tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91995945464221850702024-03-13T01:52:07.464-04:00The UFO PartisanFrank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-47868033041666854412017-12-27T21:59:00.000-05:002023-05-15T23:21:31.387-04:00The Science Behind The Pentagon UFO Study<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-science-behind-pentagon-ufo-study.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="675" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJhP055wvIH3AZj6UfbIfYhWi5qJF-eSTZ8Gl3nKS5GYOdTdpe0BfMDAulbGU4xotkpheAmUTyv9gZElP-9dTIKFfYJHUhsY_MV1XzzIUM5IYSOrp-dALjjx9YOJQK-0cY_stPF57cn04/s1600/NolanHeader.jpg" /></a></div>
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<td><a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/nolan.html%20">Dr. Garry
Nolan</a> is a Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford
University as well as being a member of the advisory board for the <a href="https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/">To
The Stars Academy</a>, a private sector follow up to the 2007-2012 Pentagon UFO study involving many of the same people including Luis Elizondo, who
headed up the Pentagon study and acts as Director of Global Security &
Special Programs for TTS. <br />
<br />
Over the last several days, Dr. Nolan has been nice enough to answer
several questions regarding what we might look for going forward regarding
the scientific research taking place as part of that follow up.<br />
<br />
The following material, while presented in a standard interview format,
was compiled from a series of private messages and open conversations
at my UFO Facebook group. Obviously, more questions will come up as time
goes on and this article will be updated accordingly.<br />
<br />
<b>NOTE: </b>There have been two significant updates to this initial story so be sure to scroll down the whole way to read the whole story . . . for now.<br />
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<b>Q</b><b>:</b> Can you give us a little background on the nature of the recovered
materials mentioned in the New York Times story?<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> These are not your grandma's alloys. If these materials truly
exist-- they are going to be found to be metamaterials. Though I call them metamaterials-- it's really for lack of a better term. They are probably even more engineered and subtle than that. The science of metamaterials is only a few decades old, but there is a whole ecosystem
of new journals growing up around their unexpected and wondrous properties.
One way to think about metamaterials is that is, basically, quantum engineeringworking
with normal matter in a way that takes advantage of properties
we dont fully appreciate yet. We draw the physical universe with
only 80 elements. I would guessjust hypothesis-- that they
(an advanced civilization) that we might infer can accomplish some of
the feats observed by the pilots understand the subtleties of isotopes
and design with all 253 stable isotopes. The metamaterials they
could design would be more subtle and likely encompass a greater understanding
of reality and physics than we know now. <br />
<br />
Remember, isotopes of a given element have the same electronic configuration,
so they form covalent bonds similar to their sister isotopes (though with
subtle differences in bond strengths). However, their nuclei have different
spins for instance with, at times, unpaired neutrons. The various nuclear
configurations gives rise to multiple fascinating opportunities in designing
metamaterials. Want to know what your children should be studying in school?
Physics, metallurgy, and advanced composite materials. <br />
<br />
People interested in understanding the reality of what's going on with
these metamaterials (so-called alloys) need to understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope
. There are 253 isotopes that do not undergo radioactive decay in any
reasonable time frame. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides">This
page has a table of nuclides where the grey boxes denote the 253 stable
isotopes.</a> Some elements, such as aluminum, have only 1 stable isotope.
Titanium and nickel each have 5 stable isotopes. Tin (Sn) has eight! There
are natural ratios of these isotopes that are largely governed by stellar
decay processes, centrifugal forces (solar and other) during planetary
formation, and proximity to gamma and other radiation sources. The ratios
vary only slightly (maximum a couple percent) across a solar system. Significant
variations in isotope ratios imply either engineering of the ratios for
a purpose, or that the materials came from somewhere that does not "play
by our rules".<br />
<br />
My suspicion is that a foundational difference is the nuclear spin of these isotopes (and other quantum features associated with different arrangements of the nuclear shells in the different isotopes) that affects how they behave/contribute in these composites or metamaterial structures.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/">We use a lot of these
isotopes in my lab at Stanford -- purely as tags in biology experiments.
We dont come close to using them in the way I am suggesting above.
</a><br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Do any of these metamaterials have shape memory properties?<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> They might, but I have not been following that area. My main
interest is in quantum microscopes and how they might manage properties of electromagnetism
and entanglement. I am particularly interested, and on record at several
conferences, stating that entanglement might offer a whole new way to
measure events at a distance for biological and clinical purposes.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Is there any sense on what the function of these metamaterials is?
Are they part of a vehicle structure or do they have an avionics or propulsion
(for lack of better words) application?<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> If I knew the answer to that I'd be filing patents right now.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Jacques Vallee has been <a href="https://www.dailygrail.com/2017/09/rendezvous-with-vallee/">discussing
these materials lately</a>. Have you been working with him at all?<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> Yes, Jacques and I have worked together on many projects.
Including his recent discussions on the isotope ratios. Jacques previously worked
with Peter Sturrock (Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics here at Stanford)
a couple of decades ago on composition of materials from UAP.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Would it be fair to say a lot of the "portal" talk surrounding
TTS and other efforts is more akin to stable wormholes/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole">Einstein-Rosen
bridges</a>?<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> While I don't officially speak for TTS, as I am on "just"
the advisory board.... My personal opinion is Yes.<br />
<br />
<b>Q:</b> Are you familiar with <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-wormhole-allows-information-to-escape-black-holes-20171023/">Aron
Wall's work</a>? He's apparently working on some sort of portal/traversable
wormhole.<br />
<br />
<b>DR. NOLAN:</b> I don't know Aron's work, but there are two physicists on
the TTS team who might. One of them is a specialist in space time metrics
(engineering of space/time).<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE FEBRUARY 21:</b> Also, I noticed among the incoming traffic links to this story <a href="https://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=fr&to=en&r=true&a=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forum-ovni-ufologie.com%2Ft21527-jacques-vallee-sa-prochaine-conference-a-paris" target="_blank">a very interesting post at a French UFO forum</a> which discusses a presentation by Dr. Jacques Vallee about these advanced and possibly ET materials. The post doesn't provide much detail about what he said but there are a series of photographs which provide tantalizing clues.<br />
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<b>UPDATE APRIL 12:</b> It turns out the above pictures are from the 2017 Contact In The Desert conference. Vallee goes into extensive detail about significant differences in the isotopic ratios, as mentioned above by Dr. Nolan. Here is the full video and a big thank you, although it is getting a bit tiresome, to the one and only <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/168251106933921/" target="_blank">Peter Mandeville</a>:</div>
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Below is a link to a paper written by Professor Peter Sturrock on the Ubatuba material Vallee discusses during the above presentation:<br />
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<a href="http://www.nicap.org/reports/ubatubanal.htm" target="_blank">http://www.nicap.org/reports/ubatubanal.htm</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>In it, he writes, "it has not proved possible to identify where the material was produced."</b></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It's also important to note <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">some, if not all, of the materials members of the To The Stars Academy have talked about have never been in the government's hands in the first place so obviously FOIAs will be of no use there. Just because TTSA is talking about something doesn't mean the United States government/military ever had it or that the TTSA organization has it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;"><b>UPDATE JUNE 12:</b> Hal Puthoff addressed the SSE/IRVA conference a few nights back and went into some detail about UFOs and metamaterials. The full transcript of his talk is <a href="http://paradigmresearchgroup.org/wordpress/blog/" target="_blank">here</a>. Here's what he had to say about the materials:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">"</span></span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #282828; font-family: "lato"; font-size: 16px;">So let me give you an example of, how this stuff helps people who are chasing these really difficult problems. I’m choosing one here: metamaterials for aerospace use. I’d love to talk about really fancy materials, but they’re classified. However, there’s a lot of materials that have been picked up or provided even in the public domain. I’m going to give an example because it shows exactly what the structure is for how to deal with this. This is an open source sample. It was sent anonymously to talk show host Art Bell. The fellow claimed to be in the military. He said that this sample was picked up in a crash retrieval, and so he sent it by email. So what does that mean? Chain of custody non-existent. Provenance questionable. Could be a hoax. Could be some slag off of some foundry floor or whatever. However, it was an unusual sample, so we decided to take a look at it.</span></blockquote>
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It was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about ten-times the size of a human hair. Supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an Advanced Aerospace Vehicle. It looks like it’s been in a crash. The white lines are the bismuth; the darker areas are the magnesium separations. So the question was what about this material, so naturally we looked in all the national labs, we talked to metallurgists, we combed the entire structure of published papers. Nowhere could we find any evidence that anybody ever made one of these.</blockquote>
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Secondly, some attempts were made to try to reproduce this material, but they couldn’t get the bismuth and magnesium layers to bond.<br />
Thirdly, when we talked to people in the materials field who should know, they said we don’t know why anybody would want to make anything like this. It’s not obvious that it has any function.</blockquote>
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Well, years later, decades later actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation terahertz frequencies. So, the wavelength is 60 microns, which is a pretty small size. But it turns out because of the metamaterial aspect of this material, those bismuth layers that act as waveguides can be one twentieth the size of the wavelength, and usually when you make a waveguide it’s gotta be about the size of the wavelength. So, in fact this turned out to be a material that would propagate sub-wavelength waveguide effects. Why somebody wants to do that we still don’t know the answer to that.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></blockquote>
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But anyway, it’s amazing we’ve gone through this and this is the kind of structure we go through a lot. You get a material sample with unusual characteristics to be evaluated, the method of manufacture is difficult to assess or reproduce, the purpose of the function is not readily apparent – as with our sample here, and then as our own technical knowledge moves forward we finally see a possible purpose or function comes to light. That sequence is repeated over and over in this particular area."</blockquote>
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Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-10143511184078888352014-05-23T07:50:00.004-04:002023-05-15T23:22:49.424-04:00Stanford Physicist: We Have Physical Evidence Of UFOs!<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2014/05/stanford-physicist-we-have-physical.html"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHGAwqeZMaKIzbHK7vslIIc9oTf4DlkdDxDPOwptt6pprGnbKESwWCwRLvPf4daEmacYXPoh3WUa6ncv3vcOo_JCjGknMg6-Nivsy9hNUzg9zqwUyEjhnkldcYRPBiIDVKXBsWnvwZVmU/s1600/ProfessorHeader.jpg" /></a>
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<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/Sturrock/Peter">Peter Sturrock</a>
is an emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford University and
one of the very few scientists who has publicly expressed a great deal
of interest in UFOs and acted on that interest by twice surveying colleagues
on the subject which resulted in some very surprising findings. He is
also unambiguous on one particular category of UFO evidence which he happens
to know a little bit about . . . . radar reports.</blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Yes - radar is physical evidence," Sturrock stated in an
email exchange he was generous enough to grant me.<br />
<a name='more'></a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Professor Sturrock's involvement with radar dates back to World War
II. While studying mathematics at Cambridge University, he interrupted
his studies to help in the war effort and joined the Telecommunications
Research Establishment in 1942, now known as the Royal Radar Establishment,
where he helped develop radar systems. </blockquote>
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Skeptics commenting on the UFO phenomenon often claim that a major problem
with UFOs is the only evidence are witness sightings, claim they are unreliable
and cite a lack of physical evidence. While that is often the case, there
are notable exceptions where physical evidence does exist in the form
of radar reports and they corroborate the accounts of multiple credible
witnesses. There have been a number of famous UFO cases that have involved
radar reports and two of the most famous contemporary incidents are the
JAL Alaska case from 1986 and the Stephenville, Texas sightings of 2008. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On November 17, 1986, a Japan Air Lines 747 cargo jet, piloted by Captain
Kenju Terauchi, was flying westward near Mt. McKinley when he spotted
a UFO. "Then there was a kind of reverse thrust, and the lights became
dazzlingly bright. Our cockpit lit up. The thing was flying as if there
was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our
speed, in our direction, so that to us it looked like it was standing
still. The next instant it changed course. There's no way a jumbo could
fly like that. If we tried, it'd break apart in mid-air. In other words,
the flying object had overcome gravity," Terauchi said. </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Terauchi and his crew had the sighting but John Callahan, the FAA Division
Chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch, had the data. The radar
report covered more than a half hour. Callahan states in the following
video interview, "As far as I'm concerned, I saw a UFO chase a Japanese
747 across the sky for over half an hour on radar." </blockquote>
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He goes on to say that members of President Reagans Scientific
Study Team, the FBI and the CIA he met with about the incident expressed
excitement at the data.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Stephenville, Texas case of January 2008 featured dozens of residents
of the Texas town and its' surroundings sighting UFOs. Some reported aircraft
the size of a football field and larger. Freedom Of Information Act requests
were quickly sent to the FAA, National Weather Service and local Air Force
bases by radar expert Glen Schulze and Robert Powell, MUFON Director of
Research, seeking radar data for January 8.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In their summary, Schulze and Powell wrote, "The enormous size of
the object, its' complete silence and its' ability to travel at high rates
of speed and to also remain stationary or travel at slow speeds is not
explained by any known aircraft. Based on approximate distance of the
object and witness descriptions of degrees of sky covered by the object
indicated an object closer to 1000 feet in size. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Twice, radar picked up
an unknown object flying at 1900-2100 mph."They discussed their findings in the CNN interview below and the full
radar report is <a href="http://www.ufocasebook.com/pdf/mufonstephenvilleradarreport.pdf" target="_blank">available at this link.</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pjHTCaucuYs" width="480"></iframe></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I also asked Professor Sturrock if he had a favorite UFO case and he replied, "The Coyne helicopter case."</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On October 18, 1973, the four-man crew of an Army Reserve helicopter
heading towards Cleveland from Columbus had an otherworldly encounter
with a UFO at about 10:30 PM as they were flying near Mansfield, Ohio.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/ufo-nearcollision-with-army-helicopter-40-years-ago_n_4119987.html">"This
craft, from the angle that we saw it, was cigar-shaped. It had no wings,
no vertical or horizontal stabilizer, was approximately 60 feet long,
15-20 feet in height. We were at 1,700 feet, then this craft began to
move slowly to the west away from us. At this time, I was worried we were
going to hit the ground, and I looked at my altimeter and our helicopter
was at 3,500 feet, climbing 1,000 feet a minute with no changes in the
control. We went from 1,700 feet to 3,500 feet in a matter of seconds
and never knew it!,"</a> Lawrence Coyne, the commander of the helicopter
recalled.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There were civilian witnesses on the ground as well.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://therustbeltchronicles.com/40-years-laterthe-coynehelicopterufo-incident-in-mansfield-ohio/">"I
had driven a few blocks from my house and was driving north on Paul Boulevard.
