The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
01-10-2017
The UFO Enigma: What Can Be Said About Anecdotal Evidence?
The UFO Enigma: What Can Be Said About Anecdotal Evidence?
What is the reality — if any exists at all — behind the UFO phenomenon?
This question has been asked for decades already, and still we collectively don’t seem to have any real answers that help instruct us as to whatever “reality” may constitute serious, tangible data on UFOs.
Way back in 1955, Edward Ruppelt, the first director of the USAF’s Project Bluebook, wrote that, “I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years there will be a proven answer.”
I often wonder if Ruppelt would ever have foreseen that well after the turn of the next century, we would still be awaiting that final “proven answer” that he anticipated.
At the very least, we might say that, based on what anecdotal evidence has been collected in UFO witness testimony since the end of World War II,there appear to have been varieties of unusual aircraft seen in our skies for decades now. Their origin, however, remains a matter of conjecture, due to the lack of physical evidence to support the range of theories that have been proposed in this regard.
Hence, with little more than decades of witness testimony, and the occasional (though scant) physical evidence that turns up rarely, perhaps one of the most important questions that should be asked is, “how useful is the anecdotal evidence at our disposal?”
At this point, it would seem appropriate that I give a disclaimer: what follows in this article is intended for readers that are still perplexed by the subject of UFOs, as I am, and are willing to ask serious, sober, and scientifically-informed questions about it. The points addressed will likely be of disdain to the willful believers that are already “certain” (in their minds, at least) of an extraterrestrial reality, and of space brothers who came here long ago to instruct humankind, or perhaps even save us from our own destructive potentials. In equal measure, dogmatic skeptics may be similarly discouraged from bothering with reading further; particularly those who have convinced themselves that nothing exists behind any UFO reports whatsoever (even those which seem indicative of clandestine, experimental manmade aircraft… which constitutes a perfectly reasonable potential solution to at least some alleged UFO reports).
For those willing to continue in the spirit of open-minded, but discerning skepticism, we must return again to the question of anecdotal data: what does it really tell us about the UFO enigma?
While unable to provide physical evidence that can be tested under laboratory settings, the point is frequently argued that anecdotal evidence, particularly gathered from multiple sources, is often what must be relied upon in a courtroom; especially in cases where physical evidence is lacking. I realize fully that this argument does little to sway the minds of skeptical scientists, who demand (and rightly so!) physical proof before they can commit to belief. However, the point to be made is that in the face of numerous instances where testimonies given by individuals seem to match, or are otherwise relatable in some way, perhaps some anecdotal data should be given consideration, as it is presently all that we have to work with.
Recently, a pairing of questions were posted at the Paracast Forums, where one of the users, operating under the amusing moniker of “Greer’s Event Planner,” raised several points of contention about UFOs in modern times. Among these had been the following:
“As a total body of evidence there is nothing that would pass scientific muster and there are no reliable multiple witness cases that prove the aliens in physical ships hypothesis.”
The thread had been partly in response to a recent appearance on The Paracast’s subscriber show by researcher Paul Kimball (also a friend and colleague of mine), who similarly offered that, “There may be a paranormal / supernatural component to it all, but I don’t see anything that even remotely indicates structured craft from an extraterrestrial source.”
Indeed, while we have a plethora of UFO reports that have piled up over the decades, some of which lend descriptions of strange beings or other phenomena, where has there been any hard evidence of extraterrestrial visitors?
This raises a common, but important misconception about the broader UFO phenomenon: that if proof of unidentified flying objects were obtained, it would therefore mean that proof of aliens exists.
Not so.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) has long been a favorite among UFO theorists, but it is by no means a consensus view among UFO advocates. The UFO phenomenon remains far too ambiguous and varied to be able to present a good case for any conclusive origin. If anything, it could be argued that early interpretations of UFOs as being evidence of extraterrestrial visitors probably relied heavily on the influences of science fiction books and films on our culture (both in America, and abroad). Also influential were our expectations about space travel in the coming decades, and our own projections for how space travelers from elsewhere might get here, from the perspective of a civilization only on the cusp of going off-planet ourselves.
Old ideas die hard, of course, and this seems to be the case with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. While it seems evident that a variety of expectations (and misconceptions) were likely informing our bias toward “alien” visitors, that meme has stuck throughout the ages… and still today, many see the concepts of “UFOs” and “aliens” as being indistinguishable.
Perhaps they should never really have become bedmates in the first place.
Returning again to what the anecdotal evidence says, we are faced with myriad problems. For one, there is the issue of the apparent variety of UFO craft reported over the years. While there are some general themes which have emerged consistently — “flying saucers” are probably the most well known of these — the actual variety of UFO craft reported since the end of WWII far exceeds anything that could be expected of a single, systematic survey of Earth by intelligent extraterrestrials. Varieties of craft include discs or saucers, globes, triangles, cigars or torpedo-shaped craft, and other strangely shaped aerial objects.
Granted, the term “daylight discs”, first used by astronomer J. Allen Hynek as a general classification system, didn’t necessarily mean that all such objects were truly “discs.” According to Hynek’s reasoning, this was merely to be used as a general classification system; however, a variety of objects, possessing various shapes, were placed in this category. Hence, many of the “discs”, at least in terms of statistics, actually weren’t discs at all.
Among the myriad types of UFOs that have remained present over the years, there is one type that, in the opinion of this writer, does appear to maintain a particular presence, and consistency, which sets it apart from other UFO category types. These are the so-called “Black Triangles,” which are large, ominous (and often very quiet) aircraft seen passing at relatively low altitudes by cover of night.
Even the Federation of American Scientists have looked into the possible relationship between reports of these aircraft, and possible black project programs, as outlined in the following quote from the FAS website:
“A very intriguing aircraft was been reported in the late 1980s. Some observers claim to have witnessed a vast black flying wing, estimated at between 600 and 800 feet in width, passing silently over city streets in California. The craft moved so slowly one observer claimed that he could jog along with it. The aircraft reportedly executed bizarre maneuvers in which it stopped, rotated in place and hovered vertically, pointing its thin trailing edge toward the ground. This vehicle’s unlikely gyrations suggest that it is distinct from the other sightings, and could be a lighter-than-air craft pushed by slow- turning propellers.”
On a personal note (and in keeping with our discussion about the relevance of anecdotal witness reports), I’ve collected several reports of aircraft like this over the years, which I deem to have been from reliable sources. Among my favorites is the following description, provided to me by a Canadian witness just a few years ago:
“We had noticed a very bright light on the eastern horizon but didn’t take much notice of it until we realized that it was slowly coming directly towards us. We kept checking in that direction and watched as the now amber light kept coming straight at us. When it was almost on top of us it was like we became frozen to the spot staring at this light that we could now see had a dark shape behind it.
The triangle flew directly over us. I estimate that it was about 75 – 100 ft. off the ground. I made this estimate because at one point I realized that it was so low I was concerned that it was going to hit the chimney on our 2 1/2 story house! We sat transfixed as it seemed to take the triangle forever to pass overhead due to the extremely slow speed that it was travelling at. I would estimate it was going no more than 10 mph. As it was about halfway over I realized that the triangle was so massive that it filled my entire field of vision. We couldn’t make out any detail of the underneath of the triangle; it was just an enormous black shape lit on each corner by an amber light. I really can’t think of anything to compare the size of the triangle to it was so huge.”
Unlike a lot of UFO reports collected since the beginning of the 1950s, the more recent reports of these “triangles” bear an almost peculiar consistency… enough so that, as the FAS seemed to think by virtue of their analysis of some of the triangle reports, these probably should not be lumped in alongside other typical UFO reports from the last few decades. In likelihood, the triangles are probably a top secret aircraft of some variety, and whether DARPA or some other agency was behind its development, it is the opinion of this writer that this craft is seen often enough, and described consistently enough by witnesses, that it warrants particular attention among those who pay attention to reports of un unusual aircraft in our skies. In other words, here the anecdotal evidence seems to support the idea that there have been a number of legitimate sightings of some variety of aircraft operating in our night skies.
To conclude, we return again to a quote from Edward Ruppelt in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, where he said, “Maybe the final proven answer will be that all of the UFO’s that have been reported are merely misidentified known objects. Or maybe the many pilots, radar specialists, generals, industrialists, scientists, and the man on the street who have told me, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen it myself,’ knew what they were talking about. Maybe the earth is being visited by interplanetary spaceships. Only time will tell.”
Although time has yet to give up the secrets Ruppelt had been looking for, it is with hope that our persistence, and a bit of logic, may yet unravel a few secrets about our world, and the types of things many have reported seeing in our skies for many decades.
Phillip Schofield stunned by UFO evidence on This Morning
They were not able to determine whether it was not of this planet
This Morning guest
“Their car started to vibrate and they heard a series of buzzing sounds in the car and suddenly they found themselves in a new location down the road,” Cathleen explained.
“They drove to their home and found evidence that something odd had happened to them.”
Cathleen claimed Betty’s dress had been torn in multiple places while “fighting for her life”, and was covered in a mysterious pink powder.
ITV
Cathleen claimed Betty's dress provided evidence of alien lifeforms on This Morning
ITV
Betty and Barney said they were abducted by aliens
However, while skeptics could easily question Cathleen, she showed viewers a photograph of the shredded garment.
“[The dress] has been analysed in five scientific labs to date and the finding is anomalous,” she stressed. “They know [the powder] didn't belong to Betty, it was where the non-human entities touched the dress.”
Cathleen added: “They were not able to determine whether it was not of this planet.”
ITV
Cathleen stunned Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield on This Morning
Viewers were amazed by Cathleen’s story, with one posting: “Wow an amazing story - wish they had a longer segment though and she wasn't interrupted constantly!”
Another admitted: “Normally I’m the first to call BS on a alien story, but this woman actually has me hooked.”
Norris awakens and senses the presence of some kind of being nearby. It reaches out and touches his forehead. He finds himself floating up to the ceiling. He is no longer in his room and can see stars through the porthole-like windows in what he realizes is an alien spaceship. A small crowd of grey humanoid creatures closes in around the operating table he is lyingon, and he sees that they are holding sharp and shiny implements. He begins to scream, and struggles but can’t avoid the sleek metal snake they slide up his nose. The pain is unbearable and the creatures continue to do unspeakable things to him. It seems to go on forever. Eventually Norris awakens in bed, feeling shaken and uncertain of what has just happened. He has a feeling that he has been given telepathic instructions to forget the events that he had just experienced. Over the next days and weeks, the memories of this experience enter his awareness and create anxiety and feelings of panic. The first time this happens Norris is twelve years old, and it is October. For years he has a similar experience every year in the fall.
While there are many variations on alien abduction reports, most occur at night after the abductee has fallen asleep (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014). The core features of the alien abduction experience include being captured and taken to an alien craft where the abductee is subjected to an examination that may be physical, sexual, or even spiritual in nature. The abductee may also be given a tour of the craft or be taken on a journey to another realm. They may also be given telepathic messages, then returned to earth. These abduction experiences often leave troubling aftereffects that are physical and/or psychological in nature (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014).
It is difficult to determine how many people have had these experiences. According to surveys cited by Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris (2014), 36% of the population of the United States believes that unidentified flying objects are actually alien spacecraft. Another survey found that 3.7 million Americans have had some form of abduction experience but the survey items allowed for the inclusion of experiences such as sleep paralysis that may not have been intended by the survey participants to be considered actual abduction experiences. One figure that has been cited is that about 2.5% of the people in the United States believe that they have been abducted by space aliens.
While many abduction experiences are reported as having happened after the individual went to bed, others have been reported as having occurred in various circumstances such as while the person was hiking in a forested area or was driving home late at a night. It is hard to pinpoint the very first alien abduction report, but an often-cited one is that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple who were involved in the civil rights movement. It is a familiar story to those who have studied the alien abduction phenomenon. This event occurred during the early sixties (September 19, 1961) as the couple was driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire late at night. During their trip they had observed what appeared to be a bright object following them and when they got home felt that something very bad had happened to them. They also felt that they were missing several hours of time from the trip. Of note, this event occurred to them while they were likely under a great deal of psychosocial stress, were most likely sleepdeprived, while on a trip through an isolated part of the country, and at a time of heightened tension and fascination with the accelerating destructive power of our weapons during the Cold War.
The couple gradually began to remember details that occurred during their missing hours and Betty started having nightmares. Two years after the event they consulted a psychiatrist and underwent hypnosis. Under hypnosis they were able to recall being taking aboard a flying saucer by grey aliens and subjected to probing with needles. The events described are truly chilling. Apparently Barney was very disturbed and frightened by the recollection but Betty gradually began to share the story and give talks on it. A book about their experiences was published in 1966 followed by a TV movie about their abduction that was aired in 1975. Following this movie, reports of alien abduction rapidly increased.
Reports of unidentified flying objects may go back as far as the Bible (e.g. Ezekiel, chapter 1), depending on how you interpret ancient reports. But reports of these objects being interpreted as alien space craft really only began in the 1940s. In the 1950s contact with aliens became a staple of early Cold War science fiction cinema. One of my favorites was “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951). In this movie, the earth is visited by a powerful alien and threatened with annihilation unless humans put aside their weapons of mass destruction, as alien peoples feared these weapons would come to endanger life everywhere in the universe.
