From UFOs to UAPs: A recent history of unidentified objects in the sky

Since the modern UFO craze started in the 1940s, there have been countless sightings, ranging from hoaxes to the unexplained.

(Getty: Bettmann)

Are we alone in the universe?

It's a question that humans have been asking for thousands of years, with cultures across the world long believing in life beyond the stars.

But recently, there's been a noticeable shift as discussions about UFOs (or unidentified flying objects) and extraterrestrial life have moved from outside the mainstream to inside the corridors of power.

Since 2022, UFOs — which are now commonly called UAPs (or unidentified anomalous phenomena) — have featured in US congressional hearings, and even NASA has weighed in.

So why is this subject now being taken seriously by some politicians and scientists?

Flying saucers

The modern UFO craze started in the 1940s.

World War II had just ended and the Cold War was imminent. New weapons were being developed by rival superpowers.

In June 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw strange objects flying near Mount Rainier in the US state of Washington, and reported it to authorities and the press.

A journalist asked him to describe their movement, and he likened it to how a saucer might move if you skipped it across water.

"[This] very enterprising journalist knew a headline when he heard one, and called them 'flying saucers', and it stuck," Greg Eghigian, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, tells ABC RN's Rear Vision.

But in modern UFO lore, this was just a curtain-raiser.

In July 1947, a rancher found some odd-looking debris near Roswell, New Mexico.

He took it to the sheriff, who passed it onto the nearby Roswell Army Air Field base. Those at the base initially said it was a "flying disc", but the official line was then clarified and it was said that it was a weather balloon.

Confusion and fascination ensued. 

The object was actually a "high-altitude surveillance balloon to look for Soviet nuclear tests in the atmosphere … [which] was a secret program", says Chris Impey, a university distinguished professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

"[But] this military officer [said] 'oh it's a flying saucer' and of course, then it's off to the races and now you have Roswell as the ground zero for UFOs."

US government concerns

Behind growing public excitement and fear about UFOs, the US government had some serious questions.

From the 1940s until the 1960s, a series of US government programs were set up "to see whether or not this stuff represents a threat", he says.

By the time the final project ended in 1969, it had collected over 12,000 UFO reports. And while most of these were able to be explained, 701 of the reports were classified as "unidentified".

"[But] all of these projects came to the conclusion … that there is no evidence that these things represent any kind of national security threat," Professor Eghigian says.

Aliens!

As the US government was looking into UFO sightings, some members of the public became convinced they were evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Professor Eghigian says the work of author and former naval aviator Donald Keyhoe in the 1950s helped kick off the modern alien craze.

"Basically [Keyhoe wrote] that the conclusion that a lot of experts are reaching is that the only thing that could explain this phenomenon [of sightings] are extraterrestrials."

UFOs then took on an even more public dimension in the 1960s and 1970s.

There were alleged alien encounters, like the story of Betty and Barney Hill, who claimed to have been abducted in New Hampshire in 1961.

Even former US President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen UFOs.

A secret government program

By the early 1990s, the Cold War was over. Fears of high-tech global conflicts dissipated and, with them, the UFO craze.

But there was one big exception: A US senator from Nevada named Harry Reid, who had "a fairly long-standing interest in things that were paranormal", Professor Eghigian says.

From 2007 to 2012, Mr Reid helped funnel millions of dollars in government funding into a secretive Pentagon project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, to look into UFOs.

And, in 2017, it all came out and into the public eye.

The New York Times reported on "the Pentagon's mysterious UFO program", and featured video footage of unknown objects travelling in the sky.

"Up until that point, everybody had assumed that our government really wasn't engaged with this. Or if they were, it was very, very secret, and that we'd never find out about it," says Leslie Kean, one of the journalists who worked on the story.

Critically, the existence of this program was not proof of extraterrestrials or that aliens have visited Earth.

Instead, it showed the US government was taking the matter of unidentified objects seriously and was trying to work out what the objects were.

"[But] nothing has been the same since — [the story] radically changed the landscape," Ms Kean says.

"Legislation was passed requiring that the intelligence community provide reports on this; they set up a task force to investigate UFOs," she says.

"It just kept building and building, and as of today, there have been three open congressional hearings dealing with this."

Notably, ever since then, US officials have been using the term UAP, a broader term and one which doesn't have the same baggage as "UFO". 

Intact crafts and 'pilots'?

In 2023, David Grusch, who worked with the US's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, and who had been involved with UAP investigations, went public.

He was "a very highly respected intelligence official [who became] a whistleblower", Ms Kean says.

Mr Grusch spoke with Ms Kean in an article that included several big claims.

"He believed, based on what up to about 40 people told him, who are directly involved with this, that the [US] government had in its possession intact crafts and also partial crafts that had crashed or had been retrieved that were not made by human beings," Ms Kean says.

In sworn testimony to US Congress, he repeated some of his claims, including how he heard that there was "non-human" biological matter from the pilots of these crafts.

"It shifted the conversation from one where government officials were talking about UFOs … to one in which a government official was talking about UFOs and saying it's aliens," says Shane Harris, the intelligence and national security reporter at the Washington Post.

"[But] a number of lawmakers, I think, found this to be problematic," Mr Harris says, because his information was all second-hand.

The Pentagon has denied the claims.

Meanwhile, NASA has started to do its own investigations into UAPs and it released a report in September.

But those hoping for proof of other life forms would have been disappointed.

"We didn't learn very much. They definitely said we find no evidence of aliens visiting," Professor Impey says.

He says for many UAP sightings, NASA simply said the data was "not good enough" to make conclusions.

'Sit back and watch'

For Professor Eghigian, the renewed interest in UAPs is unsurprising.

Firstly, there have been huge developments in technology in recent years which make it easier for militaries and intelligence services "to detect unusual aerial activities that they might have missed in an earlier age".

"[Also] we've got to remember that the UFO phenomenon has always thrived in any environment"And of course, the pandemic did just that. It fed this widespread sense of uncertainty, a sense of powerlessness."

He says this environment helped "fuel some of those more dubious" voices within the "UFO-curious world".

But after the recent flurry of UAP excitement, Ms Kean is one of many who believes that the truth is out there.

"There are a lot of efforts underway to try to get to the bottom of this. And I just think we can sit back and watch. Hopefully, we're on a train that's not stopping."

LINK VIDEOS - PETER2011

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oq6-yjbp98
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSnzcFejLA

{ https://www.abc.net.au/news }

05-02-2024 om 18:20 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Believe They Have Solved UFO ‘Foo Fighter’ Mystery Of World War 2

BY DOUGLAS CHARLES

Scientists believe they have discovered what the “foo fighter” UFOs actually were that sparked alien fears among pilots during World War 2.

The U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron was the first to describe a UFO as a foo fighter during the war and the term would go on to be used throughout the conflict.

In the January 15, 1945 edition of Time, numerous United States Air Force pilots reported “balls of fire” that they called foo fighters following them closely at high speed during the night for over a month.

Now, scientists at the University of California, the University of Arizona and and Harvard-Smithsonian believe they have finally figured out what these foo fighters actually were: plasmas in the thermosphere.

“These plasmas are electromagnetic entities that have a variety of shapes and sizes. They have repeatedly approached spacecraft and the space shuttles and are attracted to electromagnetic activity including thunderstorms,” said co-author of the study, Dr. Rudolph Schild, of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian.

“They have been filmed from space, descending into the lower atmosphere and appear to be attracted to airplanes, fighter jets, nuclear power plants, and ‘hot spots’ of radiation, such as Hiroshima, which was destroyed by an atomic bomb.

“Based on video, photographic and computerized analysis, including reports by military officers and astronauts, we believe these plasmas account for at least some of the numerous reports of UFOs and Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon over the last several thousand years including the ‘foo fighters’ observed by German, Japanese and Allied pilots during WWII.”

{ https://brobible.com/ }

05-02-2024 om 17:23 geschreven door peter  

Key takeaways from the first public meeting of NASA’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena independent study team.

 By Becky Ferreira

IMAGE: YOUTUBE/NASA

Government officials have spotted mysterious metallic orbs flying all around the world, in addition to many other types of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), according to the first public meeting of NASA’s UAP independent study team, which was held on Wednesday.

Speakers at the meeting emphasized the need to collect more high-quality UAP data and lamented the stigma surrounding this topic, which they said makes it less likely for people to report unidentified phenomena. Indeed, multiple speakers noted that members of NASA’s UAP study team have been subjected to harassment as a result of their work in this field.

“It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online all because they're studying this topic,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, during the meeting. “NASA stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse. Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter.”

NASA’s UAP study team was convened in 2022 with the mission of investigating the origin and nature of UAPs with rigorous scientific standards using mostly unclassified data. NASA and other agencies, such as the Pentagon, use the term UAP instead of the more widely known UFO, which stands for unidentified flying object, in part to expand the scope of these studies beyond the aerial domain to include unexplained phenomena in oceans, space, and on the ground.  

The team is made up of 16 members with a range of backgrounds, including NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, oceanographer Paula Bontempi, and David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist who serves as the chair of the study. The livestreamed meeting on Wednesday offered a sneak peek of some of the major findings of the study, which will be released to the public in a full report later this summer.

The meeting included a presentation by Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the US Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), who shared tantalizing reports of unexplained metallic orbs seen at various locations on Earth. 

The presentation followed up on Kirkpatrick’s appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, where he initially described an image of one of these orbs that was taken by a U.S. military MQ-9 Reaper drone during a routine mission in the Middle East in 2022. 

“This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of,” Kirkpatrick said during the Wednesday meeting. “We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers. This one in particular, however, I would point out, demonstrated no enigmatic technical capabilities and was no threat to airborne safety.”

“While we are still looking at it, I don't have any more data other than that,” Kirkpatrick added. “Being able to come to some conclusion is going to take time, until we can get better resolved data on similar objects that we can then do a larger analysis on.”

Kirkpatrick also shared newly-released footage of UAPs spotted during an aircraft training mission in the Western United States that have been provisionally identified as commercial aircraft. He noted that AARO receives an average of 50 to 100 reports of UAPs per month, though sometimes that sightings spikes due to weird events, like the Chinese balloon incident in February or Starlink launches. Only about 2 to 5 percent of reported UAP sightings turn out to be “really anomalous,” Kirkpatrick said.

“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO and in our holdings demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources,” Kirkpatrick explained. “While a large number of cases in AARO’s holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases.”

“Meanwhile, for the few objects that do demonstrate potentially anomalous characteristics, AARO is approaching these cases with the highest level of objectivity and analytical rigor,” he continued. “AARO has shared these cases with the appropriately cleared NASA team members in order to discuss and help recommend potential scientific areas of study that NASA may want to take lead on.”

To that point, many speakers at the meeting addressed the dire lack of high-quality data on UAPs, which has scuttled attempts to explain some of the most ambiguous sightings. The study team will include recommendations for collecting better data and building more efficient information-sharing systems in their report, which could help to finally solve many of the most perplexing UAP sightings—though at least some of the truth will likely remain out there.

“The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event,” said study chair David Spergel during the meeting. “They're often uninformative due to lack of quality control and data curation. To understand UAP better, targeted data collection, thorough data curation, and robust analyses are needed. Such an approach will help to discern unexplained UAP sightings, but even then there's no guarantee that all sightings will be explained.”

{ https://www.vice.com/en }

05-02-2024 om 00:41 geschreven door peter  

Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the DoD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) speaking during Wednesday’s NASA event

(Credit: NASA TV).

Kirkpatrick also addressed a video depicting a metallic orb filmed over the Middle East that was first revealed during the Senate session several weeks ago, noting that similar objects have been seen “all over the world,” adding that “we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers.”

Responding to a question from study member Nadia Drake about the number of reports currently in AARO’s collection, Kirkpatrick said, “We are now over 800,” noting that close to 100 new reports were obtained from recently acquired Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data on UAP.

In 2021, The Debrief was the first to report that the FAA was actively collecting information on UAP, which it had been providing to AARO’s predecessor agency, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). It is unclear whether this data had been provided directly to AARO or if Kirkpatrick and his Office had been required to request it from the agency.

Kirkpatrick added that “less than single-digit percentages of the total dataset” comprised those objects which AARO deems to be “possibly really anomalous,” comprising maybe 2-5 percent of the total numbers collected. Kirkpatrick added that the next annual report produced by his office is currently being completed and prepared for release later this year.

Echoing earlier statements from NASA’s independent study team members, Kirkpatrick said he and AARO staff have also been subjected to harassment.

“My team and I have also been subjected to lots of harassment,” Kirkpatrick said, “especially coming out of my last [Senate] hearing because people don’t understand the scientific method.”

“People want answers now,” Kirkpatrick said, which he said feeds the negative stigmas against UAP reporting and studies, emphasizing the importance of NASA serving as a leader in public scientific discussion of the phenomenon.

“NASA should lead the scientific discourse [on UAP],” Kirkpatrick said, adding that it represents “a hard target problem.”

During his presentation, Kirkpatrick characterized anomalous phenomena as “anything that is not readily understandable by the operator or the sensor.”

Kirkpatrick said that within the last few days, the first “Five Eyes” meeting had been held with his Office on the topic, referencing cooperative efforts between the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States on UAP studies.

Following Kirkpatrick’s presentation, Mike Freie, Technical Advisor at the Air Traffic Surveillance Services Office with the FAA, spoke about his agency’s mission and data related to UAP that it collects.

Freie discussed the various types of surveillance systems the FAA uses, which include Cooperative Surveillance and Non-Cooperative Surveillance systems, the latter comprising short and long-range radar, automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), and surface surveillance systems used in coverage of surface on approach and departure paths of aircraft.

Freie emphasized that no classified DOD systems or other sensitive information were utilized in the data he shared.

“There is a process by which air traffic controllers can report UAP sightings or events,” Freie said. “Historically, those have been in the range of 3-5 reports per month,” Freie said, noting that Starlink launches appear to have caused a recent uptick in reports by pilots. A similar rise in reports followed the appearance of a Chinese surveillance balloon that passed over the U.S. earlier this year.

“That’s 3-5 reports per month across the entire 14,000 controllers per month,” Freie also clarified, noting it was a “very small percentage.”

Freie said that data on UAP is retained for an undefined period of several months, likely in an unprocessed form.

Following a break for lunch, team member and science journalist Nadia Drake addressed the number of credible UAP sightings in recent years while also emphasizing the need for applying science toward the issue.

“There is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP,” Drake said, citing the necessity for additional scientific data before UAP can be characterized and their origins can be determined.

“In science, skepticism is not a bias, nor is it a bad word,” Drake added.

Paula Bontempi, Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, spoke about NASA’s focus on transparency, and the availability of information the agency produces, adding that NASA’s experience with long-term missions makes it well-equipped to study UAP.

Federica Bianco speaking during Wednesday’s live NASA event

(Credit: NASA TV).

Following Bontempi, Federica Bianco with the University of Delaware said that machine learning methods could be applied toward automation and retrieval of data to aid in the study of UAP.

“The current status of the UAP data… will make this really hard,” Bianco added while noting that NASA’s studies of UAP could nonetheless “be an opportunity to really increase the reach of science.”

David Grinspoon, Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, addressed the potential relevance of several existing NASA efforts to the study of UAP, despite there being no evidence study members had found that could positively link such aerial phenomena with extraterrestrial technologies.

“Within the scientific community, there is a widespread, but by no means universal belief that there are extraterrestrial civilizations,” Grinspoon said. “The same rationale which supports the idea that ET civilizations may exist and may be detectable also supports the idea that finding extraterrestrial artifacts in our own solar system is at least plausible.”

“NASA is the lead agency for solar system exploration,” Grinspoon said. “It already has an active program of detecting objects in our solar neighborhood, using both ground-based and space-based facilities, and it could leverage those capabilities to search for objects in space with anomalous motion, anomalous trajectories, unusual light curves, anomalous spectral signatures, or other characteristics.”

“Most of the solar system has not been searched for artifacts and anomalies,” Grinspoon added. “These modest data analysis efforts could potentially be applied to existing and planned planetary missions.”

“If NASA applies the same rigorous methodology toward UAPs that it applies to the study of possible life elsewhere, then we stand to learn something new and interesting.”

“Whatever the ultimate explanation is of those phenomena,” Grinspoon said.

Karlin Toner, Senior Advisor in Data Policy Integration with the FAA, mirroring the statements of earlier speakers, noted the apparent stigmas against “reporting or even researching such phenomena.”

“That said, by encouraging military aviators to disclose anomalies that they’ve seen or detected, the DoD is receiving many more reports,” noting Dr. Kirkpatrick’s earlier mention of close to 800 reports in AARO’s current holdings.

“I would propose to this panel that NASA can help make it safer for researchers to explore data in the civil aerospace domain simply by starting that work internally,” Toner said.

Following Toner’s remarks, Joshua Semeter, Director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University, said that cases involving infrared and other sensory detections of UAP collected with advanced tracking systems in use by the U.S. military allow for direct calculations of parameters that include altitude and velocity.

“This multi-sensor approach is absolutely critical to charting a path forward for UAP investigation,” Semeter said.

To illustrate this point, Semeter referenced one of three historic Navy UAP videos, popularly known as “Go Fast,” noting that information that included the elevation angle of the camera, azimuth angle, target range, and other relevant data are all featured on the screen. Based on such information, Semeter said the object in the footage was not moving as quickly as the footage seems to convey, a conclusion consistent with previous analysis of the footage that concluded the parallax effect could account for the apparent speed of the object.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/aerospace/ }

04-02-2024 om 18:15 geschreven door peter  

Ex-NASA Employee Saw Hi-res UFO/Alien Craft Photos, Ready To Testify Before Congress

On May 9, 2001, over twenty military, intelligence, government, corporate and scientific witnesses came forward at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to establish the reality of UFOs or extraterrestrial vehicles, extraterrestrial life forms, and the resulting advanced energy and propulsion technologies. As part of the Disclosure Project, Donna Hare, a photographic scientist testified to have worked for NASA contactor Philco Ford in the early 1970s. She had a high-security clearance to walk in NASA’s photo lab and other departments.

During the Disclosure Project press conference, Hare revealed that NASA covered up and eliminated space anomalies such as UFOs from the satellite photos. Hare has got several awards in the space programs. She dedicated most of her time as a technical illustrator to space programs. She created lunar maps and landing slides and had been working for 15 years as a sub-contractor for NASA.