I stopped the car once I saw how close the UFO was above the tree line
over-looking Sunset Park. The chopper was beneath my view. Here in plain
view was the UFO, green light on the front, white light and a red light
on the rear on a nearly sixty-foot long dark metallic-grey object that
had the appearance of a cigar shaped stogie. I sat in my car marveling
at its appearance. It made no sound. Suddenly the UFO shot off towards
the northwest and in literally seconds it was the size of a star in the
distance. Even faster, the object disappeared from sight."</a> said
Bill Carver, brother of Jim Carver, the author of the article linked above.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Not surprisingly, skeptic Phil Klass attempted to explain the case away
but the credibility of the witnesses involved and the detail of their
reports render his explanation implausible.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://www.noufors.com/Captain_Lawrence_Coyne.html">"Any
theory of the objects being a meteor (UFO skeptic Philip Klass maintains
that the object was a fireball of the Orionid meteor shower)
can readily be rejected on the basis of: (1) the duration of the event
(an estimated 300 seconds); (2) the marked deceleration and hard-angle
maneuver of the object at closest approach; (3) the precisely defined
shape of the object; and (4) the horizon-to-horizon flight path. The possibility of a high-performance aircraft likewise is untenable when
one examines the positions and colors of the lights with respect to the
flight path of the object. To have presented the reported configurations,
and been in accordance with FAA regulations, an aircraft would have had
to be flying sideways, either standing on its tail, tail-to to the helicopter,
or upside-down head-on."</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />Below is a segment about the case from the 1990s TV show Sightings.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uJ_Vl_IWxPs" width="480"></iframe></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Finally, I asked the professor about his own research into UFOs. In 1973, Professor Sturrock distibuted two questionaires, one to members of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the other to members of the American Astronomical Society.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The AIAA survey results indicated that "a sample of scientifically trained persons reports aerial phenomena similar to so-called "UFO reports," and the AAS survey revealed that "a small fraction (of order 5%) are likely to report varied and puzzling observations, not unlike so-called "UFO reports" made by the general public," according to the professor.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He also noted that, "if you want to find out whether scientists see UFOs you must ask them, and you probably must guarantee them anonymity. Scientists have no doubt been discouraged from taking the problem seriously by the bizarre nature of some of the reports and emphasis upon the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" (ETH)."</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Professor Sturrock's full papers on his findings are available <a href="http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc592.htm">here</a> and <a href="http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc604.htm">here</a>.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Specifically, I asked Professor Sturrock about his opinion on expanding future queries to include social scientists like historians, sociologists and psychologists, professionals who I thought might also have some interest in and be able to contribute to the UFO field.</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I would encourage similar surveys of other professions. Then the results could be compared," he replied.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br /></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Finally, I'd like to thank Professor Sturrock for taking the time to answer my questions and I would also like to thank my good friend, fellow UFO researcher and the pride of Surrey in the UK Peter Mandeville for providing the tip that led to this article. </blockquote>
Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-66782154634034618982011-11-11T19:39:00.057-05:002023-05-15T23:24:44.800-04:00THE DRAKE EQUATION, THE FERMI PARADOX & THE KARDASHEV SCALE<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2011/11/drake-equation-fermi-paradox-kardashev.html"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6043/6335382699_d53c49b6e5_b.jpg" style="display: block; height: 451px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a>
<br />
<blockquote>
Thoughts regarding the potential for advanced extraterrestrial civilization range from deeply considered speculation from well regarded scientists to inane comments on internet forums that turn every intelligent back-and-forth into an unfunny joke about how stupid humans are in general or, more specifically, how stupid supporters of the opposition political party are. I'm going to take a closer look at three of the most famous scientific ideas that have developed from the ongoing conversation regarding ET and sprinkle in some of my own lowbrow thoughts on the matter.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation">The Drake Equation</a> is, far and away, the most famous of the three concepts I'll cover. It is a fairly straightforward formula for estimating the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy capable of interstellar communication and was developed by Frank Drake, a SETI pioneer and professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as he was preparing for an early conference on the subject of communication with ET in 1961.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/seti/seti_history_07.html" style="font-style: italic;">"As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy. This, of course, was aimed at the radio search, and not to search for primordial or primitive life forms."</a><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
R* = 10/year (10 stars formed per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy)<br />
fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)<br />
ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)<br />
fl = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life)<br />
fi = 0.01 (1% of which will be intelligent life)<br />
fc = 0.01 (1% of which will be able to communicate)<br />
L = 10,000 years (which will last 10,000 years)<br />
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;<br />
<br />
Drake's initial values, listed above, resulted in N = 10.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
There is certainly one key qualification I have with the equation and that's the first variable. I don't really see what value the number of stars formed per year over the life of the galaxy actually has and <a href="http://www.space.com/18370-universe-star-formation-rate-decline.html" target="_blank">a team of astronomers from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands has determined that the rate of star creation in the universe peaked about 11 billion years ago and has been dropping ever since</a>. The problem seeks to reasonably estimate a number of contemporary advanced ET civilizations in the galaxy, so let's take a closer look at the Milky Way as it is today.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic;">
<a href="http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/seti/seti_history_07.html"></a></blockquote>
<a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6167/6176834730_21739ce903_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6167/6176834730_21739ce903_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 575px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
Somewhere between 100 and 120 thousand light years in diameter and 1000 light years top to bottom, the Milky Way is home to an estimated, a very broad estimate I might add, 200 to 600 billion stars. I like keeping my math simple, so I'll go with the smaller diameter estimate of 100 thousand light years as I move along. Breaking the galaxy into 100 sections, we get zones 10 thousand light years side to side with the thickness, of course, staying the same. Obviously, there's nothing in those corner sections, but if scientists can give themselves 400 billion stars worth of wiggle room, I'll give myself a few empty sections of space. Regardless of the broad range of estimates, the galaxy is mind-numbingly huge.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6092/6341495570_08083acce5_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6092/6341495570_08083acce5_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 382px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>One strength of Drake's formula is that it recognizes the obvious: not every star will<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
have planets, not every planet will have life, and not every planet with life will have a species on it that rises to the level of civilization builder. Of course we know there is one and that is us. How do we plug reasonable estimates into the rest of the equation? <a href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/11/10115679-160-billion-planets-in-the-milky-way">Current estimates of the number of planets in the galaxy check in as high as 160 billion</a>, some of them part of confirmed multi-planet solar systems and the best current estimate for habitable planets comes in at around 500 million to two billion.</div>
<br />
So let's assume all the planets in the habitable zone have life of one form or another. How do we get to the essential N number? <a href="http://news.discovery.com/earth/874-million-species-on-earth-110823.html">Well, a recent survey of Earth put the number of species of animals here at 7.7 million.</a> We know only one of them is a very smart monkey species so let's say that for every 7.7 million planets with life, there's one with a smart monkey, or smart something else, capable of building a civilization that can communicate with our's. My reason for that number? It's the Drake Equation, I can plug whatever number I want into that variable. So can you or anyone else. Looking at the problem that way give us the answer N = 65. A little more generous than Drake's. Of course, Drake's result might be generous. He may have been incredibly conservative too.<br />
<br />
Playing with the Drake Equation is a fun little exercise whether you come up with only one other advanced ET planet or 1000, but is the Drake equation pointless? Of course not, but it was only developed as a useful device to spur conversation and while it still serves that purpose to this day that's as far as it goes. It's basically just a tool for bullshit sessions on the subject of intelligent life in the galaxy.<br />
<br />
A confirmed answer of one would change our world forever and that brings us to the Fermi Paradox and . . . UFOs. The Fermi Paradox, as generally understood, raises the question, "If our galaxy is teeming with civilized life why haven't we discovered it?" It's certainly a valid question.<br />
<br />
Skeptics and minimizers of an ET presence in the galaxy lean hard on the Fermi <a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6034/6341443958_8dca9e2d4d_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6034/6341443958_8dca9e2d4d_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 508px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>Paradox to back their position but what many folks don't know is the <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf">Fermi Paradox developed from a very casual conversation over lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1950 or thereabouts, and the catalyst for the conversation was a recent batch of UFO sightings.</a><br />
<br />
Enrico Fermi was a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose work led to the development of the first nuclear reactor, quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic weapons. He was joined on this day by fellow scientists Emil Konopinski, Herbert York and Edward Teller.<br />
<br />
UFO fever had gripped the United States and the subject of flying saucers, as they were then called, came up. The scientists expressed doubt that the UFOs of the day were of ET origin and the subject quickly turned to our own ability to travel beyond light speed within the next ten years. According to Teller, Fermi thought there was a ten percent chance of that happening . . . back in 1950! Obviously, he was a little optimistic on that projection.<br />
<br />
While the conversation shifted off to other matters, Fermi suddenly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" causing a laugh from his party. In recounting the conversation in correspondence, everyone knew Fermi was talking about advanced extraterrestrials. He went on to, according to York's account, perform some quick calculations, his own on-the-fly version of the Drake Equation a decade before the fact, and "concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over."<br />
<br />
Some might think, me included, that Fermi's apparent skepticism of ET visitation in his day conflicts with his own calculations of the odds, that maybe we have been visited long ago and many times over. Just because they have maintained a fairly low and ambiguous profile in their survey doesn't mean they aren't visiting. Other answers to Fermi's question over the years have included thoughts like they just aren't there, faster than light travel isn't possible, they haven't found us and so on.<br />
<br />
The problem with finding an ET signal via listening to the sky, the method pioneered by Drake, is obviously the size of the galaxy. Let's say there are 1000 advanced civilizations in the galaxy, a very optimistic number, and they are fairly evenly distributed, which won't be the case but it makes the calculations easier, with 10 in every 1 percent of galaxy space.<br />
<br />
<img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6040/6336153046_42334d9d5b_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 575px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" />You can see for yourself just how much space exists between them. That one percent block of galaxy space is 10000 light years across and 1000 light years top to bottom. Each civilization is a good two or three or four thousand light years from its' nearest neighbor. Some sort of waveform communication is going to have to be in existence a few millennia for any of them to hear each other. Also in this block are two to six billion other stars and 500 million other planets with maybe 5 million of them capable of harboring life. It's both very big and very busy.<br />
<br />
But as time has worn on, the conversation of that crew of scientists has risen to the <a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6096/6341443918_c6dc12ab4e.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6096/6341443918_c6dc12ab4e.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 356px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>level of legend . . . a legend born from a lunchtime bullshit session among scientists.<br />
<br />
Lastly, I'll discuss the Kardashev Scale, developed by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, in which he categorizes advanced ET civilizations but before I get to the details of that <a href="http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1985IAUS..112&classic=YES&db_key=AST&whole_paper=NO&page=497&type=SCREEN_GIF&data_type=GIF&cover=9">I must mention this paper written by Kardashev </a>in which he suggests an alien supercivilization could build a space telescope powerful enough to see life on Earth from the center of the galaxy. The diameter of the reflector of such a device? It would need to be 0.1 light years across . . . about 586 billion miles! That's roughly 6,300 times the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the sun. The guy does not speculate conservatively!<br />
<br />
To explain the scale in greater detail, I'll leave it to Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist who co-founded string field theory and author from his speech at the Global Competitiveness Forum in Saudi Arabia early in 2011.<br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/TCWdDoTIa_o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
I have to wonder what value the scale really has? Why would any civilization need or even want to harness the power of the galaxy? What's the point? Kardashev didn't say. I have to think the most advanced ETs would be incredibly efficient and be able to generate whatever energy they need with surprising simplicity. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
As far as categorizing intelligent ET civilizations, I think earlier steps in the process are well worth recognizing like the ability to record your own history and technological knowledge base and pass that down through the generations in a more permanent fashion than storytelling around a fire pit. Metalworking is also an important step forward. Perhaps the most important step any civilization might make is simply being able to live peacefully with each other and in accord with their home planet. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote>
I applaud Kardashev's wild imagination but don't find his scale especially compelling in a practical sense but it is also a fine launching pad for bullshit sessions.<br />
<br />
Kaku's comment about the European Union being the beginnings of a Type I economy is laughable just a few months after the fact considering the current debt crisis they're going through. I think a Type I, II or III civilization might be developed enough and managed by smart enough individuals to not have any economy at all.<br />
<br />
