Thursday, November 17, 2005

Dozens of UFOs reported over Wales

DOZENS of UFOs that the Ministry of Defence cannot explain have been sighted in Wales in the past three years, the release of confidential papers has revealed.
The MoD confirmed that a green, circular object seen hovering in one position over Mumbles in January 2002 was classed as a UFO. And another bright object seen hovering over West Swansea in January of this year is also being put down as a UFO.
However, Julie Monk of the Ministry of Defence's Directorate of Air Staff made it clear a UFO classification simply meant no rational explanation for a sighting could be found, not that it was extra-terrestrial in origin. MoD figures show 28 reports of UFO sightings in Wales in the past three years cannot be explained. The close encounters include a black object hovering over Rhyl, a flying disc over Newport and a spinning craft with legs spotted in the skies above Rhondda. The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that there were seven sightings in 2002, eight in 2003, four in 2004 and nine so far this year. Whitehall-based Mrs Monk said, "The MoD examines any reports of UFOs it receives solely to establish whether what was seen might have some defence significance. That is, whether there is any evidence the UK's airspace might have been compromised by an unauthorised aircraft.
"Unless there is evidence of a potential threat to the UK from some external source, and to date no UFO report has revealed such evidence, we do not attempt to identify the precise nature of each sighting."Mrs Monk said rational explanations could be found for such sightings but it would be "an inappropriate use of defence resources" to go into great depth on each report.
Instead, a number of the reports are simply classed as UFOs and a database of sightings in Wales has now been built up from 2002 onwards. Because of the large number of reports before 2002, the MoD says the cost of examining, logging and placing them all on a database would be too expensive. The MoD holds reports of UFOs in Wales going back 25 years. Cardiff-based UFO researcher Chris Fowler said, "There are credible sightings of unidentified objects in the sky.
"Either these are our craft, which means we've got technology far more powerful than the ones most of us know about, or else they're somebody else's. I don't know more than that."
There have been a number of UFO watching groups in Wales including the Welsh Federation of Independent Ufologists. The strangest report given to the federation involved a family travelling by car to the Great Orme on November 10, 1997. They could not account for several "lost" hours when they suddenly became aware of resuming their journey, according to investigator Margaret Fry. She was told of their account by a friend of the family. Margaret says the couple and their children where driving on the Bodfair/Landernog road when they found their car engulfed by a purple triangular craft. The next thing they remember is the purple craft had gone. She said, "But they could not account for considerable hours of time lost.
"The father was having trouble afterwards with a top molar tooth and he had to go to the dentist.
"A black unknown object fell out while he was at the dentist ... but he had no fillings."
There was a raft of "cigar- shaped object" sightings in Pembrokeshire in the 1970s which prompted an RAF inquiry. And in January 1974 there were reports a spacecraft "as big as the Albert Hall" landed in the Berwyn Mountains. Last year, Alison Moore, 26, took footage of a floating disc in the sky above her Trehafod, Rhondda, home. Although astronomer Mark Griffiths said "it could have been Venus" he said the incident deserved further investigation.

X Files Opened: The National Security Agency's UFO Investigations Unearthed

There is one question that persistently circles the community of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) true-believers: If the government has nothing to hide, UFO fans often ask, then why is it keeping so many UFO records under lock and key?
“Well, it turns out that the government does have something to hide, but it has nothing to do with extraterrestrials,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
A document has surfaced that had been stamped “Top Secret Umbra”—the codeword for the highest, most sensitive category of communications intelligence.
The once-classified affidavit was originally filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) in a 1980 lawsuit to justify the withholding of records on UFOs. The document is largely declassified—with certain sections cut out, ostensibly to protect employee names, and keep NSA technologies, skills, and foreign connections out of the limelight.
The document—In Camera Affidavit of Eugene F. Yeates: Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. National Security Agency, October 9, 1980—was released in redacted form on November 3 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from researcher Michael Ravnitzky and posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.

