On July 28, 1995, the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s report on the Roswell affair surfaced from its National Security and International Affairs Division. The GAO’s report did not provide any smoking-guns – such as old B&W photos of dead bodies and wreckage at the crash-site on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico. The report did, however, provide something interesting and controversial. And it’s something that has been misinterpreted for years. During the course of their search for records to try and better understand what had taken place at Roswell in early July 1947, the GAO learned that the entire outgoing messages from the Roswell Army Air Field generated during the period that the event occurred were missing. Vanished. Gone. And under circumstances that could not be fully determined and proved. Nor could the year in which the files went missing be confirmed. Maybe the late-forties. Maybe the fifties. The seventies? Who knows?

This, inevitably and very understandably, led certain Roswell researchers to proclaim that this was evidence of a significant event of UFO proportions having occurred. An event which certain elements of officialdom were determined to keep forever hidden from the populace, the media, and the UFO research community – and possibly, even, from anyone else in government who might dare to come looking, such as investigators of the GAO. Maybe, that’s precisely what happened. But, the story is not quite as straightforward as that. Matters are seldom straightforward when it comes to Roswell. Time and again, I have heard UFO researchers say, words to the effect of: “Because the 1947 files are missing, this must mean the government or the Air Force pulled them years ago, so no-one could get the files on the aliens.” Sure, that’s not impossible. But, there is another issue. The files in question that are unavailable to us do not cover just the key period of the Roswell affair. Rather, they extend as far back as March 1945 and as late as 1950.

(Nick Redfern)

Don’t get too exited: cool models at Roswell, New Mexico

We are led to believe that if aliens crashed a couple of hours’ drive from Roswell, then it was an event that occurred out of the blue, with little or no advance notice, and certainly not something that had been anticipated for a significant period of time. So, that being the case, why the need to pull files from as early as March 1945 to hide something that is said to have occurred, without much warning (if any at all), in the summer of 1947? Proponents of the notion that aliens crashed not too far from the city of Roswell might say that the government was just being overly careful, and wanted to make sure that (a) nothing was left behind, and (b) nothing had been misplaced in an earlier collection of material, or indeed, within a later collection of material, possibly held in secure safes at the base. So, they chose the best and quickest option available to them and scooped up pretty much everything that covered approximately two years or so before, and up to two-and-a-half years after the crash. And, maybe, that is exactly what happened. On the other hand, one can make a valid argument that the vanished files issue has no bearing on Roswell from an extraterrestrial perspective, because the documents that are missing include papers dating from two years before the event even took place. This also offers a theory (and, granted, that’s all it is) that there was another reason for the large-scale loss of material that the GAO sought to uncover. Let’s see what the GAO had to say about this matter of missing messages in its 1995 report:

“In addition to unit history reports, we also searched for other government records on the Roswell crash. In this regard, the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center provided us with documentation indicating that (1) RAAF records such as finance and accounting, supplies, buildings and grounds, and other general administrative matters from March 1945 through December 1949 and (2) RAAF outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.” When the GAO demanded to know the reasons behind this development, they got an answer, as GAO files note: “According to this official [the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center], the document disposition form did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken. The Center’s Chief Archivist stated that from his personal experience, many of the Air Force organizational records covering this time period were destroyed without entering a citation for the governing disposition authority. Our review of records control forms showing the destruction of other records – including outgoing RAAF messages for 1950 – supports the Chief Archivist’s viewpoint.”

(Nick Redfern)

At the crash site on the Foster Ranch, a few words about the legendary incident

So, in other words, we have yet another explanation that does not include high-level conspiracy to explain the loss and destruction of files, but which says far more about bureaucracy. So, what’s my point in all this? Well, this is my point: Yes, it certainly is intriguing that half-a-decade of certain files are missing from the old Roswell Army Air Field, and it may even be an issue of deep conspiracy to hide the remains of dead aliens and their craft. Or, it may not be. If UFO / Roswell researchers wish to maintain that the missing files from 1947 point to a specific cover-up of the Roswell event – and Roswell occurred out of the blue in July of that year – then they have to provide a viable reason as to why documentation dating back as far as March 1945 was pulled too, and why additional documentation remains missing from as late as 1950. Saying that “the outgoing Roswell messages from July 1947 are missing” is absolutely true, and it opens eyes and it catches the attention of ufologists and Roswell disciples everywhere. Noting that, in reality, the files actually cover 1945 to 1950, and also cover general administrative issues at the base, is far less attention-grabbing.

