Monthly Archives: July, 2012

Update: The Olympic Goodyear “UFO”

I knew it was too good to be true, darn it!

Sometimes it’s a bitch finding a decent conspiracy, lol!

Goodyearblimpolympics

When a strange, milky-white object glided over the Olympics opening ceremony and was caught on video, there was chatter that this was the extraterrestrial visitation for which UFO researchers are constantly searching.

Now we know the truth behind the strange object spotted amid the pyrotechnics spectacle. It was Goodyear’s “Spirit of Safety” blimp. And a spokesman for the company tells HuffPost why the aircraft appeared so mysterious.

To put it simply, the electric signage was turned off, so that it wouldn’t interfere with the show.

“I can definitely tell you we were up in the air for the entirety of the opening ceremonies. I can’t speak to what else was in the air, but the blimp was certainly up there during the fireworks,” said Goodyear U.S. public relations manager Doug Grassian.

“During the whole ceremony, we were providing the coverage for NBC, so we were up in the air the whole time [with our ship] the Spirit of Safety,” Grassian told The Huffington Post.

Three days prior to the start of the Olympics, the Associated Press reported that William Hill, a London betting house, had offered 1,000-to-1 odds that a flying saucer would appear over Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony. So, people in the U.K. were already wondering — and betting on — if such an event would occur.

Alas, it was only Goodyear’s Spirit of Safety that showed up in the restricted airspace above the stadium.

The word “Goodyear” — which normally appears on the blimp — was removed, adding to the confusion and misidentification of the blimp as a UFO.

“Because we’re not a sponsor of the Olympics, we had to take the Goodyear branding off of it,” Grassian explained. “That’s why when you look at it, you probably just see blue and yellow with no words on it. It will remain that way until the Olympics are done.”

This isn’t the first time a Goodyear blimp has been mistaken for a UFO.

“It happens occasionally,” Grassian said. “I’ve been in this job roughly two years, and I’ve seen a couple of incidents where people have called us to ask if the blimp was around because they thought there was a UFO [in the area].”

Those London betting offices probably didn’t have to pay off any UFO wagers this time around.

Also there’s another correction, I made a notation about the “Pope.” Actually, it was Nick Pope, not the Catholic Pope.

Last month, former British Ministry of Defence UFO desk agent Nick Pope alluded to the possibility of something like this happening in remarks to The Daily Mail: “If aliens have studied our psychology, they may choose to appear in our skies on a significant date – the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games is one date being widely circulated by conspiracy groups.”

But in an email to De Void, Pope maintains his statement was a PR boost for a PlayStation Vita “Resistance: Burning Skies” alien-invasion video game. Even so, “It was a safe bet,” he adds. “With a TV audience of billions and with so many cameras, somebody was bound to spot something and say it was a UFO. Also, with my original remarks in mind, this is a classic self-fulfilling prophesy: I say ‘watch out for UFOs’ and because I used to investigate UFOs for the government, people read something into my remarks and start expecting something to happen. In such circumstances, any light in the sky will be seized upon by people and turned into an alien spacecraft, in some people’s minds.”

Ultimately, Pope says, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority should be able to resolve the issue with flight logs. But in the event the CAA draws blanks, what would it portend for William Hill, the London gambling house that begat the 1,000-1 odds on UFO wagering? This word of advice from spokesman Rupert Adams: Read the fine print.

“The betting for the UFO at the Olympics had some fairly specific guidelines,” he writes in an email to De Void. “That either the serving Prime Minister or American President confirms that either of their Air Forces confirm that a UFO was seen above the stadium.” Oh, and P.S.: “The other bet we do offer is 100-1 that the serving PM or President confirms the current existence of intelligent ET’s.”

Well, Obama’s out, this being an election year, but hey, it should be a piece of cake for David Cameron. In 2009, as a PM candidate, Cameron went on the record for UFO glasnost in the UK: “I think we should be as open about these things as possible. So I should be quite happy to give you a guarantee that if I was prime minister, I would be entirely open and frank about these things.”

William Hill should place odds on that.

Nick Pope shilling for video games?

Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. Researching UFOs isn’t exactly a profit making enterprise.

We’re all in trouble if Richard Dolan starts doing the same thing though, lol!

Olympics UFO Was Definitely Our Blimp: Goodyear

CAA logs could resolve Olympics UFO

Olympic UFO

When it comes to UFOs recently, the U.K. has had its fair share.

I don’t know whether it’s because of recently released MoD UFO documents or because Britain has the Rothschilds, when it comes to conspiracies nobody does it better than the Brits ( unless it’s the good ol’ US of A, lol! ).

Olympicsufo2

Talk about an uninvited guest at the Olympics.

Friday night’s spectacular pyrotechnics display of the most watched opening ceremony in summer Olympics history attracted more than the eyes of over 40 million people. A clearly seen unidentified flying object was videotaped making its way over London’s Olympic stadium, reports Examiner.com.

The disc-shaped object is first seen entering the upper left portion of the video as the fireworks erupt over the stadium. The UFO — which appears to have a dome or bulge rising from its center — moves slowly across the sky as if deliberately observing the light-show spectacle below it.

While NBC Olympics — a division of NBC Sports — has chosen Goodyear blimps for all of its 2012 Olympics aerial coverage, the strange-looking object that appeared over the opening ceremonies doesn’t appear to be a blimp.

So what was it?