Kaku's cliched trotting out of the martyrdom of the 16th century astronomer and friar Giordano Bruno at the hands of the Roman Inquisition more than 400 years ago seems ironic considering he gave his speech in a country that still has public beheading and dismemberment as part of its' 21st century criminal justice system.<br />
<br />
Another cliche often repeated by scientists in general is recounting the sad tale of Galileo's mistreatment by the Catholic church as a result of his book in support of Copernican heliocentric theory. What often isn't mentioned is that when Copernicus' theory was first presented to then Pope Clement VII, about 100 years before Bruno and Galileo, the pope was incredibly excited by this new concept and Cardinal Nicholas Schonberg praised him and offered financial support, writing directly to Copernicus:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=xTQyK2SrxEkC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=Copernicus+clement+vii&source=bl&ots=8vj4HXrxlb&sig=zvRUUD6zwu_1tLyycT8o_4diyUA&hl=en&ei=p6S-TvLjD-Le0QHhnOHXBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Copernicus%20clement%20vii&f=false"><span style="font-style: italic;">"I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves, that the sun occupies the lowest. and thus central place, in the universe . . . I have also learned that you have written an exposition of this whole system of astronomy, and have computed the planetary motions and set them down in tables to the greatest admiration of all. Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars . . . I have instructed Theodoric of Reden to have everything copied in your quarters at my expense and dispatched to me. If you gratify my desire in this matter, you will see that you are dealing with a man who is zealous for your reputation and eager to do justice to so fine a talent."</span></a><br />
<br />
What this clearly demonstrates is a historical lesson none of us should ever forget. No human advance is safe. We can always fall back rather than move forward. But I'm sure the check for Kaku's appearance fee cleared . . . the beginnings of a Type I economy.<br />
<br />
Of course, the very premise of such a conference, competitiveness, might very well be an anachronism to a truly advanced civilization if it has ever been embraced at all and the forum's hosts, members of the Saudi royal family, are leaders of what has long been considered by forward thinking individuals an anachronistic system here on the Earth. It's cooperation that would be needed to take a society from a level analogous to where we're all at today to the point of supercivilization. We may not be able to provide undeniable proof of ET visitation, despite compelling evidence, but we should be thinking <span style="font-style: italic;">AS IF</span> it has been occurring. The reasons are obvious . . . look at the current condition of our world. We need to deduce how a truly advanced supercivilization manages itself and become that supercivilization. Admittedly, we've got a long way to go, but if they can do it, we can do it.<br />
<br />
The truth is, if an alien civilization has been visiting us, quite possibly for thousands of years, it has happened and the how of it all is a fact even if we can't duplicate the feat and the why of it all must be considered. We clearly know the distances are incredible, the technology of actually accomplishing interstellar travel extraordinary are well beyond our current capacity. There can be no other conclusion . . . there must be some level of affection and admiration for us from them driving their intellectual curiosity, a characteristic shared by all higher order species here on Earth. No thinking, rational species would go through so much trouble to cover so much distance to study something they had utter contempt for. It just doesn't make any sense. Whether it is because of our past, our present or our potential, we must, we must embrace this idea if we want to move forward and not back.<br />
<br />
They also wouldn't have pursued their own technological progress as aggressively if they had no passion for it. Quite simply, they wouldn't do it if they didn't like it. I have some sense that there is this great passion, that a really advanced society would also have fun with and even make a game of, their technological advances.<br />
<br />
And what do they see in us? What does any Western anthropologist see when investigating primitive cultures or archeologist see when digging into the past? Being the most advanced doesn't necessarily make you the most interesting. Our science might not impress them all that much, maybe it's our art.</blockquote>
<a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6170/6176307261_31c7dcc0ef_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6170/6176307261_31c7dcc0ef_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 480px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
We can't really be sure a surveying ET would even be aware of the significance of a masterpiece hanging on a wall in a museum. Have they read Moby Dick or The Odyssey too? It seems most likely to me that they've seen some marvelous examples of human expression in many great structures spread across our planet and I really can't imagine, no matter how advanced they are, their not being admirers of them.<br />
<br />
The Great Pyramid, Chicken Itza, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Gateway Arch, the Sydney Opera House. These are the structural expressions that are most likely to attract ET attention, I think, for obvious reasons. It's hard to miss them. An advanced culture is going to be a metalworking culture. Spaceships, whatever their level of function, aren't going to be made of animal skins, stone or wood. I think they'd really like that arch.<br />
<br />
Some less ambitious statues become more spectacular because of their placement. The Statue of Liberty and Christ The Redeemer in Rio come to mind. Perhaps the geography surrounding those statues reminds them of home. Or maybe they're really impressed by our commercial billboards. You never know.</blockquote>
<a href="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6169/6176834692_fccfac45ed_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6169/6176834692_fccfac45ed_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 347px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a><br />
<blockquote>
And what of their art? The zero sum thinker wouldn't see art in the design of possible ET vehicles on a visit. Of course (if happening) they are both artistic and scientific wonders. Efficient and elegant. As far as any art in an ET world, again perhaps the binary thinking of men excludes great possibilities. Could their art fulfill both an aesthetic and practical role? Could their kinetic art, like mobiles, also generate much of the energy they need and make the idea of harnessing the power of the galaxy laughable? Could their music do the same? Or is it the other way around? Of course our own architecture and vehicle design is both a sight to behold and performs its' function to whatever extent is needed, but in an ET world have they managed to blend these concepts to a greatly advanced level? If they advanced enough to get here, you have to consider that they have.<br />
<br />
Of course the Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox and Kardashev Scale have some value in that they drive speculative conversations about ET but there may very well be a cadre of Earthophiles on some alien planet possessing a knowledge base thousands of years old and it's not inconceivable they know us better than we know ourselves.<br />
<br />
<br /></blockquote>
Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-83717312666234731742011-04-13T18:17:00.018-04:002011-04-16T00:40:27.475-04:00The Truth Revealed By The FBI-UFO Memos? Truman Didn't Like J. Edgar Hoover!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2011/04/truth-revealed-by-fbi-ufo-memos-truman.html"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 675px; height: 392px;" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5109/5617680832_3ecf4921df_b.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><p></p><blockquote>Much has been made about the FBI's new online database for searching through certain available documents, particularly as it relates to one 1950 memo regarding a UFO crash sent directly to then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. While it's a memo that has been available awhile, its' existence is new to a lot of people and the memo itself is significant and raises a significant question. Why any interest at all from Hoover if there's nothing to UFOs?</blockquote><p></p><p><a name='more'></a> </p><p><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5110/5617129265_7c95b7e871_z.jpg"></a></p><blockquote><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5110/5617129265_7c95b7e871_z.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 632px;" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5110/5617129265_7c95b7e871_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></blockquote><blockquote><a href="http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2011/04/j-edgar-hoovers-saucer-crash-secrets-by.html">It is one of a number of documents that establish that Hoover had interest in UFOs, as demonstrated recently by Anthony Bragalia at the UFO Inconoclast(s) blog. </a>The quality of the information within these memos, the one above getting all the recent attention and likely regarding a tall tale passed through many sources before reaching Special Agent Guy Hottel, also demonstrates Hoover was far outside the loop regarding the best information available about them.<br /><br />There's a reason for that . . . President Harry Truman flat out didn't like the wa<a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5617680844_319595735a.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 328px;" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5617680844_319595735a.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>y Hoover operated.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.trumanlibrary.org/calendar/main.php?searchterm=edgar+hoover&bool=AND&searchterm1&yearstart=1945&yearend=1952&limit=20&lowerlimit=0">Truman met directly with Hoover only once in his almost eight years as president, about a month after Truman took office and never again. The other ten times Hoover was on the president's calendar were dinners, awards, one of them was to Hoover for his already lengthy service, and receptions, essentially mass gatherings.</a><br /><br />Privately, Truman pulled no punches in his opinions of Hoover's FBI. From David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Truman, quoting notes from White House Counsel Clark Clifford, on Page 665, on Truman's views, <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://bit.ly/hecvXs">"very strongly anti-FBI. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of "Gestapo."</a><br /><br />From the same book, in a private correspondence with his wife, Bess, Truman wrote, <span style="font-style: italic;">"If I can prevent [it], there'll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country. Edgar Hoover's organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me."</span><br /><br />Hoover's underhanded tactics were known first hand to Truman and he rebuffed Hoover's attempts to send him dirt via techniques like wiretapping and ordered it stopped in no uncertain terms according to this article in Time magazine.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,879566-3,00.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Truman, by contrast, wanted nothing to do directly with Hoover, who had to deal </span></a><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5190/5617095831_ea8f247fbe.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 328px;" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5190/5617095831_ea8f247fbe.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,879566-3,00.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">with the President's military aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan. When Vaughan showed Truman an FBI transcript of the tap on Corcoran, Truman was unimpressed. It was about Mrs. Corcoran making appointments with her hairdresser. "Well, I don't give a goddam whether Mrs. Corcoran gets her hair fixed or doesn't get her hair fixed. What the hell is that crap?" Vaughan: "It's a wiretap." Truman: "Cut them all off. Tell the FBI we haven't got any time for that kind of shit." </span></a><br /><br />The historical record is quite clear, from first hand sources, that Truman held Hoover in low regard and certainly did not keep him up to speed on what he knew about the UFO situation and the quality of information available in the FBI files bears that out. It's equally clear that Hoover wanted to know the whole story, which is quite significant, but was relegated to outsider status by Truman.<br /><br />So if you want to get closer to the truth about what went on with UFOs during the late 40s and early 50s, take a closer look at the people who had the best information available, not the people who had to rely on second or third or tenth hand gossip.</blockquote><blockquote><p></p></blockquote><blockquote><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p>Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-28061161279887123822011-01-11T17:30:00.050-05:002023-05-15T23:30:49.006-04:00HUMANS & ALIENS: THEIR CONQUEST OF FLIGHT<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2011/01/humans-aliens-their-conquest-of-flight.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5086/5347001301_cf7d71656c_b.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 465px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a><br />
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Man probably wanted to fly as soon as he first saw birds in flight. The Greek mythological tale of Icarus and Daedalus, which may have been first told as many as three thousand years ago, evidences this long standing dream. It also provides some evidence as to how man first thought he might accomplish this task . . . by constructing wings of a design similar to those of birds, strapping them on and taking off.<br />
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The idea of copying birds, something men obviously knew could fly, clearly didn't die with Icarus. Man's early attempts at powered flight often followed the same logic and, not infrequently, followed with the same fatal results.<br />
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The above video, featuring some of those early efforts, seems pretty funny now, but it's only funny for one reason . . . they failed badly. If, somehow or some way, they had proven successful, these anonymous pioneers would be well remembered just like the pioneers who were successful are to this day.<br />
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Of course, the successful pioneers, like the Wright Brothers, are well remembered and, not surprisingly, they were successful because they thought outside the box and solved the problems of powered flight by drawing on knowledge their contemporaries didn't consider.<br />
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Orville and Wilbur Wright's key breakthrough was their invention of X-Y-Z axis control, which allowed pilots to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its' balance. Their work with bicycles, of all things, led them to believe that an unstable aircraft could be controlled and balanced with practice. This concept became the standard for fixed-wing aircraft of all kinds. For the brothers, control was the key to solving "the flying problem", instead of using more powerful engines as some other developers did.<br />
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Aviation advances moved along quite nicely for almost a half century and planes flew further and faster until they reached the sound barrier, about 760 mph. When experimental planes tried to break it, the controls would lock, the pilots would lose control, the planes would break apart. Many scientists and engineers thought cracking the sound barrier in a plane was just physically impossible, just like scientists today consider faster than light travel impossible. The death of British test pilot Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. while testing out a de Havilland DH.108 in 1946, cemented this idea in many minds. The plane literally disintegrated around him. How did the American project engineers solve this problem? Well, a bullet can travel faster than sound, so they decided to shape the Bell x-1 like a .50 caliber bullet.<br />
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<a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5166/5348274634_6ce7e47abc_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5166/5348274634_6ce7e47abc_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 267px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>Advances in aviation have always involved a lot of guesswork with a slide rule and in 1947 they guessed right and broke the sound barrier with the X-1. Something else also happened in 1947 . . . it was the dawn of the modern UFO era.<br />
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Now let's take a step further back in time and examine a couple of startling examples of man getting it wrong and what it says about us. The flat Earth model of our home planet was a misconception that stayed with us for far too long, some fools even clinging to it into the 20th century. And while some cosmologists, like Pythagoras of Samos and Parmenides of Elea<b>, </b>figured out the Earth's spherical nature more than 2000 years ago, their ideas weren't widely known in a pre-printing press world. Most people thought the world was flat and that was the case until a handful of centuries ago.<br />