Ironically, the fact that the files which have vanished (files which still cannot be found) span 1945 to 1950, actually adds weight to the idea that Roswell was a military experiment. Just about everyone I spoke with while writing Body Snatchers in the Desert told me that the human experimentation began in 1945 and ended in the late 1940s – with a few additional tests having occurred in the early fifties. Pulling 1945-era files for a one-off event that didn’t occur until the summer of 1947 makes zero sense. Pulling certain 1945-era files that might have compromised the handful of pre-Roswell experiments – had they reached the public domain, of course – makes perfect sense. The same goes for the decision to make the 1948-1950 files vanish, too. The fact is that six years of files are missing, not just files from the time of the Roswell crash. This is indicative of a fairly lengthy series of ongoing tests that had to be hidden – not the out-of-the-blue crash of one solitary alien spacecraft midway through 1947.

(Nick Redfern)

“UFO Capital”

It should also be recalled that President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments revealed that “…a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed [italics mine]. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records [italics mine], thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.” All of this is highly suggestive of an agenda to make Roswell go away – permanently.

The world of UFO and extraterrestrial study and disclosure has never had a better proponent that former Nevada Senator and Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who passed away on December 28th at the age of 82. Other media sources will detail his remarkable life and long political career, but many are leaving out the impact he had on the paranormal world by approving secretly a fund for UFO studies and publicly pushing for more.

Harry Reid

“One day in 1996, I received a call from George Knapp, an investigative reporter at KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, and a friend of mine. “Harry,” he said, “there’s something you have to attend.” He invited me to an upcoming conference that would focus on what the U.S. government generally refers to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but what most other people simply call U.F.O.s, a subject Mr. Knapp had, and still has, a particular interest in.”

George Knapp indeed still has an interest in UFOs and we’re forever indebted to him for introducing then Nevada Senator Harry Reid to the subject, as was Reid in his 2021 New York Times article on the subject. It seems strange that the Senator representing Area 51 had little interest in UFOs, but that conference and his friendship with fellow senator and former astronaut John Glenn led Reid to ‘cross the aisle’ in 2007 and join forces with Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Democrat Daniel Inouye of Hawaii (Reid was Senate majority leader at the time) to put $22 million in the Pentagon budget for what became known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP).

“I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Reid stated in 2009 that ATTIP made “much progress” with the “identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings” that will “likely lead to technology advancements.” It ended in 2012 but was continued secretly continued, and become famous through the work of Luis Elizondo, its former head, and the release of the videos of the now famous Tic Tac UFOs encountered by US Navy pilots and ship personnel.

“I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it. I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.”

Progress indeed! Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York picked up where Reid left off after retiring and were instrumental in passing an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act to establish an “Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office” which, among other things, will reverse-engineer UFOs. That’s a long way from the dreams of Harry Reid, who said that has a young boy in rural Searchlight, Nevada, he often looked up at the shooting stars. That interest continued until the day he died – Reid both pushed for more public interest in UFOs and pushed governments – ours and others – to be open about them.

“I believe that there is information uncovered by the government’s covert investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena that can be disclosed to the public without harming our national security.”

In his powerful position, Reid was a witness to what the covert investigations had found and, though sometimes misquoted, was always honest about it.

“The truth, disappointing as it may be, is that there’s still a great deal we don’t understand. It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. There may be other, as yet unknown explanations for some of these strange sightings.”

Harry Reid

Harry Reid had no problem with those who believed as a matter of faith that UFOs bore extraterrestrials from other worlds, but he always pushed to “lead with the science“ and get away from “conspiratorial theories and quack ideas.” He often said he finally came to “know Area 51 quite well” and “know what they’ve done there.” He had no reason to ‘storm’ it, but he respected the security surrounding the advanced testing going on there in his home state.

The last line of one of his last articles would make a fitting tombstone epitaph for the late Senator Harry Reid – the best friend UFOs ever had.

“Because the more I learn, the more I realize that there’s still so much I don’t know.”

Thank you, Harry Reid.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

With the advent of DNA analysis, it seems like no crime should defy solution, no ancestor should remain unidentified, no cryptid should remain unproven, no prehistoric animal should remain extinct and no alien skeleton should continue to be called ‘alleged.’ That’s why it’s puzzling that one of the most famous ‘alleged’ alien skeleton – the tiny six-inch-long being with an elongated, pointed skull and slanted eye sockets has remained famous yet unidentified for decades. (Images here.) That changed this week when researchers using the latest in DNA testing positively identified the mini remains that has two less ribs than a normal human and whose earlier DNA tests showed it had 8% ‘non-human’ DNA. What is “Ata”?