On an evening that included an apparent Queen Elizabeth and 007 agent James Bond parachuting out of a helicopter into the Olympics stadium, most people probably wouldn’t have been surprised if a staged UFO was also on the entertainment menu, just two weeks after the U.K. released its most recent batch of UFO documents.

olympicsufo1

Last month, former Ministry of Defense UFO desk officer Nick Pope suggested that a huge event like the London Olympic Games, could present itself as a prime target for otherworldly craft to show themselves to a gigantic viewing audience.

“With the summer of mass events, we are all on high alert for terrorism. But we must also cast our eyes further afield and be prepared for even the most seemingly unfathomable,” Pope said, according to PressTV.

Pope wrote earlier this year of a conspiracy theory rumor that suggested a fake alien attack would be staged at the London Olympics.

“A combination of special effects and holographic technology will be used to create the illusion of an alien invasion, the rumor claims,” Pope wrote on TruTV.com.

“If aliens have studied our psychology, they may choose to appear in our skies on a significant date — the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games is one date being widely circulated by conspiracy groups,” PressTV quoted Pope.

Maybe Friday night’s UFO appearance was a dress rehearsal.

Of course the old Project Blue Beam UFO attack from outer space was involked, this time by the Pope ( surprise, surprise, heh-heh! )

I wonder if he’s a fan of Star Trek?

UFO Over Olympics Opening Ceremony: A Classic Flying Saucer

http://youtu.be/I7jt42FxaQs

Once again, hat tip to Daily Grail.

Cool Colorado UFO Pictures

Let us take our minds off from the horrific event that took place a few days ago in Colorado and look at these UFOs flying formation in a thunder storm there last Friday.

If I was of a conspiratorial bent (LOL) I would ask if these UFOs were a portent of those events.

Some folks would say yes, some would say “are you nuts?”

You be the judges.

____________

The Daily Weird     UFOs  Is the Media Ignoring a Stunning Set of UFO Images?      July 12, 2012 12:09 am     Greg Newkirk     9 Comments  Some intriguing images snapped by a photographer in Colorado have been causing a quite a bit of discussion online this week, but the real question is why they haven’t been causing more commotion in the media.  Professional photographer Greg Archer took a few shots of a lightning storm over Castle Rock, Colorado on the 6th of this month, but the most striking objects in the photo aren’t the streaks of lightning tearing through the sky, but rather the mysterious lights hovering uniform high above the tree line.

Some intriguing images snapped by a photographer in Colorado

Photos emerge of Colorado UFOs

Links courtesy of the Daily Grail.

Laser Powered Bussard Interstellar Ramscoops

We do a change of pace today as we move from the UFO Community to the mainstream ( sort of ) of Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams and Tau Zero’s discussion of real life interstellar propulsion methods and starflight.

Here Robert Bussard’s ramjet is linked with Robert Forward’s idea of laser-powered starflight and a more efficient method of vehicle acceleration –  and more importantly ‘deceleration’ at the appointed destination:

Many of the interstellar concepts I write about in these pages take on a life of their own. After the initial brainstorming, the idea gets widely enough disseminated that other scientists take it on, looking to modify and improve on the original concept. That’s been true in the case of solar sails and the more recently devised ‘lightsails,’ which use beamed energy from a laser or microwave source to drive the vehicle. We continue to study magnetic sails — ‘magsails’ — and various nuclear options like the inertial confinement fusion that powered Daedalus and perhaps Icarus. Sometimes insights arise when ideas are grafted onto each other to create a hybrid solution.

The idea I want to examine today, a hybrid design combining a Bussard-style interstellar ramjet with laser beaming — exemplifies this mix and match process. Working with Daniel Whitmire, A. A. Jackson, a frequent commenter and contributor here on Centauri Dreams, pondered the various issues the Bussard ramjet had run into, including the difficulty in lighting the proton/proton fusion reaction Bussard advocated early in the process. Writing at a time not long after he had finished up a PhD in relativistic physics (at the University of Texas), Jackson conceived the idea of beaming energy to the spacecraft and discovered that the method offered advantages over the baseline Bussard design. The laser-powered ramjet is a fascinating concept that has received less attention than it deserves.

Image: Physicist and interstellar theorist Al Jackson, originator of the laser-powered ramjet concept.

Bussard’s ramjet, you’ll recall, lit its fusion fires using reaction mass gathered from the interstellar medium by a huge magnetic ram scoop, which itself has proven problematic given the drag issues such a scoop introduces. The other way to power up a starship using an external source of energy is to beam a terrestrial or Solar System-based laser at the departing craft, which has deployed a lightsail to draw momentum from the incoming photons. Jackson and Whitmire found the latter method inefficient. Their solution was to beam the laser at a ramjet that would use reaction mass obtained from a Bussard-style magnetic ram scoop. The ramjet uses the laser beam as a source of energy but, unlike the sail, not as a source of momentum.

Running the numbers and assuming all photons transmitted by the laser will be absorbed by the ship, the authors discovered that the laser-powered ramjet (LPR) is superior to the baseline Bussard ramjet at low velocities, while superior to the laser-pushed sail at all velocities. The Bussard design becomes the most efficient of the three at velocities equal to and above about 0.14 c. The laser-powered ramjet, then, solves at least one of the Bussard vehicle’s problems, the fact that it has to get up to a significant percentage of lightspeed before lighting its fusion reaction. LPR propulsion could be used up to 0.14 c, with the vehicle switching over to full interstellar ramjet mode to achieve high efficiency at relativistic velocities.

The laser-powered ramjet offers other advantages as well. Think back to some of Robert Forward’s laser sail concepts and you’ll recall the problem of deceleration. With the sail powered by a laser beam from the Solar System, it’s possible to reach velocities high enough to take you to the nearest stars in a matter of decades rather than centuries. But how do you slow down once you arrive? Conceiving a manned mission to Epsilon Eridani, Forward came up with a ‘staged’ solution in which the sail separates upon arrival, with the large outer sail ring moving ahead of the vehicle and reflecting beamed laser energy to the now smaller inner sail, thus slowing it down. It would be so much easier if the beam worked in both directions!

