That Time Jules Verne Caused a UFO Scare

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For a brief period during the late 1890s, a wave of UFO sightings swept across the United States. Dozens of strange objects were seen sailing through the skies from
coast-to-coast.

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In November 1896 an object was reported in the night sky over Sacramento, California. It was described as a light with a dark body of some kind above it. It was seen a second time about a week later. Similar reports, usually describing only the light, came from other cities in northern California. Reported movement of the light indicated a slow motion. The dark body seen above it was variously held to be “cigar-shaped,” “egg-shaped” or “barrel-shaped.”

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Other reports from the 1890s wave describe a fast-moving cigar-shaped object which glowed and made small explosions, similar to what might be expected from a gasoline engine. Another emitted colored rays of light. An unknown body — a “luminous ball of fire” — circled a mountain in Canada before speeding away. The ship described in an 1896 close encounter in California was characterized as “cigar-shaped.” An object seen in Kansas in 1897 looked like a 30-foot canoe with a searchlight.

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Even though Jerome Clark (“The Great Airship Hoax,” Fate, February 1977) exposed this report as a fabrication, the description is still pertinent in its choice of details: In 1897 a strange craft allegedly hovered above a Kansas farmer’s cow
lot. It was a 300-foot-long cigar with a carriage underneath and, beneath that, a 30-foot revolving turbine wheel. Windows lined the sides of the gondola and the interior was brightly lit. Another sighting involved a cigar-shaped object with four wings, a searchlight and fan-like wheels. In another report the motion of a light in the night sky was said to suggest “the flapping of wings.” Another farmer reported an airship with flapping wings, while others ascribed hissing sounds to the ships they saw.

Original frontispiece of Robur the Conqueror:

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In 1886 Jules Verne published his 31st novel, Robur le Conquerant. As were all the novels he had written to this time, Robur was immediately translated and published in English. In Britain its title became the apt Clipper of the Clouds and in the United States, Robur the Conqueror. Both editions were published in 1887, the year after the French edition. There were also an unknown number of pirated editions issued in this country.

Verne's Albatross encounters a dirigible.

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The story opens with a de­tailed description of what today would be a UFO flap of epic proportions: Mysterious objects have been observed in the sky all over the
world, in Europe, Asia and America. Strange lights and sounds are seen and heard by thousands of people. Newspa­pers on every continent discuss, report and debate the phenome­non, “recording things...false and true, alarming and tranquilizing their readers as the sale required and almost driving ordinary people mad.” Astrono­mers have no answer to the mystery.

Many of the reports are of aerial flashes of light, lasting as long as 20 seconds. A number of these sightings are by major ob­servatories. During the day the phenomenon manifests itself as a small cloud or vapor.” On one night in the center of the aurora borealis there is seen the silhouette of some enormous, unknown structure “showering off from its body certain corpuscles which exploded like bombs.”

If it is indeed the same object being seen consecutively by different observers in the same night, then its speed must be un­precedented. At the same time that one group of astronomers is “explaining” the sightings as nothing more than optical and acoustical illusions or misinterpreted meteors, another group is hotly arguing for the existence of some unknown flying object in the atmosphere.

It develops that s anti-hero Robur. He kidnaps three skeptics and takes them on a round-the-world flight (the first UFO abduction?). During this adventure, there are many scenes familiar to students of the 1890s UFO flap, including an instance in which an unknown flying machine races a passenger train!

Verne's Albatross racing a locomotive, by Frank R. Paul:SExpand

Although Verne’s book was read widely in the United States (always one of his best markets), his influence was multi­plied a hundredfold or more by reason of the virtual duplication of many of his novels, over and over again, by the dime novel­ists. These were blatant in their use of the Frenchman’s name to sell their near-plagiarisms. “Jules Verne outdone!” boasted the cover of one.

Is it possible that the reports of mysterious airships in the news at the time influenced the writing of Robur? Or was it the other way around? The former idea is improbable since the genesis of Robur is well known and contemporary UFO reports do not enter into it. There are two parts to Robur that must be considered: its description of airship technology and its plot. Some points of the latter have already been described. The story behind the technology it describes goes back more than 20 years prior to the novel’s publication.

In France in 1862 a society was founded to promote the concept of heavier-than-air flight. Verne joined the society in 1863 as its recording secretary. He began writing Robur in early 1885 under the working title of The Conquest of the Air. He based the design of Robur’s Albatross on the work of the members of the society, principally that of Gabrielle de la Landelle, whose “steam air liner” was the prime model. In fact, Verne lists some 70 inventors who contributed to his concept of a flying machine. He gives credit to those who provided the most direct inspiration: Nadar, Cossus, de la Landelle and Ponton d’Amecourt. Comparisons of drawings or photographs of their machines leave no doubt where the appearance of the Albatross came from. There is no evidence that Verne was influenced in any way by reports of sightings of mysterious airships. Since Verne like to make his books timely and often included references to current events, he surely would have mentioned them if he had heard of them.

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An 1865 illustration depicting many of the heavier-than-air flying machines
being proposed at the time:

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As one of the most popular authors of his era, Verne was widely imitated. Every nation had its own “Jules Verne.” Many of these were hack writers filling the demand for the type of novel that Verne had made so popular. Most of them are justifiably forgotten today. Nevertheless, hardly a book publisher or magazine was not running stories and novels of what was then called “scientific romance.” Verne had created a vogue for a new kind of adventure story which was sweeping the world.

Surveying the number of works of interplanetary fiction published in the 19th Century, George Locke (Voyages in Space [1975]) revealed some of the impact of Verne on the English-speaking world. Until 1871 no more than half a dozen inter­planetary stories had been published in any one year. After the publication in English of From the Earth to the Moon, in 1871, however, there is an immediate
peak. The number continued to climb from that date, reaching its maximum in the 1890s. In just one of those latter years nearly 30 novels involving space travel
alone were published. (Is it a coincidence that these were also the peak years of the UFO flap?)
The cover of one of Senerans' dime novels: SExpand

The American author most indebted to the French writer was Luis Philip Senarens (1863-1939), who He was the printed, miniscule type spelling out the hair-raising but squeaky-clean adventures of all-American heroes such as Frank Reade, Jr., or Jack Wright, the Boy Inventor.

Under the pseudonym of “Noname” (the Latin form, “Nemo,” being the name of one of Verne’s most famous characters), Senarens wrote over 1000 stories, ranging from 35,000 to 50,000 words apiece.

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Virtually all dealt with some sort of wonderful invention. Many concerned themselves with flying machines: flying boats, the “electric air monitor,” the flying “electric dragon,” the “greyhound of the air,” a flying submarine, the “electric air rocket,” and literally scores of others. Almost all of them were blatantly lifted from the fabulous Albatross. Verne had (allegedly) corresponded with the youthful Senarens for a time and if this is true, one result may have beenthat “Noname” was able actually to beat Verne into print with some of his hero’s own ideas! (The popular idea that Verne in fact copied Senarens is patently untrue. Publication dates invalidate that idea.)

During the years that Robur was being distributed in the United States, the country was also being flooded by Senarens' and other dime-novel fiction depicting flying machines similar to Verne’s, as well as other imaginative aerial craft. Even though the number of dime novels dealing with flying machines represented a small percentage of all dime novels published, this small percentage still amounted to many thousands of copies in circulation.

The publishing industry was booming at the end of the 19th Century. This was in part due to mechanical improvements in the printing industry in the 1890s, as well as the development of a national distribution system. This made magazines avail­able in railway stations, ferry terminals, candy and cigar stores, street stands, and other places. By 1900 more than 21,000 periodicals were being published, with an aggregate circulation of more than 114.2 million copies per issue. Of these two-thirds were weeklies. “General literature” accounted for 240 titles, “family reading” for 15,000. The publication of “scientific romances’’ was not limited to the dime novels. The glossier magazines aimed at an older, better-educated and more affluent audience — The Strand, The Century, Tit Bits, Pall Mall, Harper’s, Scribner’s, McClure’s — all regularly ran science fiction and many of these stories featured incredible flying machines.
A proposed powered dirigible from 1872: SExpand

Additionally, the coming heavier-than-air conquest of the skies was one of the most popular topics of the day. Scarcely a week or a month would go by without some popular ing plans, drawings, photographs and news of a new flying machine. Many were so sensational that they made headlines. It makes no difference for our purposes whether or not any of these inventions ever got off the ground. What is important that they were reported and described in pers of the time. For example, it is certain that Thomas Edison never had anything to do with the fantastic illustration edly showing his design for a flying machine. Nevertheless, this is the this is the most important thing: it was the way they expected it to look.

Edison's purported flying machine:SExpand

Lucius Parish, in Ronald D. Story’s The Encyclopedia of UFOs (1980), describes the typical 19th-century UFO: “cigar-shaped, apparently metallic, with wings, propellers, fins and other appendages. At night, [such objects] appeared to be brilliant lights, with dark superstructures sometimes visible behind the lights.” Compare this description with those of aircraft depicted in fiction or in reports of the work of inventors. Compare, too, many of the airship reports with events described in Verne’s novel and in other fiction of the period.

Why do the mysterious airships of the 1890s so uncannily resemble the airships imagined by Verne and his con­temporaries? Why does their sudden appearance coincide with the proliferation of the “scientific romance” in which such ma­chines are described in detail? Why does their appearance match the descriptions of actual airships being built or designed at the same time? Why do so many of the events and circumstances described in Verne’s novel show up later, duplicated during the flap? While I have not read all of the many dime novels describing flying machines, I wonder how many of the incidents they report also anticipated reported events.

Why the sudden change in descriptions of UFOs? Why during this brief period in the 1890s are UFOs described as looking so specifically like airships?

Why are the descriptions of the inhabitants of these machines, when they made an appearance, so prosaic! They speak colloquial English, wear contemporary clothing (one aeronaut was seen sitting on his flying machine, fishing, wearing a
“checked hunting suit”!) and have normal human needs.

And why are the needs of the airships themselves so ordinary! They seem to have been in constant need of repair, oil, tools, fuel and water.

Perhaps we are wrong to try to lump all of the observed sightings under a single explanation. Perhaps there are three interrelated ones. The first group would include those that resembled the widely-published schemes of inventors who were busy working on the problems of either heavier-than-air flight or the dirigible balloon. For one example, many of the airships of the flap strikingly resemble the model airship developed by Marriott in 1869. It is worth noting that it was once tested successfully in California.
Marriot's flying machine: SExpand

A second group consists of those that closely resemble the aircraft described in fiction. This group also includes observa­tions of machines that either couldn’t have flown or couldn’t have been controlled, had anyone actually tried to build one.