Not every strange skeleton is an alien.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, let’s start with “Who is Ata?” In 2003, treasure hunter Oscar Muño found the strange little skeleton wrapped in a white cloth in an abandoned church in the deserted Chilean mining town of La Noria in the Atacama Desert. A media report at the time described it as “a creature with hard teeth, a bulging head with an additional odd bulge on top. Its body was scaly and of dark color. Unlike humans, it had nine ribs.” While the photos circulated via the Internet and tabloid media, the skeleton itself changed hands a few times before ending up in Spain in the possession of businessman Ramón Navia-Osorio, who also runs the Institute for Exobiological Investigation and Study (IIEE) – a UFO Organization. Navia-Osorio had “Ata” – named for the Atacama Desert — analyzed and released his findings in 2017. While many people, including Stephen Greer, thought it was an alien or non-human, Navia-Osorio stated that three doctors concluded it was not a hoax and a fourth said this:

“It’s a mummified body with all typical characteristics of a fetus. The body displays all the structures and anatomical links normal for the head, trunk and extremities. Taken together, the proportionality of the anatomical structures … [allows us] to interpret beyond doubt, that this is a mummified human fetus completely normal.”

Case closed? The usual suspects who believed Ata to be an alien said no. According to Huffpost, more DNA analysis done in 2018 on what was then assumed to be a premature human fetus identified unusual but disputed mutations associated with dwarfism and scoliosis, and date its birth to the 1970s. that brings us to today. The Sun reports that Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine who has been researching Atas since 2012, has determined that Ata died shortly after birth or was only slightly premature. The original DNA images came “from remains that were not known to be human when the research began,” which distorted the results. The new research shows a number of mutations in seven genes that contributed to Ata’s various bone deformities, facial malformations and skeletal dysplasia. In other words, this female baby was born in the 1970s with severe dwarfism and died a short time later.

Case closed?

“We do not know how a little girl came to be buried next to the church in the abandoned town. We do not know if she was born alive, but we do know she was treated with care and love in her last moments, being carefully covered in a white cloth and a violet ribbon. From the presumed timeline of her death, it is likely that her mother probably is still alive. Given the amount of interest about the case in the media, it is also possible that the family has been forced to relive events from 40 years ago.”

The Chilean government has done much to protect its native antiquities and the many mummies found there – even those unusual ones with three fingers and elongated heads. Cristina Dorador writes in Etilmercurio that it should do the same for Ata – return her to Chile, locate her family, and let them bury her one more time and let her rest in peace.

That seems like a very human thing to do for a girl who has been thought to e an alien for so long. It should also cause us to consider if this is how we will treat real extraterrestrials.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

Almost a quarter of a billion years ago in the state of Nevada, a massive sea monster inhabited the area. Named Cymbospondylus youngorum, the huge fossil of this new ichthyosaur species was found back in 1998 in rocks from the Augusta Mountains.

However, it took until 2015 and with help from a helicopter for all of the fossils to be removed from the site. The remains were then brought to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County where experts have since been studying them.

Their detailed analysis revealed that the creature was massive with a skull that measured 6.5 feet in length (2 meters), meaning that the entire body of the Cymbospondylus youngorum would have been more than 55 feet long (17 meters) and weighed about 45 tons. In an email to Live Science, Lars Schmitz, who is an associate professor of biology at Scripps College in Claremont, California, described the species, “Imagine a sea-dragon-like animal: streamlined body, quite long, with limbs modified to fins, and a long tail.”

A drawing of a Cymbospondylus. (Via Wikipedia)

It lived about 247 million years ago during the Triassic Period. It would have occupied the Panthalassic Ocean off the western coast of what is now North America when the land was the supercontinent of Pangaea. It is believed that the Cymbospondylus youngorum would have feasted on ichthyosaurs that were smaller than itself, as well as fish and perhaps squid.

In a time span of about 2.5 million years, ichthyosaurs grew to massive lengths. Interestingly, it took almost 55 million years for whales to reach their sizes – the same size that it took ichthyosaurs just 1% of their 150-million-year history to achieve.

Schmitz explained this further, “We have discovered that ichthyosaurs evolved gigantism much faster than whales, in a time where the world was recovering from devastating extinction [at the end of the Permian Period].” “It is a nice glimmer of hope and a sign of the resilience of life — if environmental conditions are right, evolution can happen very fast, and life can bounce back.”

An ichthyosaur but not the Cymbospondylus youngorum.

As for why ichthyosaurs grew to such massive sizes in such a short time period, it may be partly caused by feasting on large amounts of marine mollusks called ammonoids and eel-like jawless conodonts that grew in population numbers after the mass extinction event. Two studies in relation to the Cymbospondylus youngorum have been published in the journal Science – they can be read here and here.

