Also here.

In this episode of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, the premise is that the above has an extraterrestrial source, both natural and/or intelligently guided.

________

Ancient Aliens; Plagues and Epidemics

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Source: The Daily Saucer

Watch here:

Or watch here at this site; The Daily Saucer

Scary, is it not, lol?

Cornell AIs Hold Conversation

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And it hasn’t been wasted. I learned quite a bit, but I’m still teetering on the fence about a lot of things. For example; Is the phenomenon material paranormal, is Bigfoot part of the scheme of things, and is it alien, or ghosts, goblins, witches, dragons warlocks or what?

It sounds like I’m more confused than ever, but in actuality I’ve learned quite a lot. I’ve learned that I’ll never finish learning about this stuff. And that nobody else will be right about it either. It’s all belief, no matter what label you slap on it.

Enter one Leslie Kean, author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On The Record . While I haven’t read the book, it is widely acclaimed and accepted by the main-stream media, something Linda Moulton Howe can’t say so much.

Now the History Channel have made a documentary based upon the book according to the New York Times:

NEW YORK, [date], 2011 – History is filled with accounts of new phenomena that are
misunderstood and ridiculed. Galileo was charged with heresy for his observations about
the universe. Einstein’s general theory of relativity was dismissed by many as a
conspiracy.
Now, a former Air Force general, a retired Air Force colonel, a former FAA executive,
and other credible witnesses are stepping forward to reveal something that nobody would
believe: first-hand encounters with UFOs. They’ll tell their stories in SECRET
ACCESS: UFOs ON THE RECORD, a two-hour special premiering Thursday,
August 25 at 8 p.m. ET on HISTORY.
The film features in-depth accounts by people who are willing to risk their jobs and
reputations to speak out about their extraordinary experiences, such as former Arizona
Governor Fife Symington III; Nick Pope, former head of the British Defense Ministry’s
UFO Investigative Unit, and others. Commentary is provided by investigative journalist
Leslie Kean, author of the NY Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government
Officials Go On the Record, who spent ten years studying the UFO phenomenon and
bringing together high level sources from around the world.
Sightings of strange lights and darting orbs are reported from all over the world, and most
are easily explained. But a few other cases present evidence that UFOs are real. SECRET
ACCESS: UFOs ON THE RECORD focuses on claims that cannot be ignored: sightings
over a nuclear-armed military base near Phoenix, a forest in England, a small city in
Belgium. These remarkable eyewitness stories are illustrated with actual source materials
such as footage, radar images and voice recordings from NASA, the Air Force and the
FAA. Although the government has determined such episodes to be “insignificant,” records
have nonetheless been confiscated, and the experts were sworn to secrecy…until now.
SECRET ACCESS: UFOs ON THE RECORD is produced for HISTORY by Break Thru
Films. Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg are Executive Producers for Break Thru Films.
Julian P. Hobbs is Executive Producer for HISTORY.

So is UFO theory being mainstreamed by folks the like of Leslie Kean, or is this more disinformation?

Stay tuned!

SETI is dead. Or at least, its major organ has failed, and is now in a state of suspended animation, desperately awaiting a cash transfusion. Seth Shostak explains:

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a major instrument designed to speed up our hunt for intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy, has been turned off.

On April 15, this phalanx of small antennas, built to eavesdrop on signals that might reach us from civilizations hundreds of trillions of miles distant, was put into park, and its multimillion channel receivers powered down. It’s as if Columbus’s armada of ships, having barely cleared Cadiz, were suddenly ordered back to Spain.

The reason for the shutdown is both prosaic and lamentable. Money. The Array was built as a joint project between the SETI Institute (my employer) and the University of California at Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory. The former raised the funds to construct the instrument, and UC Berkeley was responsible for operations. But the grievous financial situation of the State of California and reduced funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) have sharply curtailed the university’s research budget, and private donations haven’t yet been adequate to keep the Array in operation.

Astronomer Franck Marchis also discusses the shutdown on his blog, noting that SETI is holding out hope that the U.S. Air Force Space Command may come on-board as a partner at the ATA for its “Space Situational Awareness” program – a project which will detect, track, identify and catalogue all man-made objects in orbit around Earth.