The third and smallest group comprises those machines virtually identical in description to dirigible balloons actually constructed and flown, either in the United States or in Europe.

All three groups could be either imaginative interpreta­tions of anomalous and amorphous phenomena, simple “band-wagoning,” or even outright hoaxes. In other words, nothing that we haven’t seen taking place in so many modern UFO reports. Those of a century ago are different only in using 19th-century visual references. It is also possible that the third group could include genuine reports of sightings of real dirigible balloons (or free balloons with the distinctive cigar shape of the dirigible).

When you read a report about how some bumpkin was visited by aeronauts who described themselves as “Martians” or visitors from “a land beyond the North Pole,” can’t you just hear some balloonist laughing himself silly?

For thousands of years people have been seeing aerial phenomena they cannot explain. In the early history of mankind, these strange things were seen as manifestations of the gods: they looked like angels, devils, chariots or the gods themselves. In the latter part of the 19th Century strange things in the sky purported to resemble the aerial craft then so much in the news: they looked to people like dirigibles and ornithopters. In this century, what are probably the very same things in the sky — whatever they really are — are described almost invariably as spaceships.

Of course there are a great number of exceptions to this generalization, but it does seem true that to a large degree UFOs typically look like what the percipient expects them to look like. In the religious and warlike atmosphere of biblical and medieval times, anything unfamiliar in the sky had to be, almost by definition, a sign from God or the devil — and it was interpreted that way. Bombarded from all sides by heavier-than-air ships — both fictional and semi-fictional — the people of the last century described the strange things they saw in the sky as looking like the very aircraft they expected them to be.

Today, whenever anyone sees something inexplicable in the sky, the immediate thought is “interplanetary spaceship.” To how great a degree are the descriptions of UFOs being colored and shaped by preconceptions? If it is not unreasonable to suppose that these are the same types of phenomena that have been observed through the ages (whatever these phenomena may be), perhaps it is something a little more amorphous and vague that most observers might believe. How many sundogs, perhaps, were given wheels, wings, propellers or disc shape by the expectations of the observer, who believed these were the features it must have? This may be the most important lesson to be learned from the 1890s UFO scare.

That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal,
either sound or visual, messages is now generally known. This is why in most of
the countries the use of such technologies, without consent of the user, is
banned. Devices using light for the stimulation of the brain show another way
how the light flashing in certain frequencies could be used for the manipulation
of human psychic life. As for the sound, a report on the device transmitting a
beam of sound waves, which can hear only persons at whom the beam of sound waves is targeted, appeared last year in the world newspapers. The beam is formed by a combination of sound and ultrasound waves which causes that a person targeted by this beam hears the sound inside of his head. Such a perception could easily convince the human being that it is mentally ill. The acts presented in this article suggest that with the development of technology and knowledge of the functioning of human brain new ways of manipulation of human mind keep emerging.
One of them seems to be the electromagnetic energy.

Though in the open scientific literature only some 30 experiments were published, supporting this assumption (1),(2), already in 1974, in the USSR, after succesfull testing with military unit in Novosibirsk, the installation Radioson (Radiosleep) was registered with the Government Committee on the Matters of Inventions and Discoveries of the USSR, described as a method of induction of sleep by means of radio waves (3), (4), (5). In the scientific literature technical feasibility of making a human being asleep by radio waves is confirmed in the book by English scientist carrying out research on the biological effects of electromagnetism (6). In the report by World Health Association on nonionizing radiation from 1991 we read "Many of biological effects observed in animals exposed to ELF fields appear to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with the nervous system" (2).

Among the published experiments there are experiments where pulsed microwaves caused the synchronization of isolated neurons with the frequency of pulsing of microwaves - for example a neuron firing at a frequency 0.8 Hz was forced in this way to fire the impulses at a frequency of 1 Hz. As well pulsed microwaves changed the concentration of neurotransmitters in brain
(neurotransmitters are a part of the mechanism which causes the firing of
neurons in the brain) and reinforced or attenuated the effects of drugs
delivered into the brain (1). The experiment where the main brain frequencies
registered by EEG were synchronized with therequency of microwave pulsing (1,2) might explain the function of the Russian installation Radioson. Microwaves
pulsed in the sleep frequency would cause the synchronization of the brain
activity with the sleep frequency and in this way produce the sleep. Pulsing of
microwaves in frequency predominating in the brain at awaked state could by the
same procedure deny the sleep to a human being.

A report derived from the testing program of the Microwave Research Department at the Walter Read Army Institute of research states "Microwave pulses appear to couple to the central nervous system and produce stimulation similar to electric stimulation unrelated to heat". In a many times replicated experiment microwaves pulsed in an exact frequency caused the efflux of calcium ions from the nerve cells (1,2). Calcium plays a key role in the firing of neurons and Ross Adey, member of the first scientific team which published this experiment, publically expressed his conviction that this effect of electromagnetic radiation would interfere with concentration on complex tasks (7).

Robert Becker, who had share in the discovery of the effect of pulsedields at the healing of broken bones, published the excerpts from the reportrom Walter Reed Army Institute testing program. In the first part "prompt debilitation effects" should have been tested (8). Were not those effects based on the experiment by Ross Adey and others with calcium efflux ? British scientist John Evans, working in the same field, wrote that both Ross Adey and Robert Becker lost their positions and research grants and called them "free-thinking exiles" (6). In 1975, in the USA, a military experiment was published where pulsed microwaves produced, in the brain of a human subject, an audio perception of numbers from 1 to 10 (9). Again the possibility to convince human being that it is mentally ill is obvious.

The testing program of American Walter Read Army Institute of Research,
where the experiment took place, counts with "prompt auditory stimulation by
means of auditory effects" and finally aims at "behavior controled by stimulation" (8). Let us imagine that the words delivered into the brain were
transcribed into ultrasound frequencies. Would not then the subject perceive
those words as his own thoughts? And could not then his behavior be controled in this way? The American Air Force 1982 "Final Report On Biotechnology Research Requirements For Aeronautical Systems Through the Year 2000" states: "While initial attention should be toward degradation of human performance through thermal loading and electromagnetic field effects, subsequent work should address the possibilities of directing and interrogating mental functioning, using externally applied fields" (10). Several scientists warned that latest advances in neurophysiology could be used for the manipulation of human brain.
In June 1995, Michael Persinger, who worked on the American Navy's project of
Non-lethal electromagnetic weapons (11), published, in a scientific magazine, an
article where he states: the technical capability to influence directly the
major portion of the approximately six billion brains of the human species
without mediation through classical sensory modalities by generating neural
information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed is now marginally feasible" (12). In 1998, the French National
Bioethics Committee warned that neuroscience is being increasingly recognized as posing potential threat to human rights" (13).

In May 1999 the neuroscientists conference, sponsored by the UN, took place in Tokyo. In the declaration we read: "Today we have intellectual, physical andinancial resources to master the power of the brain itself, and to develop devices to touch the mind and even control or erase consciousnessWe wish to profess our hope that such pursuit of knowledge serves peace and welfare" (14).

The events at the international political scene, in the last few years, confirm that the concept of remote control of human brain is a matter of negotiations. In January 1999 the European Parliament passed a resolution where it calls for an
international convention introducing a global ban on all developments and
deployments of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human
beings." (15) Already in 1997 nine states of the Union of Independent States
addressed OUN, OBSE and the states of the Interparliamentary Union with the
proposal to place at the agenda of the General Assembly of the Organization of
United Nations the preparation and conclusion of an international convention On Prevention of Informational Wars and Limitation of Circulation of Informational Weapons" (17), (3). The initiative was originaly proposed, in the Russian State Duma, by Vladimir Lopatin (1). V. Lopatin worked,rom 1990 to 1995, in sequence, in the Committees on Security of the Russian Federation, Russian State Duma and Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States, specializing in informational security (3).

The concept of informational weapon or informational war is rather unknown to the world general public. In 1999, V. Lopatin, together with Russian scientist Vladimir Tsygankov, published a book Psychotronic Weapon and the Security of Russia".

Ufologist Stanton Friedman vs. Skeptic Phil Klass on ABC’s Nightline (1987) | VIDEO

In Bob Sheaffer’s recent revelation re archivist Isaac Koi’s facilitation of
infamous skeptic, Phil Klass’ “complete” collection of the latter’s Skeptics
UFO Newsletter (SUN) (making the entire volume available for
download), he also included a link to a video wherein Klass and veteran
Ufologist Stanton Friedman appeared together on ABC’s Nightline with host
Ted Koppel. For our readers benefit, we present the segment here (in two parts)
courtesy allcoded/youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLQKKwt8tm8&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ?M4oL2ZAbY&feature=player_embedded

Stan in his book, “Flying Saucers and Science” (New Page Books 2008)
recounted the experience as  follows:

How Quantum Physics PROVES There Is an After-Life

By: Amanda Froelich,

True Activist.

Debate regarding religion and spirituality has caused more discord than any other topic throughout history. While belief in synchronistic design has helped some reach unimaginable heights, others outright reject the notion of a supreme being – or an eternal life.

From a scientific aspect, many prefer to suppose the notion of an after-life either ridiculous – or at least improbable.

However, one expert claims the proof of life beyond the grave lies in Quantum Physics. Professor Robert Lanza believes the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know it is an illusion created by our consciousness.

A variety of spiritual texts teach that ‘existence’ on this plane is an experience of the limit-less, immortal soul. However, faith in the unknown has been the foundation which has molded spiritual tradition, not science. The professor’s findings may change this.

“We think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules – we live a while and then rot in the ground,” said Lanza on his website.

A graduate of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, the Professor continued, “As humans we believe in death because ‘we’ve been taught we die’, or more specifically, our consciousness associates life with bodies and we know that bodies die.”

The scientist’s entire theory explains how death may not be as terminal as commonly thought. Biocentrism is classed as the theory of everything and comes from the Greek, meaning ‘life center’.

Biocentrism, then, is the belief that life and biology are central to reality and that life created the universe, not the other way around. This suggests a person’s consciousness determines the shape and size of objects in the universe.

Lanza’s theory uses the example of the way all people perceive the world around them. A person sees a blue sky, and is told that the color they are seeing is blue, but the cells in a person’s brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red.

Simply stated: “What you see could not be present without your consciousness,” explained Robert. “Our consciousness makes sense of the world.”

This means that by looking at the universe from a biocentric point of view, space and time don’t behave in the hard and fast ways our consciousness tell us it does. According to the professor, “Space and time are simply ‘tools of the mind”.