A picture of the fossil and an image of what the Cymbospondylus youngorum would have looked like can be seen here.

With the holidays over, some parents may be reviewing the experience and planning ahead for ways to better hide presents from their inquisitive children. If your kid is a budding archeologist … good luck. The mummified body of Pharaoh Amenhotep I had been hidden for thousands of years in Egypt, then locked up for decades away from those who wished to unwrap it because of its beautiful yet fragile flower garlands and lifelike facemask inset with colorful stones. That changed recently when Egyptian archeologists and scientists used three-dimensional medical CT (computed tomography) scanners to ‘digitally unwrap’ the mummy of Amenhotep I and reveal contents that were better than they ever expected.

Pharaoh Amenhotep I with his mother Queen Ahmose-Nefertari.

(Public domain)

“This fact that Amenhotep I’s mummy had never been unwrapped in modern times gave us a unique opportunity: not just to study how he had originally been mummified and buried, but also how he had been treated and reburied twice, centuries after his death, by High Priests of Amun.”

In the press release announcing the scan, whose details were published in Frontiers of Medicine, Dr. Sahar Saleem, professor of radiology at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University and radiologist on the Egyptian Mummy Project, first reminds us that Amenhotep I had been unwrapped and rewrapped in the 11th century BCE, possibly because the tomb had been looted by grave robbers. That was 400 years after his reign from 1525 BCE to 1504 BCE. His original tomb was eventually destroyed for renovations to his mortuary temple and has never been positively identified. The mummy was found in 1881 with other reburied royal family members and has been kept safe and unwrapped ever since.

“We show that Amenhotep I was approximately 35 years old when he died. He was approximately 169cm tall, circumcised, and had good teeth. Within his wrappings, he wore 30 amulets and a unique golden girdle with gold beads.”

They could see he had been circumcised! That’s a tribute to the priests who performed the mummification, those who did the restoration, and the power of modern CT scanning. Saleem says Amenhotep I physically resembled his father, Ahmose I – bearing his narrow chin and nose, curly hair and protruding upper teeth. The scan showed post-mortem mutilations possibly made by the grave robbers but no cause of death at age 35. The scan showed him buried with 30 amulets and a unique golden girdle with gold beads befitting his status in death as a god. The fact that the priests who reburied Amenhotep I with his jewels in place was both a tribute to his status and a tribute to the priests, who many archeologists thought had repurposed such burial items for other later leaders.

An image of Amenhotep I from his funerary cult.

(Public domain)

Are your packages safe from budding young Egyptologists? Dr. Saleem doesn’t think so.

“We show that CT imaging can be profitably used in anthropological and archeological studies on mummies, including those from other civilizations, for example Peru.”

Do you own a lead closet?

RELATED PHOTOS AND VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

The mummified wrapping of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep I

Dr Saleem says the scans of the body did not show any wounds or disfigurement due to disease 

PA MEDIA

Air Force bases have always attracted odd stories and conspiracies to them, and this seems to be true across the globe. MoD Boscombe Down is an air base on the outskirts of the town of Amesbury in Wiltshire, England, and the home of a military aircraft testing site owned by the MOD, the Ministry of Defence. Built in 1917, it was used by the British Aircraft and Armament Evaluation Establishment (AAEE) from 1939, and is currently operated by operated by a private military contractor called QinetiQ, which was created as part of the breakup of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in 2001. It has always been heavily involved in flight testing and weapons development, and like many other bases of its kind, it has had its fair share of conspiracies swirling about it, and although its official capacity is evaluating aircraft used by the British Armed Forces, there have long been rumors of dark secret projects and UFOs, making it often referred to as “Britain’s Area 51.”

One of the many weird tales surrounding the base began on September 22, 1994, when numerous locals of the area reported hearing a very anomalous sound “like a freight train or a low-frequency rumbling or humming.” Although the base had many aircraft coming and going all the time, this sound was unlike anything anyone had ever heard before, strange enough to get people talking. All inquiries to the base were met with silence, and as far as the RAF was concerned, nothing strange had happened at all. Then, on September 26th 1994, something truly odd went down at Boscombe Down. On this evening an unknown aircraft malfunction occurred on Runway 23, either a crash or flight abortion, and the runway was immediately shut down and swiftly descended upon by military personnel. In addition, the main highway, the A303, that runs into Boscombe Down, was also completely closed off. Eyewitnesses would claim that the mysterious aircraft had been promptly covered with by a frame and tarpaulins, as a hive of activity and emergency vehicles swarmed around it. The response was incredibly fast and urgent for just a mere flight malfunction, and witnesses who actually saw the events playing out would say that the covered aircraft was partially visible under its coverings, charcoal grey in color, with an oddly elevated rear section, a canopy that appeared to hinge forward at the front, and inward canting twin fins at its rear section. This was about the best look anyone could get of it before the aircraft was quickly locked within a hangar.