But with the laser-powered ramjet, a round trip can be made using a single laser beam because the beam is being used as a source of energy rather than momentum. Jackson and Whitmire showed that the efficiency in the deceleration phase of the outbound journey as a function of velocity is the same as for the acceleration phase. And on the return trip, the energy utilisation efficiency is more favorable in both the acceleration and deceleration phases because the ship is traveling into the beam. In fact, the laser-powered ramjet is superior to both the laser sail and the Bussard ramjet even at high fractions of the speed of light when traveling into the laser beam.

Let’s go over that again: Jackson and Whitmire’s calculations focus on the energy utilisation efficiency parameter, showing that the laser-powered ramjet is superior to the laser sail at all velocities, whether the ship is receding from the beam or approaching (moving into the beam). The LPR is also superior to the Bussard ramjet at velocities less than about 0.14 c when receding from the beam, and superior to the Bussard design at all velocities when approaching. Add to this that the LPR concept requires no onboard proton-burning reactor — the authors assume the use of Whitmire’s ‘catalytic’ ramjet using the CNO (carbon-nitrogen-oxygen) cycle — and that the LPR’s power requirements are less than those of the laser sail.

As this talk is more ‘mainstream’ than usual, the idea of spotting interstellar craft incoming to this Solar System is easy to spot, given the power output of the craft. Any invasion would be highly visible.

But the UFO phenomenon excludes that – no incoming craft are visible until they are already in the atmosphere.

So is wormhole technology being used, or are other folding door type technologies ( if one can call such things technology ) being utilized?

A Laser-Powered Interstellar Ramjet

UFO Crashes and Psychological Warfare

When UFO crashes became big business in the U.S. Government in 1947 with the formation of the National Security Act ( precursor to the Homeland Security Act post-9/11 in 2001 ) the C.I.A. and other security agencies couldn’t wait to use the stories as cover for Cold War psy-ops.

Here researcher and author Nick Redfern offers up more info on Cold War hanky-panky via the use of UFO crashes, real or imagined:

According to a Technical Report prepared by the Air Force’s flying saucer study, Project Grudge, in August 1949: “Upon eliminating several additional incidents due to vagueness and duplication, there remain 228 incidents, which are considered in this report. Thirty of these could not be explained, because there was found to be insufficient evidence on which to base a conclusion.” Arguably, however, the most important and intriguing entry in the document appears in the Recommendations section. It’s one that many UFO researchers have not appreciated the significance of. It states: “That Psychological Warfare Division and other governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare be informed of the results of this study.”

The Department of Defense’s definition of psychological warfare is: “The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.”

Thus, there’s a very good argument to be made that, ever since its earliest years, the UFO phenomenon has been used at an official level as a tool to fool, confuse and alarm the enemy – as well as to confuse the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, too, of course.

I’m on a bit of a crashed UFO kick right now: my previous post here at Mysterious Universe dealt with the way in which the infamous Spitsbergen “Crashed UFO” event of 1952 may have had its origins in a psychological-warfare operation. But, there’s an even earlier one I want to bring to your attention that may fall into precisely this same realm.

Next to the so-called Roswell Incident of July 1947, certainly the most talked-about “UFO crash” of all is that which is alleged to have occurred in the vicinity of Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. According to information related to the author Frank Scully in the late 1940s (and subsequently published in his best-selling 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers), as a result of a number of separate incidents in 1947 and 1948, the wreckage of four alien spacecraft, and no fewer than 34 alien bodies, had been recovered by American authorities, and were being studied under cover of the utmost secrecy at defense establishments in the United States.

As Scully reported, the majority of his data came from two individuals: Silas Mason Newton (described in a 1941 FBI report as a “wholly unethical businessman”) and one “Dr. Gee,” the name given to protect eight scientists, all of whom had supposedly divulged various details of the crashes to Newton and Scully. According to Scully’s sources one such UFO was found in Hart Canyon, near the town of Aztec, in March 1948.

Although the Aztec affair has attracted the attention of numerous UFO researchers over the years, it’s a fascinating piece of documentary evidence relative to the Aztec case that surfaced in the late 1990s I wish to bring to your attention. It came thanks to the late,  investigative author and former CIA employee, Karl Pflock, and it is one that may ultimately shed more important light on the psychological warfare angle of the crashed UFO mystery.

As Pflock stated: “In 1998, under curious circumstances, I was made privy to a fascinating document about one of the most controversial cases of the Golden Age of Flying Saucers, the so-called Aztec crash of 1948. I had little more than passing interest in the case until 1998, when a source, who insists on complete anonymity, showed me a handwritten testament, set down by the key player in this amazing, often amusing, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction episode. The contents of this ‘journal’ seem to lift the veil of mystery and uncertainty from important aspects of the case, while at the same time drawing it more closely around others.”

The story as told to Pflock was that the military was keeping a secret and close watch on Silas Newton when his tales of the Aztec UFO crash were at their height. More remarkably, military personnel were dispatched to visit Newton and told him something amazing: they knew his Aztec story was utterly bogus, but, incredibly, they wanted him to keep telling it!

According to Newton, when writing in his journal about his clandestine Air Force visitors: “They grilled me, tried to poke holes in my story. Had no trouble doing it and laughed in my face about the scientific mistakes I made. They never said so, but I could tell they were trying to find out if I really knew anything about flying saucers that had landed. Did not take those fellows long to decide I did not. But I sure knew they did.”