Once this theory about space and time being mental constructs is accepted, it means death and the idea of immortality exists in a world without spatial or linear boundaries.

Interesting to note, in accordance with the scientist’s work, theoretical physicists believe there is an infinite number of universes with different variations of people, and situations, taking place simultaneously.

Enthusiastic about the truths of his studies, the Professor added that “everything which can possibly happen is occurring at some point across these multiverses and this means death can’t exist in ‘any real sense’ either.”

Instead, when one dies their life becomes a ‘perennial flower’ that returns to bloom in the multiverse. Lanza shared “Life is an adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking. When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix.”

To prove his theories, the famous double-slit experiment was cited to back up his claims. In the experiment, when scientists watch a particle pass through two slits in a barrier, the particle behaves like a bullet and goes through one slit or the other.

Yet if a person doesn’t watch the particle, it acts like a wave. This means it can go through both slits at the same time.

This demonstrates that matter and energy can display characteristics of both waves and particles, and that behavior of the particle changes based on a person’s perception and consciousness.

As the collective consciousness shifts into better understanding of the universe and the self, it can only be hoped scientific studies will continue to validate what spiritual teachings have long since acknowledged as truth.

Professor Robert Lanza’s full theory is explained in his book “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.”

Sources:

Robert Lanza; Biocentrism

Daily Mail

Humans do NOT come from Earth – and sunburn, bad backs and pain during labour prove it, expert claims

• A U.S. ecologist says conditions such as bad backs and sunburn suggest humans did not evolve alongside other life on Earth
• In a new book, Dr Ellis Silver says aliens put humans our planet as recently as tens of thousands of years ago
• He suggests the Earth might be a prison planet, since humans seem to be a naturally violent species and are here until we learn to behave ourselves

By Sarah Griffiths

PUBLISHED: 17:48 GMT, 14 November 2013 | UPDATED: 17:50 GMT, 14 November 2013

A U.S. ecologist has claimed that humans are not from Earth but were put on the planet by aliens tens of thousands of years ago.

Dr Ellis Silver points to a number of physiological features to make his case for why humans did not evolve alongside other life on Earth, in his new book.

They range from humans suffering from bad backs - which he suggests is because we evolved in a world with lower gravity – to getting too easily sunburned and having difficulty giving birth.

Dr Ellis says that while the planet meets humans’ needs for the most part, it does not perhaps serve the species’ interests as well as the aliens who dropped us off imagined.

In his book, HUMANS ARE NOT FROM EARTH: A SCIENTIFIC EVALUATION OF THE EVIDENCE, the ecologist writes the human race has defects that mark it of being ‘not of this world’.

‘Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth's environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more,’ he told Yahoo.

Dr Ellis says that humans might suffer from bad backs because they evolved on a world with lower gravity.

He also says that it is strange that babies’ heads are so large and make it difficult for women to give birth, which can result in fatalities of the mother and infant.

No other native species on this planet has this problem, he says.

He also believes humans are not designed to be as exposed to the sun as they are on Earth, as they cannot sunbathe for more than a week or two – unlike a lizard – and cannot be exposed to the sun every day without problems.

Dr Ellis also claims humans are always ill and this might be because our body clocks have evolved to expects a 25 hour day, as proven by sleep researchers.

‘This is not a modern condition; the same factors can be traced all the way back through mankind's history on Earth,’ he says.

He suggests that Neanderthals such as homo erectus were crossbred with another species, perhaps from Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star system to our solar system, some 4.37 light years away from the sun.

Dr Ellis said many people feel that they don’t belong and feel at home on Earth.

‘This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species.’

‘One reason for this … is that the Earth might be a prison planet, since we seem to be a naturally violent species and we're here until we learn to behave ourselves,’ he said.

Dr Ellis said the book is intended to create debate, instead of being a scientific study and hopes it will lead to people getting in touch with him with further suggestions of 'evidence'.

While other scientists have said some bacteria arrived on Earth from space, Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA, said that to jump to the conclusion that it is alien life is ‘a big jump’.

Professor Wainwright from the University of Sheffield plans to investigate further, and believes that life is constantly arriving from space that did not originate on Earth.

Dr Ellis says that while his idea is an extreme evolution of that idea, it is intended to be thought-provoking and he claims to have had a largely positive response to it.

He is interested in whether humans came to Earth separately, perhaps by arriving on meteors and comets, before evolving into the species we know today.

‘My thesis proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago,’ he says.

The First Aliens We Discover May Be Purple

In our quest to discover strange new life on strange new worlds, a group of astronomers has modeled potential alien worlds using Earth’s biological history as a framework. From this they have determined that if we are to detect extraterrestrial biology, we should fine-tune our search to the color purple.

Top Exoplanets for Alien Life

As we discover more and more worlds orbiting other stars in ever more biologically-pleasing orbits, the question “are we alone?” becomes increasingly acute. It’s inevitable that we will soon discover an alien world with Earth-like dimensions, orbiting a sun-like star within its habitable zone. But until we develop the means to remotely probe that world’s atmosphere, we can never be sure if it is truly habitable.

Looking for a “true” Earth analog is fraught with challenges. Are we looking for a planet with the same characteristics as modern Earth, or do we try to model our planets during different epochs and work out when Earth life would have been at its most detectable? Life on Earth has been around for the best part of 4 billion years, when would have been best for an alien civilization to detect terrestrial life and what would they have needed to look for?

It’s exactly this question that an international team of researchers is trying to answer.

13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

“Clearly what we know about our planet will be our guideline for the characterization of (small rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their stars),” writes the team, headed by Esther Sanroma of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Spain, in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. “But the Earth has been inhabited for at least 3.8 (billion years), and its appearance has changed with time.”

3 billion years ago, during the Archean eon, the Earth was likely dominated by purple bacteria, a photosynthetic microorganism that inhabited the land and ancient seas. These organisms would have had a very distinctive spectroscopic fingerprint and a tell-tail sign that Earth was covered in a basic form of life.

By modeling different distributions of this microbe throughout the planet — in the oceans, on the land, around coastlines and during different atmospheric conditions — Sanroma’s team used a radiative transfer model “to simulate the visible and near-(infrared) radiation reflected by our planet.” By doing so, they were able to determine that by using multi-color photometric observations, distant observers would be able to “distinguish between an Archean Earth in which purple bacteria inhabit vast extensions of the planet, and a present-day Earth with continents covered by deserts, vegetation or microbial mats.”

ANALYSIS: Purple Plants Might Thrive Under Multiple Stars

When looking for Earth-like worlds, the researchers emphasize the need for exoplanet hunters to be aware that they may not discover a modern-looking Earth-like world, they may stumble across a purple bacteria-dominated world with a very distinctive photometric signature more fitting with an ancient Archean eon Earth-like world.

“Earth is the only planet where life is known to exist; thus observations of our planet will be a key instrument for characterization and the search for life elsewhere. However, even if we discovered a second Earth, it is very unlikely that it would present a stage of evolution similar to the present-day Earth.”

This isn’t the first time that purple alien worlds have been discussed as a possibility. In 2011, researchers examined the exotic energy-generating regimes hypothetical alien plant life would need to develop under sunlight from binary stars.

Over 25 percent of sun-like stars and 50 percent of red dwarf stars exist in binary pairs. Should there be any planets in orbit around binary systems, any life — be it flora or fauna, or some alien form of life that we can’t comprehend, let alone categorize — would be exposed to a broad spectra of light, stretching far into ultraviolet wavelengths. The upshot of this would be purple hued (or even black) plant life that has evolved to optimize photosynthesis.

It seems that in the hunt for extraterrestrial life, all roads lead to purple.

Publication: Characterizing the purple Earth: Modelling the globally-integrated spectral variability of the Archean Earth, E. Sanromá, E. Pallé, M. N. Parenteau, N. Y. Kiang, A. M. Gutiérrez-Navarro, R. López, P. Montañés-Rodríguez, 2013. arXiv:1311.1145 [astro-ph.EP]

Image credit: NASA (purple added)

Iranian Air Force Chasing UFOs Discovered An Unknown Type Of Drone

Retired by the U.S. Navy more than seven years ago, the iconic Grumman F-14 remains in service with the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF).

Iran used its Tomcats extensively in the Iran-Iraq War and the F-14A is still today the backbone of IRIAF air defense.

Over the last few years the “Persian cats” have reportedly flown against a very particular threat: the Unidentified Flying Objects, universally known as a UFO.

More detailed information about this weird use of the last operational Tomcats can be found in the October 2013 issue of Combat Aircraft.

An interesting article written by Babak Taghvaee gives an exclusive overview of IRIAF F-14s missions conducted to intercept UFOs. But according to Taghavee these unknown flying objects didn’t conduct any extraterrestrial activity:

To intercept UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), IRIAF F-4Es and F-14As, based in Bushehr to serve as QRA (Quick Reaction Alert) interceptors, were scrambled several times. But the American drones have astonishing flight characteristics: “Including an ability to fly outside the atmosphere, attain a maximum cruise speed of Mach 10, and a minimum speed of zero, with the ability to hover over the target,” as explained by Taghavee. These performances, along with their powerful ECM, make the F-14s unable to operate their weapons.

But, according to Taghavee, at least one time a Tomcat was able to come very close to an engagement with one of these “UFOs”:

This kind of flight was suspended after several attempts to intercept the U.S. UAVs were made by F-4Es and F-14A over the Bushehr, Arak and Natanz plants. But, as reported in the article, another mission was launched around the 04.20hrs on January 26, 2012, when “an Iranian Air Defense Command radar site near Bushehr identified an unknown aircraft flying towards the area."

An F-14A was ordered to scramble. At 04.30hrs it took off from TFB.6, (6^th Tactical Fighter Base, placed near Bushehr) but seconds later the fighter exploded, killing both crew instantly. The reason for the incident remains a mystery, and the aircraft involved was one of the fittest IRIAF Tomcats, with the lowest flying hours in the fleet.”

This Tomcat was the serial 3-6062, the one which could have been shot down by the “Revolutionary Guards” air defense as explained recently by The Aviationist. So if this was the cause of the “incident” (several sources believe the F-14 was not shot down by “friendly fire”), it becomes clear that there wasn’t any UFO involved in this mishap. Only the nature of the drones involved in the intelligence activity over Iranian nuclear plants remains unexplained.

We can affirm that while many times in the last few years several UAVs flew over Iran to gather information (such as the stealthy RQ-170 captured in December 2011), a drone with flight characteristics like those described by Taghvaee is still unknown, unless we assume the SR-72, a replacement of the SR-71, or something similar, is already covertly flying.

