresswoman and feminist. The actress says she quickly realized she and Mr. Kucinich were kindred spirits. Years later he asked Ms. MacLaine to be the godmother of his daughter.

"We just thought the same," Ms. MacLaine says in an interview. "We have the same political points of view."

When Cleveland voters ousted Mr. Kucinich after one tumultuous term, Ms. MacLaine offered him her home as a sanctuary where he could write his memoirs. He lived there for the better part of a year.

Also in residence was Mr. Costanzo, a Juilliard-trained trumpet player and jujitsu black belt, who worked as Ms. MacLaine's assistant, personal trainer and bodyguard. He and Mr. Kucinich became good friends, and Mr. Costanzo, now 55 years old, served as deputy campaign director and security chief for the congressman's unsuccessful 2004 presidential run.

Ms. MacLaine -- well-known for her fascination with things mystical and extraterrestrial -- was in Canada that weekend in 1982, performing her one-woman show. But Mr. Costanzo's girlfriend at the time, a model and actress who is now 50 years old, was visiting when the UFO incident took place. She spoke after Mr. Costanzo requested she do so, and on condition that her name not be published.

Here's what happened, according to separate interviews with Mr. Costanzo and his former girlfriend:

The day was strange from the start. For hours, Mr. Kucinich, Mr. Costanzo and his companion noticed a high-pitched sound. "There was a sense that something extraordinary was happening all day," says the girlfriend. She and Mr. Costanzo say that none of the three consumed alcohol or took drugs.

As they sat down to a dinner, Mr. Kucinich spotted a light in the distance, to the left of Mount Rainier. Mr. Costanzo thought it was a helicopter.

But Mr. Kucinich walked outside to the deck to look through the telescope that he had bought Ms. MacLaine as a house gift. After a few minutes, Mr. Kucinich summoned the other two: "Guys, come on out here and look at this."

Mr. Costanzo and his girlfriend joined Mr. Kucinich, where they took turns peering through the telescope. What they saw in the far distance, according to both witnesses, was a hovering light, which soon divided into two, and then three.

After a few minutes, the lights moved closer and it became apparent that they were actually three charcoal-gray, triangular craft, flying in a tight wedge. The girlfriend remembers each triangle having red and green lights running down the edges, with a laser-like red light at the tail. Mr. Costanzo recalls white lights, but no tail.

Mr. Costanzo says each triangle was roughly the size of a large van, while his former girlfriend compares it to a "larger Cessna, smaller than a jet certainly." Neither recalls seeing any markings, landing gear, engines, windows or cockpits.

The craft approached to within 200 yards, suspended over the field just beyond the swimming pool. Both witnesses say it emitted a quiet, throbbing sound -- nothing like an airplane engine.

"There was a feeling of wanting to communicate something, but I didn't know what," says Mr. Costanzo.

The craft held steady in midair, for perhaps a minute, then sped away, Mr. Costanzo says. "Nothing had landed," he says. "No strange beings had disembarked. No obvious messages were beamed down. When they were completely out of sight, we all looked at each other disbelieving what we had seen."

At Mr. Kucinich's suggestion, they jotted down their impressions and drew pictures to memorialize the event. Mr. Kucinich kept the notes, according to Ms. MacLaine, who said he promised her recently that he would try to find them.

"It was proof to me that we're obviously not alone," says the girlfriend.

The next day, the group spotted what they thought to be military helicopters buzzing around the valley where they had made the sighting. And the high-pitched sound remained.

Mr. Kucinich called Ms. MacLaine in Canada to tell her what had happened. "He said it was beautiful, serene, and it moved him," says Ms. MacLaine, who is supporting Mr. Kucinich's candidacy. "He was not afraid of it, let's put it that way. Seeing something that close and sophisticated and gentle."

Ms. MacLaine says she has seen UFOs from a distance in New Mexico and Peru, but never up close. She was envious. "I'm the one who reports them, but they never make close visitation. What am I doing wrong?"

None of the three reported the incident to the authorities. And over the years that followed, they shared the story with very few people. "Unfortunately, people are ridiculed when they say they've had these kinds of experiences, which is why I never came forward with it," says the girlfriend.

Ms. MacLaine says she called Mr. Kucinich before she included his UFO sighting in her book, "Sage-ing while Age-ing," a recounting of her spiritual and professional journeys. "I can handle it," she says he told her.

More recently, Mr. Kucinich has dodged it. Approached by The Wall Street Journal for comment in December -- moments after he voted for a House resolution praising Christmas and Christianity -- Mr. Kucinich looked unblinkingly ahead: "I don't have any comment," he said.

Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

November 23, 2007

Trenton Trentonian

Jersey girl sparks orgy of UFO talk

by Rick Murray

It was a Jersey girl who masterminded the coming-out party for a cadre of international dignitaries pushing for the U.S. government to re-open a serious investigation into the UFO phenomenon.

Leslie Kean is the niece of Tom Kean, former two-term governor of New Jersey and lately the esteemed chair of the 911 Commission.

She was also one of the chief organizers for a recent conference staged at the National Press Club, during which former Arizona Governor Fife Symington, plus a former top FAA official, as well as governmental officials from various countries, talked turkey about UFOs.

Does Uncle Tom believe UFOs are real, as in “UFOs and you ... puffuct togethah!”?

His niece won’t say.

But Symington has become famous for his vivid description of his sighting of a huge delta-shaped aircraft that looked and moved like nothing on earth over the rugged Arizona landscape 10 years ago. Although acknowledging the craft didn’t appear to be of any human design, Symington, a former Air Force pilot, stopped short of saying he believed it to be a flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin.

He and 18 other dignitaries, including scientists and military leaders from countries as diverse as France and Iran, signed a declaration calling for the U.S. to resume the serious UFO investigations it abandoned some 40 years ago.

The declaration was the brainchild of Kean, a freelance writer and researcher who has made UFOs the focus of her work.

“I don’t know what UFOs are,” she said. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions.

Still, she said, the evidence is overwhelming that the UFO phenomenon must be reclaimed from the lunatic fringe and become the work of serious scientific and governmental inquiry.

Kean says the evidence is overwhelming: Thousands of credible observers worldwide — from airline pilots and astronauts to police officers and FAA tech personnel — have witnessed and carefully documented what are undeniably highly exotic, intelligently powered airborne phenomena.

“We do know there is a physical dimension to these things,” Kean said, alluding to the fringe theories about UFOs being part of the psychic or para-psychological realm.

“They have burnt people’s bodies, and we’ve had people actually touch them,” she said. “There’s no question we have to find out what these things are.”

Reliable and repeated reports from aviators indicate UFOS have regularly interfered with conventional aircraft, sometimes to the point of posing serious hazard, Kean supporters have noted.

To further the cause of intelligent UFO investigation, Kean has founded the Coalition of Freedom of Information, which recently pressed a law suit against NASA in quest of certain UFO files. Kean says a settlement was recently approved by a judge, which will compel NASA to disclose hundreds of such documents and provide copies to her.

Those files deal with a notorious incident in 1965, in which the government whisked away a downed UFO from Kecksburg, Pa.

“Witnesses described seeing a fireball in the evening sky, a controlled landing and a systematic military recovery of a spacecraft-like object,” Kean said. “As reported by local radio and newspapers, U.S. military personnel cordoned off the area, investigated the site and left without ever providing a full report of the incident other than to dismiss it as a meteor.”

No less a political celebrity than John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Clinton, has come out in support of Kean’s efforts.

“The time to pull the curtain back on this incident is long overdue,” Podesta said in a recent statement. “Leslie Kean’s victory is a triumph for open government and the spirit of inquiry.”

September 13, 2007

Canadian Press

Edmonton Conference Takes A Scientific Look At Whether We're Alone In The Universe

EDMONTON (CP) — After spending years laboriously searching for the faintest speck of evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, astrophysicist Jaymie Matthews says he wants far more than most to believe that aliens live among us.

"If they've come here, it means they've gotten here from a planet around another star, and that's my life's passion - I spend my life studying the light, the photons, coming from these distant suns, with telescopes, with instruments," said the University of British Columbia professor. "If I had the chance to go there and visit one, see it close up, and confirm or deny ideas I've had and expand upon them - hey, I'm first in line."

Researchers who study sightings of unidentified flying objects will get the chance to try to convince Matthews and members of the public that aliens have already made contact at a conference starting Friday called "UFOs and Intelligent Life in the Universe: Who's Out There?"

Speakers at the Telus World of Science include people who analyze UFO sightings from across Canada and the United States, as well as Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who has lectured on the issue for 40 years.

"There's an enormous amount of evidence with which most people, especially the noisy negativists, as I call them, aren't familiar," says Friedman. He cites physical traces collected from the ground after sightings of flying saucers and instances where many people in planes and at airports all saw the same unidentified objects.

But Matthews, the self-professed "party-pooping scientist" of the bunch, says he has heard these arguments before and is going into the conference a little like Daniel into the lion's den, ready for a tussle.

"I think it's important for me to convey the scientific perspective for this, and I will not be hiding my skepticism about what the other speakers are presenting," he said, adding with a laugh that his stance might not make him the most popular person there.

"But really I'm the only person that's presenting the 'scientific' perspective in this."

These divergent opinions are exactly what Frank Florian, director of space science, and others at the Telus centre were after when they came up with a sort of "science on the edge" series that will soon become a regular feature.

"We have to realize that science is an evolving thing. It's not static - we're always learning new things," he said, adding the science centre staff will stress such critical thinking at the conference.

"Science doesn't have all the answers, and any scientist that says we know everything already, they're not going to be doing good science."

Florian said they're expecting about 200 people to take part in the two-day conference. Various polls have suggested that many Canadians - ranging from 40 to 60 per cent - believe we're not alone in the universe. Even Matthews acknowledges that most astronomers, himself included, believe life exists elsewhere in the universe - they just don't believe it has made its way here yet.

Another speaker, Winnipeg's Chris Rutkowski, tries to walk the line between the divergent opinions held by Matthews and Friedman. He helps compile a yearly UFO sighting count for across Canada, and while he hasn't found any definitive evidence for aliens, he isn't ready to discount the more than 5,000 reports they've compiled over 20 years.

Between three and five per cent of the reports can't be explained, he says.

"These reports are not necessarily proof that the aliens are invading, but it is definite proof that there are some very puzzling cases that deserve further investigation and study."

This won't be the last look the centre takes at a controversial topic from a scientific perspective, said Florian.

They're planning similar seminars on topics such as ghosts and Bigfoot over the next year, in which they'll bring together both believers and those who say the science isn't there.

"We just want to take a look at these things from a scientific perspective, and just say 'What if?' "

"We really want people to scrutinize this stuff."

September 3, 2007

Charleston Daily Mail

Physicist to speak at city UFO summit

Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman arrives in West Virginia's capital Friday with "overwhelming evidence" that aliens from beyond have been visiting planet Earth for a long time.

Friedman is a keynoter for a special two-day UFO summit at the old Capitol Theater in Charleston, arranged by promoter Larry Bailey.

For almost half a century, Friedman has explored the UFO phenomenon and spent much of his time on the lecture circuit, meeting audiences on better than 600 campuses and appearing on national television interviews, including, of late, the "Larry King Show."

At every stop, his message never varies.

"UFOs are real, and the government has been covering them up in what I call the ¡cosmic Watergate,' " Friedman told The Register-Herald in a recent interview.

"I've never seen a flying saucer, but I've never seen a meteor or a gamma ray, but I think they're real, too."

No matter what side one takes in the UFO controversy, all must concede Friedman's scientific background.

For 14 years, he worked for no less giants than General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglass, TRW Systems and Aerojet General Nucleonics.

Friedman was the first scientific investigator to explore the Roswell incident and has been hard at it ever since, unearthing what he insists is a massive coverup by the government to deny the existence of alien craft.

"The flying saucer story is the biggest story of the millennium," he declares.

The linchpin of the UFO issue, of course, is Roswell.

It was there, back in 1947, that true believers say that two alien aircraft crash landed and the government recovered not only the debris from those ships but a number of alien bodies, but immediately moved into a sophisticated coverup to keep the lid on.

To cement the official lie that what landed was an aborted weather balloon, he says, the Army Air Force, as it was known back then, set loose such a device for the benefit of the press.

To those who mock his conclusions, Friedman is quick to ask if they have ever bothered to study the five major scientific studies used in his presentations. What he has learned is that 97 percent haven't.

Besides, scientific breakthroughs have seldom come without ridicule, even within the community of scientists.

In modern times, Friedman is swift to point out, the city of Troy, often dismissed as legend, a myth created in literature, was actually proven to have been a genuine place.

Skeptics often wonder why UFOs, if indeed real, haven't left behind some hard evidence and why they pick obscure locations such as a Kansas wheat field in which to set down, rather than downtown Detroit or bustling Dallas, For that matter, why hasn't a team of aliens touched down on the Rose Garden, walked up to the White House door and demanded to see the president.

Friedman alludes to violent contact between aliens and the U.S. Air Force -- a topic explored at length by the summit's other keynoter, author Frank Feschino -- as one reason.

August 27, 2007

Halifax Chronicle Herald (Nova Scotia, Canada)

Fredericton Honours World-Renowned Flying Saucer Expert

by Chris Morris

FREDERICTON — If alien visitors to Earth ever decide to formally introduce themselves to humankind, they should consider landing in Fredericton.

Not only is the New Brunswick capital friendly and accommodating, it's also the home of Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist, lecturer and world-renowned prophet of extraterrestrial existence.

The city of Fredericton is proclaiming today as Stanton Friedman Day, an homage to the 73-year-old UFOlogist who has talked and written his way to the top ring of the galaxy of believers who say Earth is being visited by aliens.

Friedman has built himself a reputation as the ultimate authority on flying saucers, alien abductions and the infamous Roswell incident, considered by many to be the definitive UFO event in world history.

This year marks the 60th anniversay of that day near Roswell, N.M., when the U.S. army claimed briefly it had recovered an unidentified flying disc — triggering a flying saucer frenzy that endures to this day.

Although the U.S. military later backtracked, insisting the object was just a fancy weather balloon, that only gave birth to Friedman's other major area of study — the so-called "cosmic Watergate."

Friedman says his personal success owes much to the fact that people have an endless fascination with space and the unknown.

"Can you think of anything that touches more deeply on who we are, where we stand and the mystery and the coverup?" he says in an interview from his comfortable Fredericton home.

"People are excited because it opens up the universe to wonderful possibilities."

Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside says Friedman is being honoured not only because of his tireless efforts in spreading the word about UFOs, but also because of his enthusiastic promotion of the city.

"Stanton has lived here for 27 years," Woodside says.

"He's not only a nuclear physicist but also a world-renowned UFOlogist. In just the past few months, he has appeared on Larry King Live, Fox News Live and he appeared on CBS Sunday Morning. He could live anywhere in the world but he has chosen to live in Fredericton. . . . We believe it is worth celebrating his celebrity."

Friedman, who was born and raised in New Jersey and began his career in California, says he's thrilled by the honour.

"I get friends in California saying to me, ‘Stan, don't you miss being in California? What are you doing back there?' And I say, ‘Yeah, I do miss the earthquakes and the horrible smog and the terrible traffic and the drive-by shootings and the drugs all over the place, but I've learned to do without those things.' "

Although Friedman has been a UFOlogist for more than 40 years, he has yet to see an alien spacecraft.

He says his belief is founded in the data he has uncovered over the years about flying saucers and various UFO events, most of it buried in U.S. government documents.

"I have never seen a flying saucer and I have never seen an alien. But remember, I chased neutrons and gamma rays for a lot of years as a physicist and never saw one of them either," he says.

"In fact, I've never seen Tokyo, but I'm convinced it's there."

Friedman, who refers to himself as "a wandering Jew," says he has so far lectured at more than 600 colleges, addressed more than 100 professional groups and toured all 50 American states, as well as nine Canadian provinces, the Yukon and 16 other countries.

He has no plans for retirement, but he admits he has been at it for a long time.

"One reason I'm beginning to feel old, I did Merv Griffin twice and he just died," he says ruefully.

"I have never seen a flying saucer and I have never seen an alien. I've never seen Tokyo, but I'm convinced it's there."

July 29, 2007

Do UFOs really exist?

Edinburgh Scotsman (UK)

by Marc Horn

IT'S the weird and wonderful place where the men in grey suits from Whitehall meet the little green men from Mars.

The Ministry of Defence has for the first time opened its real-life 'X Files', detailing how its experts have examined photographs of UFOs hovering over the UK.

While the images range from the baffling to the risible, there is no doubting the seriousness that officials reserve for the issue of extraterrestrial life.

Correspondence between the MoD and members of the public who report sightings of strange objects reveals that Whitehall mandarins remain "totally open-minded" about the existence of UFOs.

The letters - obtained by Scotland on Sunday through the Freedom of Information Act - confirm that the MoD has a procedure of scrambling fighter planes to confront any unidentified craft or object that enters UK airspace.

Do you have any photographs of UFOs?

Share them with us by emailing them to sospics@scotlandonsunday.com

However, there are hints that at least some strange objects seen in the sky are of a distinctly terrestrial provenance.

In one letter, officials admit that military helicopters carry out low-flying combat training missions across Britain, and apologise for any alarm they may have caused.

The MoD has confirmed it receives more than 100 reports of UFO sightings every year, many of which come from Scotland.

Last year alone, the Ministry was sent five sets of photographs and videos purporting to show UFO activity.

One was sent by a concerned resident who last March reported seeing silent superfast "triangular craft" and other strange objects in the skies above the south of England.
He enclosed a picture that appears to show a ball of light moving at speed across the sky with an illuminated trail in its wake.

A lengthy official response from the MoD's Directorate of Air Staff is at pains to reassure the individual.

It states: "We remain totally open-minded, but to date we know of no evidence which substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena.

"The MoD examines any reports of unidentified flying objects it receives, solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance; namely whether there is any evidence that the UK's airspace might have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised air activity."

The letter claims the Ministry could not justify spending public money on being an "aerial identification service", but stresses that every precaution is taken to protect the integrity of UK airspace.
It adds: "I should inform you that low-flying training takes place throughout the UK.

"In the event of conflict, helicopters are vulnerable to ground fire, and one of the vital skills that must be acquired by pilots is flying as closely as possible to the nap of the earth so that the aircraft is shielded and camouflaged by the features of the terrain.

"This type of training is spread as thinly as possible throughout the UK, so as not to concentrate activity over one area. I am sorry if this training has caused disturbance to you."
The MoD also received a succession of images of objects in the sky above Portsmouth harbour last July.

And in one decidedly eccentric letter last May, a concerned citizen warns the MoD that she and her husband are being menaced by invisible craft, the grey alien inhabitants of which have already abducted her in the past to "extract her DNA".

To support her case, she enclosed a photograph of an all-too-visible object (possibly a Frisbee or a satellite dish) "hovering" over a church.

In an impeccably polite response, MoD officials come to the sober conclusion that: "With regard to your particular observations, we are satisfied that there is no corroborating evidence to suggest that the UK's airspace has been breached by unauthorised aircraft."

In another response to an individual who claimed to have provided film evidence of UFO activity over the Clyde in Glasgow last year, an official states frankly: "I have viewed your video and I am content that it contains nothing of defence concern."

The MoD confirmed that in 2006 it received more than 100 reports of UFO sightings, including 12 from Scotland.

The previous year around 150 sightings were reported, with again a dozen coming from north of the Border. These included six reported sightings on the same day (September 14, 2005) in Fife and Perthshire of "bright white lights" in the sky.

The unidentified objects were sighted in Lochgelly, Glenrothes, Crieff, Letham, Blairgowrie and Kinross.

Nick Pope, who headed the MoD's UFO Project between 1991 and 1994, confirmed that reported sightings were taken extremely seriously.
"The MoD wants to know everything flying in the UK's air-defence range and investigate all sightings," he said.

Pope revealed that 95% of UFO reports turned out to either have obvious explanations or to be so vague that any investigation was impossible.

"The remaining 5% of cases were pretty interesting and remained unexplained even after a very thorough explanation. It doesn't prove that these objects were extraterrestrial, but you can't rule any option out."

The former MoD investigator even claimed that officials tried to copy the advanced technology of unidentified vehicles. "A number of reports were of silent triangular aircraft travelling at considerable speed," he said. "These and some other reports suggested some sort of propulsion system we would be extremely interested in.

"A lot of the serious UFO investigation was aimed at trying to ascertain things such as the aerodynamics of some of the UFOs, the avionics and the propulsion systems.
"We wanted to know if there was anything that we might learn from, regardless of what the source of these UFOs is.

Have you seen UFOs flying above Scotland or do you think the whole idea of little green men is pie in the sky? Tell us what you think and discuss extra-terrestrial matters with other readers.

June 17, 2007

Canadian Press

UFO group that offered briefings to GG pleased by pro-forma response

by John Ward

OTTAWA (CP) - A UFO researcher who offered to brief Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean on the presence of extraterrestrials is putting an optimistic spin on the pro-forma response he received from her office.

Victor Viggiani of Exopolitics Toronto, admits that the perfunctory reply could be seen as a polite brush off, but he's taking it as more than that.

The letter from the Governor General's office says Viggiani's concerns "would be best addressed by the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service."

You may wish to contact these organizations."

Said Viggiani: "You could interpret it in one way as a standard response. But we're interpreting it, I guess, in a positive way that we now have the Governor General's OK to pursue this thing in the Canadian security service . . . with her support.

"She's giving us sort of, quote unquote, her permission, consent, tacit permission to go forward with this."

In an e-mail to supporters, Viggiani said his group had "received direction from Jean's office to pursue this issue with Canada's space agency and CSIS."

The retired Toronto school principal has been a dedicated supporter of UFO research and a firm believer in extraterrestrials for years.

In a May 17 letter to the Governor General, Viggiani offered a private briefing by "citizen experts" including one-time Liberal defence minister Paul Hellyer.

Hellyer, a 1960s minister, has said he is convinced that UFOs are real and are evidence of extraterrestrial visitations.

He spoke at a UFO convention two years ago.

Viggiani's letter also asked: "Is Canada willing to be left behind the other G-7 countries as they begin to examine both the historical and future implications of contact with off-world civilizations?"

He believes that shadowy government agencies - and some governments - are aware of the existence of alien visitors and may actually have met them. He feels that governments are on the brink of announcing the extraterrestrial presence.

He also thinks that secret labs are reverse-engineering technology from crashed spacecraft that could solve energy and pollution problems forever.

He said he hopes the Governor General's letter will help him gain a high-level meeting with either the security service or the space agency.

"Any little bit of leverage that we can use to get people's attention in terms of who we notify about this ... we feel that this is very important."

At that meeting, he plans to lay out his group's documentation.

"What we want to do with them is ... brief them on what we know ... and just see what their response is."

He said he wants to know if there is a legitimate reason for keeping the reality of visiting aliens a secret.

"There may be an issue regarding this extraterrestrial presence that we may not want to know about," he said. "It may be something that's so clandestine and so dangerous for the human race to know that that's one of the reasons they're not releasing it.

"I'm not saying that that is the case. My opinion is just the opposite. They know about this and they're hiding it for other reasons."

Viggiani's approach to the Governor General comes 60 years to the month after the legendary incident credited with giving birth to the UFO phenomenon.

On June 25, 1947, a businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane on a business trip near Mount Rainier, Wash., when he saw nine strange objects in the sky.

He told reporters later that they seemed to be able to fly faster than the speed of sound - in a day before any aircraft had broken the sound barrier - and their movement was like a "saucer" skipped over water.

Thus, the phrase "flying saucer" entered the language. Within weeks, hundreds of similar sightings were reported and thousands more have been recorded in the last six decades.

Arnold died in 1984 at the age of 69.

June 20, 2007

Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

Maury Island's UFO: 60 Years Later, The Mystery Lingers

by Amelia Heagerty

Roswell, once just a military base in the New Mexican desert, is known today as the site of the United States' most high-profile and controversial UFO sighting and crash. But few Islanders know that Maury Island was home to the first alleged UFO sighting in U.S. history, and it took place weeks before two crafts fell from the sky in Roswell.

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the Maury Island Incident, as it was later dubbed in books and newspaper articles. It took place in June 1947, two years after World War II ended. The nation was abuzz with paranoia and suspicion, and it was in this atmosphere that first one, then two, then hundreds of Americans reported seeing strange, unidentifiable, usually saucer-shaped, objects whizzing through the sky.

These were the incidents that triggered UFO hysteria, which gripped the nation for decades and spawned countless movies and books. But it all started with one close encounter. One X file. It all started with Maury Island.

While no one can say for sure what happened that afternoon in the Puget Sound, after cobbling together the various eyewitness, secondary, government and media accounts, a story with a life of its own emerges:

At 2 p.m. on June 21, 1947, Tacoma seaman Harold Dahl was trolling the waters just east of Maury Island, looking for loose logs, which he collected and sold for profit.

"As I looked up from the wheel on my boat I noticed six very large donut-shaped aircraft," Dahl later told one of the investigators of the incident. "I would judge they were about 2,000 feet above the water and almost directly overhead."

He said the ships were 100 feet in diameter, had no "visible signs of propulsion" and made no noise.

One craft wobbled and dipped to about 500 feet, he told investigators. It then spewed what Dahl described as thin sheets of white metal and several tons of hot lava-like rocks or slag. As the slag rained down on Dahl, his son and his dog, it punched holes in the vessel, burned Dah's son on the arm and killed the family dog.

Another of the six saucers seemed to come to the assistance of the ship in distress, "jump-starting" it, according to Dahl. Then the crafts took off. Dahl gathered samples of the rocks and the white metal and went home for the night, shaken.

The next morning he had what modern ufologists refer to as the first encounter with a "Man in Black" — an ominous individual who warned Dahl his family would be in danger if he went public with his story, according to Kenn Thomas, who wrote the book "Maury Island UFO." Although Dahl had not yet told anyone about his UFO sighting, the man in black knew many details of the incident, he later reported. Dahl said he suspected the man was a government official.

Later that day, Dahl told his supervisor Fred Crisman about his UFO sighting. Crisman, dubious, visited Maury and collected his own samples of the slag. He then contacted Ray Palmer, an adventure magazine publisher, to see if Dah's story was fodder for his magazine.

The next day, three days after Dah's sighting, UFOs went from obscurity to front-page news. On June 24, 1947, U.S. Forest Service employee and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine "saucer-like" objects flying in formation at speeds of up to 1,200 miles per hour near Mount Rainier. Arnold contacted the press immediately, and the tale spread like wildfire. Soon, U.S. media were saturated with reports of Americans spotting UFOs, almost always saucer-shaped. "Flying saucer" became a household term.

