UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In May of this year I had a new book published by Lisa Hagan Books. Its title: The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. Here’s the publicity information for the book: “In the final days of December 1980, strange encounters and bizarre incidents occurred in the heart of Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. Based upon their personal encounters, many of the military personnel who were present at the time believed that something extraterrestrial came down in those dark woods. What if, however, there was another explanation for what happened four decades ago? What if that explanation, if revealed, proved to be even more controversial than the theory that aliens arrived from a faraway world? The ramifications for the field of Ufology would be immense. In his new, sensational book, Nick Redfern reveals that one of the most famous UFO cases of all time was really a series of top secret experiments using holograms, mind-control programs, deception, disinformation, conspiracies and cover-ups. The shocking truth of a forty-year-old mystery is now revealed.”

There’s a good reason why, today, I’m mentioning the book again. There is some fascinating information that I wasn’t aware of, but which certainly now adds to the “secret experiment” angle of the Rendlesham affair. In my book, I pointed out that the events in the forest occurred over the Christmas period – something that would have ensured most people would not have been out and about at that time. They would be celebrating at home. And that also included significant numbers of military personnel who – on leave for the holidays – worked at the two nearby military bases: Royal Air Force Bentwaters and Royal Air Force Woodbridge. In other words, by running the clandestine program over the Christmas nights, few people would know what happened. One of the other issues I address in my book is the matter of how, in the latter part of 1964, U.K. military personnel were dosed with LSD in a couple of English woods – and without their knowledge of what was going down. It was an experiment coordinated by staff from Porton Down, Wiltshire – a facility that has a long, secret and controversial history of researching the effects of hallucinogens on people. That brings us to the latest bit of the story.

I should stress that it isn’t exactly a new revelation. In fact, it was noted back in the 1960s; however, as a result of what I learned while doing the research for my book, it now places this particular piece of information in a new, eye-opening light. The story can be found in the pages of Arthur Shuttlewood’s 1967 book, The Warminster Mystery: Astounding UFO Sightings. On the book’s jacket, we’re told: “Two years ago the small Wiltshire town of Warminster was suddenly gripped by a series of Flying Saucer sightings, which have persisted right up to the present day. No town in England, or for that matter in the world, has registered so many authentic reports of UFOs.” The publisher continues: “The Warminster Mystery is a dramatic unfolding of these sightings, with eye-witness accounts of strange ‘things’ seen by day and night; of bewildering mushrooms of smoke, crescents of fire, weird, disturbing sounds, and even accounts of conversations with those from Outer Space.”

Now, to the crux of it all. Stationed at a military facility called Knook Camp at Heytesbury (which is only four miles from the town of Warminster) was the 1st Welch Regiment. On Christmas Day, that same regiment found themselves in a very strange situation. As Arthur Shuttlewood wrote: “Over thirty soldiers awoke to a thunderous crescendo at the camp early on Christmas Day, 1964 [when it was still dark, in other words]. A sergeant told me ‘it was as if a huge chimney stack from the main block was ripped from the rooftop, then scattered in solid chunks of masonry across the whole camp area.'” Shuttlewood added: “The guard was alerted, standing by for action, but none developed. Surprised, the soldiers were unable to explain the blasting sounds, beyond asserting that they were decidedly not caused by conventional type aircraft. This aerial thunderclap was the forerunner of an astonishing series of incidents like that which occurred on Christmas Day, 1964.”

So, on Christmas Day, in both 1964 and 1980 – and when most Brits would have been at home celebrating Christmas – military personnel in the U.K. were exposed to strange and unexplained phenomena that was perceived as being UFO-based in nature. And, the LSD experiments run by Porton Down’s scientists took place in the final days of 1964. Not only that: Porton Down is located only twenty-four miles from Warminster. And, as my book on Rendlesham demonstrates, there was a Porton Down presence in Rendlesham Forest the night before the incidents began. There are, without doubt, significant parallels and threads to be unraveled here. For me, this is all beyond coincidence. We’re seeing two different experiments – one in the 1960s and the other in December 1980 – but with identical goals: to fabricate UFO events (both on just about the quietest day of the year in the U.K.) and to see how military personnel responded to amazing and bizarre phenomena (Many thanks to Ray Cox for bring this development to my attention).