Anyone who has heard president Eisenhower’s final report to the country as he was finishing his presidency in 1961 heard him use the frightening term “military industrial complex”. A short time after his speech, the Cuban missile crisis occurred and those times, like ours today, were tense and uncertain. Add in the stress of being involved with the highly charged and challenging efforts to promote civil rights and it isn’t hard to imagine that Barney and Betty were under significant stress, although they apparently didn’t believe this was a factor in their experience. It was, however, in that context that reports of individual alien abductions began to emerge.
While I can’t verify this, my first memory of being aware of UFOs as alien craft occurred around the mid-1960s. I believe I was watching “Astro Boy”, an early example of anime that was broadcast from Washington D.C and aired on a channel we were able to pick up in a small town in Virginia. The program recounted the first appearance of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) during World War II. These were observed by pilots on bombing missions and were known as bogeys. A few years later “The Invaders” (1967 – 1968) aired and took paranoia to a whole new level. During the Viet Nam and Cold Wars, this kind of programming fit right in.
My first opportunity to meet actual abductees occurred in the early 1990s when I attended a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) convention with a relative who was, at that time, deeply involved in the UFO research world. Interestingly, there were people there who were very angry that their reports were not being taken seriously and that the government was doing nothing to help them. At that time, the book “Communion”, by Whitley Strieber was extremely popular and a central text in the abduction movement. In it Strieber described his own abduction experience. A major researcher and popularizer of alien abduction experiences was John Mack, a psychiatrist at Harvard, who extensively used hypnosis to recover memories of abduction experiences from patients. His credentials helped legitimize the belief in these events, even if his research methods were questioned. (Here is a link to a transcript of a fascinating interview with him on NOVA from the 1990s.) In the 1980s and 1990s, increasing numbers of people reported experiences of alien abduction and these accounts were incorporated into cinematic depictions of alien encounters.
There have been many movie depictions of alien abductions over the years. The above mentioned 1975 made for TV movie was an early example of this. It was followed by many others including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Fire in the Sky” (1993), and “The Fourth Kind” (2014). “Close Encounters” popularized the scale, developed by Allen Hynek in the early 1970s, that listed the various levels of increasing theoretical contact that we could have with aliens. A close encounter of the first kind involves seeing an alien craft in close proximity. An encounter of the second kind leaves some trace such as people being placed in a trance or burn marks being left on the ground by alien technology. An encounter of the third kind involves actual contact with an alien being. Additions have subsequently been made to the scale beyond these three. For example, the fourth kind is alien abduction.
“Close Encounters” had the 1970s New Age feeling of beneficent aliens that could help humans develop to a higher level. “Fire in the Sky”, based on the reported 1975 abduction of Travis Walton, while not a perfect movie, gives one of the most harrowing and “realistic” depictions of a terrifying and overwhelming medical examination that would almost certainly leave the victim with a severe case of PTSD. “The Fourth Kind” despite its flaws was interesting in that it seemed to conflate two of our greatest fears – abduction by aliens and the demonic.
I will state at this point that while I tend to find the falsifiability and Occam’s Razor positions (discussed in the previous post) to be powerful arguments against the objective reality of these events, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that abduction reports are accurate descriptions of actual events involving aliens. Clearly intelligent people like Strieber and Mack have found evidence that they find compelling enough to argue that these are not simply psychological phenomena. Before considering possible explanations for these experiences I want to address a number of other factors that might impact on how we interpret these reports.
The first thing that I want to make clear is that people who report these experiences are not psychotic and most are not simply advancing a hoax. In fact, going public with these reports can have a negative effect on your standing in most communities. There are, of course, communities of people, often with “New Age” beliefs, who accept these experiences as being objectively real and are supportive of each other, but this is not the typical social environment of most people today. There is risk in sharing one’s abduction story. Second, studies that have been done of the aftereffects of these events report injuries such as cuts and puncture wounds, vision problems such as sensitivity to light and pupil dilation, skin burns, stomach distress such as nausea and diarrhea, balance problems, and dehydration (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014). People have also reported being healed of illnesses and experiencing weight loss. There are a number of frequently reported psychological effects including anxiety and nightmares. Interestingly, despite the often negative aftereffects, most abductees report that they would still choose to have been abducted. This is because many abductees come to see these events as having added meaning and purpose to their lives and they may also feel that they have undergone positive personality changes as a result.
The universe is a very large place, little explored directly by humans, and may be only one aspect of a vastly greater, indeed infinite, multiverse (Green, 2011). We have been systematically observing the universe for the past few thousand years, and only during the last 400 years have we had tools such as the telescope to see much beyond the nearest planets and stars. Since the 1990s vast numbers of planets have been observed around other stars. I think that even with the progress that humans have made, we need to be humble about what we say concerning what exists in the vast expanses of space-time.
The lack of obvious alien visitation, say with a landing by an alien space ship on the White House lawn, has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox after the physicist Enrico Fermi who asked, “Where are the aliens?” He reasoned that there must be many planets in the galaxy that could support alien life, and noted that even at sub-light speeds, over millions of years it would be possible for an advanced civilization to spread throughout the Milky Way. Some of the explanations for why we haven’t met them in an obvious way include: we are the only advanced civilization in the galaxy, other advanced civilizations have wiped themselves out with their own technologies, or they exist but have chosen to not make contact. Of course, for alien abductees, these ideas are absurd because, for them, the reality of alien contact is clear. There is no lack of evidence - they have experienced it themselves.
Other scientists have tried to imagine what far advanced civilizations could potentially do after a long period of exponentially advancing growth in science and technology. The Kardashev Scale was an effort by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev to use a theoretical scale of energy usage to measure the development of advanced societies. A type 1 civilization would have the ability to use all of the energy and control the events on an entire planet. A type 2 civilization would be able to use the energy resources of an entire solar system. A type 3 civilization would be able to use the output of an entire galaxy. Even more advanced civilizations have been proposed. On this scale, we on earth have not yet reached a type 1 civilization.
If intelligent entities could reach the levels of types 2 and 3, it is easy to see that they could be virtually beyond comprehension to us with our relatively crude technological means. I believe it was the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku who once used the analogy of the ant and the superhighway. If there were a truly advanced civilization capable of spanning the vast distances of the cosmos, then, to us, their activities might be indistinguishable from the workings of nature itself. Consider the ant walking along the edge of a superhighway. It only sees hills and valleys with occasional rocks here and there. It would, we assume, have no comprehension that the thing it was walking on was built by other creatures who possess a type of technology far advanced beyond the tunnels and rooms in the earth it can construct.
How would such advanced alien entities go about contacting us? Would they use things we can recognize such as space ships or medical instruments that we could have fabricated in the 20th Century? More abstract depictions of contact with alien beings have been presented in works such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “Contact” (1997), and “Interstellar” (2011). These show aliens (or possibly our future selves in the case of Interstellar) as vastly more advanced than those using the kind of space ships usually reported in typical alien abduction accounts. On the other hand, these movies also suggest that the aliens might use familiar-seeming props to help us gain some understanding of them. So perhaps, these typically reported space ships and medical instruments are meant to facilitate communication between us and an otherwise incomprehensible intelligence.
At the other end of the scale, according to the rare earth hypothesis, it seems that life of a simple nature may be very common in the universe, while more complex forms may be less so, and intelligence may be very rare indeed, perhaps having happened only once so far. In this case movies such as “Andromeda Strain” (1971), “Alien” (1979), and “The Thing” (1982) might be closer to what would be expected for first contact. In the case of aliens of these kinds, panspermia would be the most likely means of contact. Panspermia is the idea that simple forms of life could spread slowly and accidentally throughout space by being attached to asteroids and comets and would introduce the new life forms to the planets they happen upon. It could also include the deliberate release into space of “instructions” carried on tiny craft or existing objects like asteroids in the form of genetic information that could then assemble more complex life forms once it had reached a hospitable environment.
We have now explored the nature of the alien abduction experience and considered some possible factors relating to the probability that they represent actual contact with alien entities. In the next post I will delve deeper into the possible explanations for them, including sleep phenomena.
Appelle, S., Lynn, S.J., Neuman, L., & Malaktaris, A. (2014). Alien abduction experiences, in Cardena, E, Lynn, S.J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2014). Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Greene, B. (2011). The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Vintage Books.
MYSTERIOUS PLANET EJECTED FROM BLACK HOLE AT CENTER OF GALAXY COULD SOON IMPACT EARTH
MYSTERIOUS PLANET EJECTED FROM BLACK HOLE AT CENTER OF GALAXY COULD SOON IMPACT EARTH
A literally mind-bending new 737 page report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by Aerospace Defence Forces (ADF) scientists states that this past January’s confirmation by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 2005 discovery of a new planet in our solar system has been confirmed.
What is in the center of the Milky Way? For many years, astronomers suspected that there was a black hole in the center of our galaxy, but they were not sure. Only recently, after 15 years of regularly monitoring the Galactic Center with ESO telescopes, at the La Silla and Paranal Observatories, have scientists finally obtained conclusive evidence. The density of stars at the center of the Milky Way is so high that special techniques such as the Adaptive Optics were needed to increase the resolution of the VLT.
Astronomers were able to observe individual stars with unprecedented accuracy as they revolved around the Galactic Center. Their trajectories have conclusively shown that they must be subject to the immense gravitational pull of a black hole with a mass that is almost three million times the mass of the Sun. The observations of the VLT also revealed flashes of infrared radiation emerging from region at regular intervals. Although the exact cause of this phenomenon is still unknown, observers have suggested that the black hole may be spinning fast. Whatever is happening, the life of a black hole is not calm or quiet.
UNKNOWN OBJECT RECORDED IN THE SKY OVER SAN DIEGO, SEPTEMBER 28, 2017
UNKNOWN OBJECT RECORDED IN THE SKY OVER SAN DIEGO, SEPTEMBER 28, 2017
Several witnesses in Sand Diego have seen these lights in the sky above San Diego.
Are there six objects or a large one? The lights don't move down. Skydivers, Chinese lanterns or flares can be excluded. Are there any more witnesses? What's your opinion?
(Natural News) An upcoming interview to be published next week on Natural News features Dr. Steven Greer in a face-to-face interview with Mike Adams (the Health Ranger). Dr. Greer is an emergency room physician who has spent decades researching UFO phenomena. His new film, “Unacknowledged,” is currently one of the most popular feature documentaries on Netflix (see link and trailer below). Mike Adams is the founder and lab science director of CWC Labs, a mass spec analytical laboratory specializing in heavy metals and chemical analysis of food and environmental samples.
What’s interesting about this interview is that both Dr. Greer and Mike Adams are trained in the sciences, yet both recognize the deep layers of deception used by powerful, covert groups to deceive and manipulate humankind. This rare interview delves into UFO myths vs. truths, social engineering and the “grand false flag” that may subject all of humanity to a faked alien invasion as a means of finalizing a totalitarian world government.
In effect, Dr. Greer is warning humanity about the most massive false flag operation in the history of the world. If he’s right, we are all about to be subjected to an unprecedented psychological warfare operation rooted in fear and deception in order to achieve world government and the outright elimination of individual liberties and national sovereignty.
The full interview, lasting about 45 minutes, is being published next week on NaturalNews.com.
See Dr. Greer’s site at SiriusDisclosure.com, then watch and share the trailer below:
Have you seen a UFO streaking across the sky far faster than any normal jet is capable of? Heard mysterious booms that no one can explain and government officials refuse to acknowledge? Congratulations! You may be one of the first civilians to have witnessed or experienced the long-rumored SR-72 ‘Son of Blackbird’ spy plane which has been expected for years as the replacement for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird which spied on the Soviet Union, North Korea and North Vietnam and was feared and respected by MiG-25 pilots who could never outpace, out-climb or out-maneuver them.
Lockheed Martin
Aerospace Daily & Defense Report has confirmed sightings of an SR-72 demonstrator or prototype accompanied by two T-38 jets in late July landing at the U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, home of the infamous Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs division. At the SAE International Aerotech Congress and Exhibition in Ft. Worth, Texas, this week, Orlando Carvalho, executive vice president of aeronautics at Lockheed Martin, would not discuss the SR-72 specifically, but had this to say about what its capabilities might be:
“Hypersonics is like stealth. It is a disruptive technology and will enable various platforms to operate at two to three times the speed of the Blackbird. Operational survivability and lethality is the ultimate deterrent. Security classification guidance will only allow us to say the speed is greater than Mach 5.”
That means at least Mach 6 or at least 3,800 mph (6,126 km/h) and probably faster for a very big reason … it’s designed to fly both piloted and unmanned. The manned X-15 reached Mach 6.72, setting the acknowledged speed record in 1959, but the Cold War and heightened security has likely kept the U.S. military from revealing the true speed of subsequent jets.
X-15
NASA’s unmanned X-43 scramjet reached Mach 9.6 (7,310 mph – 11,850 km/h) in 2004 but the program was suspended shortly afterwards. Boeing’s X-51 Waverider unmanned “research” scramjet hit Mach 5 in 2013.