In the meantime though, SETI wants you! Or more precisely, a donation, aiming $5million. Jill Tarter told MSNBC she hopes “the public will get inspired to help us explore those Kepler worlds”, while Seth Shostak ends his HuffPo article with a call to arms:

You’re a member of the first generation possessing technology good enough to turn up some cosmic company, and your financial support could restart this instrument. We can never prove that we’re alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we’re not.

Here’s a tip to Jill and Seth. If you want financial support from the portion of the public interested in the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, maybe it wasn’t such a wise move to hop in bed with CSICOP and start talking down your nose at that public, when many skeptics think you’re just as fringe as those same topics. Just sayin’.

Personally though I hope they get back up and running soon – in government spending terms, that’s not even a drop in a bucket, and I’m all for trying to answer the big questions…even if I may doubt that SETI is taking the right approach to do so.

Actually I find this kind of sad. It shows that an institution of mainstream science is going belly up.

But as Greg Taylor noted, Uncle Seth is getting what he deserves for getting in bed with the skeptic organization CSICOP instead of doing some scientific research into a phenomena that had at least anecdotal/trace evidence of alien life.

That’s the real shame of it all.

SETI is Dead

What could these three things have in common?

Well, according to ‘Mirage Men‘ author, Mark Pilkington, not really a whole hell of a lot, just rampant opportunism:

When the first mention of UFOs in the tranche of diplomatic papers unveiled by Wikileaks proved to be less than explosive, the ufological rumour machine went into interstellar overdrive with a wackyleak of its own, released on 17 January via ‘Allnewsweb’:

New secret UFO Wikileaks cable revealed

A source from within the inner circle of the Wikileaks team has confidentially leaked to All News Web the content of a State Dept cable, concerning UFO affairs, that Wikileaks has declined to upload onto their website.

“It is critical all embassy staff understand that they are not to discuss under any circumstance concerns DOD has with UFOs entering orbit, once again the seriousness of this matter cannot be overstated”

The cable was sent on 9 November, 2005 by the State Dept to a diplomat connected to the US embassy in Kiev, Ukraine.

Unlike Wikileaks’ own releases this one contained no actual documents (couldn’t they at least have made one up?), just a sensational message that was sure to get Exopolitical juices flowing and make Wikileaks look a bit hokey if the story ever escaped into the mainstream media – which, by the way, it didn’t. It even copied the Russian origin for this alleged cable from the earlier Wikileaks release, which emerged from the US embassy in Minsk.

The author of this message, and others like it (‘Barack Obama to make UFO Announcment’ etc), was one Michael Cohen, while the site carrying the story, Allnewsweb is part of the All News Network, which describes itself as ‘The Official News for the Tea Party’ and appears to allow anyone to post stories as long as they don’t obviously conflict with the Tea Party message. (Update: There seems to be some question as to the extent that the site is actually connected to the movement – see comments below).

So where’s all this leading? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in the Independent newspaper might provide some pointers:

The computer hackers’ collective Anonymous has uncovered a proposal by a consortium of private contractors to attack and discredit WikiLeaks…

The PowerPoint presentation claims that a trio of internet security companies – HB Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies – are already prepared to attack WikiLeaks which is rumoured to be getting ready to release a cache of potentially embarrassing information on the Bank of America.

The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who the leakers to WikiLeaks are and going after sympathetic journalists.

Now I don’t want to make any grand leaps of conspiratorial connectivity, but I will propose the following:

if someone was trying to discredit Wikileaks – and there are many people and organisations who might wish to do so – then one way to do it might be to stir up nonsense UFO stories (the ‘Allnews’ posting  was just a few days after the first bona fide, if unsensational, UFO-related diplomatic paper had gone public) and disseminate them via a grass roots, broadly right-leaning political movement. This would certainly add an extra dimension to the idea of astro-turfing!

Whether Michael Cohen is an apolitical hoaxer, perhaps one hoping to turn a fast web-buck (see Kandinsky’s comment below), an overzealous believer in ET visitation, a ‘private security’ specialist working on behalf of someone else, or a mixture of all of the above, remains to be seen. In the mean time it’ll be interesting to look into the amount of cross over between the Tea Party movement, which is a very broad church, and the UFO/Exopolicial movement.