Foreign signals
A read of the document yields insight into how a super-secret agency like the NSA became caught up in the UFO phenomenon.
Created in November 1952, The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is America’s cryptologic organization. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and churns out foreign signals intelligence information.
Being a high-tech organization, the NSA is a cutting-edge home for communications and data processing. It is also a center for foreign language analysis and research within the government.
The just-released 1980 document explains that a total of 239 documents related to UFOs were located in NSA files, with 79 of those documents originating with other government agencies. One document is an account by an NSA official attending a UFO symposium. A healthy chunk of these reports were produced between 1958 and 1979.

Deceptive data
The titles of NSA-related UFO documents that are noted in the declassified document are intriguing, such as UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions.
Another title cited is UFO’s and the Intelligence Community Blind Spot to Surprise or Deceptive Data. In this seven-page, undated, unofficial draft of a monograph authored by an unnamed NSA employee, the author reportedly points out what he considers to be “a serious shortcoming” in the NSA’s communications intelligence (COMINT) interception and reporting procedures. That is, “the inability to respond correctly to surprising information or deliberately deceptive data.”
The unidentified author uses the UFO phenomenon to illustrate his belief that the inability of the U.S. intelligence community to process this type of unusual data adversely affects U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities.
Within the pages of the newly-released affidavit—and between sections of excised copy—it shows NSA intercepted in 1971 communications between two aircraft and a ground controller discussing a “phenomena” in the sky, as well as radar screen observations, labeling what was viewed as “unidentifiable” objects.
Other intercepted and decrypted reports of bright lights, luminous objects, and unidentified aircraft—along with an elongated ball of fire—scooting through the skies over non-U.S. countries are noted too.

Intercept operations
The 21-page affidavit makes clear that release of documents for public scrutiny, for a variety of reasons, “would seriously damage the ability of the United States to gather this vital intelligence information.”
Furthermore, how the NSA works with a network of foreign sources, organizations, and other governments to secure intelligence data would be adversely affected.
The majority of these records, explained NSA official Eugene F. Yeates in the 1980 affidavit, were communications intelligence reports that “are the product of intercept operations directed against foreign government controlled communications systems within their territorial boundaries.”

New insight
According to Aftergood, the newly declassified Yeates affidavit provides new insight into the types of records sought by UFO researchers that have been withheld by NSA.
“Even with all of the deletions, one can get a sense of the enormous scale—and the apparent success—of the worldwide electronic intercept operations conducted by NSA at the height of the Cold War,” Aftergood told SPACE.com.
“Unfortunately it is not clear from the affidavit how the withheld documents might have related to UFOs,” Aftergood said. “There must have been some connection in order for them to be within the scope of the original FOIA request…but I have no idea what it was.”
But for those hungry to show a great government conspiracy is at work and that alien-driven UFOs routinely cruise through our skies, the just brought to light document won’t help you.
“The affidavit does not discount the UFO phenomenon…it simply doesn’t address it one way or the other,” Aftergood concluded.
To view the affidavit, check out: http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/yeates-ufo.pdf

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Adamski produces faux UFO abduction phenomenon