“Simply put, I believe the United States is on the verge of a hypersonics revolution.”
Carvalho dropped this big hint that the SR-72 will (or has already) delivered more than its predecessors. Rob Weiss, executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs said in June that development of an SR-72 precursor flight research vehicle (FRV) was proceeding on schedule. Then in July, the SR-72 unmanned subscale prototype was seen landing at the Skunk Works. Aerospace Daily & Defense Report says Lockheed Martin has had no comment on that sighting.
Why not?
“Speed matters, especially when it comes to national security.”
Carvalho gives the obvious answer — national security. No air force or jet contractor has publicly acknowledged the successful development of a propulsion system that combines a jet turbine with a ramjet, allowing the aircraft to take off from a conventional runway rather than being dropped at high altitude from another plane. Is Lockheed covering up the possibility that the craft which landed at the Skunk Works is already there? Unfortunately, no one saw it take off (or is willing or brave enough to admit it).
Lockheed Martin
However, plenty of people in the U.S. and England are hearing mysterious and unexplained booms and seeing impossibly fast UFOs. Are they seeing an SR-72? Has another developer beat Lockheed to the hypersonic punch? Do you actually expect an answer?
Keep watching the skies and have your smartphone ready.
GABRIELLE BELLOT ON LITERARY STARGAZING AND RECKONING WITH THE INFINITE
Just before the summer of 1835 could come to an end, The New York Sun announced that the astronomer John Herschel had found life on the moon. In the previous century, Herschel’s father William, another famed astronomer who had discovered Uranus and suggested the universe was inconceivably vast, had famously, if somewhat playfully, proposed not only that our lunar satellite might contain life, but that the sun, which he believed was hollow, contained beings inside it; now, the newspaper article proclaimed, the son had proved one of the father’s extraordinary theories by observing a veritable menagerie of wondrous creatures through an unprecedentedly powerful telescope in South Africa.
For days the paper increased its circulation and generated a mixture of hysteria and bemusement from the general public as it described the moon’s putative personages in increasingly explicit detail through a six-part series: blood-red poppies, blue unicorns, amphibious blobs that rolled precipitously across pebbly beaches, and, most shockingly, simians with batlike wings (“Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat”). The moon, it appeared, not only hosted life; its life was positively, bombastically thriving in an extraterrestrial Eden.
It was all an elaborate hoax. The story, which was published under Herschel’s name and intended to satirize absurdly specific claims about the universe (most notably those of Scottish reverend Thomas Dick), was ludic and lucrative science-fiction, and it would be just over a century before a piece of sci-fi caused such a mass uproar again, with Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio rendition of The War of the Worlds on Halloween night (which engendered both hysteria and heart failure in those listeners who thought it a real broadcast about Martian invasion.)
By the time it was revealed as a hoax, however, an American minister had already readied crates filled with Bibles to be shipped up to the moon to convert the extraterrestrial heathens, and a rankled Edgar Allan Poe claimed that the sensationalist newspaper had simply plagiarized one of his own short stories about a voyage to the moon, “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” published just before the Sun’s series. Herschel placidly dismissed the articles as “incoherent ravings,” but his wife Margaret was amused by the “clever” fraud. “It is only a pity that is not true,” she sighed to William Herschel’s sister, Caroline, herself renowned for discovering new nebulae and comets.
The idea that life might exist elsewhere in our universe has a long history, and from our discovery of the first exoplanet—a planet outside our solar system—in 1995 to today, that notion remains scientifically intriguing, if unresolved. But before scientists observed exoplanets, many writers and philosophers turned to our solar system’s own humble retinue for speculations—and, sometimes, explicit assertions—about life beyond Earth. These musings and, in the case of the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, entire spiritual travel guides to other planets, helped shape a particular literary genre: the “plurality of worlds” or “cosmic pluralism” debate, which was intimately connected to certain forms of what we would later call science-fiction. (Sci-fi has a lengthy history; these texts are both ancestors and oft-unacknowledged elders of the genre.) Those who believed in a plurality of worlds claimed that other planets, if not an infinity of undiscovered “worlds,” were inhabited. This little genre, ergo, had large aims: no less than to explain whether life on Earth was unique, the answer to which held profound theological and philosophical implications. Are we special? the debate asked. And can we really handle it, if we aren’t?
In 2017, near the anniversary of when the astronomer Shannon Lucid returned to Earth in 1996 and took the title of most hours in orbit for a woman (188 days, later exceeded in 2007 by Sunita Williams), it’s interesting, if unnerving, to reflect on this literature of other worlds in space, given that our own planet lies under the subtle yet lethiferous glare of a changing climate many politicians refuse to acknowledge is real. That we are aiding in the possible eradication of life (except, perhaps, for the cute, near-indestructible tardigrades) on the only planet known to harbor it tempers the charm and comedy of revisiting these writers’ projections. Yet for all their naïveté of imagining all our planets, moons, and even suns could support life, the genre still has something to teach us today. How we envision alien life, even in fiction, often reflects us in turn, often betrays our own limitations and assumptions. How we portray the Other is a sundial of the self.
We may not be able to tesser time, slipping through temporal wrinkles to a better elsewhere, but the assumptions in these plurality-of-worlds texts can teach us a little for present and future, all the same.
Cosmic pluralism dates back millennia. Some of the ancient Greeks, like Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, proposed that our cosmos contained “infinite worlds” or aperoi kosmoi; from here emerged the now-quotidian idea of extraterrestrial life. An unknown author designated pseudo-Plutarch described the 5th-century B.C.E. Pythagorean belief that “the moon is terraneous, inhabited as our earth is, and contains animals of a larger size and plants of a rarer beauty than our globe affords.”
Still, the basic idea of other worlds was far from unique to ancient Greece. In various forms, such speculations appeared across time and place; it’s only natural, after all, to wonder what secrets the night, with its curious stars and stelliferous storms, may hold. Multiple tales in One Thousand and One Nights, for instance, feature trips across the cosmos and even discussions of inhabited planets beyond Earth. With the rise of Christian orthodoxy, texts that spoke explicitly about the “plurality of worlds” were suppressed in the Middle Ages. From the 17th century onwards, there emerged a particularly notable outburst of such texts with the development of improved telescopes; the literature of a plurality of worlds is largely a literature reflecting the science of its day. Some of their authors, however, faced draconian consequences for voicing their ideas, most notably Galileo and Giordano Bruno, the latter of whom, after suggesting a pantheistic cosmos in which infinite planets existed, was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600.
These texts abounded. Pierre Borel, a physician and compatriot of Descartes, published in 1657 A New Discourse Proving the Plurality of Worlds, the title of which indicates both ongoing debate and firm conviction. Borel claimed that “many of the most subtle minds in France” believed in the plurality of worlds “but keep [their beliefs] secret for fear of being ridiculed by the vulgar ignorant.” A highly influential book appeared in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, which detailed a series of conversations between the narrator and a beautiful marquise, in which the narrator speculates, seriously and jocularly, on the existence of other inhabited planets. In his preface, Fontenelle claimed that “religion simply has nothing to do with this system, in which I fill an infinity of worlds with inhabitants…When I say to you that the Moon is inhabited, you picture to yourself men made like us, and then, if you’re a bit of a theologian, you’re instantly full of qualms.”
The moon was indeed a popular and controversial place to imagine other people in this genre, thanks largely to Galileo’s unprecedented descriptions of it as “not unlike the Earth” after observing it through his powerful lens (though literature on lunarians predated this, as Lucian of Samosata had satirically described a voyage to an inhabited moon in his True History, a progenitor of sci-fi, in the 2nd century). Galileo did not claim the moon harbored life. But his timid-yet-revolutionary descriptions in The Sidereal Messenger of earthlike mountains on the moon seemed to blasphemously suggest our planet was not special; if other cosmic bodies, too, could have mountains, couldn’t they also have civilizations, casting doubt on the Bible’s implication that we were unique? (Kepler, going beyond Galileo, argued that cavities on the moon were the “homes” of intelligent lunar beings.)
Before Galileo, Ludovico Ariosto had sent his character Astolfo to the moon on a hippogriff in his 1532 mock-epic, Orlando Furioso; the following century, the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin composed The Man in the Moone, in which a man rides geese up to the moon and encounters Protestant Christians named “the Lunars.” John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac added to this genre, in 1638 and 1657 respectively, of literature about lunar civilizations. So infectious was the idea of an earthlike moon that the cartographer Michael van Langren produced an astonishing map of the moon in 1645—the world’s first recorded lunar map—in which he named mountains and craters after “great men” to secure his patronage. The moon, it seemed, was quite profitable for sublunary Earthlings.
After William Herschel discovered Uranus and began suggesting the cosmos was terrifyingly immense, Romantic writers—who, contrary to stereotype, often held some interest in science—began including such imagery in their work. The lone figure, like the iconic ancient mariner or the men standing alone against vast natural landscapes in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, animated Romantic work, and scientists sometimes became those solitary symbols: William Wordsworth described Newton in The Prelude as a Romantic mariner himself, “voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Percy Shelley was particularly intrigued by the seemingly blasphemous implications of a plurality of worlds, threading images of “those million worlds” with “inhabitants” in lines and footnotes through Prometheus Unbound and Queen Mab. In “Essay on the Devil and Devils,” he mused, with vulpine glee, whether or not hell might exist on fiery comets (or even in the sun) and whether “Earthlings or Jupetrians [sic] [are] more worthy of visitations by the Devil.” Influenced by revolutionary astronomical observations and before a figure like Jules Verne was even born, many a writer was imagining worlds twenty thousand fathoms—or more—from our own.
Perhaps the most extraordinary entry into the plurality-of-worlds literature came from Swedenborg. A controversial Christian mystic, Swedenborg alleged that the Lord had appointed him the religion’s savior, allowing him to travel freely, in “astral” form, between Heaven and Hell. Putting this handy ability to use, he published a remarkable book in 1758, The Earths in Our Solar System Which are called Planets and the Earths in the Starry Heaven, and Their Inhabitants; Also the Spirits and Angels There From Things Heard and Seen, detailing what he claimed were visits, in spirit, to Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and more—all of which, of course, were inhabited. Astonishingly, Swedenborg united anthropocentrism and Copernicanism: there are many inhabited earths, he alleged, but because “the Divine created the universe for no other end than that the human race may exist… wherever there is an earth, there are men.” Humanity, the angels conveniently revealed to the Swedish mystic, is central, everywhere.
Here is the crux of a deeper problem. Swedenborg’s “quest” to speak with “men” from other “earths” reveals a recurring issue with writers who imagined a plurality of worlds: that the very idea of “other earths” suggests how strongly they desired non-Earthlings to be, for all intents and purposes, human.
Many of these texts indeed proffered aliens who seemed curiously, conservatively like us. Sometimes, this was intentional, satirizing real-life figures; other times, it was not. The trend for some science fiction to imagine that alien life will resemble Earth’s inhabitants (human or otherwise) has long irked me: why should we think any other planet’s life would have eyes in the places we do, if they possess eyes at all? (The worst, to me, are aliens that wear human clothing, like t-shirts, yet possess anatomies that make such attire impractical at best, if not impossible for them to get on.) They also tended to be men, and male-dominated where women exist; imagining gender beyond a simple fixed binary, as in Ursula Le Guin’s masterful, much later novel, TheLeft Hand of Darkness, was rarer.
These are failures to imagine that which is truly, utterly alien. Yet there’s something human in this failure. It says much about us, after all, that we find it so much easier to imagine aliens resembling us, or organisms on our planet, than something definitively different. “Given the diversity of life on Earth,” the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote in NASA’s Astrobiology magazine in 2003, “one might expect a diversity of life exhibited among Hollywood aliens. But I am consistently amazed by the film industry’s lack of creativity. With a few notable exceptions,” he continues,
such as life forms in The Blob (1958) and in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Hollywood aliens look remarkably humanoid. No matter how ugly (or cute) they are, nearly all of them have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two ears, a head, a neck, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, a torso, two legs, two feet—and they can walk. From an anatomical view, these creatures are practically indistinguishable from humans, yet they are supposed to have come from another planet. If anything is certain, it is that life elsewhere in the universe, intelligent or otherwise, will look at least as exotic as some of Earth’s own life forms.
This trend makes me occasionally cringe at planet-hopping books and films I enjoy, from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to the Saga comics. Their non-Earthlings may vary from the outré to the orthodox, but even in their oddest permutations, they often seem, at core, like us. To get around this, writers like Fontenelle, and, later, William Herschel cautioned that their aliens were “not like men in any way,” yet their writing, like so many others, still makes extraterrestrial life seem positively, well, terrestrial.
I was guilty of this as a younger writer, too. I imagined worlds at once fantastical and hewing to earthly imagery. Mauve deserts, sprinkled with brittle crystal flowers small and smaragdine. Halloween-themed planets, peopled with grinning upside-down-teardrop ghosts and witches with wisteria hair. As a teen I feverishly wrote juvenile novels this world will (hopefully) never see, in which other universes, known, simplistically, as dimensions existed, and in which grand subway trains in a rocky hub deep in our Earth—Grand Central, perhaps, with stalactites and interdimensional post offices—rattle-roared through subterranean tunnels to purple portals that led to other worlds.