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We find another striking example of this two-dimensional thinking in the arts. Filippo Brunelleschi created the first known paintings demonstrating the concepts of linear perspective and vanishing points in Florence, Italy. He showed artists for the very first time how they could paint their paintings and make three-dimensional objects in them look just like a mirror would reflect them. Before long, the principles of linear perspective became the standard, an artistic tool used to this day for presenting realistic renderings.<br />
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<a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5208/5347387807_b57061019e_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5208/5347387807_b57061019e_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 375px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>And when did Brunelleschi come to this revelation? 1425! That's 1425 A.D.! Man had been creating images on flat surfaces since the days of the caveman. Carbon dating of the cave paintings at Lascaux in France tell us they are 36,000 years old. It's funny if you think about it . . . the ancient Egyptians could build the Great Pyramids but they couldn't draw them properly!<br />
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So now we return to UFOs, or flying saucers, and man's occasionally two-dimensional way of thinking about them.<br />
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Looking at the Avrocar, a literal copy of a flying saucer, you have to wonder why a vehicle like this would even be built if engineers didn't think some UFOs were actually alien visitors. Ultimately, it didn't perform anywhere near as well as promised and was scrapped in 1961, a couple years into the program.<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2010/08/area-51-founders-ufo-sightings.html"> Other projects, which also seem to have been clearly inspired by UFOs, like the SR-71, did much better.</a> It is my belief that programs like these provide some of the best evidence for alien visitation. Why follow the historically human path of copying what we see and trying to make it work for us if it doesn't exist?<br />
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And while it seems certain cutting edge aviation engineers since the 1950s have done exactly that, there are enough witness descriptions of UFOs and their extraordinary capabilities to make some reasonable speculations about what influenced and inspired aliens in constructing their vehicles . . . not birds, but sea life.<br />
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The morphing memory metal as described by Roswell witnesses seems evident in this video . . .<br />
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. . . and the vehicle, based on witness accounts and visualized in a film on the Roswell incident, looks amazingly like a hybrid of a manta ray and a stingray. Also, consider the similar, albeit more sharply angled at the edges, design of the X-47 drone pictured in the header for this article. Could the movie version of the Roswell ship be nothing but artistic license? Possibly, but there's more . . .<br />
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<a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5208/5347817505_1d5f76d79f_b.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5208/5347817505_1d5f76d79f_b.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 821px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>Consider the reports of UFOs able to instantly appear or disappear. Is it an example of crossing dimensional thresholds on a whim or something a bit simpler?<br />
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Consider witness accounts of lighted UFOs, sometimes multi-colored, sometimes the entire vehicle glows. Skeptics might ask why would advanced aliens need lights on their vehicles at all? I ask if they are merely inspired by the bioluminescent aquatic life from their home planet and using it to attract attention and recognition when it suits their needs of the moment . . . just like marine life here on Earth.<br />
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I think to a great extent, we humans can still be very much “flat Earthers” thinking in only two dimensions. A few of us have dragged the entire species forward through great discoveries in their areas of expertise, but most of us remain intellectual remoras. I think that it's generally agreed all life came from the water, but we've been evolving so long on land that it's fair to say that being land-based is, in fact, our nature. No amount of time spent sailing or scuba diving or water skiing can change that.<br />
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Michael Chorost, technology theorist and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Wide-Mind-Integration-Humanity/dp/1439119147/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291417487&sr=1-1">World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rebuilt-Journey-Back-Hearing-World/dp/0618717609/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291418135&sr=1-1">Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World</a>, <a href="http://www.michaelchorost.com/blog/2010/12/can-the-octopus-help-us-understand-intelligence/">wrote recently in his blog</a>,<span style="font-style: italic;">"it’s hard to develop tools without access to fire and the metalworking it affords.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">But that could just be my carbon-based, air-breathing, tool-using, bipedal-locomotion biases speaking. Perhaps there are forms of aquatic intelligence on other planets that focus on mimicry and language. Until we get to meet E.T., we really can’t know what aspects of intelligence are inherently universal."</span><br />
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Of course Chorost raises an excellent point, but what if the truth is really quite simple?<br />
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What if aliens really have been continually visiting us for thousands of years?<br />
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What if their interest in us is due to our ground-based, "two-dimensional" psychology which is so different from their own?<br />
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What if our close relationship with oceans, lakes and rivers, despite our ground-based nature, is of particular interest to them as well?<br />
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What if their highly developed aquatic intelligence, based on living and evolving in a “3-D” environment, is better suited to more creative thinking and problem solving?<br />
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If so, what can we gain from that and how can we do it?<br />
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What if they themselves were genetically engineered from their natural aquatic physical state, perhaps with DNA culled from a species much like us, so they could leave the water and develop the technology to fly to the stars and find themselves?<br />
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Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-69378776474840772572010-08-29T19:37:00.027-04:002023-05-15T23:29:36.624-04:00Area 51 Founder's UFO Sightings<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2010/08/area-51-founders-ufo-sightings.html"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 675px; height: 450px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4115/4939841092_c3788874e4_b.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><blockquote>Clarence "Kelly" Johnson was a pioneer in aeronautical engineering and aircraft design and was the visionary behind planes like the X-104 Starfighter and the Blackbird family, which includes the SR-71. He was the first team leader at the famous Lockheed Skunk Works and personally scouted and picked the location for and initiated construction of the airbase at Groom Lake, NV, better known as Area 51.<br /><br />He also witnessed UFOs with otherworldly capabilities on two occasions and wrote in his official report on his 1953 sighting, <span style="font-style: italic;">"For at least five years I have definitely believed in the possibility that flying saucers exist — this in spite of a good deal of kidding from my technical associates. Having seen this particular object on December 16th, I am now more firmly convinced than ever that such devices exist, and I have some highly technical converts in this belief as of that date."</span><br /><a name='more'></a><br />Johnson was a rare two-time winner, in 1958 and 1963, of the Collier Trophy, an annual award <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/4939841130_50214a0e7f_z.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 275px; height: 625px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4077/4939841130_50214a0e7f_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>given to the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America in the previous year and placed 8th in Aviation Week's "Top 100 Stars of Aerospace" poll of members of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) and its U.S. affiliate, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) behind the likes of only the Wright Brothers, Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Lindbergh. He was also awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. His credentials as a UFO witness are unimpeachable.<br /><br />But long before all that, on December 16, 1953, Johnson was in his home three miles west of Agoura, CA and looking out the window. <a href="http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB19-1710">In his official report, available in its' entirety here</a>, he describes seeing a solid object hovering over what he estimated to be Point Mugu, which was and is also the location of a Naval Air Station, not quite 20 miles west of his home. <span style="font-style: italic;">"When it did not move or disintegrate, I asked my wife to get me our 8X binoculars, so I would not have to take my eyes off the object, which by now I recognized as a so called 'saucer.'"</span><br /><br />The time was about 5 PM and the setting sun was below the horizon line, leaving the ellipsoid UFO silhouetted. By the time Johnson got the binoculars and went outside for a better view, the object was moving away from him and out over the Pacific Ocean.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"I gathered its' speed was very high because of the rate of foreshadowing of its' major axis. The object, even in the glasses, appeared black and distinct, but I could make out no detail, as I was looking toward the setting sun, which was, of course, below the horizon line,"</span> he wrote.<br /><br />The UFO continued on its' path westward in a slight climb and disappeared in 90 seconds according to Johnson. He did not make an estimate of its' dimensions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4123/4939256111_354771b721_z.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 575px; height: 368px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4123/4939256111_354771b721_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I cobbled together this accurately scaled 3D visualization of what Johnson saw through the binoculars and I added an airplane model for reference. It's pretty easy to tell it's supposed to be a plane. The plane is about 10 miles from the camera and scaled to a wingspan of 100 ft. The UFO is 20 miles away and scaled to 200 feet (more on the reason for that later). You see they both look the same size. I took the additional step of scaling each object 8X larger to match Johnson's binocular aided viewing.<br /><br />Weather conditions are a huge factor, and they sound perfect for being able to keep the UFO in view for a great many miles. I estimate, and I think this is very conservative, that with the aid of binoculars, Johnson would have been able to keep the UFO in sight up to 70 miles away. Clear day, backlit by a setting sun. No reflection off the vehicle that might have caused it to blend into a background sky or clouds perhaps obscuring detail that would have made a conventional aircraft obvious. In fact, the conditions were just the opposite.<br /><br />The more you look at it, the more you just have to say it's a helluva case. But there's more: Johnson was not the only witness, there were four others and they were in flight several miles to the south!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/4946219519_cd62a9fc28_z.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 575px; height: 283px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/4946219519_cd62a9fc28_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>While testing out a Lockheed WV-2 Constellation over the Catalina Channel, four crew members, flight engineer R.L. Thoren, test pilot Roy Wimmer, aerodynamics engineer Philip Colman and flight test supervisor J.F. Hare, saw the same UFO Johnson did. They describe the exact same hovering for a couple minutes and then flying on a path westward and leaving their sight within a matter of seconds.<br /><br />Still, there are differences between the accounts of the crew members, <a href="http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB19-1714">their official reports available here</a>, and Johnson's and what the crew attempts to do very quickly is try to gauge the size of the object based on quantities they already know. Hare initially thought it might be a Globemaster C-124, which had a wingspan of 174 feet. Colman thought the UFO might be a Convair B-36, which had a wingspan of 230 feet. Those were big planes, especially for the day.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4125/4946342959_a661175fd1_z.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 575px; height: 282px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4125/4946342959_a661175fd1_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>The exact size of the UFO obviously can't be known but I think a reasonable estimate is 200 feet. If it were much smaller, say less than 150 feet, I frankly don't think the airborne witnesses could have seen it at all. They all must have had eyes like hawks as it was, being more than twice as far away as Johnson and not having the aid of binoculars. And if the UFO were bigger than 200 feet?<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/4946219519_cd62a9fc28_z.jpg"><br /></a>Now we get to the speed of the UFO, something neither the crew nor Johnson attempt to estimate and with good reason!<br /><br />I also accept Point Mugu as the general location where the UFO was hovering. The only fixed point we're sure of is Johnson's location . . . . home. I don't know exactly where he lived but he did. The two other points, the UFO and the crew of witnesses, obviously float along the timeline of five or so minutes total.<br /><br />During the hovering phase with aid of binoculars, Johnson is able to get a good look and the object is about 20 miles away. For an object that size to completely vanish, I estimate it has to travel at least 50 miles further away in the 90 seconds. I think that is conservative when you figure that the airborne witnesses see the object from not quite 50 miles away at first and with unaided vision. With the binoculars, Johnson should be able to see the UFO well beyond 70 miles away. But 50 miles in 90 seconds is 2000 mph.<br /><br />Whether the UFO was smaller and much closer to the witnesses than they thought or it was bigger and further away, the UFO had to be traveling at beyond 2000 MPH to follow a path, get smaller and finally leave the witnesses' sight. They all state this. The bigger it was, the faster it must have been traveling.<br /><br />One curious discrepancy between the accounts is that the airborne witnesses were able to make out a crescent/flying wing shape from more than double the distance of Johnson and without the aid of binoculars, and Johnson was not. For Johnson to only see a saucer shape, I think the UFO would have had to remain at just the right angle to him the entire sighting. The official explanation was that they all saw a lenticular cloud, but the path westward the vehicle took and the speed it left the area in seem to rule that out.<br /><br />Whatever Johnson and the flight crew really saw that day, filing an official report didn't seem to negatively effect his career. Johnson was already chief engineer at Lockheed's Burbank plant, would be selected to break ground on the mysterious Area 51 air base in 1955 and became Lockheed's vice president of Research Development Projects in 1958.<br /><br />Well if you think the entire case is interesting, take a look at Johnson's drawings from his two sightings and compare them with the Northrop B-2. It's almost like a Johnson fan at Northrop read his UFO report, looked at the drawings and a light bulb appeared over his head. It's certainly a much more elegant design than Lockheed's boxy F-117. The bottom drawing was from the earlier incident in November 1951 and it is clearly described as an emanation from an object Johnson couldn't make out, not the object itself, but the gestalts are amazingly similar.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4136/4939841052_e8ed1b5b9c_z.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 575px; height: 370px;" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4136/4939841052_e8ed1b5b9c_z.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Clarence "Kelly" Johnson had his following, no question about that, and his influence reverberates through the aeronautics industry to this day. The question is what influence did alien spacecraft have on Johnson?<br /></blockquote>Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-59455393710873385782010-08-16T00:19:00.061-04:002023-05-15T23:28:30.415-04:00Roswell, D-Day And The Titanium Industry<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2010/08/roswell-d-day-and-titanium-industry.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4094/4896760742_257751eb1b_b.jpg" style="display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a>