Hare claimed to have had access to a place known as “Building Eight,” from where she made contacts with high-ranking officials. Once, she walked into a restricted area which was NASA’s photo lab. She noticed the lab had photographs of the Moon taken from satellites. She was with a friend who pointed at one of the photographs and surprisingly, she saw a round white dot.

Read also:

• Ret. US Army Major Showed Deleted UFO Photos Captured By Apollo Astronauts On Moon
• Former Area-51 Engineer Claimed Testing Re-Engineered UFO That Crashed In Arizona In 1953 With Four Aliens
• Ret. US Army Colonel Claimed Aliens In Roswell UFO Crash Were Bio-Robots Built For Space Travel
• FBI Chilling UFO Reports: Recovered 3 UFOs With Alien Bodies In New Mexico & 27,000 Mph Craft

Below is the transcript of Hare’s part in the Disclosure Program (Full Video link here):

“Good morning everyone! My name is Donna Hare, and I worked at Philco Ford aerospace from 1967 to 1981. During that time, I was a design illustrator draftsman. I did the launch slides, landing slides, and also projected plotting boards lunar maps for NASA. We were a contractor but most of the time, I worked in Building 8. I had the opportunity to do extra work during downtime which was between missions, and I walked into a photo lab which was the NASA lab across the hallway. I had a secret clearance which is not that high but I was able to go into restricted areas.

At the time, I was talking to one of the techs in there and he drew my attention to a NASA photograph. It had a “Dot” on it, and I asked what it was. Well, he drew my attention to it and I said is that a dot on the emulsion? He was smiling and he had his hands crossed… This was an aerial photograph of the Earth, I’m assuming the Earth because it had pine trees on it and the shadows of the craft or whatever it was were at the same angle as the trees and by its very nature, a UFO. And I wanted to clarify that to the gentleman that was talking to me… So, I did not know what this was but I realized at this point that it’s very secret.

I asked him what he was gonna do with this piece of information. He said they always airbrush these out before they sell them to the public, so they’re pissed pesky little creatures appearing on this photograph they wanted to get rid of. After that, I decided I would ask questions to other people that worked there (away from the site and not on site).

A guard told me that he was asked to burn some photographs and not to look at them, and there was another guard guarding him who was in green fatigues watching him burn the photographs and he said he was too tempted he looked at one.

I knew someone in quarantine with the Apollo astronauts he told me that the Apollo astronauts saw crap on the moon when we landed. He said that the astronauts are told to keep this quiet.”

Hare was told by one of the sources that during one of the moon landings, three UFOs had landed. Subsequently, there was a codeword “Santa Claus” for these crafts. She said she would be willing to testify before Congress. (Source)

In 2000, Gary McKinnon, a British Hacker who got so fed up with the government hiding information related to UFOs and free energy that he decided to hack the most secured servers of NASA and the Pentagon. McKinnon said that he had seen real photographs of UFOs in computer files at the Johnson Space Center Building. He even took a screenshot of one of the cigar-shaped UFOs in-between space and the earth’s atmosphere. Unfortunately, it was removed from his computer after being seized.

Below is the recreation of the famous ‘NOT MAN MADE’ craft that was seen by McKinnon when he hacked & accessed NASA computers. (Source)

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

04-02-2024 om 17:51 geschreven door peter  

Is this another Chinese spy balloon moment? Famous 'cube in a sphere' UFO spotted at military bases along the East Coast may have been a high-tech ENEMY drone, says ex-Pentagon UFO investigator dubbed 'Dr. Evil'

• The Pentagon's first ever UFO boss pointed to a Chinese-made 'spherical' drone in an uncut version of his new interview, made available to DailyMail.com 
• Retired UFO chief Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick was called 'Dr. Evil' for his laser research 
• READ MORE: UFO whistleblower held secret talk with 'Wall St. bigwigs' and CIA officials in Manhattan and claimed US was in possession of 40ft Tardis-like craft

By MATTHEW PHELAN SENIOR SCIENCE REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

The Pentagon's former UFO chief has revealed his conclusion to one of the most famous UFO cases of the modern era: the Navy's baffling 'cube in a sphere' UFO was just a super high-tech drone.

US Navy fighter pilots had reported seeing these other-worldly craft near the Atlantic coast between 2014 and 2015, which nearly tore the wing off an F/A-18 Super Hornet that was flying with the USS Roosevelt during one incident.

Now Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Pentagon's recently retired UFO chief, says that the objects were likely 'next generation,' 'spherical' drones that move 'very accurately.'

While not confirmed, his description matches a drone-prototype made public by Chinese researchers in 2022 — a silver orb with eight thrusters configured at the tips of an internal cube, making it capable of unprecedented mid-air twists and turns.

The case highlights why UFOs must be taken seriously and not be subject to ridicule, Kirkpatrick suggested. 

The Pentagon's departing UFO chief, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, cited public 'next generation' drone research by academics in Singapore in an effort to explain the Navy's 'cube in a sphere' UFO sightings. Above a 'SpICED (Cube)' drone prototype published by Chinese researchers in 2022

In an op-ed published by Scientific American last week, Dr. Kirkpatrick dismissed US Air Force veteran David Grusch as one of several 'conspiracy-minded 'whistleblowers'' on UFOs. He emphasized that the Pentagon's UFO mission should be focused on US foreign adversaries

Dr Kirkpatrick's new comments come ahead of the Pentagon's congressionally mandated 'Historical Record Report' on UFOs, due to lawmakers in June of 2024. 

DailyMail.com was given an early draft transcript of Dr. Kirkpatrick's appearance on Fresh Produce Media's 'In the Room with Peter Bergen,' in which the physicist delved deeper into the national security risk that has come from stigmatizing eyewitness reports of UFOs.

'That gap could potentially be exploited by somebody,' Dr. Kirkpatrick told Bergen, 'put a platform in [the] continental United States that nobody knew was there.'

A longtime laser physicist, Dr. Kirkpatrick's government service took him to the Air Force Research Laboratory, the CIA and a position at America's highly secretive spy satellite agency the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) before chasing UFOs.

The physicist's Air Force colleagues once nicknamed him 'Dr. Evil' after the laser-obsessed villain in the Austin Powers series of spy film spoofs. 

'One of my going away presents, as I was leaving the National Reconnaissance Office,' Dr. Kirkpatrick told CNN national security reporter Peter Bergen, 'was one of my close colleagues gave me a shark with a laser pointer strapped to its head.'

Dr. Kirkpatrick headed up the Pentagon's then-brand new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) from July 2022 until the end of December 2023, leveraging his scientific expertise toward the tricky task of investigating military UFO cases.

Last May, Dr. Kirkpatrick briefed NASA's UFO advisory panel that AARO had logged roughly 800 cases of flying, spherical 'metallic orb' UFOs.

'This is a typical example of the thing that we see most of,' Dr. Kirkpatrick told the panel. 'We see these all over the world and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers.' 

It's unclear just how similar these metallic orbs may be to the UFOs first brought to public attention by former Navy lieutenant and fighter pilot Ryan Graves, who described them to Congress as 'a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere.'

But Dr. Kirkpatrick told the podcast these otherworldly craft may very likely have been a foreign espionage platform.

'There's a large number of people, pilots, others, who have said, 'Hey, I saw this giant sphere. It had a cube in it,'' he said, ''I don't understand it. It must be an alien.''

Swiss-based drone maker Flyability has also been producing spherical 'gimbal' drones since at least 2015. Both Flyability and the Singapore-based makers of the SpICED drone cited collision safety as their reasoning for pursuing these aircraft's round designs - not airborne spying 

DailyMail.com has been given an early draft transcript of Dr. Kirkpatrick's appearance on the 'In the Room with Peter Bergen' podcast (above) in which the physicist discussed 'spherical' drones made by researchers in Singapore, comparing them to the US Navy's UFO sightings

'Well, actually, no, there's a number of papers out,' Dr. Kirkpatrick continued in this early, uncut draft of his podcast interview with CNN analyst Peter Bergen.

'The most recent one was from, University of Singapore, I believe, where the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical.'

'They've taken about a two-meter size, inflatable, and they put a cube inside of it,' Dr. Kirkpatrick continued. 'And everywhere the corner of the cube touches the sphere, they've fused it, cut it out, and put little thrusters in.'

READ MORE: 

• US Customs and Border Protection quietly released a tranche of 10 videos of mysterious 'craft' whizzing around US skies - as one senior ex-intelligence officer says they are a THREAT

US Customs and Border Patrol, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and weapons out of the country, uploaded 10 videos that appear to show craft moving in strange ways in our skies. The videos document a fighter jet pursued by an apparently baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider, and another apparent orb hovering near a parked 16-wheeler truck

'So, now I have eight thrusters. And I can put cameras on it and anything else I want,' the ex-AARO chief told Bergen. 

'With eight thrusters in a cube configuration, I can maneuver this drone around very accurately.' 

Scientists with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) in China did, in fact, prototype a spherical drone along these lines, dubbed the 'Spherical Indoor Coandă Effect Drone (SpICED)' in a September 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Drones. 

The research team in Singapore noted that their new prototype, which benefited from an internal propulsion system with eight nozzles in a cube configuration, showed a promising 40 percent reduction in 'trajectory control error' during their test flights. 

The SUTD's 'cube in a sphere' drone prototype, they wrote, proved to be more swiftly and accurately maneuverable than their past internal 'tetrahedron' configuration.

But the Chinese-made drone is not the only novel unmanned spherical craft in production: Swiss-based Flyability has been producing 'spherical' drones since at least 2015, when it won a $1 million competition in the United Arab Emirates.

The makers of Flyability's 'gimbal' drone and the SpICED balloon drone both cited collision safety as their reasoning for pursuing these unmanned aircrafts' round designs — not high maneuverability for clandestine spying.  

But they are not the only actors pursuing this kind of aerospace research, according to AARO's departing director. 

'They've tried these all over the place,' Dr. Kirkpatrick said.

'There are a number of advanced technologies that are being commercialized that people don't recognize,' he said. 'Why they go immediately to 'this is extraterrestrial' is another conversation.'

While playing a 2022 military UFO video taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Mid East, AARO director Dr. Kirkpatrick told NASA's UFO advisory panel last May, 'We see these ['metallic orbs'] all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers'

Speaking to Bergen's podcast, Dr. Kirkpatrick emphasized that he sees more terrestrial, counter-intelligence and defense-oriented tasks as AARO's primary reason for being.

'The office's mission is not to prove the existence of extraterrestrials,' he said.  

'The office's mission is to minimize technical and intelligence surprise. That is the primary mission.'

The laser physicist noted that last February's Chinese spy balloon drama, when multiple objects were tracked and shot down within US and Canadian airspace, could be attributed to AARO's work focusing on anomalous aerial activities.

'Four major candidates' have been interviewed to replace Pentagon UFO boss, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick (above), an anonymous source told DailyMail.com, following heated public sparring between the former CIA physicist and UFO whistleblowers, who 'never did trust Sean,' according to one UFO whistleblower's attorney Daniel Sheehan  

For years, national security reporters have speculated that the Navy's 'cube in a sphere' UFOs might be related to a 1949 patent for an 'airborne radar reflector' (schematic above) filed with the US Patent and Trade Office by Washington DC resident Leon Chromak

In the past, Dr. Kirkpatrick said, 'in the long list of things that they need to be paying attention to, this one was at the bottom of that list.' 

'So, there is a gap — and no one fully, I think, appreciated until the last few years that that gap could potentially be exploited by somebody,' he explained, 'put a platform in, you know, [the] continental United States that nobody knew was there.' 

But Dr. Kirkpatrick's terrestrial approach during his 18-month tenure at AARO has not been without its critics — particularly over his very public disagreements with UFO whistleblower and fellow NRO veteran David Grusch. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick expanded his own criticisms of Grusch in his new interview with Bergen, describing him as someone who had 'fallen to the influence' of UFO 'True Believers' within the US military and private defense contractor Bigelow Aerospace, which investigated UFO cases on contract for the Pentagon from 2007 to 2012.

In a new op-ed published by Scientific American last week, Dr. Kirkpatrick further dismissed Grusch as one of several 'conspiracy-minded 'whistleblowers.'' 

Grusch, a former high-ranking US intelligence official, has accused the US military and its private contractors of illegally hiding evidence of crashed UFOs, recovered 'beings,' and even UFO-related deaths, both under oath to Congress and in the press. 

For their part, these same UFO whistleblowers have accused Dr. Kirkpatrick of fostering an 'atmosphere of disinterest,' while others have suggested his superiors are secretly holding back AARO's UFO investigation efforts. 

Daniel Sheehan, the Harvard-trained lawyer who represented UFO whistleblower Luis Elizondo in his complaint to the Pentagon's Inspector General, said last year to DailyMail.com, 'really knowledgeable' UFO whistleblowers 'never did trust Sean.' 

Instead, 'what they were doing is they were going straight through to the Senate Intelligence Committee,' Sheehan said. 

(To be sure, however, some military UFO witnesses have also described 'really positive' experiences with the Dr. Kirkpatrick's office.)

Scientists with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) in China, published their prototype spherical drone (above) in a Sept. 2022 issue of the journal Drones. The cube configuration, they wrote, showed a 40 percent reduction in 'trajectory control error'

Swiss-based Flyability entered their own spherical drone (above) into a contest launched by the Prime Minister's Office of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE competition was billed as the 'World Cup of Drones,' with over 800 submitted entries from 57 countries

Flyability won $1 million in the UAE's 'Drones for Good' competition in 2015 for their 'gimbal'

In portions of Dr. Kirkpatrick's new podcast interview, which appear to have been cut before air, the retired government scientist commented that AARO's benefit to the US Intelligence Community (IC) was its latitude to conduct domestic surveillance 'We filled a gap,' he said

In portions of Dr. Kirkpatrick's podcast interview — which appear to have been cut before air — the retired government scientist commented that AARO's benefit to the US Intelligence Community (IC) was its latitude to conduct domestic surveillance.  

'We filled a gap,' Dr. Kirkpatrick said. 'The intelligence community is prohibited by law from observing [the] continental United States, right?' 

'And so, the only people that actually have authority to do that, really, are FBI, Homeland Security, [and] a few other counter-intelligence elements across the IC,' he noted, 'but that's pretty much it.'

'No one fully, I think, appreciated until the last few years that that gap could potentially be exploited by somebody [...] And that's where you ended up with Chinese balloons,' he said. 

When DailyMail.com reached out to Peter Bergen and a spokesperson for his podcast, the spokesperson noted that, based on conversations with the 'In the Room' team, 'those excerpts were cut for time.' 

'Episodes generally don't go over 45 minutes,' they said.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

02-02-2024 om 20:38 geschreven door peter  

Arizona Man Filmed Huge Solid UFO In Phoenix Lights: MIB Took Video & Man Vanished

Frances Barwood, a member of the city council, opened an investigation into the incident. Since the military and local authorities had already managed to claim that the lights seen by the eyewitnesses were only flares, her coworkers thought her behavior was ludicrous.

Barwood received a call from Richard Curtis a few months later. He said right away that he had extremely detailed footage of the Phoenix Lights despite being an injured former soldier. He claimed that had personally captured them using high-quality equipment.

“He said you could see the shape. He said you could see how big it was in comparison to the surrounding buildings and everything. He described that the lights were gaseous. He was so excited that he had gotten all this on video,” Barwood recalled him telling her. Additionally, Curtis admitted to Barwood that he had no idea who else to call and that he trusted her.

Since the majority of the Phoenix Lights video footage up until this point had been merely specks of light on a dark background, Barwood was intrigued by this message. Curtis agreed to provide copies of the footage to Barwood’s office after she urged him to do so. However, days passed, and she did not receive films either by mail or by courier. “I thought he made this up. He didn’t have video, you know, all this stuff,” she said.

A week later, Curtis telephoned Barwood at her house and inquired about her thoughts on the films. Barwood informed him that she had not received them and expressed her amazement. Curtis continued by telling her that following their phone call, two men from her workplace stopped up at his home. The two “similar-looking” individuals were fully covered in black (three-piece black suits, black shoes, black hats, black suitcases, etc.). The men were not dressed in jackets or other gear, even though it was fairly chilly outside. It struck Curtis as weird.

He asked the men if they were from Barwood’s office and they confirmed it. Then they inquired about the Phoenix Lights videos, specifically to find out if Curtis had copied them. They responded that they would make copies for him themselves when he said he had not been able to. Curtis then handed them his videos and the two men left his house in a black sedan.

Barwood informed Curtis that she had no men in her office and that all of her staff were female. “I had no idea who these guys were. It sounds so bizarre. Nothing made sense to me,” Barwood recalled thinking. All of this infuriated Richard Curtis, who concluded that the authorities had misled him. In an interview with Phoenix TV, he discussed everything that had happened, including the “Men in Black” visit and that they took his videos.

Read also:

• Neil Armstrong Confided Italian Journalist That UFOs Observed Them Insistently On Moon
• Harvard Scientist Explains Which UFOs Over Ukraine Could Be Extraterrestrial Spacecraft
• Ex-US Army Major Released NASA Footage Of 2000-Mile-Long UFO Near Saturn
• Ex-CIA Officer: Truth About UFOs Is Terrifying & Interdimensional Beings Are Within Us

And shortly after that, when Barwood tried to call Curtis, she discovered that he was not answering. When she got to his apartment, he was not there, but the neighbors informed her that Curtis had supposedly taken a faulty medication and had been transported by ambulance to the hospital. There were no records of Curtis ever being admitted to any Phoenix-area hospitals when Barwood started looking for him there.

Barwood made the decision to have her phone lines checked by a professional when she questioned how the odd men even knew about the tapes. He visited her house and conducted his tests there. After that, he went outdoors. “He wouldn’t come back in the house. He came to the backdoor and said, “No, I’m not coming in. Yes, your phone is tapped, it’s a government tap,” she said.

Since the military and authorities insisted that the Phoenix Lights were nothing more than flares, Barwood was astounded to learn that someone in the US government had tapped her phones. Richard Curtis vanished without a trace.

It became a worldwide sensation throughout the course of the subsequent months. It was “the second biggest case in UFOlogy after Roswell,” according to the late Art Bell, host of the syndicated paranormal radio program Coast to Coast AM.