But again, Taghvaee has no doubts about the nature of these unidentified flying objects, since in his article he says that “After two years of research on the objects' flight profiles and examination of remnants of a crashed example recovered in 2006 (in both Iran and then by experts in Russia), the Iranian Army specified that they were U.S. intelligence drones.”

This post originally appeared at The Aviationist. Copyright 2013.

Mystery Monday: Pilot Dies In Pursuit Of UFO

A national interest in UFO's was sparked, in part, by a plane crash in Kentucky back in 1948. A celebrated war pilot died while following an unidentified flying object.

65 years later, the cause of that Kentucky crash remains unclear.

"This is where it all began. Right out here," says Shelby Stones as she drives up to a small building that used to be her old school house in her neighborhood in Franklin, Kentucky.

"And this was where I was standing when it all happened. The plane was falling out of the sky just up the road here," she said, describing a day in January 1948 she'll never forget. "And that's what I remember most, is the noise it was making"

Stone was 11-years-old when she witnessed a military jet crash just beside her home. The pilot was World War II veteran Thomas Mantell, a 25-year-old, honored for his role in D-day, and now a captain in the Kentucky Air National Guard.

The crash Stone witnessed would forever changed the country's perception of UFO's. There's not much that remains of the crash from 1948, but there is this one artifact - it's a piece of Mantell's plane, and it shows wear and tear not just of age, but the crash itself, it's dented and scarred with burn marks on both sides. And it remains one of the last links to this great mystery from the 40's about what exactly happened to Mantell that day.

"Here was the very first individual to be a casualty of a UFO incident," said National Guard Historian John Trowbridge.

Trowbridge has studied this case.

"Godman Tower had been watching this thing. They'd gotten calls from around the area, from around the state, from state police," he said. "And it was just sitting there for so long and they were trying to figure out what it was. And, apparently, Colonel Hix, who was in the tower said 'hey, we see something. Can you investigate'?"

Before his death, Captain Mantell described the object as "tremendous in size, made of metal of reflective surface, moving at about 360 miles per hour."

Captain Mantell chased the object about 25-thousand feet into the air, say military records, when Mantell likely passed out from lack of oxygen, and then plummeted to the ground.

It's an explanation many have doubted, and one important piece of the mystery was never solved.

"They had no idea what this thing was. And this whole UFO phenomenon was brand new," Trowbridge said.

Above all, this is captain Mantell's legacy, the center of a still-unsolved mystery. That's not all that's mysterious about this case, though. Thomas Mantell lived in Louisville all his life, but was born in a Simpson County hospital. Historians say Mantell was only in Simpson County for two days in his life, the day he was born, and the day he died.

Watch live! - Frank Drake on Kepler and Its Impact on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM (PST)
Watch Frank Drake's discussion LIVE at http://connect.arc.nasa.gov/kepler

NASA's Kepler mission has answered, finally, some of the prime questions to be answered when we consider the ossible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life and how we might find it. Now we know that almost all stars have planetary systems. Of special importance, the very numerous red dwarf stars have planetary systems, a situation which many astronomers have thought unlikely. I will discuss how the planets of red dwarfs and larger stars might be habitable, what hazards there might be to life, and how life, with its wonderful ability to evolve and adapt, might defend itself against these hazards. Many of the solutions to survival can be found already in the solar system.

About the speaker:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first modern SETI experiment in 1960, continues his life-long interest in the detection of extraterrestrial sentient life. He participates in an on-going search for optical signals of intelligent origin, carried out with colleagues from Lick Observatory and the University of California at Berkeley, using the 40-inch Nickel telescope at Lick.

Frank also continues to investigate radio telescope designs that optimize the chances of success for SETI (he proposed the plan used in the design of the Allen Telescope Array, based on some of his work of more than forty years ago.) He is also interested in the possibility that the very numerous red dwarf stars, stars that are much less bright than the Sun, might host habitable planets. In this regard, he has noted that the behavior of various objects in our own solar system – in particular the resonances between their rotation and orbital periods – when applied to some of the newly discovered extrasolar planets, strongly suggests that most planets orbiting red dwarfs will not keep one face towards their star, and thus are more likely to be habitable. If this is proven correct, it will increase by almost ten times the probable number of habitable planets in the Milky Way.

More about Frank Drake

About the mission:

NASA's Kepler mission was designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to determine what fraction of stars have terrestrial-size planets in or near the habitable zone. Launched in March 2009, Kepler identified planets by watching for dips in starlight that occur as the planets transit, or pass in front of their stars, blocking the light. Through the first three years of data, Kepler has already discovered more than 3,500 planet candidates and confirmed 156 as planets.

To learn more about Kepler, visit www.nasa.gov/kepler and follow the mission on Twitter at @NASAKepler or on Facebook atwww.facebook.com/nasaskeplermission.

The Chicago O’Hare UFO Incident: 7 Years Later, Still No Answers

I always assumed that most fantastical UFO stories occurred only in the past. The ‘Flatwoods UFO incident‘, ‘The Shag Harbour‘, The Rendlesham Forest incident….

But what occurred one cloudy morning in 2006 at Chicago’s international O’Hare airport could potentially be a modern marvel in Ufology. On November 7th, 2006, an employee noticed a large, dark disc hovering above the runway space. The employee quickly realized that what they were looking at was not normal and should not be floating there in the middle of a busy airspace.

The word spread through the staff’s radios of a mysterious floating object above O’hare International. Pilots, air traffic controllers, employees, and travelers alike bore witness to the hovering UFO. There were reports of pilots peering out their cockpit windows in the runway and staff going outside for a better look of the object. In the midst of all the commotion and without warning, the disc broke away. Shooting straight up through the cloud bank that blanketed the airport, piercing straight through the thickness and leaving a large visible hole punched through the clouds. The UFO had zipped up into the sky at an incredible speed according to the witnesses.

A reporter soon got wind of what had transpired at O’hare and inquiries were made to the United Airlines to follow up with the initial report from their employee. United Airlines denied such a thing occurred and claimed to know nothing of the incident. The reporter from the Chicago Tribune then began making calls to the FAA to see if they had any information.

The Federal Aviation Administration responded just as the airline did and claimed no knowledge of any strange aerial reports during that time. Days passed and rumors began to swirl about a coverup. The airport officials and the FAA both denied any knowledge of the incident and claimed that there had been no reports even through hundreds of those who were traveling at the time continued to talk.

Then, the newspaper came forward and said that they had filed a Freedom of Information Act request and that they had uncovered the coverup. What they got back showed that the United Airlines officials knew about the reports that were filed by their employees and had in turned asked the FAA about the supposed UFO sighting. This incriminate both the airline and the FAA and only fanned the flames of conspiracy. When confronted with the information, the FAA quickly released a statement saying that what many airport employees and travelers had seen that November day was a strange weather phenomenon.

So then the million dollar question is: Where are the resulting UFO IMAGES?

With all the camera-packing travelers in one of the most busiest airports in the U.S, we could assume that some evidence exists, right?

Wrong!

Incredible as it sounds, there is no compelling photograph or video footage of this famous UFO incident released. At least not to the public. Those images that are floating around the web claiming to be that of the O’Hare UFO have been labeled as fakes. Only one of them is known throughout the UFO community as a possible real photograph.

According to some rumors, Dan Aykroyd has most of the photos taken that day.

Yes, the actor Dan Aykroyd came forward and claimed that he was in possession of some of the Chicago O’hare photographs and/or film taken by witnesses. But here’s were the story ends. Neither the Chicago Tribune or Aykroyd himself have come forward with any other evidence that could shed light to this modern mystery.

Could it be possible for someone like Dan Aykroyd to ‘buy up’ all the photographs of this supposed UFO?

Why hasn’t he released them to the public?

Dan Aykroyd, are you reading this? Tell us…why?

CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black
 Highlighters All These Years

LANGLEY, VA—A report released Tuesday by the CIA's Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters.

CIA Director Porter Goss.

According to the report, sections of the documents— "almost invariably the most crucial passages"—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency's inception in 1947.

CIA Director Porter Goss has ordered further internal investigation.

"Why did it go on for this long, and this far?" said Goss in a press conference called shortly after the report's release. "I'm as frustrated as anyone. You can't read a single thing that's been highlighted. Had I been there to advise [former CIA director] Allen Dulles, I would have suggested the traditional yellow color—or pink."

Goss added: "There was probably some really, really important information in these documents."

When asked by a reporter if the black ink was meant to intentionally obscure, Goss countered, "Good God, why?"

Goss lamented the fact that the public will probably never know the particulars of such historic events as the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, or the growth of the international drug trade.

"I'm sure the CIA played major roles in all these things," Goss said. "But now we'll never know for sure."

In addition to clouding the historical record, the use of the black highlighters, also known as "permanent markers," may have encumbered or even prevented critical operations. CIA scholar Matthew Franks was forced to abandon work on a book about the Bay Of Pigs invasion after declassified documents proved nearly impossible to read.

"With all the highlighting in the documents I unearthed in the National Archives, it's really no wonder that the invasion failed," Franks said. "I don't see how the field operatives and commandos were expected to decipher their orders."

The inspector general's report cited in particular the damage black highlighting did to documents concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, thousands of pages of which "are completely highlighted, from top to bottom margin."

"It is unclear exactly why CIA bureaucrats sometimes chose to emphasize entire documents," the report read. "Perhaps the documents were extremely important in every detail, or the agents, not unlike college freshmen, were overwhelmed by the reading material and got a little carried away."

Also unclear is why black highlighters were chosen in the first place. Some blame it on the closed, elite culture of the CIA itself. A former CIA officer speaking on the condition of anonymity said highlighting documents with black pens was a common and universal practice.

"It seemed counterintuitive, but the higher-ups didn't know what they were doing," the ex-officer said. "I was once ordered to feed documents into a copying machine in order to make backups of some very important top-secret records, but it turned out to be some sort of device that cut the paper to shreds."

The Numbers Are Astronomical

A press conference today laid bare some new results from NASA's Kepler space telescope. They're astounding.

It turns out that about 22 percent of all Sun-like stars boast a planet that's at the right orbital distance to sustain liquid water on its surface. In other words, one in five of such stars has an Earth-size orbiting world in the so-called "habitable zone."

This result, announced by astronomers Erik Petigura, Andrew Howard, and Geoff Marcy (from the universities of California and Hawaii), significantly plumps the odds that there's life elsewhere in the cosmos. That's because the prevalence of the messy, organic chemistry we gentrify with the term "life" is proportional to the amount of real estate available for it to arise and flourish. The argument is straightforward and unassailable, unless you're convinced that biology is zapped into existence with lightning bolts hurled by the gods.