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The Roswell crash of early July, 1947 is the best known of all UFO cases. Something fell out of the sky in southeastern New Mexico, no one denies that. Was it an occupied alien spacecraft as many UFO advocates claim or was it a MOGUL balloon outfitted with specialized atmospheric equipment sent aloft as part of a top secret project to monitor the air for evidence of Soviet nuclear weapons testing?<br />
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Either way, the UFO phenomenon is a compelling one, but in trying to figure out what has really gone on, we have to consider the alternatives. If Roswell wasn't an alien crash, then the entire phenomenon was and remains as baffling to our nation's leaders as it is to us. If it was, not only was alien visitation a known fact to our government all the way up to then President Harry Truman but the found debris certainly led to some sort of technological advancement we should be able to identify today.<br />
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Critics toss a number of skeptical spitballs at the case for an alien crash at Roswell, but these stock arguments betray a lack of historical perspective. One that is frequently used is that it simply wouldn't be possible for the military to cover such an event up. Well, ignoring the fact that we're still talking about Roswell more than 60 years after the fact, let's consider Roswell's connection to the Allied preparations for D-Day.<br />
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Now I'd happily bet a dollar that more people have heard of Roswell than have heard of the Exercise Tiger catastrophe. On April 28, 1944, more US servicemen were killed, 749 in total, in this Nazi attack on a pre-Normandy training exercise just off Slapton Sands in the English Channel than had been killed on any single day during the war since Pearl Harbor. There were three times as many men killed there than were killed on Utah Beach during D-Day itself yet most people don't know about it. There's a reason for that.<br />
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<a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4127/4955935178_e80ba862d4_z.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4127/4955935178_e80ba862d4_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 358px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30977039/"><span style="font-style: italic;">"No questions were to be asked about what had occurred. Medical staff were also told not to keep any records. Officials informed victims' families simply that they were "missing in action" after maneuvers at sea. The servicemen were threatened with court-martial if they ever discussed what had occurred. Many took the "ever" very literally.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Nathan Resnick, who was aboard one of the other landing craft in the attacked convoy, said: "We were told not to say anything. I was married for 40-something years and never told my wife a word."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Frank Derby, a gunner's mate 3rd class who now lives in Fallston, Md., added: "Our officers made it very clear that we'd be court-martialed if we breathed a word of it. That scared the hell out of all of us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">After the war ended, the vast majority of the men who returned to the U.S. kept their mouths shut."</span></a>
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So what does the military do in response to these accounts coming to the fore? They deny there ever was a cover up!</blockquote>
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In his article, <a href="http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq20-2.htm">'Slapton Sands: The Cover-up That Never Was,'</a> Charles B. MacDonald, former deputy chief historian at the Army's Center of Military History wrote that there was a mention of the attack in Stars And Stripes and goes on to write, <span style="font-style: italic;">"The story was also covered in two of the U.S. Army's unclassified official histories: Cross-Channel Attack (1951) by Gordon A. Harrison and Logistical Support of the Armies Volume I (1953) by Roland G. Ruppenthal."</span>
So let's take a closer look at Cross-Channel Attack, <a href="http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/7-4/7-4_Contents.htm">available in its' entirety here</a>. It's a 500 page behemoth that thoroughly covers the entire Normandy operation, yet the following paragraph is the only mention of Exercise Tiger.
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"Amid all the simulation there came one serious note of war. One of the convoys of exercise TIGER was attacked by two German E-boat flotillas totaling nine boats. Losses were heavier than those suffered by Force U during the actual invasion. Two LST's were sunk and one damaged. About 700 men lost their lives. The loss of three LST's to the OVERLORD assault lift was particularly critical in view of the general shortage of landing craft. General Eisenhower reported to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that the sinkings reduced the reserve of LST's to nothing. The Germans realized that they had sunk landing craft but guessed that the craft had been participating in an exercise. The incident passed without repercussions."</span><br />
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One paragraph out of 500 pages! That's some coverage! Not a word of mention about how poorly planned the exercise was, that 4000 men were left hanging out to dry in dangerous wartime waters without adequate backup, 749 of them were killed and families were left wondering about the fates of loved ones. But since the Exercise Tiger catastrophe was obliquely mentioned in a couple publications, of course there was no cover up . . . there was just a disgusting and insulting whitewash!<br />
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At least someone remembered the victims properly:</blockquote>
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Now the Roswell connection to all this should be pretty self-evident. Don't the statements from the surviving servicemen about keeping quiet about the attack sound an awful lot like Roswell witness accounts of government intimidation about the crash? And if the government/military could keep an attack that killed 749 American servicemen under wraps, with loved ones at home worried about their fates, isn't it also possible they could keep the facts regarding a much smaller scale crash in the desert quiet as well? After all, if there were aliens killed in that crash, their families were too far away to do much complaining.<br />
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Now that I've passed along some thoughts about the initial Roswell crash, recovery and whitewash, let me move on to the all important back end. The debris went somewhere, regardless of what fell to Earth, and that somewhere was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Even the United States Air Force admitted this in its' 1995 Roswell report, <a href="http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/Publications/fulltext/roswell.pdf">available here</a>.<br />
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I freely admit that my favorite UFO researcher is Anthony Bragalia. His work on this all important back end of the Roswell saga has generated some awfully compelling evidence for an alien crash particularly as it relates to the development of titanium based shape memory alloys (SMAs) with properties similar to those of the Roswell crash debris as described by witnesses. His most recent blog on the subject is <a href="http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2010/08/roswell-battelle-memory-metal-new.html">available here</a> and links to the rest are available at the same blog, The UFO Iconoclast(s). Reading the articles over, and as thorough as I think they are, I was overcome by the sudden feeling that something was not there. I decided to take a closer look.<br />
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Today, titanium is ubiquitous and everyone has heard of it. It's used in important items like eyeglasses frames, roller blade chassis and wedding rings. OK, so two out of three ain't bad, but it wasn't always this way.<br />
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At the time of the Roswell crash, there was no commercial titanium production anywhere in the world. Titanium was in this hazy phase, somewhere between being just a laboratory curiousity to being a metal of great potential. It was already under study by the US Bureau Of Mines and the government contractor the Battelle Memorial Institute. Then something happened sometime during 1947. Boutique <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4101/4899541981_72671f59fe.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4101/4899541981_72671f59fe.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 353px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>titanium production for research use jumped and was followed late in 1948 by its' first commercial production, by Manhattan Project contractor DuPont.<br />
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Let's look at titanium production during those years and those that followed. The numbers speak for themselves.<br />
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<a href="http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/titanium.pdf"></a><a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed032p439">1945-a few pounds</a><br />
<a href="http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/titanium.pdf">1947-2 tons<br />1948-9 tons<br />1949-23 tons<br />1950-68 tons<br />1951-449 tons<br />1952-975 tons<br />1953-2030 tons<br />1954-4870 tons<br />1955-6710 tons<br />1956-13200 tons</a><br />
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Lawrence Foster wrote in his <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed032p439">review</a> of "Titanium In Industry" that, <span style="font-style: italic;">"The exponential growth of metallic titanium production is unparalleled in the history of metallurgy."</span><br />
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In <a href="http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1712&page=11">"Titanium: Past, Present, and Future,"</a> the Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems wrote "<span style="font-style: italic;">Only in the case of the Manhattan Project for the development of enriched uranium and the atomic bomb has there been a concentration of scientific, technical and financial support for a single metal (certainly to a single structural metal) similar to that devoted to titanium from the early 1940s to the late 1950s.</span>"<br />
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The comparison to the Manhattan Project is certainly an interesting one, but dating the concentrated effort to develop titanium back to the early 40s is dubious as the above production numbers from the U.S. Geological Survey, the story of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Justin_Kroll">William Kroll</a>, who invented the process by which titanium is extracted from its' ore, and the speech by Nathan Promisel, of the Materials Branch of the Navy Department's Bureau of Aeronautics delivered at the titanium symposium in December 1948, where he stated that, <a href="http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA382831&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf">"The Bureau of Aeronautics' interest and activity in this field date back about two years,"</a> would indicate.<br />
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Titanium production skyrocketed because the US military, in particular the then fledgling Air Force but the Navy too, wanted it. The sound barrier had been broken in October 1947 in an aircraft, the Bell X-1, made of steel alloys. The Air Force knew that the heavier steel would limit air speed at some point and that the lighter aluminum would melt at supersonic speeds. Titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal on Earth. It was the answer and the US military, especially the Air Force, was the market.<br />
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This would become evident in the ensuing years as the world's most advanced aircraft broke Mach 2 and then Mach 3 in aircraft like the all-titanium SR-71, designed by Area 51 developer and UFO witness Kelly Johnson. Those speeds simply would not be possible with any other structural metal.<br />
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<a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4896760762_58888a6c9c_z.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4896760762_58888a6c9c_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 301px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a><br />
Naturally a success like the titanium industry, a combination of government and private contractors working together to change the world for the better, should have its' founding fathers. It is as if someone in government said, after decades of wood and then steel aircraft manufacture, it's titanium! The metal had been known more than a century, a process for it's extraction from the ore since the '30s. The question becomes who?<br />
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If you believe <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,857343,00.html">this Time magazine story</a> from 1952, it's Col. John Dick. Something tells me that building an entire industry from scratch is outside the powers of a USAF colonel. What isn't clear is where the tipping point came to cause the creation of an entire industry and who championed it.</div>
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We have the ordinary cause for the wonder metal's growth: Titanium was a metal <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4150/4955280799_039c807bfd_z.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4150/4955280799_039c807bfd_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 543px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 400px;" /></a><a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4150/4955280799_039c807bfd_z.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><br /></a>that demonstrated great potential thanks to research from various sources. This research reached a critical mass and it was determined that a titanium production industry was needed. But by who? I can't find the answer and it should be readily available. Certainly not a USAF colonel. A general or group of generals, a president, yes. But no one is given credit. Online archives reveal little or nothing. Why? It's not like titanium itself stayed secret, it's development was widely promoted, the symposiums on its' potential quite public. Another issue to consider is the overall defense budget. <span class="st">Secretary of Defense James Forrestal favored a defense budget of $17.5 billion, compared with Truman's $14.4 billion. Regardless of their difference of opinion on the matter, the money was still found to underwrite the cost of the fledgling titanium industry . . . and leave little trace of it except for the industry itself. </span></div>
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We have the extraordinary cause: Research on titanium was already taking place when the crash of an alien ship, made mostly of titanium alloys, some of which were SMA, created the tipping point where these high ranking leaders came to a no brainer of a decision: a titanium production industry was needed. And curiously enough, the extraordinary cause fits with the Roswell crash time line. The exponential titanium production growth begins in late 1948, one and a half years after Roswell. Recognizing titanium within crash debris would undoubtedly happen quickly in the well equipped labs of Wright-Patterson AFB. Further research was contracted out from there. For preparing commercial-quantity manufacture facilities, 1.5 years seems about right.<br />
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If we assume that an alien crash did happen at Roswell, it's hard to imagine at least some watershed change in our technology taking place in the short term not happening. Was it the recognition that titanium use as a structural metal in our most advanced aircraft would take their performance to the next level and beyond? The key points WHO made the decision to jump start the titanium industry and specifically WHEN and WHY they did it are missing! Titanium development was a true game changer in the history of aeronautics. Its' impact can not be understated yet these important questions about the early days of its' development remain improperly answered. The WHY certainly could be the breaking of the sound barrier, but there's no mention anywhere of linkage.<br />
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There is an old saying, "Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." Titanium is a huge success, it has changed the world, but is an orphan. Compare that with the extremely well documented history of the aforementioned Manhattan Project. The historical record is clear that President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the formation of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-1_Uranium_Committee">The Uranium Committee</a> in October 1939, just after the Nazi invasion of Poland and his receipt of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter">Einstein-Szilard letter</a>, and the more robust <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development">Office of Scientific Research and Development</a> in 1941.<br />