The bizarre light show, according to skeptics, was caused by man-made aircraft from Glendale’s Luke Air Force Base or other neighboring military installations conducting training drills. The Phoenix Lights, according to UFOlogists, were not of this world.

Below you can find a transcript from a FOX10 NEWS (Phoenix Lights) reported by Jim Schnabel: (Source)

Voiceover: Months after this (March 13) sighting there are many questions regarding the strange lights over Phoenix. Is this a solid craft, or merely lights in an empty sky? What could be the conclusive evidence is now mysteriously missing. Richard Curtis claims his home video is proof that this sighting was a huge flying craft. And he claims his video shows a solid object in the sky passing over his home.

Curtis: I saw the bottom part (of the craft) as it went over Phoenix, because the lights lit the bottom of it, and it partially blocked out the clouds and the stars. : voiceover: Curtis called city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, wanting to show her the footage. : (on screen: cut to a headshot of Barwood)

Barwood: He said he had it on two videotapes, and would I like them, so I said, “Of course I would.”, and could he give me copies of them. He said he would. I told him how to get them to my office and to mark them ‘personal and confidential’.

Voiceover: But before Curtis could send copies to Barwood, he’s paid a visit by two mysterious men in black. : Curtis:(voiced over MIB reenactments) They were dressed in black suits, with black hats and sunglasses. They asked me if I had tapes for councilwoman Barwood, and I said “Yah, they’re laying right here”. They said, “We’ve stopped by to pick them up.” So I said, “Great!” and just handed (the original tapes) to them.

Barwood: I didn’t get them, and I have no idea who these two men were since I have just females working in my office. It’s absolutely puzzling to me.

Voiceover: Did the tapes ever exist, and if so were they proof of more than “lights” in the sky? And who were these mysterious Men in Black who allegedly took them?

Curtis (voiced over): I think someone listened in on that phone call and wanted those tapes.

Barwood (voiced over): I can’t explain it. It’s just eerie. Voiceover: The mystery continues.

Source:

•  Encounter: UFO, Season 1, Episode 5, Episode aired Sep 21, 2021

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

02-02-2024 om 00:46 geschreven door peter  

Ufology: Why Scientists Are Finally Turning UFO Sightings Into Serious Research

For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor to UFO research.

Take Richard Hoffman, an information technology expert with over 25 years of experience, formerly contracted with the U.S. Army’s Materiel Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a senior lead architect, he kept the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.

He’s also a UFO researcher.

“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”

Hoffman is one of three executive board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU).

✅ Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.

“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long-term scientific study of cases.”

The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data, like radar tracks and video, may exist.

Getty Images

An Objective of Legitimacy

The SCU played a significant role in studying the 2004 Nimitz UFO Encounter, when the organization released a nearly 300-page report on the incident. In 2017, the story hit the mainstream when the New York Times published a groundbreaking story about the Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego in November 2004, and captured video of the object with their F-18’s gun camera.

In 2019, Popular Mechanics published a story about several other military personnel who also witnessed the Nimitz encounter on their radar systems and over their ship’s video system.

The SCU paper examined the available public data and testimony regarding the case, concluding that the “results suggest that given the available information, the AAV’s capabilities are beyond any known technology.”

To be clear, the SCU hasn’t concluded that some non-human intelligence is responsible. Fully aware of the significant gaps in data, the organization has suggested that “the public release of all Navy records associated with this incident to enable a full, scientific and open investigation is strongly recommended.”

The UFO research community is used to having scant data on UFO incidents; the vast majority of cases are purely anecdotal. When physical evidence or data is available, the well-established ufological conspiracy and myth-making machines begin to put that data into jeopardy.

“To date, there hasn’t been an extensive and well-funded scientific investigation of these phenomena using state-of-the-art investigative tools and a dedicated investigative team,” Robert Powell, an SCU executive board member and device physics expert, tells Popular Mechanics. The SCU is aiming to change that. Membership in the organization requires a resume submission, and a committee meets to thoroughly vet each new member.

So who makes up the 120+ members of the SCU, exactly? Mostly scientists, former military officers, and former law enforcement personnel with technical experience and investigative backgrounds, Powell says. While SCU encourages all UAP scientists to publish their work through peer-reviewed journals, and SCU members have been authors in peer-reviewed journals, a stigma still exists about UAP research. “This prevents quality papers from being published in mainstream journals simply because the topic is UAP. Therefore, SCU also provides a peer-review process for UAP papers submitted to SCU for publication,” Powell says.

To begin bridging the gap between the UFO research community and the scientific community, the SCU formed its own open-access peer-reviewed academic journal, Limina. “Anyone wishing to submit a paper to the journal should contact SCU,” Powell says.

Bettmann//Getty Images

Fighting the Stigma

Yet for all the promising progress, the SCU and similar organizations are still facing an uphill battle. The decades-long taboo surrounding UFOs and their study is thoroughly entrenched in established scientific and academic communities. They are, in essence, a dirty subject that can kill a professional career.

In 1953, the Robertson Panel was formed to look at UFO reports at the behest of the government due to a string of odd aerial objects being spotted over Washington, D.C. the previous year. The panel concluded in its classified report that UFOs posed no risk to national security, and proposed that the National Security Council actively debunk UFO reports with the intention to ideologically inoculate the public to ensure UFOs would become the subject of ridicule. The Panel even recommended that UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity.

Seventeen years later, the infamous Condon Report, which was a product of the U.S. Air Force and the University of Colorado, was responsible for the death of the Air Force’s UFO study, Project Blue Book. The report became embroiled in controversy when a memorandum was released, explaining that the report itself had to “trick” the public into thinking the study was objective, but would ensure that the final and official position is that all UFO incidents were hoaxes, delusion, and human error.

Officially, UFOs became the subject of ridicule. Tie that in with the rise of new-age UFO prophets and cults, stories of space men from Venus, alien bases in Antarctica, and the merging of UFO and conspiracy cultures, and those who used empirical data or maintained a rational and logical research approach became lumped into the same subculture as people claiming to be alien channelers or time-traveling alien ambassadors who often use people’s gullibility to earn a living.

It’s no wonder academics, professionals, and scientists publicly shy away from the subject. In research for this article, one physicist from a university in New York expressed their discomfort and asked that their name not be used because they were still trying to get tenure.

“I don’t get the sense the scientific community is any more interested or open than it was before,” Alexander Wendt, Ph.D., a political science professor at the Ohio State University, tells Popular Mechanics. “But what has changed, I think, is the politics. I think that the wind is changing on this, just like it is on a lot of things. And it’s probably young people in particular who are driving the change and are more open.”

Forging a Scientific Future

Wendt, who has done academic work on the UFO question and presented a lecture at TEDx Columbus on the science of UFOs, sits on the board of UFOData, a project designed to create high-tech observation systems to monitor the skies and track anomalous phenomena. He knows that the taboo exists surrounding UFO research, and getting any grant money to study UFOs is still practically impossible. According to Wendt, neither the government nor any established scientific organizations are going to fund UFO research. The solution seems to be crowdfunding or finding private donors who will invest in these projects.

UFOData isn’t the only group engaged in observational studies. For three decades, Project Hessdalen, a small observatory station that monitors a valley in Norway subject to strange light phenomena, has been jointly funded by the Østfold University College and personal donations. Another organization, the UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP), is also building small computer units designed to monitor and track aerial oddities. Using multiple sensors, the UFO Data Acquisition Unit is designed to record and track UAP, as well as provide metadata which can be analyzed.

Hoffman recognizes that contemporary ufology still makes academics and scientists nervous. Even with the 2019 Navy announcement that UAPs do violate American airspace and that the Pentagon was running the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, people are starting to ask more questions and some scientists are starting to participate.

“We are encouraged by this and believe it will continue to advance, however, the UFO community itself is composed of factions which continue to make scientists cringe,” Hoffman says. “SCU is attempting to support scientists and serious researchers by focusing on what science can do to advance their interests. They see us as being a safe place where conspiracy theories are non-existent and scientific methodologies win.”

So while the existence of UFOs is no longer up for debate, their source very much is. The UFO community has always been comprised of cultural and social renegades who haunt the fringes of mainstream culture, subjects of ridicule more than respect. While some still smirk at the thought of anomalous aerial objects occupying our skies, the information slowly coming out into the public domain is starting to prove that these objects may not be a laughing matter.

Whether the source of some of these data-rich UFO incidents is secret government technology, an alien nonhuman intelligence, or something fundamentally beyond our physical and philosophical understanding, we’re left to wonder, as countless thinkers and, yes, even scientists, have before: “What if?”

• Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on July 2, 2020.

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

Vallée’s lecture at the event, titled “The Age of Impossible: Anticipating Discontinuous Futures,” dealt with how the speed at which modern technology accelerates has resulted in events that would have seemed impossible to many people only years before they transpired. With examples ranging from the collapse of General Motors in 2009 to Bernie Madoff’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vallee presented what he called a “Typology of the Impossible” that hinged on four main kinds of scenarios: events that escalated too quickly, convergences of “low-p scenarios,” events that appear to violate current cultural norms, and finally, scenarios that involve the appearance of a “completely alien concept within a particular culture.”

“There are many things in our culture today that fit that model,” Vallée said at one point during the talk, as he described historical instances where things that seemed unimaginable at one time later became technological norms. Such things, Vallee said, “are possible, but we cannot imagine them. The public is not aware that they can be done. History provides many examples, and the internet itself is an example of something that was unimaginable.”

After discussing his own part in helping create ARPANET, Vallée went on to share several more examples from recent history where unforeseen scientific advancements occurred, seemingly out of the blue.

“And finally,” the scientist said, never evincing a change in his measured tone and demeanor, “the Pentagon could not imagine that fast, erratic, mobile, oval objects in the sky were anything other than mental illusions, and they…” After a brief pause, Vallée cryptically added, “and you can fill out the answers in the next few years.”

Despite his success as a venture capitalist and “co-creator of the Internet”, most of the attendees at the 2013 TEDx event in Geneva were likely aware of what Vallée is best known for: his decades of involvement with the study of unidentified aerial phenomena. As a young computer scientist and astronomer in the 1960s, Vallee not only worked alongside Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book but also authored Anatomy of a Phenomenon, one of the earliest popular books written on the UFO subject by a professional scientist. Though he never uttered any of the popular names or abbreviations for the phenomenon, it was obvious what Vallee had been alluding to during this brief, passing reference to “oval objects” during his talk.

At least at that time, what had not been so obvious had been why Vallée specifically referenced the Pentagon’s relationship to UAP, nor why a series of seemingly impossible future events might come to pass involving this subject “in the next few years.”

THE CALL FROM DR. VALLÉE came through earlier than I expected.

The scientist’s voice, softened by age yet still resonant with the French he learned as a youth in Pontoise before emigrating to America many decades ago, was unmistakable to me, having heard it in many interviews and documentaries over the years. Vallée, now 83, is a man whose work in the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is only one finger on the glove of his impressive resume, spanning decades of work in astronomy, physics, computer science, and venture capitalism.

As evidenced by his billing at the TEDx event in 2013, one could indeed argue that Vallée is partly responsible for the creation of the Internet, although the affable Frenchman is modest on this point, nearly to a fault. This much was evident almost immediately as we began our discussion, and I wasted no time in bringing up the talk in Geneva and some of the intriguing hints he had dropped at that time.

“I’ve seen the development and the unfolding of a number of technologies,” Vallée told me during our call. “Very often what happens is that a discovery is made, and everyone agrees that it is important, and people write papers, and so on. And then it disappears.” 

• Don’t miss Jacques Vallée’s recent interview on Rebelliously Curious with Chrissy Newton over on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel, and linked at the end of this article.

“You know, the Arpanet was essentially dead for a while,” Vallée recalls from his years working on the project decades ago. “Until [the] National Science Foundation picked up the funding, thinking that there would be several internets.” Initially a simple matter of accounting, the NSF initially believed it would be easier to fund three separate projects that looked at using networks through which computers could connect for purposes of communication.

THE PATH THAT BROUGHT

Vallée into the tempest that is the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is a long one, which stems back to his early years in Pontoise at an age when the world was still at war.

“There are things you don’t forget,” Vallée said during our call, describing his memories of seeing American aircraft being shot down over his town when he was five years old.

“I remember seeing the crew dropping out in parachutes and the Germans shooting at them.”

By 1945, the war had ended, although fears of a return to conflict lingered throughout parts of Europe. To the north, reports of ghostly “rockets” over countries like Sweden in the summer of 1946 kept many guessing whether the Soviets were conducting tests, perhaps with a form of secret new aerial weapon they had captured from the Germans. The following year, an all-new kind of paranoia would erupt across the Atlantic, as American newspapers were flooded with stories of “flying saucers” seen careening through the skies, especially in airspace around sites of importance to U.S. national security.

By the Autumn of 1954, as the wave of sightings of strange objects was cresting over North America, France was having its own torrent of reports of similar phenomena. Major newspapers like L’Aurore and France-Soir were carrying stories about unidentified flying objects almost daily, and Vallée began collecting clippings of stories like those of Marius Dewilde, a railroad worker who described his observation of a pair of diminutive “robots” next to a dark machine resting on the train tracks.

The reports seemed incredible, and very well might have remained so had it not been for what occurred the following year in May 1955, when Vallée had his own sighting.

“My mother saw it first,” he would later recall of the incident. She had been working in the garden when Vallée, sixteen at the time, heard her screaming for him and his father. Vallée made his way from the attic where his father’s woodworking shop was located, and down three flights of stairs just in time to observe a metallic disc-shaped object “with a clear bubble on top” as it hovered over the nearby church of Saint-Maclou.

The object reminded them of the parachutists the family had watched descending from the skies during the war. His mother, who continued watching it, recalled how it sped away, leaving only a few wisps of white vapor where the object had been. Vallée would later learn that a schoolmate nearby had also noticed the object, observing it through binoculars.

Despite his father’s disapproval, Vallée maintained his interest in these unusual aerial objects. “I realized,” he would later write in his journal, “that I would forever be ashamed of the human race if we simply ignored ‘their’ presence.” The young Frenchman began to educate himself on the topic by reading the works of Aimé Michel, one of the earliest serious French researchers to undertake the study of unusual aerial phenomena. It was an interest he maintained through his college years, completing his degree in mathematics at the University of Paris in 1959 and going on to receive his M.S. from the University of Lille Nord de France two years later. By 1961, Vallée was employed at the Paris Observatory as an astronomer with its artificial satellite service, tracking space objects through theodolites by night.

“Naively, I started work here with great enthusiasm, assuming that we would be engaged in genuine research,” Vallée would recall of his years at the observatory. “That is not what I found.” In July of 1961, he and the other astronomers recalled a few instances where they observed objects passing overhead that they could not identify. “The next morning,” he recalled of one incident, his superior “simply confiscated the tape and destroyed it.” Vallée inquired as to why they hadn’t sent this seemingly important information along with their normal Telex tape dispatches to U.S. Navy officials in Paris.

“The Americans would laugh at us,” his superior scoffed.

Having his fill of the prevailing attitudes in Paris, by 1962, Vallée had emigrated to the United States, first working at the University of Texas, Austin, as a research associate in astronomy, and thereafter for a short stint at the McDonald Observatory, where he helped to compile the first informational map of the planet Mars with fellow French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs. However, by the summer of 1963, Vallée was looking ahead at new opportunities, one of which arrived following a meeting in September with astronomer J. Allen Hynek, chair of Northwestern University’s astronomy department, who helped the young scientist find work as a systems analyst on campus. Hynek, at the time the scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, was a natural ally; not only would he serve as a mentor to Vallée, who went on to receive his Ph.D. from the institution in 1967, but for years thereafter the two would remain close colleagues in the pursuit of their mutual interest.

An undated photo of astronomer J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée

(public domain).

However, by the late 1960s, it seemed evident that scientific opinions on the UFO subject in the United States had finally begun to sour, despite the efforts of Hynek, Vallée, and a close network of like-minded scientists looking into the problem. By the end of 1968, the University of Colorado UFO Project, a U.S. Air Force-funded study headed by physicist Edward U. Condon, had delivered its findings; in an introductory summary to the lengthy report, Condon wrote that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” adding that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Vallée, musing over the Condon study during our call, remembered his incredulity at the time he first heard about its conclusions.

“That’s an interesting chapter in science,” he said. “Or the failure of science.”

By then, Vallee had already returned to France. As he, his wife Janine, and their son, Oliver, were acclimating to life in Europe again, Vallée was quietly readjusting his approach to the UFO question.

“Once I was back in France, in a way, it served to give me the space to rethink what we had done,” Vallée told me. “I mean, I knew the Condon Committee was a joke… and that science was somewhere else. So it forced me to ask some fundamental questions that I would not have asked if I had stayed at Northwestern.”

“So I thought, where does all this come from, anyway?”

Vallée began haunting the old Paris bookshops, acquiring rare historical texts and early treatises on the sciences. An interesting question had begun to form in his mind, as he recorded in a journal entry on October 29, 1967: What about the forgotten accounts of Little People, of Elementals, of Leprechauns? If these beings are part of the same phenomenon we see now, what does that mean for their nature? Are we necessarily dealing with extraterrestrials?

“I found that the phenomenon has always been there,” Vallée says of his years spent mining observations of unusual aerial phenomena from texts that date back to classical antiquity. “Of course, they are describing it in the language of the time,” he notes, “but they are describing something that’s very, very much like what I get from witnesses today.”

The fruits of such musings culminated in Vallée’s seminal 1969 effort, Passport to Magonia, widely regarded as one of his most influential early works and, paradoxically, the effort that cast him as a pariah in the eyes of many of his ufological peers.

“At first, it was completely rejected.” he says, recalling one UFO magazine that featured his likeness shortly after Magonia was published, accompanied by the headline, “Vallée has gone off the deep end.” Today, Vallée laughs about the chiding he received from his peers, and I note a hint of nostalgia about those early works behind the dry chuckle that emerges.

“Maybe the truth was in the deep end.”

OVER THE COURSE OF the ensuing decades, Vallée would continue to challenge the extraterrestrial hypothesis favored particularly among American UFO researchers. Parallel to this effort, his professional career brought him into work with the Institute for the Future in the mid-1970s, where he worked as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation computer networking project that gave rise to one of the earliest iterations of the ARPANET conferencing system. In the following decade, Vallée would become involved in venture capitalism, first as a partner at Sofinnova, then moving on to become a general partner in multiple different Silicon Valley funds, including his involvement in private investments today.