In view of the revelations that the USAF encouraged Newton to continue championing the Aztec incident (or non-incident!), Karl Pflock wondered: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps? Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation?”

Within the crashed UFO research arena, researchers are generally polarized into two camps: (A) those who believe aliens really have crashed to Earth; and (B) those that conclude all the cases can be explained in prosaic terms (hoaxes, aircraft crashes and balloon accidents, etc). As both the Aztec affair and the Spitsbergen case demonstrate, however, we might have a better chance of resolving the crashed UFO enigma by digging into the 1947-era-onwards world of military psychological warfare operations than by looking for little men with big black eyes…

It seems more and more lately that Roswell, Aztec and other 1947 – onward UFO “crashes” are being pushed as Cold War psy-ops disinformation.

If that’s the case however, where does that leave the advanced tech that Corso supposedly fed private industry at the time?

Was it alien, or Nazi tech?

The Aztec UFO and Psy-Ops

Hat tip to The Anomalist.

Air Force Personnel and Project SERPO

Caryn Anscomb, a reporter and researcher for Gary Bekkum’s site Starpod.us gives an update on government whistle blowers about the UFO phenomenon, mainly former Air Force personnel.

I used to believe in the SERPO project happening at one time, but I don’t think it fits into the future human coming back to visit us criteria. Now I’m not sure about that theory either since it just muddies up the waters of truth also. But I think one is just as confusing as the other and it doesn’t advance the truth either.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to.

[…]In 1997 Col. Philip Corso’s book “The Day After Roswell” was published. This was the first time that a high ranking and respected military personage had come forward with information in connection to Roswell and crashed disks. Not only that, but Col. Corso states that he witnessed the shipment of dead aliens and was later to personally handle alien artifacts. This book caused a commotion throughout the UFO community, many viewing it as a major revelation and the beginning of a disclosure process they had long awaited.

The late Col. Philip J. Corso’s military history is certainly impressive. During his twenty-one-year military career, he was honored with nineteen medals, decorations and ribbons for meritorious service. He was a key Army intelligence officer who served on General MacArthur’s staff in Korea.

From 1953 to 1956, Corso was given intelligence staff assignments on both the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) and the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). The OCB was established as an independent agency by Executive Order 10483, September 2, 1953, to report to the NSC (National Security Council) on the development, by appropriate Executive branch agencies, of operational plans for national security policies of international import. In 1961, Corso was assigned to Research and Development (R&D) at the Pentagon, working under Lt. General Arthur Trudeau, head of Army R&D.

Col. Corso retired from the army in 1963, and went on to serve Senator James Eastland and Strom Thurmond as a staff member specializing in national security.

In 1947, Corso was posted to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the afternoon of July 6th 1947, several army vehicles pulled in to Fort Riley with a shipment of cargo on route to Wright Field, Ohio. (Wright Field became Wright-Patterson AFB in 1948). The crates were offloaded and stored in one of the old veterinary buildings on the base. That evening Corso was assigned to post duty and whilst doing his security checks he made his way over to the veterinary buildings to check on Bill Brown, who was on post duty that night.

According to Corso, when he got there he noticed Brown wasn’t stationed at his post, as he stood wondering where Brown could be he heard a voice hiss out of the darkness “Major Corso”.

It was Brown, he sounded excited and told Corso that he should take a look at the crates stored in the building. Corso, after much debate with Brown agrees to take a look. One of the crates had already been opened so the lid didn’t prove too troublesome to remove. As he peered into the crate the shock of what he discovered sent him into a swoon. Instead of weapons, as expected, he could make out a small-framed body suspended in an unusual thick blue liquid.

“At first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere,” writes Corso, “But this was no child. It was a four-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking six-fingerer hands –- I didn’t see a thumb —  thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent light bulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin.” [1] Corso adds that the image of the dead alien never left his memory.

In 1961, Corso was assigned to Research and Development (R&D) at the Pentagon, working under Lt. General Arthur Trudeau. Corso was in the Trudeau’s office when Trudeau pointed to a filing cabinet and said, “This has some special files, war materiel you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your Foreign Technology responsibilities.” [2] The General informed Corso that the filing cabinet would be transferred to Corso’s office and that Corso was to decide how to deal with the contents advising Corso that he should do a little research on the Roswell files first.

According to Corso, the cabinet contained retrieved alien artifacts from the Roswell crash and he had been placed in charge of devising a way to exploit the obvious strategic value of the wreckage. The wreckage had evidently been locked away in the Army’s possession from 1947 to 1961, with very few knowing about it. The few who did know were convinced that certain U.S. intelligence agencies had been infiltrated by Soviet spies and informers, and the UFO wreckage was so sensitive that no one could be trusted to deal with it. So Corso’s task from 1961 to 1963, was to secretly distribute various pieces of potentially valuable wreckage to scientists and industrial bodies who were known to be trustworthy, and the human patent process would effectively mask the alien source of the technology.

In January, 1994, author and researcher Karl T. Pflock met up with Col. Corso at the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. Corso had returned to New Mexico to refresh his memories before starting work on his memoirs. Corso had arrived at the museum before Pflock, and had a private meeting with Glenn Dennis and two others whilst waiting. Corso discussed his involvement in a project that had been set up to learn the secrets of the Roswell saucer and put them to use in national defense, and allegedly showed Dennis and the others sketches of aliens.