Because Arnold had the eye of a highly trained pilot, his story became big news. Dah's story, however, remained obscure until Arnold was dispatched by Palmer to investigate just what it was Dahl saw off the shores of Maury.

Arnold flew to Tacoma in July 1947 and rented a room in the Winthrop Hotel, where, according to FBI reports, Arnold met with Dahl, decided the sighting was authentic and called two U.S. intelligence officers to tell them the news. The men, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank Brown, became the first two Army officers to investigate UFOs, Arnold said in a book he later wrote.

After Arnold phoned Davidson and Brown on July 31, 1947, they flew to Tacoma within an hour, gathering in Arnold's hotel room where they pored over the details of the incident and collected samples of the slag and white metal, according to Arnold.

The officers' plane was due back the following morning for inaugural Air Force Day ceremonies, marking the separation of the Air Force from the Army. So, although it was after midnight, they returned to their plane, allegedly carrying UFO slag and metal, and headed for Hamilton Air Force Base in California. Twenty minutes into the flight, their engine caught fire, igniting the left wing. The two crew members aboard the plane with Davidson and Brown parachuted to safety. But neither intelligence officer jumped nor radioed distress, according to news reports. Instead, both died when their B-25 plane crashed near Kelso, Wash.

The military promptly sealed off the crash site and cleaned up the rubble from the U.S. Air Force's first accident. But they left some of it behind.

Only a few locals knew the location of the crash, and none investigated it fully, LeFevre said. But in April 2007, now-owner of the site Bob Greear visited it, accompanied by LeFevre and Philip Lipson, co-directors of the Seattle Museum for the Mysteries.

The three retrieved a blackened, lava-like rock from the site, which now sits in their museum, as well as mangled pieces of the B-25 that went down that night.

Bill Beaty, a research engineer at the University of Washington and a member of the museum's board, analyzed the rock and found that it was "almost certainly an Earth rock." But more analysis should be done before writing the specimen off, he said.

After the fatal accident, the government staunchly denied any classified material had been on board the B-25.

But the media knew the names and mission of the deceased officers before the military released them. An anonymous caller contacted various Washington dailies on July 31 through Aug. 3, 1947. The caller gave such intimate details of the conversations that took place in Arnold's hotel room that Arnold thought the room was bugged. The identity of the caller remains unknown.

While newspapers differed on details, they were in agreement on one thing — the government wasn't telling the whole truth.

The U.S. military cited Dahl and Crisman's signed confession that the Maury Island Incident was a hoax. But upon government questioning, the two said they had only sworn their story was a fabrication to protect their families.

It wasn't until 1979 that the government declassified the FBI files admitting Davidson and Brown had been investigating the Maury Island flying discs at the time of their deaths.

"It didn't start with Roswell. It started here in the Pacific Northwest," LeFevre said of ufology. "People should be aware of that."

June 15, 2007

National Post (Canada)

Sixty Years Later, We're Still Alone: In June, 1947, an Idaho businessman invented the idea of 'flying saucers.' Thousands of supposed sightings later, the world remains alien-free

by Scott Van Wynsberghe

Sixty years ago this month, on June 25, 1947, an Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold showed up at the offices of an Oregon newspaper, the East Oregonian. He had quite a story to tell.

Arnold claimed he had seen something strange near Mount Rainier, in neighbouring Washington state, while piloting his own plane the day before. It was a bizarre formation of aerial objects scooting around at what he reckoned was over twice the speed of sound. The objects moved, he said, "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water." At that moment - as described by aerospace historian Curtis Peebles in his 1994 book Watch the Skies! - the concept of the flying saucer was born, and the UFO movement began to stir.

Exactly what Arnold saw remains uncertain, but he did not help his case when he fell in with Ray Palmer, a science-fiction editor who had been boosting the sales of his magazine by printing the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic about the existence of a scientifically superior race living under the earth. Palmer became such an unflagging popularizer of UFOs that Peebles has dubbed him, not Arnold, "the man who invented flying saucers."

Generations later, the Arnold incident still pretty much sums up the field of unidentified flying objects, as repeated in countless similar episodes all over the rural United States: Something supposedly was seen and reported-and then a lot of fuss is stirred up by an irresponsible element. Once the dust has settled, we invariably are left with no proof that the sky has yielded anything unusual, and so no proof to dispute the default assumption that we are alone in the universe.

This unchanging pattern over six decades should be sufficient grounds to dismiss the possibility that our earth is being visited by space aliens. But in case you aren't convinced, here are 10 more reasons.

1 Humanity has yet to detect a single, extraterrestrial civilization. For decades, the heavens have been scanned by both government and private agencies for unusual, electromagnetic emissions, with no significant result. A turning point may have been reached in 2000, when The New York Times, Time magazine and Scientific American all reported on the growing pessimism even among UFO enthusiasts.

This is as it should be, because much of their enthusiasm was based on false assumptions made by an astronomer named Frank Drake. In 1961, Drake devised a famous equation proving (he thought) that our galaxy was teeming with advanced species. Alas, in a 1997 book, Yes, We Have No Neutrons, science writer A.K. Dewdney showed that a simple - and logical - reinterpretation of the equation yields a result of just one species. "That," Dewdney commented, "must be us."

2 People have always seen too much in the night sky. Astrology, for example, has stubbornly survived, based on ancient, esoteric interpretations of random star patterns. Comets, too, have regularly been interpreted as mystical portents. We seem to have some inborn need to look to our sky in search of existential succor.

3 Human perception is shaky. By the mid-1970s, it was already understood by both UFO believers and skeptics that eyewitnesses could be wrong. J. Allen Hynek, a prominent believer, conceded in The UFO Experience (1974) that claimed sightings always occurred more often at night, when human visual perception is weakest. Philip J. Klass, a debunker, spent a whole chapter of his own UFOs Explained (1976) on the impossibility of estimating the size, distance, and altitude of an unknown, aerial object in the absence of any known point of reference. (A frisbee one yard away looks much like a giant flying saucer one mile away.)

4 Consequently, almost all UFO sightings are explainable. At a 1977 UFO conference in Chicago, American researcher David M. Jacobs observed that the rate for explainable sightings was "90% or more." In recent, annual surveys, Canadian researcher Chris Rutkowski has arrived at such rates as 83% (2003) and 88% (2006).

5 And the "unexplained" sightings may not be unexplained at all. So much is now known about CIA and Pentagon activities involving balloons and spy planes in the post-war years that the history of UFOs for that era has had to be completely rewritten. Peebles, cited earlier, is also an authority on U.S. aerial reconnaissance in the Cold War, and his book Shadow Flights (2000) makes clear that U.S. authorities chose to allow "UFO" sightings to spread rather than admit to the existence of widespread airborne intelligence. In one case, Peebles uses declassified records to produce an exact match between a balloon launch on May 21, 1952, and a same-day "UFO" sighting that was documented by flying-saucer enthusiasts Jim and Carol Lorenzen. Historian Gerald Haines has estimated that "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s" were caused by spy flights.

6 Nor is there a government conspiracy to conceal alien visitations. For example, in the case of the widely claimed "UFO crash" at Roswell, N.M., in 1947, a 1994 study by the U.S. Air Force found that reports of mysterious wreckage actually involved yet another intelligence effort. It was called Project Mogul, and it used specially equipped balloons to detect atmospheric traces of Soviet nuclear tests. One of the secret balloons came down at Roswell.

7 There are no alien abductions. In the late 1980s, UFO skeptic Klass noticed that almost all abduction claims came from the U.S. To him, that suggested a cultural problem, not a cosmic one. In 2005, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy argued that even the apparently sincere claimants of abduction were probably just victims of sleep-related hallucinations, recklessly administered hypnosis, and social influences.

8 UFO activists are their own worst enemies. A 1995 article in Saturday Night magazine detailed how abduction researchers muddied the waters for decades through unprofessional, investigative techniques. It was not until 1994 that the efforts of a Toronto-based psychotherapist, Dr. David Gotlib (who became aware of the problem through his patients), convinced them to adopt a code of conduct. (Meanwhile, in 1996, three UFO fanatics on Long Island were arrested for plotting to assassinate local politicians and officials suspected of covering up the "truth" about aliens.)

9 The study of UFOs is riddled with fraud and hoax. As early as 1950, a convicted swindler in Denver, Colorado, named Leo GeBauer began passing himself off as a UFO expert, "Dr. Gee." A few years later, Californian handyman George Adamski declared he was in contact with spacemen, but his only evidence was blurry photographs and witnesses who later recanted. From the late 1950s until his confession in 1966, U.S. Navy radio operator Z.T. Fogl mischievously spread doctored photographs across the flying- saucer community.

In the 1980s, the UFO world was rocked by a 1947 U.S. government document that mapped out a flying-saucer cover-up entitled "Majestic 12" (or "MJ-12"). The document was a forgery, and such activists as Kevin Randle have since denounced it. Beginning in 1991 (and as recently as 2002), British tricksters have come forward to admit responsibility for huge numbers of crop circles that appeared in their country.

10 In the end, UFOs are just an overgrown offshoot of science fiction. As noted above, science-fiction editor Ray Palmer was present at the birth of the field in the 1940s, but the groundwork was prepared as far back as 1898, when H.G. Wells brought out his alien-invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. Orson Welles turned that book into the infamous radio broadcast of 1938, and Kenneth Arnold's sighting occurred just nine years later. In turn, the flap caused by Arnold helped inspire science-fiction writers and filmmakers in the 1950s.

April 28, 2007

Guernsey Star (Channel Islands, UK)

Testing Is UFO Theory

Joel de Woolfson

The UFOs seen by two airline pilots earlier this week could have been military test planes.

Another pilot, Flybe's Troy Queripel, put forward thattheory yesterday.

"There is military air space all around Guernsey and there is a lot of activity in that space. We call them danger areas," said the 40-year-old.

"My theory is that it could have been some sort of military test aircraft that entered our air space by mistake."

The objects were seen by Aurigny captain Ray Bowyer and confirmed by the pilot of a Blue Islands aircraft.

Reports were sent to the Ministry of Defence for further investigation.

French military air space starts 20 miles west of Guernsey and occupies an area of approximately 150 square miles.

British military air space starts 40 miles north of Guernsey and Captain Queripel believes military involvement was the likeliest explanation.

"I am not trying to discredit anything that Ray said because I saw him 45 minutes after the incident and he was clearly shaken. He obviously saw something.

"But think about the stealth bomber and the U2 spy plane. They were being tested for years before anyone was aware of them.

"The stealth bomber had been around for 25 years before anyone knew about it. The first the Iraqis knew of it was when it was above them dropping bombs."

He said it is impossible to know what is being tested today.

'the U2 spy plane was taking photos over Russia and they knew nothing about it at first."

Captain Queripel, who has been a pilot for seven years, said military air spaces around the island are off-limits to commercial planes.

"They are called danger areas for a reason: enter them at your peril. You can ask for permission to go through, but it would usually be denied."

He added: "Two per cent of me thinks it was little green men, but the other 98% thinks it was the military testing new technology that we haven't even heard of."

April 26, 2007

Guernsey Star (Channel Islands, UK)

Pilot's UFO Shock

Joel de Woolfson

UFO sightings are being investigated by the Ministry of Defence.

Two experienced airline pilots on separate flights saw something up to a mile wide off the coast of Alderney on Monday afternoon. Surprisingly, Jersey radar equipment did not pick up the object, although an air traffic controller said he had received simultaneous reports from the Aurigny and Blue Islands pilots.

Aurigny's Captain Ray Bowyer, 50, said he saw the strange object during a flight from Southampton.

He spotted a bright-yellow light 10 miles west of Alderney while his plane was about 30 miles from the island and at 4,000ft.

"It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary," he said.

"I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realised it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a 737."

A 737 is slightly smaller than a jumbo jet.

"But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide."

As he continued his approach to Alderney, Capt. Bowyer saw a second identical object further to the west.

"It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away. It was closer to Guernsey."

The sightings come days after reports that scientists have discovered outside our solar system an Earth-like planet capable of supporting extraterrestrial life.

"I can't explain it. At first, I thought it might have been a reflection from a vinery in Guernsey, but that would have disappeared quickly. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes."

The sightings happened at about 3pm. Capt. Bowyer, who has flown commercial planes for about 20 years, said he had described the objects to air traffic control and filled in an incident report.

"As I got closer to it, it became clear to me that it was tangible. I was in two minds about going towards it to have a closer look but decided against it because of the size of it. I had to think of the safety of the passengers first."

He added that the experience had been quite scary.

"I"m certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I"m saying is that I have never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying."

Paul Kelly, 31, the air traffic controller who was on duty, said the Blue Islands pilot had made a similar report, but nothing had appeared on his radar.

"The pilot from Blue Islands was en route to Jersey at the same time and as he went past Sark he described an object behind him to his left," he said.

"The description was very similar to Captain Bowyer's and they described it as being in exactly the same place. But they were looking at it from opposite sides."

The pilot told him the object had been 1,500ft beneath his plane.

The Blue Islands plane was at 3,500ft at the time so, again, both pilots placed it at the same altitude.

"If the object was stationary, our equipment would not have picked it up because the radar would have screened it out."

April 22, 2007

Harrison Daily Times

UFO Conference Is Celestial Experience

By David Holsted

davidh@commpub.com

EUREKA SPRINGS — It's been said that Elvis, to satisfy a hankering, would fire up the jet and fly across the country to get a hamburger from a certain restaurant.

It would only make sense that extra-terrestrial beings, overcome by the munchies, would likewise fire up the flying saucer and travel across the galaxy to get some southern-zapped chicken from Arkansas. Or so suggested Ken "Casper" Bergeron of Fayetteville, whose passion is looking for UFOs.

"I don't know if they're looking for lunch or what," joked Bergeron, noting that many UFOs have been sighted around chicken farms in northwest Arkansas. "They probably have Buffalo wild wings where they come from, I don't know."

No UFOs were reported at the Sonic drive-in this past weekend, but plenty of earthlings were in town to talk about them.

Between 350 and 400 people made the trip, presumably in cars, to Eureka Springs for the Ozark UFO Conference at the Inn of the Ozarks. It was a time for greeting old friends and fellow UFO hunters, for swapping stories and relating experiences concerning UFOs, buying and selling books and other articles related to the subject and attending seminars conducted by some of the most respected UFO authorities around.

It was an eclectic group of stooped old men in suits, young men with pony tails, mountain men with beards wearing flannel shirts, matrons wearing jogging suits, Goth-like young women in black and others, diverse in their appearance, but united in their interest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The conference's motto, "They're Here!", pretty much summed up the feeling of most of the attendees.

"Call me a nut or whatever you want to call me," conference organizer Lou Farish said, "I've seen some things I can't explain."

Looking for UFOs

Although he believed wholeheartedly in the existence of UFOs, Bergeron took a lighthearted approach at times to the subject, as evidenced by his joke about ETs in search of KFCs.

Bergeron is the field investigator for the Arkansas chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, a national organization whose motto is "The truth is out there." Along with state director Norm Walker of Tontitown, Bergeron manned the MUFON table at the conference.

Bergeron said he goes out three or four times a week to look for UFOs and he is seldom disappointed. They're easily spotted if you know what to look for, he said.

Once, while at Devil's Den State Park, Bergeron noticed some clouds beginning to glow. There was no moon out that night, so the light source had to come from somewhere else.

"We know (UFOs) hide in clouds," Bergeron said. "I've seen them emerge from clouds."

According to Bergeron, UFOs are getting good at mimicking the flight lights on airplanes, further confusing spotters.

Bergeron does not subscribe to the theory that UFOs are piloted by beings who have traveled great distances across the galaxy. Rather, they are the original inhabitants of Earth, he said, who are "conducting their experiments on us."

Referring to the many caves in the Ozarks, Bergeron suggested that UFOs might have their bases underground. Farmers around Seligman, Mo., have reported lights that seem to be going into caves in the area. Using a Geiger counter, Bergeron said he has gotten indications of the presence of metal underground, such as some kind of machinery.

"It's just a matter of finding them," he said.

Warming to their task, Bergeron and Walker then related the story of the "Ozark Devil," a creature that was shot and killed near Clarksville. Strange animals are often reported during UFO encounters, they said. The dog-like animal was shot by a farmer who said it was stalking his cattle. The teeth were different than that of a coyote and the tail was bushier, the farmer reported.

A MUFON consultant in veterinary science concluded that the animal was not a dog. Rather, it had similarities to a wallaby, a small kangaroo. These included large erect ears, short woolly fur, a long tail, small forequarters and better developed hindquarters. Wallabies, though, are vegetarians and the Ozark devil had dog-like teeth. A MUFON field investigator had the carcass refrigerated should DNA testing be necessary.

Meeting ET?

Jason Startup, a Topeka, Kan., artist, stood next to a seven-foot polyurethane figure of a multi-armed, multi-eyed, multi-antennaed serpentine creature. Titled "Quetzalcoatl Reptilian Insectoid Hybrid," the figure represented what Startup imagined the Mayan god who imparted knowledge might have looked like.

Startup claimed to have had several personal encounters with creatures as fanciful as his sculpture. The first, he said, came when he was 10 years old. His mother had just put him to bed when saw a flash "behind the Lincoln Logs." A three-foot, tan creature with large round eyes and long arms then appeared.

The being seemed to exert some kind of control over Startup, because he couldn't move nor scream. As the creature took a step forward, Startup said, his mother could be heard moving in the hallway. The distraction momentarily broke the creature's power and Startup was able to scream and the visitor retreated.

Though his mother dismissed the incident, Startup knew

differently.

"I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt it was real," he said.

Startup has had subsequent dreamlike episodes in which reptilian beings, then a light bulb-headed alien creature, have appeared, each time exerting the same controlling influence over him.

Startup acknowledged that some might think he's crazy, but he remains convinced that what he saw was real.

"Through our perceptions, we dictate our reality," he said.

Only a weather balloon

"That's why I hate Fox News," said Sam Maranto, as the audience watched a television news reporter, through special effects, being "beamed" up by some alien force.

Maranto, the Illinois state director of MUFON, presented one of the programs at the conference. He spoke of "Cases from the heartland and beyond," particularly the UFO sighting at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in November.

Unlike almost every other UFO sighting, which seemed to take place in the middle of a desert or some Mississippi swamp (or an Arkansas chicken house), the O'Hare incident took place at a major airport in the middle of the afternoon. Maranto, an Art Buchwald lookalike, said witnesses described the UFO as a dark gray, metallic saucer.

After remaining stationary over the airport for some time, the saucer then took off at such a great rate of speed that it left a huge hole in the overcast skies, allowing a patch of blue to be seen.

Maranto said he is currently investigating 20 cases of UFO sightings.

On the screen behind Maranto there flashed the face of a meteorologist who was explaining a UFO sighting in the Chicago area.

It was flares suspended from a weather balloon, the meteorologist said.

A ripple of laughter went through the gathering of Ozark UFO conventioneers.

They knew better.

April 11, 2007

Canadian Press

Annual UFO survey records 736 reported sightings across Canada last year

by James Stevenson

WINNIPEG Aliens and spaceships are a bit passe these days, but 736 reported UFO sightings across Canada last year shows an "underlying, real phenomenon" going on, says one of the country's top UFO researchers.

"It's true, we don't have as many aliens on TV as we used to -- they used to be on commercials selling us everything from Pepsi to decongestants," says Chris Rutkowski, director of the Winnipeg-based Ufology Research institute.

"And yet the phenomenon persists, which to me says there is a basic underlying, real phenomenon that extends beyond media and pop culture."

Rutkowski's annual Canadian UFO Survey last year recorded the third-largest number of sightings in its 17-year history -- down from a record of 882 sightings in 2004.

British Columbia and Ontario had the highest number of recorded cases, but Saskatchewan posted an all-time record of 98 sightings.

The tiny community of Maidstone just east of the Alberta boundary accounted for more than half of the reports from Saskatchewan.

Barb Campbell, who now lives farther down the Yellowhead highway in Paynton, Sask., says she saw a dark triangle larger than a helicopter hovering in the sky above Maidstone last year.

"It was just above the glare of the street light, so you couldn't quite make out the whole thing, but it had a very unusual, strobing, eerie kind of light in the middle," she says.

"It made absolutely no sound whatsoever -- it was just really mind-boggling."

Campbell doesn't believe there's anything particularly alluring for extraterrestrials in Maidstone and says there's likely far more UFO sightings right across Canada each year that don't get reported.

Rutkowski, who wrote a book last year on Canadian UFO sightings, is quick to point out that no incontrovertible proof exists that any of the UFO cases involve aliens.

Most of the sightings are of strange lights in the night sky, with close encounters and reports of "classic" flying saucer shapes being relatively rare.

"It would be difficult to conceive of how aliens could travel here from out there."

Still, he says earthlings are a "relatively young civilization" surrounded by stars and planets that are older and potentially have civilizations that are much further evolved than us.

"Perhaps if we hang around another hundred, thousand or ten thousand years we might come up with a way to travel between the stars."

Of all the reports included in the 2006 UFO Survey, the most mysterious include the sighting of a huge, black, V-shaped object moving slowly out over the Newfoundland coastline last August.

Another incident was reported by a motorist outside of North Bay, Ont., who saw a cluster of blue-glowing orbs that zipped closely past his car and then hovered in some nearby trees.

Disappointingly enough, one of the biggest problems that Rutkowski and other ufologists face in their study of unidentified flying object reports is not a shadowy group of powerful people trying to obscure the truth. It's actually the Internet.

With no Canadian government department officially recording UFOs, THERE's NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY to keep track. And more Web sites are appearing all the time.

"There's so many people interested right now and they're setting up their own Web sites -- there's a confusion now. There's no one central place to report UFOs anymore."

Last month, the French government created a world-wide stir when its space agency published more than 100,000 documents online from its secret "X-files" relating to UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena.

The space agency said it made the documents public to draw the scientific community's attention to unexplained cases and because their secrecy generated suspicions that officials were hiding something.

April 11, 2007

Comox Valley Record

UFO Conference Is Celestial Experience

by Mitchell Smyth

RACHEL, Nevada — Take a turn off State Route 375 here in south-central Nevada, drive up a gravel road and you come to a place that doesn’t exist.

That, anyway, is what the U.S. government says.

To you and me the huge swath of desert west of Rachel is known as Area 51.

It’s where—depending on which stories you believe—the U.S. military is testing top secret weapons; or building flying saucers from the wreckage of crashed extraterrestrial craft (as in the movie Independence Day); or experimenting with something else that Buck Rogers or Anakin Skywalker would recognize.

Pentagon officials predictably deny all this, even deny that Area 51 exists, although they admit there’s a gunnery and bombing range somewhere around here. Maybe, I thought, I should have a closer look, so I took the gravel road.

It stopped me short at a gate in a perimeter fence. “Warning. Restricted area,” said a sign. Behind it, surveillance cameras swivelled this way and that on their stilts.

I was about to climb over the gate when I read the line in red paint on the sign: “Use of deadly force authorized.” I decided to go no farther (though I did disobey the further warning: “Photography of this area is prohibited.”)

“They wouldn’t have shot you,” UFO “expert” Chuck Clark assured me later. “But they’d certainly have arrested you if you’d gone in and you’d have been fined $600. It’s an expensive lesson.”

Clark, author of The Area 51 Handbook, has spent years trying to find out exactly what is happening in the top-secret installation. He and the other residents of Rachel, the closest town to Area 51, know that something is going on in their backyard. They’ve all seen enough strange sights through the years.

Many of these, says Clark, can be explained rationally. Flares, dropped for bomb tests, can be mistaken for UFOs.

And this is probably one of the places where top-secret aircraft, such as the U-2 spy plane of the 1950s and the B-2 Stealth bomber in the 1980s, were tested.

Still, he says, there have been other sightings that defy rational explanation. And that’s what brings the tourists, many of them “UFOlogists,” to Rachel. The government’s veil of secrecy helps fuel the rumours.

Many believe that in a morgue in Area 51 there are the bodies of those little grey men allegedly recovered from the crash of a “flying saucer” in Roswell, N.M. in 1947.

“As they say in The X-Files, ‘The truth is out there’,” says Rachel’s Pat Travis, the owner of The Little A’Le’Inn (“little alien,” get it?), a pub, restaurant and motel, and gathering place for the curious. (“Welcome UFOs and crews,” says one sign; another, beneath a drawing of a flying saucer, reads: “Self parking.”)

Rachel (population: 98) is the only town on the 158-kilometre stretch of two-lane blacktop Route 375 running alongside Area 51.

To help the tourist trade, the residents persuaded the state to designate 375 “The Extraterrestrial Highway,” and signs along the road now carry that name.

April 10, 2007

Star Phoenix

UFO Spotters Probe The Paranormal In Maidstone

by Peter Wilson

MAIDSTONE — There's no hesitation in the man's hand as he sketches the shapes of the UFOs he's spotted near this rural Saskatchewan community over the years.

"Once you've seen them, you never forget. The images are burnt into your memory," he says, taking a sip from his coffee cup in the truck stop restaurant outside this small town near the Alberta border.

These experiences with the unknown are not so bizarre, according to a recent report. Numbers released by the Winnipeg-based Ufology Research Institute show Saskatchewan posted an all-time record of 98 reported UFO sightings, and Maidstone accounted for more than half of those reports. That's a big chunk of the total 736 reported sightings across Canada.

Let's call this particular UFO spotter Dave, as he doesn't want his real name used because he feels his creditability as a federal employee might be tarnished.

Dave explains that the rocket-shaped craft he's drawn in the cafe along the Yellowhead was what he saw when he was a youngster. He'd spotted it when he was with his mother, but her attention was focused on pulling weeds in the garden as he observed the object. By the time the stunned six-year-old had alerted his mom, the UFO had vanished.

Dave's second drawing, a barrel-shaped object, was one he observed only a couple of years ago when he was driving on a rural road near town.

"It didn't look at all aerodynamic. It looked odd and moved slowly. It had a kind of panel on it and had two lines down the side," he says.

While there were no witnesses to these events, another encounter he experienced had another set of eyes to record the phenomenon. Driving with a friend one night, Dave and his companion noticed bright lights reflecting off their truck. They stopped the vehicle, jumped out and saw two bright lights in the night sky. As they watched, the lights merged into one solitary light before gradually shrinking in size and disappearing.

Barb Campbell, a former Maidstone resident who now lives in Paynton 25 kilometres farther down the Yellowhead highway, has made numerous UFO sightings in the area during the past three years. From a fireball that shot through the heavens, to what she describes as a triangular-shaped flying object that hovered in the night sky over Maidstone last summer, the UFOs she's seen have made indelible impressions on her.