As his professional career flourished, Vallée never lost sight of his fascination with strange aerial phenomena. He authored a string of follow-ups to Magonia on the topic of UFOs throughout the 1970s and 80s, each continuing to build on the premise that the phenomenon could be far more complex than conventional opinions on UFOs would offer. His pioneering work continued to garner attention along the way, even serving as the inspiration for Claude Lacombe, a French scientist portrayed by actor François Truffaut in Stephen Spielberg’s classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

In the 1990s, Vallée authored a trilogy of books that focused on the prospects of alien contact. However, he always maintained a healthy distance from drawing conclusions about what any exotic technologies behind UFOs might represent. It was also during this period that Vallée began working with real estate developer Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded scientific research effort that looked at UFOs and related phenomena.

In July 2014, Vallée presented a paper at the GEIPAN International Workshop in Paris, France, titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Strategy for Research,” offering both a snapshot of what he had learned about the complexities of the phenomenon over several decades of study, as well as what he believed might be a path toward more fruitful future research.

“After years of ideological arguments based on anecdotal data the field of UAP research appears ready to emerge into a more mature phase of reliable study,” Vallée wrote in the paper’s abstract. Citing the mounting scientific interest in UAP around the world, based in part on documents conveying an official military interest in these phenomena, the scientist argued that the path forward would require the analysis of hard data, paired with intelligently informed theoretical studies.

“Without pre-judging the origin and nature of the phenomena, a range of opportunities arise for investigation,” Vallée wrote, warning that “such projects need to generate new hypotheses and test them in a rigorous way against the accumulated reports of thousands of observers.”

The problem was that in 2014, despite the existence of several notable independent catalogs containing information on historical incidents, there was no single collection of reliable UAP reports—a centralized database, in other words—upon which such studies could rely. This had been part of what prompted Vallée to assemble such a database for NIDS, work that would later carry over as Bigelow’s efforts moved out of the private sector and into the official world as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP).

“In the United States the National Institute for Discovery Science (“NIDS”) and the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation have initiated a series of special catalogues to safeguard their own reports from public sources and from their staff,” Vallée wrote in his 2014 paper, adding that he had been asked to develop a UAP data warehouse containing 11 individual databases.

“The project is known as ‘Capella,’” it stated.

According to slides accompanying Vallée’s 2014 presentation, the Capella project focused on several areas that ranged from patterns emerging from UAP data to possible physics underlying the phenomenon and its impact on humans.

During our call, Vallée spoke candidly about the project and what he hopes it might still be used to achieve.

“There is such a database. It is the one we built as part of the AATIP/BAASS project in Las Vegas,” Vallée told me. Comprising roughly 260,000 cases from countries around the world, the scientist said during our call that the Capella database had been one of the major focal points of the program.

“Contrary to what people believe, [Capella] is the largest part of the budget that was spent on the classified project,” Vallée said. This included paying for translations of incident reports from Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and several other languages into English, and providing funding for teams that conducted additional research on-site.

“It was a large effort for two years, Vallée said, though he added that in reality, “probably close to fifty or sixty years of work went into the database.” Although Capella constitutes what is arguably the most extensive database containing information on UAP ever built, don’t expect to see it any time soon; it remains classified as a part of the data developed under the DIA’s AAWSAP program managed by James Lackatski between 2008 and 2010.

• 

See Also

EARTH ‘ON COURSE’ FOR SATURN-LIKE RING OF SPACE JUNK

“The database is still classified, to my knowledge,” Vallée said during our call, prompting me to ask whether such a vast amount of historical information on the UAP subject shouldn’t be made publicly available.

Speaking with The Debrief in December 2021, Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D., director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and a longtime colleague of Vallée, expressed frustration over previous statements made by Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., another of the scientists who worked on the AAWSAP program, who noted that much of the AAWSAP data will likely remain classified.

“I mean, isn’t that discouraging, disappointing, [and] ridiculous,” Rodeghier told The Debrief. “It’s not work on how we can get a hypersonic missile. It’s UFO investigations. How can that be classified at this point? And the answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be classified now.”

During our call, Vallée expressed similar sentiments to Rodeghier’s, although he also defended Capella’s current classified status on account of some of the information it protects.

“You make a good point,” Vallée told me. “That’s the kind of thing that should be accessible to science,” although adding that “it will be accessible to very highly competent people who can continue to look at it under the proper classification.”

“I think it’s properly classified,” Vallée added, “because it contains a lot of medical data that should be private.” However, he said that he thinks that over time, perhaps portions can be “sanitized” for release to the public, “so that we don’t invade the privacy of individuals who have reported those things, especially their medical data.”

“It’s not classified for any military or intelligence reason as far as I know,” Vallée said. “But I’m not part of the project anymore.” Vallée noted that even he no longer has access to Capella, although several longtime colleagues of his who still work in government do.

“I’m very proud to have worked on that,” Vallée said. “It’s probably the high water mark in the computer study of UFOs so far.”

“But as we know, the high water mark is going to go even higher after this.”

DESPITE HIS OWN LEVEL of involvement with government UAP studies, as well as the level of interest generated by videos of unidentified objects collected by the U.S. military—the existence of which Vallée himself hinted at in Geneva as early as 2013—the 83-year-old scientist still doesn’t necessarily hold military UAP data in higher regard than that collected by civilians.

“The military cases in the databases I know of are less than ten percent in every country,” Vallee said during our call. “They are really good because the military has radar. They have, of course, planes that can chase the objects… pilots who are very well trained and very well positioned to give a description.”

“Those are excellent reports,” Vallée concedes. “But what about the farmer in the field, who sees [an object] close to him, and has traces, and has materials? Who has felt physiological reactions?”

“What about those cases?” he asks. “They are full of information.”

Vallée’s appreciation for UAP information collected from non-governmental sources is particularly evident in his latest book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, coauthored with Italian journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris. In it, they unravel the story of two men, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, who claim to have witnessed the crash of an unusual aircraft near San Antonito, New Mexico, in August 1945. Padilla, who went on to become a State Trooper in Rowland Heights, California, maintained that as children, he and Baca had seen a large, dull-gray avocado-shaped object—along with its frantic occupants—where it had apparently crashed near his family’s ranch. The object, they say, was later recovered by the military.

In a newly updated second edition of the book, Vallée and Harris present additional witness testimony they have gathered about the alleged incident, which includes an observation of the crash remembered by the family of Lt. Colonel William J. Brothy, who at the time had been piloting a B-25 on a training mission. According to Brothy, he and his crew had flown over the site and recalled, “There were a lot of pieces.”

In Trinity, Vallée emphasizes what he believes are undeniable similarities between descriptions of the 1945 incident and a UAP landing in New Mexico observed by police officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964. Then, the following year another strikingly similar incident occurred near Valensole, France, involving the close observation of a landed craft and its apparent pilot or occupant.

“There is a case in Valensole, in France, and the case in Socorro. The object is identical to the Trinity object,” Vallée said. “And the [occupants] are identical to the creatures that Mr. Padilla is describing to me at Trinity, that he saw.”

“I was involved in Socorro, and I was involved in Valensole. Those are cases I know very well,” Vallée said, adding that Trinity contains new information on the Socorro case, once referred to by Hector Quintanilla, director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book at the time of the incident, as being “the best documented case on record.”

Today, much of Vallée’s research is focused on the collection and study of material samples believed to have been collected from UAP. Compared with his earlier work, which challenged popular notions about extraterrestrials being associated with UAP, this might surprise longtime followers of the scientist’s work. For Vallée, however, it is only the next phase in the many decades he has spent working toward resolving the mystery.

“It’s all one thing,” Vallée said during our call. “The first book I wrote was Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which… I took as a study of extraterrestrial intelligence in general, and how it was I thought UFOs illustrated the idea of life elsewhere and intelligence elsewhere… that’s definitely the place from which we started.”

“Then, when I started working with Dr. Hynek, and I started working with—in those days, it was just called ‘computer catalogs,’ it wasn’t dignified as databases or data warehouses—but those catalogs held thousands of cases. My first complete catalog was donated to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado, when they did the study funded by the Air Force.”

“Which,” Vallée notes, “to my surprise, concluded the problem didn’t exist. So, we’ve come a long way from that.”

Given his level of involvement in working to resolve the UAP question—an effort now spanning more than six decades, including his involvement in official government UAP investigations in several countries and having authored some of the most popular books ever written on the subject—perhaps the most surprising thing expressed by Vallée during our discussion had been his predictions about how he thinks his own work will be remembered by future generations.

“I think everything I’ve done, and everything my contemporaries have done, is going to be forgotten,” he said, mirroring his observations of the invention, and subsequent reinvention, of so many other innovations in science over time, not least among them the World Wide Web.

“And then in a few years, it’s going to be reinvented by, you know, great people at Stanford and Harvard in a new way,” he tells me, accompanied by the distinctive chuckle I had by now come to expect after one of his witty responses.

“That’s always the way science works.”

• Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

01-02-2024 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

Two US Marines Claimed Corbell’s Huge Mojave Triangle UFO Is Definitely Not Flares

UFO investigator and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released another captivating footage for UFO enthusiasts. Along with investigative journalist George Knapp, Corbell claims to obtain spectacular footage of a UFO with five shiny lights in the V-formation as in the “Phoenix Lights,” hovering over a Marine base in the California desert.

Corbell has provided a detailed description of this incident and considered it a “Mass UFO sighting” as it involves a substantial amount of diverse documentation, including videos, photos, and recorded direct eyewitness testimonies from active military personnel. But still, it carries numerous doubts. Before discussing them, let us first take a look at the sighting details shared by Corbell.

According to Corbell, the incident occurred on the evening of April 20, 2021, at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms – Camp Wilson, a significant United States military base. The sighting lasted approximately 10 minutes and was witnessed by more than 50 people. They consistently reported observing a triangular-shaped craft during the encounter. It did not make any sound and was reported to be the size in the range from a football field to that of a three-bedroom, two-story house.

Corbell explained that he received a tip about the incident, prompting him to investigate further. Within a remarkable 36 hours after the event, he managed to connect with individuals who were present at the base during the sighting. He compared the sighting to the famous Phoenix Lights incident, citing the resemblance of a perfect V-shaped row of lights.

The craft was first observed at 8:20 pm PST and after a few minutes of observation, witnesses captured it on their iPhones. At 8:29 p.m., another remarkable occurrence took place. Illumination rounds were discharged into the night sky, above the UAP craft, leaving a visible trace and providing additional evidence of the incident. Astonishingly, at 8:30 pm, witnesses reported that the UAP seemingly “blinked out” or disappeared, just moments before the illumination rounds approached the vicinity of the unidentified craft.

Skeptical of military involvement, Corbell shared the first video of the sighting on his podcast “Weaponized” and discussed it in detail with Knapp. The footage captured the astonishment and confusion of witnesses as they saw the unidentified object in the sky. While the video did not clearly show the body of the craft, the audio and eyewitness accounts confirmed its presence.

Corbell shared the second video, which featured the reactions of U.S. Marines who were present. Their comments reflected a mix of bravado and genuine awe, acknowledging that something extraordinary was unfolding before their eyes, says Knapp. They ruled out the possibility of flares and recognized the uniqueness of the situation.

Corbell Rules Out Flares As An Explanation For UFO

Corbell debunks the theory that the sighting could be attributed to flares. He points out that the lights observed in the footage were a different color, more reddish, compared to the illuminating flares typically used, which are brighter and have a different hue. Flares also descend on parachutes, while the unidentified craft remained stationary for the duration of the sighting, with only slight forward movement at one point.

Although the triangle shape of the craft is not visible in the video, eyewitnesses on the ground reported seeing it. In a stroke of luck, another detachment of Marines shot up illuminating flares in an attempt to get a better look at the craft. The subsequent footage shows the descent of these flares onto the object, providing a side-by-side comparison between the appearance of flares and the lights observed on the craft.

Interestingly, as the flares descend, the lights on the craft appear to blink out in succession. However, according to eyewitnesses, the entire craft itself disappeared, as they could see more clearly than the footage captured.

Corbell raises an intriguing question about the behavior of the craft. If it is intelligently controlled, how might it react to the presence of flares being deployed above it to illuminate the area? This line of inquiry suggests that the craft’s response, or lack thereof, could indicate an advanced level of control and intelligence behind its movements.

Interview with Two US Marines who saw UFO

Corbell conducted a groundbreaking interview with two active-duty US Marines who witnessed this remarkable UFO sighting. The conversation, which was recorded and obtained by Corbell, provides a gripping firsthand account of the event, offering a glimpse into the experiences of these Marines during the encounter.

Taking place approximately 36 hours after the initial sighting, the interview captures the raw emotions and astonishment felt by the Marines as they recall the extraordinary incident. Both Marines, one serving as a mortar man and the other as artillery, share their perspectives on the sighting, revealing intriguing details about the event.

Corbell begins the conversation by asking for specific details, such as the location and time of the sighting. The Marines state that the event occurred around 8:25 pm near 29 Palms, California, adjacent to Camp Wilson, a Marine base. The Marines mention that the sighting attracted considerable attention, with over 50 people gradually gathering to witness the mysterious lights that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

When asked about people’s reactions to the sighting, the Marines explain that the majority of witnesses were unable to identify the object. They note that, despite being military personnel, the sighting was unprecedented for them and left everyone puzzled.

Corbell then inquires about the evidence the Marines captured, referring to the video and photo that were shared with him. The Marines confirm that the footage was indeed recorded by one of them, emphasizing that the lights remained stationary for a solid 10 minutes. They assert that the lights were not flares, as flares typically descend rather than stay in one spot for an extended period.

In response to Corbell’s question about their belief in the presence of a craft, one Marine confidently states that he would have to believe so, referencing a photo he took showing a black triangular shape beneath the lights. He dismisses the possibility of the object being flares or illumination rounds based on his experience working with artillery. The other Marine explains that the size, color, and behavior of the lights were unlike anything they had encountered before, drawing comparisons to their own illumination rounds.

Read also:

• Pentagon Has Clear Image Of Triangle UFO Rising Out Of Ocean, Elizondo Confirmed
• Karla Turner Claimed She Found Evidence That Aliens Are Manipulating Human Reality
• Stanford Top Scientist Claims ‘100%’ Aliens Are On Earth; He Himself Saw Grey E.T.s
• Whitley Strieber’s Alien Abduction & Stranger Who Told Him ‘Mankind Is Trapped’

Corbell seeks further clarification, asking if the craft was hovering silently. Both Marines affirm that there was absolutely no sound, emphasizing the stationary nature of the object. When pressed about the size, one Marine compares it to a stealth bomber, although acknowledging that a stealth bomber cannot hover. He suggests that the object might have been even larger than a stealth bomber.

As the conversation progresses, the Marines recount additional intriguing details. They describe objects that emerged from the craft and circled it shortly before it went dark. They explain that these objects were the orange lights seen in the footage, which were actually the illumination rounds discharged above the craft. After the lights disappeared, helicopters began rapidly approaching the area, circling it extensively. The Marines note the presence of a convoy of over 60 trucks that also headed towards the site.

Corbell concludes the interview by asking the Marines to reflect on their experience. One Marine admits that he cannot determine what exactly they witnessed, as it was unlike anything he or his comrades had ever seen before. However, he firmly states that it was not anything recognizable from the US military and believes it was a UFO. The other Marine expresses his curiosity, emphasizing that the event remains highly documented, yet its nature and origin remain a mystery.

Another explanation by John Greenewald, Jr.

Renowned researcher John Greenewald, Jr. offers an alternative explanation for the UFO sighting over Twentynine Palms. Drawing from his experience working on the television show UFO Hunters, Greenewald suggests that the event could be linked to military training exercises rather than an unidentified aerial phenomenon.

Greenewald recalls his time on the show, where they encountered numerous cases similar to this sighting. To provide context, he highlights the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-21 taking place at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center on the same date as the UFO sighting. He presents photographs released by the Department of Defense (DoD) that depict military aircraft on runways during the training exercise.

Greenewald refers to nighttime videos released by the DoD, recorded on April 20, 2021, which showcase the significant military activity in the area. He emphasizes that the DoD’s official release clearly indicates the date and location of the videos. Greenewald acknowledges the presence of live training ranges in the Twentynine Palms area but notes that there was no mention of the UFO event coinciding with the military training exercise in the podcast transcript he examined.

Drawing from his past experiences, Greenewald suggests that many incidents occurring over military training ranges are often misinterpreted as UFOs when they are more likely related to military activities. He recalls solving cases involving Air Force One sightings, military aircraft, and drones, which were initially thought to be UFOs. Greenewald explains that the extensive work done behind the scenes often reveals the true nature of such incidents.

To provide further evidence, Greenewald refers to the additional context provided by The Black Vault, sourced from submitted material. He mentions the presence of B-Roll footage showing five aircraft flares being shot in night vision, which resembles the lights observed in the “UAP” videos. Greenewald questions the coincidence of both the flares and the UFO event occurring on the same date.

Greenewald concludes by sharing the Department of Defense’s response to the claims. A spokesperson confirms the presence of military aviation assets and the ongoing Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course in Twentynine Palms at the time. However, they state that there is no record of communication or allocation of resources to investigate a UAP sighting, and the authenticity of the report cannot be verified.

While Greenewald’s explanation points to military training exercises as a plausible cause for the UFO sighting, further investigation and analysis are necessary to reach a definitive conclusion.

Both Jeremy Corbell and John Greenewald, Jr. present their respective explanations based on their knowledge and perspectives. Corbell highlights the firsthand accounts of eyewitnesses, including active military personnel, who describe a triangular craft with specific characteristics and behavior. He emphasizes the mass UFO sighting and the subsequent air and ground response, suggesting that the event warrants further investigation.

On the other hand, Greenewald provides an alternative perspective grounded in his experience working on UFO-related projects and analyzing military activities. He draws attention to the military training exercises taking place at the same time as the sighting and presents evidence, such as photographs and videos released by the Department of Defense, suggesting that the lights observed could be related to flares and other military operations.