Caribbean reality, as Junot Diaz says, can be quite sci-fi, and I embraced this. A group of my Dominican friends who were all atheists would sometimes get together in Roseau for beers and I transformed them, later, in a story into a Borgesian secret society that studied inter-universal libraries, searching, as they descended down shelves on jetpacks—these were quite formidable libraries—for clues about the gods of other realms. For years a staggering drunk with the glower of a gargoyle lumbered up the precipice side of the mountain road to my village, narrowly being missed by rushing buses and cars who laughed at him as they passed by, and I later placed a version of the man—who had by then vanished, perhaps down the precipice—in another universe.
My fantastical images were not “real,” yet they were not that alien, ultimately. They were combinations of parts, recolors, reskins, refractions, through the prism of a muse, of motifs from books, videogames, anime, reality, my walks on lonely nights through the star-dusted orchard of the self. There’s nothing wrong with this. I loved writing these stories. But it reveals how difficult it is, even in art, to escape our humanness.
Yet there’s a darker side to this fixation, through history, with depicting the colossal cosmos as essentially human or alien worlds as similar to Earth. “Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom,” the gothic novelist Horace Walpole pooh-poohed the rise of hot-air ballooning in 1783. Walpole may have somewhat overestimated the aerial capabilities of balloons, but his larger point was accurate. We speak so often conceptually of “colonizing”—a telling word—the moon or Mars to save our species, and perhaps our fictional proliferation of humans across a plurality of worlds symbolizes, more broadly, our seeming inability to discard our worst aspects, our most fearful symmetries, even when we leave a planet.
*
Imagine, on a clear night, that every star is a planet exactly like our own, with people imagining just like us. It makes us seem quite infinitesimal. “In cosmic terms, we are subatomic particles in a grain of sand on an infinite beach,” Calvin tells Hobbes. It’s difficult to envision large numbers, so many of us don’t realize how vast the universe truly is, or how minuscule we are—enough that, in a map of the cosmos, we might as well not even exist.
Yet we do. For all our tininess, what we do matters.
Thomas Hardy understood it well for his time, as Two on a Tower, his underrated 1882 novel of astronomy and romance—love set against a terrifyingly, monstrously vast universe—indicates. Its universe is enormous and uncaring, yet even as subatomic specks on an endless beach, its characters’ star-crossed romance matters. Our love matters. We make our own meaning in a likely meaningless cosmos. We sail on, even if there is no port on our map, because of the sheer love that animates our sailing. When we stop creating our story, like Scheherazade, we may die. And sometimes we love the things that bring us closest to Death, love the songs that pull us into rocks flecked with foam and bone, love the books that take us to the cold smoking edge of the world.
Yet we are in danger of losing the seas we know, their salt-breath, the familiar ports we sail to on so many green nights. Things are falling apart—but slowly enough that we can tell ourselves all is well. Ninety-nine of life on our planet since its genesis is extinct, and it is only within the last few centuries that we have lost some of them—due either to wanton hunting, as with Steller’s sea cow or the iconically nonexistent dodo, or to the unexpectedly catastrophic results of mundane events, like the erasure of a rare flightless wren in New Zealand’s Stephen’s Island in the 1890s, which met its end at the paws of a lighthouse keeper’s cat (alongside copious, concupiscent feral cats that had escaped from their owners into the forest) that kept bringing its owner its avian corpses, until there were none left for the cat to display. Perhaps our familiar things won’t entirely vanish as the climate changes, but they will colossally, fatally transform—and with them, if we survive, so will our art. So will we. It all sounds alarmist, even silly. I wish it was.
Cosmic pluralism reads with a vespertine poignancy to me today. But even as a pessimist, I see something in the plurality-of-worlds genre, and sci-fi more broadly, that may save us yet: our curiosity. Cosmic pluralism bloomed out of wonder about the “big” questions, a wonder that won’t ever fully leave us—I hope—even if we think we’ve answered some of them. We’ve made it this far; perhaps that will save us, somehow, in the end.
It’s lovely to dream of other worlds, to listen to the music of a mapless place. That’s what fiction, in all forms, does. I cherish seeing the world from a rarer angle: the small-vastness of things before skydiving, the way scuba-diving at night feels like spacewalking on Earth, the way our own mundane-sublime planet may seem an alien landscape from the right angles. But we cannot forget this world when we wake from those dreams. If I have children, I want them, one day, to be able to enjoy the Earth as I did, its little and big wonders—as well as those of the vast cosmos. We need to harbor, if we do not, a caring, earthly, life-affirming perspective, even as we also require a more humbling cosmic one, lest we think ourselves the grand owners of the universe, with domain over its contents.
Perhaps we cannot tesser away to a less dire future, but we can try to better the future we do have, all the same.
It is a common occurrence for ‘UFO’s to be tracked on military radar, and more and more people are starting to believe that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin. One reason for this is the disclosure of evidence supporting such a hypothesis in recent years. If you want to see a fraction of that evidence, you can check out this article or the one pertaining to military radar linked above, or you can visit the exopolitics section of our website, here. If you really want to go in depth and read some proper studies on this topic, you can check out Richard Dolan’s books. They are a great place to start, he is a brilliant academic and one of the world’s leading researchers on the topic of UFOs.
Sagan’s Close Colleague
Apart from the congressional hearings on this subject, and the fairly recent citizens hearing that took place, along with the release of official documentation, there has been a surge in people believing that ETs are real because of the work of scholars like Dr. Brian O’Leary.
Brian was a close colleague of Carl Sagan, who recruited him to teach at Cornell University in the late 1960’s, where he researched and lectured in the department of astronomy and physics. After Cornell, he taught physics, astronomy, and science policy assessment at various academic institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Hampshire College, and finally at Princeton University from 1976 to 1981. After this he went on to Washington, where he would become an advisor to various political leaders, presidential candidates, and the United States Congress.
Before all of this, Dr. O’Leary was a NASA astronaut and a member of the sixth group of astronauts selected by NASA in August of 1967. One year after that, as mentioned above, Sagan recruited him to teach at Cornell. O’Leary was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as secretary of the American Geophysical Union’s Planetology Section. Furthermore, he was the team leader of the Asteroidal Resources Group for NASA’s Ames Summer Study on Space Settlements. He was a founding board member of the International Association for New Science as well as founding president of the New Energy Movement.
“Carl Sagan called me from Cornell and asked me to join the faculty. I accepted the offer and spent many years at Cornell in the astronomy department, planetary science department. And I became very creative in research then, but still within the bounds of western science, but in the planetary exploration program. That was for a period of about a decade.”(source)(source)
As you can see, his resume is more than extensive, and O’Leary is just one out of hundreds of people with this type of distinguished background to blow the lid on the extraterrestrial phenomenon. I use his video below in a lot of my extraterrestrial/UFO related articles, and I apologize to our regular readers, but I feel it’s always useful to share with readers who have yet to come across it. The clip is taken from the Thrive documentary which, if you haven’t seen yet, I highly recommend.
You can read his entire biography — though I’ll warn you it is quite large — HERE. Above I’ve provided only the highlights of his impressive career.
Brian passed away shortly after this video was taken. Apparently it happened shortly after having a heart attack and a diagnosis of intestinal cancer.
He had some interesting things to say during a live interview with Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot (view full live interview here, read transcript of video here). O’Leary and Sagan were close for a number of years, but had a little bit of a falling out when O’Leary decided to leave Cornell. In the interview, he remarked:
It was… One very cold snowy day in May, I landed in Syracuse, and there was a horizontal blizzard — in May — and I said: That’s it for upstate New York. And Carl thought that was very frivolous. Because, of course, he was kind of an empire-builder kind of guy; and he also had a huge ego.
After he left, O’Leary started to examine some of Carl’s work. He said that the famous “Face” in Cydonia on Mars — photographed by Viking in 1975, this enormous formation (about a mile across) resembled a human face and created a major buzz at the time — was tampered with by Sagan before being released to the public:
It was very, very disappointing to me, because not only was Carl wrong, he also fudged data. He published a picture of the “Face” in Parade Magazine, a popular article, saying that the “Face” was just a natural formation, but he doctored the picture to make it not look like a face.
At this time, Sagan and O’Leary were arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars, and they entered into many disagreements over that face. This rift was made clear in O’Leary’s publication in 1998, “Carl Sagan & I: On Opposite Sides of Mars.” It can be found in The Case for the Face: Scientists Examine the Evidence for Alien Artifacts on Mars, eds. Stanley V. McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press.
I began to realize, just directly from the scientific point of view, not only hearsay, that this man was colluding with NASA, that there might be more to this than before. . . . Carl was on a committee with a number of notable people. There was a report issued by the Brookings Institution in 1961 — and that’s about when I knew Carl, during those years; the ’60s mostly was when I worked closely with him — that he and this other group said: Well, if any ETs ever showed up on the Earth, it has to be covered up. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to manage this, because if we can’t, then it would be too much of a culture shock.
Quite a shocking statement from someone of Brian’s stature, isn’t it? In the interview, he goes on to say that Carl and his colleagues recocover-up remains today, but it’s plausible to assume that in the beginning, perhaps there was no I’ll intent.
“Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are ledmmended that the governments cover up the UFO phenomenon, and that he believes this provided justification for the ongoing cover-up
It’s important to note that this does not make Sagan a ‘bad guy.’ He was clearly the opposite of that, and his love for science and educating humanity was quite clear. If he was in favour of covering this up, if he did know about it, there is a very good chance it was done for what they perceived to be, good reasons. Sure, there might be some corporate reasons, and some other not so pleasant reasons the to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source)
Interesting Quotes About The UFO Phenomenon (A Few Out Of Many)
***Please keep in mind, the documentation regarding this phenomenon can be found from links that were mentioned in the very first paragraph of this article
” Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.”
– General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2,″ written by Richard Dolan.
“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” (source)
– Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee
“There is another way whether it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that they’re here shows us that they found a way.” (source)
– Jack Kasher, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of physics, University of Nebraska.
“This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified.”
– Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (source)
Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.”
– John Mack,Dr. John E. Mack, a Harvard University psychologist and Pulitzer prize winner (source)
“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. . . . [and] it behooves us, in case some of these people in the future or now should turn hostile, to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubbishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
— Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)
“An extraterrestrial influence is investigating our planet. Something is monitoring the planet and they are monitoring it very cautiously.”
- 2008 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel (source)(source)
“Some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial (ET) vehicles. Some of those extraterrestrial vehicles actually have ET crews, and some of those ET crews catch and release humans.”
— Dr. Don Donderi, a retired McGill University Professor of 40 years in the Department of Psychology(source)
“Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth. They are variously referred to as Visitors, Others, Star People, Et’s, etc…They are visiting Earth now; this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking.
– Theodor C. Loder III, Phd, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire (source)
“Decades ago, visitors from other plants warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead, we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.”
– Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source)
My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving, and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.”
I’m skeptical about many things, including the notion that government always knows best, and that the people can’t be trusted with the truth. The time to pull the curtain back on this subject is long overdue. We have statements from the most credible sources – those in a position to know – about a fascinating phenomenon, the nature of which is yet to be determined.
John Podesta, for example — former White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s right hand man (councillor), and the current head of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign,Taken from Leslie Kean’s 2010 New York Times bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record, in which Podesta wrote the forward
“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered… We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time…I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.”
– Doctor Edgar Mitchell, 6th man to walk on the moon(source) (source)(source)
Below is one video out of thousands floating around on the internet of supposed footage of unidentified flying objects. Keep in mind, many pictures and videos of these crafts have been published and analyzed thoroughly, so there is no shortage of verified footage and pictures. (More information on that can be found below the video.)
This one in particular comes from Dr. Steven Greer, founder of The Disclosure Project and the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Known to some as the “Father of the Disclosure Movement,” he was instrumental in bringing forth hundreds of military whistleblowers of all ranks, with verified backgrounds, to share their experience and testify on the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.
There is, admittedly, plenty of disinformation being spread within the UFOlogy field, and many people seeking to manipulate the evidence and public opinion, which makes it difficult to assess what information is legitimate and what is not. It unfortunately comes down to doing your own research and using your best judgement.
Greer has had meetings with high level people in the Pentagon, according to himself, Dr. Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14, who accompanied him on some of these meetings), and many more.
Dr. Greer has been doing these types of outings for quite a while, and he’s not the only one. Last year, a couple of CE members made a trip out to a gathering of researchers, whistleblowers. and enthusiasts, and witnessed something similar.
When you get to that level, and hang around those types of people, your going to draw attention, and anybody who draws massive amounts of attention will be praised, as well as vilified. Within the UFO movement, there are those that disagree and don’t associate with each other, which is very weird and shouldn’t be happening.
Interesting footage.
I think it’s safe to say that UFOs are no longer a fringe topic, as their existence has been verified in the mainstream world, but beyond that, most people are still in the dark. It’s important to keep in mind that a decade ago you were considered a conspiracy theorist for even believing in the existence of UFOs. Things have changed since then, but believing that some of these craft are extraterrestrial in origin is still considered ‘out there.’