One UFO encounter in Maidstone that she witnessed alongside her daughter has made a particularly strong impression.

"We were sitting outside watching the stars when a bright light appeared from the southwest, heading northeast. It grew brighter and larger and was flying as high as some helicopters we see around here," Campbell says.

Perfectly round, the object was silent and about 60 to 80 metres in diameter. From its underside glowed a constant yellowish-white light.

"It appeared right overhead, and I waved my arms and yelled to try and get a reaction, but the object carried on over Maidstone and out of sight."

Not surprisingly, Campbell strongly believes there's something very real about UFOs.

"I have seen enough evidence and talked to people who have had similar encounters to know there's something out there. It could be aliens or the military, I don't know, but I mean to get to the bottom of it."

That's one of the reasons she founded the Saskatchewan Provincial Paranormal Research Centre (SPPRC), which she runs out of her home. Through her website, www.spprc.org, Campbell and about 10 other observers scattered around the province record UFO sightings in Saskatchewan.

The small group of devotees connect the dots, and there are plenty of them, says Campbell.

"I think there are many people who have had UFO encounters who do not report them because they are afraid they're going to be called crazy. That's too bad, because the only way we're going to get to the truth is by telling our personal stories," she says.

While Barb and her colleagues continue to record their experiences on the website, other Maidstone areas residents are not so convinced that aliens and spaceships frequent their air space.

"Never seen one, ever," says Caroline Smith, who works at the seniors' lodge in Maidstone. "Mind you, that could because I spend too much time working inside. I never get to look up at the sky," she says with a laugh.

Jenna Wall is a high school student in town. She's surprised at all the national UFO fame her community has generated.

"Not only have I never seen anything like that, I don't know anyone else who (has)," Wall says.

Ken Reiter, administrator of the local RM of Eldon, is sitting on the fence as far as the sightings are concerned. There was a time when he used to think people who saw UFOs were wacko, but after a visit to a science centre in the U.S. in the 1980s he changed his mind.

"One display showed that there had been three documented almost identical UFO sightings within seconds of each other, all from places many, many miles apart. Now that makes you think," Reiter says.

April 8, 2007

Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK)

Deluded Geek Or Public Enemy No 1?

by Richard Elias

The question posed by the film poster asked: "Is it a game or is it real?"

The year was 1983 and the movie was WarGames and it told of a bored high school student called David Lightman who inadvertently uses his computer to gain access to the United States' nuclear programme.

Once logged in, Lightman, played by Matthew Broderick, is asked to take part in a game between the two world superpowers but it soon becomes apparent he is triggering Armageddon.

Sitting in a north London cinema 24 years ago, a teenage boy watched the movie, fascinated. It created in him a burning desire to learn about cyberspace and to understand every aspect of the then relatively-new phenomenon.

But today, Gary McKinnon probably wishes he had never paid his entrance money for the movie.

He is awaiting extradition to the US, accused of being a cyber-terrorist and the world's most notorious military computer hacker. US officials claim he made more than 50 alterations to top-secret computer programmes in 2001 to 2002 that cost them $1m to correct.

If convicted the softly-spoken Glaswegian, whose online name was "Solo", faces spending the rest of his life in a maximum-security jail as well as being hit with a $1.75m fine.

The most-likely destination is a cell in Red Onion State Penitentiary in south-west Virginia. Located in the town of Pound - population 1,089 and a place where they recently banned dancing because it "entices sin" - the jail is one of two 'Supermax' prisons in the state and has infuriated human rights campaigners with its ultra-harsh regime. According to a recent report, it "restricts inmate movement and activity to a far greater degree than other maximum security jails".

One ex-inmate recalled: "Upon arrival, I was told that I was at Red Onion now and if you acted up, they would kill me and there was nothing anyone could or would do about it."

Although 14 individual states have claimed McKinnon hacked into their computers, the state of Virginia has taken the lead in the case.

Paul J McNulty, the US Attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, issued the indictment against McKinnon on November 12, 2002, stating he had "accessed and damaged without authorisation computers belonging to the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defence and Nasa, and six computers belonging to a number of private businesses."

Just days later he was arrested on behalf of the Americans at the flat in north London which he shared with his then girlfriend. The fight against extradition, with McKinnon free on bail, has been ongoing ever since.

He is accused by the Americans of hacking into more than 90 top-secret military and Nasa sites, offences which he has constantly denied.

But last Tuesday, his campaign to stay in Britain was dealt a severe blow when the High Court in London ruled he could be sent across the Atlantic for trial. Lord Justice Maurice and Mr Justice Goldring stated they could not find any legal grounds to refuse the extradition application but added, however, that they had a "degree of distaste" for the way the American authorities had handled the situation.

McKinnon's legal team is now preparing a final appeal through the House of Lords to prevent their client from being extradited but the immediate future looks bleak for the 41-year-old.

The Scot has never denied accessing the military computer sites from his London flat but his defence is he was looking for evidence of UFO activity which, according to him, the Pentagon had deliberately suppressed.

He said: "I wanted to find out stuff the government would not tell us about."

This interest in UFOs goes back even further than his trip to the cinema 24 years ago.

McKinnon spent the first six years of his life in Glasgow but his parents split up and he moved with his mother and stepfather to London.

It was his stepfather who was to open the youngster's mind to stories of spacecraft and alien beings. He had been raised in Bonnybridge, near Falkirk, a spot which UFO aficionados from around the world claim is an alien spacecraft hotspot.

McKinnon became hooked on science fiction and, by the age of 14, armed with the computer his parents had bought him, he began to experiment.

The catalyst for his later successful attempts to hack into some of the world's most secretive programmes was, he says, WarGames, prompting him to spend more and more time sat alone, smoking cannabis, trying to emulate what Broderick had done on the silver screen.

McKinnon has always denied being a hacker - despite admitting voraciously digesting the Hacker's Handbook, a notorious self-help guide to exploring the limits of cyberspace, as a teenager. He prefers to describe himself simply as a "computer nerd".

His defence is that many of the sites he visited, despite holding top-secret government documents, had little, or in some cases, no, security systems in place.

But one of the major problems facing McKinnon and his defence team is the timing of his hunt. When he was scouring confidential sites, America was reeling from the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Following his arrest, McKinnon made another serious error. Offered a deal which would have brought him a relatively light four-year jail sentence in the US, he turned it down because of concerns about how the trial would be conducted.

McKinnon threatened to go public with what he had learned. But by his own admission he had collected little information of value and says he was "stoned" most of the time he was online.

Infuriated, the US Justice Department appeared to decide to make an example of the man they dubbed the "worst military hacker of all time".

All McKinnon can do now is hope that the House of Lords rules in his favour. Otherwise, he will be handed over to US Marshals, handcuffed and shackled, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and put on a plane heading across the Atlantic.

By fighting extradition here, his chances of getting bail in the US are virtually nonexistent.

McKinnon admits to being "terrified" at the thought of going to jail but he realises his fate is out of his hands. "I won't stand a chance in hell if I am extradited," he said. "It'll be Gary down a black hole and you won't see him again."

How he must have wished he had followed the advice given by the computer to Broderick at the end of WarGames. It told the fictional hacker: "The only winning move is not to play."

Hacked off

US student Robert Morris became one of the world's first hackers in 1988. Just five years after the launch of the internet, he set off a computer worm virus that spread to 6,000 networks.

Kevin Poulsen, Ronald Austin and Justin Peterson rigged a Los Angeles radio phone-in to ensure only their calls got through. In 1993, they won two Porsches, $20,000 in cash and holidays in Hawaii.

In 2000, the ILOVEYOU virus was sent via e-mail attachment. It deleted programs and damaged 10% of UK businesses. Just months later Microsoft admitted its corporate network had been hacked and its source code for future Windows products had been seen.

Raphael Gray, 19, from Wales, sparked a global investigation by accessing the details of 23,000 internet shoppers in five countries and posting some on websites in 2001.

April 5, 2007

Victoria Times Colonist (British Columbia, Canada)

A Victorian Encounter Of The Blurred Kind

by Jack Knox

It was around 10 p.m. one night in mid-March that the Victoria woman, standing in the driveway of her acreage, saw a UFO.

"I heard a very powerful blowing noise, almost a white noise as it grew louder just to my left and just over the tree line. What came first was a very large, but dull, flashing red beacon in the centre of what began to appear as a massive triangular shape. It was like nothing I have ever seen before.

"As it approached very low, just over the trees and my house, it had a very strange white light on each side of the triangle; they seemed to be extremely bright but did not illuminate the ground at all. As it crossed overhead I thought I should be able to get a good look at it as it was a clear, starry night, but it brought a darkness with it. Darker than the night. Blacker than black, making it unable to distinguish any actual lines."

Well, must admit that's not something you see every day (unless you've been hanging around crematoria with Keith Richards), which is why Ufologist Brian Vike, after receiving the written report, forwarded it to the TC.

Vike lives up in Houston, B.C., where for the past seven years he has run HBBC UFO Research - collecting reports on unexplained sightings, doing an Internet radio show.

He gets maybe 900 UFO reports a year worldwide, had 274 from Canada alone last year. Of those 274, he says maybe 200 could be readily explained away - aircraft, Venus hanging low on the horizon, that sort of thing. He tries to weed out the hoaxers and kooks, discounts any report where the e-mail address bounces back. That still leaves plenty that's intriguing.

Vike fielded a spate of calls from Ontario in March. "We had reports of triangles. We had disc craft. We had metallic balls." Some people reported lights zig-zagging across the sky. BBC Radio interviewed him about all that this week.

Usually it's B.C. that is Canada's UFO-sighting capital, but lately it's been slow here. "It's eieather has been so crappy." Got to keep a sense of humour in thther because the aliens went to Florida for a vacation, or the we UFO business.

Anyway, Vike was happy to get that report from Victoria. "From the position of the lights and the shape of the blackness I am sure it was a triangle, quite flat in depth," the woman's statement read. "It moved in a very strange manner, almost hovering, this incredibly massive - about 200 feet across and almost that long - powerful craft moving at maybe 10 mph just over my head. It made the strangest noise, not like any kind of engine or jet. It was all very mesmerizing, and thinking back I really was very oddly stunned. I wanted to run to the house for my son but I couldn't take my eyes off it. I watched as it went over my house maybe 200 feet. ...It took up a bit of speed and altitude as it flew away. The lights very clearly started to move horizontally, left and right very quickly. It veered off towards the ocean and was gone."

Now, being a professional skeptic, my automatic suspicion is that the writer either A) was pulling Vike's leg, or B) took the brown acid at Woodstock.

On the other hand, in a world in which there are so few unexplored horizons, it is oddly comforting to remember that improbable doesn't equal impossible, that unproven doesn't mean disproven, that you can never really shut the door.

"I do believe in my heart that there is something out there, some kind of life," says Vike.

March 28, 2007

Moline Dispatch

Silvis Woman Claims To Have Seen A UFO Maybe

by Anthony Watt

At first, she thought what she was seeing was something ordinary.

"As I pulled out of my driveway, I noticed it," Theresa Sinclair, 58, Silvis said. "I thought it was an airplane that was very low."

It was about 6:30 a.m. March 23, and Ms. Sinclair was on her way to her job at the Rock Island Arsenal. What she saw through the open window of her car was a triangular shape in the sky, with bright red, green and white lights along its edges, outlining the shape.

When Ms. Sinclair first saw it, the triangle appeared to be over a high-rise building at the intersection of 10th Street and Crosstown Avenue. She couldn't say what distance it actually was away from her, but it appeared big.

She said she then looked away because she was concentrating on driving west on Crosstown, but when she looked up again, it was moving -- fast.

"It just, like, zipped to Jewel (grocery store), then it zipped to over by Colona Road," Ms. Sinclair said.

She stopped her car at the intersection of Crosstown and 10th Street and got out to have a better look.

"I decided I was intrigued at this point," Ms. Sinclair said. "Then I looked up, and it was gone."

The whole episode only took three or four minutes, she said.

The whole time she observed the object, she did not hear anything like the sounds of jet engines or helicopter blades. It appeared to stay the same distance away from her the whole time.

"I heard nothing, I heard nothing at all," Ms. Sinclair said.

And apparently neither did anyone else.

Local and federal authorities, including the National Weather Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and Quad City International Airport said they received no reports of anything odd in the sky during that time.

Ms. Sinclair said she did not report it either. "I was just so taken aback by it," she said.

She did tell some of her co-workers about it, though. Jokes about little green men ensued.

"You laugh, but stranger things happen," she told them.

The next day, Ms. Sinclair went out at the same time, but did not see anything. There wasn't a second show.

She said Wednesday that she's not on any medications, had not had any alcohol, nor suffered any recent blows to the head.

Many officials, and some local astronomers, also could not or, in some cases, would not, explain what she saw.

"Chances are she wasn't seeing what she thinks she saw," said Black Hawk College professor Richard Harwood, who teaches geology, geography and astronomy.

He said that Saturn and Jupiter would have been visible in the sky as bright stars that morning. It's possible one of them could have appeared moving because Ms. Sinclair's vehicle was in motion.

"In her case, who can say," Mr. Harwood said. "Nobody else saw it, it's hard to tell."

When asked what she thought it was, Ms. Sinclair replied with a laugh that it was an unidentified flying object, or UFO.

But then she added, "I can't say."

"I would like to have been able to say it was a plane or a weather balloon," she said. "But I don't know. It was unidentifiable."

March 23, 2007

National Post

Former governor’s ‘alien’ admission

by Mary Vallis

A former Republican governor of Arizona says he saw an unidentified flying object in a famous incident 10 years ago while he was in office.

In interviews this week, Fife Symington insisted he witnessed a strange, otherworldly event on March 13, 1997.

The controversial incident has become known as the Phoenix Lights. Hundreds of residents of Arizona reported seeing a strange string of lights hovering in the sky on that clear night; some also claimed they had spotted a massive triangular craft.

“The lights were really brilliant. And it was just fascinating. I mean, it was enormous,” Mr. Symington told CNN. “It just felt otherworldly. You know, in your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly.”

It was “probably one form of an alien spacecraft,” added the Vietnam Air Force veteran, and challenged the U.S. Defense Department to prove otherwise.

Earlier this month, an official with the Air National Guard told the Arizona Republic the lights were flares dropped night-time exercise.

Political experts and those investigating the Phoenix Lights say Mr. Symington’s statement lends credibility to the UFO theory.

“It’s going to have a huge impact on this story,” said William Warwick, an investigative journalist who is organizing a conference for witnesses of the Phoenix Lights. Mr. Symington is the highest elected official in the country to admit to seeing the lights, he noted.

“I think it’s going to embolden a lot of other witnesses that have a lot of other pertinent information, been holding back these past 10 years, to come forward and speak.”

Bruce Merrill, a political scientist at Arizona State University, said Mr. Symington is a “bright guy” and “very credible person.”

“The fact that people like that say they saw something and that it needs to be investigated clearly gives it more credibility,” he said.

Mr. Symington, who worked as a real estate developer, was forced from office a few months following the sighting after he was convicted of bank fraud in his real estate dealings. The verdict was
overturned in 1999; Bill Clinton issued a pardon shortly before he left office two years later.

The Republican re-invented himself as a pastry chef and went on to co-found the Culinary Institute of Arizona, based in Scottsdale. He said he did not reveal that he had witnessed the lights in 1997 because he did not want to “stir the pot.”

Indeed, he went to great lengths to make people laugh about the incident, staging a press conference and saying he would order an investigation. A member of his staff then paraded in front of reporters in an alien mask and handcuffs.

“Many witnesses were more than offended,” said Lynne Kitei, a doctor who put her medical career aside to study the sightings. “They knew that what they had witnessed on March 13, 1997, was something extraordinary.

“And instead of answering their pleas for an investigation and explanation, their elected official was making jokes.”

Mr. Symington now claims he was trying to introduce a little “levity” to the situation.

February 28, 2007

Toronto Sun (Canada)

Paul Hellyer has a unique solution to global warming and the gas shortage -- ask aliens what makes their saucers fly

by Mike Strobel

Al Gore is the poster boy for global warming.

He sure is. Look at him.

There's a man who has never run for a bus.

All that gushing, honey love spread over him by other rich and famous people at the Oscars worries me, too. Watch for a new hole in the ozone 20 klicks above the Kodak Theatre.

Now the radio says Gore's mansion in Tennessee devours $30,000 a year in hydro and gas, at a clip 20 times the U.S. average.

If this emperor has no clothes, why should he? His thermostat is set on high.

So if not Al Gore, who will save us from drowning in glacial melt and keep beach resorts from Nunavut?

I find one answer in the lakefront office tower where my mom happens to hang her shingle.

Hon. Paul Hellyer. Remember him? Defence minister under Pearson. Liberal leadership contender. Trudeau's transport minister. The Belinda Stronach of his day. Grit. Tory. Grit. He even toyed with the NDP.

'OPEN YOUR EYES'

These days he dallies with another airy acronym. UFO.

"Open your eyes," he tells me. "Two days of research and you'll believe it too."

I will ask the United Airlines workers who saw a big, metallic Frisbee over Chicago's O'Hare airport last November.

I will not ask the air traffic controller who quipped: "To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable."

What have UFOs to do with global warming, or the GTA gas shortage?

They're the cure, says Hellyer, 83. Here's how he sees it:

When a UFO crashed in Roswell, N.M., in 1947 (oh, stop being such a cynic), it offered a techno treasure trove.

From that wreck, and 77 others, the military gleaned hardware that was out of this world.

The micro-chip, for instance. Bullet-proof vests. Fibre-optics. Tupperware. (Just kidding). Lasers. Star Wars weaponry.

"And particle guns."

What?

"High voltage. They fire something like controlled lightning."

Aha. Ray guns.

"Yes. The U.S. air force probably has them by now."

The big prize, though, is what makes those saucers fly.

Imagine a vehicle that does 30,000 km/h or hovers on a dime, regardless of whether Esso has any gas.

NO GREENHOUSE GAS

Best of all, no exhaust. No stench. No smog. No greenhouse gas. No ice cap melt. No drowned continents. No Al Gore?

The U.S. must have figured out the aliens' propulsion by now, says Hellyer.

Likely it is zero point energy, an idea floated by Einstein, which is infinite, pollution free and exists all around us.

Think of it as you queue for rationed gas.

The perfect fuel.

(Or is it? Why do flying saucers keep crashing?)

"That's why I've gone public. I want the Americans to tell us if they have it. Or how close they are.

"The people of the world have the right to know, too. To save this planet."

And if the Americans haven't figured it out?

"Instead of trying to shoot down those guys, we should invite them down to tell us what we need to know."

Which guys?

"The aliens. I'm told there's more than one species."

How do we get them to come?

"I'm told there have been face-to-face communications."

I wait for him to cackle or make monkey sounds or jump on the desk of his lakeview office. But Hellyer has unwavering, sane eyes, pale and clear. He is 6-foot-3 and every inch a gent.

He will be on hand next Wednesday for the Toronto screening of the UFO documentary Fastwalkers, so called for a military code name. (See exopoliticstoronto.com).

Hellyer has never seen a UFO. "I've never seen the Taj Mahal either, but I know it's real."

Maybe he is right. Maybe oil execs are not the only slimy green men in the energy business.

Beam me up, Scottie.

Anything's better than a buck a litre.

January 4, 2007

Newsweek

Not a bird or a plane?

by Jessica Bennett

Jan. 4, 2007 - The Federal Aviation Administration says it must have been a weird weather phenomenon, and United Airlines denies any knowledge of the case. But though it has been two months since what appeared to be an unidentified flying object (UFO) was spotted over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the incident is still raising questions about what exactly was seen and whether the authorities are trying to downplay it.

As many as a dozen United Airlines employees swear the mysterious object they saw on Nov. 7 was real—hovering for several minutes above the United Airlines terminal and then shooting up through the clouds so powerfully that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies. "At first we laughed to each other" when the report came over the radio, a witness told the National UFO Reporting Center, a Seattle-based nonprofit that maintains a UFO hotline and is listed as a resource in the FAA's official Aeronautical Information Manual. But then I saw the "dark gray, hazy, round object" and seconds later "there was an almost perfect circle in the cloud layer where the craft had been." His statement is published on the Web site of the National UFO Reporting Center, which says its policy is to protect the anonymity of its witnesses.

So was it a UFO? A secret military aircraft? And why did it take two months for the details to come out? It may sound like the oldest hoax in the book, but the United workers—including several pilots—who say they saw the object are reportedly upset their claims have been ignored. The FAA has said it won't be investigating the incident further, and it wasn't until this week that The Chicago Tribune broke the story, speaking to several unnamed witnesses after a tip-off from the head of the National UFO Reporting Center. Peter Davenport heads that organization, and has a lot to say about the way the incident has been handled. A self-described UFOologist, Davenport spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jessica Bennett. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Your Web site has documented more than 3,000 UFO sightings just in the last year. Is that normal?
Peter Davenport: We get reports that number certainly into the thousands, and sometimes into the tens of thousands.

How many of these do you believe are real, and how do you determine whether they are real?
The overwhelming majority of [reports we get] are not UFOs. Many people report stars and planets and aircraft and humming birds and pelicans and Frisbees and hubcaps—there are thousands of things people can look at and not be able to identify. We rely on our experience to try to quickly identify those cases that are probably not genuine UFOs.

How long have you known about this particular incident in Chicago?
I found out about this on the day of the event. We got multiple communications. We released the information about the 12th or 13th of November, put it on our homepage, and, frankly, I was flabbergasted that nobody was paying attention.

Do you think there has been an effort to downplay it?
My strong suspicion is that this case showed up on the 8th of November—the day after it happened—in the intelligence briefing document that the president apparently reads every morning. Are we to believe that a UFO can appear over a major U.S. airport and the American intelligence community is not informed of it? That proposition is absurd.

If that's the case, why would the federal government keep those findings from the public?
You've got to go directly to the government or to United Airlines [for the answer to that question]. I'm shocked by their response to this, except for the fact that we've seen this kind of response—certainly on behalf of the government—for the past 59 and a half years.

What happened 59 years ago?
That takes us back to the first formal sighting that caused a ripple in the press, which was June 24, 1947, here in the state of Washington. That was Mr. [Kenneth] Arnold, who saw a string of [disc]-shaped objects streaking down the Cascade Mountains [near Mount Rainier]. That was the event that gave us the term "flying saucer."

Still, there are a lot of UFO skeptics out there. What do you say to them?
I've been asked that question about half a dozen times before. Skeptics are free to think whatever they wish. All I do is release the information—hopefully, accurate information—and people may read it or consume it anyway they wish. But many of these hard-boiled skeptics simply do not look at the data. They have a preconceived notion of how the universe works—what is possible, what is not possible—to the extent that they no longer have to look at data.

What is that data?
The data are the cases that come in, the information that we're receiving on a steady basis—over the telephone, over the Internet, photographs and so on. Probably the most reliable source of data that we receive is eyewitness accounts from responsible witnesses who seem to be independent of one another. That's not true of all the people who contact us, of course. We get calls of many, many stripes. But we focus on the cases that are very well documented—as in the case of the O'Hare sighting.

So you've spoken to the witnesses in this case.
Yes, that's how we got the information.

And you think they're credible?
The witnesses [in this case] are not only responsible but they're qualified by virtue of the fact that they've worked in the aviation industry for decades—each one of them. They're familiar with aircraft, they're familiar with weather phenomena. United Airlines and the FAA have apparently taken the position that it either didn't happen, or if it did happen it was a weather aberration. Well, the written communications that I have in my possession clearly belie that position.

So you obviously believe that UFOs do exist.
My objective is to give the American people the information that they need to have, in my opinion, in order to make a rational decision with regard to the UFO phenomenon. In a sense, I guess I'm an advocate for the notion that our planet is visited on a frequent basis by these things we call UFOs. If my theory and the theory of many other UFO investigators is correct, then the U.S. government certainly knows about this [phenomenon], and has known about it for at least six decades and is not sharing that with the American people. I believe that is wrong.

How do you define a UFO, and what elements of that definition were visible in what was seen at O'Hare?
From my standpoint, [UFOs] are those objects that exhibit characteristics that strongly suggest that they, almost without a doubt, are not of man's manufacture. That statement I think is supported by the fact that these UFO sightings appear to go back hundreds or thousands of years. We have reports on our Web site from the 1930s, from the 1890s, from 1860, and I have two written reports on file—one from China in the 12th century A.D. and a report from ancient Egypt from 1770 B.C. So could that be the U.S. Air Force experimenting with aircraft? Clearly not. In the case of this object at O'Hare, [the object sighted] seemed to accelerate so fast and disappear so fast that people's eyes were unable to follow it, and they didn't know which way it had gone. Now, could that be of man's manufacture? I doubt it.

Why is there so little debate on this subject?
People think that UFOs are strange. But in my opinion, the reaction of the American press to the UFO phenomenon is stranger still. They're not interested in what I consider to be the greatest scientific question of man's existence of all times: are we alone in this galaxy or are we not? From my vantage point, the clear answer to that is that we're not. And it appears that these objects visit our planet on a regular basis.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16472286/site/newsweek/

September 25, 2006

London Guardian (UK)

Is There Anybody Out There? How The Men From The Ministry Hid The Hunt For UFOs
MoD tried to cover-up secret investigation unit
10,000 eyewitness reports 'mostly due to weather'

by James Randerson
Science Correspondent

The Ministry of Defence went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its true involvement in investigating UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under the "30-year rule" that would have revealed the extent of the MoD's interest in UFO sightings.

In particular, the ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated to UFO investigations within the Defence Intelligence Staff. UFO conspiracy theorists have likened the unit, called DI55, to a sort of "Men in Black" agency for defending the Earth against invasion but the released documents show this is far from the truth. One 1995 memo from DI55 to the MoD's public "UFO desk" said: "I have several books at home that describe our supposed role of 'defender of the Earth against the alien menace' - it is light years from the truth!"

The files were made public following FOI requests by David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and his colleague Andy Roberts.

"These documents don't tell us anything about UFOs but they do show how desperate the MoD have been to conceal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject," said Dr Clarke.

The trail begins with a request, in 1976, from a UFO enthusiast called Julian Hennessy for access to the MoD's records on UFO sightings. A note from the UFO desk to the MoD's head of security on March 23 shows that officials intended to refuse him access on the grounds that the files contain confidential information and "very little of value to a serious scientific investigator".

But the note continues: "This is not to say that the investigation is not taken seriously. The branches have their own methods - and [the public UFO desk] has no 'need to know' about them - but we are aware that DI55 for example sometimes makes extensive inquiries.