In 1936, workers at archaeological excavations of monuments belonging to the Parthian civilization (248-226 BC) in the village of Khujut Rabu, near Baghdad, Iraq, stumbled across something unusual down in the ground. They found an ancient, weathered terracotta pot or jar, about 6 inches high, which contained a cylinder made of a rolled copper sheet, within which sat a rod of iron, and the whole of it was topped with plugs or stoppers of bitumen. The innards of the jar had been corroded with perhaps some sort of acidic juice or vinegar, and the whole of it was very odd and out of place amongst the other artifacts of the era that were being dug up. Others were found, twelve in all, and no one could figure out what the anomalous objects were supposed to be or what they were used for. At the time, the strange jars and the inexplicable contents were put on display in the National Museum of Iraq and sort of forgotten about. Little did anyone know that these unassuming little pots would turn out to be a persistent historical mystery.

It would not be until 1938 that anyone would take a really good look at the artifacts, when German archaeologist Wilhelm König was at the museum and saw one sitting there amongst other objects from the site, including some other similar jars. The curious objects drew his attention and he had them studied, deducing that they were from the 3rd century BC and were a form of crude galvanic cells, or basically electric batteries. He deduced that the iron and the copper were mounted in such a way as to insulate them with the bitumen, or asphalt, after which an electrolyte such as vinegar or some other acidic substance had been poured in to produce a voltage difference generated by the metals. He speculated would have been used for electroplating layers of precious metals such as gold onto objects.

Whatever the “batteries” were for, if that is what they were this would all be very interesting indeed, because it would usurp the generally held view that the battery was invented in 1800 by the Count Alassandro Volta, whose name is indeed where we get the word “volt.” If these were indeed batteries, then it would mean that human beings had created this technology thousands of years earlier than previously thought. König would go on to write a paper on this hypothesis in 1940, after which World War II came and the “Baghdad Battery” was forgotten once more. After the war, a Willard F. M. Gray, of the General Electric High Voltage Laboratory in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, did his own experiment with the battery and found that it could produce up to two volts of electricity, or about a fortieth of the power of a triple-A battery and other experiments produced similar results, further strengthening König’s case. In 1980, German scientist Egyptologist Arne Eggebrecht found that the voltage could be increased if several of the batteries were linked together, and demonstrated that the devices could produce enough electricity to gold plate a small statue when a gold cyanide solution was used. In more modern times, in 2005 the Discovery Channel TV show Mythbusters it was shown that ten replicas of the Baghdad Battery linked together could produce five volts of power. The problem with the experiments linking the jars together is that there is no evidence that the original jars ever had any sort of wires or electrical connections for links between them.

Although the idea that the Baghdad Batteries were some sort of batteries was and still is widely accepted by many, it is unknown for what purpose such a device would have been used, as there are no artifacts from the time of anything that would have required such a power source, and while many experiments work on the assumption that the power was used for electroplating, there is no evidence of gold plated items produced in such a way from the era these batteries supposedly belong to. Besides electroplating, it has been speculated that the devices were used for electrotherapy of some kind, for some theatrical or ritual purpose, or even that these were merely vessels for holding papyrus scrolls. Other more fringe ideas are that these were from aliens, or that they were made to power some as yet unknown and mysterious ancient technological device. No one really knows, and sadly we probably never will, as the original batteries vanished during the 2003 Iraq invasion, when the National Museum was looted and thousands of exhibitions were stolen or destroyed.

We are left to wonder what these strange objects were. Who made them and for what purpose? Why have there been no others found? Were they used for powering something, medicinal purposes, or were they simply some bored person’s little science project? Among the many instances of ancient technology that have been found over the years, the Baghdad Batteries have gone on to be continually discussed and talked about, as well as unsolved.

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