This is why so many scientists around the world have been urging the scientific study of UFOs for decades. The Sturrock Report, for example, an effort that gathered the world’s top minds, was put together in the form of a paper urging that, if “the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles, but probably also extraterrestrial beings.”
Their main objective was to examine any possible physical evidence, and have it carefully collected and analyzed. These objects have been commonly photographed, as well as tracked on air/ground radar.
The pilots were flying in a formation of four F86 Sabre jet aircraft. One of the pilots described the phenomenon as a “bright light which was sharply defined and disk-shaped,” that looked like “a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” Another pilot managed to photograph the object, as you can see above.
An analysis of this case was also published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (“Optical Power Output of an Unidentified High Altitude Light Source,” vol. 13, #2, 1999).
This is one of many examples to give you an idea. Many documents indicate electrical equipment failure when entering the vicinity of these UFOs, like this one from the National Security Agency (NSA).
Just as there was evidence for UFOs when they were still considered a conspiracy, most, if not all researchers who have studied this phenomenon, will tell you with absolute certainty that there is ample evidence to support what’s known as the “extraterrestrial hypothesis,” and so will high ranking whistleblowers with verified backgrounds, from various decades — from Herman Oberth, one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, to Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon.
It’s similiar to Snowden’s mass surveillance revelation, which also used to be considered a conspiracy theory. His story stands as a great example of just how hard it is for someone to blow the whistle on secret, unacknowledged Special Access Programs.
“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubbishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
— Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)
These objects perform maneuvers that defy our understanding of physics. What’s more, there have been strange reports of involvement with and of extraterrestrials within the secret space program.
If you want to listen to a great lecture and learn more about the secret space program, you can check out this article we published on it earlier in the year.
If you’d like to go through some of that evidence, please visit the exopolitics section of our website.
Or you can check out these two articles (out of many) that explore the different types of possible races we could be dealing with here:
Members of the Society For Planetary SETI Research (SPSR) have recently published a paper in the Journal of Space Exploration about certain features on the far side of the moon that appear in the crater Paracelsus C. Titled “Image Analysis of Unusual Structures on the Far Side of the Moon in the Crater Paracelsus C,” it argues that these features might be artificial in origin, meaning someone other than a human being built them and put them there.
Contrary to popular belief, reports of artificial structures on the moon are both common and persistent. Among the first were from George Leonard’s 1976 book, Somebody Else is on the Moon, and Fred Steckling’s 1981 book, We Discovered Alien Bases on The Moon. There are many more, and from many credible sources, which we will get to later in the article.
During the early years of SETI, in 1963, even Carl Sagan spoke about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation:
It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even thatsome kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of the Earth, it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the Earth’s surface. The Moon seems one reasonable alternative. Forthcoming high resolution photographic reconnaissance of the Moon from space vehicles – particularly of the back side – might bear these possibilities in mind. (source)
This new study describes how they discovered seven Apollo-15 and four Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) images of the same enigmatic objects in the moon crater Paracelsus C, and how they differ significantly from the rocks scattered around and within the majority of craters on Luna.
Drawing from multiple images taken at different times of the lunar day, and from different sun angles, the authors point out how it’s possible to predict an approximate shape for the objects by using shape-form-shading software. This type of 3D rendering has allowed them to fly around the site in order to see how odd the objects look in their location within the south-west quadrant of the crater, which is approximately 24km in diameter. The question the scientists now ask is, are these objects artificial? If so, when were they manufactured, and by whom? They emphasize that a rover mission to Paracelsus C would probably provide some very interesting answers.
The study concludes by stating that,
“Based on the evidence presented in this paper we believe this area in Paracelsus C is one such candidate that is worthy of future study by orbital missions and surface rovers. Both of the features analyzed in this area are statistically different from the surrounding terrain.”
Carl Sagan argued that deviations like these are a necessary (though insufficient) condition of intelligent activity. What’s also interesting to note about Sagan is that he was accused, by multiple colleagues, of assisting the elite with the extraterrestrial coverup. You can read more about that allegation here.
Another great point the authors make deals with scientific fraud, which is something we see today in all realms of research, from health to climate change. The politicization of science is a real problem in the modern day world, and the study authors point out how it is impeding efforts to learn more about outer space:
A decidedly conservative mainstream scientific establishment often rejects anomalies based on subject matter alone, i.e., there cannot be alien artifacts on the moon because there are no alien artifacts on the moon (or other planets). Such a view is an example of circular reasoning, based on the belief that extraterrestrials do not exist, or if they do exist that they could not have traveled to our solar system.
What Could They Be? Here Are the Images
One of the authors, Mark Carlotto, an image scientist with 30 years of experience in satellite remote sensing and digital image processing, studied optics, signal, and image processing at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1972-1981, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He’s had several positions in academia and industry. Here are some of the peer-reviewed papers he’s authored and c0-authored prior to this one.
In the video below, as well as in the paper, he outlines how these lunar features look like “unusual structures” and even “passageways”:
By combining multiple images, we show the larger feature, oriented in a northeast/southwest direction, is not simply a wall but two walls on either side of a narrow valley or “passageway”. Using single image shape from shading and 3D terrain visualization we show in a computer-generated perspective view looking northeast that the southwest end appears to be the entrance to the passageway. A reverse angle view looking southwest shows the passageway ending at a rise of terrain at the other end, possibly leading underground. The terrain surrounding the two structures is not flat but appears “excavated” by some unknown mechanism, natural or artificial. It is shown that these objects are visually different from the lunar background because their underlying structure is different. (source)
More Strange Oddities on the Moon
“Ladies and gentlemen, my government, NASA, which many of us in the United States say stands for Never A Straight Answer, proceeded to erase 40 rolls of film of the Apollo Program — the flight to the Moon, the flight around the Moon, the landings on the Moon, the walking guys here and there. They erased, for Christ’s sake, 40 rolls of film of those events. Now we’re talking about several thousand individual frames that were taken that the so-called authorities determined that you did not have a right to see. Oh, they were ‘disruptive,’ ‘socially unacceptable,’ ‘politically unacceptable.’ I’ve become furious. I’m a retired Command Sergeant Major. I was never famous for having a lot of patience.” (source)
The quote above is from Bob Dean, a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major who also served at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) of NATO as an intelligence analyst.
Even the Russian government called for an international investigation into the U.S. moon landings about the disappearance of film footage, as well as 400 kilograms of lunar rock that were obtained from multiple lunar missions. You can read more about that here.
On top of that we have comments from several astronauts, including Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, alluding to the fact that our government already knows we are not alone:
Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on, because there is no doubt that we are being visited. . . . The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time. . . . [Mankind has long wondered if we’re] alone in the universe. [But] only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we’re not alone. (source)
“I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been covered up by governments for quite a long time. Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone, they have been coming here for a long time.” (source)(source)(source)(source)
– Dr. Edgar Mitchell, ScD., NASA astronaut
Here is a clip of NASA astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary saying the same thing.
Even the Deputy Manager of the Clementine Mission to the Moon, which was part of a joint space project between the Ballistic Missile Defence Organization (BMDO) and NASA that discovered water at the Moon’s poles in 1994, said that it was really a photo reconnaissance mission to check out strange objects on the far side of the moon. He’s also stated that he has seen pictures of multiple artificial structures on the moon that aren’t ours, arguing that there is no way we could build such things and that someone else is up there. (Source: page 16 of 18)(source)(source)
He currently works as a consultant to Morningstar Applied Physics. Here is one of his latest research endeavours.
Not long ago, he gave a lecture showing evidence for the existence of an intelligent civilization existing on Mars long ago, as well as, according to him, definitive proof that the giant face and pyramid found on Mars in 1976 were constructed by intelligent life: “Secrecy in government is an evil which is sometimes necessary, but I think it’s a good thing that this coverup on Mars is ending, and, hopefully at some point we can sit down and have a frank conversation, not about what happened on Mars 250 million years ago, but what is happening right now.”
Dr. Norman Bergrun, who worked for Ames Research Laboratory, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, now known as Lockheed Martin, has accused NASA of “garbling” images to hide certain things, in this interview. You can see the full interview here.
He worked for NASA for more than a decade, and you can view some of his publications for NASA here.
Another great example of witness testimony comes from Donna Hare, who had a secret clearance while she was working for the NASA contractor Philco Ford. She is one of hundreds of insider witnesses with a verified background that have come forward as part of Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project in order to publicly testify about their experiences working within these sectors.
It was the job of her colleague to airbrush evidence of UFOs out of photographs before they were released to the public. (source)
Karl Wolf, another witness for Greer’s Disclosure Project, who was with the USAF and held a top secret crypto clearance at Tactical Air Command in Langley AFB Virginia, was assigned to an NSA facility to do equipment repair, and came across an airman who told him about how they receive images from the lunar orbiter. He was told that they’ve discovered a base on the backside of the moon. Keep in mind, this was in 1965. Karl claims to have seen the mosaic which showed the base, geometric shapes, towers, spherical buildings, radar dishes, and other massive structures. He gave his testimony in Washington at the National Press Club more than a decade ago and you can watch it here.
Interesting to think about, isn’t it?
The crazy thing is, that it’s not just the moon. For example, A new study published in the Journal of Space Exploration titled “The Mounds of Cydonia: Elegant Geology, or Tetrahedral Geometry and Reactions of Pythagoras and Dirac?” has added to the already robust evidence pointing to “artificial surface interventions” on Mars.
You can read more about that in this article linked below:
The farmer who saw and the Mountie who believed: Sask.'s most famous UFO sighting
The farmer who saw and the Mountie who believed: Sask.'s most famous UFO sighting
MARK MELNYCHUK, REGINA LEADER-POST
There are no concrete answers for what happened on Edwin Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago.
Kneeling on his living-room floor, Edwin Fuhr reaches beneath a TV cabinet decorated with angel statues and family photos to insert a VHS tape into his video cassette recorder.
It shows Fuhr smoking a cigarette as he looks over a collection of photos scattered on a kitchen table. They’re intriguing images of strange circular patterns on a field — remnants of Fuhr’s sighting of what he believes were UFOs. Interviews with Fuhr are all over the Internet, but not this one, circa 1988.
A province away, at his Winnipeg home, retired Mountie Ron Morier also has a keepsake from the time when he and Fuhr and a small Saskatchewan town became an international sensation. “UFO Incident: Langenburg, Sask. Sept 1, 1974,” reads the cover of Morier’s black binder.
Lifting that cover feels like opening a secret document that should be stamped “classified” in bold, red letters. It contains a police report, newspaper clippings, faded photographs and letters from scientists with the Canadian government.
Morier jokingly calls it his X-File, a fitting nod to the sci-fi TV show that often focused on aliens, UFOs and the paranormal. It’s a treasure trove any UFO aficionado would covet.
The cover of Ron Morier’s file containing his RCMP report and other memorabilia pertaining to Edwin Fuhr’s 1974 UFO sighting near Langenburg, Saskatchewan.
A business card in the binder bears the name Dr. J. Allen Hynek, hinting at just how seriously the “incident” was taken. One of the UFO field’s most famous researchers, Hynek worked as a scientific consultant for a U.S. government initiative called project Blue Book, investigating UFO phenomena. Hynek weighed in on the Langenburg event in the media, even reportedly sending a representative to study the site, about 230 kilometres northeast of Regina.
First told before the World Wide Web or even VHS tapes, Fuhr’s story today endures in corners of the Net dedicated to UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. A video interview with him on YouTube five years ago had a resurgence in popularity after taking off on the website Reddit. It’s had more than 20,000 views.
And yet, some of the story’s most interesting parts remain strictly analog, existing only in the possession of two men forever linked to the strange event.
There are no concrete answers for what happened on Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago. Just a tantalizing story told by a Saskatchewan farmer, and the RCMP officer who believed him.
A close encounter of the second kind
Seeing a UFO up close is an incredibly rare experience. Most people just see lights in the sky, but Fuhr got closer.
Around 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1974, the then 36-year-old was swathing his fields when he saw five saucer-shaped objects on the edge of a slough.
Thinking they were duck blinds and that someone was playing a joke on him, Fuhr got off of his swather for a closer look, but still kept at least 15 feet back. He says the saucers were hovering a foot off the ground and rotating at a high rate of speed. Their surface looked like highly-polished steel.
Fuhr stopped, backed up and got on his swather. He sat there for the next 15 minutes watching them hover, too scared to move.
“They had me in a trance,” says Fuhr, now 79. “I didn’t even know what to do, cause I sat there and I thought, ‘Well gee whiz.’ ”
According to Fuhr, the objects then took off — emitting a grey vapour from underneath — and disappeared into the sky. They made no sound. The objects flew away so fast that they were gone “like that,” says Fuhr, clapping his hands.
He waited a few more minutes to make sure they were gone, then walked to the edge of the slough where he saw five ring patterns in the field. The grass in the centre of each circle was standing, while the grass surrounding that was flattened in a clockwise circle.
With no idea what he had just seen, Fuhr headed home home for lunch. His wife Karen and his parents could tell something was wrong.