"It is undesirable that even a hint of this should become public and we are currently consulting the [Air Historical Branch] on ways of expurgating the official records against the time when they qualify for disclosure [at the Public Records Office]."

Hearing of the background to his fob off 30 years ago Mr. Hennessy, who is a local magistrate, was not surprised. "Everything led me to believe there was a major cover up going on," he said" T hey didn't want to let the public know just how interested they were in these phenomena."

Attempts to alter the public record went on into the 90s. In a note dated April 28 1993 from DI55 to the public UFO desk the unnamed author argued the unit's involvement should be excised from records due to be released under the 30-year rule. But the cat was already out of the bag. A clerical error in 1983 had meant that the distribution list was incorrectly left on a publicly released UFO-related document, so UFO enthusiasts were already asking questions.

"Since then they have obviously been bombarded by people saying who is this DI55, what do they do, what is the extent of their involvement," said Dr Clarke.

Eventually, DI55 decided to allow its involvement to be made public. A note from DI55 to the public UFO desk on 5July 1995 said: "I see no reason for continuing to deny that the [Defence Intelligence Service] has an interest in UFOs. However, if the association is formally made public then the MoD will no doubt be pressured to state what the intelligence role/interest is. This could lead to disbelief and embarrassment since few people are likely to believe the truth that lack of funds and higher priorities have prevented any study of the thousands of reports received."

At this point someone, presumably from the public UFO desk, has scribbled "ouch!" in the margin.

"The lengths they went to to remove any mention of the Defence Intelligence Staff's central role in investigating sightings suggests they had something to hide," said Dr Clarke. "But what they were hiding was not evidence of ET visits but embarrassment at the fact they were never allowed to spend public money on investigating the subject in any depth." The full extent of DI55's involvement has subsequently been made clear by a report released to Dr Clarke in May and reported in the Guardian. That threw up a 500-page document which brought together everything the unit knew about UFOs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) as the MoD prefers, including more than 10,000 sightings. It said the existence of UAPs was "indisputable", but blamed the most vexing sighting on airborne "plasmas" formed during "more than one set of weather and electrically charged conditions", or during meteor showers.

Sighting aliens or otherwise?

August 10 1965 A man reported seeing a crimson ball fly out of the side of a hill in Warminster, Wiltshire. A fortnight later, another man photographed a UFO in the centre of Warminster. In 1994 it was claimed the photo was a hoax and the object was made from a cotton reel and a button.

Boxing Day 1980 A UFO reportedly crash landed in Rendlesham forest, Suffolk, near the Woodbridge US air force base. The incident was nicknamed Britain's Roswell in a reference to the famous UFO sighting in New Mexico in 1947. Witnesses said the craft was covered in markings similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs and aliens emerged from it. An airman later confessed the incident was a hoax.

November 28 1980 Policeman Alan Godfrey reported seeing a six-metre wide dome-like object hovering in the air in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. He returned to the site with colleagues and they found the area where the object had supposedly been hovering was dry even though the rest of the road was wet because of earlier rain.

Early 1990s A string of sightings by residents in north Scotland of a UFO regularly flying overhead at great speed. Documents released earlier this year suggested the aircraft was a spy plane called Aurora, designed by the Americans to take covert pictures of the Soviet Union.

May 2006 The MoD released details of Project Condign, a four-year secret study into possible explanations for UFOs. The report concluded that many sightings could be explained as by glowing "plasmas" of gas created by charges of electricity.

June 14, 2006

Western Daily Press (Bristol, Devon, UK)

So Where Are All The Crop Circles?

by Tristan Cork

Hay fever, different crops, tragedy, emigration and yet more argument. Yes, the 2006 crop circle season is now under way... or is it? The rumours spreading around the wacky crop-circle world of Wiltshire are that there might not be as many of the mysterious formations this year as in previous summers.

While some people who claim to make the crop circles say they are hanging up their planks and ropes to have time out, others in the furtive world of the circlemakers pledge that this year will be the biggest yet.

And then, of course, there are the crop-circle devotees. They scoff at such planks-of-wood nonsense and say the more other-worldly circle- makers are sure to carry on.

One thing is certain, the possibility that there will be fewer, or even no crop circles this year, has sent the close-knit croppie community into a geometric vortex.

It was prompted by probably the most famous circlemaker in Wiltshire, Matthew Williams, announcing he would be taking a year off because hay fever, probably sparked by the increase in oil seed rape fields, was getting the better of him.

Mr Williams, still the only person in the world to be found guilty of crop circle criminal damage, said: "I'll not be out this year, it really is getting too bad. After a night in the fields, it takes me at least a day to recover."

He, and other crop circlemakers were also stunned by the death of one of their number, Paul Obee, who was found dead in a car at Erlestoke, near Devizes, last month.

He was a popular member of the circlemaking community, which is based around the Barge Inn pub at Honeystreet, in the heart of Wiltshire's crop-circle country. That tragedy, coupled with another prominent but unnamed circlemaker emigrating to Portugal, raised doubts that there wouldn't be many formations this year.

And, until this weekend, that appeared to be the case. The crop-circle enthusiasts' Bible, the website cropcircleconnector.com, failed to report a single formation throughout May and early June, when normally there would be at least a dozen early happenings.

Enthusiasts of course, don't believe all, or even most, circles are made by a group of 'landscape artists' with planks of wood and a computer-aided graphic design sheet and they can spot a hoax a mile off.

They are still expected to come in their thousands to Wiltshire this summer, looking for more evidence and clues to the real perpetrators of the crop circle phenomenon. They will also be engaging scientists to show the intense heat and energy used to create a real crop circle, as well as trying to capture the balls of light many have seen around the time of the creation of crop circles.

This weekend, despite the fears of a barren year, a beautiful geometric circular formation appeared at West Overton, near Avebury. And now all appears to be right with the crop-circle world again.

Circlemaker John Lundberg, from London, said yesterday this year would be the best yet for crop circles. "To be fair to him, Matt Williams hasn't made a crop circle in years, probably not since he was arrested. Paul's death was tragic and did hit everyone hard, but there's more than three or four people making circles and it's business as usual.

"This year is an important year for us, as it is the 30th year since Doug and Dave (the first people to claim they hoaxed crop circles) first made a circle. We're going to have the biggest summer yet, and I'm looking forward to it."

Mr Lundberg and his colleagues Robert Irving and Mark Pilkington have a book published this month entitled A Field Guide: The Art, History And Philosophy of Crop Circle Making.

June 6, 2006

Florida Today

Another Tactical Blunder For Bush?

by Billy Cox

In 2001, a flawed but intriguing book called The Hunt For Zero Point took a peek at America's longstanding efforts to harness antigravity propulsion. No shortage of material on that subject, but British author Nick Cook's credentials are impressive. Cook is the award-winning aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, one of the world's top military-industry magazines.

Cook was mystified over what happened to the antigravity research conducted by Martin Aircraft, Bell Aircraft, avionics designer Bill Lear, General Electric, and Sperry-Rand -- among others -- after 1956. That's when subsequent progress reports in the public domain went completely black. Cook's 10-year investigation unearthed, among other things, disturbing patterns of research scientists being bullied and intimidated into silence by authorities; however, Cook couldn't nail down proof of the hardware.

The reason this matters today -- aside from the obvious fact that whomever controls renewable free energy rules the frickin' world -- is that the Bush administration is on the brink of making yet another tactical blunder.

The Justice Department wants to extradite a 40-year-old, confessed British hacker named Gary McKinnon to the United States for breaking into and damaging NASA and military computer systems. Among other things, he allegedly deleted 1,300 user files in seven states and wreaked $1 million worth of havoc. Federal prosecutor Paul McNulty calls McKinnon "the biggest military computer hacker of all time."

But here's the twist:

McKinnon, who scoured American databases in 2001-02, claims he was looking for classified information on antigravity and UFO technology. Based on his disclosures in recent media interviews, the guy didn't get far. Most of what he discovered has been in the public arena for years.

Last month, British courts cleared the way for extradition to the U.S., where McKinnon could face more than 50 years in prison if convicted. A secret "enemy combatant"-like trial probably won't work in this case, because McKinnon is something of an underground cause celebre in the UK, and you can check out the buzz at http://freegary.org.uk/.

In 1996, another British citizen named Matthew Bevan found himself in a similar jam. Then a teenaged computer geek, Bevan got busted for trying to extract classified UFO data from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base files. The Justice Department wanted to extradite Bevan to the States, but he was acquitted in England, where continued pursuit through the courts was ruled "not in the public interest."

Bevan told the BBC last month that America was hot for McKinnon because, despite who-knows-how-much-$$$ the Yanks invested in beefed-up computer security since his own escapade, "It just shows that in 10 years, nothing has changed."

Glandular and punitive responses are hallmarks of the current administration, but this is a fight officialdom isn't smart enough (yet) to realize it doesn't want.

Ten years after the Bevan affair, the Brits are our most reliable partners in the "war on terror." Give McKinnon his day in the UK courts and let it go; they're capable. Otherwise, a sharp American defense lawyer could turn it around and put the classification of our antigravity assets on trial -- definitely not a discussion this most secretive presidency wants to conduct in the light. After all, dark-project technology research conducted without accountability for 50 years could be misinterpreted for taxation without representation.

May 23, 2006

Sudbury Star (Ontario, Canada)

Sudbury Man Keeps An Eye On The Sky
UFO researcher is writing a book about sightings in Northern Ontario

by Laura Stradiotto

Michel Deschamps, a UFO researcher/historian, has spent several years compiling data on UFO sightings in Sudbury and Northern Ontario.

He has investigated abductions, UFO crash sites and obtained "official" UFO documents.

Deschamps has witnessed 17 sightings since the age of nine.

He encourages people to contact him with their experiences and is currently writing a book on the history of flying objects, abductions, crop circles and other paranormal activities across Northern Ontario.

Deschamps shared his findings at a workshop during the weekend at Rayvin’s Eclectic Enchantments. It was the first one he has presented in six years.

Only a handful of people attended, but one could tell by the binders of documents he hauled in with him that Deschamps takes his work very seriously.

He stood behind a podium and said when it comes to the subject of UFOs, people are more "close-minded" than they were 15 years ago.

Today, people are reluctant to admit they’ve seen something unusual hovering in the skies overhead and are even more reluctant to leave their name with him.

Glancing at Sudbury Star newspaper clippings, it’s surprising the amount of space that was dedicated to reports of flying objects.

Eye witnesses are clearly identified, including their exact address.

In 1948, for example, Joe Caruso of 294 Albinson St., spotted a "long oval-shaped black object with 20-foot orange-coloured sparks shooting out from the rear."

"To me, newspaper articles are our history a history that is not spoken of often," Deschamps said.

Most people are skeptical of his work and tell Deschamps there’s no physical evidence of close encounters of the first, second, third or fourth kind.

With encounters of the first kind, there is no interaction between the eyewitness and UFO, while encounters of the second kind involve actual landings often involving scorched ground.

Encounters of the third kind include sightings of aliens or human-like entities, while abductions are characteristic of encounters of the fourth kind.

The largest number of UFO sightings in Sudbury occurred during the summer of 1967, when there were eight incidents reported.

While it became known as the (psychedelic) summer of love, the 1967 sightings were so vivid eyewitnesses often called the Ontario Provincial Police and the Canadian Forces station at Falconbridge to report what they saw.

In one incident, police were called to investigate a report of an attempted UFO landing, but when they tried to contact headquarters there was "heavy radio interference", the Sudbury Star reported.

Often a UFO sighting was corroborated by other people who saw the object from different areas of the city.

It was 1974 when Deschamps, then nine years old, had his first UFO encounter.

He was playing with friends at the end of Pharand Street in Hanmer when something caught his eye.

"I remember seeing this metallic silver-looking ball above the tree line. It was probably no more than one-metre wide. I thought it was an advertising balloon, so I looked to see if it was tied down. It wasn’t."

Years later, Deschamps bought a book about UFOs and one chapter discussed sightings in the Sudbury area, particularly sightings during the first few weeks of July 1974 the time he figures he saw the UFO.

"Up until then, I thought I had imagined it," he said.

That’s when Deschamps started spending considerable time conducting research.

"I still get bugged at work," said Deschamps, who works at Wal-Mart.

Deschamps created posters of physical evidence to show skeptics, including: cow mutilations, sketches of eyewitness accounts and photographs of crop circles one of which was discovered in Spring Bay on Manitoulin Island in the early 1990s.

Called a hoax by non-believers, to this day Deschamps says there’s no way it was a joke. The imprints look like they were burned and they’re located off a beaten path.

Surely if it was a hoax, the jokers would have placed the crop circles in an area frequented by passersby, he said.

Shortly after that experience, Deschamps joined the UFO Network, an Internet-based initiative designed to unite researchers across the world. He is also a member of the Mutual UFO Network.

Many UFO sightings have occurred in mining areas like Copper Cliff, Garson and Falconbridge, he said.

Deschamps said that’s because a mining centre gives alien life an indication of our technology base.

"If NASA is interested in us, I’m sure others are curious, too."

May 18, 2006

Salem Statesman Journal

UFO Festival Looks Into The World Of Aliens
Scientists, revelers and people who've been abducted come together in McMinnville

by Angela Yeager

Marius Dekker doesn't want to talk about his experience being abducted by aliens - even though he is giving a speech about the subject this weekend.

Vancouver, Wash., resident Dekker, 70, is a retired chemical engineer and scientist who will be speaking about his abduction experience at a workshop on UFOs at 10 a.m. Saturday.

"It is a very good possibility I was abducted. I can't go into it on the phone," he said, after being asked to explain his abduction experience.

"You'll just have to come see my talk. I'm not going to get into the whole story on the phone. It first happened in Holland, when I was 16. I suspect I was abducted. I am examining these things now."

Dekker's workshop is part of the McMenamins UFO Festival, which is Friday and Saturday in downtown McMinnville. There also is a preview event at 7:30 tonight at the Kennedy School in Portland, featuring a screening of the 1994 Showtime movie "Roswell."

The event is in its seventh year and brings the serious and the goofy sides of aliens and UFOs together. There are workshops and forums with speakers on UFOs and alien abduction, as well as more light-hearted events such as the UFO Costume Parade at 1 p.m. Saturday, which is followed by an Alien Pet Costume Contest at 2 p.m.

Dekker was selected to speak because of his research into abduction; he is one of the festival's many scheduled speakers.

Dekker is retired, but worked as a chemical engineer in Alberta, Canada, and as a math, physics and chemistry professor at Capilano College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

He said he started believing in aliens later in his life.

"I grew up as a scientist and a real nerd and had little use for UFO talk," he said. "Over the course of many years, I have reversed my feelings about them."

This will be Dekker's first time attending the UFO Festival in McMinnville. He refused to give any details on what he will talk about for his speech, other than to say he will chronicle the "long story" about why he believes he was abducted. He would say, however, that "missing time" is one of the main elements that abductees find they have in common.

"It's the most telling sign," he said. "People wondering, 'Where have I been in the last three hours?'"

When asked if that could just be memory loss, Dekker explained: "People might think they just had a memory lapse, but there's usually more to it."

Another high-profile speaker at this year's festival is Jesse Marcel Jr., who will give the keynote speech to promote his new book, "Roswell: It Really Happened."

According to Tim Hills, the project historian with McMenamins Pubs, Marcel is a big name in the UFO community.

Marcel Jr. will speak at 7 p.m. Friday at the Mack Theater and will follow his speech with a reception and book signing in a tent that will be set up next to the Hotel Oregon on Evans Street.

Aside from people giving serious speeches about UFOs and aliens, there are those who go to the festival as an excuse to paint their faces and put on pairs of antennas to parade through downtown McMinnville.

The UFO Costume Parade is one of the highlights of the event each year and is organized by McMenamins and the McMinnville Downtown Association. The parade will feature more than 24 entries this year, including floats and marching bands.

The Salem-area Star Trek club USS Destiny plans to participate in this year's parade. Salem resident Craig Martin, a member of USS Destiny, said members dressed in officer's uniforms as well as others from a separate Klingon club will be on the back of a flatbed truck for the event.

"I'm going to be in a 'Next Generation' commander's uniform because I'm the commanding officer of the club," Martin said.

"We try to interact with other groups doing the same kinds of things we are. And it's a good way to advertise for new members," he said.

"Last year, we just had bales of hay on the truck. This year, the Klingons thought it would be cool to have a table in the middle with peace talks going on, which sounds like a lot of fun to me."

May 12, 2006

Reading Evening Post (Berkshire, UK)

UFO Cannot Believe It!

A space odyssey of UFO sightings has been zooming across our radar courtesy of eagle-eyed readers.

Your calls flooded in after Pip Neal spotted a mysterious green ball in the sky over Southcote on Friday, April 7, and Vicky Chapman saw a glowing red orb over Basingstoke Road on Good Friday (Post, Wednesdays, April 19 and 26, respectively).

It's not the first time Mr. Neal has seen unexplained things in the sky. He also told us that he saw a triangle of light in the skies over Lincoln two decades ago.

Gloria Fisher, a carer from Meadow Road, Earley, called to say she and husband, Roy, a window-maker, spotted the same phenomenon, also 20 years ago, while camping in Wittering, Sussex.

She said: "We looked up in the sky and saw a triangle of white light as though joined but you could see through the middle. It was in complete formation but whether it was a Government experiment, you just don't know.

"We haven't really mentioned it too much to people.

"My husband, if you do see things, says it's probably clouds or aeroplanes and the last thing you think about is UFOs but you do think: ‘Ooh, I wonder'."

Peter Brake, 77, revealed his experiences after reading about the Good Friday sighting in the Post.

"The first one was mind-boggling, like a world just going along," he said of his sighting of a multicoloured globe while in his Whitley Wood garden some years ago. "It wasn't smooth, it was like in a square pattern and lit up. I didn't know quite what to make of it.

"When it got level with me it was there one second and suddenly went away from me within two seconds."

Then last September the retired forestry worker spied a deep red star-like object moving slowly over his Falmouth Road garden.

But perhaps the most exciting phenomenon has been by former coffee shop worker Janet Cryer, from Woodley who witnessed a bright, whooshing light roaring past her first-floor window.

She couldn't sleep at around 1am on Tuesday, April 18, when suddenly she heard a noise "like an underground train, a roar and a whoosh at the same time" before a greeny-coloured light flew past her open-curtained window.

"Immediately I thought it was a meteorite and I was waiting for a bang," said the 58-year-old.

"It was faster than a helicopter and nothing like an aircraft. The day after that I saw all those stories in the paper."

Mrs Cryer, of Hanwood Close, added: "My late husband used to long to see a UFO, he used to keep all the clippings."

Have you seen any strange aerial objects or inexplicable sights worthy of the X Files? Call the Evening Post's extra terrestrial reporter on (0118) 918 3009.

May 8, 2006

Great Falls Tribune

Mariana's UFO Film One Of The Best Produced

Great Falls area residents have seen many unidentified flying objects over the years.

Some of those people might have had too much hootch to drink at the time.

But that wasn't the case for Nicholas Mariana, who filmed strange objects from Legion baseball park with a 16mm camera in August 1950.

Mariana was general manager of the Great Falls Electrics baseball team at the time.

Little did he know that his quick-thinking work with a camera would make Mariana a heroic figure among UFO buffs.

Mariana was standing in the bleachers one day when he was amazed to see "two vehicles hovering above the pitcher's mound," his son related in an interview Saturday.

The elder Mariana, who studied journalism at the University of Montana, kept a movie camera in his glove box.

He ran for the camera, and stood in the bleachers behind home plate filming closeups of the strange objects.

After a short time, the aircrafts shot up into the air in a flash.

Soon, "they were little dots on the horizon," said the son, Nick Mariana of Victor.

Mariana's film is credited as one of the best films ever taken of possible extra-terrestrial activity. And he had a witness, his secretary, who backed up his story.

Mariana later complained the best segment of his film disappeared after he gave the movie to Malmstrom Air Force Base to analyze. Base officials denied intentionally clipping out the best closeups from the film.

Mariana once appeared on "I've Got a Secret," a TV program hosted by Gary Moore in which a panel tried to guess what secret a guest had.

Panelists didn't guess Mariana's secret.

Mariana died Aug. 20, 1999, in Oregon, but interest in his film continues.

Mariana's son, Nick, was born in Great Falls, but the family almost immediately moved to Missoula.

Today, he owns a former Great Falls business called Mr. Video. As it turned out, he had his own movie camera when he was a kid.

Nick Mariana shares his father's view that the government took the best part of the film and stuck it in a classified folder somewhere.

"They don't lose that stuff," he said. The younger Mariana thinks the vehicle may well have been from another world.

"I'm a believer," the Victor man said. "I think it's perfectly feasible that they've made contact."

At the same time, he said there are plenty of "crackpots" out there who falsely claim to have been abducted by aliens.

For years, the Marianas had the famous 15 seconds of 16 mm film around the house in a collection of movies. Then Nick Mariana tried to find it.

"It disappeared from our house," he said. Fortunately, that part of the film had already been copied.

Nick Mariana said his father was irritated that the government whacked out the best section of his movie. After all, who wouldn't object to a hatchet job of editing?

But the elder Mariana didn't dwell on what happened to his film, even if he wasn't thrilled about it.

"He just wasn't that kind of guy at all," son Nick said. That hasn't kept the Marianas from musing over the years about what the full film might have been worth to collectors.

This spring, makers of a two-hour UFO film documentary for the History Channel in Canada, All In One Films of Toronto, are trying to find friends or relatives of Mariana who heard him talk about filming the UFOs.

They also would like to talk to anyone who might have seen a showing of the Mariana film in Great Falls in the 1950s.

If you fill that bill, either e-mail or write me and I'll pass the information on to the folks upstairs in Canada.

Tribune Staff Writer Richard Ecke writes a weekly column on city life. Reach him by e-mail at recke.nul, or at (406) 791-1467 or (800) 438-6600.

May 5, 2006

Northwest Meridian (Aurora, Oregon)

Sci-Fi Man

by Tracy Macdonald

The film "Roswell: The U.F.O Cover-up" (1994) tells the story of USAF Major Jesse Marcel's attempt to understand the events that unfolded in the southeastern New Mexico desert in July of 1947.

The picture's executive producer, Paul Davids, will be on hand to take questions at the screening of the film at McMenamins Kennedy School Theater in Northeast Portland.

When Major Marcel (played by Kyle MacLachlan) is called out to investigate the mysterious debris discovered by a local rancher, he concludes (allegedly, along with his colleagues) that the ranch was the site of a UFO crash. The tables turn, however, and Marcel soon becomes the fall guy for a government cover-up, and then the object of press mockery, when his superiors claim the debris in the rancher's prairie came not from a flying saucer, but a typical weather balloon.

Confused and disillusioned, Marcel spends the next 30 years torn between honoring his duty as a soldier and discovering the truth about what really happened. When he attends the 30-year reunion for the members of his Air Force unit, suffering from a heart ailment and faced with his own impending mortality, he's overtaken by his desire to solve the mystery, or at least finally commit himself to asking the hard, potentially dangerous questions, whatever the risks and whatever the cost.

Davids, who also wrote and directed the 1996 documentary "Timothy Leary's Dead", and more recently, "The Sci-Fi Boys", released earlier this year, was interviewed by Northwest Meridian via email about "Roswell", and his career as a writer, filmmaker and UFologist.

Northwest Meridian: Your film implies that there was a massive government conspiracy to conceal the truth about Roswell. Do you believe that this conspiracy is real, or were you just intrigued by the story?

Paul Davids: I have read about and researched this case since 1987. I think I've read nearly everything written on the subject. There are two books which provide the details of the so-called "conspiracy" with greater accuracy and depth than any others I've come across: "UFOs and the National Security State", by Richard Dolan, and "The Missing Times", by Terry Hanson. Both present what I think is an entirely convincing view that we do have extraterrestrial visitors, and that the facts have been officially and deliberately suppressed since at least 1947.

I personally cannot find any fault with the points of view, so eloquently presented, in those books. Also, in the last year the former Defense Minister of Canada Paul Hellyer has stated in public interviews that this conspiracy does exist and that "flying saucers from other worlds" are as real as airplanes.

(Hellyer) stated that he is convinced the claims of Lt. Colonel Philip Corso in the book "The Day After Roswell" are essentially correct, i.e., that this has been one of the most highly classified issues for over half a century, and that the failure to inform and educate the public has been appalling. His views have not been widely reported in the U.S. media, but once again, in all my research, nothing has convinced me that he's mistaken, including several government reports that declare Roswell to be "Case Closed".

NWM: Were the other people involved in the making of your film believers in the government cover-up?

Davids: Captain Kevin Randle (U.S. Air Force) and Donald Schmitt are the authors of a book called "UFO Crash at Roswell", upon which we loosely based the drama of the film. They are both "believers" in the cover-up, and Captain Randle was a military technical advisor to our film. Don Schmitt for many years was the Director of Special Investigations for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. Apart from them, I believe I was the only person involved who had a driving passion to tell the story because I felt it was urgent and credible.

The others were not necessarily "disbelievers" but took the position they didn't know much and were curious to learn more. Of everyone, Kyle MacLachlan was probably the most skeptical, or at least very cautious about saying anything to give the impression he was a "UFO believer". It shows what a superb actor he was. His personal beliefs had no influence whatsoever on his magnificent performance as Major Jesse Marcel. Martin Sheen was open-minded about the story, but he is what I would call a devoted Catholic with special interests in reported sightings of the Virgin Mary. He could accept the possibility of UFO's only insofar as he did not feel it conflicted with his Catholic faith, which actually does not at all rule out the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds ("In my Father's house are many mansions...".).

Interestingly, since we made the movie, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, who was the Vatican's Apostolic representative in Washington D.C. for many years, has been giving lectures, apparently with Papal blessing, stating that extraterrestrial visitors are real and are neither angels nor demons nor delusions. Jeremy Kagan, who directed "Roswell", and Arthur Kopit, a great American playwright credited with the screenplay writing (based on a story written by myself and Jeremy and Arthur) were what you might call "agnostic". They felt the "conspiracy" could possibly be true, perhaps was even probably true - but they (and I) felt that the drama should be done in a way that left the final result ambiguous and showed that the data, no matter which side you are on, has been "salted" with disinformation.

NWM: How do you think the public reaction to the Roswell incident - and the government's explanation of that incident - would be different today than in 1947?