The history of alien abductions has gone through some strange changes over time. In the 1940s, no one had ever heard of alien abduction. In the 1950s, a group of people claimed they were contacted by aliens and given special knowledge, because aliens were afraid that we were going to ruin our planet with nuclear weapons. In the 1970s and 1980s, people began to claim that they were forcefully kidnapped by aliens and had terrible medical procedures performed on them. This is also the period where people claimed that aliens have always been among mankind, kidnapping people. There's one portion there that the modern UFO enthusiast is quick to gloss over: the role of the "contactees", who claimed to have been contacted by people from space and given advanced technical, medical, or philosophic information with which they were going to save the world.
These people were, each and every one of them, lunatics or con-men. That's why the UFO enthusiast is so quick to try and ignore that they existed; because the modern movement of alien "abductees" has its roots in the contactee movement, which was a load of baloney. The most famous contactee was a man by the name of George Adamski, a Polish immigrant living in California. He claimed, among other things, that while driving with friends, he saw a huge, submarine-shaped flying saucer that he was sure was "looking for him." He got out of his car, went off alone, and met a spaceman named Orthon (a native of Venus) who warned him that humanity was going to really screw itself over if we kept developing atomic weapons. Adamski eventually produced lots of photographs of UFOs, which looked suspiciously like the lids of water coolers that he delivered for a living; this was because they were, in fact, the lids of water coolers he sold for a living tossed into the air and photographed from afar. He also made plaster casts of footprints he claimed were left by the men from Venus, and believe me: they've got some weird footwear. Instead of treads or cleats or whatever you usually find on the bottom of shoes, they contained elaborate artwork. I guess if you're in a spaceship, style is more important than traction.Anyway, Adamski claimed that the first photos of other planets brought back by Soviet satellites were fakes; he'd know because his friends from beyond the sky had taken him to most of the planets in our solar system and let him look around. When he eventually claimed that he wouldn't be in town for a few weeks because he was going to a conference on Saturn, most of his disciples became a little annoyed and he soon lost popularity, though there are still piles of websites singing the praises of his "research".
Adamski had something that, often times, people who report meeting aliens have: a prior interest in meeting aliens. Before he was tasked with his important mission to save mankind from the atomic inferno, he was an author of bad sci-fi books; in fact, in his later books written about the impact space aliens were having on society he just re-writes some of the things he'd mentioned in his first, all-fiction book.But why is a stark-raving madman like Adamski worth knowing about? One of the things that I frequently hear from UFO enthusiasts is that before being kidnapped by space aliens, people usually have never heard about UFOs, or alien 'abductions', so on and so forth. That's a wad of baloney. At the height of his popularity, Adamski's books were best sellers, he was on major TV talk shows, he was even discussed in major magazines, such as Time. (Time, to its' credit, called Adamski the "Crackpot from California.") And Adamski was only one of the contactees; there were hundreds of others, all working as hard as they could to spread their story and gain believers. For most of them, of course, this was the first step to getting something more important: their believers' money. The modern UFO enthusiast would have you believe that the phenomenon of "Alien Abductions" came about in a vacuum: no one had ever heard of flying saucers or alien kidnapping, and then one day space ships appeared and started stealing people and chopping up their cattle. They are quick to dismiss the Contactees as cranks, to downplay their fame at the time, or to ignore them all together. This is not true. Alien abductions did not begin in a vacuum. It was slowly and inexorably blended into the popular culture over a period of some odd hundred years. I've already written until I became blue in the face about how the "gray aliens" (supposedly from Zeta Reticuli and allied with Majestic 12, the true one-world government) were originally developed in the 19th century as part of a ploy to sell more newspapers. Combine this with the Contactees and add a dash of movies, TV shows, or books, and you've got everything you need to fabricate the UFO phenomenon today.Even if you don't believe my assertions that the Contactees were money-hungry loonies, you must see that something strange is going on. In the 1950s aliens abducted people to warn them about the danger of nuclear war, and then took them on fabulous all-expense-paid vacations to other planets. Nowadays, aliens abduct people and steal their genetic materials as part of a top-secret plan to enslave humanity.
I don't know what we did to make them treat us differently, but it must have been amazing.The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much the UFO enthusiast would have you ignore them, Contactees are an important part of the UFO story. It is a well-told story, and an entertaining story, but a story nonetheless. A poll taken before the release of the movie Independence Day showed that 50% of people believe that our government has made some sort of secret pact with space aliens. I'm not sure if this number is accurate, but either way, it's impressive. If all the people that spend so much time believing in this sort of thing were to put their energies towards, say, scientific research, can you imagine the world we'd be living in today? I'm sure we'd already have a cure for cancer and we'd all be flying around in solid gold helicopters. I have the strange feeling that I'm stealing this from a Johnny Cash song, but something seems off. Anyway, don't believe everything the UFO enthusiasts tell you. There's more historical context for the phenomenon than they let on.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Fireballs spark UFO speculation