This isn’t the first time Michael Cohen has been accused of being a hoaxer, even on the conspiracy forum Above Top Secret he is considered persona non grata.

To be fair, I have posted and linked to Allnewsweb occasionally, if for no other reason than to grab some UFO stuff rather lazily on my part on a slow posting day. Guilty as charged.

But to take the site seriously? Naaah, not even close.

However, I still follow the UFO subject closely because it has the potential to become an explosive meme. It doesn’t matter if it’s hoaxed or not to become viral on the InnerTubes to attain religious value.

Just witness the Jerusalem UFOs on YouTube.

Wikileaks vs UFO Disinformation?

But he is. He is very skeptical of the recent videos coming out on YouTube about the UFOs dive-bombing the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Israel. And I agree with him in that we should all be wise to question these events:

There is a dangerous new crowd afoot on the planet: weirdly twisted versions of our former selves roam at will, seeking to consume our rational minds.No, I’m not referring to extraterrestrial aliens sneaking their way into our bedrooms in the darkness to poke our bodies and steal our souls.

The new crowd is far more insidious than the alleged kidnappers from Planet Ten (or was it Planet Thirteen?). They lurk in the subconscious shadows of cyberspace, ready to pounce from the safety of their anonymous smirks, as their fingers tap dance across keyboards on all sides of the globe.

They are the Cyber Tricksters: Shadowy Avatars tracing their thoughts into your home as a play of light and shadow.

Some are artists; some are cons; some are, apparently, quite clever, indeed.

And some are making and distributing videos of alleged encounters with something unexplained: perhaps even something from beyond this world.

The question at hand: what are we to make of all the videos of alleged encounters with Unidentified Flying Objects?

The latest ‘contact’ with ‘the otherworldly’ reportedly took place in Jerusalem over the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. As of this moment, at least four videos have appeared on YouTube. Each of the videos appears to show a brilliantly illuminated object descend over the Dome of the Rock, and then zoom upwards at what appears to be an enormous velocity, disappearing into the blackness of the night sky.

We certainly cannot dismiss the possibility of alien life (even intelligent aliens) living on other worlds, somewhere else, ‘out there’ — besides UFOs, seriously bad weather, and confrontations in Egypt — today’s news includes the discovery of at least 54 potentially habitable planets by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

Now it is also true that we have heard stories from former senior US intelligence types concerning a now-legendary tale of extraterrestrial contact with something not-of-this-Earth. We have also heard that no one really has a handle on the reality behind the tales, beyond a few rumors shared amongst the senior ranks. (We anxiously await Colonel John B. Alexander’s new UFO book to compare notes with our own sources.)

The latest Internet video craze should leave you in a similar state of mind: the visual displays are intriguing enough to fire up the engines of your imagination (or ire-up the engines of the skeptics) — but do you really want to believe?

Any intelligence capable of imagining their way from the depths of interstellar space to arrive here on Earth would be more than intelligent enough to play mind-games with the human race. Rather than bright lights in the sky, I would expect our new friends (enemies?) to employ a more covert and stealthy approach in their dealings with human beings. To further complicate the situation, consider recent developments in the breakthrough science of invisibility. Indeed, the reports of encounters that we have heard (from semi-official sources) fit the ‘high-strangeness’ profile better than any ‘nuts-and-bolts’ spacecraft explanation.

By all means enjoy the show, but keep in mind even if the alleged sighting is real  — and there are always reasons to doubt the veracity of even the best video evidence — seeing is not believing in the murky dark strangeness of paranormal activity. Just ask those who have been ‘down the rabbit hole’ for the US government.

In this age of PhotoShop, is any video real? Should we question any and all photographic proof of any type?

I’m afraid the answer is yes.

Do you believe your lying eyes?

Extraterrestrial Rapture: Will spooky Jerusalem UFO videos entice believers in aliens?

During this show Filer talks about his encounters with UFOs when he was an Air Force pilot, good stuff.

Paracast: George Filer Interview

This was a down to earth and civil interview, even the subject of Disclosure was handled smoothly. Actually a very enjoyable show!

Clifford Clift Interview