“When he came in he just sat there,” remembers Karen. “All of the sudden we asked him, ‘Is there something wrong?’ And … well then he started telling us.”
The Langenburg incident came at the tail end of a golden age for UFO sightings, when reports of seeing physical craft had tapered off.
Even more tantalizing, the Langenburg UFOs — if that’s what they were — had left behind a physical trace, the circles. This classifies the sighting as a close encounter of the second kind.
Edwin Fuhr indicates where multiple flying saucers landed on his farm in Langenburg, Saskatchewan in September, 1974. (Photo by Don Healy, Regina Leader-Post)Don Healy /Regina Leader-Post
Edwin Fuhr, left, and his wife Karen at the site of his 1974 UFO encounter on July 26, 2017.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post
Investigating the landing site
Later that night, Ron Morier, then a 27-year-old RCMP constable, got a phone call at the Langenburg detachment.
Fuhr’s brother-in-law Carl Zorn asked if the police had fielded any UFO reports. Zorn had heard of Fuhr’s experience in a phone call. Although the cop and the in-law were skeptical, both men thought there was little reason to think Fuhr would make up such a tale.
“He’s the last guy in the world that would. I mean he was a teetotaller. He’s a churchgoer, a very quiet, shy man,” says Morier.
He decided to check it out. Being an RCMP officer in small-town Saskatchewan in the 1970s, he had time. Morier and his colleagues provided what he wistfully refers to as “gold-plated policing.” No job was too small.
“Back in those days, anytime anybody approached us about anything, we responded,” says Morier.
A photo that Ron Morier took of the crop circles in Edwin Fuhr’s farm near Langenburg in 1974.
The next day, he checked out the markings in Fuhr’s field. What caused them? Morier still doesn’t know to this day.
Five circles fit with the same five objects Fuhr saw. Morier’s report says the flattened portion of the circles was approximately 18 inches. The total diameter of two of the circles was 12 feet, while the other three were 10.5 feet.
There was no physical evidence in the area that would indicate someone had driven in and made the circles.
“Whatever made those impressions in his slough there came from the sky and left the same way,” says Morier.
Fuhr was the only person at the farm who saw the UFOs. Despite how fantastic the story was, Morier could not come up with a reason why this quiet farmer would make it up.
“He is a responsible person, and his information is considered reliable,” wrote Morier in his report.
He doesn’t think Fuhr was seeking fame, or even wanted his brother-in-law to tell police about it.
“Why would he want thousands of people coming to his little place there and trampling all over his yard and his fields and all of that?” asks Morier.
The fire in the field
Once the story got picked up by the media, thousands of people flocked to Fuhr’s farm. He says cars were lined up “bumper to bumper” along the road from his farm to Langenburg.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time.
It was harvest time, and people were literally getting in the way of the family’s work. Tourists, UFO enthusiasts and onlookers from all over were trying to get to the site and to Fuhr.
“They were chasing us down in the middle of the field,” he recalls, saying some drove right in front of his combine.
“My brother was getting upset and dad was getting upset,” says Fuhr. “I said, ‘What the heck am I supposed to do?’ ”
He says a plane carrying Australians who wanted to see the site even landed on a field adjacent to his farm.
Hoping to deter onlookers, Fuhr’s father finally set fire to the grass surrounding the slough where the circles were. It didn’t help though, as markings were still visible on the ground. Fuhr thinks they may have been made by legs stretching out from the UFOs.
The phone at the family’s home was also tied up with people from all over the world calling Fuhr. He says one call came from the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. The two-hour conversation, Fuhr says, involved Armstrong telling Fuhr that astronauts saw UFOs when travelling through space, but were told not to divulge that to the public.
“He said ‘It’s real all right.’ ”
Asked about the possibility of people making crank calls, Fuhr says the conversation convinced him it was indeed Armstrong.
Fuhr never began turning people away, or refusing to pick up the phone. He shrugs, and says he accepted that people were interested.
“I couldn’t do nothing about it. You know how people are,” he says. “Once the public finds out there’s something out there, they’ll all come out and see.”
A farmer made famous
Fuhr and his wife now live a quiet life in a bungalow in Langenburg. He retired from farming in 1989 and runs a landscaping and snow blowing business. To keep his mind occupied, Fuhr does carpentry in his spare time.
And he also enjoys reading books about UFOs.
Some of those books even mention Fuhr’s story, one of North America’s most famous UFO encounters. It was even featured on a History Channel documentary about UFOs. A cheesy dramatization of the sighting was made, with an actor playing Fuhr sitting on what looked more like a backhoe than a swather.
The setting for the video is a poor backdrop for Saskatchewan, with hills and trees in the background rather than fields. When the actor playing Morier arrives on scene, he’s wearing the stereotypical red serge, dress uniform of the RCMP — definitely not what he wore for daily duties.
Fuhr still gets the odd phone call from people curious about his encounter. He’s taken no pains to make himself hard to find, and is happy to oblige anyone who calls and wants to hear the story he’s told countless times.
“To me, it don’t matter. I’ll talk to anybody. If they want the story, I’ll tell them the story.”
He’s friendly, funny, welcoming — and still in surprisingly good spirits about the attention.
The land where the sighting happened still gets its share of visitors. It’s now farmed by Fuhr’s nephew, who tells those searching for the famous site that he has no idea what they’re talking about.
“He doesn’t want nothing to do with it,” says Fuhr.
Edwin Fuhr, a retired farmer, recalls his a close encounter with several UFOs while swathing in his field in the 1970s. His story made international news and is one of the most documented UFO cases in history Canadian history.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post
The most he ever got for sharing his story was a complimentary breakfast from CTV when visiting the studio for an interview. And that’s all right with him. Asked about ever making money from his story, he tilts his head, ponders the prospect, but then shrugs it off.
“To me it don’t matter. It’s out, the story’s out long already.”
Fuhr doesn’t give much thought to his status as a UFO celebrity. “If I had to think about all that I think I’d go bananas,” says Fuhr.
He is so humble about the experience, he doesn’t even like to take credit for it. “It was not my doings. It’s somebody from outer space that’s doing it, not me,” says Fuhr. “I’m a spectator just as well as all the rest are.”
Saskatchewan’s own Fox Mulder
After the Langenburg incident, Morier took his share of ribbing from his colleagues, who sometimes called him Mulder, after the X-Files investigator.
But it never negatively affected his career in the RCMP, which was extensive.
Morier became a composite artist and also trained to reconstruct the facial features of unidentified deceased people using sculpting techniques. During the rise of the computer, he worked on the RCMP’s initiative to begin doing composite sketches digitally.
A photo of Ron Morier from circa 1974.
After retiring from the RCMP with 27 years of service, he travelled all over the U.S. while working as a consultant on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. His last job was teaching at the Northwest Law Enforcement Academy in Winnipeg for 14 years.
Morier occasionally grants interview requests from the media or UFO researchers. But he knows they will inevitably lead to more phone calls.
“I don’t know why I do it cause I know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass again,” he says.
Years ago, Morier was contacted by an engineer from Japan who wanted to learn more about the sighting. While the subject is a hotbed for conspiracy theories, every person who reached out to him seemed legitimate.
“I didn’t talk to any kooks, I don’t think.”
Morier has never tried to hide from the event. If anything, he’s preserved it with his binder.
“I’m a bit of a collector that way. I’ve got lots of old reports and stuff,” says Morier.
One of the most precious items in the binder is a handwritten letter from the National Research Council to Fuhr. Dated Oct. 4, 1974, just over a month after Fuhr’s sighting, the letter explains how scientists have been unable to find any evidence that aliens landed in Fuhr’s farm, and asks for more samples.
The NRC says it no longer possesses any research on the Langenburg incident. Only one brief record acknowledging Fuhr’s sighting exists at the Library Archives of Canada.
Morier has no ill feelings about the Langenburg incident, or its persistence to keep popping up in his life. He still has fond memories of policing the small community.
“To be honest with you it was the best time of my life,” says Morier.
A page from Ron Morier’s RCMP report on Edwin Fuhr’s UFO sighting near Langenburg in 1974.
I want to believe
Fuhr is convinced what he saw that day was extraterrestrial.
Over the years, he has taken an interest in the subject of UFOs, and is well read on the subject. He refers to government cover-ups, Roswell and popular theories that aliens may be concerned about global conflicts on Earth.
No scientific investigation has ever found evidence that alien craft landed at Fuhr’s farm. There were no other witness reports. The truth comes down to Fuhr.
Edwin Fuhr, a retired farmer, recalls his a close encounter with several UFOs while swathing in his field in the 1970s. His story made international news and is one of the most documented UFO cases in history Canadian history. Fuhr stands in a field near where the encounter was.
Whether his recent YouTube interview, or footage from the old VHS interview in 1988, most of the details are remarkably similar. The fact he has kept it so consistent over the years is one of things that makes it so compelling for Winnipeg-based science writer Chris Rutkowski.
“You’d think that after all these years he might want to embellish the story, but he tends to tell the same story over and over again. The story as of late hasn’t developed into glowing green goo and aliens with almond-shaped eyes and that type of thing,” says Rutkowski, who publishes an annual survey on UFO reports in Canada. “It’s a very straight story, so it’s compelling to think that this probably really did happen as he describes it.”
But is it proof enough?
A more recent photo of Ron Morier, who now resides in Winnipeg, Man.
(Photo courtesy Ron Morier)
“I guess the assumption is if it’s not ours, whose is it? But on the other hand we just don’t have the proof to make that quantum jump to say this definitely was proof of alien visitation in Langenburg,” says Rutkowski.
The story was compelling enough to be taken seriously by the federal government. Grass and soil samples were sent to the upper atmosphere research branch of the National Research Council, but no conclusions could ever be drawn.
The scientists were intrigued by a black substance found as a precipitate, especially in a sample that was taken from one of the rings that appeared to be burned. The sample was sent to Simon Fraser University for x-ray fluorescence analysis, but no conclusions could be drawn.
Fuhr doesn’t really care who believes or doesn’t. People have been telling him since the 1970s that it was all in his head.
“I had a guy from Quebec come out, and he figures I was smoking pot,” says Fuhr.
But to this day, Morier still believes Fuhr is being honest about what he saw.
“Why would he just out of the blue make this up?’” says the former officer.
The media ran with Morier’s findings, and in some cases used them as confirmation that flying saucers had landed. A headline from a newspaper in Newfoundland read “RCMP officer convinced UFOs were real.”
While Morier believes Fuhr to be truthful, he doesn’t believe in UFOs or little green men. The uncertainty of the Langenburg incident frustrated Morier because as intriguing as it was, it didn’t yield any answers.
“It bugged me a little that it didn’t confirm or not confirm that they do exist,” he says. “I still don’t know.”
Morier notices Fuhr seems more outspoken in his interviews now than the quiet farmer he knew. He commends him for sticking to his story.
“Good on him. He’ll never know and we’ll never know I guess,” says Morier.
“But boy that would’ve been quite an experience that day to see what he saw.”
You may want to rub your eyes both before AND after you watch this new ad from a Japanese milk company. It shows a UFO with an oddly familiar black-on-white paint job hovering over a field filled with children holding glasses. As they raise them skyward, the UFO’s bottom opens to reveal a giant cow’s nipple that squirts what is allegedly milk into the glasses to the delight of the kids. What bizarre future might this ad be preparing the Japanese — and possibly the world — for?
I knew you’d have to see it to believe it. Do you believe it?
According to Sora News 24, the company behind the ad is Rakunoh Mother’s, a Japanese milk producer, which in itself is an anomaly since Asians are more lactose intolerant than most other ethnic groups. Can an Uddered Flying Object convince them to ignore the revulsion and gulp gallons of milk like their American counterparts? Rakunoh Mother’s seems to think so, but comments on Japanese social media sites may indicate otherwise.
“This is madness!” “Shouldn’t that be pixelated when it appears onscreen?” “That’s one long nipple right there.” “I never knew this sort of thing happened in Kumamoto.” “My heart is pure so all I see is the fact that the milk is freshly squeezed.”
My heart is pure? What does that have to do with drinking alien milk? Or is it? Apparently the response to the first commercial was so confusing that Rakunoh Mother’s felt the need to make a second one showing how the ship acquired the milk.
Well, that was less creepy … not! Just when we’re starting to get used to the ideas of alien abductions, cattle mutilations and flying saucers stealing our water, fuel, precious metals and volcanic power, now we have to consider they’re absconding with our milk too? Can’t beings from the Taurus constellation find their own cows?
Is there a sinister motive behind these commercials or is this just the work of a really clever ad company? Perhaps an earlier commercial about how milk can build strong bones for even non-humans can answer this question.
That one isn’t as creepy but is it convincing? Is Japan covertly preparing its citizens for an announcement about alien contact? Or are ETs capitalists too and these commercials are their way to prepare us to buy back what they’re taking from us? Perhaps they’re more human than we think.
Often, the resulting videos and pictures are immediately discredited or easily explained – but on rare occasions, believers are treated to a genuine mystery.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with any of the following videos.