Ultimately, it is up to us to evaluate the evidence and draw our own conclusions. Both Corbell and Greenewald contribute to the ongoing discussion surrounding UFO sightings, offering differing viewpoints that highlight the need for continued research and analysis in order to better understand these phenomena.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

31-01-2024 om 00:44 geschreven door peter  

“I found the aliens, but…” Pentagon's UFO hunter talks about evidence of alien presence

Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon's UFO investigations, debunks conspiracy claims of government cover-ups and alien technology possession.

The truth is out there, but is it extraterrestrial? Sean Kirkpatrick, the scientist who led the Pentagon's UFO investigations, spills the beans on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and the quest for alien life.

No evidence of alien life

Despite conspiracy claims of government cover-ups and reverse engineering of crashed spacecraft, Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon's UAP investigations, sets the record straight: "The best thing that could have happened in this job is I found the aliens, but there's none."

The departure from UAP investigations

Kirkpatrick recently stepped down from directing the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), tasked with investigating potential UFO sightings. The departure comes amid renewed attention fueled by military testimonies suggesting government possession of alien technology.

Military testimonies & alien technology

Former military witnesses testified to the House Oversight Committee, claiming the government's awareness of non-human activity since the 1930s. Allegations included the possession of alien UFOs and bodies of "dead pilots." Kirkpatrick notes that many interviewed shared similar stories of hidden UFOs dating back to the 60s or even earlier

Lack of evidence and government conspiracy

While acknowledging stories of hidden UFOs, Kirkpatrick stresses there is "no evidence of aliens" or a government conspiracy. He mentions a push to bring alien craft materials back into government oversight around the turn of the century, alleging Congress did not know about the supposed hidden program.

Pilots' UAP sightings

Many UFO sightings are reported by pilots witnessing strange objects in the sky. Kirkpatrick explains that, often, these sightings turn out to be caused by parallax—where an object appears to change position due to a shift in the observer's point of view.

Anomalous cases and lack of data

Kirkpatrick notes that between 2 percent and 5 percent of the investigated reports had sufficient data but remained "truly anomalous." He highlights the challenge in explaining phenomena when there is a lack of data, citing the case of U.S. Navy pilots witnessing a tic-tac-shaped object off the coast of California.

{ https://www.hindustantimes.com/ }

25-01-2024 om 21:42 geschreven door peter  

De drie getuigen, Ryan Graves, David Grusch en David Fravor leggen de eed af voor de hoorzitting

{ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/ }

23-01-2024 om 20:59 geschreven door peter  

Op 14 november 2004 stijgt de aanvalsjager Boeing F/A-18 op van het vliegdekschip USS Nimitz in de Stille Oceaan, zo’n 160 kilometer ten zuidwesten van San Diego, Californië.

Aan boord bevindt zich David Fravor.

Met 18 jaar in de cockpit van de US Navy heeft de ervaren piloot veel meegemaakt in de lucht.

Maar over een paar minuten zal David Fravor iets zien dat alle logica tart.

Sinds enkele weken observeert een ander Amerikaans vliegdekschip, de USS Princeton, een reeks onverklaarbare objecten die rondvliegen in het omringende luchtruim. Nu moet David Fravor ze nader onderzoeken.

De gevechtspiloot doorklieft de wolkeloze hemel, tot hij plotseling een van die objecten ziet waar de bemanning van de USS Princeton zich het hoofd over brak.

Uit het raam van de cockpit ziet David Fravor een wit voorwerp met een glad oppervlak dat met circa 222 km/h door de lucht vliegt. Het object is ongeveer 14 meter lang en heeft de vorm van een Tic Tac. Het heeft geen vleugels, straalt geen warmte uit en lijkt op niets wat hij ooit eerder heeft gezien.

neens zoeft de enorme Tic Tac naar zee, waarbij hij in enkele seconden bijna 2 kilometer aflegt – een manoeuvre die met de toenmalige vliegtuigtechnologie niet mogelijk is.

In de loop der jaren zijn er talloze onverklaarbare vliegende objecten gezien. Vaak zijn er natuurverschijnselen in het spel, maar wat de Amerikaanse marine de afgelopen tien jaar heeft meegemaakt, blijft een mysterie.

In 2021 bracht de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst een rapport over ufowaarnemingen uit, en misschien hebben we wel bezoek van levensvormen van elders gehad.

VIDEO: Bekijk de ufowaarneming van 2004

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rWOtrke0HY

23-01-2024 om 20:43 geschreven door peter  

Over the past few years, much of the talk in the UAP community has revolved around Brett Tingley’s reporting of unusual patent applications by Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). Among those patents are: a “plasma compression fusion device” that promises to generate practically unlimited amounts of clean energy with a small reactor; a “high-frequency gravitational wave generator” that promises to harvest the power of gravity; and a “craft using inertial mass reduction device” that promises to revolutionize transportation.

These patent applications relate directly to UAP observables, in that UAPs seem to defy the known laws of physics precisely by appearing to deploy unthinkable amounts of energy in small regions of space, manipulate gravity at will, and have little to no inertial mass. For this reason, many—such as Ariel Cohen, writing for Forbes—have speculated that Pais’s ostensible inventions may be a cover for reverse-engineered UAP technology, and the associated patents an attempt by the US Navy to stay ahead of China and Russia in the new arms’ race.

• https://youtu.be/5E6QyAhTB3o

• https://youtu.be/_lml2D4eHbQ

In this essay, I will argue that these speculations are based on a fundamentally wrong understanding of how the game of Intellectual Property Rights—or ‘IPR’ in short, which includes patents—is played. Whatever NAWCAD’s inventions are, they aren’t reverse-engineered UAP technology and almost certainly have no defense significance.

Although I am best known as a philosopher and scientist, I have spent almost 25 years in the high-tech industry doing technology strategy. I have been deeply immersed in the world of high-tech IPR, having even once co-founded a computer company—Silicon Hive, now part of Intel—that dealt in IPR licensing. As such, despite not being a lawyer myself, I am qualified to opine on patent matters.

A patent is a legal monopoly: it gives an individual or a company the right to be the exclusive exploiter of the patented idea for a limited period—usually 20 years—unless the individual or company in question chooses to license the patent to a third-party. The goal is to give companies an incentive to invest in Research and Development (R&D) without fear that its competitors will immediately benefit from the fruits of that R&D without having invested in it. Patent law is at the foundation of high-tech entrepreneurship for this reason. Without it, which company would invest billions in, say, inventing a new drug, just to see its key competitors reverse-engineer the drug and commercialize an identical, cheaper alternative within months?

But patents represent a trade-off. While giving their holders temporary monopoly power, they also force the inventors to publicly disclose the ideas in question. Indeed, patents—and even patent applications—are public documents by law, available on multiple searchable databases such as Google Patents. Moreover, not only do the inventors have to publicly describe their inventions, they must also do so in a manner that a “person skilled in the art”—that is, a minimally competent practitioner in the field in question—can, based on a patent’s text and diagrams alone, implement a working embodiment of the corresponding invention.

As such, patents are the opposite of industrial secrets. Before deciding whether to patent an idea, a company needs to weight its monopoly benefits against giving the competition a head-start; for this is exactly what a patent application does: it broadcasts to the world the lines along which a company is developing its technology.

Sometimes, the decision of whether to patent an invention or keep it a secret is straightforward. For instance, it may be impossible to hide an idea, either because it is a visible and advertised product feature—such as a fingerprint reader or facial scanner to unlock your phone—or because the product can be easily bought from a shop and reverse-engineered. In these cases, it’s best to patent the whole thing in advance, as the secret cannot be kept.

{ https://thedebrief.org/ }

21-01-2024 om 18:01 geschreven door peter  

THE VANISHING STAR ENIGMA AND THE 1952 WASHINGTON D.C. UFO WAVE

BEATRIZ VILLARROEL·

As we look up at the starry sky, countless celestial bodies silently peer down upon us. Most of these have been there for billions of years as stellar processes slowly unfold, starting from their birth until their final demise. Light from other celestial objects, though long vanished, has only recently reached us. In other instances, swift changes in the sky occur at timescales as short as seconds or minutes, like when a dwarf star momentarily flares up or when a human satellite crosses the field of view.

My team has been searching for objects that may have vanished. As an unexpected result of our searches, we found cases where multiple star-like objects (transients) appeared and vanished in a small image within an hour, and even more peculiarly, two of our brightest cases happened in July 1952, coinciding in time with the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flyovers. But what have we actually found, and how do these two events potentially link to one another?

In the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, our team has been dedicated to the search for celestial objects that vanished over the span of 70 years. In the grand scheme of cosmic time and the billions of years needed for a low-mass star to turn into a white dwarf, seventy years is only a fleeting moment in cosmic time. But 70 years is also much longer than the time needed for a satellite to pass through the telescope’s field of view. Our original objective was to search for a star that had vanished, with the hope of detecting instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole (failed supernova), an event predicted by supernova theoreticians. Alternatively, we were intrigued by the prospect of finding a star that vanishes entirely without a trace or explanation; a signature of a highly advanced civilization.

However, this task was far from straightforward. My colleague spent two years developing powerful methods [5] for sifting through the vast terabytes of image data involved. In parallel, we were (and still are) running a citizen science project together with scientists, amateur astronomers, and students primarily in Algeria and Nigeria, to search for these vanishing stars.

For our searches, we employed an object catalog sourced from the US Naval Observatory (USNO) together with archival images dating back to the early 1950s, captured at the Palomar Observatory in California. The images from Palomar predate the dawn of human space exploration. This night sky was pristine, and a far cry from today’s sky that is littered with tens of thousands of debris pieces from human satellites in orbits around the Earth, many producing flashes lasting fractions of a second as they reflect sunlight and tumble through space. These images we compared to the modern databases from Palomar Sky Survey, PanSTARRS, and the Gaia satellite in our quest to find disappearing objects.

Then we executed the search. We identified two candidates that were statistically significant and had unlikely alignments of transients and an additional three statistically weaker candidates (in total 5 candidates). Our best candidate, Candidate 5, had a probability of p ~ 0.0001 to exist by chance (see Figure 1 below). Regrettably, one journal after another declined to send our paper for peer review, informing us that the topic of the paper consistently fell ‘outside the scope of the journal’. Only one journal sent the paper to referees, which ended up being rejected after several confusing rounds. The paper remains on the arXiv preprint server.

Meanwhile, our team continued its search efforts. One year ago, my colleague presented the team with a case that he had uncovered during the automated searches [5]. The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS-I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure [3] (see Figure 2 below). The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself. We explored a gravitational lensing hypothesis, considering the possibility that a massive foreground object could bend the passing light so that three images appear only to vanish moments later. Perhaps, a supermassive black hole located just a few light-years from Earth, with a mass ten times that of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, could explain the triple transient? We were not convinced. The article was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Figure 2. The left image shows three transients on the 19th of July 1952 in the First Palomar Sky Survey. The right image shows the same star field in the Second Palomar Sky Survey, about 30 years later. This image is an adaption of the images in Solano, Marcy et al., 2023.

Let us have a closer look at the time period of the observations. July 1952 was a very special month in Washington D.C. Between July 12th and July 29th, 1952, a multitude of UFO sightings occurred over Washington D.C. in the United States involving radar-visual sightings in simultaneous observations, and even circumstances where a Navy pilot was authorized to shoot down an object (with some debris collected). The highest number of sightings took place during two weekends: July 19th – 20th and the weekend of July 26th – 27th, 1952.

An official record from the National Archives of Australia reveals that while the average monthly number of UFO reports of sightings between 1948 and 1951 was 15 per month, there were approximately 536 reports in July 1952. The US Air Force held a large press conference at the Pentagon (the largest press conference since the end of World War II), claiming that the radar observations were caused by temperature inversions, citing a theory produced and promoted [6,7] by the astronomer and UFO skeptic Donald Menzel, who had the highest clearances within the National Security Agency in the United States. Further work cast serious doubts on Menzel’s explanation. Also, the US Air Force failed to explain the numerous eyewitness reports.

This is where things get fun. The three transients we found were, indeed, observed on the night of July 19th, 1952, which coincided with the first weekend of the Washington UFO flyovers – a coincidence first noticed by my friend David Altman. As scientists, we recognize that coincidences will occur from time to time, no matter how remarkable they may seem. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about whether any of the five top candidates in our previous 2022 arXiv paper could have been observed during the Washington flyovers.

Indeed, our absolute top candidate (Candidate 5, with a mere 0.0001% probability) was observed on July 27th, 1952, aligning with the second weekend (Author’s Note: In the arXiv paper and all presentations, including one I presented at the Sol Foundation event at Stanford University in October, 2023, and up until December 2023, I have quoted the wrong date of 28th of July 1952. The correct date for the XE141 plate, according to the STScI plate archive, is the 27th of July 1952). Ironically, our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.

What types of events might lead to the detection of multiple transients in plates from the same period? One possible explanation is that these transients are indeed UFOs. Another hypothesis is that high-altitude atomic bomb tests could have generated aurora-like phenomena over Washington. These events might have produced nuclear fallout in other regions of the vast country, which–perhaps–could be detected as false stars on the photographic plates. Perhaps, in this instance, Occam’s razor suggests that the first hypothesis requires less of a stretch.

A dataset that possibly could help to solve the mystery is the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) project, which comprises digitized portions of Harvard College Observatory’s photographic plate collection. The observatory’s plate collection consists of 550,000+ plates that played a pivotal role in cutting-edge astronomy research spanning over a century. Given that the Harvard Observatory is considerably closer to Washington D.C. than Palomar, it might possess valuable records from the time of the Washington D.C. UFO flyovers. As recently as a few weeks ago, the DASCH project came back online after a several years-long hiatus; a blessing to many astronomers.

Despite its numerous successes, Harvard’s photographic plate collection faced many challenges during its history. In the early 1950s, Harvard University chose to destroy a portion of its own photographic plate collection under the directive of its Director Donald Menzel who entered office in 1952. This story is carefully retold in the astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit’s autobiography, Misfortunes as Blessings in Disguise. Furthermore, Donald Menzel stopped Harvard’s observatory from conducting further photographic plate surveys of the sky in 1953. The latter event is now commonly referred to as the ‘Menzel gap‘. Constraints related to storage space and budgetary limitations were cited. Only fifteen years later, Harvard resumed its surveillance of the sky upon Menzel’s retirement.

{ https://thedebrief.org/ }

21-01-2024 om 17:21 geschreven door peter  

Journalist Reveals First-Ever Photograph of UFO Shot Down in Syria in 2021

There is a series of shooting down unidentified objects around the world that involves the United States. The military 2023 February UAP events are among the recent cases. Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, along with investigative journalist George Knapp, has revealed a photograph of an object initially labeled as a “hostile drone” by the media. However, official statements from the United States, the UK, and allied intelligence agencies now confirm their inability to ascertain its origin, designating it as “unidentified.”

In episode 41 of Weaponized, Corbell and Knapp discuss UFO shootdowns covering both current events and historical perspectives. Corbell discusses events in 2019, specifically mentioning attempts to bring down over 100 UAPs on Navy warships using electromagnetic systems like the DRAKE (Drone Restricted Access Using Known Electromagnetic Warfare) Anti-Drone System.

In the episode, Jeremy Corbell provides details about a UAP event that took place in late summer 2021 off the coast of Japan involving the USS Milius. The USS Milius experienced a series of encounters with UAPs that exhibited similar behavior to the previously mentioned incidents near Navy warships. However, in this case, the UAPs were observed in a vast 300-mile radius of sea, with no other ships around.

Corbell further describes the frustrating attempts to take down the UAPs using electromagnetic techniques, noting that these efforts were once again ineffective. The UAPs displayed extreme maneuverability over four or five consecutive nights, with multiple objects present during a 5-hour window from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. or midnight to 4:00 a.m. The ship’s captain, out of frustration, reportedly instructed the crew to stop reacting to the UAPs and creating reports since there seemed to be no viable solution.

It’s a UFO, not a Hostile Drone!

Corbell and Knapp discussed an incident that happened in the Middle East, specifically in Syria on December 14, 2021. Corbell describes how the Royal Air Force, using a Typhoon fighter plane, reported shooting down a hostile drone, marking the first air-to-air firing by the Royal Air Force in 40 years. The media initially reported it as a terrorist drone, but there was a subsequent shift to calling it a “Mystery drone” as no terrorist group or nation claimed responsibility.

Corbell notes a significant discrepancy between public reporting and intelligence community products. He introduces an image, referred to as the “Syria Dome UAP,” associated with the event, and mentions that internally, the intelligence community labeled it as an UAP. Corbell emphasizes the importance of transparency and accurate reporting, pointing out that what is publicly disclosed differs from the information shared among allied nations within the intelligence community.

Corbell posts on X (formerly Twitter), “In a joint operation, a Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jet engaged an unidentified aerial vehicle using an Advanced Short Range Air to Air Missile (ASRAAM). Initial media reports labeled the unidentified as a ‘hostile drone’ – however – internal intelligence products officially classify the aerial vehicle of unknown origin as a UAP – and maintain this designation. The UAP was not recovered.”

Liberation Times writes, “According to Corbell, the Five Eyes report was published months after the incident occurred and indicates that on 14 December 2021, an RAF Typhoon jet shot at one UAP using an ASRAAM missile. At the time, the incident was reported as the first enemy aircraft shot down by the RAF since the Falklands War in Argentina more than 40 years ago.”

Corbell continues, stating that Centcom (United States Central Command) has been tracking UAP for over 15 years, and the frustration lies in the lack of proper reporting and handling of these incidents within the chain of command. He notes that in conflict zones, there is a tendency to shoot at anything within a certain proximity to ground troops or bases, especially if it appears to have a payload. However, the issue arises in the lack of recovery or proper handling after such engagements.

Further, in the episode, Corbell reveals the image of an object that he called the “Syria Dome UAP.” He says, “This image… is the one that was historically fired upon. It is referred to as a ‘terrorist drone,’ exhibiting a peculiar appearance. Whatever it may be, it is classified as a UAP within the intelligence community. This is not something that has been identified.”

Corbell notes that there were two of these unidentified devices, and when the Royal Air Force engaged with them, firing an Advanced Short Range Air-to-Air Missile (ASRAAM), one of the objects managed to evade and escape the scene. Corbell emphasizes the intelligence control exhibited by these objects, suggesting that they were not under random or autonomous flight.