Davids: I don't think the rancher would necessarily have summoned the authorities (the sheriff and the military) before alerting the media, and a total cover-up would have been more difficult. Also, the public today would be much more skeptical about a military pronouncement, for instance when the Army changed the first announcement from "flying saucer" to "weather balloon". There was a very similar incident in Brazil in recent years, and much more information leaked out, much more quickly, than was the case in the Roswell Incident where military people felt it was their sworn duty to reveal nothing for decades. The "crash dummy" report at the Pentagon in 1997 drew an unintended reaction of public ridicule and hostile rejection. All military statements were much more likely to be accepted without much questioning back in 1947, so soon after World War II.

NWM: You have been a Science Fiction fan since childhood. What fueled your initial attraction to this genre?

Davids: My love of the sci-fi double features that came out every Saturday during my childhood. Some of them (such as "Forbidden Planet", with Robby the Robot,) were masterpieces that stimulated my imagination for years. I absolutely loved the space films of George Pal including "The War of the Worlds" (the first one, from 1953), plus films such as "The Thing From Another World" and the "Day the Earth Stood Still". And I was of the Baby Boom generation who grew up on Forrest J Ackerman's "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine, which I relished, even though my parents had a dim view of it. But all of this was Science Fiction for me. It did not occur to me that extraterrestrial contact may already have taken place until 1987, the year I had a close range daylight disc sighting with my son and daughter.

NWM: How has your work in this genre evolved over the years?

Davids: It's not so much that my work in this field has "evolved" as that I have gone where the opportunities have taken me.

I never expected to be the production coordinator of "The Transformers" television show, which was on every day beginning in the mid-1980's - it was a lucky break - I was called in to take the place of someone I knew who was leaving the show and who had to be replaced immediately.

I seized the opportunity to develop "Roswell" as a film after the experience of my daylight disc sighting, and after doing much research. For years I wanted to do a film based on the research of Richard C. Hoagland, who passionately believes there were extraterrestrial civilizations on both the Mars and the Moon, and that there are archeological remains there. We came very close to launching the film, but ultimately it has not happened yet. I co-wrote six "Star Wars" sequel books with my wife because the opportunity was there - Lucasfilm was interested in having some sequel books developed and published, to keep the public aware of "Star Wars" up until the fourth film would come out.

Finally, I made "The Sci-Fi Boys" out of a passion for the sci-fi genre and the feeling that there was a story that had to be told about the "pioneers" of the genre who inspired my generation of filmmakers (and also Peter Jackson's generations of filmmakers). What started as a dream without great hope of commercial release became very real once Peter Jackson saw and loved my first edit of the film and agreed to be in it.

NWM: Can you expound briefly upon the idea of Science Fiction as a mechanism of cultural and political criticism?

Davids: Science Fiction has often been used as a mechanism of cultural and political commentary, a way to teach us about the predicaments we are in as human beings by showing us fictional extrapolations of what might come to pass or what could happen. Two excellent examples are Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (about censorship and book burning in a society which does not allow reading) and "The Day After Tomorrow", which dramatized the extreme possibilities of climate change. But there are hundreds of examples. From a literary point of view, it's often easier for authors to couch their political attitudes and social criticisms by creating fictional literary universes. "Gulliver's Travels" is one of the early examples, and the anti-war attitudes of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is another.

Finally, I made "The Sci-Fi Boys" out of a passion for the sci-fi genre and the feeling that there was a story that had to be told about the "pioneers" of the genre who inspired my generation of filmmakers (and also Peter Jackson's generations of filmmakers). What started as a dream without great hope of commercial release became very real once Peter Jackson saw and loved my first edit of the film and agreed to be in it.

NWM: Can you expound briefly upon the idea of Science Fiction as a mechanism of cultural and political criticism?

Davids: Science Fiction has often been used as a mechanism of cultural and political commentary, a way to teach us about the predicaments we are in as human beings by showing us fictional extrapolations of what might come to pass or what could happen. Two excellent examples are Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (about censorship and book burning in a society which does not allow reading) and "The Day After Tomorrow", which dramatized the extreme possibilities of climate change. But there are hundreds of examples. From a literary point of view, it's often easier for authors to couch their political attitudes and social criticisms by creating fictional literary universes. "Gulliver's Travels" is one of the early examples, and the anti-war attitudes of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is another.

NWM: What inspired the creation of your new film, "The Sci Fi Boys"?

Davids: "The Sci-Fi Boys" shows the evolution of Science Fiction in cinema. Kellen Quinn, a critic and commentator for the Tribeca Film Festival, called it "a must-see for anyone who has screamed, gasped or laughed at a movie monster". I have not only screamed, gasped and laughed at movie monsters, I started out making them when I was nine years old and all I had was an 8mm home movie camera and my own ingenuity, plus copies of Famous Monsters magazine that gave away a few of the "trade secrets" of Hollywood. All of those secrets have since changed, but the love of movie monsters is still with me.

These monsters, throughout the decades, have often stolen the limelight from the actors who share the movies with them - and the creatures that once scared us are now like our long lost friends from childhood. We love to collect model kits of them, or build them and paint them. Once we covered our eyes when they came on-screen because they represented our darkest nightmares. Today we can laugh at those nightmares of days gone by and know that we survived them.

Our real problem (now) - the problem of all of us as human beings in today's society - is the issue of whether we can we survive the actual nightmares of living in this current era, an era of too many lethal weapons and too many leaders and soldiers and others who are willing to use them on innocent civilians all over the world. If we can ever lick that monster, then as a human species, we will have won, and we will have a future out there among the stars. If we cannot lick that monster, then we are witnessing something terrible in our lifetimes, the collapse and destruction of what could have been, what might have been, a magnificent and peaceful worldwide human civilization, with all of mankind respecting everyone regardless of cultural and religious differences. As Michael Rennie stated (as the character Klaatu) in "The Day the Earth Stood Still": "The choice is up to you".

May 1, 2006

Los Angeles Times

Foiling The Space Aliens
In the search for the perfect tin hat, a few things are learned about community and mind control

by Bettie Rinehart

For two weeks I've been thinking about aluminum foil. The problem is that my thoughts should have been focused on tin foil because that, you see, is what purportedly provides the best shield against alien mind control. At least that's what I've read on the Internet.

This is not simply a matter of research. This weekend, I'll be chronicling in writing and on video the Retro UFO Space Convention at the Integratron in the Mojave Desert. I'll be chatting with the abducted, drinking in the wisdom of guest experts on extra-terrestrials and listening to some UFO performance poetry.

But it was the "Tinfoil Hat Contest" that hit me like a gigaton of space balls. Although I didn't even know what the prize was, I wanted to win.

Foil hats got a pop culture bump in the 2002 thriller, "Signs," when, in perhaps the film's funniest scene, Joaquin Phoenix donned aluminum headgear to keep his thoughts protected from unseen aliens. But in my Web sleuthing I found that the coterie of the aluminated is of two minds. Anecdotally speaking, some feel that tin foil provides a shield to thought invasion by both aliens and, dare I say, the CIA. Others contend that the thin metallic sheets are actually more of an "antenna" for other-worldly communication.

I've chosen the style of my hat with an intensity bordering on obsession. I knew I wouldn't be caught dead wandering the desert like some still-wrapped Hershey Kiss or like the styles I'd seen on the Web, including the "Kutcher" (an annoying trucker cap), or the Fez (nice enough with its sassy tassel, but too easy).

For me, would it be Katherine Hepburn in "The Alien Queen?" Uma Thurman in "Even Martian Ladies Get the Blues?" No, I'd go more exotic-a Chinese sunhat with a huge, garish aluminum foil and pink construction paper rose. Maybe some trim, too. A little Chinoiserie meets Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Alien."

I headed to the Rite-aid and Office Depot for foil, tape, colored paper and paste. Four hours later, voila!

My hat turned out to be a pretty glamorous little something for the stylish, paranoid gardening enthusiast. Any misguided extraterrestrial looking to probe my thoughts would be in for a big surprise. They'd have to dig through that monster garnish on the top of my head. Good luck, space invader. Good luck.

They say that the desert doesn't care if you live or die. The desert doesn't care about fashion, either. It's really, really hot. And within a half hour of my arrival, I'm sweaty and smell bad. I've left my hat in the car, stressed about the resilience of Elmer's glue and foil.

The hard sun glints off a mere handful of silvered pates. There isn't much competition. Or maybe, like myself, folks are just waiting for the crucial moment. The competition is scheduled to take place after a very down-to-Earth lunch of burgers and hot dogs, beans, slaw and apple pie.

After I've completed a few select interviews with members of the UFO community-learning along the way about the tall, thin Arcturian tribe of aliens, the dovetailing of heavenly angels and extraterrestrials and universal astrology-I run to the car, grab my precious hat and arrive at the judging table in a cloud of dust, just in time.

After all the hopes I'd rested atop my foil hat, the judging turned out to be a very informal affair-winners determined by claps, hoots and hollers. Not first, not second, but third place was mine. The prize: a sound bath at the Integratron. A $40 value!

Afterwards, Frank Bollinger, co-creator of the "Brain Tuner," which he claims "stops anxiety and trans-cranial electro-stimulation," asks me, "Is that just a hat, or does it have another purpose?"

It no longer mattered to me that I felt like I'd put more brainpower into my hat than the other winners, who'd constructed theirs' in a matter of minutes before the contest. Maybe, in my striving toward alien sartorial greatness, I had been foiled by my own design. I remembered the words of extraterrestrial expert Dr. Louis Turi, author of "Moon Power Starguide 2006": "You have to mean business with the super-conscience of time and space. Be prepared."

With that piece of real-world advice in and on my head, next year I'll be all business.

April 24, 2006

Woodland Hills Daily Bulletin

UFO Devotees To Gather In Landers

by Redmond Carolipio

According to The X-Files, the truth is out there.

And on Saturday, it'll be in Landers.

The High Desert will become the landing site for the Retro UFO Spacecraft Convention, an old-school homage to the starry gatherings that used to draw people to the desert decades ago.

"We're going back to the history," said Barbara Harris of Yucca Valley, one of the event's co-creators. "We don't want to make it scary - we want it to be fun."

Many trekked to UFO conventions in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, Harris said. People used to gather from all over the country for a chance to hear people called "contactees" talk about their personal experiences with beings from another world - and expound about what it all meant.

One of the first contactees was George Van Tassel, an aerospace engineer who said he was visited by people from space, boarded a ship and was given the plans to build a machine called the Integratron, which is the focal point of the convention.

Van Tassel, who died in 1978, held yearly "spacecraft conventions" near Giant Rock in Landers, which attracted thousands of people. The conventions helped raise the funds for Van Tassel to build the Integratron, which he described as a "time machine, a rejuvenation machine, and an anti-gravity device."

Today, people boldly go to the Integratron to do everything from record music in the sound chamber to meditate. One of its signature features is the "sound bath," which is said to have therapeutic effects.

Harris said the rest of the fair will be quite a break from a run-of-the-mill UFO convention, which is heavy on academics and theories.

"Typical conventions are held in hotels, and they just feature a lot of speakers - like a lecture," she said. "We're outside, we're going to have lectures in tents, hayrides, shows, bands at night, contests... it's very lighthearted."

There are also going to be tours of Giant Rock and the Integratron, art exhibits and a UFO opera performed by the band UFOetry, which has won two L.A. Music Awards for their work.

Visitors also have the option of staying at the Integratron overnight, supported by campfires and astronomers.

Some of the original contactees from years past will be part of the lineup of speakers.

Rob Harris, Barbara's husband and co-organizer of the event, said while much discussion about meeting alien beings might sound "out there" at first, it's obviously still on a lot of minds - just look at pop culture as proof.

"There's that sense of wonder out there," he said. "It's still a big topic. You see more stuff about aliens on television shows and movies, so people are definitely still interested."

However, much of what's seen in the media perceives aliens as malicious creatures that want to wipe humans off the face of the Earth, and people aren't getting the clearest picture of the movement, said Josh Poet, co-founder and member of UFOetry.

"One of the things Barbara (Harris) talked to us about was that she wanted to reinstill the idea of the innocence and the purity of when we first heard about life on other planets," he said. "We wanted to get a back to the stuff that's been shrouded in conspiracy. There's more than just one group of aliens... many of them want to help us evolve."

And Barbara Harris hopes the convention itself evolves into something that leaves a lasting impression.

"This made memories for people years ago," she said. "We want to create new memories for the next generation."

The Retro UFO Space Convention
When: Saturday, 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: The Integratron, 2477 Belfield Blvd., Landers
Cost: $25 for general admission, $145 for full-day pass, $195 to
stay overnight

Information: www.integratron.com www.retroufo.com,
or call Barbara or Rob Harris: 760-365-3266

April 18, 2006

Hagerstown Herald-Mail

The Truth Is Up There

by Nick Ritchick

One April night, the Socorro, N.M., police department received a radio call from Sgt. Lonnie Zamora. Zamora said that while investigating a loud roar at a dynamite storage shack, he encountered a strange scene.

What he first thought to be an overturned car with an exploded gas tank turned out to be an oval-shaped object about the size of a car, with legs that extended to the ground.

According to UFO Casebook magazine's Web site (ufocasebook.com), Zamora reported the object had no windows or doors and had a red insignia on the side. Two child-sized people in white coveralls stood nearby.

Zamora told his dispatcher he was going to go closer to investigate. But he heard a loud roar and saw a blue-orange flame at the bottom of the object. Then the object rose into the air and flew away.

Air Force and FBI investigators arrived on the scene within a few days, gathered evidence and spoke to witnesses. After two years, Air Force investigator Hector Quintanilla, Jr., released his surprising conclusion.

"There is... no question about Zamora's reliability," Quintanilla reported. "... we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic."

Weird science?

According to the National UFO Reporting Center (www.nuforc.org), there were 3,999 unidentified flying object (UFO) reports in the year 2005. Some of these reports, according to Bruce Maccabee, former president of Mutual UFO Network, Maryland chapter, remain unexplained.

"Most cases - 70-80-90 percent - you can reasonably explain," said Maccabee, of Thurmont, Md., in a phone interview last week. "But maybe 5 percent do not fit."

Maccabee, a civilian physicist working with the U.S. Navy, said he has been investigating UFO reports since the 1970s. He said the U.S. government has investigated UFOs since the first sightings were reported in newspapers a few years after World War II.

"The government thought maybe the Russians had leapfrogged our technology. These craft were probably nuclear powered. The government was naturally worried, at the beginning of what is called the Cold War," Maccabee said. "Air Force pilots were also involved. FBI was involved to find out if there was any communist activity."

Government investigators discounted most UFO reports, but a few were truly strange. But they told the public differently, according to Maccabee.

Maccabee has been interested in these unidentified aircraft since he was a teenager in the 1950s. During this era, newspaper reports of the UFO appearances caught the interests of many people. He volunteered with the Washington, D.C., office of the National Investigating Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and began investigating reported sightings.

"That's where the rubber hits the road - witnesses who are telling the truth as they know it, or just plain hoaxing," he said. "Where I investigated, they were telling the truth as they know it.

"But it's possible to misperceive. You know there are stars and planets up there - aircraft with lights on. If the light was traveling along and made a right-angle turn, it wasn't a star, wasn't a meteor. Sometimes it takes days or weeks or years. After you spend time and you have no other explanation that fits, you can say it might be unidentifiable. This is the scientific method."

Maccabee has published several books and reports on UFO investigations, including "UFO FBI Connection," which details early FBI investigations. To visit Maccabee's Web site, go to www.brumac.8k.com.

Read about thought-provoking UFO reports such as Lonnie Zamora's in "Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time: The Unexplained." And, for fun, find good UFO fiction in "Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens 1" and "Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens 2."

You can believe me or not, but there are reports of flying objects that cannot be explained. Next time you're outside at night and see stars, just think to yourself that maybe not all of those lights are stars.

April 16, 2006

Beaver County Times

So What Happened?

by Scott Tady

As far as the federal government is concerned, the incident is over and done.

"The case was closed and never reopened," said Brian Seese, a paranormal researcher from Hopewell Township, who includes the incident in his new book, "Unexplained Events in Beaver County."

In late 1966, Weitzel, the NICAP investigator assigned to the case, delivered his final report to his Washington, D.C., supervisor, Richard Hall.

"I personally hand-carried a copy of Weitzel's very thick and extremely well-documented report to Dr. Edward Condon," Hall recalled last month.

Condon, a scientist, was in charge of a UFO study conducted by the University of Colorado under the sponsorship of the Air
Force.

"Years later, I learned to my astonishment that he never turned over the case to his staff, and it gathered dust in his personal files," Hall said.

And so when the Air Force turned the Colorado report over to Congress, the Ohio-to-Conway incident wasn't mentioned.

"Maj. Hector Quintanilla tried to pass it off as a sighting of the planet Venus and an earth satellite, which was quite preposterous," said Hall, who wrote "The UFO Evidence, Vol. II; A Thirty-Year Report," published in 2001. "I think he may have changed it to an unexplained case later on."

According to the files of a leading UFO researcher, Brad Sparks, the Air Force ultimately did categorize the case as "unexplained" and probably left it at that, Hall said.

Project Blue Book files would show the final status of the incident, Hall said.

But trying to get someone to share Project Blue Book details isn't easy.

The feds closed Project Blue Book in 1972, ending at least publicly the Air Force's role as a UFO investigation agency.

Representatives of the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency contacted last month said documents from Project Blue Book are kept at the National Archives and Records Agency, though two representatives at that agency said they couldn't confirm the status of the case, ultimately transferring a reporter's phone call to a third person who never returned the call.

"Getting someone from the government to talk is almost impossible," said Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter who, backed by cable's Sci-Fi Channel, sued NASA under the Freedom of Information Act to see files on a UFO sighting Dec. 9, 1965, in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County.

NASA maintains the "fireball" that dozens of witnesses spotted that night was a remnant of a Russian satellite that disintegrated after re-entering the atmosphere. But official documents from that investigation were lost in the 1990s, NASA claims.

As for the Conway sighting, Kean speculated the Air Force proclaimed that matter dead after Quintanilla's ruling, or once the University of Colorado-Air Force report didn't list it.

UFO investigators claim that Air Force report "was a totally bogus thing" anyway, designed from the onset to debunk UFO theories, Kean said.

In the first few years after Project Blue Book ceased, UFO sightings continued to crop up nationally, including a six-month span from 1973 to 1974 that included separate sightings in Center Township, Ohioville and West Mifflin. Gradually, the phenomenon faded away, and recent years have been devoid of similar reports.

"The UFO sightings may have appeared to slow down," Seese said, "but these may only be reported sightings. As a general rule, most people do not report what they observe.

"According to veteran UFO researcher Paul Johnson, the Internet changed the way people report their sightings," Seese said. "Instead of contacting the state police or local researchers, they can now send their report directly to the Internet and remain anonymous and not have to deal face to face with an investigator initially."

The Internet certainly has kept the Conway-to-Portage incident alive.

Dozens of sites, many suspecting a government cover-up, recount the morning of April 17, 1966.

Meanwhile, the men who saw the flying object are left with their own unique perspectives.

"I don't know what I would have done it if had landed," Panzanella said. "I don't know if I would have run or not."

Scott Tady can be reached online at stady@timesonline.com

April 11, 2006

Salt Lake Tribune

Are Are We Alone? UFOs The Topic

by Dan Nailen

In 1952, Navy officer Delbert Newhouse was driving cross-country with his family, a trip that took them through northern Utah the morning of July 2.

Around 11 a.m., Newhouse's wife reportedly noticed odd figures in the sky a few miles outside Tremonton. Grabbing his movie camera, Newhouse ended up with some striking images of the unidentified flying objects - images that persuaded the U.S. Air Force, Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate.

The government eventually concluded the "Tremonton tapes" simply showed some seagulls in flight.

Of course, what would you expect the government to say?

The Tremonton episode is one story in a long line of alleged extraterrestrial activity in Utah. It's one reason independent UFO researcher and lecturer Robert Hastings will make his fourth trip to the state Wednesday for a lecture at the University of Utah.

Of the Tremonton tapes, Hastings said: "If one looks, using modern, computer-based visual-enhancement technologies, those seagulls essentially were saucer-shaped. They were round, oval-shaped or disc-shaped, so clearly they weren't seagulls.

"That's one example of countless ones where the PR guys at the Pentagon have tried to explain away UFOs."

UFOs, extraterrestrials and all manner of unexplained phenomena are always the subject of uneasy debate between believers and nonbelievers, government agents and private citizens. And UFOs are fodder for pop-culture fantasies, whether through sci-fi flicks of the 1950s or "The X-Files," a TV show in the '90s that rekindled talk that "The Truth Is Out There."

The 56-year-old Hastings has dedicated much of his life to formulating counterarguments to official dismissals of all things UFO-related, digging through once-classified documents, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and interviewing people with firsthand knowledge of UFO sightings and the government's efforts to ignore them.

He's delivered his findings in lectures at more than 500 colleges and universities.

Most of his study involves the preponderance of UFO activity near America's nuclear weapons, and he has studied intently cases in Wyoming, New Mexico and Montana.

"There are FBI, CIA and Air Force documents going back to as early as December 1948 confirming that what the documents themselves refer to as 'flying discs' or 'flying saucers' have demonstrated an ongoing interest in our nuclear weapons sites," Hastings said, noting that since 2001, the release of sensitive, UFO-related documents by the government has slowed to a trickle. Much of his lecture Wednesday, "UFOs: The Hidden History," will involve the history and potential risks of alien life forms' interest in U.S. nuclear weapons.

Stephen Nielson, the 23-year-old speakers board chairman for the Associated Students of the University of Utah, booked Hastings' lecture at the U. Nielson said he believes in extraterrestrial life, but "I don't necessarily know if they've been to Earth."

"UFOs, everybody has some fascination with them," Nielson said. " 'The X-Files' made them extremely popular during the '90s, so the generation that's now in college kind of has that mentality."

For more on UFOs in Utah

Robert Hastings will present his lecture "UFOs: The Hidden History" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Auditorium. Admission is free.

To view video of the Tremonton tapes, visit: http://galactic2.net/video/ufo9.avi

and for photographs, visit: http://www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk /utahcondon.htm

For more information on UFO activity in Utah, visit the Web site of the Utah UFO Hunters at: http://www.aliendave.com

April 7, 2006

Melbourne Herald Sun (Australia)

UFO Witnesses Reunite

by Terry Brown

The truth is out there ... in Clayton South

One of Australia's biggest UFO mysteries has taken off again, 40 years on.

And researchers hope the truth will out at a reunion of more than 30 witnesses tomorrow.

About 200 people are said to have seen either a flying saucer or crop circles near Westall High School on April 6, 1966.

The craft was described as silver, saucer-shaped and silent.

Some witnesses say they saw it drop behind trees at Westall's Grange Reserve, then rise vertically and leave.

Flattened and charred grass "crop circles" were said to have been left.

Canberra academic Shane Ryan says he has contacted about 50 witnesses in the past year.

The bulk were Westall High School students who were gathered on the oval at the time for physical education.

The incident was reported in daily papers, on Channel Nine and twice as front-page news in the local Dandenong Journal.

About a quarter of the witnesses said they saw the flying saucer and the rest saw as many as five so-called crop circles.

Many children reportedly ran down to the Grange after the sighting.

John Spencer, a seven-year-old at Westall Primary School at the time, said the incident still got to him. "I need answers, 'cos this has been a real bugbear over the years," he said.

"I have remembered the day as vividly as a seven-year-old could -- Mum dragging me away from the Grange after school from the landing site . . . seeing this object in the sky, other planes flying, following it."

Mr Spencer said the Grange was a second home to kids, a spot to catch frogs and tadpoles.

He said that after the incident, "guys in uniforms" made the reserve a no-go zone.

Mr Ryan said many witnesses reported police or military activity after the incident.

Science teacher Andrew Greenwood told the Dandenong Journal at the time he saw a silvery-green disc.

Mr Greenwood also claimed he was visited at home by two uniformed officers and threatened with prosecution if he continued to speak of it.

The defence department says there is no record of any military action after the sightings.

Gerry Shepherd taught woodwork at the time and says he never saw any military at the school.

"All I can say is that the school bell went to start the afternoon classes and there was hardly anyone there," Mr. Shepherd said.

"I would say 99.999 per cent it's a load of bull."

Mr Ryan hopes retired police or military will go to the reunion, from 11am-2pm at Westall Tennis Club on the edge of the Grange in Clayton South.

"I'm convinced people saw something quite out of the ordinary," he said.

"It is a story that has almost been completely forgotten.

"These people, even after 40 years, have this burning desire to make sense of what they saw."

March 25, 2006

Farmington Daily Times

UFO Symposium Draws Believers

AZTEC - Jack Berringer said he began going to UFO conventions after his first encounter with aliens. The 69-year-old California resident claimed that on Feb. 8, 1980, spacecrafts hovered directly over his home. The event sparked an interest in the extraterrestrial and caused him to begin reading about the subject.

"I've met some interesting people," Berringer said of the conventions he attends. "But I only go to 'smart' UFO conventions."

Berringer was one of many who gathered Friday afternoon to meet with some of the 9th Annual UFO Symposium speakers in Aztec. He and others discussed ufology - the study of unidentified flying objects - over wine and cheese at Hard Backs Book Store.

"It's basically for speakers and anyone who wants to come in," said event organizer Scott Ramsey. "We try to make it a community event."

According to the event's Web site, www.aztecufo.com, New Mexico is ranked highest in the world for UFO-related sightings.

According to the site, 12 "crashed disks" or alien space crafts were recovered in New Mexico.

"Our UFO Symposium will initiate discussions on the UFO, alien phenomenon that seems to permeate our culture," the site states.

The city of Aztec gained prominence among UFO enthusiasts after a crash reportedly occurred around March 25, 1948, almost 12 miles outside of Aztec in Hart Canyon, according to information provided on the Web site.

Ramsey said he believes this year's speakers will shed some insight into new findings in the field of ufology, noting that two of Saturday's speakers will do so in Aztec for the first time this year.

Ramsey said each year Friends of the Library choose speakers who have done much research and have published literature relating to the study of UFOs and aliens. The group also attempts to bring in at least one scholar with a Ph.D.

"You can learn and have fun at the same time," he said. Dennis Balthaser, one of the event's lecturers, said he has been involved with the Aztec UFO Symposium for nine years.

"I've been fortunate to work here as a speaker and as an emcee," said the Roswell resident. "I think it's one of the better managed symposiums because it doesn't have the carnival aspect."

Balthaser said he believes the event had also served as an important fundraiser for the new library in previous years.

When asked how he responds to skeptics and naysayers, Balthaser said he speaks with them publicly.

"Years ago, I did it privately not to embarrass people," he said. "That didn't work."