Numerous sightings of massive fireballs in the skies over Germany this week have led to an upsurge in reports of UFOs, but scientists believe the cause could be a bizarre annual meteor blitz. According to the Web site of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), such fireballs have been reported elsewhere in the world and may also be due to the fact that the Earth is now orbiting through a swarm of space debris. Many people in Germany have noticed the fireballs, said Werner Walter, an amateur astronomer in Mannheim who runs a Web site on unexplained astronomical phenomena and a hotline for reports on unidentified flying objects (UFO).“The last reported sighting was yesterday at 7:30 p.m. in a corridor near the border of the Netherlands,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “This week we have had at least 15 emails and phone calls from people reporting these fireballs,” he said. “Some people said it looks like something out of a science fiction horror film.”In addition to a possible meteor streak, Walter said amateur and professional astronomers were considering the possibility that the blitz was the result of a “falling satellite or UFOs.”
“It is possible that they are UFOs, which are after all things which we cannot explain,” he said. NASA’s science Web site (http://science.nasa.gov) mentions reports of recent fireball sightings in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, North Ireland and Japan. It includes images of the fireballs, which one man likened to a spotlight. Walter described them as “super-large, coloured fireballs that shoot with the speed of lightning through the sky”.However, the NASA Web site quotes meteor expert David Asher from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland as saying that people “are probably seeing the Taurid meteor shower”.Taurids are meteors that shoot out of the constellation Taurus, which peaks at the end of October and early November.
- reuters

Fireballs spark UFO speculation

Numerous sightings of massive fireballs in the skies over Germany this week have led to an upsurge in reports of UFOs, but scientists believe the cause could be a bizarre annual meteor blitz. According to the Web site of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), such fireballs have been reported elsewhere in the world and may also be due to the fact that the Earth is now orbiting through a swarm of space debris. Many people in Germany have noticed the fireballs, said Werner Walter, an amateur astronomer in Mannheim who runs a Web site on unexplained astronomical phenomena and a hotline for reports on unidentified flying objects (UFO).“The last reported sighting was yesterday at 7:30 p.m. in a corridor near the border of the Netherlands,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “This week we have had at least 15 emails and phone calls from people reporting these fireballs,” he said. “Some people said it looks like something out of a science fiction horror film.”In addition to a possible meteor streak, Walter said amateur and professional astronomers were considering the possibility that the blitz was the result of a “falling satellite or UFOs.”
“It is possible that they are UFOs, which are after all things which we cannot explain,” he said. NASA’s science Web site (http://science.nasa.gov) mentions reports of recent fireball sightings in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, North Ireland and Japan. It includes images of the fireballs, which one man likened to a spotlight. Walter described them as “super-large, coloured fireballs that shoot with the speed of lightning through the sky”.However, the NASA Web site quotes meteor expert David Asher from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland as saying that people “are probably seeing the Taurid meteor shower”.Taurids are meteors that shoot out of the constellation Taurus, which peaks at the end of October and early November.
- reuters

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Aurora, Texas UFO crashes into nonexistant windmill