Before the Kepler mission, no one knew what fraction of stars would have hospitable planets. So this work is both important and encouraging. Why encouraging? Well, consider the numbers that tumble from this result -- the quantitative consequences.

We'll do the simple math for you. However, and just in case arithmetic makes your eyeballs glaze over like a holiday ham, we'll make sure the bottom line of this article gives you the bottom line. It's a result you'll find useful for striking up conversation with people who are overly impressed with their own importance.

Here are the stats. As noted, 22 percent of all Sun-like stars will sport a habitable, Earth-size world. Since stars similar to Sol (so-called G and K stars) make up 20 percent of the roughly 200 billion stars of the Milky Way, they account for 9 billion planets able to support life. That's the contribution to the planetary population from cousins of the Sun.

However, three-quarters of the Galaxy's stellar complement is comprised of so-called "red dwarfs" -- dim, puny stars rather smaller and much dimmer than the Sun. A recent analysis of Kepler data by Harvard astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau implies that 16 percent of red dwarfs sport a planet in the habitable zone. Do the multiplication, and you can throw another 24 billion candidates for life into the galactic barrel.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -- the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

So now we have the skinny for our galaxy: There are at least 33 billion habitable worlds. At least. (We haven't considered large moons that could be paved with protoplasm, such as the fictional satellite Pandora in the movie "Avatar"). If they exist, they'll simply swell this already-impressive crowd.

However, and before cutting to the chase, a brief, historic note: In 1961, a dozen scientists gathered in West Virginia to bat around the idea of intelligent life in space. The agenda of this small meeting was a simple equation, constructed by the organizer, astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake Equation has since become a staple of astronomy textbooks everywhere, as it neatly summarizes the parameters that determine how many aliens might populate space.

One of the factors in this famous formulation is the average number of Earth-like worlds in a random solar system. In 1961 -- which was long before planets around other stars had been found -- the meeting participants didn't dare to offer an official opinion on this number. But they did vaguely speculate that most stars might have such life-friendly locales. Today, their optimism seems both justified by the data, and remarkably insightful. They were either prescient, darn smart, or secretly clued in by aliens. I vote door number two.

So check out the Milky Way next time you're outside the glare of city lights, and ruminate on the thought that at least 33 billion habitable planets are somewhere up there. But that's just the local population. We can't see the entire universe, but the fraction we can see is studded with roughly 150 billion other galaxies; each with its own complement of habitable worlds. So the number of life-friendly planets that are currently in the part of the cosmos we can possibly observe is five thousand billion billion.

That's a big number. It's bigger than the number of cells in all the people of Earth.

You may note that we've generally reckoned these figures to two decimal places, although that accuracy isn't really justified. For example, you could argue about the definition of "habitable zone," and plenty of people do. Different zone limits would shift these totals by maybe a factor of two or three, one way or the other. But when you're talking five thousand billion billion, all that really counts is the number of zeroes (in this case, 21).

It's a real morale booster for those who are searching for extraterrestrial biology. Look at it this way: In the Powerball lottery, your chances of winning the jackpot on a single ticket are about one in 175 thousand. If Earth is the only planet with life in the visible universe, then our planet has done the equivalent of winning the jackpot four times in a row. Not just four wins. Four wins in a row. That would, I aver, qualify our home world as a miracle.

So here's that promised bottom line. Unless you're convinced that our watery planet, one of hundreds of billions floating in a non-descript galaxy similar to a hundred billion other galaxies, is somehow more worthy than all the rest, you should expect not merely an occasional Chewbacca or Klingon hanging out in space. The universe is far more likely to be a teeming shore of life, and biology as much a part of nature as rocks and rain.

Are you special? Sure you are. But it's a good bet that you're not alone.

The Echo Flight UFO Incident: James Carlson is Still Wrong After All These Years

     Saying that the moon is made of green cheese doesn’t make it true, even if one repeats that claim over and over, hundreds of times, or finds a small band of like-minded believers who parrot the claim.

It’s not entirely clear why James Carlson continues to post countless comments online, denying the existence of UFO reports during the Echo Flight missile shutdown incident at Malmstrom AFB, Montana, on March 16, 1967, in the face of witness testimony to the contrary—including from one of the missile launch officers present that day.

Carlson knows about the tape recorded conversation (see below) between myself and now-retired Col. Walter Figel, the deputy missile commander at Echo during the incident, in which he told me that he had indeed received a radio call from a security guard at one of the Echo missile silos, saying that he was observing “a large, round object” hovering “directly over the site.”


Figel also confirmed that he had, in response to the call, sent out two Security Alert Teams to investigate the report and that at least one of them confirmed seeing the object hovering over the missile silo. Figel also said that he and James’ father, Captain Eric Carlson, had been debriefed back at Malmstrom and told not to talk about the incident.

While my recorded conversations with Col. Figel took place between 2008 and 2010, he had made nearly identical statements in another taped phone conversation,(see below) with former Minuteman missile launch officer Bob Salas, in 1996.


There are other U.S. Air Force veterans who have also gone on the record about a UFO involvement in the Echo Flight incident, as well as a Boeing Corporation engineer, Robert Kaminski, whose job it was to find out why the missiles malfunctioned.

In 1997, in a letter to researcher Jim Klotz, Kaminski wrote that, “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. In other words there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.”

Kaminski also wrote, “Meanwhile I was contacted by our representative at OOAMA [Office, Ogden Air Material Area], Don Peterson, and told by him that the incident was reported as being a UFO event—that a UFO was seen by some airmen over the Launch Control Facility at the time E-Flight went down.”

Actually, the large round object sighted by the missile guard and reported to launch officer Lt. Walter Figel, had been hovering over one of the Echo missile silos, not the launch control facility itself. Nevertheless, Boeing engineer Kaminski’s revealing testimony essentially confirms Figel’s account of a UFO-presence during the incident.

Of course, if James Carlson were ever to admit that Kaminski’s letter is important, or that Figel’s tape recorded statements to me and Bob Salas do indeed contradict his father’s now-discredited claim that there were no UFOs reported at Echo Flight, he would in effect be admitting that he has been making a complete fool of himself online for the past several years, by championing his dad’s untenable position and, in doing so, viciously insulting the other veterans and researchers who dare challenge it.

This is one reason why Carlson will never, in his many online rants about Echo Flight, provide a link to the tape recorded admissions by Col. Figel that are available online.

After all, one can hear Figel tell me that, while he was skeptical of the UFO report he received from the security guard, it nevertheless did indeed occur. Figel also says, clearly on the tape, that while he thought the guard might be joking, that individual’s demeanor was calm and businesslike. “He seemed to be serious and I wasn’t taking him seriously,” Figel told me.

When I posted the transcript of this conversation-excerpt in 2008, James Carlson doubted it’s accuracy and chided me to post the actual tape recording. When I eventually did, Carlson then claimed that I had doctored it to make it prove my points. All challenges by me, to have a team of audio experts examine the tape—to verify that it is pristine and unaltered—have been ignored by Carlson and his supporters. Of course, they would have to pay for that expensive analysis so, it seems, they are not prepared to put some money where their skeptical mouths are.

Another reason James Carlson does not want others to listen to my tape recorded conversations with Col. Figel is because he refutes Carlson’s claims, calling them “off-base”. Figel also says that Carlson “has an ax to grind,” something that James certainly does not want others to hear—given that Carlson incessantly cites Figel as someone who supports his own position. Regardless, James’ relentless hate campaign is quite obvious to anyone who reads his breathless tirades against me and Bob Salas.

Even Carlson’s handful of supporters have urged him to tone it down, given the manic, often hysterical tone of his blog comment postings in which he wildly attacks anyone who supports the notion of a UFO presence at Echo Flight during the shutdown incident. Other, unaffiliated readers of his rants—who have no strong opinion about the case, one way or the other—have called him a “nut”, “wacko”, “fruitcake” and the like.

Years ago I myself accused James Carlson of “foaming at the mouth”. However, that was before I learned that he had been medically discharged from the U.S. Navy due to a diagnosis of epilepsy. One symptom sometimes exhibited during epileptic “fits” is indeed a frothing at the lips during the seizures. Once I had James’ medical situation brought to my attention, I never again used that unkind characterization of his online outbursts.

Nevertheless, James’ usually bizarre, over-the-top tirades against me and Bob Salas—he has called us “liars and frauds” countless times—raises the issue of his state of mind. When I spoke with his father Eric, in October 2008, he continued denying that UFOs had been reported at Echo Flight, however, when I asked why his son was so out of control in his online posts, Eric responded, “James has some problems.”

That same month, in a phone conversation with an associate of mine, Eric told him that he was concerned that James would “have a nervous breakdown.” (I am willing to testify under oath in a court of law that the elder Carlson’s comment to me was exactly as I have portrayed here, and that I have accurately related the other conversation as it was presented to me.)

So, does James Carlson incessantly lie about the facts relating to the UFO events at Malmstrom Air Force Base because he is psychologically unbalanced, or is it just due to his complete lack of ethics? Or both?

Regardless, the questions remain: Why is James Carlson so unwilling (or perhaps unable) to accept the fact that his father misled him when he said that there were no UFO reports at Echo Flight at the time of the mysterious, full-flight missile shutdown? Why does James continue to deny or, in some posts, twist Col. Figel’s candid, taped remarks to me and Bob Salas?

Similarly, why does Carlson repeatedly lie about Salas’ former missile commander, Col. Frederick Meiwald, who has made emphatic remarks supportive of Salas? In 2011, Meiwald told me during a taped conversation (see below) that UFOs were indeed present at a different flight—Oscar—when those missiles malfunctioned eight days after the Echo incident.


Although Meiwald had been on a rest break in the launch capsule when the ICBMs began “dropping off alert status”, once awoken by Salas, he witnessed most if not all of the missiles malfunctioning.

Meiwald also confirmed that moments later, in response to triggered alarms at one of the silos, Salas had dispatched a two-man Security Alert Team to the site. Those men, said Meiwald, saw “a bright, flying object at low-level.” near the missile silo and immediately fled back to the Oscar Launch Control Facility. One man was so distraught that he had to be transported to the base hospital before completing his shift.

James Carlson has for years loudly proclaimed that Salas was lying when he said that he had witnessed a UFO-related missile shutdown at Malmstrom in 1967. True, until Salas located Meiwald in 1996, he couldn’t remember the designation of the flight and thought that he might have been at Echo or November.