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Harry Truman is famously quoted as saying,<span style="font-style: italic;">“It's amazing what you can accomplish, when you don't care who </span><i style="font-style: italic;">takes the credit,</i><span style="font-style: italic;">”</span> but the story of the birth of the titanium industry or, more to the point the lack thereof, strains credulity. Considering Truman's proactive management style as president, some trail should lead to him or at least someone close to him . . . but it doesn't. It leads nowhere or to military personnel who certainly did not have the authority to create an industry from thin air.<br />
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<a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5214/5468815031_017887d308_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5214/5468815031_017887d308_z.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 484px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>The whole thing makes no sense . . . unless you take Roswell into account. Could we have quickly reverse engineered interstellar propulsion and avionic systems from a crashed alien vehicle? No, but we could have lifted design elements from such a vehicle and figured out what it was made of in fairly short order and it may very well be that's exactly what happened. </blockquote>
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<br />Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-63585957963173707292009-11-06T14:07:00.057-05:002018-06-03T14:49:20.889-04:00How The Socorro UFO Hoaxers Did It!<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-socorro-ufo-hoaxers-did-it.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2559/4080930077_5059d6c4ae_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 413px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;"></a><br />
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The 1964 UFO "landing" in Socorro, NM has been one of the most famous UFO cases for almost a half century now and should remain so for as long as curious people continue to earnestly investigate the possibility that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials. I believe that this case was a prank pulled off by New Mexico Institute of Mining And Technology students based on three reasons:<br />
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1. Anthony Bragalia's research. <a href="http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2009/09/socorro-hoax-exposed-famous-1964.html">Part One</a> <a href="http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2009/10/socorro-ufo-hoax-part-2-getting-closer.html">Part Two</a> <a href="http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2009/11/socorro-ufo-physical-evidence-points-to.html">Part Three</a><br />
2. The geography of the landing site. Perfect for pulling off such an illusion.<br />
3. Lonnie Zamora's detailed Blue Book account.<br />
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I think Mr. Zamora was a great and honest witness. He recounted exactly what he saw on April 24, 1964 when he was an officer on duty for the Socorro Police Department. I think most UFO witnesses do. If anything, I think this is a great case to hold up as an example of credible UFO witnessing. Unfortunately, it's also a great example of how an event can be perverted by others.<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2687/4081094533_8e47270d13_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2687/4081094533_8e47270d13_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 332px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;"></a><br />
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What happened is other people's exaggerated versions of Mr. Zamora's account bled into this case as it's now remembered and, yes, that is a problem for UFO research but doesn't reflect on UFO witnesses in general or Mr. Zamora specifically.<br />
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Remember Kenneth Arnold openly complained about the same thing although he stayed in the field while Mr. Zamora just sought to go on about his business.<br />
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It all started innocently enough. I had watched most of the UFO documentaries on the various cable networks over the years but began to take an active interest in the phenomenon after the publicity surrounding Edgar Mitchell's appearance at the National Press Club this past spring. I developed a particular interest in UFOs during the Truman presidency.<br />
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Reading up on the internet, I began to notice that a lot of the really interesting new stories being developed came from the same guy, Anthony Bragalia.<br />
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I decided to drop him an email saying I appreciated his work. He's not the first UFO researcher I've done this with and hopefully not the last. He responded and suggested that if I ever came across anything relating to the Battelle Memorial Institute or Clyde Williams, its' director in the years following the Roswell crash, to let him know. So I did a quick search, found a few links and took a closer look. One thing that caught my attention was Williams' correspondence with Linus Pauling. Pauling's was a name I hadn't thought about in years but I was well aware of who he was and decided to do another simple search on his name and UFOs just for the hell of it.<br />
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Right near the top of the search results, I found <a href="http://paulingblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/linus-pauling-and-the-search-for-ufos/">this link</a> to a Pauling related blog site and gave it a look, including <a href="http://paulingblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/letter-from-lp-to-colgate-6-19-1968.jpg">the Stirling Colgate, NMINT's president at the time, correspondence with Pauling</a> regarding the Socorro case which expressed his view that it was a hoax pulled off by his engineering students. Great stuff of course and I passed my findings on to Bragalia and <a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/10/linus-pauling-two-time-nobel-winners.html">wrote up my own opinions on Pauling's outline for a UFO study</a>. Let me make clear I never regarded the Socorro case as a visit from extraterrestrials. From what I knew of it, the noise, flames and persons wearing coveralls Mr. Zamora recounted ruled that out in my mind. Mr. Zamora clearly ruled that out as well when he said, <i>"Well, I didn't think it was an object from outer space because I don't believe in those things."</i><br />
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I believed Mr. Zamora, but I just figured it was some sort of experimental lander, certainly not an elaborate prank. I laughed at the idea until Bragalia started making direct contacts and made those results known, took a closer look at the actual "landing" site and, most importantly, read Mr. Zamora's own documented account very carefully. They "must have been some engineering students" I jokingly wrote to Bragalia early on. Well, they were! I know Bragalia was skeptical too, but where I blew the whole thing off, he picked up the phone, did the work and found the true story. He deserves the credit and certainly not the abuse that's been thrown his way by some frauds who lurk within the UFO field.<br />
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This isn't the first time a hoax claim has been associated with the Socorro sighting. Air Force investigators on the scene suggested to J. Allen Hynek that it was a hoax. Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel claimed it was a hoax pulled off by local high school kids. Not a chance in hell high school kids could have pulled this prank off. Notorious and irresponsible debunker Phil Klass said it was a hoax and went so far as to name Mr. Zamora and Socorro's mayor, Holm Bursum, as conspirators in it. Their motivation was, according to Klass, turning the site into a tourist attraction and cashing in, an incredibly loathsome and unsubstantiated claim and certainly not true.<br />
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<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2554/4081099471_e1ba575ca6_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2554/4081099471_e1ba575ca6_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 390px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;"></a>So what did happen? I invite you all to <a href="http://www.ufocasebook.com/Zamorareport.html">click this link</a> and read Lonnie Zamora's actual account of what happened that day and see for yourself how it fits like a hand in a glove with the student balloon launch explanation. Above you see a map of the area. Of course all the housing wasn't there in 1964 and the roads were different but I'm comfortable this is a fairly good representation of the scene which you can compare to <a href="http://www.factfictionandconjecture.ca/images/socorro_map.jpg">this map</a> and <a href="http://www.cufon.org/contributors/chrisl/images/map1.gif">this one</a>. I'll make my points below, but do keep Mr. Zamora's account open in another window.<br />
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1-Mr. Zamora is initially led toward the scene by a speeding black Chevrolet driven by a <span style="font-style: italic;">"boy about seventeen."</span> Consistent with a college aged student.<br />
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2-Mr. Zamora's attention is drawn to a roar and flame in the sky. Is it the bait to draw him towards the magic show that awaits or the second in a series of incredible coincidences?<br />
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3-Mr. Zamora first sees the vehicle, represented by the white dot, and the two people in coveralls. One of them <span style="font-style: italic;">"</span><span style="color: rgb(0 , 0 , 0); font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">seemed startled--seemed to jump quickly somewhat."</span></span> Startled or attempting to make sure they <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">were</span> seen? Also notice he puts legs, when referring to the legs of the vehicle, in quotes. At this point, I approximate Mr. Zamora's position at the blue dot in the above map but feel free to compare it with the others I've linked to. He also notes that the quick look was the only time he saw people near the vehicle.<br />
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4-Mr. Zamora then drives closer to the vehicle but the road that leads him closer is also separated from the vehicle by a hill that obstructs his view of it. He<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>parked and then<span style="font-style: italic;"> "</span><span style="color: rgb(0 , 0 , 0); font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">got out of car and started to go down to where I knew the object (car) was</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">."</span> This phrase only makes sense if he can't see the vehicle from where he was as he was driving closer and parked his car, which in fact he couldn't. The view of the scene below evidences this. He parks to the right of the hill as you can see the vehicle sitting in the arroyo.<br />
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<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2616/4082002806_df53846440_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2616/4082002806_df53846440_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 254px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;"></a>You can see how the hill blocks his view and the time he took to drive from the blue point, where he first saw the vehicle and two people, to the yellow point, where he parked his patrol car, gave the pranksters enough time to gather up what they needed to and escape easily in the opposite direction.<br />
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5-Mr. Zamora got his closest view of the vehicle as it flew away and described it as follows: <span style="color: rgb(0 , 0 , 0); font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">"It looks like a balloon."</span></span> He was right about that.<br />
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To be certain of anything other than the prank/hoax explanation you have to accept some extraordinary coincidences. An advanced craft, either Earthly or not, had to have landed on the outskirts of Socorro just as Mr. Zamora was chasing a speeding teenager in that direction. The vehicle's occupants, already walking around the immediate landing area are startled by Mr. Zamora seeing them and scramble back into their vehicle, which Mr. Zamora did not see, and took off for the nearby White Sands Missile Range, which in fact isn't nearby at all, it's 80 miles away, or back to their home planet. The final coincidence is the site itself, geographically perfect to pull off such an illusion. Of all the places on Earth an experimental or alien craft could have landed, they chose that one at 5:45 PM on a Friday afternoon on April 24, no more than a month before college finals.<br />
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The hoax/prank explanation hardly paints Mr. Zamora to be a fool. In fact, it's just the opposite. The pranksters counted on Mr. Zamora to do his job the right way. It's his detailed account that reveals that fundamental elements of magic were at work that day.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Vanishing</span>-Mr. Zamora saw two people and then they were gone. <span style="font-style: italic;">"They must have gotten </span><a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2497/4081090909_e4fdf031c8_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="font-style: italic;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2497/4081090909_e4fdf031c8_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 403px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;"></a><span style="font-style: italic;">on the ship!"</span> No, they simply ran in the opposite direction Mr. Zamora approached from. Mr. Zamora never said he saw them get on the ship.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Transformation</span>-A ship with "legs" sits on the ground and then flies away with "legs" no longer visible. <span style="font-style: italic;">"The "legs" must have retracted into the ship!"</span> No, they were simply lightweight props, possibly cardboard, that were simply carried away by the pranksters.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Levitation</span>-The craft flew away. <span style="font-style: italic;">"It must be an advanced aircraft, possibly from another planet!"</span> No, it was a balloon.<br />
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It was a magic trick so good that it's fooling people who didn't even see it almost a half century after it was executed. We don't know just yet who the pranksters were, but that doesn't matter to me. If there's a riot on Main Street and I walk down Main Street the next day and see a busted out storefront window, I don't need to know specifically who did it to be pretty certain that rioters were responsible. I do think that if the actual pranksters are identified at least one of them will have a deep interest or background in stage magicianship.<br />
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Preposterous claims such as the vehicle leaving the area in excess of 2000 MPH have been made regarding this case and are believed by some as truth. Mr. Zamora never says any such thing. These claims merely muddy the waters and make the truth that much more difficult to find. The primary source of those claims, Ray Stanford, is simply not credible and has a track record of making equally ridiculous claims in every field he sticks his beak into which you can verify for yourself by doing an internet search on his name.<br />
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I think Mr. Zamora gave an honest and highly accurate account of what he saw in 1964. I think the Socorro case is an excellent incident to point to in regards to the honesty of UFO witnesses but it also remains a cautionary tale for people who are serious about the UFO phenomenon. We all must always look deeper and not take at face value the preposterous claims of bullshit artists who attempt to profit from that interest.<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />UPDATE:</span> <a href="http://www.saturdaynightuforia.com/html/articles/articlehtml/deathofalegend.html">I really want to thank Steve Sawyer (Anonymous) for posting the link to this article.</a> It's a very good compilation of some reports that have not been readily available on the internet.<br />
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I'd like to point at Sgt. David Moody's report where he writes, <span style="font-style: italic;">"Sgt Chavez then went to the area where the craft or thing was supposedly sighted and found four fresh indentations in the ground and several charred or burned bushes. Smoke appeared to come from the bush and he assumed that it was burning, however no coals were visible and the charred portions of the bush were cold to the touch."</span><a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2551/4093208403_a2fd82287b_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="font-style: italic;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2551/4093208403_a2fd82287b_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 233px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 445px;"></a><br />