Balthaser said he believes answering such questions is an important part of his research, noting that serious researchers spend much of their time "putting out fires" by validating their findings.

"I think skeptics are needed," he said. "But they usually don't present a whole lot of information to counter (our findings)."

Rhys Saunders: rsaunders@daily-times.com

March 20, 2006

Ann Arbour News

'UFO' Mystery Still Haunts Some
1966 Dexter sightings by residents, officer called swamp gas by U.S. government

By Jo Collins Mathis

Forty years ago today, for a brief but interesting time, Washtenaw County became the flying saucer capital of the Midwest.

It started when a Dexter farmer named Frank Mannor and his 18-year-old son, Ronald, told the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department that a strange flying object appeared and landed in a swampy area at Quigley and Brand roads.

Frank Mannor, 46, told authorities that night that the two went out in search of the object moments after they saw it touch ground. He said it appeared to be brown, with a "quilted" effect on the surface. It was flat on the bottom and cone-shaped toward the top, with two small lights on the outer edges emitting a glowing blue-green color that intensified and turned red at times. When it became brightly lit, the entire object was light yellow, with the light running horizontally between the two outer running lights.

According to the police report, Mannor said: "We then heard the sound of a whistle - something like a rifle bullet makes when it ricochets off something. Then this object went up in the air, passed directly over us and disappeared."

Patrolman Robert Hunawill of the Dexter Village Police Department reported then that he saw what appeared to be the same object after he parked his car near the area. He said it suddenly appeared over his patrol car at a height of about 1,000 feet, that it had white and red lights on it that at times had a bluish tinge, and that it hovered over the car before continuing sweeps over the swamp.

Hunawill reported that he watched the object for a few minutes before it was joined by three others that flew in formation, with one set of two flying high above the other two. They then disappeared into the sky.

Professor J. Allen Hynek, a Northwestern University astrophysicist who consulted with the military, came to Dexter to investigate, and then reported his findings at the Detroit Press Club.

"It was like a mob scene," said Bill Treml of Ann Arbor, the Ann Arbor News reporter who covered the story. "Then (Hynek) said: 'As near as I can tell, what we're seeing is swamp gas*.'"

"I remember (Mannor) saying, 'I was in the Army and we were down in Louisiana and there was swamp gas all the time; this was not swamp gas.' "

Treml is convinced the Mannors and Hunawill saw something that night.

"Frank Mannor wasn't a nut case," he said. "He wasn't a guy who had wishes of grandeur. He was just telling what he saw. I'm sure he didn't dream it up. He died thinking that was some kind of UFO, either Air Force-connected or from another planet or something."

Treml said he thinks that something was manmade.

"I'm sure the Air Force has secret files about all their experiments with rockets or whatever," he said. "Sometimes the high officials are so stupid, they think, 'This will create a panic.' That's their alibi for not saying, 'Hey, we had a rocket ship go round the moon, or something come down.' Each administration continues the charade."

Douglas Harvey, Washtenaw County sheriff from 1965 to 1972, agrees with Treml that the Mannors clearly saw something.

And he's never believed the government's official stance on what that something was.

"Dr. Hynek was sent in from the U.S. government. He came into my office. We went out to the site where supposedly this object came down on the ground. Dr. Hynek in the car said, 'There is something. We just can't put our finger on it. We've been investigating this for quite a while.' "

They returned to Harvey's office, where Hynek asked to use the telephone in private.

"He was on the phone for quite a while, which I found very enlightening," Harvey said. "He came out and I said, 'Well, Dr. Hynek. What do you think?' He said, 'It's swamp gas.' He tells me one minute he has no idea what it is. And then he makes one phone call to Washington and comes out and gives a statement that it's swamp gas. Very strange."

"And then the Mannor family really caught a lot of flak, which was very unfortunate."

He said soon after that, a man who was out running in Brighton reported a sighting.

"And then that was it," Harvey said. "It just kind of died away."

Harvey doesn't know what to think about it.

"They did see something," he said. "I'll believe this to the day I die. Somebody has kept something quiet, and nothing more ever materialized. So we don't know if it was the government experimenting, or was it really a UFO. I don't know."

Harry Willnus of South Lyon, the former state director of the Mutual UFO Network, has investigated the sightings and wrote a feature article about it for UFO (UK edition) magazine two years ago.

Willnus has a copy of the police report from that night, and said there's no way that it was swamp gas.

"For instance, it mentions that the object was observed to rise to an altitude of approximately 500 feet, and then return to the ground," he said. "Swamp gas doesn't do that. It only goes off the ground a few feet. It mentioned when it took off, it sounded like a rifle shot in a canyon. Again, swamp gas doesn't do that."

So what was it?

"We can't be sure," he said. "It was, I think, either a craft that came from off the earth, an extraterrestrial, or some kind of one-dimensional device. And I'm starting to use the word multiverse rather than universe... Some kind of one-dimensional craft, perhaps, that came into our realm and then left."

Willnus, who is retired from teaching in the Romulus school district, worked for a while as an investigator for Hynek after Hynek started The Center for UFO Studies.

"We haven't solved the mystery," Willnus said. "This case is 40 years old. We still don't know the answer, and yet it still continues to occur, with sightings every day around the world."

Jo Collins Mathis can be reached at jmathis@annarbornews.com or 734-994-6849.

March 20, 2006

Ridgeway Recorder

Today is National Festival of Extraterrestrial Abductions Day

Extraterrestrial abduction claims have become almost common since the late 20th century and once each year alien enthusiasts have a day to speculate on the validity of such reports.

In Pennsylvania, a number of extraterrestrial abduction claims have been documented. The international extraterrestrial abduction and UFO reporting center, "Mystical Universe," keeps a comprehensive listing of the reports of such phenomena from around the world. The largest number of such sightings and abductions seem to come from California, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Although the reasons for this are unknown, Pennsylvania is listed as the sight of 19 such reports. A particularly famous abduction report involved a group of four men, three of which were Pennsylvanians, who claim to have been abducted while camping in Maine.

Four distinct abduction or sighting reports stem from the Harrisburg area alone and involve up to 17 witnesses. The Bensalem area is also the sight of four purported incidents. Other locations such as Mt. Carmel, Langhorne, Easton, Springfield, Lewiston, Jessup, Levittown, Highspire, Union City and Vermillion Hills record as many as three reports each. Unfortunately, many of those reporting such phenomena do not disclose an actual location and, fearing public censure, only report the general region or state in which their experience occurred.

In our own area, no claimants could be contacted to discuss their experiences. It is very likely though that someone in our region believes to have been abducted or have seen a UFO. Statistically, these reports are more common in rural areas such as our own. Given county population and geographic features, our area most likely has residents who believe to have had such experiences, although they may never have reported it.

Ridgway Borough Police and Pennsylvania State Police based in Ridgway were both contacted in regards to such extraterrestrial experiences. Neither office reports having any such incident claims on file. One state police officer claimed that in his entire time here he knows of no such reports and stated that something of that nature would probably have been brought up for procedural instruction at daily roll call. That doesn't mean that no one in our area makes such claims, only that they have thus far gone unreported. In researching such events you quickly find that everyone knows someone else who makes such claims, but can rarely give you any accurate information.

Local astronomer Richard Steudler was willing to give his opinions on such phenomena. Steudler stated that he didn't put a whole lot of faith in such stories. He said he felt that, without solid proof, the stories remain completely unsubstantiated, and said he couldn't figure out why no one has ever gotten any sharp pictures if such reports are true. Steudler said he believes that there probably is alien life somewhere else in our vast universe, but he does not believe that extraterrestrials would be secretly abducting people. Steudler stated that he felt that visitors with such capabilities would make themselves known and not be, "sneaking around."

Steudler has, in the past, seen things as an astronomer that he himself was unable to account for at the time, but all such occurrences were later given a valid scientific explanation. He said that he has read some things on the infamous Roswell, New Mexico incident that prove, in his mind, that it wasn't aliens at all. Steudler stated that his research has led him to believe that the incident was merely an accident involving a Canadian test pilot working with an American bomber plane. He felt that the story was simply, "blown out of proportion."

Steudler also believed that many reports of UFO sightings can be accounted for by ball lightning. Ball lightning, claimed Steudler, can occur on perfectly clear nights. He also stated that it can account for the buzzing noise reported by many extraterrestrial phenomena claimants, since ball lightning makes a similar buzzing sound. Ball lightning, said Steudler, can also account for the ground tremors and static shocks that many people claim to experience in such cases, as it can cause both when it grounds.

Whether the purported experiences with extraterrestrials that many people claim to have experienced in the past are bonafide events, simple misunderstandings of naturally occurring phenomena, or merely pleas for attention we may never know. Steudler though did have this to say on the matter, "I hope if they (extraterrestrials) do make contact with us they have a better attitude than people have proven to have in encountering strangers." Steudler referred to such incidents as the European colonization of the Americas as proof that humanitiy's track record in such events has not proven the best. With such events in our own past, it is hard not to echo Steudler's sentiments.

March 10, 2006

Charlotte Observer

Farewell To Flying Saucers
UFO expert Fawcett is retiring, but he hasn't lost his enthusiasm

by Joe Depriest

LINCOLNTON - That NASCAR Hall of Fame announced in Charlotte this week sounds great, says UFO expert George Fawcett.

He's got an idea, too.

Why not a UFO museum in the Queen City?

After all, North Carolina ranks fifth in the U.S. for flying saucer sightings. Sightings are up worldwide. So is interest.

As we sat in his Lincolnton ranch house this week, Fawcett, 76, reminded me he'd pitched the idea of a state UFO museum to anybody who'd listen way back in the 1970s. Back when people called him a nut for believing in stuff like that.

"Now skeptics are in the minority," Fawcett said.

The soft-spoken dean of North Carolina "UFOnauts" has had a rough year following two knee surgeries and lengthy therapy. At times, he didn't think he'd make it.

I've known Fawcett, a Mount Airy native and retired YMCA director, for more than 20 years. Last month, I spotted a notice about his upcoming "farewell address" at the 58th meeting of the Mutual UFO Network of North Carolina at Pfeiffer University.

Fawcett is founder of the N.C. Chapter of MUFON, a group that tracks and researches reports of UFOs.

According to the notice, Fawcett was retiring from active membership because of his health.

It was time to check on my old friend. I hadn't seen him since 1998 when he'd just donated most of his Sauceriana Collection to the International UFO Museum in Roswell, N.M.

That's it, I figured. Fawcett had been collecting UFO materials since the subject hooked him in 1944. Maybe he'd finally let it go. Maybe he'd take up golf or stamp collecting.

I should have known better.

Funny thing about those empty UFO files, Fawcett said as he showed me into the living room. They'd filled up again. People from all over the world keep sending him books and videos, research papers and photos. He gets journals from England and Australia and subscribes to a national UFO clipping service.

Fawcett is pretty much the same as ever. He still likes to talk about his wife, two children and grandchildren. He's big on Duke basketball and pancakes. He remains active in St. Luke's Episcopal Church, singing in the choir and serving on the vestry. And his passion for UFOs is still hotter than a down-to-the-finish race at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

When I stopped by, he was boxing up another load of UFO materials for the Roswell museum, where he's an honorary board member. He ships at least two boxes a year.

"George is a major benefactor to our library," museum director Julie Shuster told me. "We rely on the generosity of people like him."

I've never seen a UFO. Not that I know of. Those strange lights I spotted in the night sky once were probably shooting stars or aircraft of some kind.

Fawcett has seen only one UFO. That was in 1951, on the campus of Lynchburg (Va.) College, where he was a student. It was 30 feet in diameter and orange.

His interest in UFOs went back even earlier, to 1944, when he spotted an Associated Press article about "mysterious balls of fire" American pilots saw over Germany in World War II.

Fawcett has taught a UFO class at Gaston College, founded and advised five UFO study groups from New England to Florida, served as a movie consultant and written two books, one of which he recently revised and enlarged.

You can hear him speak in April at the Lincolnton Rotary Club. I hope he tells the story of how he met a Man-in-Black in 1974. Sometimes called MIBs, these mysterious figures try to intimidate witnesses to UFOs or other strange doings the government is trying to cover up, according to UFO circles.

Fawcett may hit the highlights of the conclusions he's reached after years of study.

Fawcett believes UFOs are real, controlled by a clear intelligence, and that extraterrestrials could be responsible. The government knows all this, but keeps the information hidden from the public while considering UFOs a threat to national security.

That's it in a nutshell. His research continues.

Wading deeper and deeper into UFOs isn't my thing, but Fawcett keeps probing. I admire the depth of his curiosity. And he's got a neat philosophy: "Keep an open mind and not an empty head."

So rest easy. Don't worry about the night sky. The UFO man is still on the job.

Want to Know More Lore?

• For information about George Fawcett's revised "Human Reactions To UFOs and UFOnauts Worldwide 1940-1983" and "What We Have Learned From UFO Repetitions 1947-1984," call (704) 735-5725. Or write to Fawcett at 602 Battleground Road, Lincolnton 28092.

• For information about the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, N.M., call (505) 625-9495 or go to www.iufomrc.com.

March 9, 2006

Wandsworth Borough News (London, UK)

UFO Sighting Really Took My Breath Away

by Carron Taylor

Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was a shining silver pyramid, according to two colleagues who spotted a UFO in the skies of Putney last week.

Michelle Medhat was sitting at her office desk last Wednesday morning when she glanced out of the window and spotted a glimmering silver object in the sky.

"I thought what the hell is that?' There were no clouds in the sky at all and 100 per cent visibility.

"The sun was hitting the object and you could see it was turning very slowly.

"I did get a feeling there was something strange about the thing," she said.

Entranced, Michelle signalled to her colleague Peter Gardiner, 53, to take a look.

He said: "At first I thought it was a big piece of rubbish or a clear tarpaulin sheet.

"But then it glistened and it was shiny. It had a strange pattern of movement. It was a significant size, possibly the size of a roof or even a house."

The pair watched it for a couple of minutes, rotating in the distance and heading towards Wandsworth Town. Then, as soon as it had appeared it vanished.

Michelle said if it was a piece of rubbish it would have caused severe damage when it came down, because of its size and density.

"I can't explain it and therefore I'm calling it a UFO. It took my breath away. It did feel weird.

"The more I looked at it I realised there was something not quite right. It wasn't moving like anything I've ever seen before," she said.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it had not been notified of any sighting of the pyramid.

"The MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of UFO/flying saucer' matters or to the question of the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial lifeforms, about which it remains totally open-minded."

He said it examined the reports of UFO sightings it received solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance, namely whether there was any evidence the UK's airspace might have been compromised by hostile or unauthorised air activity.

Michelle and Peter said there has been a lot of activity in the skies over Putney recently.

Michelle said they had seen several Chinook helicopters over the past week and believes something must be happening.

Chinooks are used to transport troops, artillery, supplies and equipment, but also used for operations such as medical evacuation, disaster relief and search and rescue.

When travelling to Putney, our reporter saw what looked to be three Apache helicopters travelling east.

A spokesman for the MoD said the helicopters were probably part of general aviation traffic over London and there was no specific activity or event they were involved in. He added such movements were "not unusual".

Did you see the flying silver pyramid? Call the newsdesk on 020 8254 5409.

ctaylor@london.newsquest.co.uk

March 8, 2006

Brisbane Courier-Mail (Queensland, Australia)

Blinded By Power Of Illusion

by Stephen Hughes

THERE have been a number of UFO sightings reported in Queensland recently, two of which I was asked to look at by Channel 10.

One was Venus hanging in the early morning sky off the beach at Mackay and the other was aircraft contrails high over Brisbane, illuminated by the rays of the sun in the pre-dawn sky.

Other reports followed in regional newspapers.

Sceptics may say that in this case the UFOs could be easily identified – and so became "IFOs" or Identified Flying Objects – but what about the UFO sightings that cannot be so easily explained? Are these evidence of alien spacecraft visiting the Earth and are governments guilty of covering up the truth about UFOs?

UFO sightings are nothing new.

In ancient times people saw "fiery dragons" and "foo balls" and so on.

In the 1800s strange lights were reported off the coast to Japan that would follow a ship all night.

In 1897, there was the flying-saucer scare in the northwest of the US – although in this case the object was said to be a cigar-shaped airship.

The modern flying saucer or UFO era begun on June 24, 1947 when a pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing nine unidentified objects which he said flew erratically like a saucer skipping across the water.

Although Arnold actually described the objects as looking like boomerangs, the newspaper report said that flying saucers had been seen rather than flying boomerangs.

No doubt, if the newspaper article had been more accurate we would have entered the flying boomerang era (possibly with interesting consequences for the Australian tourist industry).

One of the most famous cases known to the general public is the Roswell incident, which hit the media only one month after the "official" start of the UFO era.

It is claimed by some that in July 1947 the US Air Force recovered debris from a crashed alien space ship near a ranch at Roswell in New Mexico.

In August, 1985, the Fox Network in the US aired a film claiming to show autopsies of alien bodies recovered from the Roswell wreckage.

It subsequently has been proved – I would say beyond even unreasonable doubt – that the wreckage discovered at Roswell was the remains of a weather balloon and that the autopsy film is fake.

In spite of this, many claim that the US government has covered up the true details of the case for almost 50 years.

I find it impossible to believe that any government could cover up something that really happened for so long with no leaks ever taking place.

The vast majority of UFO sightings are either Venus, a bright star (for example, Sirius), meteors, aircraft, weather balloons, high-flying tumbleweed, reflective layers of ice crystals, not including UFO photos that clearly have been faked.

However, this still leaves a significant number of unexplained sightings.

I believe that many of these can be explained by invoking more exotic atmospheric phenomena such as a special type of "reverse" mirage known as a superior mirage.

We are all familiar with a standard mirage (inferior mirage) in which the light from a line of trees on the horizon appears to be reflected in water.

This effect is caused by a hot layer of air near the ground reflecting light from the trees and the surrounding sky upwards so that it appears to be coming from below the horizon.

If we have the situation where we have cold air close to the ground with a warm layer above, we have what is known as an inversion layer.

Light rays which pass from the cool layer of air into the warm layer are reflected downwards and so in this way can be projected over the horizon.

The effect is similar to the way in which light is propagated down a fibre optic cable and has been used to describe the origin of the Min Min lights in western Queensland.

Temperature inversions can occur high up in the atmosphere and are capable of projecting astronomical bodies such as Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) and Venus over the horizon.

When an aircraft arrives at the right place at the right time, the UFO can appear to travel from the horizon several hundred kilometres away to appear just a few hundred metres from the plane.

When the plane flies out of the part of the sky where the inversion layer lies between the plane and the horizon, the object appears to rush back to the horizon in almost no time at all.

This back-and-forth motion may be repeated a number of times, making it appear as if the UFO is engaged in a "dogfight" with the aircraft.

The result of these observations is that the UFO is assumed to be powered by some unknown energy source when in reality it is all an optical illusion.

---

Dr Stephen Hughes is a lecturer in physics and astrophysics with QUT's Faculty of Science and School of Physical and Chemical Sciences

http://www.sci.qut.edu.au/profiles/hughes/sw.hughes@qut.edu.au

March 2006

Focus Magazine (UK MOD)

The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident

The Ministry of Defence's UFO Project has its roots in a study commissioned in 1950 by the MOD's then Chief Scientific Adviser, the great radar scientist Sir Henry Tizard. As a result of his insistence that UFO sightings should not be dismissed without some form of proper scientific study, the Department set up arguably the most marvellously-named committee in the history of the civil service, the Flying Saucer Working Party. The committee's conclusions were sceptical; UFO sightings were misidentifications of ordinary objects, or hoaxes. They recommended no further action. But in 1952 there was a series of high-profile events where UFOs were tracked on radar and seen by RAF pilots, and this forced the MOD to think again. UFO sightings were to be collated and sent to the Department for investigation, so that a determination could be made as to whether anything of any defence significance might have occurred. Since then, over 10,000 UFO reports have been received. From 1991 to 1994 I worked in the department responsible for this bizarre subject. It was among the most fascinating of my postings in 20 years in the Department.

Most UFO sightings received by the MOD had prosaic explanations: aircraft lights, weather balloons, meteors, airships, etc. But in all of this, a small percentage looked more interesting and one case in particular stood out. This was the so-called Rendlesham Forest incident. Last December saw the 25th anniversary of what is universally accepted as Britain's most famous UFO sighting. There was extensive media coverage of this bizarre anniversary, a commemorative Boxing Day event organised by the Forestry Commission at the site of their ‘UFO Trail', and several unofficial ‘skywatches' where UFO enthusiasts came together to mark the event, swap stories, and generally stand around getting extremely cold. So why the interest? What happened in the forest all those years ago and why is it still generating so much interest?

Rendlesham Forest lies between the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk. In 1980 both facilities were operated by the United States Air Force (USAF). The Cold War was still decidedly frosty. The Solidarity Movement was taking hold in Poland and Soviet forces were building up on the border. It was against this background that a strange series of incidents occurred.

In the early hours of 26 December 1980 military personnel at the twin bases saw strange lights in the forest. At first they thought an aircraft might have crashed, so they went out to investigate. What they found was not a crashed aircraft, but what they could only categorise as a UFO. Nearby farm animals were going into a frenzy. One of the security police officers got close enough to touch the side of the object. He and another of the airmen present attached a sketch of the craft to their official USAF witness statements. One of these sketches even details the strange symbols seen on the craft's hull, which the witness likened to Egyptian hieroglyphs. "I wish I'd had my weapon, because I felt totally defenceless," one of the young airmen, John Burroughs, subsequently remarked.

Two nights later the UFO returned. The Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, was informed and went out into the forest to investigate. He too saw the UFO, which at one point fired beams of light down at his party and at the Woodbridge facility. "Here I am, a senior official who routinely denies this sort of thing and diligently works to debunk them, and I'm involved in the middle of something I can't explain", he subsequently commented.

The MOD's investigation included an inconclusive search for radar evidence that might have corroborated what was seen. Of far more interest, however, was an assessment of radiation readings that had been taken from the landing site with a Geiger counter. The readings had peaked in three holes in the ground which formed the shape of an equilateral triangle, as if the UFO had landed on a tripod of some sort. The Defence Intelligence Staff stated that the readings seemed "significantly higher than the average background". Their report suggested that the radiation level was around seven times what would have been expected for the area concerned.

There are various sceptical theories for what was seen, the most prevalent one being that the various witnesses were somehow misled by the beam from Orfordness lighthouse, shining through the trees. "If the USAF really are capable of hallucinations induced by a lighthouse which must surely be familiar to them, then I shudder for that powerful finger which lies upon so many triggers," remarked Ralph Noyes, a former MOD Under Secretary who took a close interest in the case after his retirement. Charles Halt's reaction to the theory was blunter. "Lighthouses don't fly," he said. Ralph Noyes was not the only senior figure to take an interest in the case. Former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Hill-Norton corresponded with the Department extensively about the incident, and tabled a number of Parliamentary Questions in the House of Lords.

Many UFO researchers believe that information about UFOs is being covered up. They see a vast conspiracy to keep the truth from the public. Nothing could be further from the truth. Requests concerning UFOs are among the most frequently submitted under the Freedom of Information Act and the MOD has made great efforts to be as helpful as possible. Information has been made available under the Publication Scheme, in the FOI ‘Reading Room' and at the National Archives in Kew. The entire file of the Rendlesham Forest incident has been scanned in and is available on the MOD's website.

The official position is that these events were of no defence significance, but the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident remains unexplained to this date. I hope that we have some answers before the 50th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary incidents ever investigated by the MOD.

February 17, 2006

Western Daily Press (Derby, Derbyshire, UK)

Revisiting Riddle Of The Thing

Thirty years ago, two teenage lads from Warminster were up on the nearby Cradle Hill every week to watch for UFOs, inspired by a local journalist's book about the flying saucer flap which by that time had been flustering the Wiltshire town for more than a decade. Arthur Shuttlewood's book of 1967 was entitled The Warminster Mystery, and much of the mystery still abounds.

But now those same lads, Steve Dewey and John Ries, are the authors of a remarkable new book, In Alien Heat: The Warminster Mystery Revisited, an in-depth investigation of the UFO fever that gripped the town in the 1960sand 1970s.

Modestly, the pair - Steve now lives at Westbury, Wiltshire, and John in Shropshire - say it was not a book waiting to be written.

The Warminster case, if not forgotten, is an embarrassment to modern-day ufologists, they say, and the story of the Warminster Thing almost unknown outside the UK.

But I would say this is a book that w as waiting to be written. It's a riveting social document, objectively placing the phenomenon in its cultural and historical context, and providing a highly engaging and revealing analysis of those strange d ay s.

"When we were younger, with all the enthusiasm of youth, we were much more into it all, " Steve, a technical author, told me. "We thought things were happening and a UFO landing was imminent.

"We went to Cradle Hill a lot; we were too young to go to the pub! We were there once a week for at least two years.

"But watching the sky-watchers made us sceptical because they would get so excited about things which were quite mundane. We began to think it was all in the UFO culture."

While the book clears up some aspects of the Warminster mystery - some lights in the sky could be explained by military exercises on nearby Salisbury Plain - other questions remain unanswered.

"We think there is a genuine mystery behind what happened, " said Steve. "It all started with a strange noise from the sky and there have never been any conclusions about what it was."

>From Christmas 1964, humming or droning sounds were reported to Shuttlewood - sonic disturbances which flung people to the ground and damaged buildings.

Shuttlewood blamed what he called The Thing and became the prime focus for the whole saucer circus that followed.

What was to mark out Warminster particularly was the sheer volume of UFO sightings, several thousand, and that the whole town seemed to be caught up in the fantastic affair.

Steve and John say it's clear that the ufologists who flocked into Warminster helped to create the phenomenon.

They demanded that the weird sounds be spaceships, and the populace duly saw them.

The Warminster Journal, Shuttlewood's paper, also played a role by its reporting, and providing a forum for UFO debate, and Shuttlewood created the national media interest, often embellishing or exaggerating incidents.

A photograph of a flying saucer over the area, taken by local man Gordon Faulkner in 1965, and which came to be the emblematic image of The Thing, now used for the cover of In Alien Heat, later turned out to be a hoax. In January 1969, the veteran TV astronomer Patrick Moore visited Warminster, poked fun at Shuttlewood, and cracked that several of the objects seen in the sky "looked like balls".

However, Shuttlewood, who died in 1996, wrote two further books in which he claimed to have had contacts with extraterrestrials wanting to save humans from destroying the planet. Just how a straightforward, respected journalist in a small West town turned into a deluded UFO guru is not the least part of the Warminster mystery.