Daily Star Online has collected four of the most outrageous alien hoaxes ever to fool the world – starting with a classic.
YOUTUBE
FACT OR FICTION: Daily Star Online explores four of the most famous alien hoaxes
In September last year, it was reported that a giant alien spacecraft had been spotted in the skies above Malaysia.
Video of the alleged sighting does indeed show an enormous object whizzing through the air, accompanied by the low roar of an engine while panicked voices behind the camera murmur with concern.
As the craft passes overhead, white light can be seen shining from the underside of the vessel.
However, Malaysian police claimed to have received no reports of such a sighting.
The spacecraft was later understood to have been inserted into the video using special effects, hijacking a 2007 conceptual spaceship design by artist Damien White.
'UFO' hovers in the night sky before disappearing
Almost 13 million people saw remarkable footage showing a cluster of glowing blue lights in the skies above Colorado, US, after it was posted on Facebook earlier this year.
The group of UFOs behave strangely in the sky before ascending in unison and disappearing into a portal and out of sight.
It is claimed that the video was shot near the San Luis Valley – a notorious hotspot for alleged UFO activity – although local media did not pick up on the incident.
As it transpired, the footage was ripped from a YouTube video claiming to have been filmed in Mexico.
But a Spanish YouTube investigator savaged the footage, suggesting it could be easily replicated using video effects.
Gabe Hash said: “The video is only 30 seconds long and nobody is talking while the person is recording it, meaning that it meets all the characteristics of an animation.
“Most of the video is blurry and as I’ve said below, this is done to camouflage the animation. In conclusion, in our opinion the video is fake and just an animation rendered via computer.”
NASA live stream cuts out after floating grey object spotted
UFO-hunters could not believe their eyes when they discovered a grey-shaped object appear on NASA’s live video stream from the International Space Station.
And their suspicions were apparently confirmed when the stream cut out almost immediately, fuelling rumours of an agency cover-up.
However, the bizarre phenomenon was easily dismissed by experts as, rather disappointingly, the moon.
The moon can appear grey, not white, when viewed from outer space due to various mineral on its surface.
The Earth’s atmosphere can also make the moon seem oddly-shaped.
These two facts, combined with the likelihood of technical malfunction when broadcasting from space, mean the feet likely showed the moon shortly before a common video interruption.
UFO-like figures appear in the sky over the Dominican Republic
Strange lights in the skies above Haiti were captured on video in one of the first YouTube viral phenomena.
The clip shows a series of strange ships appear in the sky before whizzing out of sight, with footage of similar incidents claiming to have been shot in other cities around the world.
Millions have seen the video since it was posted on YouTube – although the video has far less exciting origins than many would have you believe.
It is actually the creation of an artist known only as “Barzolff”, forming as part of a “sociological experiment”.
SHAG HARBOUR, N.S. – As Laurie Wickens pointed off to the horizon one evening last year, it was like he was 18 years old again.
But there were some major differences. This time he was riding in a bus with a group of UFO-story enthusiasts.
And it was nearly five decades later.
What wasn’t different, however, was the level of intrigue and mystery, despite the passage of time.
This week the annual Shag Harbour UFO Festival touches down and will mark the 50-year anniversary of the Shag Harbour UFO incident of Oct. 4, 1967.
Wickens was one of many eyewitnesses to see something in the sky five decades ago, and he’ll be among those taking part in the festival running Friday, Sept. 29 to Sunday, Oct. 1.
Wickens still can’t say with 100 per cent certainty what he saw that night in Shag Harbour, but he’s convinced it was an unidentified flying object – a UFO – which is also how the incident was referred to in Government of Canada documents.
Wickens’ description on the bus tour last year – and more bus tours are planned this year – kept everyone enthralled. He said as he and some friends drove in a 1956 green and white Pontiac they saw lights above the tree line, but heard no sound.
“The lights would come on in sequence – one, two, three, four – then they’d all go off for a while and then start that sequence over,” he described, estimating the length of what he saw to be around 60 feet long, flying low to the horizon
"They weren't high because we wasn't looking up, we were looking out,” he said about the lights.
At the Shag Harbour Incident Centre.TINA COMEAU PHOTO
Eventually the lights crossed over the road and for a few seconds he and others lost sight of them. But then they watched the lights dive in a rapid 45-degree movement towards the water’s surface. At that point they Wickens and his friends thought they had witnessed a plane crash.
“When I called the RCMP the first thing he wanted to know was what I was drinking,” Wickens said about reporting the incident. But his phone call was followed by other ones, including one from other residents and also an off-duty RCMP officer. It wasn’t long before the RCMP, Coast Guard and fishing vessels had descended on the scene.
The fact that there was never any debris found made Wickens certain it wasn’t a plane crash he has witnessed. But what had left the yellow foam on the water’s surface, and what were the lights they had seen in the sky and then watched for about an hour on the water’s surface?
To this day, that remains the question.
Visiting the site of the crash of an object in the water in what is referred to the 1967 Shag Harbour UFO incident.TINA COMEAU PHOTO
Peter Goreham is another witness to the 1967 Shag Harbour UFO incident. In an interview during last year’s festival he recalled about telling his parents about the incident the next morning. They didn’t believe him until they saw the story on the news.
In the decades that have past Goreham said he continues to wonders about a cylinder-type device found by a lighthouse keeper the following morning. It was damaged, smouldering and had wires or something else coming out from it, he said. Someone from the American military, he claimed, took it away and told the lighthouse keeper not to talk about it.
“That was the last we saw of it,” he said
The keynote speaker at this year’s festival will be Chris Styles, who has been investigating the Shag Harbour incident for decades and has co-authored two books on the subject: Dark Object, with Don Ledger, and Impact To Contact, with Graham Simms.
“There’s been a lot of updates to the story and more information is now available since he wrote the two books,” Brock Zinck, vice-president of the Shag Harbour UFO Incident Society, told this newspaper a few weeks ago. “I’m really looking forward to his presentation. I don’t want to give away anything, but I think people are going to be surprised by what he has to say.”
At the Shag Harbour Incident Centre you can buy an alien.TINA COMEAU PHOTO
2017 Shag Harbour UFO Festival Schedule
Friday, Sept. 29
• 6-6:45 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: registration and meet and greet
• 6:45-7 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: opening remarks
• 7-9 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Keynote address: Chris Style “Shag Harbour 50 Years On”
• 9-11 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Musical performance by Jon Mullane
• 10 p.m. Impact Site: Dark Skies Stargazing presented by Deep Sky Eye Observator
Saturday, Sept. 30
• 7-9 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Breakfast served by community hall
• 9-10:15 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Don Ledger “Pilot Cases & Incident, and Air Canada Flight 305”
• 10:15-11:30 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Aaron Gulyas “History of UFO Crashes”
• 11:30 a.m. UFO Interpretation Centre: Vendors
• 11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Graham Simms “Maritime Mysteries and UFOs”
• 12:45-1:45 p.m. Lasagna Lunch at Samuel Woods Museum or food trucks at the Interpretation Centr
• 1:45-3:45 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Shag Harbour UFO Incident Witness Panel with Q&A. Panel will include Laurie Wickens, Peter Goreham, Norman Smith, Michael Crowell, Captain Ronnie Newell (Skipper of Coast Guard Cutter 101), Bill Boudreau (Shelburne Witness), Ralph Loewinger (commercial pilot)
• 3:45-5 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: TBA
• 5 p.m. Shag Harbour Community Centre: Dinner Break served by the Chapel Hill Historical Society
• 4:30-6:30 p.m. UFO Interpretation Centre: Live Podcast Recording with Jordan Bonaparte from Night Time Podcast and Martin Willis from Podcast UFO
• 7-8 p.m. Guided Bus Tour #1
• 9 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Danc
Sunday, Oct. 1
• 7-9 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Breakfas
• 9-9:45 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Hugh Spencer “Roswell, St. Paul, and Shag Harbour”
• 9:45-10:30 a.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Coffee Party with Tim Doucette of Deep Sky Eye Observatory
• 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Alien Abduction Panel with Q&A: Susan Anderson and Ruth Kenney
• 12:30-1:30 p.m. Lunch (Served by Woods Harbour Community Hall)
• 1:30-2:30 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Paul Kimball “UFO Filmography”
• 2:30-4 p.m. Woods Harbour Community Centre: Q&A with festival speakers
Doctor Roger Lier is a polarizing figure in the world of UFO enthusiasts and the new mystery/documentary, Patient Seventeen, seeks to provide more information about Lier and his beliefs. Roger Leir claims to be a leading surgeon that removes nanotechnology from human beings that were placed in them by aliens from another world and Patient Seventeen looks to verify the authenticity of Leir's claims through the thought provoking documentary. The real-life Patient Seventeen is a man from Southern California in his forties and he claims that he was visited by aliens when he was a child. Leir recently put him under the knife to remove a metallic object from his calf, which he believes was put there by extraterrestrial beings. The official synopsis for the documentary reads.
"Meet a surgeon who claims to remove highly advanced implants, nanotechnology microchips imbedded by aliens, non-humans monitoring our earth. Discover the world of abductions, scalar wave transmissions, and a program to study or manipulate the human race. Armed with a patient, a scalpel, black lights and a stud finder; we seek to verify the authenticity of this alleged Off-World Implant Technology."
Filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Locker Corbell aims to find the truth in Leir's work and interviews him and Patient Seventeen at length throughout the course of the unsettling movie that is sure to raise a few eyebrows. Patient Seventeen is the latest movie in a series that Corbell calls his "investigative film series" through his Extraordinary Beliefs productions.
A podiatrist by training, from the late 1980s Roger Leir became increasingly involved with his local branch of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Attending one of its conferences in 1995, he was presented with several foot X-rays from a woman who believed that she had been abducted by aliens. Despite Leir's skepticism, the scans did indicate that there was something in her big toe, and to satisfy his curiosity he offered to operate on her, free of charge. On August 19th, 1995 he extracted two very small foreign objects from the patient, each one metallic in appearance. A second patient underwent surgery that same day for an object about the size of a watermelon seed, between his thumb and index finger.
By the late 1990s, Leir's findings had established him as a prominent, though controversial, spokesperson for the alien abduction and UFO communities. The Aliens and the Scalpel, detailing his experiences with "implant" surgery, was published in 1999, followed by Casebook: Alien Implants. He made appearances in various television documentaries, including the History Channel's UFO Hunters, and attended conferences in more than 40 countries. In 2003, he travelled to Varginha, Brazil, to conduct his own research into the alleged crash of an alien craft there seven years previously, an event dubbed "the Brazilian Roswell." The investigation formed the basis of his final book, UFO Crash in Brazil.
Doctor Roger Leir died in 2014 at the age of 79 and Patient Seventeen aims to dive into his studies that many believe to be completely fabricated. Discover the world of alien abductions in the new trailer from The Orchard's Patient Seventeen. Armed with a patient, a scalpel, black lights and a stud finder; director Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell seeks to verify the authenticity of alleged Off-World Implant Technology in this gripping documentary available to own October 10th, and On Demand October 31st. You can check out the trailer courtesy of The Orchard Movies YouTube channel below.
Alexander the Great's 'lost city' was a magical place where people drank wine and naked philosophers imparted wisdom, ancient accounts claim.
Now, nearly 2,000 years after the great warrior's death, archaeologists believe the city may have finally been discovered in Iraq.
Experts first noticed ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband, after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s.
The images were made public in 1996 but, due to political instability, archaeologists were unable to explore the site properly for years.
Now, using more recent drone footage and on-site work, researchers have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC, which had strong Greek and Roman influences.
They believe Alexander the Great founded it in 331 BC, and later settled in the city with 3,000 veterans of his campaigns.
Alexander the Great's 'lost city' was a magical place where people drank wine and naked philosophers imparted wisdom, ancient accounts claim.
Now, nearly 2,000 years after the great warrior's death, archaeologists believe the city may have finally been discovered in Iraq.
Experts first noticed ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband, after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s.
The images were made public in 1996 but, due to political instability, archaeologists were unable to explore the site properly for years.
Now, using more recent drone footage and on-site work, researchers have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC, which had strong Greek and Roman influences.
They believe Alexander the Great founded it in 331 BC, and later settled in the city with 3,000 veterans of his campaigns.
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Nearly 2,000 years after Alexander the Great's death, archaeologists believe his 'lost city' has been found in Iraq's Qalatga Darband. Shown here is the Darband-i Rania pass from the northeast. The site of Qalatga Darband is the triangular land beyond the bridge on the right
WHO WAS ALEXANDER THE GREAT?
Alexander the Great is arguably one of history's most successful military commanders.
Undefeated in battle, he had carved out a vast empire stretching from Macedonia and Greece in Europe, to Persia, Egypt and even parts of northern India by the time of his death aged 32.
Only five barely intact accounts of his death at Babylon in 323 BCE survive to the present day.
None are from eyewitnesses and all conflict to varying degrees.
According to one account from the Roman era, Alexander died leaving his kingdom 'to the strongest' or 'most worthy' of his generals.
In another version, he died speechless in a coma, without making any plans for succession.