On Pflock’s arrival the party left the museum and made their way to the alleged UFO crash sites, and debris field. On route Corso told Pflock about his interest in Roswell and said that he had played a small role in the aftermath of the affair, and that he would be including it as a minor piece in his memoirs. Pflock states that it struck him that Corso really knew very little about the Roswell incident and appeared to be trying to gather information from others in the group. Corso goes on to make some outlandish claims about an encounter he’d had with a CIA operative and how he had to read him the riot act, and had to even get a little physically aggressive with him.

Unbeknown to Corso, Pflock knew the CIA station chief who Corso was referring to, from his time in the agency. Pflock knew the story was highly unlikely and wrote Corso off as another blowhard.

In 1997, Pflock was asked to review a new book publication, it happened to be “The Day After Roswell” by Col. Philip Corso. Pflock was astonished to find that instead of the expected memoirs a significant amount of information in the book pertained to Corso’s personal involvement with a dead ET and retrieved alien artifacts. Much to Pflock’s surprise, Senator Strom Thurmond had written a brief foreword for Corso’s book. Pflock called the senator’s press secretary and discovered that Corso had asked the senator to write a foreword to his memoirs “I Walked with Giants: My Career in Military Intelligence.” According to the senator’s press secretary no mention of a book on Roswell and USG cover-ups had been mentioned.

On June 5th, 1997, in a press release on the matter, Senator Thurmond states:

I did not, and would not, pen the foreword to a book about, or containing, a suggestion that the success of the United States in the Cold War is attributable to the technology found on a crashed UFO. I do not believe in UFOs, do not believe that the United States is in possession of such a vehicle, and do not believe that there has been any government cover-up of a UFO crash. The outline of I Walk [ed] with Giants provided to me by Mr. Corso indicated he was writing a book of his recollections and observations on topics such as World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnamese Conflict, intelligence, espionage, and counter-espionage operations. There was absolutely no mention, suggestion, or indication that any of the chapters and subjects listed dealt with Unidentified Flying Objects and government conspiracies to cover-up the existence of such a space vehicle.

Senator Thurmond’s foreword was promptly removed from subsequent printings of the book.

I have checked Corso’s DA record, and it does show that Corso was in the places he says he was. However, without substantive evidence to back his claims up, and there is very little at this time, the fact that he was in the right locations and at the right times does not validate his claims.

In June, 1998, one month before his death, Corso filed an affidavit in the U. S. District Court for the District of Arizona — via Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. Department of the Army (Civil Action No. 98-0538 PHX ROS).

Corso states:

I, [Lt.] Col. Philip J. Corso, do hereby swear, under the penalties of perjury, that the following statements are true:

That at all times hereinafter mentioned, I was a member and officer of the defendant.

That during my tenure with the defendant I was a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk at defendant’s Research & Development department.

That on or about July 6, 1947, while stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, I personally observed a four-foot non-human creature with bizarre-looking four-fingered hands, thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent-light-bulb-shaped head. The eye sockets were oversized and almond-shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose. The creature’s skull was overgrown to the point where all its facial features were arranged frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part of the head. There were no eyebrows or any indications of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully functioning orifice.

That in 1961, I came into possession of what I refer to as the ‘Roswell File.’ This file contained field reports, medical autopsy reports and technological debris from the crash [of] an extraterrestrial vehicle in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

That I have personally read the medical autopsy reports which refer to the autopsy of the previously described creature that I saw in 1947 at Fort Riley, Kansas.

That said autopsy reports indicated the autopsy was performed at Walter Reed [Army] Hospital, which was under the authority of the defendant at the time of the autopsy.

That said autopsy report referred to the creature as an ‘extraterrestrial biological entity’ …

The question remains: was Corso telling the truth, was he over-inflating his involvement and position, as some have claimed, or could he have been engaged in a little ongoing intelligence work, a final bit for government and country?

We might never know.

Corso, like so many UFO proponents, claims Government cover-ups of the reality of UFOs and nefarious acts perpetrated by the CIA to shut the public up and put researchers off the scent should they get too close to the truth. Shadowy cabals and secret Majestic types, all hell bent on keeping the public in the dark for their own wicked ends.

One such group often referred to in the UFO world are the AVIARY, an alleged group of high-level insiders, with CIA/military/government connections. They all have bird names (hence the AVIARY) and according to many UFOlogists, when they’re not trying to fry your minds with psychotronic weapons, they are out to hide ET secrets through deception and skullduggery. In fact, although the existence of MJ-12 is highly questionable, the AVIARY does ‘loosely’ exist and part of the above is factual. The majority do have CIA/military/government connections. But rather than a tight-knit secret cabal, they are a loose network of professionals who share a mutual interest in UFOs and parapsychology. Some are good friends and some have worked together on a variety projects researching UFO data and the paranormal.

The bird name code was the brainchild of William Moore. He and his colleague, Jaime Shandera, needed a safe means for discussing some of their more sensitive contacts when in public or over the phone. So partially tongue and cheek they settled for bird names. Virtually everyone they came in contact with, who had some form of government connection, were allocated a bird name. Many of the birds were unaware of their code names until months, if not years later. The core group of the AVIARY are fairly well known in UFO circles. These ‘core’ members formed the UFO Working Group, a couple having worked together on psi research and remote viewing projects, and later at NIDS (National Institute of Discovery Science).

Out of all the bird names the ‘Falcon’ is possibly the most mysterious, having not been clearly identified to date.