In Alien Heat is published by Anomalist Books for 11 Pounds Sterling.

December 31, 2005

Independent (London, UK)

'Right To Know' Fails To Open The Government's Vaults Of Secrets

by Robert Verkaik
Legal Affairs Correspondent

Labour's much-trumpeted freedom of information laws have failed to open up Whitehall to public scrutiny, judging by the evidence of the first 12 months of the new order.

A year after we were first granted the "right to know", new figures show nine out of 17 government departments have failed to provide adequate answers to half of the requests they received.

Gordon Brown's Treasury was the worst offender by refusing to release information in three-quarters of all "resolvable" requests.

Further findings reveal that all but one government department has breached the FOI legislation by failing to answer requests within the 20-day time limit.

The report, published by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, confirms what many suspected - that the Government has blocked access by failing to observe the spirit of the new law in a year in which central government bodies received 36,000 requests.

While Labour has been happy to release documents embarrassing the previous Tory administration over its handling of "Black Wednesday" - Britain's forced withdrawal from the ERM -ministers have been less willing to let the public use the Act to shed light on Labour's own political controversies.

For example, ministers are still refusing to release earlier drafts of the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war with Iraq.

At the heart of its strategy is the Orwellian-sounding Central Clearing House where all sensitive or difficult requests are sent. Set up by ministers in the run-up to the introduction of the legislation, the unit employs 12 staff to monitor the public's use of the legislation. A FOI request from The Independent reveals, in its first year, the clearing house cost the taxpayer £700,000.

The most popular target for information is the Ministry of Defence, which handled more than 2,700 requests for the disclosure of ministerial letters, memos and military reports.

Maurice Frankel, a man who for many years campaigned for Britain's own freedom of information laws, said in the first year of the Act's operation the Government had responded "cautiously" to most of the important requests and there was still no voluntary process of disclosure.

He said: "They are not taking gigantic leaps by making proactive releases. There is much more information to come out but the Government is not going to release it until it has to."

Michael Smyth, an expert on FOI and head of public policy at Clifford Chance, a law firm, said: "The clearing house is a development that will need monitoring. People making requests of bodies subject to the clearing house can be confident they will be dealt with by FOI experts but over-zealous application of the exemption regime could mean less information is released."

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, the FOI's independent watchdog, is considering a backlog of more than 1,200 appeal cases, including government refusals to release information about policies on defence and the environment.

The public also made requests for information from a further 1,000 public bodies. The new figures show those bodies have found a similar willingness to rely on the 34 statutory exemptions to refuse disclosure.

The Crown Prosecution Service has only complied with a fifth of the 229 requests for information. The Health and Safety Executive received more than 5,300 applications for disclosure of which it has answered around 60 per cent. But generally non-government bodies are granting 10 per cent more requests than Whitehall departments.

The figures do not include hundreds more requests which have become " lapsed" because the applicant has not paid a fee for any additional work the department says the request would generate.

A spokesperson for the Department for Constitutional Affairs said yesterday: "Central government performance has improved steadily throughout the year. The response has been very positive. Latest figures show 86 per cent of requests are answered within statutory deadlines and the majority of those requests (60 per cent) result in full disclosure. About 16,000 pieces of information have been given out by central government bodies."

The spokesperson added: "The Freedom of Information Act recognises the presumption of openness, but it also expressly recognises that there must be responsible limits."

The successful requests

* UFOs

Requests from The Independent led to the Ministry of Defence revealing details about UFO sightings across the country. Branded "Britain's X files", reports from senior military personnel, police officers and civil servants gave some credibility to sightings which had been previously dismissed as cases of mistaken identity. Although there was never any official recognition of visits from other planets, the documents proved that the Government still had a special unit set up to monitor the reports of UFOs.

* FARMING SUBSIDIES

Some of Britain's wealthiest landowners have received hundreds of thousands of pounds in farming subsides, including the Queen, who was given more than £750,000 over the past two years. The figures became public after a list of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies in England was published by the Rural Payment Agency, under the terms of the Freedom of Information legislation. The Queen's subsidy, paid through CAP, went to Sandringham Farms. Charles's cash went to the Duchy of Cornwall, which made a profit of almost £10m in 2003.

December 8, 2005

Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader

Sci Fi Channel-Backed Researcher Pressing NASA For 'UFO' Files

by Joe Mandak

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Researchers and witnesses who believe a UFO landed in the woods of western Pennsylvania 40 years ago are marking another anniversary on Friday: two years since a lawsuit was filed to get NASA to release records of what happened.

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman says there's no cover-up: the "UFO" was a Russian satellite but government records documenting it have been lost.

Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter backed by the Sci Fi Channel, and a group connected to the cable TV channel sued the NASA two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.

Kean wants files on what happened Dec. 9, 1965, in the unincorporated hamlet of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Witnesses described a "fireball" in the evening sky, and a metallic, acorn-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet high and 8 to 12 feet in diameter that landed gently in the woods, according to media accounts at the time.

Kean's attorney Lee Helfrich said she'll file a new court motion on Friday seeking to "jump start" NASA's search for the information.

"NASA has been stonewalling for too long, and in the process has given us a great record to show that it's recalcitrant and acting in bad faith," Helfrich said. "What is NASA trying to hide?"

Nothing, NASA spokesman Dave Steitz said.

The object appeared to be a Russian satellite that re-entered the atmosphere and broke up. NASA experts studied fragments from the object, but records of what they found were lost in the 1990s, Steitz said.

"As a rule, we don't track UFOs. What we could do, and what we apparently did as experts in spacecraft in the 1960s, was to take a look at whatever it was and give our expert opinion," Steitz said. "We did that, we boxed (the case) up and that was the end of it. Unfortunately, the documents supporting those findings were misplaced."

Kean and Helfrich don't believe that explanation.

Kean said Nicholas L. Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, determined the object couldn't be a Russian satellite or any other manmade object, after studying the orbital paths of known satellites and other records from 1965.

Johnson didn't immediately return calls for comment Thursday to his phone number listed on NASA's Web site. Steitz referred questions on Kean's claims to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which didn't immediately comment.

Witnesses claim military personnel cordoned off the site, removed the object and threatened residents who questioned the incident. The military later called the object a meteor.

On Saturday, Kean, Helfrich and others connected to a Sci Fi Channel documentary will speak at the Kecksburg fire hall, where a mock-up of the object is on permanent display.

Kean said a pair of West Virginia University scientists who examined the reported landing site made two recent discoveries.

Forestry professor Ray Hicks counted tree rings and determined that trees in the area were damaged in 1965. Hicks, however, said the trees were likely damaged by ice, and then snapped off by the wind. He says his findings don't support Kean's claim that "something physically landed" at the site.

Geoarchaeologist J. Steven Kite says he found no evidence to support the high-speed impact of a meteor or other large object - which Kean says supports witness accounts that a spacecraft landed softly.

November 20, 2005

Associated Press

Harvard Researcher Ready To Wash Her Hands Of Space Aliens

by Michael Kunzelman

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Susan Clancy is sick of space aliens.

The Harvard psychologist figures she has read every book and seen every movie ever made about extraterrestrials, and she has interviewed roughly 50 people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

And it's all in the name of scientific truth, not science fiction.

"I have become a reluctant scholar of alienography," Clancy said.

Clancy is bracing for a fresh round of hate mail with her new book, "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," published by Harvard University Press.

Those who believe aliens are among us haven't taken kindly to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out of, she writes, a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy."

That doesn't mean Clancy thinks her subjects are crazy. In fact, she was surprised how many of them seemed quite normal, intelligent and articulate.

"Arguing weird beliefs is a very normal thing," she said in an interview from Nicaragua, where she is a visiting professor at INCAE, the Central American Institute for Business Administration. "It's very human for us to believe in things for which there is no scientific evidence."

When she arrived at Harvard in 1996, Clancy didn't set out to debunk the stories of little green men kidnapping people from their bedrooms and using them for painful experiments. Instead, she started her research on false memories by studying victims of sexual abuse.

She quickly found herself the target of angry "outsiders" who accused her of trying to discredit victims. One irate letter-writer called her a "friend of pedophiles everywhere."

Around the same time, Harvard Medical School started investigating the research methods employed by Pulitzer Prize-winning psychologist John Mack, who used hypnosis to retrieve memories from people who claimed to be alien abductees. (The school decided not to censure Mack, who was struck and killed by a drunk driver in London last year.)

Mack's work gave Clancy an idea: Wouldn't it be easier to test her theories if she could be certain that her subjects' memories were not real? She and her adviser, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, placed a newspaper ad that asked, "Have you been abducted by aliens?" It took less than a day for callers to fill her voice mail.

As Clancy and McNally interviewed the abductees, they started to find some common threads. Many of them, for example, described the terrifying experience of waking up and being unable to move, certain that an intruder was lurking in their room.

To the Harvard psychologists, it was obvious that their subjects had suffered an episode of sleep paralysis - a state of limbo between sleep and being awake, sometimes punctuated by hallucinations.

"It's a little bit like a hiccup in the brain. It's harmless," said McNally, adding that 20 percent of the population will experience sleep paralysis at least once.

Many of the abductees also could be described as "spiritual people" who have abandoned conventional religious beliefs, McNally added. "The people convinced of this are getting genuine spiritual payoff," he said. "To encounter a naturalistic account of it is deeply offensive."

In her book, Clancy describes her subjects' stories of abduction in detail, changing only their names.

One man, "an articulate, handsome" chiropractor with a "strikingly attractive wife" and twin sons, claimed to have fathered hybrid babies with an alien, a "streamlined, sylphlike creature."

Another subject, a 34-year-old artist with a college education, couldn't identify "disturbing sleep-related experiences" until he was hypnotized by an abduction researcher he found on the Internet. During his second hypnosis session, the artist said he recovered memories of being abducted by aliens who strapped him down on a black marble table and subjected him to a painful sexual experiment.

Clancy said a wealth of research shows that hypnosis makes it easier for people to create false memories.

"This is in large part because it both stimulates the imagination and relaxes reality constraints," she writes in her book.

However, Clancy learned it was impossible to categorically disprove alien abductions.

"All you can do is argue that they're improbable and that the evidence adduced by the believer is insufficient to justify the belief," she wrote. "Ultimately, then, the existence of ETs is a matter of opinion, and the believers have their own opinions, based on firsthand experience."

One of those "believers" is Will Bueche, a 36-year-old who was working for Mack when Clancy and McNally interviewed him several years ago.

Bueche said he has had more than a dozen "encounters" with aliens since he was a young child. These encounters with the "pale, thin beings," he said, usually happen at night, in his room, and he feels alert but "a little bit drugged" while they communicate with him telepathically.

"It's not like they're speaking English in my mind," he said. "It's a mixture of music, pictures, feelings and impressions."

Bueche said Clancy's theories about alien abductions, including sleep paralysis, cannot fully explain what he's experienced.

"I think her book comes close to the truth in many ways, but it isn't able to see the potential out there for another breakthrough in how we see reality," he said.

Clancy's conclusions aren't shared by David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University. Jacobs, who teaches a class called "UFOs and American Society," said Clancy's "Abducted" is a "typical debunking book."

"This is junk social science, and there is a certain condescending quality to it," he said.

Jacobs, who said he has used "hypnotic regression" to recover memories from more than 900 alien abductees, said sleep paralysis, faulty hypnosis and false memories "simply do not account for the convincing details" in abductees' stories.

"All debunkers make one or more of the following mistakes: They ignore the data, they distort the data or they don't know the data," he said, describing himself as a "serious UFO researcher who believes the evidence is compelling that these events are happening more or less as (abductees) say."

Clancy and McNally aren't the only psychologists who have studied alien abductees.

Leonard Newman, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the co-author of a paper that argued alien abductees are "masochists" who enjoy the painful experiences they describe.

Unlike Clancy and McNally, Newman did not interview any abductees firsthand, relying instead on other published accounts of abduction reports.

Clancy said the volume and nasty tone of the hate mail she gets these days is far worse than what her research on sexual-abuse victims generated.

"I'm done with aliens," she said.

September 21, 2005

National Post (Canada)

Holding Editors To Account

Andrew Coyne

The former Liberal cabinet minister Paul Hellyer, after a long career defending Canadian sovereignty from American incursions, has a new reason to mistrust the United States: UFOs. Specifically, the efforts by successive American governments to conceal from public knowledge the 1947 crash of an alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico.

"I believe that UFOs are real," Mr. Hellyer, who was second to Pierre Trudeau on the first ballot at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention, told the Canadian Press recently. Later this week, he will speak at a convention of UFO enthusiasts in Toronto. "I'll talk about that a little bit and a bit about the fantastic cover-up of the United States government and also a little bit of the fallout from the wreckage." By "fallout" he means the adaptation of technologies found in the Roswell craft in subsequent American technical advances. I'd tell you more, but it's just too risky.

I feel a certain unease in writing this: It is possible that Mr. Hellyer has simply lost his mind, and it's not right to poke fun at a lunatic. On the other hand, who knows any more? What once were classed as psychological disorders are today considered perfectly normal, while behaviour for which one might previously have been held responsible is now just another form of mental illness.

More to the point, what is to distinguish Mr. Hellyer's belief in a massive, decades-long conspiracy by the American government to conceal the existence of alien visitors to planet Earth from, say, Paul William Roberts' belief in a massive, decades-long conspiracy by the American government to create the very Islamist terror network it is now fighting -- not as an accidental "blowback," but as a deliberate strategy to justify more military spending? The first makes you the butt of an oddly-enough piece on the CP wire. The second is worth a three-page, 5,000-word essay in The Globe and Mail. Yet the one has precisely as little plausibility or supporting evidence as the other.

Mind you, give it time. Experience teaches that any theory, no matter how crackpot, can gain a respectful hearing in this country, so long as it asks us to believe the worst about the Americans or their government: Anti-Americanism inoculates even the worst cranks from serious scrutiny. Paul Hellyer may not have much of a following now, but depend upon it, he will be packing them in at the universities before long.

My colleague Jonathan Kay has already detailed the many factual howlers in the Roberts piece, which somehow "got by" the Globe's fact-checkers. But I rather think something else is at work. The piece would have been planned long in advance. Having written several previous pieces for the Globe, Mr. Roberts would be well-known to the editors, as would his views. For example, readers of his latest book, A War Against Truth, will learn, inter alia, that Saddam Hussein killed many fewer Iraqis than the United States, and with more justification: After all, the hundreds of thousands of Saddam's victims were people "who opposed him in some way." And they will learn the real reason for the failure of Saddam's vaunted Special Republican Guard to show up for battle: They were all vaporized, 40,000 of them at one go, by "some kind of hi-tech bomb" detonated in the warren of tunnels under Baghdad.

"Fact-checking," in the circumstances, would seem beside the point. It isn't that Mr. Roberts' piece was, in that fine old journalistic phrase, "too good to check," or that the Globe editors think fact-checking is a tool of imperialism. It's more that it would be, well, gauche -- like the fellow who objects to modern art because it isn't realistic. It may not be true, but it's "true enough." Likewise, when Linda McQuaig explains that the Katrina disaster is a consequence of FEMA having been "privatized," or when Jeremy Clarkson writes feelingly in London's Sun of seeing New Orleans looters blown to bits by helicopter gunships, it isn't true in a conventional, real-world sense. It is rather true in a transcendent, ecstatic sense.

We are dealing not so much with a factual matter, in other words, as a psychological one. There is an undeniable pleasure in tweaking the conventional wisdom: I confess to indulging in it at times myself. But what begins as a harmless contrarianism can progress by stages into full-blown conspiracy-theorizing, of which anti-Americanism is a particularly malignant example. The sufferer experiences the thrill of having "pierced the veil." He has seen through the official lies that have everyone else in their thrall, and every piece of evidence to the contrary merely confirms him in his belief. At the furthest extreme, it emerges as Holocaust denial.

This puts the student of argument in an uncomfortable position. Convention dictates that every opponent should be treated with courtesy, every argument with respect. But what do we do with arguments that are plainly, well, crazy? Reasonable people can differ, of course, but so can unreasonable people, and we do our worthy opponents no honour by lumping them in with our unworthy opponents.

Civilized discussion depends not only on an open-minded readiness to consider other legitimate points of view, but on an equal readiness to exclude the obviously marginal. There is a time and a place to debate whether the Earth goes around the sun or the contrary, but we should have little time to address other matters if we were perpetually revisiting old controversies, or disproving every fantasy. For everyday purposes, we are obliged to exercise some basic judgment: I cannot prove beyond dispute that there are no UFOs, but I am justified by all experience in drawing the inference that there are not.

And, when it comes to the public square, we depend on the gatekeepers -- the editors of our newspapers, the publishers of our books, to exercise that judgment on our behalf. If they fail in that duty, the result is intellectual anarchy, where every opinion, no matter how nonsensical, is of equal validity and every source, no matter how dubious, is of equal authority. Or, if you prefer, contemporary Canada.

September 12, 2005

Ukiah Daily Journal

Judicial Follies: Alienating Your Employer

by Frank Zotter Jr.

A quarter century ago, the expense of copy machines came down so much that photocopies cost less than a nickel apiece, and photocopying became America's favorite method of reproduction. The saying in those days was that Gutenberg made it possible for everyone to be a writer; Xerox made it possible for everyone to become a publisher.

The Internet has gone a step further: it has made it possible for everyone to become his own publicist. No matter how absurd the cause or how wacky the belief, there is a web site out there devoted to it.

Ah, for the simpler days of yore - like way, way back about 1990 - when folks who trafficked in Elvis sightings or gunmen on the grassy knoll were relegated to the fringe where they belong. Consider, for example, Larry Bryant's fight with the Defense Department over his beliefs in little green men.

Well, maybe "little green men" is too specific. But Bryant clearly grew up watching too many episodes of "The Invaders" or "Twilight Zone."

According to Judge K. K. Hall of the federal appeals court in Virginia, Bryant was a civilian employee of the Army for more than 30 years. Beginning in 1981, he wrote news items for the Army News Service, a wire service disseminating information to Army installations around the world. Judge Hall described him as someone who apparently was quite good at this job; he was consistently rated "exceptional" by his supervisors - until 1986, that is, when he unexpectedly received an "unsatisfactory."

It seems that Bryant suspected the Army had an ulterior motive for giving him that low rating after so many years of good performance. Bryant, Judge Hall explained, was "convinced that the government has concealed evidence of UFO visits." In fact, Bryant was the director of the Washington, D.C., office of something called "Citizens Against UFO Secrecy" (CAUS).

In 1983, Bryant, on behalf of CAUS, filed a civil action in district court in the District of Columbia which he called a "Writ of Habeas Corpus Extraterrestrial." In this suit, he sought to compel the Air Force to produce the bodies of space creatures that Bryant claimed the Air Force had retrieved from crashed flying saucers. This suit was eventually dismissed, but not until it had generated a good deal of publicity.

Sadly, because it was never appealed, there are no readily available copies of the lawsuit (or the judge's ruling, which would have been an irresistible opportunity for some judicial humor of its own). Still, one has to hand it to Bryant - he knows his legal terminology. "Habeas corpus" literally means "produce the body." Thus, his lawsuit translated to "produce the bod(ies) - of the extraterrestrials."

While the courts were busy wrestling with that legal effort, in late 1984 and early 1985, Bryant submitted paid classified advertisements to some of the newspapers in which his own wire stories were published, seeking information from the papers' military audience about the government's alleged cover-up of the UFO menace. The ads didn't use Bryant's name; they were listed as being placed by CAUS, but they did give his home address for replies. Some of the advertisements were printed, but others were rejected by the publishers. Bryant never identified himself as a federal employee in these off-duty pursuits.

In 1986, Bryant received that "unsatisfactory" rating from one of the Army captains who oversaw his work. The captain claimed that it was because the quality of Bryant's work had declined; Bryant even was placed on a probationary status for a while, although he later attained the higher rating and the "unsatisfactory" was expunged.

Bryant nevertheless was unhappy. He filed a lawsuit claiming the Army had retaliated against him for his valiant attempts to expose the government cover-up of visits by UFOs.

The trial judge dismissed the lawsuit and Judge Hall's court upheld him. Although Bryant claimed that his right to free speech had been violated, Hall agreed with the trial judge that Bryant had not been injured (his unsatisfactory rating had, after all, been expunged,) but also that the Army proved it would have taken the actions it did anyway, even if Bryant's extracurricular activities had not been about extraterrestrials.

Bryant, no doubt, took the judge's ruling as further evidence that the conspiracy was even bigger than he originally believed. Still, if Bryant ever does lose his job, just a few years later an opportunity opened up with a new television series whose producer, Chris Carter, would undoubtedly love to have Bryant as a creative consultant.

September 11, 2005

Macleans Magazine (Canada)

Politics
Former Cabinet Minister Paul Hellyer Takes Up The Cause Of Believers In UFOs

by John Ward

OTTAWA (CP) - Paul Hellyer, onetime cabinet minister and a political chameleon who went through Liberal and Tory colours before founding two political parties of his own, has a new cause - UFOs.

Hellyer is to be a featured speaker at a UFO conference in Toronto later this month and organizers are making much of his credentials as a former defence minister in the Pearson administration 40 years ago.

Skeptics are, well, skeptical.

The 82-year-old Hellyer says he believes not only that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, but that some governments - the United States at least - know all about it and are covering up.

He says he believes American scientists have re-engineered alien wreckage from a supposed UFO crash at Roswell, N.M. in 1947 to produce modern technical marvels.

"I believe that UFOs are real," he said in a recent interview. "I'll talk about that a little bit and a bit about the fantastic cover-up of the United States government and also a little bit of the fallout from the wreckage, by that I mean the material discoveries we have made and how they've been applied to our technology."

Hellyer was once a political star. He was first elected to the Commons in 1949 at the age of 25, at that time the youngest person ever to win a seat.

He went on to become a cabinet minister, ran for the Liberal leadership against Pierre Trudeau, switched parties to the Conservatives and ran for that party's leadership, too. He eventually founded two other political parties, Action Canada in 1971 and the Canadian Action party in 1997.

He says his conviction that UFOs are real arose from reading in recent years, not from anything gleaned from secret archives during his time in office.

"I've been a skeptic for quite a while but I've been exposed to more and more information recently and have just decided to take a stand," he said.

Organizers of the MUFON conference - the name is an acronym for the Mutual UFO Network - see Hellyer's participation as giving legitimacy to the cause.

The conference is billed as "Canada's first major UFO symposium calling for complete government disclosure concerning the reality of UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence on Earth."

"Mr. Hellyer's involvement will increase the impact of the symposium," says a conference news release.

Victor Viggiani, a retired educator who is an organizer of the event, calls him a featured speaker.

"We're depending on him to be a real focal point," Viggiani said. "We're using his sort of experiences to demonstrate that national political figures can come out and talk about this."

He says Hellyer has a simple point to make: "Let's start telling the truth about what we all know is really happening in the skies and journalists start paying attention, that's basically going to be his message."

Does Hellyer feel he's being used?

"I think they are trying to make the most of my appearance."

His participation is exasperating for David Gower, a spokesman for Skeptics Canada, a group dedicated to rational thinking and to debunking paranormal claims.

"This sort of thing is a big feather in their cap, to come across people like him," says Gower, who is dismissive of the whole UFO mystique.

"There's no convincing evidence that can be anything other than personal anecdotes or allegations that can't be proven," he said.

He said UFO enthusiasts have a quasi-religious fervour that often makes them impervious to doubt.

"There is a deep-seated need, a desire in people, to feel that there's something in control somewhere, bigger than they are, something that can give some kinds of answers."

Trying to wean people away from UFO beliefs is like "nailing Jello to the wall," he said.

Viggiani says UFOs could be a boon for mankind. He says they have technology that could solve the world's energy problems "in one fell swoop."

This is where the conspiracy theory takes off for him.

"For some strange reasons, our governments can't come forward to talk to us about what these energy sources are," he says. "Because oil is just about $70 a barrel and that would undercut a lot of the power structure, the World Bank . . . the fossil fuel industry.

"They are just not prepared to handle this."

Hellyer, too, thinks there are important secrets to be learned.

"I think, frankly, that the subject should be taken seriously, because there are consequences that have real effects or could have real effects on the people of the world and I think there should be discussion of it."

While some believers think western governments have actually negotiated with extraterrestrials, Hellyer doesn't go that far.

"To my knowledge, it's just visitations," he says.

Although his participation in the conference is likely to draw ridicule, Hellyer said he's used to that after his roller-coaster political life.

"It wouldn't be the first time, would it?"

"I think they are trying to make the most of my appearance."

His participation is exasperating for David Gower, a spokesman for Skeptics Canada, a group dedicated to rational thinking and to debunking paranormal claims.

"This sort of thing is a big feather in their cap, to come across people like him," says Gower, who is dismissive of the whole UFO mystique.

"There's no convincing evidence that can be anything other than personal anecdotes or allegations that can't be proven," he said.

He said UFO enthusiasts have a quasi-religious fervour that often makes them impervious to doubt.

"There is a deep-seated need, a desire in people, to feel that there's something in control somewhere, bigger than they are, something that can give some kinds of answers."

Trying to wean people away from UFO beliefs is like "nailing Jello to the wall," he said.

Viggiani says UFOs could be a boon for mankind. He says they have technology that could solve the world's energy problems "in one fell swoop."

This is where the conspiracy theory takes off for him.

"For some strange reasons, our governments can't come forward to talk to us about what these energy sources are," he says. "Because oil is just about $70 a barrel and that would undercut a lot of the power structure, the World Bank . . . the fossil fuel industry.

"They are just not prepared to handle this."

Hellyer, too, thinks there are important secrets to be learned.

"I think, frankly, that the subject should be taken seriously, because there are consequences that have real effects or could have real effects on the people of the world and I think there should be discussion of it."

While some believers think western governments have actually negotiated with extraterrestrials, Hellyer doesn't go that far.

"To my knowledge, it's just visitations," he says.

Although his participation in the conference is likely to draw ridicule, Hellyer said he's used to that after his roller-coaster political life.

"It wouldn't be the first time, would it?"

September 3, 2005

Austin American-Statesman

When UFOs Plied the Night Skies: Air Force Blue Book on UFOs
Peek into the U.S. files: declassified documents of Air Force 'Blue Book' on UFOs

by Delia M. Rios
Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON -- "Rumors about the saucer mystery fly almost as fast as the strange sights themselves," pronounced the narrator of a 1952 Paramount newsreel, commenting on a rash of UFO sightings from New York to Washington, D.C.

He added ominously: "With this evidence, the mystery thickens."

And so it seemed.