Corbell admits uncertainty about whether the fired missile hit the object or if it made contact with the ground. He underscores the discrepancy between the public narrative, which presented the incident as involving a terrorist drone, and the internal classification within the intelligence community, where it is recognized as a UAP. The point is reiterated that the public is not receiving the full and accurate information about these encounters.

He told Liberation Times: “Unless observed with a possible payload, UAPs largely go ignored, as they are not part of the mission – this means that we lose the opportunity to study the phenomena and answer key questions, including 1) Who are the operators 2) Where do they originate from 3) How do they work? And 4) What is their intent?”

“I can confirm that there is frustration within the ranks of the U.S. military that UAPs with unique flight characteristics are being ignored. Worryingly, this critical information is not being reported up the chain of command properly – causing vulnerability to our troops and those of other nations.”

Previously on the Joe Rogan show, Corbell claimed that based on information from documents, the military fires upon UAPs within a certain proximity to ground troops, typically within 27 to 30 miles. The decision to engage is reportedly based on the perceived threat, with the military firing upon objects that appear to have a payload. The text also mentions that UAPs resembling cubes surrounded by spheres are not targeted, as they do not appear to have a payload.

Corbell suggests that the military has been firing Hellfire missiles at these UAPs, and there are reports of similar actions by countries like Russia and Syria. The text raises questions about the origin of these UAPs, as they are not believed to be assets of the countries engaging with them. Some UAPs are described, such as one resembling a jellyfish about the size of a coffee table.

“One of the UAPs that was fired upon looked like a jellyfish, about the size of a big coffee table, and domed. There is no known retrieval program in these war zones, and even if they did hit something, it’s unknown if they would be able to take it down. It’s possible that these UAPs could be balloons used by drug smugglers, but they have controlled flight, which is not a new phenomenon. There have been similar sightings of metallic spheres outpacing planes during World War II, with both sides thinking it was the other side’s technology.”

A while ago, Lue Elizondo, the former head of AATIP shared his thoughts on the UFO/UAP and how the Pentagon approaches the phenomenon from strictly national security perceptive. In an interview with Curt Jaimungal and Sean Cahil, Elizondo provides deeper insight into the Pentagon’s theories on why UFO/UAPs are routinely spotted around American, Russian, Chinese, and other nuclear-armed nations’ most secretive and sensitive nuclear assets.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

Allow me to start with a confession: although the topic of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, previously called UFOs) has always fascinated me, my reaction to confronting much of the related literature—beyond the safe harbour of a few serious authors—has been one of considered dismissiveness. In my view, a significant portion of the published material could benefit from greater rigor, empirical grounding, theoretical clarity, and logical reasoning. This field often appears to diverge from the standards of intellectual precision and level-headed analysis that hold in academia. However, recent developments over the past six or seven years invite us to re-examine the subject from a more open and inquisitive perspective.

Because there are so few—if any—consensus launchpads for such a polemical topic, I must explicitly justify each step of my thinking and, thus, cover a lot of ground in this long essay. I shall start, below, by motivating the validity of the mystery: UAPs are no longer just tall and questionable tales shared on social media, accompanied by grainy, out-of-focus cellular phone footage. Enough has been officially acknowledged since 2017 that the topic is now undoubtedly deserving of serious treatment. After laying foundations for my argument, I will then proceed to elaborate on what I currently consider to be the most level-headed and plausible account of the phenomenon. And to anticipate a question you are bound to be already asking, no, I don’t think it is aliens from Zeta Reticuli; the facts may be a lot more surprising and closer to home than that.

SURPRISINGLY MUCH HAS RECENTLY BEEN DISCLOSED

In 2017, several videos of UAPs—soon to become known as the ‘Pentagon UFO videos,’ as they were recorded by infrared cameras in military aircraft—were circulating widely on the Internet. At around the same time, the story behind the videos was covered in a now-seminal report by The New York Times.

The videos seem to show airborne craft without wings or engines, flying and hovering deliberately, sometimes against high winds. They perform maneuvers despite the absence of flight control means—no rudder, elevators, ailerons, thrusters, etc.—and display surprisingly high acceleration with no detectable means of propulsion. The US Department of Defence later officially acknowledged the authenticity of the videos, as well as the fact that the objects visible in them remain unidentified.

Years later, in the summer of 2023, US Navy pilots involved in these incidents provided public testimony to Congress, under oath, adding detail and background to the odd images. Asked whether the UAP he saw with his own eyes moved in a way that defied the laws of physics, Commander David Fravor replied: “The way we understand them [i.e., the laws of physics], yes.” He then confirmed that the UAPs were not only captured on camera, but also tracked by radar from three different vessels: “The Princeton tracked it. The Nimitz tracked it. The E2 tracked it.” Asked to describe how the UAP maneuvered, CDR Fravor said, “Abruptly, very determinant. It knew exactly what it was doing. It was aware of our presence and it had acceleration rates—I mean, it went from zero to matching our speed in no time at all.” Finally, asked if any human technology could emulate the UAP’s flight characteristics he observed, he said: “No, not even close.” Navy F-18 pilot Ryan Graves—another military witness giving sworn testimony—described a UAP sighted from 50 feet away as “A dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere,” something that cannot be conflated with a drone or ordinary aircraft.

Still in 2023, United States Air Force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch became a UAP whistle-blower. In interviews with various media outlets, he claimed that several defense officials had confirmed to him that the US government maintains a secretive UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program, and is in the possession of several technological craft with Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) provenance.

Mr. Grusch, too, provided sworn testimony during the congressional UAP hearing of July 2023. Asked whether the US has the bodies of the pilots of the recovered UAPs, he said: “As I have stated publicly already … biologics came with some of these recoveries.” Pressed on whether these “biologics” were nonhuman, he confirmed without ambiguity: “Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.” Mr. Grusch understands that the penalty for lying under oath is jail, and offered several times during his testimony to confidentially—as required by law—provide specific details to lawmakers.

Mr. Grusch, Mr. Graves, and CDR Fravor are far from alone. In recent times, other individuals in a position to plausibly be privy to what the US government knows about the subject have come forward. For instance, oceanographer and retired US Navy Rear Admiral Timothy Cole Gallaudet has acknowledged having seen footage of UAPs while on active duty. Some of these UAPs have displayed the capability to go underwater (the so-called ‘transmedium’ capability described often in UAP reports). He has also expressed his belief that Mr. Grusch’s claims are true. Recently retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell—currently an aerospace executive—along with Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the US Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, have lent credibility to the claim that there are active UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Defence Intelligence Agency Programme Manager Dr. James T. Lacatski did the same, in a book officially cleared for publication by the Defence Office of Prepublication and Security Review of the US Department of Defence.

Up until 2017, the profitable UAP rumor mill was fed mainly by ‘anonymous sources,’ filmed with their faces and voices concealed, and telling vague stories largely impossible to verify independently. Even when one of those anonymous sources eventually identified himself—Mr. Robert Lazar—his credentials and even college education could never be verified. This has changed now: the names and credentials of the individuals mentioned above are not in doubt; they are who they say they are. And their ranks and roles put them in a position to plausibly know what they claim to know. These individuals are willing to testify under oath in public hearings and confidentially provide evidence to members of Congress. All this, while not proving that UAPs are of exotic origin, does lend credibility to UAP speculation. 

Even the former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the US Department of Defence—Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a man widely reviled in the UAP community as a prejudiced gatekeeper working against UAP disclosure—has made very consequential revelations during an official NASA press briefing: there are seemingly metallic spheres out there that, somehow, move and maneuver without any signs of propulsion or flight control surfaces. He proceeded to show a declassified video of one such a sphere, as recorded by an MQ-9 ‘Reaper’ military drone, one of the most sophisticated sensor platforms in the world today. The sphere shown moves fast, in a controlled, non-ballistic trajectory. Dr. Kirkpatrick then stated that this is just “a typical example of the thing we see most of; we see these all over the world.” That the spheres are described as making “very interesting apparent maneuvers” is significant, as it rules out balloons and ordinary drones. That they are seen frequently and all over the world also rules out elaborate, expensive hoaxes.

Prejudiced gatekeeper or not, Dr. Kirkpatrick has thus officially acknowledged that there are concrete UAPs “all over the world,” for which there is no prosaic account thus far. They have been recorded by a variety of military-grade sensors, not just cell phones. That Dr. Kirkpatrick’s revelations have not become headline news in every mainstream media platform across the world is emblematic of the apathy and cynicism—the ‘don’t-look-up syndrome’—that has been assailing Western societies in recent years.

CROSSROADS

As a culture, we’ve thus reached an impasse. On the one hand, the meager amount of data that has been declassified or leaked isn’t enough for us to derive any firm conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, enough has been begrudgingly but officially acknowledged that we can’t dismiss the phenomenon under prosaic accounts either. The best we can do is thus to take the data seriously, but not extrapolate from it without basis.

In this spirit, I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human. The counterargument to this is, of course, that UAPs may be top-secret but very human military devices, often called ‘black technology.’ Yet, this seems to contradict much of what has been disclosed since 2017. The following passage from the testimony of CDR Fravor to Congress illustrates the point: Representative Ms. Nancy Mace asked, “Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?” To which CDR Fravor responded: “No. We have test ranges for that.”

Moreover, if UAPs such as the metallic spheres were black technology the US Department of Defence were trying to keep secret, it is hard to imagine why Dr. Kirkpatrick—an official of that very department—would publicize their existence and even declassify a video showcasing their size, form, flight capabilities, etc. Also, the fact that UAPs often seem to defy our understanding of physics doesn’t line up with the black-technologies hypothesis, as it would require not only the engineering to be secret, but also the very advancement of the human understanding of physics. This isn’t impossible, but isn’t very plausible either. Finally, it is difficult to imagine why such game-changing black technologies—which would have to have been around for at least as long as the UAP phenomenon itself—were never used in large and conspicuous scales to advance the geopolitical interests of any nation.

Secondly, if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs. This does not imply that the NHIs are extra-terrestrial; it means simply that they aren’t human.

As implausible as these two premises may sound in this particular historical junction, the data, if taken seriously, does not seem to allow for prosaic alternatives. So whatever hypotheses we entertain, they will perforce stretch our credulity. Indeed, to insist on prosaic explanations we must disregard the data. The latter is not necessarily invalid—it isn’t incoherent to imagine that all the data are the spurious fabrications of some sprawling disinformation campaign stretching over decades—but it certainly doesn’t advance the discussion. It thus seems more productive, at this point, to bite the bullet of what the data suggests—at least hypothetically—and then check whether we can make sense of it in a manner that renders the data less vexing.

Before we can try that, however, we first need to understand the key characteristics of the phenomenon we are trying to account for.

THE HALLMARKS OF THE PHENOMENON

Although the disclosure process is relatively young, having publicly started only in 2017, the phenomenon itself seems to be at least as old as humanity. Ancient mythology, religious and otherwise, contains narratives largely consistent with today’s UAP observations. And serious researchers—the most prominent, competent, and reliable of which, in my view, is French astronomer and computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallée—have been collecting data on it, applying statistical analyses to such data, and deriving conclusions from such analyses for decades now.

Two key conclusions from Dr. Vallée’s work are particularly pertinent to our challenge here. The first is that, based on countless witness reports, the phenomenon does not seem to make any distinction between physical and psychological effects; it produces both, as if they were mere facets of one and the same causative mechanisms. The boundaries we draw between the mental and the physical don’t seem to be observed by the phenomenon, which transits casually back and forth across the dividing line. Dr. Vallée acknowledges the undeniable physical aspect of the phenomenon—it can be filmed, tracked by radar and other sensors, emits measurable energy, often leaves physical footprints and vestiges behind, etc.—but adds that at least part of what the witnesses experience is “staged”: the UAP sometimes evokes archetypal, symbolic imagery directly in the witness’ mind to convey a feeling-laden metaphorical message, which transcends the objectively measurable characteristics of the phenomenon.

Though Dr. Vallée had already come to this conclusion decades ago, recent investigations into secret US Department of Defence programs on UAPs, by journalist Ross Coulthart, seem to confirm it (see pages 265-267 of Mr. Coulthart’s 2021 book, In Plain Sight). Stanford Professor Dr. Garry Nolan, perhaps the most respectable scientist to actively research the phenomenon, acknowledged Mr. Coulthart’s reporting on the matter. He went on to recount a specific UAP case that illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the UAPs’ ability to directly manipulate human perception: “[this is a] story that Jacques Vallée brought to me, of a family in France, driving down the highway. This was like in the last five or ten years [from June of 2022]. And they had a glass-topped car. They look up and they see a UFO, you know, basically paralleling them down the highway. The mother looks around and sees that no other individuals nearby are freaking out about this thing above them. The children in the back take out their cell phones, take a picture of it. They get home and they look at the pictures on their camera, and they don’t see an object [of the kind they thought they had witnessed]; they see a little star-shaped thing about thirty or so feet above, and I have the picture. That doesn’t look anything like a drone. … I think it has like seven spokes and a central hole of some sort. So, you’re left with this: they saw a giant craft, but the picture shows that it was nothing [like it] there. Nobody else could see it. So, even if it was an object that was there, others weren’t capable of seeing it, so it was manipulating vision” (my emphasis).

behavior of UAPs is not consistent with the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (see chapter 9 of his book, Dimensions). Dr. Vallée estimated that, in a period of just twenty years, there have been about three million UAP landings. This is not consistent with visitations by beings from another planet for the purposes of surveying the Earth or researching its inhabitants (orders of magnitude fewer visits would have sufficed for these purposes); instead, the UAPs’ behavior is precisely what one would expect if they were from here—and were simply going about their business. After all, there are many rare—and some not-so-rare—animal and plant species that human beings encounter a lot less frequently than 150.000 times per year, and they are undeniably terrestrial. In his interview with Mr. Coulthart, also Dr. Nolan expressed the view that UAPs are not extra-terrestrial.

TWO DISTINCT PHENOMENA?

Although the two characteristics discussed above generally apply to most of what we colloquially label ‘UAP,’ ‘UFO,’ or ‘alien’ encounters, there are reasons to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with at least two distinct phenomena here. If so, it is crucial that we do not conflate the two, otherwise, any viable account of one phenomenon may be discarded merely because it is not suitable for—or even contradicts—the other, leading to an insoluble impasse.

One clearly discernible class of observations, which I shall henceforth refer to as ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs, entails physical craft that can not only consistently be seen, filmed, and tracked by radar, but also—if we are to believe Mr. Grusch’s informants and other sources in a position to plausibly know—stored in hangars for decades, drilled into, analyzed under a scanning electron microscope, etc. The bodies of their occupants can also—again, if we are to believe the sources—be kept in freezers and harvested for biochemical analysis. This means that the phenomenon in question has a physical aspect as consistent and stable as our own body and the car in our garage. Moreover, these ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs are more frequently observed in the proximity of military exercises and installations, particularly nuclear installations (this has been the case for decades, the recent Pentagon UFO videos simply reiterating the pattern). They don’t seem to be interested in teaching us anything, but simply in monitoring human activity that could lead to large-scale destruction and compromise the planet’s habitability (incidentally, this is exactly what one would expect if the NHI in question is terrestrial).

Unlike the above, another class of observations entails encounters in one’s bedroom, at school, during one’s commute back from work, and other ordinary, random situations unrelated to military activity. These are the so-called ‘high strangeness’ events, encompassing the ‘alien contactee’ and ‘alien abduction’ cases. The craft and beings observed don’t have a consistent physical aspect but are, instead, elusive, appearing and disappearing, taking on an absurd variety of incongruous forms and behaviors. They leave either none or scarce, ambiguous physical traces, such as spontaneous nose bleeds, ordinary cysts found in places where the witness claims to have been implanted with alien technology, marks on the ground consistent with a variety of causes, and so on. This ambiguous physical evidence is better described as synchronistic—i.e., coincidental in a meaningful way—as opposed to causal. The observations are elusive, illogical, and shapeshifting like a dream. They seem focused on a form of deliberate, symbolic communication with the witness, aimed at conveying a teaching of some kind, as opposed to arising from chance encounters. Like a vision, they can’t be photographed.

I am not dismissive of this ‘high strangeness’ class of observations. As a matter of fact, I have written an entire book—Meaning in Absurdity—in which I try to account for it. I believe these visions are real as such; they are part of a natural feedback mechanism intrinsic to the human mind, which seeks to dislodge it from ossified worldviews that, despite having become stable, no longer serve the advancement of our understanding of ourselves and nature. The visions in question emerge from collective, phylogenetically ancient layers of the human mind shared by all of us, which, for being incapable of language and conceptual reasoning, communicate to the executive ego through dream-like, immersive metaphors. They should be taken seriously, just not literally.

But I do not think that the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon is the same as the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs. Conflating the two, in my opinion, may make it impossible to account for either, as no one account will be consistent with the sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics of both. For this reason, and because I have explored the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon in previous work, I shall henceforth exclusively discuss the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon.

IF TERRESTRIAL BUT NOT HUMAN, THEN WHO?

The idea that the intelligence behind the UAPs is terrestrial and ancient is itself not new. Dr. Hal Puthoff calls it the “ultra-terrestrial” hypothesis. He raises the possibility that remnants of a pre-Diluvial high-tech human civilization—think of the Atlantis myth—may have survived at the end of the last ice age and remain active today, though discreet in their activities.

The problem with this hypothesis is that any truly high-tech civilization—unless it has moved underground very early, which may not be plausible due to difficulties related to the space required for industrial and logistical infrastructure, difficulties with waste management and pollution, etc.—leaves vast and long-lasting footprints on the terrain and environment, such as mining holes, landfills, urban infrastructure, artificial pollutants such as microplastics, etc. These footprints, though degraded, would have remained conspicuous enough over the period of only several thousand years since the last ice age. Yet, we find no such traces predating our own civilization.

Because high technology development requires—at least at first—extensive industrial infrastructure, any ancient civilization capable of technology as advanced as that in UAPs will almost inevitably have had to go through steps of industrialization and resource extraction analogous to ours, and then some. It will have had to go through phases of urbanization, mining of metals and burning of hydrocarbons, the construction of vast industrial parks, logistical/transport infrastructure, and so on. If the intelligence behind UAPs is terrestrial, it will thus need to be ancient enough for the associated footprints to have been almost completely erased by natural weather and geological processes. Yet, it will also need to be recent enough to already have had access to fossil hydrocarbons to fuel the early stages of its industrialization process. Are these seemingly conflicting constraints reconcilable?