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Investigator J. Allen Hynek added, <span style="font-style: italic;">". . . the burning seemed to be sporadic. Clumps of grass in close proximity to the burned ones were untouched, while others just a short distance away from the unburned ones were again burned."</span><br />
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Very interesting revelations and consistent with site preparation by pranksters well before the actual event.<br />
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Now onto the matter of footprints or lack thereof. This part of the equation has <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4092/4946050175_6e5a1f97e9.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4092/4946050175_6e5a1f97e9.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 180px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;"></a>troubled me and I have not addressed it, but it occurred to me today that if I wanted to create fake "legs" for a spaceship and leave the area without leaving footprints, I think I'd employ something similar to the technique you see above and kill two birds with one stone.<br />
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Also note that in Mr. Zamora's two drawings, he only draws two legs.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">YET ANOTHER UPDATE:</span> There's been some debate about the meaning of the insignia on the vehicle Zamora reported and after mulling it over awhile, I'm quite convinced it's nothing more than a "This End Up" indicator that would help people get<a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4042/4448646278_5dda5fc2a4_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4042/4448646278_5dda5fc2a4_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 235px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;"></a> an uninflated balloon situated properly on the ground before it was inflated.<br />
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Whoever the manufacturer of the balloon was would have been selling them world wide, so no English would be used, but the insignia would communicate which end was up pretty easily in any language . . . . and also provide another bit of evidence that the vehicle was manufactured here on Earth.<br />
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So the red marking on the vehicle isn't a symbol. It isn't an insignia. It isn't a corporate logo. It's an instruction.</blockquote>
Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com77tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-40273586854586263452009-10-13T23:27:00.031-04:002023-05-15T23:27:04.057-04:00LINUS PAULING: THE TWO TIME NOBEL WINNER'S HUNT FOR UFOS<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/10/linus-pauling-two-time-nobel-winners.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2568/4009836307_f747b3117c_o.jpg" style="display: block; height: 433px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a>
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Linus Pauling was one of the greatest men who ever lived. He was a chemist, professor, best-selling author and both a peace and health activist. He was a pioneer in the fields of quantum chemistry and orthomolecular medicine and Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, called him "the father of molecular biology." He is among the most important scientists in any field in any century. He also developed a fascination for UFOs and the possibility of alien visitation.<br />
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<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2425/4012678594_6ce275ae65_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2425/4012678594_6ce275ae65_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 352px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>Pauling is one of only four people to have won more than one Nobel Prize and one of only two people to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, Chemistry and Peace. The other was Marie Curie who won the Chemistry and Physics prizes. He's also the only person to have been awarded both of his prizes without sharing them with someone else.<br />
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Pauling's UFO related books, notes and correspondence are held at the Oregon State University library's Special Collections department, <a href="http://paulingblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/linus-pauling-and-the-search-for-ufos/">a detailed account of the contents of the collection can be read here</a>, and reveal both the two-time Nobel winner's curiosity and, in some cases, skepticism. <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2480/4009836267_aa0b688215.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2480/4009836267_aa0b688215.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 274px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a><br />
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Notes in the margins of books indicate that Pauling intended to follow up directly on some matters that caught his attention and that he highly doubted some claims made regarding others. Correspondence with New Mexico Institute of Technology President Stirling Colgate demonstrates that Pauling did take action on his curiosities, asking Colgate what he knew of the 1964 Socorro UFO landing case. Pauling's letter and Colgate's response, <a href="http://paulingblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/letter-from-lp-to-colgate-6-19-1968.jpg">which can be viewed here</a>, was that it was a hoax, but <a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-socorro-ufo-hoaxers-did-it.html">the details of all that are another story for another blog</a>.<br />
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The most compelling document in the collection is Pauling's own outline for a proposed study of the UFO phenomenon. The two-page plan, written in July, 1966, can be viewed <a href="http://paulingblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/sci10-009-1-01-900w.jpg">here</a> and <a href="http://paulingblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/sci10-009-1-02-900w.jpg">here</a>.<br />
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Clearly, this document is the work of a methodical and disciplined person. In Point One, he indicates that reports of the same phenomenon by different people in different locations merit special attention. In Point Six, he recognizes that off the books experimental aircraft are likely responsible for some UFO sightings and that information regarding those vehicles will not be readily forthcoming from the government or military.<br />
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In Points Seven and Eight, he even considers ancient alien visitation and alien seeding<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3520/4017917719_cd480478ca.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3520/4017917719_cd480478ca.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 441px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a> of the Earth in 1966! That's a few years before von Daniken's Chariots Of The Gods was published.<br />
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Finally, in Points Ten and Eleven, he gets right to the heart of the matter which is, how might an advanced extraterrestrial civilization be able to build vehicles that can do what is, to us, the unthinkable: Actually be able to somehow control or transcend space and time itself and traverse the light years' distances between neighboring stars and our planet Earth.<br />
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Who knows why he never followed through. It seems Pauling may very well have been asked to join the Condon Committee investigation as his outline for a UFO study seems to correspond with the timeline of the Condon effort. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHzG3nTA27M">In this interview with Pauling he refers to Condon as "Ed" which indicates to me they had at least a passing friendly relationship and Condon helped Pauling write a petition calling for the banning of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, so the collaboration was significant! You'll find it at the 17:00 mark.</a><br />
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Whatever the reason, it's regrettable that he didn't, but looking at that agenda, it's pretty clear it wasn't because he suddenly determined UFOs were all a bunch of nonsense. He also certainly wasn't fearful of public ridicule as he had already put himself in harm's way with his staunch advocacy of peace in general and an end to nuclear weapons testing, which led to his Nobel Peace Prize, in particular.<br />
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The backlash from his decades of peace activism included having his passport pulled by the U.S. State Department for two years starting in 1952, being called "<span style="font-style: italic;">the number one scientific name in virtually every major activity of the Communist peace offensive in this country</span>," by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and Life magazine termed his 1962 Peace Prize victory as a "<span style="font-style: italic;">A Weird Insult from Norway</span>."<br />
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I'm old enough to remember Pauling when he was still quite active publicly and was strongly advocating people take vitamin supplements, especially vitamin C. He lived until he was 93, so he was certainly on to something. The guy was obviously an active thinker what with that, his peace activism and chemistry work as well as his interest in UFOs. It's also obvious he maintained a sharp sense of humor, as this video evidences.<br />
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I hear many people call for more scientific study for UFOs but the calls are vague. Pauling has left a clear game plan and his status in the world of science is analogous to the greatest of sports hall of famers. That simple document is something to rally around.<br />
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</blockquote>Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-50253833913062338652009-10-13T22:58:00.035-04:002023-05-15T23:25:45.218-04:00ASTRONAUT DEKE SLAYTON'S AMAZING UFO ENCOUNTER<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/10/astronaut-deke-slaytons-amazing-ufo.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2597/4009779101_b21c077cc7_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 413px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a>
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Deke Slayton was one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts. He served as NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations for nine years and as the docking module pilot of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, which was also the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.<br />
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On December 12, 1951, Slayton had an extraordinary aerial experience while testing out a P-51 Mustang in the skies over Minnesota. He described it in his 1995 autobiography, Deke!:<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"I realized I wasn't closing on that son of a bitch. A P-51 at that time would cruise at 280 miles an hour. But this thing just kept going and climbing at the same time at about a forty-five-degree climb. I kept trying to follow it, but he just left me behind and flat disappeared. The guys on the ground tracked it with a theodolite, and they'd computed the speed at four thousand miles an hour."</span><br />
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<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=z_xE22Pp2P0C&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=%22Deke+Slayton%22+ufo&source=bl&ots=FuH2DDkmaR&sig=rkvSYplC2kHKbnFKAkJc6Mw0ZTU&hl=en&ei=YdmdSsm4J9TRlAe2mqG_DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false">You can read Slayton's full account, which begins at the bottom of page 49 here.</a><br />
<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2516/4013714602_cdfaca5026_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2516/4013714602_cdfaca5026_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 409px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>This is a simply amazing UFO incident considering both Slayton's resume and the speed of the UFO. To put it in context, the SR-71 Blackbird, which wasn't introduced until more than a decade later and was the fastest plane in the world in its' day and long after, topped out at around 2200 MPH. The hovering and then hitting that speed in apparently very short order is really astonishing. The forty-five degree climb Slayton describes is a clear signature of a high performance aircraft.<br />
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I had known that Slayton had a sighting, but never delved into the details and they are well worth taking a closer look at. It's truly one of the great UFO incidents that has somehow been overlooked over the years.<br />
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Slayton goes on to mention in his account that he often wondered if his report made it into Project Blue Book. Well it did! And that makes this case doubly compelling.<br />
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<a href="http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-660">The report, since declassified, is available here and covers six pages starting with this </a><a href="http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-660">link.</a><br />
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I think it's important to consider that when you're recounting an event, who the <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2665/4009779155_241fc6dd76.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2665/4009779155_241fc6dd76.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 347px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>audience is matters. If it's a casual conversation, the story might go one way, if it's for a formal report or part of a book or article or a media interview, it could go quite differently.<br />
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On page 663 of the Blue Book archive, investigator Major Gerhard Kaske wrote, <span style="font-style: italic;">"The pilot </span><span style="font-style: italic;">assumes</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> the speed of the object at this point was about 380 to 400 mph."</span><br />
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Discrepancies don't necessarily equal dishonesty but the difference between 400 MPH and 4000 MPH is not within any reasonable margin for error.<br />
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If Slayton <span style="font-style: italic;">assumed</span> much higher then he would have been making a pretty bold statement considering the speed of planes in those days. Slayton was already a very experienced pilot at that point, having flown 56 combat missions during World War II, had a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Minnesota and was well on his way to testing supersonic aircraft at Edwards Air Force base before ultimately joining NASA. He was well aware of what contemporary aircraft were capable of.<br />
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The math doesn't check out for the object to flat out disappear in the three to four minutes Slayton said the incident took place in at 380 to 400 MPH, not with excellent visibility that day. The Blue Book investigators determined Slayton had seen a balloon, but winds in the upper atmosphere top out at about 250 MPH, so even with a conservative speed estimate of around 400 MPH along with the change in speed Slayton describes in both his bio and official account, that explanation just doesn't hold up. <span id="goog_1116345173"></span><span id="goog_1116345174"></span><span id="goog_1116345175"></span><span id="goog_1116345176"></span>This video of Slayton discussing the incident recently turned up on youtube thanks to the work of eeasynow! Thanks! </blockquote>
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My guess: he deliberately low balled the speed in the report. Slayton himself said he had to be talked into making a report. He made the report a week after the incident. Of course a stone cold debunker might say he exaggerated his account in the book to make for a better read but considering the totality of his lifetime of accomplishments and the small portion his UFO sighting takes up in his bio, that's highly unlikely.<br />
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Slayton also mentions in his bio that the UFO crowd had latched onto a couple <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2486/4016337565_0bdafcbfae_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2486/4016337565_0bdafcbfae_o.jpg" /></a>innocuous events during space flights, but there was really nothing there. I'm not sure which ones he's talking about specifically. I did see an interview with Martyn Stubbs where he actually talks about the John Glenn "fireflies" incident as if that was still a UFO, although it technically was until Scott Carpenter figured out it was only frost flaking from the capsule on the next flight.<br />
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The Glenn incident is covered in some detail in the Academy Award winning 1983 film The Right Stuff, which features Slayton prominently as well.<br />
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When it comes to astronauts and UFOs, it's the usual mixed bag you get with the UFO phenomenon, isn't it? A little bit of everything that only intensifies the mystery.<br />