A comic book narrative of the time came down on the side of believers. "SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON, D.C.," blared its bold black headline. It dismissed the military's "glib" explanation of radar blips seen that July by National Airport flight controllers. Simply a case of temperature inversion or reflections of ground objects, insisted the Air Force brass. But what about the pilot, the cartoonist countered, who described "a bright light moving faster, at times, than a shooting star"?

Well, what about it?

From 1947 to 1969, Americans accounted for 12,618 reports of unidentified flying objects. It was up to investigators at Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to determine if extraterrestrial beings, in fact, had descended from space to Earth.

This work was incendiary enough to be classified. But the government bestowed a bureaucratic name just the same: "Project Blue Book."

It went on until 1969. That year, the United States Air Force declared itself out of the UFO business, but not before concluding that 701 sightings remained "unidentified."

Not to worry, Wright-Patterson officials assured the public in a 1985 fact sheet:

"No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' are extraterrestrial vehicles."

Just to be clear: Should anyone feel threatened by something he or she sees, the Air Force advised, "contact a local law enforcement agency."

And one last thing: "Periodically, it is erroneously stated that the remains of extraterrestrial visitors are or have been stored at Wright-Patterson AFB. There are not now, nor ever have been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base."

Did Project Blue Book really lead to such a disappointing end?

The unconvinced -- or the merely curious -- are welcome to see for themselves. Blue Book's documents and photographs comprise 42 cubic feet of declassified records -- numbering 2,000 pages per cubic foot -- now housed in the Military Reference Branch of the National Archives. They can be accessed through 94 rolls of 35 mm microfilm.

A glimpse inside the files finds a graphic charting coverage of UFOs -- including in the popular magazines Look and Life -- against subsequent spikes in sightings. There was a outbreak of them in the summer of 1952. Even Harry S. Truman got involved. A July 26, 1952, memo from Box 26 reveals that "the President had requested Gen. Landry to find out the details of the sighting that had occurred in Washington on Saturday night."

That 1952 newsreel, with its breathless narration, describes how "across the river from New York City, a Jersey City volunteer air-defense observer reports that not only has he spotted a flying saucer in the nighttime sky over Manhattan, but that he's actually photographed it."

What was it, really?

We are left to wonder.

August 22, 2005

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Researcher Feels Certain UFOs Exist

HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. -- Peter Davenport has received more phone calls than he cares to count that have an unusual opening: "Please believe me, I'm not crazy."

For Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, it's part of the job.

Davenport spoke Sunday at the Little Green Men Festival in Hopkinsville with tales of what he believes are some of the more fascinating, provable cases reported. The festival, at the Hopkinsville-Christian County Conference and Convention Center, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Aug. 21, 1955, report of an alien invasion at Kelly.

After a lifetime of studying what many brush off as science fiction, Davenport is feels certain that UFOs exist and have been witnessed on Earth, and second, that the government has known about them for decades.

"I have not just a mountain of data, perhaps a mountain range of data. And I assure you, it's strictly by accident," Davenport told the Kentucky New Era in an interview.

Davenport has spent the last 11 years filing accounts and eyewitness reports of UFO sightings from a reporting center that consists of one phone, one fax, and one Web master, and is almost completely privately funded by Davenport and donations.

Davenport graduated Stanford with degrees in Russian and biology and received his MBA in finance and international business. But, years before receiving a master's degree in genetics and biochemistry of fish, Davenport heard of the Kelly Green Men incident on the radio.

The story from Kelly was one of several that piqued his interest in UFOs, which eventually led to his involvement in the National UFO Reporting Center.

Davenport said his perspective of UFO sightings took on a whole new dimension when he was 6-years-old on a July night in 1954. Davenport said that's when he, his mom and brother saw a strange object in the sky while at a drive-in theater on the edge of the St. Louis Airport.

"We didn't know it at the time, but my father, and people in the tower on the north side of the airport, were looking at the same object with their binoculars," he said.

Davenport said the object was about the size of the moon, bright red like a traffic signal and slightly oval in shape.

"And (it) stopped, almost stock-still, in the sky to the east of our location. People were getting out of their cars," Davenport said. "It was casting a red light ... all over the theater, all over the airport, as far as we could see."

Since then, Davenport has logged literally thousands of calls about colored lights, flying triangles and hovering disks on his web site, but he's hesistant to say any two are the same sighting.

August 20, 2005

Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville)

UFO expert to speak at Green Men festival

by Emily Burton

After a lifetime of studying what many brush off as science fiction, Peter Davenport is relatively certain of two things. First, that UFO's exist and have been witnessed on Earth, and second, that the government has known about them for decades.

As director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Davenport has spent the last 11 years filing accounts and eyewitness reports of UFO sightings.

The reporting center in Seattle consists of one phone, one fax, and one Web master, and is almost completely privately funded by Davenport and donations.

Often, Davenport receives anonymous reports of UFO sightings in e-mails or phone calls from people who begins, "Please believe me, I'm not crazy."

He has been interviewed by Peter Jennings, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, to name a few. Davenport will regale the crowd at the Little Green Men Festival today with tales of what he believes are some of the more fascinating, provable cases reported.

The festival, at the Hopkinsville-Christian County Conference and Convention Center, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Aug. 21, 1955, report of an alien invasion at Kelly.

As Davenport retells each sighting with an immense focus on scientific details, his out-of-this-world stories become more science and less fiction.

"I have not just a mountain of data, perhaps a mountain range of data. And I assure you, it's strictly by accident," he said.

Before Davenport graduated Stanford with degrees in Russian and biology, he received his MBA in finance and international business. Years before receiving his master's degree in genetics and biochemistry of fish, Davenport heard of the Kelly Green Men incident on the radio.

The story from Kelly was one of several that piqued his interest in UFOs, which eventually led to his involvement in the National UFO Reporting Center.

But one July night in 1954, Davenport's perspective of UFO sightings went from third-party listener to first-hand witness. He was 6 years old.

Sitting in a 1953 Studebaker, Davenport was at a drive-in theater on the edge of the St. Louis Airport with his mom and brother when a strange object appeared to their right.

"We didn't know it at the time, but my father, and people in the tower on the north side of the airport, were looking at the same object with their binoculars," he said.

Imagine an object the apparent size of the moon, said Davenport.

"It was bright red, the color of a red traffic signal. With perhaps just a shade of orange in it, and slightly oval. And stopped, almost stock-still, in the sky to the east of our location. People were getting out of their cars."

For decades, his family would discuss that night and wonder, "what was that object?" Davenport said.

"It was casting a red light … all over the theater, all over the airport, as far as we could see."

His sighting is one among literally thousands on his Web-site, www.ufocenter.com. But while there are many mentions of colored lights, flying triangles and hovering disks, Davenport is hesitant to say any two sightings are the same.

Among the multitudes of sightings he's logged, Davenport will present Saturday his "best" documented cases, he said. Ever the scientist, Davenport's list of what constitutes good evidence of UFO activity reads like a textbook.

"Once you have evidence, there's the question, is it accurate? Does it come from independent sources? Is it indelible in the sense that, do you have photographic evidence or just eye-witness accounts?"

Take for example the 1998 UFO report from a former Canadian fighter pilot, who said he saw green balls of light in the sky. Or the 14 forestry workers in Washington who all witnessed a horseshoe-shaped object lift an elk from the forest and fly away with it. In St. Clair County, Ill, five years ago, "officers from eight police departments witness, pursue, and photograph a huge, triangular object," Davenport wrote from reports.

Witnesses include a commercial pilot, a radar patrol officer, a former Navy Chief, a Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controller, and even an astronaut. Local officials and high-ranking government agents who know of nowhere else to go with reports of a UFO sighting now call him, Davenport said.

"We are the facility to which law enforcement agencies, military facilities and the FAA report UFO events."

By his own admission, about 70 percent or more of the reports to Davenport's hotline and Web-site have nothing to do with actual UFOs. But of the remaining 30 percent …

During a classified meeting on the East coast several years ago, with a government agency Davenport is not at liberty to identify, the exact scope of the government's involvement in their own UFO research was partial revealed, he said.

"They identified themselves, … and they said, ‘Peter, we know who you are. We have visited your web-site extensively.' And they said, ‘You appear to us to have information that we are very interested in.'

They wanted to know more about a UFO that had been seen near a commercial airliner.

After a four-hour meeting, they thanked Davenport and told him, "‘Out of our sense of gratitude, we're going to tell you what our position about UFOs is in the U.S. government,'" he said.

The officials told Davenport, "‘Number one, we know that UFOs are real. Number two, we know that UFOs are what they appear to be. Namely, sophisticated craft under intelligent control. There's no doubt of that', they said. ‘And number three, we in the government are a bit worried about them,'" recalled Davenport.

But if the government knows anything about UFOs, they aren't about to crack, Davenport said.

"Clearly, the U.S. government -- from my vantage point I think I can say this safely -- is doing everything in its power to quash interest in the subject of ufology in general. And in individual cases that are dramatic and well documented, and evident to a large body of people. Now, is that conspiracy or is that policy? I'm not sure I can answer that."

Is there intelligent life cruising the night skies, and did it ever visit Kelly? If local lore can't convince us, maybe science and an extensive collection of similar stories can.

"If it were not for our center, I fear the American people would be naked in the face of whatever threat we may be dealing with. Even if its just as mild of threat of ignorance of UFO phenomena," said Davenport. "And that threat makes me very uncomfortable."

August 13, 2005

Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville)

The Kelly 'Commotion'
Life Hasn't Been Easy Since The Aliens Came Calling

by Jennifer P. Brown

Kelly, a tiny town about five miles north of Hopkinsville, was made famous by the Aug. 21, 1955, report of an alien invasion.

If Lonnie Lankford had been a little older, his mother might not have pushed him under the bed that night she thought she saw an alien outside her bedroom window.

It was the evening of Aug. 21, 1955, and Glennie Lankford was trying to protect the children in the little farmhouse off Old Madisonville Road at Kelly. So, Lonnie, who was 12 years old, was scrunched under the mattress with his brother, Charlton, 10, and sister, Mary, 5.

He never saw the little creatures that frightened his mother and sent his older half-brother, Elmer "Lucky" Sutton, running for a shotgun.

But Lonnie Lankford heard plenty, both that night and in the days and weeks that followed, and he remains clear about what did and did not happened that night 50 years ago.

His mother saw a space creature outside her window, not a cat or a monkey or a bird. There were more in the yard and on the roof.

The creatures were sliver, not green. They were small, about 3 feet tall, and had webbed hands and feet, and big round eyes,.

Shots were fired at the creatures, but there was no raging gun battle that went on for hours.

Most important, Lonnie says, no one was drinking at the house that night. No beer, or liquor or moonshine was allowed inside. That was Glennie Lankford's rule.

"I remember the commotion and the hollerin' and screaming," Lonnie, 62, said Friday afternoon. "I didn't see them, but my momma did, and I believe her because she was a religious woman and she wouldn't lie."

The Legend of Kelly

Today, the world knows the Kelly story as the tale of the Little Green Men, or the Kelly Green Men.

In the days following the first news story of the family's report, published on Aug. 22, 1955, in the Kentucky New Era, the world beat a path to Kelly, a tiny community about 5 miles north of Hopkinsville.

The New York Daily News reported on its front page, "Spacemen Take Kentucky." A headline in the Los Angeles Times read, "Kentucky Gains New Fame."

Someone -- maybe a headline writer -- couldn't resist the word play on Kelly and Green, and the little men changed colors, from silver to green. (A French journalist, Yann Mege, who traveled to Hopkinsville in 2000 to research the story, has theorized that the phrase "little green men" originated from the Kelly story.)

The family, embarrassed by reports that they were drunk or simply pulling an elaborate prank that night, rejected the attention and turned away reporters. While the world laughed, they were often insulted.

The Kelly incident became a legend that grew over time. It remains a classic chapter in the U.S. Air Force's "Project Blue Book," a catalogue of more than 12,000 UFO sightings in the United States between 1952 and 1969.

A different time

In the summer of 1955, air conditioning was rare in Christian County homes and highly prized in public places such as theaters, stores and churches. People spent a good amount of time simply trying to endure the heat and humidity, said William T. Turner, county history. Fans blew in hallways and at night people often slept, or languished, on pallets on their porches.

The First Presbyterian Church in Hopkinsville was running a newspaper ad that touted its air-conditioned sanctuary. Window air conditioning units were selling for $169 at Keach Furniture.

Many people in Hopkinsville had black-and-white television sets and received antenna signals for three stations, channels 4, 5 and 8, all out of Nashville, Tenn. At 7 o'clock on Saturday nights, they watched "The Lawrence Welk Show."

Six movie theaters, including three drive-ins, were showing westerns, romance stories, monster movies and science fiction. The Alhambra had "Rainbow Over Texas," starring Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and Trigger. The Family Drive-In was showing "Daltons Ride Again," and the Skyway Drive-In had "Revenge of the Creature" and "Flying Saucers."

The Shrine Circus came to town, featuring clowns, dancing dogs, elephants and ponies. Hopkinsville resident Margaret Rash played the organ for the circus.

There were parties at restaurants -- the Coach and Four in Hopkinsville and Gray's Steak House out on Madisonville Road.

One day, people stood in line to apply for jobs at the new Moe Light Plant of Thomas Industries.

At Buddies restaurant next to the fire station on East Ninth Street, people paid 10 cents for a hamburger.

Former Gov. A.B. "Happy" Chandler campaigned at the courthouse for another term in office. His opponent, Bert Combs, courted voters at the Memorial Building.

Dalton Bros. Brick was developing a new subdivision on South Jessup.

Almost everybody in Christian County, even the ones in Hopkinsville, still had a connection to farming. They worked on farms, or in tobacco warehouses, or they worked for businesses that couldn't survive without the money generated by farming.

Many families, like Lonnie Lankford's, lived on small farms and lived a modest life.

The Kelly sighting

At Glennie Lankford's house, there was no indoor plumbing. There was an outhouse in the back. Water had to be toted from an outdoor well.

Billy Ray Taylor, a visitor from Pennsylvania and friend of "Lucky" Sutton, was going to the outhouse when he saw a light streak through the sky, said Lonnie, who related the story Friday at his home off U.S. 68 near the eastern edge of the Hopkinsville city limits.

Taylor saw a spaceship land in a field of sagebrush, but he didn't tell anybody what he saw when he returned to the house.

Then Lonnie's mother screamed. She had seen a space creature through the bedroom window. "Lucky" ran for his double-barrel shotgun and fired at the creature. It retreated, but was not hurt.

Stepping outside on the small front stoop, "Lucky" felt a tug at his hair. One of the creatures had reached for him from the roof, Lonnie said.

"Lucky" backed into the yard and saw four or five aliens on the roof. He fired a few shots. Again, the creatures seemed to retreat but were not hurt.

Later, according to the family's story, everybody in the house, including Glennie, the three children, "Lucky" and his brother, J.C. Sutton, and Billy Ray, loaded up in a couple of vehicles and headed for Hopkinsville.

At the Hopkinsville Police Department, they asked Police Chief Russell Greenwell for help.

Police officers, Kentucky state troopers and soldiers from Fort Campbell converged at the Lankford place that night and searched for a spaceship and aliens. They found nothing, according to the report in the U.S. Air Force "Blue Book."

Over the years, Lonnie has heard the speculation that his family actually saw some escaped monkeys from the Shrine circus. He laughs at the suggestion.

"I ain't ever seen a silver monkey, or a green one," he said.

Lonnie concedes that his older brother, "Lucky" had a reputation for telling tales and that he drank. But on that night, "Lucky" wasn't drinking and he didn't invent a story about space creatures.

"He was one of the biggest liars in Hopkinsville, but he didn't lie about that," Lonnie said.

To this day, Lonnie wishes he had not crawled under the bed after his mother screamed.

"I wish I had seen one of them, but I didn't and I'm not going to lie about it," he said.

It's hard to tell, Lonnie said, how many people have made money off the Kelly Green Men since that night in 1955. It seems like everybody but his family made something off the story.

"Here I sit, broke and poor, and I ain't made nothing off it," said Lonnie, who is disabled after years of manual labor. He worked so many different jobs, it's hard to list them all Š roofer, gas station attendant, truck driver, saw mill hand.

But Lonnie still has a sense of humor about his family's brush with fame. Three years ago, he went to a Halloween dance at the Hopkinsville Elks Club. He dressed as an alien. Hardly anyone knew the story behind the mask and cape that night.

Lonnie has been looking for his costume this week. Next weekend, for the Little Green Men Festival's Alien Ball, he'd like to go as an alien.

August 9, 2005

New York Times

Health: Books on Science
Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press
Explaining Those Vivid Memories Of Martian Kidnappers

By Benedict Carey

People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that they are daft or psychotic.

They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over the last several years.

In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine visitations.

"Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," she writes.

Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders.

Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike experiences.

Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim the scene as a real experience, studies find.

Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits."

One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy.

Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring to a needle.

"I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes other abduction accounts, past and future.

In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet."

When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream.

In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty that something profound really did happen.

Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role."

Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a middle-age divorcée engaged in a quest for personal understanding: "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all interconnected in some way. Everything is."

At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.

Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her original research. The reader may regret that, too.

The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious imagery.

When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religion.

August 7, 2005

Brisbane Sunday Mail (Queensland, Australia)

Our X-Files

by Kate Patterson

Hidden files, cover-ups and pressure on witnesses to "forget" the UFOs they say they saw – these are the Queensland X-Files.

Australian UFO Research Centre investigator Dominic McNamara has spent two years uncovering restricted files from the Federal Government's top-secret national archives.

For the first time, The Sunday Mail is able to disclose three sightings previously marked classified and deemed to be a matter of national security.

Mr McNamara said there was little doubt the files – detailing UFO sightings between 1950 and 1970 – were deliberately hidden or made difficult to find.

"We are under the impression that some files are yet to be found or they are in something deeper that we are never going to get a look at," he said.

Mr McNamara said Queensland had a spate of sightings for which there did not seem to be much explanation.

"It's a bit of a hot spot," he said.

"The bureaucratic solution is to contain it, especially if your mandate is to be able to explain what goes on in the sky.

"There were a number of sightings in that time, where there was something really strange going on in Queensland.

"The best evidence we have are the witnesses who have risked their social lives, their career and their sanity to come forward at a time when it was extremely difficult to do so and make a report."

The engineer said there was too much unexplained activity to simply discount extra-terrestrial life.

He said sightings tended to peak around the time humans extended their push into the skies, with events such as rocket launches or nuclear bombs.

Mr. McNamara said a lot of people thought he was "mad" and compared his work as a UFO investigator to that of TV character Fox Mulder of The X-Files.

"It's hard for people to consider that there's such a thing as alien life, but it's harder to accept that there can't be any," he said.

The sightings include:

Unidentified Aircraft

Witnessed by Harold Jackwitz at Wulkuraka, west of Ipswich, on July 14, 1958, at 1.45pm. The object was seen by 12 members of a construction gang employed at the partly built electric shunting and marshalling yards.

Mr Jackwitz, of North Ipswich, described the object as round, silent and cloud-like, giving off light reflection, solid in construction, but emitting no sound or any obvious means of propulsion.

When seen, it was to the northwest and apart from one period where it appeared to hover, the direction remained constant until visual contact was lost.

Bruce Stephens, of Auchenflower in Brisbane, who was at the location, made observations of the phenomenon through his theodolite for about eight minutes.

He drew a detailed sketch.

Interrogators reported, "the possibility of it being an aircraft is most unlikely... the observers gave straightforward information, showed no tendency to embellish and their details were identical".

No RAAF or civil aircraft was airborne or operating within these confines at the time.

Unusual Sighting

Roland Roberts, witnessed a UFO at Daunia Station, via Nebo, near Mackay, on June 24, 1965, at 6.45pm.

"Saucer shape with silver dome top and black underneath... with lights around the side of it brilliant bluish white," Mr. Roberts wrote.

He included a sketch of his sighting. He described the object moving from southwest until it vanished in a northeast direction.

"It had a constant red jet tail or slip stream at the rear the colour did not vary," the report read. "Never seen anything move as fast as the object observed."

Mr Roberts was a grazier at his homestead when he saw the object, which he said "would have been between 30 to 50 feet (9m to 15m) across, could see no legs or landing gear under the object".

Mr McNamara said there was great interest in this sighting because there was a boat which made a similar UFO report in Darwin.

Flying Object

Police officer Leslie Gray saw a UFO from his address at Kedron in Brisbane on November 12, 1966, at 7.55pm.

Mr Gray, then 36, said he was watching Russian satellites from his back yard with his family when a slightly illuminated boomerang-shaped object travelled overhead.

"I said to the children, come and look and try and remember what you've seen because no one will ever believe you," he told The Sunday Mail this week.

The sighting was confirmed by his then-wife Elva and two children Robyn, then 13, and Stewart, then 5.

He described the object moving from the north to the south before it disappeared about 30 degrees above the horizon.

Mr Gray said lights in straight lines covered the object and there was a faint glow outlining the whole object, giving the impression of a brighter light above it.

"I thought no one's going to believe me, but I would like to get it recorded," he said.

No aircraft were reported as being in the area.

"Being a policeman I knew that you don't ring the police and talk about things like that, so I called a friend in the air force," he said.

Mr Gray said he was interviewed soon after he reported it, but "he was the most uninterested person I have ever met and thought I was crazy," he said.

"I haven't heard a thing since."

Mr Gray said a newspaper article appeared soon after about a banana-shaped object burnt into the ground in Victoria.

Mrs Gray said it had been hard to convince others.

"People would brush you off, saying you've been drinking, but we'll never forget it."

- All documents obtained from the National Archives of Australia. Australian UFO Research Network Sightings Hotline: 1800 772 288.

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July 29, 2005

Exeter News-Letter

UFO Saga Continues

by Adam Dolge
adolge@seacoastonline.com

EXETER - There has been a considerable response to Tuesday’s article in the News-Letter about a recent UFO sighting. Interested local residents and skeptics joined UFO enthusiasts commenting from throughout the nation, and reaction was even received from a French "Ufologist" who recalled two similar sightings in Europe.

Yann Marchandin, the French "Ufologist" who contacted the News-Letter via e-mail, said there was a similar UFO sighting in Poland in 1997 and another in 1999. In both incidents, witnesses claimed to have seen large "military ship-sized" tubes, or cigar-shaped objects in the sky.

She said this recent report, by an Exeter man who wished to be identified only as "David," was very interesting to her because of its similarities to the two other sightings and also because of his military and aviation background.

There were also those who questioned the recent sighting. If the object was so large in the sky, why did nobody else see it, many asked in e-mails sent to the News-Letter.

Last Wednesday, Aug. 20, David reported seeing a silver, cigar-shaped object around 3 p.m. that he said was roughly the size of two aircraft carriers. It changed colors to an orange-red before stretching to twice its original size, then disappearing.

David is recently retired as a flight engineer with the U.S. Navy and has logged more than 10,000 hours in the air.

Contacted this week, David said he couldn’t explain why he alone saw the UFO, and he even asked several of his neighbors if they saw anything odd that day. No one had, he said.

He still has several houses to check, as he lives in a neighborhood with about two dozen homes.

The Exeter Police Department said there were no reports that day, or since then, of a UFO sighting. Local Federal Aviation Administration officials could not be reached for comment.

But Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, said there are various reasons why no one else witnessed what David did. David submitted a report to the reporting center shortly after his encounter.

Davenport said that perhaps David was in the right place at the right time. Also, the object’s technology could have been so advanced that it might only have been visible from where David was standing.

David’s report will soon be available for public viewing at the center’s Web site at www.nuforc.org

July 28, 2005

Ipswich Evening Star

Keeping Tabs on Aliens UFO

ALIENS hover over the skies of Suffolk and Essex once every three months, according to sightings of UFOs reported to the Ministry of Defence.

And if the reports are to believed, it seems our galactic neighbours prefer the brighter lights of Essex to our unlit pastures of Suffolk.
Between 2002 and 2005, there were 14 reports of unidentified flying objects made to the MoD – three in Suffolk and 11 in Essex.
But documents show differing descriptions for the mysterious sightings.

While many report strange, silent, patterned lights in the night sky, others are a little more vivid.

Bizarrely, the last sighting reported in the region – in Basildon in April this year – described “a spaceship with aliens (the Greys) sitting on top of it, above the bungalow”.

And perhaps worryingly for air traffic controllers at Stansted Airport, “a ball of fire, very bright, with no colour” suddenly appeared near the Essex terminal at 10.21pm on April 11, 2003.

Although the MoD said it does not investigate UFO reports, it added they are examined to establish whether the UK’s airspace could have been “compromised by hostile or unauthorised air activity”.

“Unless there is a potential threat to the United Kingdom from an external source, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each sighting reported to us.

“We believe that rational explanations, such as aircraft lights or natural phenomena, could be found for them if resources were diverted for this purpose, but it is not the function of the MoD to provide this kind of aerial identification service.

“It would be an inappropriate use of defence resources if we were to do so,” a spokeswoman said. Mystery therefore surrounds three reported sightings in Suffolk in the last three years. A large silver triangle “which then changed shape” and was clouded in a pink and green haze was reportedly spotted over Woodbridge at dawn on October 23, 2002.

Fourteen months later, what looked like an unusual aircraft with strange lights was reported above the riverside town, which is close to RAF Bentwaters and notorious for an unexplained sighting by US Air Force personnel in 1980. However, alien interest in Suffolk appears to be on the wane with the last sighting reported to MoD officials coming in March last year, when a circular formation of yellow lights flashed across the sky before fading away over Lowestoft.

Interestingly, in Essex, most UFO spotters hang out in the south of the county where seven sightings were reported between 2002 and 2005.

However, aliens also seem to have been yearning for a bit of history, spying on Britain’s oldest recorded town, Colchester, in October last year when a bright orange object “rapidly and randomly” dashed from east to west.

In September 2002, three lights “in the shape of a star” were reported to have circled over the market town of Halstead while in January last year, residents in Thaxted were puzzled by a strange light in the sky that stayed there for 90 minutes, but Brenda Butler, UFO-spotter and Leiston-based author, revealed the MoD figures are only the “tip of the iceberg”.

Mrs Butler, who regularly encounters extra terrestrials in Rendlesham Forest, said: “People are becoming blasé about seeing UFOs nowadays – they’re everywhere. We get calls all the time.”

She said there was one UFO in particular – a giant black triangle with different coloured lights inside – that had been puzzling lorry drivers along the A12 in Essex for months recently. It was last seen heading out towards Canvey Island, she said.

Have you seen something spooky recently? Have you got photo evidence? Write to Spooky Suffolk, The Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich or e-mail tracey.sparling@evening star.co.uk