They are, as per the so-called “Silurian Hypothesis” first proposed by Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank in a 2018 paper on the International Journal of Astrobiology. The idea is as follows: our planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, with life on it for about 4 billion years. The genus Homo, to which we belong, has been around for less than 3 million of those 4 billion years; the blink of an eye in geological terms. And modern humans—Homo sapiens—for just 2 or 3 hundred thousand years. There is, thus, plenty of time and opportunity for other non-human species to have arisen on Earth, developed to a level of technology far beyond ours (imagine where our own science and technology will be in a mere thousand more years, if we don’t kill ourselves before that), and then to have effectively vanished due to one or more of the myriad possible civilisation-ending cataclysms that could end our own (climate change/collapse, comet/asteroid impact, pandemics, solar storms, thermonuclear war, etc.).

Any sign of abandoned urban and industrial infrastructure is unlikely to survive a period of only a few million years, due to weather erosion. Synthesized chemicals, alloys and other compounds, technological artifacts, as well as terrain signatures such as mining holes, are ultimately unlikely to survive the constant recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics. What is now the Earth’s crust will eventually sink into the molten asthenosphere and mantel beneath, where it will be reforged, just to eventually re-emerge through volcanic activity as a brand-new crust. As a rough estimate, if we assume an average plate movement of a few centimeters per year, it could take only tens of millions of years for large swathes of the Earth’s crust—especially the ocean crust but, to a more limited degree, also the continental crust—to be recycled in this manner. No conspicuous remnants of an ancient, technological, nonhuman civilization would likely survive all this.

The question now is, when were fossil hydrocarbons first available in large enough quantities to fuel the initial growth of an ancient industrial civilization? Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank estimate that this was already the case in the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago, which leaves us with a window of hundreds of millions of years for industrial NHIs—multiple different ones—to have developed on Earth.

Notice that my claim here is not that it is likely that high-tech nonhuman civilizations have emerged on Earth before us; I cannot evaluate the probabilities involved. My claim is that, based on what we know, such civilizations are not impossible or inconsistent with the geological record. On the contrary: as Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank point out, the record shows several periods of global warming consistent with large-scale industrialization.

Now, since we cannot visit an NHI city today, it is necessarily the case that, if such ancient terrestrial civilizations ever existed, they have largely died out—at least as far as the surface of the planet is concerned. This, however, is not implausible: as we know from our own case, civilizations can start, reach high-tech levels, and then be annihilated in a mere few thousand years. Indeed, although our civilization is still going, we are painfully aware of how easily and quickly it can be brought to a swift end tomorrow, in a thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, climate collapse, or a more deadly pandemic than the one we have just survived, etc.

Yet, it is unlikely that all members of our species would die in a planetary catastrophe. There is a good chance that few but enough of us would survive in shelters and preserve a minimum level of knowledge to keep some of our technology going, especially if we get some advance notice of the impending doom. In as little as a decade or two from now, for instance, we will likely have mastered the technology of small-scale, portable, clean nuclear reactors that can be buried in a backyard (or a cave) and provide effectively unlimited energy. Portable 3D printing technology is reducing our reliance on centralized, large-scale manufacturing facilities. Our computers, which were once the size of buildings, now live in our pockets. If we extrapolate these trends for another mere century or two, it is reasonable to imagine that technological miniaturization and portability will allow our civilization to survive at a reduced scale in, for instance, underground shelters. It is thus not unreasonable to imagine, purely speculatively, that the same could have been the case for ancient NHIs hypothetically behind today’s UAPs.

Any culture once exposed to the magnitude of a planetary catastrophe will have a historical trauma transmitted down the generations through myth and storytelling, similarly to—but much more acutely than—how flood stories have survived since the end of the last ice age. Such a culture will be wary of the planet’s surface, for the latter is a notoriously exposed and volatile region: it undergoes far more extreme temperature swings than, say, the deep oceans and underground caves; it is prone to severe weather that can ruin crops and flood entire cities; it is exposed to irradiation from solar storms and other cosmic events, which can ruin technology and life; it is extremely vulnerable to comet and asteroid impact, as the dinosaurs found out; etc. And since such a post-apocalyptic culture would have been reduced to relatively few members, their requirements for living space would also be relatively modest. Depending on the surviving level of their technology, they could have made a home for themselves underwater or underground. A few generations of (directed) adaption—genetic and cultural—to such an environment would render the planet’s surface perhaps as alien and inhospitable to them as the Mariana Trench is to us. They would be okay with allowing the monkeys to run amok on top of the roof (provided that the monkeys don’t start a thermonuclear war and compromise the entire house), but would rather stay safely indoors.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WEIRD MIND MANIPULATION STUFF?

Science fiction has inculcated in our culture the notion that communication with another, completely different species is a matter of translation or word-swapping; something akin to what we do to convert Chinese text into English. Indeed, we now have a completely manufactured sense of the plausibility of such an idea. But it is naïve.

Ordinary translation presupposes two important things: a shared cognitive structure (templates of thinking) and shared empirical references. The latter is easy to see: if both you and I have already had the experience of seeing and driving a car, then to understand each other we just need to learn what word the other uses to denote that experience. However, things are more subtle when it comes to shared cognitive structures, as they operate based on abstractions, not direct empirical experiences. For instance, think of the concept of ‘flow’: it can be used to denote a concrete empirical experience, such as watching a river flow. But it is also used in much more abstract ways: we say that ‘time flows’ even though we can’t see time, let alone its flow; we speak of the ‘flow of ideas’; we say that ‘we are in the flow’; and so on. ‘Flow’ is an abstraction that refers to sequential, somewhat ordered changes of state, something entirely bound to our human mode of cognition. To understand ‘flow’ one needs to share the basic cognitive templates that gave rise to the concept in us to begin with. Without these shared templates, it is impossible to merely translate the word.

All humans share these basic cognitive templates by the mere fact of being members of the same species. In other words, we think alike because we are alike. Some linguists—such as Noam Chomsky—go as far as to say that the basic structure of all human languages, which he refers to as the ‘Universal Grammar,’ is biologically encoded in the human cognitive system. Although Chomsky’s opponents argue that language is merely invented and shared by convention, it is still necessarily the case that the underlying foundations of whatever is invented reflect cognitive modalities the inventor shares with all other members of their species. It is this commonality that enables what we call ‘translation’ across human languages, and we tend to take it entirely for granted.

But NHIs, by definition, don’t share such commonality with us. After all, they belong to a different species. Their cognition will almost certainly unfold with vastly different patterns and modalities. Even their logic may bear little resemblance to our own Aristotelian axioms. Moreover, their cultural context is bound to be entirely different from ours, leading to different empirical references: originally, they may not have had a cognitive category for, say, ‘car’ or understand the concept of a wheeled vehicle (for instance, if they are an aquatic species). It is naïve to expect that NHIs could learn our language as easily as a Chinese person can learn English. The underlying cognitive structures and references won’t line up; why should they?

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that we and NHIs can never communicate. What it does mean is that achieving this feat will require an effort to enter each other’s cognitive inner space—literally. In other words, before they could communicate with us, they would have to gain direct access to, and manipulate, our abstract mental processes. This is not something that can be casually achieved in the way I can pick up Italian during a holiday.

You will be closer to appreciating the difficulties if you think of whales: we know they have a language that scores higher in some relevant measures of complexity than our own. Yet, we can’t translate ‘Whalish’ into any human language, even though whales, just like us, are air-breathing, breast-feeding mammals.

To really appreciate the difficulties we have to go beyond whales—close relatives of ours—and imagine that, say, praying mantises—ancient insects much less related to us than whales—would have some form of language, and that we would try to communicate with them. Now we’re getting closer to the mark, for the cognitive templates and inner logic of insectoids are bound to be very largely incommensurable with ours. The challenge here is not mere translation; to speak ‘Insectoidish’ one would have to enter the cognitive space of insectoids—i.e., enter their mind.

Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will perforce have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally.

There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, and metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, prompting us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space.

Notice the similarity between this and the ‘high strangeness’ class of observations: both entail symbolic communication by means of direct manipulation of our inner cognition. In the latter case, the communication is between deeper and shallower—primitive and modern, respectively—layers of our mind, taking place naturally and spontaneously. In the former case, the communication—likely mediated by technology—is between an NHI and a human, taking place in an artificial and deliberate manner. But both are metaphorical, akin to dreams and visions. This similarity is part of the reason why we feel tempted to conflate the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ and ‘high strangeness’ classes of observations.

In conclusion, I submit the hypothesis that, when UAPs manipulate our perceptions during an encounter, they are, in fact, attempting to communicate in the only way they can. Analogously, if you are hiking on a remote trail and come across a wild bear—another terrestrial species with a cognitive structure different from ours, which we encounter by chance as they go about their business in their own habitat—the bear, too, will communicate with you in the only way it can: through meaning-evoking body posture and sounds; and you will even understand it. The difference is that UAPs are better, more nuanced, and more sophisticated at the task.

HOW CAN WE CONFIRM THIS HYPOTHESIS?

For every useful, truly scientific hypothesis, there must be an experiment or a passive observation under controlled conditions that can either confirm or contradict it. As we’ve seen in the foregoing, the hypothesis in question is that the NHI—or NHIs—behind the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon is(are) ancient but terrestrial. We’ve discussed the characteristics of the phenomenon that motivated the hypothesis to begin with: (a) the frequency of UAP encounters, which suggests that they are from here and we meet them as they go about their business, just as we meet a bear in a trail; and (b) their interest in human activities that may jeopardize the habitability of this planet, such as nuclear installations and military exercises. But these characteristics aren’t conclusive. So just what could be conclusive?

If it is true, as Mr. Grusch claimed in his testimony to Congress in July 2023, that the US government has “biologics”—that is, the bodies of crashed UAP pilots—then a biochemical analysis of these biologics, if not conclusive, would at least be very indicative of whether they are terrestrial or not.

All terrestrial life we have studied in detail thus far, despite their drastic morphological differences—think of the differences between an amoeba, a praying mantis, and a cat—share the exact same biochemistry: they have two-stranded DNA with sugar-phosphate backbones and four nucleobasis (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) that form two possible base-pair configurations. Despite their extreme morphological differences, all terrestrial life thus looks the same when observed ‘under a microscope with sufficient magnification,’ so to speak.

Yet, the functions performed by this very specific biochemistry are multiple-realizable: there are many other conceivable ways in which these functions could be performed based on different biochemistry. The fact that all life we’ve studied thus far shares such specific biochemistry means simply that we all have a common ancestor dating back to an abiogenesis event: the rise of life from non-life. That event has defined the biochemistry we have all inherited. But it could just as well have been quite different; there is no a priori reason why biochemistry must be the way it is in us.

Indeed, a different event of abiogenesis—there is no a priori reason why life must have arisen from non-life only once on Earth either—could have set a different biochemistry; one still capable of storing the organism’s body plan, of constructing the organism’s building blocks (proteins, in our case), of metabolizing, and of passing the organism’s body-plan to the next generation via reproduction; yet one different from ours. This is acknowledged in biology in the hypothesis of a “shadow biosphere”: there may, in fact, be organisms on Earth with biochemistry different from ours, because they may be descendants from a different abiogenesis event; we haven’t detected them yet because we haven’t done a detailed biochemical analysis of most organisms on the planet.

If even terrestrial organisms, which arose and evolved on this very planet, could have biochemistry distinct from ours, it stands to reason that organisms evolved on another planet, with different environmental conditions and chemical composition, are very unlikely to have the exact same biochemistry we do. That would require an implausible coincidence of literally cosmic proportions, even under the assumption of convergent evolution at the level of the phenotype (i.e., body form).

Therefore, if the biologics in the freezers of the powers-that-be have the same biochemistry we do, I believe it is safe to assume that they are terrestrial; they are our older cousins—likely forever traumatized by earlier planetary cataclysms—and certainly not aliens.

Another prediction of the ‘ultra-terrestrial’ hypothesis is this: the materials—say, the metals—used in the UAP craft should have isotope ratios compatible with an earthly origin, as opposed to one outside the solar system. If the powers-that-be are in possession of such craft, this shouldn’t be a difficult test to perform.

Together, the two test results suggested above, if mutually consistent, should be conclusive.

CONCLUSIONS

The hypothesis I put forward is that, if the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon and the Non-Human Intelligence(s) behind it are real, they are unlikely to be extra-terrestrial. Instead, they may consist of remnants of industrial, technological NHIs that evolved on Earth up to 350 million years ago. We cannot find conspicuous archaeological or geological footprints of such civilizations because, according to the so-called ‘Silurian Hypothesis,’ not only weather erosion but also the regular recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics, erase them. The anthropocentric notion that nothing intelligent has arisen on our planet in the billions of years for which no conspicuous evidence would have remained on the geological record is unjustified. There has been plenty of time and opportunity for many technological, industrial, but non-human civilizations to have arisen and disappeared from the surface of the Earth.

Though I understand that many may consider this hypothesis disturbing at some level, it does not require anything fundamentally beyond natural processes we know to exist: we know that intelligent life can arise on this planet, given its environmental conditions; we know that industrial civilizations can arise, develop, and go extinct in a period no longer than a few thousand years, which is the blink of an eye at a geological scale; we know that our own technology today would have looked like magic to the Great Goethe, only 200 years ago; we know that intelligent species that evolved the ability to act according to an abstract ethical code can operate under a policy of non-interference towards less evolved life (just think of human wildlife researchers); and so on. The present hypothesis requires nothing more than the foregoing. As such, there is nothing unnatural or truly extraordinary about it. If it violates our sensitivities, then this informs us about our sensitivities, not about the plausibility of the hypothesis in a naturalist framework.

Notice, however, that the hypothesis proposed here presupposes the UAP data disclosed thus far to be authentic, and not the result of a sprawling disinformation campaign. In the latter case, the key motivations and empirical ground for the speculations in this essay would be void, and the hypothesis should be disregarded in its entirety.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I am very grateful to Dr. Hal Puthoff, Dr. Garry Nolan, Rob van der Werf, and Paul Stuyvenberg for the generous feedback provided on earlier drafts of this essay. 

• Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch philosopher, computer scientist, and the executive director of the Essentia Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and another in computer engineering, and has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost scientific laboratories. His main interests are metaphysics and philosophy of mind. He lives in Veldhoven, Netherlands. This essay originally appeared on Kastrup’s personal website. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

07-01-2024 om 21:49 geschreven door peter  

Discovered 2-Min Footage Of ‘Phoenix Lights’ & Arizona Man Who Filmed Huge Solid UFO Vanished

During the early 1980s, numerous people reported sighting colossal, sluggish V-shaped crafts silently hovering through the night sky above the Hudson Valley in New York. On March 13, 1997, a massive and noiseless aircraft was witnessed by thousands of people throughout Arizona, Nevada, and northern Mexico in the “Phoenix Lights” event.

While there are conflicting reports, some people claim that there were two distinct groups of lights amalgamated into one incident, but the majority of observers claimed to have seen an immense, silent object that was either V-shaped or triangular, gliding low over the area. According to a Rocky Mountain Poll conducted at the time, as well as the commotion that ensued, around 10% of Arizonans claimed to have witnessed the incident.

Despite the United Air Force’s identification of one of the groups of lights seen as flares dropped by A-10 Warthogs during training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range, Arizona’s then-governor Fyfe Symington firmly believed that he saw something entirely different. In fact, he was a witness to the incident himself and later informed reporters of his stance.

“I witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights… (Source)

As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation.”

Former Director of The Pentagons UFO Program (AATIP), Luis Elizondo explained many people are confused about the flares from the A10s, but the lights were a separate event and were witnessed by hundreds or thousands of people at the same time. There is a theoretical technology that if you can master it, all 5 observables (what we see the UAPs doing) are possible. If you know how to manipulate spacetime, all of these observables are possible. (Source)

Although there are many accounts of witnessing the Phoenix lights, Tim Ley and his family had a close look at the object hovered over the city in the V-formation. Ley, his wife Bobbi, and their son Hal saw a massive V-shaped object with five lights slowly and silently flying over their heads. The craft was so large that it spanned the entire length of the street.

For Tim Ley and his family, the experience was life-changing. They had never imagined they would witness such a bizarre and unexplainable phenomenon, and it has left an indelible mark on their lives. They continue to share their story, hoping that someday, the truth about the Phoenix Lights will be revealed.

We watched these lights, and I’d say the time it took from when we first spotted them until this thing actually went over a house was about 10 or 12 minutes. This thing never wavered once; it always came directly straight at us.

After a few minutes, maybe six or eight minutes, all of a sudden, instead of being five lights in a round arc shape, the lead light seemed to come out in front, and now it looked like a V formation flying towards us. I remember talking with Bobby as we were watching it, saying, “What could that possibly be?”

I said, “Well, maybe it’s a formation of helicopters.” But as the lights were getting further and further apart, the relationship between the lights never changed. They got further apart, but the individual distance between the lights always remained in the same relationship. They were perfectly even, and they didn’t move up or down. I said, “Wow, if this is a formation of aircraft, whoever’s flying this, I don’t know how they’re staying so tight in formation.”

And this last light came down and Bobbi and I were just standing there, and it went right over us. It looked like this big circular hole of pure white light. It looked… almost like little particles of light, and the light was stuck up inside. It was almost like it was being held inside.

There was no glass on it, and there was no light that I noticed around us on the ground, but it was really, really, really bright. Then the tail end of this thing went by like that, and I saw a very absolute sharp edge went by, and as it did, the stars unfolded after it.

We live up and about probably about 1200 feet above sea level. We’re in a little valley above Phoenix, and surrounded by this valley are like little mountain peaks. And there’s this one, two peaks, and in the middle of it, a little hill. This thing went right through the crack in the mountain.

It flew right through there, didn’t go over the top. It just barely fit. It was in such a way. Now it was probably just going straight because now I could see the lights from the backside underneath. It went out straight over towards the airport, right to the right side of peak, and then I lost the lights in the whatever lights were flying around in the atmosphere disturbance.