Nevertheless, by the time Carlson started his public vendetta against Salas in the late 1990s, Col. Meiwald had already discussed the UFO-related events at Oscar Flight with Salas during a taped telephone conversation (see below). Meiwald later wrote him a follow-up letter (see below) containing more details.

Meiwald Letter 10-1-1996 -click on image(s) to enlarge -

Fortunately, James Carlson has a relatively small audience, even though he has posted hundreds of comments about these topics at various websites over time. Unfortunately, his hard core supporters, whose strong anti-UFO biases apparently allow them to endorse a delusional (or, perhaps, merely dishonest) person’s baseless charges, keep egging him on, rather than urging him to seek the help he obviously needs.

Now, in the wake of Bob Salas’ recent revelation about having had an apparent UFO abduction experience in 1985, the usual critics are gleefully sharpening their knives. Given their blanket rejection of anything UFO-related, Carlson and his crew can be expected to go after Salas with renewed viciousness.

Importantly, six other former U.S. Air Force personnel have provided similar accounts to me in recent years. Those individuals had previously been involved in a nuts-and-bolts UFO incident in one of the nuclear missile fields operated by various Strategic Air Command bases. Then, weeks, months or years later, they allegedly had an experience comparable to the one now being revealed by Bob Salas. In short, his account is not unique.

I will have more to say on this last subject at some point in the future. At the moment, I am still gathering data. While the number of military veterans who have told me of their strange follow-up experiences is quite small, compared with the number who make no such claim, their accounts obviously deserve serious, unbiased investigation.

Out of the closet, into the fire

For more than six years, De Void has tended to avoid the whole alien abduction thing because, well, radar tracks, multiple eyewitnesses, detectable electromagnetic effects and videos are one thing. Nasal probes, mindscans, teleportation, hybrids — that’s an entirely different conversation. Although, if UFOs are truly the manifestation of the technology they appear to be, running circles around our most advanced weapons systems, then it stands to reason that literally anything is possible. But if that’s true, if Zeta Reticulans or whatever can move like vapors into our bedrooms, then we’re all screwed, and De Void’s not into that. Furthermore, try to goad the mainstream media into getting a grip on the idea of beaming humans aboard starships seriously; hell, De Void can’t even get Texas public radio reporter Wade Goodwyn to examine ordinary FAA/National Weather Service records that painted a UFO incident he covered in his own back yard.

But, deep breath, here we go: Recently, retired Air Force captain Bob Salas went public with his own abduction experience. And there’s no getting around it because Salas was one of the first military veterans to go on record about UFOs tampering with and disabling U.S. nuclear missile systems. His example emboldened dozens of other USAF veterans to step up and share their stories about high strangeness in the missile fields. Salas took a no-nonsense stance and wasn’t afraid to call people out if he thought they were being dingbats. He spent years crafting a rep as a fully grounded left-brain type.

Now this -- an abduction in 1985 in Huntington Beach, Calif. You can read all about at the Open Minds site. The salient passage (cringe): “He floated off the bed towards the locked bedroom window, which he felt certain they [the aliens, presumably] would be unable to lock. Nevertheless, he went through the window in an upright position and was taken aboard a craft. He was shown a needle, eight to twelve inches in length, which was inserted into one of his testicles in order to collect semen.” Oy vey! “The pain was excruciating, and when Salas complained to his abductors, the pain suddenly ceased. This was followed by a physical checkup in which his back seemed to be of primary interest. He next remembers moving through a curved hallway and seeing a bright light before suddenly finding himself back in his bed.”

As abduction accounts go, this one’s pretty routine. Salas states he never forgot the incident after it occurred, but he didn’t recover the details until undergoing hypnotic regression in 2006. Only then did he begin discussing it with his wife Marilyn who, even today, recalls only the broader aspects.

“I don’t remember nearly as much as Bob does. I think I was being an ostrich about it, like, if I stuck my head in the sand it’d all go away,” Marilyn says from their home in Ojai, Calif. “I remember being on the side of the bed that faced the doorway, and when I opened my eyes, there was a foggy, bluish, gray light down the hallway that seemed to be coming from the living room area. That’s all I remember, but it was a freaky thing at the time and I shut my eyes, thinking ‘I don’t believe what I just saw.’ It was so strange I didn’t even mention it to Bob the next morning.” Nor did hubby say mention it to her.

Though they met in 1969, Marilyn says Bob didn’t even discuss the Minuteman missile shutdown at Malmstrom AFB, which happened just two years earlier, until the mid-1990s. Even then, it would be another decade before he started asking if she remembered a blue-light incident from Huntington Beach. Bob pressed the issue a lot farther than Marilyn did.

“Honestly, I don’t have any desire to know more than the blue light,” she says. “My concern, when Bob decided to discuss it openly, was how the general public was going to respond to it. But this is something Bob felt like he needed to do.”

Salas says he wanted to spill the beans as soon as he got sharper visuals through hypnosis. “Understandably," he says, "I wanted to fully establish my primary story before I talked about this. I did not factor my reputation into it — I’m not trying to make anyone’s life more difficult. But I feel a responsibility not only to myself but also to the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, who’ve been abducted.”

So there it is — the point man on UFOs and WMD, out of the closet. Will it damage his credibility? No doubt. Salas is unconcerned. “I’ve already received some blowback, but so be it,” he says. “But they’re not just here to fly around in our airspace. Something else is going on. If they're taking eggs and they're taking semen, then they're producing hybrid beings. And it could be either horrifying or unifying, depending on how you want to look at it.”

De Void doesn't want to look at it at all. Nevertheless.

The Numbers Are Astronomical

A press conference today laid bare some new results from NASA's Kepler space telescope. They're astounding.

It turns out that about 22 percent of all Sun-like stars boast a planet that's at the right orbital distance to sustain liquid water on its surface. In other words, one in five of such stars has an Earth-size orbiting world in the so-called "habitable zone."

This result, announced by astronomers Erik Petigura, Andrew Howard, and Geoff Marcy (from the universities of California and Hawaii), significantly plumps the odds that there's life elsewhere in the cosmos. That's because the prevalence of the messy, organic chemistry we gentrify with the term "life" is proportional to the amount of real estate available for it to arise and flourish. The argument is straightforward and unassailable, unless you're convinced that biology is zapped into existence with lightning bolts hurled by the gods.

Before the Kepler mission, no one knew what fraction of stars would have hospitable planets. So this work is both important and encouraging. Why encouraging? Well, consider the numbers that tumble from this result -- the quantitative consequences.

We'll do the simple math for you. However, and just in case arithmetic makes your eyeballs glaze over like a holiday ham, we'll make sure the bottom line of this article gives you the bottom line. It's a result you'll find useful for striking up conversation with people who are overly impressed with their own importance.

Here are the stats. As noted, 22 percent of all Sun-like stars will sport a habitable, Earth-size world. Since stars similar to Sol (so-called G and K stars) make up 20 percent of the roughly 200 billion stars of the Milky Way, they account for 9 billion planets able to support life. That's the contribution to the planetary population from cousins of the Sun.

However, three-quarters of the Galaxy's stellar complement is comprised of so-called "red dwarfs" -- dim, puny stars rather smaller and much dimmer than the Sun. A recent analysis of Kepler data by Harvard astronomers Courtney Dressing and David Charbonneau implies that 16 percent of red dwarfs sport a planet in the habitable zone. Do the multiplication, and you can throw another 24 billion candidates for life into the galactic barrel.

We've accounted for 95 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way. The other 5 percent are big, bright stars -- the kind that dominate the night sky, but are lamentably both rare and short-lived. If biology's your thing, you can forget those guys.

So now we have the skinny for our galaxy: There are at least 33 billion habitable worlds. At least. (We haven't considered large moons that could be paved with protoplasm, such as the fictional satellite Pandora in the movie "Avatar"). If they exist, they'll simply swell this already-impressive crowd.

However, and before cutting to the chase, a brief, historic note: In 1961, a dozen scientists gathered in West Virginia to bat around the idea of intelligent life in space. The agenda of this small meeting was a simple equation, constructed by the organizer, astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake Equation has since become a staple of astronomy textbooks everywhere, as it neatly summarizes the parameters that determine how many aliens might populate space.

One of the factors in this famous formulation is the average number of Earth-like worlds in a random solar system. In 1961 -- which was long before planets around other stars had been found -- the meeting participants didn't dare to offer an official opinion on this number. But they did vaguely speculate that most stars might have such life-friendly locales. Today, their optimism seems both justified by the data, and remarkably insightful. They were either prescient, darn smart, or secretly clued in by aliens. I vote door number two.

So check out the Milky Way next time you're outside the glare of city lights, and ruminate on the thought that at least 33 billion habitable planets are somewhere up there. But that's just the local population. We can't see the entire universe, but the fraction we can see is studded with roughly 150 billion other galaxies; each with its own complement of habitable worlds. So the number of life-friendly planets that are currently in the part of the cosmos we can possibly observe is five thousand billion billion.

That's a big number. It's bigger than the number of cells in all the people of Earth.

You may note that we've generally reckoned these figures to two decimal places, although that accuracy isn't really justified. For example, you could argue about the definition of "habitable zone," and plenty of people do. Different zone limits would shift these totals by maybe a factor of two or three, one way or the other. But when you're talking five thousand billion billion, all that really counts is the number of zeroes (in this case, 21).

It's a real morale booster for those who are searching for extraterrestrial biology. Look at it this way: In the Powerball lottery, your chances of winning the jackpot on a single ticket are about one in 175 thousand. If Earth is the only planet with life in the visible universe, then our planet has done the equivalent of winning the jackpot four times in a row. Not just four wins. Four wins in a row. That would, I aver, qualify our home world as a miracle.

So here's that promised bottom line. Unless you're convinced that our watery planet, one of hundreds of billions floating in a non-descript galaxy similar to a hundred billion other galaxies, is somehow more worthy than all the rest, you should expect not merely an occasional Chewbacca or Klingon hanging out in space. The universe is far more likely to be a teeming shore of life, and biology as much a part of nature as rocks and rain.

Are you special? Sure you are. But it's a good bet that you're not alone.

Paul Kimball's UFO Debunking and Irrationality

     Every so often I find a UFO debunking piece that illustrates the irrationality of the debunkers’ arguments despite the educational background of the debunker. For example, Dr. Isaac Asimov who wrote more than 300 books, mostly on scientific topics and many Science Fiction tomes made the following claim, “If aliens were visiting Earth, they would either land and make themselves known, or keep hidden. If they do neither, they are not visiting.” How extraordinary that a world class sci-fi writer can’t think of other scenarios, some place in between the noted extremes. He certainly gives no rationale. He has not claimed to be himself in touch with ETs or to have studied the evidence presented by witnesses to actual ET behavior. One might say it illustrates arrogance combined with ignorance.