[Editor’s note: In July 2012, author Greg Bishop revealed that Bill Moore identified FALCON to him as the late Harry Rositzke.]( Emphasis mine )

Several names have been put forward over the years as possible candidates for ‘Falcon,’ including:

  • Richard C. Dotty, USAF
  • Richard Helms (deceased), former DCI at CIA
  • Dale Graff, physicist and former director of Project STAR GATE, and Founder of The Baycliff International Psi/RV Alert Center
  • Col. Barry Hennessy, Director of Security, Counterintelligence and Special Program Oversight, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, D.C.
  • Cecil B. Scott Jones, PhD, former officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

In order to collate the opening comments to this series of articles, we need to hone in on a few key individuals, whose respective legs straddle the UFO / parapsychological realms. The first notable character is Dr. C. B. Scott Jones, who embodies this overlap between UFO culture, parapsychology and Intel. He is a former officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence (retiring as Commander in the US Navy) he participated in a number contracts with the DIA over the years and from 1985 to 1991, Scott Jones was appointed as Special Assistant to Senator Claiborne Pell.

In 1985, he founded and was president of the Center for Applied Anomalous Phenomena, a non-profit educational and scientific research organization which was chartered to conduct research and analysis of anomalous phenomena. Networking with the para-psychological and UFO communities, he has worked throughout the executive branch to address issues of government support for basic parapsychological research, and to consider implications and application of these phenomena.

In 1989, Dr Jones and Senator Claiborne Pell co-founded the Human Potential Foundation. The Foundation was involved in a number of research projects, including a joint research effort with the Chinese Academy of Somatic Science in Beijing, in accelerated bone healing using Qi Gong; a sponsored symposium conducted by Russian medical scientists on psychoanalytical and psycho-correction computer technologies and the translation from Chinese of the book Collected Works on Qi Gong Science.

The late Philip Corso was also a proponent of the aliens are time travelers theory and I have a hard time thinking he had knoweledge of SERPO.

But necessity makes strange bedfellows at times, whether purposely or not.

Paranoia, Suspicion and Allegations Abound … Caryn Anscomb’s UFO Trickster

The U.K. and their released UFO Files

Last week the U.K. Ministry of Defence released more of their UFO files. Some of them have discussions made by various Parliment ministers and they reveal some very interesting tales:

Ukufo

Newly released X-Files from the United Kingdom’s National Archives reveal the role of that country’s Ministry of Defense UFO Desk officers, what they actually thought about possible alien visits to Earth and their ideas on harnessing alien technology as a weapon.

There are 25 files, comprising more than 6,700 pages, that include UFO policy, parliamentary questions, media issues, public correspondence and, of course, UFO sighting reports. Overall, more than 10,000 UFO reports came through the special Ministry of Defense unit from 1950 to 2009.

“These are probably the most fascinating and bizarre government files ever made available to the public,” said Nick Pope, who was the UFO Desk officer from 1991 to 1994.

“There’s massive public interest in UFOs, and at one point, the MoD was getting more Freedom of Information Act requests about UFOs than any other subject,” Pope told The Huffington Post in an email. “The files contain the usual mixture of policy documents, sighting reports, photos, sketches and papers discussing how best to handle the subject with Parliament, the media and the public.”

File DEFE 24/2080/1 is a collection of MoD UFO information from 1972 to 1995 that includes intelligence papers that were declassified from “secret.”

On page 157 of this file is a briefing prepared for the MoD before a 1979 House of Lords debate in which an intelligence officer asks why aliens would want to visit “an insignificant planet (the Earth) of an uninteresting star (the sun).” He wrote that this sort of visit “would probably not occur more than once in 1,000 years or so, even if one assumes that every intelligent community made 10 launches a year.” The officer concluded that “claims of thousands of visits in the last decade or so are far too large to be credible.”

Pages 38 to 43 of the file contain a 1995 briefing by a UFO Desk officer, calling for a full study of UFOs, since national security implications had never been assessed. The writer suggested that, “If the sightings are not of this Earth, then their purpose needs to be established as a matter of priority.”

In that same briefing, an intelligence officer indicates the need to capture UFO technology for U.K. use. “If the reports are taken at face value, then devices exist that do not use conventional reaction propulsion systems; they have a very wide range of speeds and are stealthy. I suggest we could use this technology, if it exists.”

File DEFE 24/2090/1 references a U.K. study of what were called Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. Page 47 of this file reports that some UFOs/UAP might be rare atmospheric plasmas or ball lightning that could be harnessed or used by the military as “novel weapon technology.”

A recent Huffington Post story included statements from former undercover CIA officer Chase Brandon, who said that in the 1990s, he found a box labeled “Roswell” at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Brandon said there was information in that box that was related to the alleged 1947 UFO crash outside of Roswell, N.M.

File DEFE 24/1985/1 brings up the subject of the Roswell incident in a Jan. 3, 1997, response to a question raised on whether or not the MoD had ever been briefed by the CIA about Roswell. The response by a Defense Intelligence official states, “We have no data on the alleged ‘Roswell incident’ or any ‘crashed UFO incidents in the UK.’ In short, DI 55 has no records of any UAP/UFO ‘crashes’ in either the UK or US and have never, as far as we can tell from existing files, received any briefs from any US agencies, including the CIA.”

“The question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe is one of the biggest and most profound questions we can ask,” said Pope. “People are fascinated with the idea that we might have been visited, and these files chart MoD’s attempts to grapple with the subject.”

There is much more to be revealed about the U.K. files, including how Prime Minister Tony Blair was briefed on UFO sightings in 1998, and how the efforts of David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University were instrumental in getting the MoD to release the UFO files to the public.

While the British are releasing their files ( even though the info isn’t really “new” ) the good ol’ U.S. maintains their policy of deny and debunk.

And guess who probably has control of any back-engineered technology, if there was any to be had?