Read also:

• Filmmaker Corbell On Active UFO Shootings By Militaries: It’s No One’s Technology
• Massive Objects Detected by SpaceX & Elon Musk Shocking Comment on UFO Shootings By US
• US Govt. Insider Contacts Neuroscientist And Tells Him ‘UFOs Are Non-Human Intelligence’

Video Evidence

Below is the only known video recorded on March 13, 1997, around 8:30 PM that shows the V-shaped object (according to user Tom King). The video was captured by a man in the AZ area who wants to stay anonymous.

As you are watching the video, you can see one of the lights falling back from the group. This was reported by various people of the lights undocking and going out of formation. This happened during the video taken in Carefree, Arizona. That was also reported from Prescott, AZ.

Moreover, a man named Richard Curtis, who witnessed the incident and had compelling evidence, reached out to Councilwoman Frances Barwood from Arizona. However, after encountering MIB and exposing the incident to the media, he disappeared.

Frances Barwood, a member of the city council, opened an investigation into the incident. Since the military and local authorities had already managed to claim that the lights seen by the eyewitnesses were only flares, her coworkers thought her behavior was ludicrous.

Barwood received a call from Richard Curtis a few months later. He said right away that he had extremely detailed footage of the Phoenix Lights despite being an injured former soldier. He claimed that he had personally captured them using high-quality equipment. (Source)

Phoenix city councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood sits in her north Phoenix home with a copy of The Arizona Republic which touts “UFO Mania” on its front page June 20, 1997. Barwood didn’t see the lights, but many people called her about them demanding an explanation.

(AP Photo/Scott Troyanos, File)

Since the majority of the Phoenix Lights video footage up until this point had been merely specks of light on a dark background, Barwood was intrigued by this message. Curtis agreed to provide copies of the footage to Barwood’s office after she urged him to do so. However, days passed, and she did not receive films either by mail or by courier. “I thought he made this up. He didn’t have video, you know, all this stuff,” she said.

A week later, Curtis telephoned Barwood at her house and inquired about her thoughts on the films. Barwood informed him that she had not received them and expressed her amazement. Curtis continued by telling her that following their phone call, two men from her workplace stopped up at his home.

Curtis inquired if they were from Barwood’s office, and upon receiving confirmation, they asked about the Phoenix Lights videos, specifically questioning if Curtis had made copies. Curtis denied this and they offered to make copies for him themselves. He then gave them his videos and they departed in a black sedan.

Barwood was shocked to hear about the incident, as all her staff workers were female and she had no knowledge of the men. Curtis was angry and felt misled by the authorities. He spoke about the strange encounter and how the “Men in Black” took his videos in an interview with Phoenix TV.

Richard Curtis disappeared after supposedly taking a faulty medication and being transported to the hospital. There were no records of his admission, and when a professional checked Barwood’s phone lines, he confirmed that they were tapped by the government. This was surprising to Barwood, as authorities claimed the Phoenix Lights were just flares. Curtis’ disappearance became a major UFOlogy case, the second biggest one after Roswell.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

05-01-2024 om 21:54 geschreven door peter  

Tom Delonge Has UFO Secrets That Kept Him Up For 3 Nights: ‘These Beings Have Been Around Forever’

There are many things happening within the UAP phenomenon. With the recent Mexican UAP hearings, the entire world has come to learn about how governments worldwide are earnestly investigating this phenomenon. It is not solely about alien objects flying at supersonic speeds; the UAP phenomenon is intricately connected to our reality. Such like-minded individuals as Jacques Vallee and Michio Kaku propose the existence of other dimensions, also known as parallel universes, coexisting alongside our own reality. Within these dimensions, it is plausible that there are beings or entities living alongside us, despite our inability to perceive them.

Interestingly, Tom DeLonge, the former lead vocalist and guitarist of the popular band Blink-182, has always had a keen interest in UFOs. He has spent many years researching and studying the topic. He has even formed a company, To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science (or To The Stars) to investigate and promote research on UFOs and other related phenomena.

DeLonge even paid a visit to Rome with former Pentagon UFO official Luis Elizondo, where they discovered shocking details about the 2004 Sicily UFO attack. His “To The Stars” is behind publishing the three footages (captured in 2004 and 2015 by the US Navy) that were released in 2017 and 2018. They depict UFOs and include audio recordings of the pilots. These videos gained a lot of attention when they were released.

Tom’s fondness for UFOs began at a young age. As a child, he was fascinated by stories of alien encounters and sightings. He used to spend hours reading books and watching documentaries about unidentified flying objects and was particularly interested in the 1947 Roswell crash. Furthermore, his research led him to conclude that UFOs are not only real but that they have alien origins. He believes that there is a wealth of evidence to support this conclusion, including reports of sightings and encounters, as well as physical evidence such as radar tracks and photographs.

In this podcast with Dr. Brian Keating, Tom DeLonge shared several insights and personal experiences related to his involvement in UFO research. He was asked by TOE host Curt Jaimungal what it was that kept him up for three days.

DeLonge at first hesitates to delve into this topic but continues to talk about his communication with Jim Semivan (who is a co-founder of TTSA) and their unique way of thinking. Tom notes that Semivan and others have taught him how to analyze information more critically and avoid jumping to conclusions. They emphasize the importance of forming patterns and analyzing data over time.

Tom then touches on the idea of not fully grasping the stakes involved in the UAP phenomenon. He explains that initially, he struggled to accept the reality of it, despite encountering videos and books on the subject. He emphasizes the importance of verifying the authenticity of such evidence, especially when it comes to videos with a chain of title traced back to the Department of Defense (DOD).

“That’s why it was so important with the ones we brought out had chain of title all the way back to the DOD. So we knew those were real, it wasn’t just like it was on YouTube and leaked. So it’s, it’s the idea of bringing for things that you know, where they come from, and and you really take it from that point forward, and start getting really good data and evidence on people’s encounters, and the stakes that come with that. And that when when I’ve talked about this, as a threat, you know, this, that’s just my words, right? I mean, I would never know the way that government treats that that’s not my zone, obviously.

But for me, in my own personal research, if something’s been here for a long period of time, and it really is showing up in people’s bedrooms, or in front of an F 18, or on a petroglyph wall, or in an ancient text down in archives of the Vatican, or whatever it might be, it’s obviously doing something. And it’s obviously having an influence, and it might only be an influence on where we end up as mankind, or it might be an influence, to keep us suppressed in a weird way to where they can take advantage of something, who knows, um, but it’s here for a reason. And it’s not really being, you know, forward about its intent. But we do know that we’ve been dealing with it for a long period of time.”

Tom then recalls a personal experience when he had a meeting with a couple of generals in Colorado Springs. During the discussion, they talked about things that people were experiencing or witnessing related to the UAP phenomenon. This conversation left him feeling uneasy and made him question the safety of his environment, similar to how his religious mother might feel if she encountered something that contradicted her beliefs. He emphasizes that the phenomenon’s impact becomes more significant when it is perceived as real rather than just a belief.

He shares his personal belief that as humanity advances in its understanding of consciousness and the UAP phenomenon, it will merge metaphysical consciousness science with conventional science. He suggests that this merging might lead to a more harmonious coexistence of various religious beliefs, as the core principles of many religions focus on the individual’s connection to a higher consciousness. Tom hopes that instead of crumbling, religions will adapt and find common ground in this new understanding of reality.

“You know, I look at the taskforce report, and I look at what’s going on now. And if I if there was such a thing, like bodies are great After whatever, um, and they’re so advanced, and they’re somehow influencing the, you know, mankind and the way we are engineered to evolve or something crazy. I mean, because I look at us now it’s like, first we, we got into the biology of our bodies, and then we got deeper and we got into like, you know, DNA and what that’s doing. And every time we master parts of the body and parts of, you know, the world, we see and touch and feel like, what’s the next thing?

Well, I think the next thing is going to be discovering consciousness, and then we’re going to go how do we manipulate consciousness? And how do we capture it? And how do we are you know, so I’m kind of thinking of this, these beings have been around for so long, they must be in, they must be so far beyond like, wondering about our DNA, or wondering about like, what our spleen does, I think it’s going to be probably unnerving, probably complicated, probably a lot that we don’t know. And so the idea of the government just coming out and saying, Hey, look, what we got, before they know what it is, doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Read also:

• Journalist Said 2023 Alaska Object Was ‘Anomalous’; It Looked Like A Giant Tic-Tac
• Former CIA & Retd. Army Colonel Say Grusch’s Claims Are True: NHIs Are Behind Some UFOs
• Journalist Reveals Bob Lazar’s Astonishing Claim: Extraterrestrials See Humans as ‘Containers of Souls’
• David Grusch Credits Elizondo Galactic Zoo Theory: Aliens Are Studying Us & UFO Crashes Are Intentional

For some reason, Tom could not boldly speak about what he had discussed with those generals that kept him up for three days. In the same context, the case of former NASA researcher Ed Harris might shed some light on what Tom was trying to say.

Ed Harris claimed that serious researchers on the subject believe the story of former President Jimmy Carter crying after being briefed about classified UFO information to be true. According to the story corroborated by multiple witnesses, the U.S. presidents are given only a brief overview of the subject by the CIA, and presidential curiosity is not considered a sufficient need to know. (Click here to read the full article)

After being repeatedly stonewalled, Carter was given “the talk,” which reportedly left him deeply sobbing and visibly disturbed for weeks. He was told that major religions, including Christianity, were created by extraterrestrials to prevent humans from destroying themselves while they ran experiments on us, and that they made us. Carter, a deeply religious man who had witnessed a UFO with six other people, realized that releasing such information could cause tremendous economic and social upheaval.

Richard Dolan also covered this incident in his book, “UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed.” He wrote that President Carter was given a UFO briefing at the White House on June 14, 1977, which he was then bound to secrecy about.

Astronomer Jacques Vallée developed an alternative hypothesis that UFOs are part of a mechanism for controlling mankind. He is one of the few people who added credibility to the UFOlogy. When others called the UFO encounters a hoax, Vallée explained it scientifically. During his interview in 1986, he said that UFOs are a “physical object that interacts with the environment that causes effects on the witnesses on the psychology and the physiology and leaves traces on the ground and yet are capable of appeared to be manipulating time and space in ways that go beyond what our physics understands.” (Click here to read the full article)

Dr. Vallée argued that when investigating a UFO encounter, the focus should be on the witness, how he/she interpreted the event, and how it affected their life (he noted that many people tend to emotionally react to a UFO sighting as a spiritual or religious experience).

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

05-01-2024 om 17:45 geschreven door peter  

Original UFO Photograph From 1942 Battle Of Los Angeles That Was Sold On eBay

On February 25, 1942, around 2:30 in the morning, the people of Los Angeles were abruptly awakened by air raid sirens. The city was instructed to blackout and prepare for a possible attack. Searchlights illuminated the sky, searching for enemy aircraft. Eventually, the lights converged on a single object, causing frightened citizens to step outside to observe. The sky was filled with hundreds of explosions and smoke as the Battle of Los Angeles began.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the entire west coast of the United States was on high alert. Blackouts and curfews were common, and rumors circulated about Japanese battle groups invading the coast and enemy spies infiltrating the population. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, warned that American cities should be prepared for enemy attacks.

On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara fired 25 explosive shells at an oil field, causing minor physical damage but sending a clear message that America’s coast was vulnerable to attack at any time.

In the early morning of February 25, a radar station picked up a strange object in the sky over the Pacific about 200 miles from Los Angeles. By 2 am, two other radar stations confirmed the object, now only 120 miles off the coast, and headed directly for the city. At 3 am, the object was reported to be 25 planes flying at 12,000 feet, just off the coast of Santa Monica.

Suddenly, the object vanished from the radar. The city was ordered to blackout, and anti-aircraft batteries were loaded and ready to shoot on sight. Visual sightings continued, with some reporting one large ship and others multiple aircraft in formation. Anti-aircraft explosions lit up the sky as shrapnel rained down on the city for the next hour. The object eventually disappeared over Long Beach, and the situation was already under control by 4:14 am.

The incident was front-page news along the West Coast and across the nation. Over 1400 high-explosive shells and countless 50-caliber rounds were fired, but there was no evidence of any downed aircraft or bombs. Shell fragments damaged several buildings and vehicles, and five civilians died as an indirect result of the anti-aircraft fire: three were killed in car accidents in the ensuing chaos, and two heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long action.

The Battle of Los Angeles has been the source of numerous UFO sightings, with some of these reports coming from credible military sources. Project Blue Book investigated over 12,000 UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969 and was able to explain most of these sightings, but the object over Los Angeles in 1942 remains unsolved and unexplained. Despite numerous investigations and explanations, some still question what was fired upon that night.

Out of the 12,000 cases, there are still 701 unsolved, unexplained objects documented in Project Blue Book. Of the 700 cases, the object over LA in 1942 remains unexplained.

The most logical explanation for the LA object was a Japanese air attack, although 250 anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with explosions and shrapnel, there were no confirmed hits or downed targets. After the war, the Japanese military claimed they had no aircraft in the area at that time.

A local police officer claimed he saw two planes shot down, but there was no evidence of that on the ground. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, said it was just a false alarm and an overreaction due to jitters, but the army disagreed. They said the alert was absolutely real, and the army report said that as many as 15 planes might have been involved flying at various speeds and altitudes.

Despite the numerous military reports of something in the sky, skeptics say it was just jitters, but what about the eyewitness accounts and the three separate radar hits? The supporters of the UFO theory say the radar hits are absolute proof of a UFO, but it is important to note that radar technology in 1942 was not perfect.

Read also:

• Elizondo & Tom Delonge Found Photos Of Italian Helicopter Destroyed By UFO In 2004
• Famous 19-Sec UFO Footage Could Be Greatest Leak: CGI Experts Say It Is Real Deal
• 2006 Chicago O’Hare UFO Sighting: 22ft Long Alien Craft Witnessed by Many
• Leaked UFO Footage Shot In 1968 Smuggled By Journalist George Knapp From Russia

Upon asking his opinion on the UFO sightings, Major Donald Keyhoe said, “With all due respect to the air force, I believe that some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin. During a three-year investigation, I found that many polishes have described objects of substance and high speed. In one case, the polish reported their plane was buffeted by an object which passed them at 500 miles an hour. Obviously this was a solid object that I believe was from outer space.”

However, the famous photograph of the object over LA has been discovered to be doctored and possibly retouched. One can see the searchlights converging on something in the sky that is shaped like a saucer or football. However, the photo was enhanced and possibly retouched.

Image credit: David Marler

This was a common practice in the past to make photos more visible in newsprint, but the original photo was very different. It was underexposed and barely showed anything except for the faint lights. It was previously thought the original negative had been lost, and the one in the LA Times photo archives is not the original. The LA Times could not track down the original after working with investigators.

Interestingly, UFO researcher David Marler presented an original photo of the object over LA at the 2017 Ozark Mountain UFO Conference. He has actively investigated and researched the subject for 32 years. He joined The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1990 as a Field Investigator Trainee. (Source)

The story of how Marler got the original photo is really interesting. He claimed he bought it on eBay back in September 2012. The famous photograph was possibly not taken by an LA Times photographer, and the source of the original negative is in doubt. If it didn’t come from the LA Times, where did it come from?

Marler claimed that he traced it back to the Associated Press. So, all the photographs of 1942 objects over Los Angeles on the internet are doctored image published by the LA times. The authenticity of his photo can be confirmed after Ben Hansen, a former FBI agent, showed him a clip he shot with Simon Eliot, Archivist of the LA Times Collection at UCLA, where Eliot showed Hansen the original negative that an LA Times photographer did not take.

Below is the explanation given by David Marler:

“This is the original negative, and I’m viewing it as a positive because it just plays havoc with your eyes when you’re looking at things in reverse. So I wanted you to be able to see what the actual original image before it was doctored looks like. Here you can see all the writing on the side of the negative and again that typical notch pattern that’s not typical for the LA Times. If we blow this up, here’s what we’re looking at. This right here, and you can see these little blobs of light. These are all anti-aircraft explosions captured at the moment the photographer clicked the shutter…

I know what the original photos look like and the characteristics they need to have. One interesting thing is that not only is it a photo, but on the back, it has a stamped property of Associated Press dated February 25, 1942. I have other examples to show you from the collection that have the original news teletype glued to the back with one of the original descriptions of the event.

Here’s a blow-up and it’s very blurry, but there is a note to the editor dated February 25, 1942. This means that it was published that morning in preparation to be disseminated across the newswire as an Associated Press photo. It says ‘caution, use credit if you use this photo.’ I have many other similar photos, so I know the characteristics to look for.

The original news teletype says ‘Associated Press Photo, not LA Times.’ It says ‘caution, use credit from Los Angeles, how any aircraft barrage looked to Los Angeles.’ This picture shows how the early morning anti-aircraft guns shooting shells into the sky appeared to the average Los Angeles resident who got up to watch it. The small round white dots were made by the exploding shells.

Many people thought that a slow-moving object was the target of the guns, but hours later, the army still had not identified it. And again, Associated Press Photo, February 25, 1942. This is a nice piece of history to have in regards to the case.

Now we’re talking about a case that is 75 years old this year, and I think it’s interesting because as UFO researchers, we can never close a case unless we can rule out the possibility of a prosaic explanation. If you have an open case and you know it’s not a satellite or aircraft, it’s truly an anomalous case, and you can never close it.”

Some people claim that the object was shot down by the ordinance in the air that night, but others believe it was just a weather balloon that anti-aircraft gunners launched. There are reports of planes, bombers, and a crashed aircraft in the middle of the city, but the government claimed that it was likely shrapnel and burnt embers from exploding shells.

Dr. Robert Wood, an aerospace engineer who worked for Sikorsky, Hughes, McDonald Douglas, and Lockheed, believed there was a cover-up and exposed secret government projects. After retiring, Dr. Wood researched and exposed the Majestic 12 and other secret government projects. He received five leaked documents about the Battle of Los Angeles; at least one has been authenticated.

One of the documents is a memo between FDR and George Marshall, the army’s chief of staff. It is dated one week after the incident. It reads, “This headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are not of earthly origin and according to secret intelligence sources, they are in all probability of interplanetary origin.”

However, the government denied the memo, and Dr. Wood only received photocopies, not originals, so there is no way to test the paper to authenticate them as genuine. Nevertheless, this case, 80 years later, remains unsolved, and if there was a flying object in the skies above Los Angeles in February 1942, it remains unidentified.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

04-01-2024 om 22:11 geschreven door peter