My nephew Paul Kimball has a law degree and has spent a lot of time “studying UFOs”; in mid August he penned a piece about which one can only shake one’s head and ask where that nonsense came from. He starts by saying “here are the reasons why I am completely convinced there was no ET Crash.
If aliens had sufficiently advanced technology of the kind that would permit travel to the stars (and I have talked to enough scientists to know just how mind blowingly advanced this would have to be, Stan Friedman and his nuclear rockets balderdash not withstanding) then it beggars belief that they would crash in spaceships that looked like something out of a 1950s sci-fi B movie once they got here (much less crash multiple times, as some posit, including Stan).” As noted in the book “"Science Was Wrong"” by myself and Kathleen Marden, there were loads of scientists who were totally negative about flight in the air and then flight in space. I don’t know how Paul knows what the Roswell crashed saucer looked like . . . lots of reports of small light weight pieces of wreckage . . . not like a spaceship at all.

Notice the assumption that the same small vehicle that crashed at Roswell, or Aztec, or the Plains of San Agustin came to earth directly from another star system. Is he really unaware that flight in the atmosphere of a planet is a very different business than flight in deep space between stars? Wow! Lift, drag, heating, gravity etc., are very different for airborne vehicles than for deep space rockets. We have many reports of huge mother ships into and out of which the small earth excursion modules fly.

The Lunar excursion modules which landed on the moon were extraordinarily different from the huge Saturn V rockets which were launched from Earth with the LEMs on Board. Surely he (with a very strong background in history) is aware that even as far back as the epic battles of World War II, there were huge aircraft carriers which carried a bunch of small airplanes to the locations from which these aircraft flew. The carriers didn’t fly, and the aircraft didn’t float on the water. The carriers carried fuel for the airplanes and provided housing, food, ammunition for the pilots, etc. The aircraft are far more maneuverable than are the carriers. Despite all the aircraft in a huge variety of sizes, speeds, etc., there are loads of crashes. Two huge and expensive space shuttles crashed.

Paul has another sword which he wields, ”However, allowing for the equally infinitesimal [based on what?] possibility that Murphy’s Law applies to super advanced aliens, It beggars belief that they would just leave the remains of the ship and their dead comrades to be found by beings, who, as Stan puts it, were here to observe us because we might be dangerous someday soon.” In actuality, I have suggested more than 20 reasons for coming here. Furthermore we are already dangerous. We killed 50 Million of our own kind in WWII. We destroyed 1700 cities. We have exploded 2000 nuclear (there is that word again) warheads. Not dangerous?

Additionally, there certainly were later sightings near the Roswell crash site that might well have been aliens looking for their fallen comrades. I doubt if they worried much about our duplicating their technology. Christopher Columbus could not have duplicated a nuclear submarine or a radio or computer chip. After all we Earthlings have left many of our dead behind. Check out "By Any Means Necessary: America's Secret Air War in the Cold War" by William Burrows. 166 US military men were in planes “tickling” radar sets in North Korea, China, and Russia just after World War II . . . and being shot down. We didn’t go after them (starting WW III) and their families weren’t told about what happened to them until 50 years later in 2001. We didn’t attack Russia when they downed Gary Powers U-2.

Yet Paul asks “How can we be asked to believe that they would let we warlike creatures have their technology? “ Why does he think we would have been able to duplicate it? Has he no concept of how difficult it would be? Moreover, he pontificates as a supposed expert on alien behavior and technology, “if they had the ability to get here from another star system, then they would certainly have had the ability to collect or vaporize the wreckage.” One might note that we earthlings have had the ability with nuclear (that word again) weapons to vaporize all the civilizations. Yet we have exploded 2000 nuclear warheads, but only 2 on people; funny how countries agree not to use poison gas.

Paul also pontificates about keeping secrets, “It beggars belief again that the United States government could have maintained what must be [why?] such a vast conspiracy to this day to keep it all quiet. History tells us that the reason they are kept for a very long time successfully is that they are always confined to only a few people. As soon as they start expanding the circle of knowledge, then the wheels fall off.” Now that is real balderdash! The definition for balderdash is “senseless prate, a jargon of words, noisy nonsense.” Yes, Paul you hit it on the head. There were 12000 people at Bletchley Park in the UK secretly working on intercepting, decoding, translating and carefully distributing German military communications in the early 1940s. Not one word in public until 25 years after the war was over. The Lockheed Stealth aircraft was developed at a cost of $10 Billion over 10 years in secret utilizing thousands of people. At one time the Manhattan Project involved 60,000 people in secret. The National Reconnaissance Organization contracted with Boeing on new spy satellite architecture and then cancelled the program. That involved thousands of people in secret at a cost of $13 Billion. The development of the first successful US spy satellite in the “Corona” program was kept secret for more than 30 years. The first one (after 12 expensive failures), obtained more information about Soviet military installations than all the U-2 spy planes that preceded it. Many more than a few people were involved.

Now let us look at “Stan Friedman’s nuclear rockets balderdash.” It is quite clear that when engineers and scientists want to control large amounts of energy, they go nuclear. When it comes to bombs, a big bomb in WWII released the energy of 10 tons of dynamite in 1944. In July 1945 the first nuclear fission bomb released the energy of 16 thousand tons of dynamite; by 1952 the first nuclear fusion weapon (Mike) released the energy of 10 million tons of TNT. The Russians later set off a fusion (H-Bomb) one releasing the energy of more than 50 million tons of TNT.

The US Navy, admittedly a bit larger than our Canadian navy, built their first NUCLEAR submarine in 1956; able to sail around the planet underwater. Submarines in WWII could stay underwater for all of 24 hours. Years later the first NUCLEAR fission powered aircraft carriers operate for 18 years without refueling. Three different organizations successfully operated NUCLEAR fission rockets at the NUCLEAR test site in Nevada. They were Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory (I worked on their NRX A-6 at a power level of 1100 megawatts); Aerojet General operated the XE-1 at a power level of 1000 megawatts. Los Alamos operated the Phoebus 2B at a power level of 4400 megawatts or twice the power of Grand Coulee Dam, less than 8’ in diameter. There are no fission nuclear reactors in Nova Scotia where Paul lives. We here in the neighboring province of New Brunswick have the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, a fission power- plant producing 2200 megawatts. I and many others worked on studies of fusion rockets able to eject charged particles having ten million times as much energy per particle as in a dumb old chemical rocket. Many papers have been published but I suppose Paul hasn’t seen any.

It should be noted that almost all the energy in the universe comes from nuclear fusion in the stars. Why Paul is in denial about nuclear rockets I don’t know, though I suppose lawyers don’t dig into such matters. I should note that my book “Flying Saucers and Science” has pictures of several real nuclear rocket engines

The real balderdash is that one should theorize for ever about alien activities and motivation, but avoid the facts; however—it is the evidence that matters. Of course there might be advanced propulsion systems that can outdo nuclear fusion. They are not needed to get us out there and certainly not needed to get aliens here. Let us not forget that nearby stars are already within reach, if we want to spend the money. We didn’t even find out that there was such a process as nuclear fusion until 1938—a very short time ago indeed. We now know that there are planets all over the place many of them have to be much older than earth.

Paul may think “nuclear rockets are balderdash” and only small groups can keep secrets. He probably is aware that many nuclear facilities had UFO sightings back in the 1940s. These included reports near Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Hanford Atomic works up in eastern Washington state. Furthermore as delineated by Robert Hastings and Robert Salas, there have been UFO observations where missiles on which were mounted nuclear weapons had been shut down by the aliens. The notion that that only small groups can keep a secret is put to rest by the fact that this year the US black budget is about fifty billion.

Creepy confessions

Deputy Val Johnson is on patrol in the middle of the night.

The Minnesota highway is dark, except for a light that appears to float above the road about a mile away.

Curious, Johnson turns his cruiser toward the object.

Suddenly, impossibly, the light is upon him in a blinding flash.

Brakes slam and just before the deputy blacks out he hears the sound of breaking glass.

Fast forward 27 years to the Briese farm outside of Tappen, N.D.

Sixteen-year-old Evan Briese gets out of bed for a glass of water. Glancing out a window, he spots something moving near the family’s hog pen.

He arms himself with a rifle and goes to investigate.

Stepping into the corral, he’s startled by the sight of beings 8 to 9 feet tall doing something to one of the hogs.

The rifle fires and one of the giants lets out a shriek.

Before the boy can comprehend more, something throws him to the ground and he loses consciousness.

Unsolved mystery

Spooky stuff.

But is it true?

This time of year, when tales of witches, ghosts and things creepy hold sway, what is one to make of first-person accounts of strange and bizarre happenings?

Dennis Brekke has yet to come up with an answer.

Nearly 30 autumns have passed since the retired Marshall County sheriff got a call that one of his deputies needed assistance.

It was Aug. 27, 1979.

Deputy Johnson sent a radio transmission around 2:19 a.m. stating he needed help.

When Brekke got there, Johnson was gone, but his battered police cruiser was not.

“The car was standing crossways in the middle of the road and the ambulance had just taken off with him (Johnson),” said Brekke, who still lives in Warren, Minn.

“I drove that car in that night. It drove OK, but the antennas were bent and there were some holes,” said Brekke, who investigated what became a classic case in UFO lore.

“He said he’d seen a bright light and that’s about the last thing he knew,” Brekke said, referring to Johnson, who later estimated he had been rendered unconscious for about 40 minutes.

“He had welder-type burns in his eyes. That’s what the doctor said,” Brekke recalled.

Missing minutes

Brekke’s report on the incident noted that Johnson routinely set his watch at the start of each shift by calling dispatch for the official time. After the incident, Johnson’s watch and the clock in his car were 14 minutes slow.

A headlight on the driver’s side of the car was smashed and there were small dents in the hood just below where the windshield was fractured, also on the driver’s side.

Two antennas on the car were bent, though they had spring bases to prevent that from happening.

Brekke consulted scientists in Minneapolis who told him whatever struck the car was something very fast.

“Our first thoughts were maybe it could have been somebody with an airplane and drugs,” Brekke said. “We called the Air Force and talked to them. There was nothing they had seen in that area.

“We did everything we could,” Brekke said. “There’s no good answer to what happened.”

