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

Last year, a team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim, saying they had captured the most distant cosmic explosion ever—a gamma ray burst in a galaxy called GN-z11. But that flash of light—supposedly from the most distant galaxy known—has a far more prosaic explanation: It was a glinting reflection from a tumbling, spent Russian rocket that happened to photobomb observers at just the right moment, two new studies claim.

“In the end, I’m of the opinion that this was a fluke,” says D. Alexander Kann, an expert in gamma ray bursts at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia who was not involved in either of the studies.

Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe. They occur when enormous stars die and collapse into a black hole, or when compact objects such as neutron stars merge into a black hole. Although they happen all the time, the chances of catching one when a telescope is pointed at a particular galaxy are quite slim.

So it was even more surprising when astronomer Linhua Jiang of Peking University and colleagues claimed—using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii—to find a burst coming from GN-z11, a galaxy dating back to a mere 420 million years after the big bang. Indeed, the team itself reported in December 2020 that the odds of catching such a burst were one in 10 billion.

Those odds raised red flags for Charles Steinhardt, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen. “You start asking,” he says, “‘Are there any other causes that are more likely?’”

That’s where the Russian rocket comes in. Humans have launched and left behind large numbers of objects in orbit around Earth, including satellites, rocket boosters, and even screwdrivers gone missing during spacewalks. Up to half a million bits of metal larger than 1 centimeter are thought to be tumbling around our planet.

Glints of sunlight reflecting off this debris could be responsible for as many as 10,000 flashes of light per hour throughout the night sky, estimates Eran Ofek, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who has published independent analyses of this phenomenon. The vast majority are invisible to the naked eye, he says, but they can be discernable to astronomical observatories.

Given such potential light pollution, the possibility of finding a debris glint in a random telescope image is somewhere between one in 1000 and one in 10,000, Steinhardt and his collaborators calculate in one of the new studies, published today in Nature Astronomy. That seems more likely than the one-in-10-billion chance of a gamma ray burst, Steinhardt says. “If you have to pick between the two answers, yes they’re both unlikely, but one of them is millions of times more likely.”

But was there any known debris in the path of the Keck telescope at the time of the claimed GN-z11 flash? Astronomer Michał Michałowski of Adam Mickiewicz University and his colleagues quickly found something that fit the bill: the discarded booster of a Proton rocket launched by Russia in 2015, they argue in another Nature Astronomy paper published today. Michałowski says the object passed well within the Keck instrument’s field of view. For him, the case is pretty much closed: “Either it’s an extraordinary discovery of something we’ve never seen, or it’s something that we know there are thousands of.”

But Nature Astronomy is also publishing a rebuttal from Jiang and his team, who aren’t conceding the point. Their own examinations suggest the chances of some bright entity close to Earth mimicking a gamma ray burst to be one in 1 trillion or less.

“If there are so many spare pieces of debris producing transients, people would have seen lots of coincidences in their data,” Jiang says. But he reports that none of the colleagues he’s spoken to has seen a satellite flash that overlapped with a known object such as a galaxy.

Using CalSky.com, a web-based tool for determining the positions of objects in the sky, Jiang’s team believes the Russian rocket actually passed outside of the Keck’s view at the time of the debated gamma ray observation. Unfortunately, the website has since shuttered, meaning no one can corroborate the analysis, says Michałowski, whose team used four different night sky simulation programs that each showed the rocket passing within the field of view of the telescope.

Other scientists take issue with the data from Jiang and his team. Christina Thöne, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia who was not involved with any of the papers, says the data were faint and noisy and lacked the telltale signatures in the light that would represent the presence of different elements.

Jiang attributes some of the poor data quality to the object’s extreme distance. Seeking corroboration, he has searched through archives of other observatories to see whether any were trained on this particular patch of sky at the time, but hasn’t turned up anything.

Thöne says the outcome is frustrating because finding a gamma ray burst in this era would be a game changer, potentially revealing intriguing details about the giant stars that are expected to have been dying at this time, seeding the universe with heavy elements forged in their cores. “If it were real,” she says, “that would be amazing.”

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I moved to the United States to live in 2001, and, in the summer, I traveled around much of the west coast – chiefly to do a series of lectures for various UFO groups situated in California. An old lady put out a thread and asking if we could talk. Well, that would be just fine. On July 28, 2001 I hung out with the then-seventy-nine-year-old woman: we had lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant and chatted extensively. She was driven to the restaurant by a family member, a much younger man who seemed to be equally as worried as she was. Nevertheless, she agreed to share what she knew, providing her name was never published (although, she was required to provide Simon & Schuster’s legal people with a release form, as were each and all of the other whistleblowers, too). So, I sat back and listened. I referred to her in the book as the Black Widow. When we met, and knowing that she had read my 1998 book, The FBI Files, my natural assumption was that she wanted to tell me something about UFO encounters at the Oak Ridge atomic facility, where she worked. Makes sense, right? No. I was dead wrong: what she actually wanted to share with me was certain information that, if provable, would radically alter the face of Ufology and blow the Roswell case right out of the water. As we ate, I wondered, with a fair degree of excitement: what the hell have I got myself into? It wasn’t long before I had the answer to that loaded question.