Image by Steve Baxter

It all had the feel of something very hush hush, which was only made stronger when the next day U.K. special operations forces and two special operations aircraft arrived at the base, described as an Agusta A109 helicopter from the British Army’s 8 Flight AAC, and a Chinook from the RAF’s No. 7 Squadron, which witnesses would claim had seemed be securing the area as activity continued on the runway that looked like some sort of intense cleanup operation. The special operations helicopters tirelessly circled the area for several days as the activity on the ground continued, and in the meantime some other aircraft arrived as well. One of these was a USAF C-12 Huron, used by the DoD for air transport, and another was an unmarked Boeing 707, its origins unknown. What were all of these aircraft up to? Perhaps most unusual of all was a Boeing 737/T-43 which had the distinctive red and white markings of planes operated by the private contractor EG&G, who were most known for carrying out an array of black project clandestine flights for various aerospace companies and the military, as well as for running the planes that carried employees to and from the mysterious Groom Lake facility and Tonopah Test Range Airport, near Las Vegas, Nevada, both of which have plenty of their own conspiracies swirling around them.

Not long after this, a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy transport plane from the United States Air Force, in this case modified in order hold oversized cargo, arrived and allegedly was loaded with an unidentifiable tarpaulin-covered object from within the hangar and supposedly flown off towards the mysterious USAF Plant 42 Airport, known as a cutting-edge military aircraft manufacturing facility for various contractors including Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and others. It would later be found that this plane had been suddenly diverted to Boscombe from its original flight plan to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Even after the mysterious cargo was whisked away, Boscombe Down would continue to be frequented by various government aircraft, such as a plane registered with the CIA that arrived under heavy security.

It is clear that something very big went down at Boscombe Down, attracting the attention of the RAF, USAF, the CIA, and who knows who else, but it has never been clear just what that may have been. Researchers Ren Hoek and Marco Van der Welk would investigate the strange incident for two years, culminating in a March 1997 cover story in Air Forces Monthly, but they were never able to get to the bottom of what was really going on. Just about the only thing they could say for sure was that there as “no doubt that an incident did happen on the day in question and it has never been satisfactorily explained by the authorities.” The governments involved have not helped make anything clearer. Both the British Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Defense Department have always denied that the incident occurred, and have claimed that there were no flights of any sort of test aircraft on the night in question. So, what are we dealing with here?

One idea put forward by Hoek and Van der Welk is that this was some sort of very advanced top secret experimental reconnaissance aircraft, according to them most likely what is called the ASTRA (Advanced Stealth Reconnaissance Aircraft), a mysterious theoretical aircraft that has never been confirmed to actually exist but has been rumored for a long time in conspiracy circles. The ASTRA has often been blamed for sightings around the UK of mysterious “black triangle” UFOs that have never been explained, as have other alleged top-secret aircraft being supposedly developed at around the same time. One of these is the Hypersonic Aurora Spy-plane, as well as the so-called TR-3A “Black Manta,” purportedly a subsonic stealthy tactical reconnaissance aircraft. Of course, both the RAF and USAF have denied that any such aircraft have ever existed. Other theories are that the object at Boscombe may have been captured foreign tech or even a crashed UFO.  The site The War Zone has done much in-depth research on the incident, filing various Freedom of Information Act requests and also speaking to author and Nick Cook, who was the aviation editor at Jane’s Defense Weekly at the time and one of the first to break the story, who would say of the incident:

I definitely think something happened. The C-5 definitely came into Boscombe Down. I didn’t talk to the witnesses directly but I read enough witness testimony to say they saw something with a tarpaulin on it on the runway. It had to have been American or have had some American lineage in it in order for the C-5 to have turned up. There were quite a few rumors of joint black programs between the U.S. and the U.K. at the time. There was a lot of the Aurora stuff knocking around at the time but I don’t think it was Aurora. It sounded smaller, tactical, deployable, F-117-like. That sort of size. Certainly, something happened. What it was, I have no idea.

To this day, no one is really sure just what, if anything, went down that Autumn night in 1994 at Boscombe Down. What was that craft that was being so secretly whisked away and hidden? What was the meaning of all of those aircraft from different agencies descending upon the base in the wake of the incident, and just what did that cargo plane carry off? Was this some sort of highly sensitive and experimental aircraft or something else? No one really knows, and the incident at Boscombe Down remains an impenetrable mystery.