The brown 1977 Ford LTD Johnson drove that night was taken out of service shortly after the incident and ended up in the Marshall County Historical Society Museum in Warren.

Now and then, it is dusted off and driven in parades.

Every time UFO stories appear on TV, a new flock of curiosity seekers finds its way to the museum, said curator Ethel Thorlacius.

‘Look at that!’

The museum display includes a testimonial from Evarist and Kathy Ruzicka, a Grafton, N.D., couple who said they saw a bright flash of light the night Johnson said he had a run-in with something unexplainable.

Reached by phone at their home, which is not far from the Stephen, Minn., area where Johnson’s car was found, the Ruzickas vividly recall the incident.

“It was an extremely bright flash. I just kind of yelled, ‘Look at that!’’’ Evarist Ruzicka said, describing the moment he saw something weird in the eastern sky as they were driving home that night.

His wife was a bit sleepy during the ride, but she said her husband’s shout woke her in time to see a blinding burst of light.

Evarist Ruzicka said he suspected an earthly explanation for what they saw – a government experiment, perhaps – but at first he wasn’t keen on telling anyone about the episode.

“I really didn’t want to get involved. At the same time, I hated to see what they were doing to the deputy,” Ruzicka said, referring to grief Johnson took from some people.

The incident left Brekke philosophical.

“We’re sitting here on this planet. It’s possible there could be people in other places,” he said.

Brekke said Johnson left his job not long after the incident, but he isn’t sure where he ended up.

It might be Wisconsin, according to Torrey Briese, a Tappen-area farmer whose family went public last fall with some odd stories of their own. They’ve since become tied into the UFO community.

After they were approached by The Forum, Briese and his wife, Myra, described a number of things they say happened to their family, including a tale about giant beings attacking their son, Evan, and stealing the family’s hog, Ruthy, one night in September 2006.

Peculiar calls

On top of that, Torrey Briese said he experienced a strange episode himself in July 2006.

While giving a neighbor a ride into town, Briese said he saw a strange blue light in the sky that would move when the vehicle moved and stop when the vehicle stopped.

The aerial display continued for about 30 minutes before the object zoomed away and was out of sight within seconds, Briese said.

After the revelations were made public last fall, the family’s story was featured on a nationwide radio show and plastered on countless Internet Web sites.

Torrey Briese, a member of the Tappen School Board, said his family only recently turned their telephone back on after shutting it off for six months.

“We had a lot of peculiar phone calls,” said Briese, who added he knows who Johnson is and has heard the former deputy isn’t interested in talking to the media anymore.

Briese said he wasn’t sure he should be talking either, not after the reaction they got from some people last fall.

‘A serious matter’

He believes his son experienced something that can’t be explained and the family still has the shredded shirt Evan Briese was wearing the night he said he was assaulted by beings that did not look human.

“Whatever it was, was some kind of physical presence, because it took that animal,” Torrey Briese said, referring to Ruthy the hog, who has not been seen since.

“People don’t realize this was a serious matter and it still is,” Myra Briese said.

“I think the big thing our family learned is don’t be quick to judge others.”

She said they don’t laugh at people who approach the family with strange stories, some of which, she said, come from others in the Tappen area.

Another thing they don’t do, Myra Briese said, is spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders for strange lights or things that go bump in the night.

“We just do our everyday thing. We’re not into looking for them all the time,” she said.

---

Readers can reach Forum reporter Dave Olson at (701) 241-5555

Tags: news

’68 UFO run-in at ND air base still unresolved

A routine bomber flight in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 24, 1968, turned unforgettable for navigator Patrick McCaslin.

McCaslin and his B-52 crewmates were practicing maneuvers in the skies above Minot, N.D., when officials at the nearby Air Force base radioed a request.

“The tower called and said, ‘Could you guys keep your eyes open for anything unusual?’ ’’ said McCaslin, recalling that flight four decades ago.

“We asked, ‘What are we looking for?’

“They said, ‘You’ll know it if you see it,’ ’’ McCaslin said.

“This is a dim memory,” he added, “but I think one of the pilots said, ‘Are the missile crews seeing things again?’ ’’

McCaslin’s first move was to focus the plane’s radar into a narrow, high-intensity beam.

“I saw a (radar) return off to our right; it was faint on the first sweep and then it was very strong on the next sweep,” he said.

When McCaslin informed the pilots about the contact, they replied they couldn’t see anything because of cloud cover, but asked him to keep them apprised of what the object did.

What it did, McCaslin said, was move faster than anything he had ever clocked on radar.

“From one sweep (of the radar) to the next, it came from three miles to one mile,” he said. “Later, we computed the closure speed at 3,000 miles an hour.”

From there, it only got stranger.

“It blew my mind that this thing had closed on us this quickly,” said McCaslin, who recalled that as he advised the pilots of what the object was doing, the bomber lost radio contact with the tower.

“We could hear them, but they couldn’t hear us,” he said.

A short while later, the object dropped from the plane’s radar.

Officials in the tower also watched the blip disappear from radar and asked the bomber to fly lower in an attempt to regain contact.

As the plane approached the spot where radar contact was lost, the crew finally saw something.

“The pilots indicated they could see it visually, just hovering above the ground,” McCaslin recalled.

“They said to me, ‘Why don’t you unstrap and come up and take a look at this thing?’ ” said McCaslin, who decided to stick close to his ejection seat.

“I didn’t know what this thing was.”

Shortly after the pilot and co-pilot began observing the mysterious, glowing object, it rose quickly into the sky and disappeared.

Long witness list

While the bomber crew members were making their observations, workers on the ground were seeing something similar and reacting to alarms going off at one of the Minuteman missile silos near the Minot air base, said Bill McNeff, who heard parts of the story firsthand from a brother-in-law who worked as a security guard at the air base in 1968.

McNeff, a retired electrical engineer living in the Twin Cities and a former director of the Minnesota chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, said the Minot incident was one of the things that inspired him to pursue decades of research into UFO phenomenon.

His quest led him in the 1980s to the National Archives in Washington, where he poured over the files of Project Blue Book, the official U.S. Air Force inquiry into reports of unidentified flying objects in the 1950s and ’60s.

“There were incidents (during the Minot episode) that did not make it into the Blue Book files,” said McNeff, who added the official record doesn’t reflect that two airmen passed out after a close approach from the UFO.

He said a report that the lid of a missile silo was tampered with was also left out.

“What I learned later is that the lid was completely off the silo and lying on the grass,” McNeff said.

‘Patternicity’

McNeff said the Minot case ranks among the most intriguing of all UFO sightings because of the number of witnesses and its proximity to a heavily guarded nuclear installation.

Those factors don’t impress Michael Schermer.

Schermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and founder of the Skeptics Society, shakes his head at any suggestion UFOs are anything more than earthly events that have yet to be explained.

“What the public has done is equate ‘UFO’ with ‘extraterrestrial spaceship,’ but to date we don’t have a shred of evidence that any of the sightings represent extraterrestrial,” Schermer said.

He said the Minot case, with its radar contact indicating an object that moved extremely fast, is interesting, but proves nothing.

“How do you know it just wasn’t one branch of the military not telling the other branch of the military what they’re doing? That happens all the time.” Schermer has coined a term for why some equate UFOs with visits from outer space.

“I call it patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise,” he said.

“Basically, our brains are wired to always find an explanation even if there isn’t one,” he said. “In other words, we have a low tolerance for ambiguity.”

Vega schmayga

McCaslin, who eventually became a pilot and later a high school science teacher in Texas, where he still lives, doesn’t know if what showed up on his radar that night 40 years ago came from outer space or inner space.

But he said one of the explanations the Air Force came up with – that his bomber crew was looking at a star called Vega – is hogwash.

Well, he actually used a stronger noun.

And his irritation with the official story is still evident after four decades.

“My business was to navigate with several means, the star Vega for one,” he said. “This thing was at or near the ground. How could it be a star if you’re looking at the ground?”

When TV specials air interviews with McCaslin, his neighbors will approach him and ask if he believes in UFOs.

“I’ll tell you what I tell them. I believe what I saw that night. I’m not ready to accept all the things that you see out there – about alien abduction and all that – because I didn’t have that experience.

“It would be a leap in logic to say it came from outer space,” McCaslin said.

“It could have come from inner space,” he said. “It could have come from anywhere.”

Scientist says some UFO reports worth pondering

Stories about a B-52 bomber’s encounter with an unidentified flying object in North Dakota in October 1968 pop up on many Web sites.

In one posting, Twin Cities-based UFO researcher Bill McNeff relates what co-pilot Brad Runyon reported seeing in the early morning hours on that day 40 years ago.

Runyon described an object more than 200 feet in diameter and hundreds of feet long.

He said the object had a metallic cylinder attached to one end, with a crescent moon-shaped section glowing yellow-green connected to the cylinder.

Many scientists dismiss UFO sightings as unremarkable.

Many, but not all.

“My perspective is there’s certainly something going on. I don’t know what it is,” said Bernard Haisch, an astrophysicist and author of more than 130 scientific publications.

Haisch believes the UFO question deserves to be pondered by the scientific community, even if 99 percent of reports are explainable or hoaxed.

“There’s still a huge amount of data that is potentially useful,” said Haisch, who operates a Web site called ufoskeptic.org.

He defines “skeptic” as someone wary of extraordinary explanations for perplexing mysteries who is also willing to look at data.

With the rise of string theory – which allows for the possibility of multiple universes – Haisch finds it odd that physicists are usually the first to scoff at the idea of visitors from other worlds.

“It’s kind of a strange situation,” he said.

Thomas McDonough, senior scientist with a group called The Skeptics Society, grew up believing in the paranormal, but gradually became a doubter.

“There are so many ways people can be fooled,” said McDonough, who like Haisch is from California and has a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

Absent tangible evidence, McDonough said he has concluded that the Earth is not being visited by aliens.

However, he’s keeping the door open to possibilities.

“Every now and then in science, someone comes along with a weird story that leads to something new.

“But most times,” he said, “the weird stories lead to something mundane.”

Readers can reach Forum reporter Dave Olson at (701) 241-5555

Tags: daily updates, news

Army Colonel Reveals Amazing Skinwalker Ranch Stories | VIDEO

      Retired Army Colonel John Alexander was part of a group researchers and scientists who investigated reports of cattle mutilations and other strange occurrence at Skinwalker Ranch. The ranch is located southeast of Ballard, Utah, and was previously known as the Sherman Ranch. For years stories of cattle mutilations, sightings of UFOs, orbs and bigfoot, among other paranormal events, have been reported on the ranch. . . .