Undefeated in battle, Alexander had carved out a vast empire stretching from Macedonia and Greece in Europe, to Persia, Egypt and even parts of northern India by the time of his death aged 32.
Researchers believe Qalatga Darband - which roughly translates from Kurdish as ‘castle of the mountain pass’ - is on the route Alexander of Macedon took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC.
The city may have served as an important meeting point between East and West.
It is 6 miles (10km) south-east of Rania in Sulaimaniya province in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Researchers at the British Museum first explored the site using spy footage of the area from the 1960s.
An archaeological dig was not possible when Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq.
But more recently improved security has allowed the British Museum to explore the site as a way of training Iraqis to rescue areas damaged by Islamic State.
As well as on-site work, the Museum has also been able to capture its own drone footage of the area.
'We got coverage of all the site using the drone in the spring — analysing crop marks hasn't been done at all in Mesopotamian archaeology', lead archaeologist John MacGinnis told The Times.
'It's early days, but we think it would have been a bustling city on a road from Iraq to Iran.
'You can imagine people supplying wine to soldiers passing through', he said.
'Where there are walls underground the wheat and barley don't grow so well, so there are colour differences in the crop growth'.
A graphic of what the 'lost city' would have looked like, with a temple, inner fort and wine press facilities. Farmers in the area had found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall in the area
Researchers first noticed apparently ancient remains in the Iraqi settlement, known as Qalatga Darband (pictured) after looking at declassified American spy footage from the 1960s. However, an archaeological dig was not possible when Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq
From the excavation work, they discovered an abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues, suggesting the city's early residents were Alexander’s subjects.
Among the statues they found was a female figure believed to be Persephone, the Greek goddess of vegetation, and the other is believed to be Adonis, a symbol of fertility.
They also discovered a coin of Orodes II, who was king of the Parthian from 57 BC to 37 BC.
On its western flank, the city was protected by a large fortification which ran from the river to the mountain.
It is situated on a large open site around 60 hectares (148 acres) large on a natural terrace.
The 1960s Corona spy satellite footage showed a large square building, potentially believed to be a fort, according to aBritish Museum blog.
More recently improved security has allowed the British Museum to explore the site as a way of training Iraqis to rescue areas damaged by Islamic State. The findings suggest, Qalatga Darband, may be on the route Alexander the Great took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC
An abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues suggests the city, which now has a thriving wine trade, could have been created by Alexander. Statue of a nude male (left) which could possibly be Adonis and a Coin of Orodes II (right)
WHAT DID THEY DO?
There were rumours there was an ancient city at the site three years previously and farmers had found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall.
Experts processed their drone footage and increased the colour contrasts to show rectangular buildings hidden beneath fields of crops.
An abundance of terracotta roof tiles and Greek and Roman statues also suggests the city, which now has a thriving wine trade, could have been created by Alexander.
They found two key statues - one a female figure believed to be Persephone, the Green goddess of vegetation, and the other is believed to be Adonis, a symbol of fertility.
Farmers in the area had also found remains of big buildings and a large fortified wall.
There were a number of limestone blocks, believed to be wine or oil presses.
Meanwhile, excavation of a mound at the southern end of the site revealed a monument which could have been a temple for worship.
Fieldwork started in the autumn of 2016 and is expected to last until 2020.
The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country.
It is part of a £30 million ($40 million) government plan to help Iraq rebuild historical sites destroyed by Islamic State.
This fund is designed to counter the destruction of heritage in cultural zones from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The programme involves bringing groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum.
They are then sent to excavations in the field for six additional weeks where they learn how to do drone surveys and 3D scanning.
Archaeologists at the British Museum have found a number of statues and coins and have established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC which had strong Greek and Roman influences
Archaeologists also found terracotta roof tiles, such as this antefix (pictured) - which suggested Greek and Roman influences
Experts believe Qalatga Darband is on the route Alexander the Great (pictured) took to attack Darius III of Persia in 331 BC
Qalatga Darband is six miles (10km) south-east of Rania in Sulaimaniya province in Iraqi Kurdistan, just next to Dukan Lake. Using drone footage, experts have now established there was a city during the first and second centuries BC
CULTURAL PROTECTION FUND
The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country.
It is part of a £30 million ($40 million) government plan to help Iraq rebuild historical sites destroyed by Islamic State.
This fund is designed to counter the destruction of cultural heritage in cultural zones from Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The training programme involves bringing groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum.
They are then sent to excavations in the field for six additional weeks where thy will learn how to do drone surveys and 3D scanning.
The plan is to provide training for more than 50 Iraqis over a period of five years.
The team now want to find linguistic evidence to confirm their findings.
Earlier this year archaeologists believe they found the last will and testament of Alexander the Great - more than 2,000 years after his death.
A London-based expert David Grant claimed to have unearthed the Macedonian king's dying wishes in an ancient text that has been 'hiding in plain sight' for centuries.
The long-dismissed last will divulged Alexander's plans for the future of the Greek-Persian empire he ruled.
It also reveals his burial wishes and discloses the beneficiaries to his vast fortune and power.
Evidence for the lost will can be found in an ancient manuscript known as the 'Alexander Romance', a book of fables covering Alexander's mythical exploits.
Likely compiled during the century after Alexander's death, the fables contain invaluable historical fragments about Alexander's campaigns in the Persian Empire.
The project, which was part of the government-funded Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme, has been possible due to improved security in the country
COUPLE SAW ’40 UFOS’ HOVERING OVER BRITISH BEACH BEFORE MAJOR MILITARY OPERATION
COUPLE SAW ’40 UFOS’ HOVERING OVER BRITISH BEACH BEFORE MAJOR MILITARY OPERATION
The couple’s bizarre claims concern the night of September 14 2009 at 11pm.
They lived in one of 30 flats that overlook the sea at Wilsthorpe.
The pair decided to go to bed, however, as the woman went to turn off the lights, she saw a glow outside.
Mr Sinclair said “something told her to look outside” before she opened the front door and looked out to sea where she was amazed to see several glowing UFOs above the coast.
Mr Sinclair said she described them as 15-feet long and eight-feet wide “spaceships over the sea”.
He said: “She said there was a huge circle of boomerang-shaped craft.
“She said there were loads – 30 to 40 and the sea below was bubbling, banging and crashing.
“They were silent, but there was electricity going into the sea.
“Ron (her husband) said it was like a blue and white Christmas tree over the sea. He was frightened and left after ten minutes and put his head under the pillow for the night.
“But, she told me she was not frightened and knew she was never going to see anything like it again in her life.”
She stayed for around half and hour before the objects began to “lift out of the circle in pairs at a 45 degree angle until just two were left which shot off straight up.”
Two Chinook helicopters full of RAF personnel landed at the beach by the remote hamlet.
Mr Sinclair also spoke with a man who runs a bait shop at Bridlington Harbour, who told him his bait diggers had seen “triangle” craft enter the sea in 2009 over the same period.
He said two of his bait diggers had been on Wilsthorpe Beach the day the couple saw the military operation.
They told of seeing “triangles entering the sea” and later “being surrounded by soldiers.”
Separately a man working on a boat at Blythe Park boat compound also confirmed the military presence, he said.
Mr Sinclair submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to find out why the operation took place on September 15.
However, the response he eventually received, said it was just a “routine military exercise” and few other details were provided.
The reply said “no live ammunition was used” and “any explosions heard were controlled detonations of simulated ammunitions.”
The response added that it was “one of a number of regular exercises” as part of work to defend the UK, and new locations would often be used with landowners’ consent.
Mr Sinclair continues to investigate the case and is trying to obtain historic coast guard reports from the period.
He believes it is connected to a high level of reported UFO activity along a 25-mile stretch of the East Yorkshire and North Yorkshire coast from Brandesburton in East Yorkshire to Scarborough, North Yorkshire, between May and September 2009.
High levels of military aircraft flying low and circling near his home in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, were also recorded that September.
Mr Sinclair said the case did not yet prove a UFO presence, but: “I think the military arrived because of the objects.”
In a post on his Truth Proof Facebook page about the case, he wrote: “Nothing found can prove with any certainty the UFOs were over the sea as an elderly couple claim, or that the black triangles entered the sea in September 2009 like the bait diggers described.
“All I can do is stack the evidence for and against, either side of the scale.”
Dusk is falling outside the Alien Research Center, and I’m ready to go home. But Mikayla, our photographer, wants to capture some final shots of the metal alien while the light is good. The sun is flat on the horizon, turning the desert, the highway, the alien and everything else gold. The pros call this moment “magic hour.” I shuffle around the empty lot and snap a few phone pics of a street sign that warns: Open Range Next 110 Miles.
From out of nowhere, a rushing engine and flying dirt. Could it be a UFO? Nope. It’s a jalopy, nearly hitting me. A young man and his father have driven all the way from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to explore the interplanetary hot spot that surrounds state Route 375, aka the Extraterrestrial Highway. They’ve already visited the gate to Area 51, but they’re too late for the Alien Research Center. The gift shop is closed.
Meeting an extraterrestrial would be the coolest thing ever, the son, Jeremy Richter, tells me. He spins intricate histories of aliens, and I wonder aloud what he’ll do if he actually meets one.
His answer? A question: “What do you think about our species? In my opinion, our species is half idiotic and half insane.”
What is it about humanity and our insatiable need to be judged? Thousands of years of advancement and we still desire some Egyptian god—or Ancient Alien—to weigh our souls against a feather.
In Rachel, Nevada, polite European tourists have mostly replaced the true believers. This town is famous for interstellar travel, yet it doesn’t even have a gas station. But it does have the Little A’Le’Inn, which serves surprisingly delicious “World Famous Alien Burgers.” Inside, the waitress wears flying saucer earrings and a branded T-shirt. Also, the wall of old UFO photos has been encased in plexiglass, and the owner has grown suspicious of camera-wielding journalists.
There, Mikayla and I buy enamel souvenir pins and a 33-cent map of Area 51. We use the latter to find the famous “black mailbox,” which an annoyed local rancher constructed to corral all the letters people sent to aliens. It has come and gone and even changed color over the years. Right now, it’s located at the dirt-road turnoff to Area 51.
It’s also surrounded by an ad hoc collection of trinkets. I look and see the future: One day, after the robots revolt, the zombies attack and the few human survivors regroup into sad little bands that scour a scorched and despoiled Earth, this will be what passes for a religious temple. Even now, it feels holier than Parisian cathedrals. The items could be mistaken for the flotsam and jetsam of a single-use society, except for the thoughtful way it has all been arranged: painted rocks, a Star Wars-themed sunshade, a Hawaiian lei, mason jar shrines, business cards, foil food wrappers, water bottles, a pink glowstick, a brunette hairdresser’s mannequin ... and, above it all, an American flag taped to a broken lawn chair.
The black mailbox is stuffed, and the letters are all dated within the past few weeks. They’re written on whatever scrap people had with them: valet parking tickets, a Utah church comment card and a Styrofoam cup. Most are ironic or funny or fishing for social media likes. But Mary Staunton’s letter to “E.T.” sticks with me: In neat script, the Irish woman explains how her late husband had wanted to meet an alien: “He always said that we have enough room in our garden for a ship to land. Maybe he’s with you now. I still miss him so much.”
The scene outside the Little A’Le’Inn is equal parts Mayberry and Twilight Zone. Two middle-aged tourists from the Midwest relax out front, enjoying the shade of a rare tree. Begrudgingly they admit their fascination with UFOs, like it’s an embarrassing medical condition. They have a healthy sense of skepticism, but still, they’ve seen some freaky stuff. To their credit, invisible planes buzz overhead—circling and circling, like motorcycles in a cage. Also, right on the side of the road, there’s a big government testing device that tracks the amount of nuclear contaminants in the air. It’s higher here than in Vegas, but Vegas isn’t at zero radiation, either.
These men understand the ambient creepiness but also stand outside it. Like the way we enjoy Vegas kitsch: It’s that double appreciation where you get the joke but also fall for it at the same time. Just as Mikayla and I are searchers, even though we pretend not to be.
Once I start looking for them, I see aliens everywhere. A Hoover Dam gift shop called the Flying Saucer stocks a collection of used and rare books and DVDs about aliens. A green figurine rides a model train at the Railroad Museum in Boulder City. A bunch of cute, alien-themed school supplies are on clearance at the local big box. Bumper stickers, tattoos, emoji and trendy hipster patches. Turns out Alien Tequila is owned by George Harris, who also owns the Alien Research Center. He’s planning to build a museum in the back.
If what we seek can be found, Mikayla and I discover it in the array of alien-themed gift shops and jerky stands scattered around our desert landscapes. Here, decades of human ambition, fears and scientific discoveries have been distilled to a shelf of refrigerator magnets and bouncy balls. I’m sincerely inspired when I see the vast selection of memorabilia. Together it tells the story of who we are and who we want to be: from the optimism of Star Trek’s Prime Directive to the deadpan cool of Men in Black to the suspicion and distrust at the heart of The X-Files. Are aliens as ubiquitous in older places, where trees and skyscrapers crowd out potential UFO landing spots? Or just in the desert Southwest, where the Wild West serves as a runway to the Final Frontier?
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 75 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.