UFO X-Files Released By U.K. Reveal Desire To Weaponize Alien Technology

Red Ice Creations: “Clouds of alien life forms are sweeping through outer space…”

From YouTube via Red Ice Creations:

“Clouds of alien life forms are sweeping through outer space and infecting planets with life — it may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0Y0glCjUQ&feature=youtu.be

_________

Red Rain in India
The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials


Also tune into Red Ice Radio:
Michael Mautner – Panspermia, Seeding the Universe with Life
Lloyd Pye – Human Origins, Intervention Theory & Genetic Experimentation
Mike Bara – Dark Mission, The Occult NASA Moon Mission
Marcel Kuijsten – Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind & The Origin of Consciousness

Susan Joy Rennison – A New Cosmic Age, Space Weather & Cosmic Radiation

The theory of Panspermia is also advocated by mainstream scientist Chandra Wickramasinghe and supported by the late Sir Fred Hoyle .

Maybe Sir Ridley Scott wasn’t too far off the beam?

Horizon: We Are The Aliens

New Super Amplifier Can Be Used To Explore Nature

This news has been passed all over the InnerTubes this past weekend, a new micro-amplifier developed by CalTech that can be used for many applications because it can boost the signal of anything in the electromagnetic spectrum, no matter how weak:

“This amplifier will redefine what it is possible to measure,” says Jonas Zmuidzinas, Caltech’s Merle Kingsley Professor of Physics, the chief technologist at JPL, and a member of the research team. An amplifier is a device that increases the strength of a weak signal. “Amplifiers play a basic role in a wide range of scientific measurements and in electronics in general,” says Peter Day, a visiting associate in physics at Caltech and a principal scientist at JPL. “For many tasks, current amplifiers are good enough. But for the most demanding applications, the shortcomings of the available technologies limit us.” Conventional transistor amplifiers—like the ones that power your car speakers—work for a large span of frequencies. They can also boost signals ranging from the faint to the strong, and this so-called dynamic range enables your speakers to play both the quiet and loud parts of a song. But when an extremely sensitive amplifier is needed—for example, to boost the faint, high-frequency radio waves from distant galaxies—transistor amplifiers tend to introduce too much noise, resulting in a signal that is more powerful but less clear. One type of highly sensitive amplifier is a parametric amplifier, which boosts a weak input signal by using a strong signal called the pump signal. As both signals travel through the instrument, the pump signal injects energy into the weak signal, therefore amplifying it. About 50 years ago, Amnon Yariv, Caltech’s Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, showed that this type of amplifier produces as little noise as possible: the only noise it must produce is the unavoidable noise caused by the jiggling of atoms and waves according to the laws of quantum mechanics. The problem with many parametric amplifiers and sensitive devices like it, however, is that they can only amplify a narrow frequency range and often have a poor dynamic range. But the Caltech and JPL researchers say their new amplifier, which is a type of parametric amplifier, combines only the best features of other amplifiers. It operates over a frequency range more than ten times wider than other comparably sensitive amplifiers, can amplify strong signals without distortion, and introduces nearly the lowest amount of unavoidable noise. In principle, the researchers say, design improvements should be able to reduce that noise to the absolute minimum. Versions of the amplifier can be designed to work at frequencies ranging from a few gigahertz to a terahertz (1,000 GHz). For comparison, a gigahertz is about 10 times greater than commercial FM radio signals in the U.S., which range from about 88 to 108 megahertz (1 GHz is 1,000 MHz).

“Our new amplifier has it all,” Zmuidzinas says. “You get to have your cake and eat it too.” The team recently described the new instrument in the journal Nature Physics. One of the key features of the new parametric amplifier is that it incorporates superconductors—materials that allow an electric current to flow with zero resistance when lowered to certain temperatures. For their amplifier, the researchers are using titanium nitride (TiN) and niobium titanium nitride (NbTiN), which have just the right properties to allow the pump signal to amplify the weak signal. Although the amplifier has a host of potential applications, the reason the researchers built the device was to help them study the universe. The team built the instrument to boost microwave signals, but the new design can be used to build amplifiers that help astronomers observe in a wide range of wavelengths, from radio waves to X rays. For instance, the team says, the instrument can directly amplify radio signals from faint sources like distant galaxies, black holes, or other exotic cosmic objects. Boosting signals in millimeter to submillimeter wavelengths (between radio and infrared) will allow astronomers to study the cosmic microwave background—the afterglow of the big bang—and to peer behind the dusty clouds of galaxies to study the births of stars, or probe primeval galaxies. The team has already begun working to produce such devices for Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) near Bishop, California, about 250 miles north of Los Angeles. These amplifiers, Zmuidzinas says, could be incorporated into telescope arrays like the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy at OVRO, of which Caltech is a consortium member, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. Instead of directly amplifying an astronomical signal, the instrument can be used to boost the electronic signal from a light detector in an optical, ultraviolet, or even X-ray telescope, making it easier for astronomers to tease out faint objects.

Hmm..no mention of using these new amplifiers in the new Square Kilomer Array ( SKA ) telescopes being constructed in Australia and South Africa. These certainly could help improve the performance of radio telescopes, perhaps help in the discovery of Earth-like worlds.

But as in all things human – politics interferes in a lot of good things.

Getting amped: Researchers develop instrument for exploring the cosmos and the quantum world 

Hat tip to the Daily Grail.