The Black Widow, born in 1922, had been in the employ of Oak Ridge from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. While there, and on three occasions between May and July 1947, she saw a number of unusual-looking bodies brought to the facility – and under stringent security. They looked like regular Japanese people, she said. Others, however, displayed the signs of certain medical conditions: dwarfism, oversized heads, and bulging eyes. A few of the bodies were extensively damaged – as if they had been in violent accidents, which proved to be the case. In all, fifteen such bodies were brought to Oak Ridge under great secrecy; all of them reportedly used in certain high-altitude, balloon-based experiments in New Mexico, one of which led to the Roswell legend. Or, became a part of the legend is probably more correct. The Black Widow said: “Those bodies – the Roswell bodies – they weren’t aliens. The government could care less about those stories about alien bodies found at Roswell – except to hide the truth.” She added she didn’t know anything at all about how these people were brought to the United States, but she heard at Oak Ridge that some of them were in the States in late 1945 and brought over with Japanese doctors and Nazi doctors who had been doing similar experiments. “That’s when some of this began,” she told me. The story continued that at least some of the people used in the tests were American prisoners given the opportunity to cut the lengths of their sentences – if, that is, they were willing to take a chance and take part in the dicey experiments. Reportedly, a number did take the bait, but failed to survive the flights. Not all of the handicapped people came from Japan, but from “hospitals and “asylums” in the United States. The grim plot was that they wouldn’t be missed. Ever.

(Nick Redfern) At the “Roswell Ranch”

All of the material evidence was said to have been eventually destroyed – chiefly because the operations didn’t provide much in the way of results, and because of the outright illegality of the experiments. Everything, the Black Widow said, was hidden beneath a mass of fabricated tales of flying saucers and little men from the stars. She doubted that anything of any significance still existed – certainly not the bodies or the balloons, and probably not even the old records, which she believed were burned to oblivion. Unless, however, some of them were preserved for secret, historical purposes, which is not impossible. I hope they were. If not, it may be nigh on impossible to conclusively prove anything about Roswell – ever. There was one other aspect of the Black Widow’s story that needs to be addressed: her overwhelming fear. It was ever-present throughout our 2001 meeting. She tried to disguise that fear with smiles and laughter, but she was certainly no Oscar-winning Hollywood actor. That’s for sure. Seeing through her facade was like seeing through freshly polished glass. In my Body Snatchers in the Desert book I said that she “possessed the sad and somewhat sunken eyes of a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She was clearly looking for someone to speak with; but, equally, she was very concerned about the ramifications of doing so, ‘if the government finds out.'”

In my original manuscript, I detailed why she was so scared, but that section didn’t make the cut. The reason? The publisher was highly concerned about the Black Widow’s extremely controversial claims to me that certain people who had got too close to the truth of Roswell, and who couldn’t keep their mouths shut, had been “removed.” So the story went, certain hired assets, who regularly worked with the intelligence community on troublesome situations, were secretly contracted to terminate those who threatened the status quo and its dangerous secret. Yep: very controversial. Interestingly, the Black Widow made a mention to me of a long-retired nurse from Roswell who had died under extremely questionable circumstances “a few years ago.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s highly possible that she was referring to a woman named Miriam Bush. Miriam was not actually a nurse, at all: in 1947 she was an executive secretary at Roswell’s RAAF hospital. She worked for a medical officer named Lieutenant Colonel Harold Warne, and saw the bodies found on the Foster Ranch – specifically when they were brought into the confines of the hospital. They were, as nearly everyone claimed, small, damaged, decaying and unusual-looking. This trauma-filled experience clearly affected Miriam to a huge degree. The whole thing was like an albatross around her neck. That huge, ominous bird never left her.

(Nick Redfern)

Miriam’s private life was a mess and she became an alcoholic – as did, by the way, two other players in the Roswell story. They were Major Jesse Marcel and Dee Proctor; a sign, perhaps of the tremendous burden of hiding what they knew. And, in the late 1980s, Miriam became fearful that she was being watched and followed. She was. Miriam was found dead in a motel-room just outside of San Jose, California, in December 1989. A plastic bag was around her head and her arms were bruised and scratched. The verdict? Suicide. Yeah, really. When the story of Miriam Bush surfaced – years after I spoke with the Black Widow, and also a couple of years after Body Snatchers in the Desert was published – my mind instantly swung back to the Black Widow’s comments relative to the highly suspicious death of a certain “nurse” from Roswell. Was it Miriam Bush? I don’t know. But, logically, it would make sense, even if the ranks and positions were wrong. If so, though, how did the Black Widow know this? After all, Miriam was based at Roswell, New Mexico and the Black Widow worked in Tennessee. I have no answer to that question; I wish I did. But, I do know that the Black Widow’s major concern about speaking on the record was the fear that she would finish up like the woman from Roswell; a woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who paid for it with her life, years later.

Now, it’s twenty years since I began to seriously pursue the theory that the Roswell affair was a top secret experiment – rather than a UFO crash – that revolved around high-altitude flights and the secret use of handicapped people in that same experiment. A dark and disturbing story, for sure. It still is a dark story, And, I still continue to get new information that makes me believe Roswell had zero to do with aliens. Not even a single one. It’s too bad that the UFO research community is scared (rather, absolutely pissing themselves) to look at what I call the alternative side of Roswell. Should they delve into it all of this, they may not like what they find. But, they will know the real story – even though it’s a terrible one.

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