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You've got Edgar Mitchell, who makes no claim of a direct UFO encounter but is adamant about alien visitation.<br />
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You've got Gordon Cooper who was adamant about his own encounters in particular and alien visitation in general.<br />
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And you've got Deke Slayton who reported initially and wrote about a UFO encounter but declined to attempt to explain it himself. <span style="font-style: italic;">"I don't know what it was,"</span> he wrote in his bio. <span style="font-style: italic;">"It was unidentified."</span><br />
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The Deke Slayton case is one of the most underrated of all UFO cases. The witness had impeccable credentials as an aviator and continued on to a distinguished career as a space pioneer, a true American hero. His autobiographical account is consistent with his initial report in its' essential elements and where it strays is both explainable and understandable.<br />
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In the 44 years between the incident and the book, no information came to Slayton, despite the high ranking positions he held at NASA, "<span style="font-style: italic;">Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon because I selected him,"</span> he wrote, that would move the incident from unknown to explained in his mind. How it has slipped through the cracks all these years is beyond me, but I'm glad I took a look at it in detail and am pleased to be able to share the two documented accounts of it with you all.</blockquote>Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9199594546422185070.post-4778849883121982062009-10-07T20:51:00.057-04:002023-07-06T13:59:28.144-04:00THE REAL MAJESTIC 12: TRUMAN'S 1952 DC UFO MEETING<a href="http://ufopartisan.blogspot.com/2009/10/trumans-white-house-meeting-on-1952-dc.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5245/5244350197_24f4683eee_b.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 383px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 675px;" /></a><br />
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The Washington DC UFO Incident is one of the most significant cases ever documented. Sightings from both commercial and military pilots were recorded as well as radar hits from both military and commercial radarscopes, one of which reached 7000 mph. There were multiple events spread out over the last half of July in 1952. <a href="http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/02/washington-national-ufo-sighting-press.html">The press conference that was held by the Air Force to attempt to explain the event, presided over by General John Samford, was the largest held up to that point since the end of World War II.</a><br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington_D.C._UFO_incident">Here is a more detailed account of this headline event from that day long ago.</a><br />
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While publicly, every effort was made to keep the public calm, privately, very high level meetings and conversations involving President Truman took place as a result of this famous incident.<br />
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<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2530/4002383756_85ff8c2c0d_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2530/4002383756_85ff8c2c0d_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 344px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>A little additional background on Truman's schedule around the DC case dates. Truman had been in hospital a few days and got out just before the 1st weekend of sightings. Then during the following week, went to Chicago for the Democrat National Convention and then spent some time in his home town until August 5.<br />
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<a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2480/4002383762_8771c27ea5_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2480/4002383762_8771c27ea5_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 323px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 575px;" /></a>This from Capt. Edward Ruppelt, Project Blue Book director during the incident, in his 1955 book: <span style="font-style: italic;">"About 10:00 A.M. the President's air aide, Brigadier General Landry, called intelligence at President Truman's request to find out what was going on. Somehow I got the call. I told General Landry that the radar target could have been caused by weather but that we had no proof."</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.nicap.org/rufo/rufo-12.htm">Here's a more detailed account of Ruppelt's activities surrounding the DC UFO incident from that terrific book, The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects.</a> It's available online in its' entirety.<br />
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<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3498/4002383788_77f1767745_o.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3498/4002383788_77f1767745_o.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 205px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>General Robert Landry was, in fact, Truman's Air Force Aide, his personal red tape cutter with the Air Force, and briefed Truman on UFOs on a regular basis starting in 1948.<br />
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From Landry's 1974 oral history on record at the Truman Library, <a href="http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/landryr.htm">which can be found here in its' entirety</a>: <span style="font-style: italic;">"I was directed to report quarterly to the President after consulting with Central Intelligence people, as to whether or not any UFO incidents received by them could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">The report was to be made orally by me unless it was considered by intelligence to be so serious or alarming as to warrant a more detailed report in writing. During the four and one-half years in office there, all reports were made orally. Nothing of substance considered credible or threatening to the country was ever received from intelligence."</span><br />
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As an aside, I believe that when Landry refers to "<span style="font-style: italic;">Central Intelligence</span>" here he means the <a href="http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/histechintel.htm">Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC)</a> and not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).<br />
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Finally, on September 3, 1952, a meeting was held and documented on the President's Calendar. The connection between the DC UFO incident of late July and this meeting is self-evident based on the stated purpose of the meeting, its' timing and its' attendees. This was an incredibly important meeting and it regarded UFOs.<br />
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<a href="https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/calendar?month=9&day=3&year=8" target="_blank">Here's the entry from Truman's calendar at the Truman Library's website.</a><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">12:30 pm (The President met in Cabinet Room, with group from Air Force, the Rand Corporation and National Security Resources Board, for briefing on defense of Capital. LOWER WEST DOOR, HALF HOUR OFF THE RECORD</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">FOWLER, Colonel John G.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">GARLAND, General William</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">GRAHAM, Colonel Gordon</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">HUNNER, Major Paul</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">McCLELLAND, John C.</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">RAND CORPORATION</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">HENDERSON, Lawrence J.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">NILES, Walter W.</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">NATIONAL SECURITY RESOURCES BOARD</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">GORRIE, Honorable Jack</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">LANCASTER, Presley, Jr.</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">ASH, Russell</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">LANDRY, Brig. Gen. Robert B., Air Force Aide to the President</span><br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">DENNISON, Rear Adm. Robert L., Naval Aide to the President</span><br />
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Ironically, the meeting had 12 attendees. While the famous Majestic 12 documents are certainly very obvious fakes, no one can deny this meeting or its' subject matter. The public record speaks for itself.<br />
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Here's a little more on one of the attendees, <a href="http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Article/107003/brigadier-general-william-m-garland.aspx" target="_blank">Brigadier General William M. Garland. In September 1952, General Garland was named chief of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.</a> He must have made a good showing of it at this meeting. He was rated a command pilot.<br />
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Some background from Capt. Ruppelt about Garland's Project Blue Book involvement:<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"Major General John A. Samford had replaced Major General Cabell as Director of </span><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5583479301_16788607c0_z.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5583479301_16788607c0_z.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 621px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 415px;" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Intelligence, but General Samford must have been told about the UFO situation because he was familiar with the general aspects of the problem. He had appointed his Assistant for Production, Brigadier General W. M. Garland, to ride herd on the project for him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Colonel Dunn briefly outlined to General Samford what we planned to do. He explained our basic policy, that of setting aside the unknowns and not speculating on them, and he told how the scientists visiting ATIC had liked the plans for the new Project Grudge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">There was some discussion about the Air Force's and ATIC's responsibility for the UFO reports. General Garland stated, and it was later confirmed in writing, that the Air Force was solely responsible for investigating and evaluating all UFO reports. Within the Air Force, ATIC was the responsible agency. This in turn meant that Project Grudge was responsible for all UFO reports made by any branch of the military service. I started my briefing by telling General Samford and his staff about the present UFO situation."</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.nicap.org/withtext.htm">Notes from Ruppelt's personal archives</a> also reveal that Gen. Garland himself had already seen a UFO while stationed in Sacramento, CA in the late 1940s, <a href="http://www.project1947.com/shg/csi/life52.html">was the catalyst behind a very famous Life magazine article</a> published in April, 1952 before his appointment to lead ATIC, and when he retired from the USAF, he went to work as a consultant for the RAND Corporation.<br />
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If you did look at the link above to Garland's official biography at the USAF website, he clearly had a wide ranging and exemplary career highlighted by his service in the Eighth Air Force where he was involved in the planning of the pivotal Ball Bearing Raids of Nazi industrial centers, but this UFO-related activity clearly indicates how seriously the issue was taken at the highest levels. Think about it . . . all this is taking place right in the middle of the Korean War!<br />
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<a href="http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=5446">Here's a little more on another attendee, John Fowler.</a> His promotion coincided with this meeting as well, a clear indication of its' importance and also a pattern that takes place in the Air Force regarding high ranking officers who had involvement with the <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2726/4020265354_056bbd7acf.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2726/4020265354_056bbd7acf.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 338px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 275px;" /></a>UFO phenomenon . . . they keep getting promoted!<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"Joining the Directorate of Intelligence at Air Force Headquarters in March 1952, General Fowler was deputy to the assistant for production. The following month he was named assistant deputy director of targets there, becoming deputy director that September,"</span> per his USAF online biography. In this instance, targets refers to radar targets.<br />
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Why two members of the RAND Corporation were there is anyone's guess although speculative papers regarding alien visitation by RAND employees have been written <a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/drafts/DRU1571/">as this link evidences</a>. Henderson headed RAND's Washington office, was an original member of RAND's board of trustees and acted as Associate Director.<br />
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The publicly disseminated explanation, temperature inversion, simply doesn't hold up when you consider that military pilots reported solid objects moving at supersonic speeds well beyond what aircraft of the day were capable of. The September 3 meeting also seems to point to Truman and his advisers not being convinced of the weather explanation either.<br />
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Aside from that, if the case was nothing more than a natural weather phenomenon, shouldn't we have had the same sort of incidents on at least an infrequent basis? <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=cZw5HQ07BXUC&pg=RA1-PA62&lpg=RA1-PA62&dq=atic+ufos&source=bl&ots=_BvKwgJhZB&sig=Lc8Y0M4z4JKQioX15lrZGxT7suI&hl=en&ei=hRSNTbe-J8fG0QHE5aSpCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=barnes&f=false">Harry Barnes, the senior air traffic controller in the tower at the Washington National Airport, didn't think it was a temperature inversion when he said,</a> <span style="font-style: italic;">"Every man in here knows temperature-inversion effects. When an inversion's big enough, it picks up all sorts of ground clutter. Water tanks, buildings, shore lines, and so on. But anybody can recognize it. You'll see huge purplish blobs, but nothing like those things we tracked. In the six years I've watched the scopes, absolutely nothing, high-speed jets, storms, inversions, or anything else, has ever caused blips that maneuvered like that and we've had identical weather systems."</span><br />
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Neither did Al Chop, who worked at the press deck at the Pentagon and was roused out of bed at midnight and hurried to Washington National Airport. <span style="font-style: italic;">"And the guy that the Colonel, that Dewey bought with him, declared that as far as he was</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">concerned, those were real objects up there. No ground clutter or nothing. And the fact that when we had an intercept come in, and those things vanished the very instance that we could see the planes coming in on the radar scope. The minute we saw the beginning of these guys, the UFOs just disappeared. They just left,"</span> <a href="http://sohp.us/interviews/pdf/Chop-Albert-1999.pdf">Chop stated in an oral history for The Sign Oral History Project.</a><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">"I mean, the fact that obviously whatever these things were had intelligence enough to get out of the area when they had an intercept going in. They had to be intelligently controlled. You know, I was very apprehensive about that! I, in fact, was scared! I don't mind telling you this, it scared me! It was frightening! And I think everybody in the room was very apprehensive!<br /><br />About three hours later, when we got the second intercept up, and sent one guy up round the north part of the city, he didn't see anything. But Paterson, down in the other quadrant down here, flew right into the middle of four of them, and he actually said, "They're closing in on me! What shall I do?" Well, what the hell is he going, "what shall I do?" What was I going to tell him? I’m a civilian. I am not going to tell an Air Force pilot to fire at that damn thing or anything! I didn't say anything! Nobody said anything! All of a sudden, these things began to move away from him, and he said, "they’re gone!"</span><br />
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The Washington Merry-Go-Round, as the case came to be known in its' day, is one of the most famous and compelling cases ever recorded. It is also the only UFO case that led directly to a definitively documented White House meeting, clearly substantiated on President Harry S. Truman's calendar and available in his presidential library's online archives to this day.</blockquote>
Frank Stalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823301792209882497noreply@blogger.com20