Freeman Dyson and the original Orion Spaceship

As of this moment, NASA is contracting Lockeed-Martin to build a small four man capsule called “Orion.”
It’s billed as a “beyond-earth-orbit” vehicle and a successor to the Space Shuttle. But it’s a paltry, poor substitute to it’s name-sake precursor that was never built due to what usually slows down human progress; politics:

It had never occurred to me that there was something the Graf Zeppelin and the Saturn V had in common. Nonetheless, a re-reading of Freeman Dyson’s paper “Interstellar Transport” confirms the obvious connection: Like the great airships of the 1930s, the Saturn V was huge and carried a payload that was absurdly small. Dyson, writing in 1968 fresh off the end of Project Orion, the rise of Apollo, and the triumph of chemical propulsion, had thought at one time that the US could bypass the Saturn V and its ilk, offering a fast track to the planets at a fraction of Apollo’s cost. The Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was a major factor in putting an end to that speculation.

I mentioned yesterday that I thought Dyson set about to be deliberately provocative in this piece, that he hoped to reach people who would have been unaware that interstellar distances could conceivably be crossed (thus his choice of Physics Today as his venue). To do that, he had to show that even reaching the Moon was a stretch for chemical methods, which he characterized as “…not bad for pottering around near the Earth, but… very uneconomic for anything beyond that.” While an Apollo mission to the Moon demanded staging and a huge mass ratio, an Orion vessel was built with only one stage, its mass ratio well under 10 even for long journeys out and around the Solar System.

Image: Dyson’s largest concept, a ‘super-Orion’ carrying colonists on an 1800 year journey. Credit: Adrian Mann.

Orion could have managed this because the exhaust velocity of the debris from its nuclear explosions would be in the thousands of kilometers per second range instead of what the chemical rocket could offer with its paltry 3 kilometers per second. Dyson assumed the use of hydrogen bombs (“the only way we know to burn the cheapest fuel we have, deuterium”) and a conservative energy yield of one megaton per ton, going on to say this:

These numbers represent the absolute lower limit of what could be done with our present resources and technology if we were forced by some astronomical catastrophe to send a Noah’s ark out of the wreckage of the solar system. With about 1 Gross National Product we could send a payload of a few million tons (for example a small town like Princeton with about 20,000 people) on a trip at about 1000 km/sec or 1 parsec per 1000 years. As a voyage of colonization a trip as slow as this does not make much sense on a human time scale. A nonhuman species, longer lived or accustomed to thinking in terms of millenia rather than years, might find the conditions acceptable.

Anyone who has spent time in the absurdly pretty town of Princeton NJ, where Dyson has lived for years while pursuing his work at the Institute for Advanced Studies, knows why he coupled a familiar scene with something as joltingly unfamiliar as a starship. The choice is reflective of his method: Dyson expresses the results of his calculations in tableaux that are both publicly accessible and mind-jarring, as a look through almost any of his books will demonstrate (think, for example, of his idea of a life-form that might poke out from an inner sea onto the surface ice of a Kuiper Belt object, a kelp-like, mirrored being he christened a ‘sunflower’). Root one end of an idea in the everyday, the other in a mind-bending direction, and you make your point memorable, which is one reason Dyson has inspired so many young people to be scientists.

Remember, the intent here was to get the Orion idea into the public discussion, along with an interstellar implication that Orion’s original designers had never built into their thinking. Dyson always knew that if you put the idea out there, the next step is to get to work on the specifics, detail after patient detail, work that on the interstellar level would presumably involve many generations. When remembering Dyson’s involvement with Project Orion, I think about something he once told Stewart Brand (in a Wiredinterview):

You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works—it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

It’s the same method we would have used for Orion if the project had proceeded, but the number of factors working against it proved insurmountable, and here one of Dyson’s greatest strengths — his ability to engage the public — was running up against a growing public distrust of nuclear technologies. But the point is that theory always couples with engineering practice, hammering on a problem until the best solution is reached. Unless, of course, the kind of bureaucracy that Dyson so disliked steps in to muzzle the research early on. A bit of that dislike comes across in the conclusion of “Interstellar Transport,” as he ponders what a starship would achieve:

By the time the first interstellar colonists go out they will know a great deal that we do not know about the places to which they are going, about their own biological makeup, about the art of living in strange environments. They will certainly achieve two things at the end of their century-long voyages. One is assurance of the survival of the human species, assurance against even the worst imaginable of natural or manmade catastrophes that may overwhelm mankind within the solar system. The other is total independence from any possible interference by the home government. In my opinion these objectives would make such an enterprise worthwhile, and I am confident that it will appear even more worthwhile to the inhabitants of our overcrowded and vulnerable planet in the 22nd century.

Dyson looked at questions of cost and energy production and assumed a continued economic growth of what today seems like a sizzling 4% per year. Working out the cost of the Orion starship (he figured 1011 dollars), he concluded that such a mission would be as economically feasible in the future some 200 years off as a Saturn V was in 1968. We can argue about such numbers (and be sure to check the comments from yesterday, where a fruitful discussion on the implications of exponential economic growth is continuing) but I suspect they are the first instance of a methodical prediction on when starflight will occur that most readers of Physics Today had ever encountered.

The paper thus comes into focus as a landmark in introducing a pulsed fusion concept to a wide audience, explaining its deep space potential, and calculating when an interstellar future might be possible. I can see why Greg Matloff considers it a key factor in the growth of the interstellar movement because of its broad audience and energizing effect. But tomorrow I’ll make the case for a slightly earlier paper’s even more profound effect on the public perception of interstellar flight, one that has played into our media imaginings of traveling among the stars ever since its publication.

Dyson will go down as one of the most prolific space science writers of our time. His ideas will stand perhaps the test of time.

As one commenter notes, maybe Elon Musk will take a modified nuclear-pulse spaceship to Mars and beyond.

An Interstellar Provocation