The history of UFO cases is pretty straightforward, as much as the UFO enthusiast would like you to believe otherwise. In the 1890s, people began reporting seeing airships that looked like blimps or zeppelins floating above their cities. The vast majority have been shown to be the product of hoaxes or people looking for attention. Unfortunately, time and exaggeration have blown this phenomenon out of proportion.Not much happened for the next few decades, until people started to report seeing flying objects shortly after the second world war. This is when the term 'flying saucer' was coined, and no one really knew what was going on. There were a few "flaps", during which thousands of people saw the objects, that concerned the government to the extent that the Air Force was ordered into investigating. They were afraid that the Soviets could use UFO reports to cause confusion in the critical, early stages of some sort of Russian/American war, so the Air Force bent over backwards to discredit everything even peripherally related to UFOs. Even when they couldn't find an explanation, they really went to town to try and quell the publics' fears. Considering that the Soviets were well-armed and deficient in the morals department, I can hardly blame them. Anything that the Soviets could use to even a tiny advantage over us had to be neutralized. Of course, the UFO enthusiast sees things differently. They would have you believe that it was not crippling fear of the Red Menace that led our government to try and discredit UFO reports; rather, the government is in league with space aliens for some nefarious reason and needs to cover things up. I can also understand and respect this; the American people have a long history of not trusting the government farther than they can throw it. It's healthy to be a little paranoid about a group of people that controls our whole lives and has a giant pile of atomic weapons. On the other hand, thinking that the government is in league with space aliens is based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. I'd suggest going back to thinking that they're trying to tax you too much.Anyway, during the 1950s a group of people calling themselves Contactees sprung up. They claimed that they'd been contacted by space aliens and given some important information about how to live life without exploding our planet. Usually, they started cults and bilked people out of money. Over time, the contactees disappeared and were replaced by abductees, who spoke of substantially less pleasant contact with life from outer space. Here, for your reading pleasure, are samples of UFO cases that were proven to be hoaxes. I'm not naive enough to think that one can prove all cases to be untrue by proving some of them to be hoaxes, but perhaps after reading them you'll be less likely to believe everything you hear on the internet or in the supermarket checkout line. The place: Aurora, Texas. The date: April, 1897. Several prominent citizens of the town claimed that they had seen a large, blimp-like airship hovering over the town for some amount of time, doing all the creepy things UFOs usually do: changing course rapidly, moving at great speeds and other maneuvering feats that seemed pretty amazing for an era before the airplane had been invented. They further claimed that the airship collided with a windmill, and that the body of a strange alien had been buried in the town cemetery. Mind you, the pilot of this craft could have navigated the non-trivial distances between stars and the barrier between space and atmosphere, but he met his undoing at the hands of a windmill?Upon further investigation, it was revealed that the town never had a windmill anywhere near it. This is Texas we're talking about, not 14th century Belgium. Further, the town's mayor owned the parcel of land where the ship was said to have crashed and had been very upset that the town did not have enough tourists visiting it. Either of these two facts is a fatal blow to the credibility of the case, and yet recently a group of researchers petitioned a judge to let them dig up the graveyard in search of the craft's alien occupant. I can only imagine that the judge shook his head in disbelief as he said no.The first and most famous of the 'abductees' are Betty and Barney Hill. They were more or less the first people to report being abducted by aliens and having terrible medical procedures performed on them. Now that a few decades have elapsed, only the most hardcore of die-hard holdouts continue to think that what Betty and Barney Hill experienced was real. Before the abduction, Betty was known to have an active interest in the occult; afterwards, she led a group of people to an empty field and claimed there was an invisible spacecraft there that only she could see. She also claimed her cat could fly and her husband, to his credit, poached part of his account of the experience from an episode of The Outer Limits. You can read the entire story in an article I wrote a few months ago. And to those of you that did and claim I am somehow dirtying the memory of the now-deceased Hills, let me just say that I am sure they were nice people. I'm sure they were sweeter than a molasses milkshake. I'm just saying they weren't abducted by space monsters. One thing keeps popping up in cases where aliens are seen: sometimes, they are described the same way. People have reported seeing everything from Hitler to giant metal robots with carrots for noses to Bigfoot to normal looking humans inside UFOs, but a lot of them claim to see the small, big-headed, hairless, gray monsters that made Chris Carter a millionaire a hojillion times over. They were described in the Aurora, Texas case and they were described by the Hills. How dare I say that these are hoaxes when the details line up so well?I dare because I know something about history. After the Civil War newspapers began speculating as to what humankind would look like "in the year ten million." Just like today, when a story sold well for one paper, all the others copied it, and this story sold well. The author speculated that, because we would have machines to do all our work, we would become smaller, with giant heads and big black eyes. Starting to sound familiar? Also, we wouldn't have hair and our skin would turn gray. I'm not sure why he said that, but that's what was reported. This description was then printed in every newspaper, written in thousands of books, and appeared in the early 20th century in legions of comic-books. Everyone knows what they look like; I'm not surprised or concerned in the least that so many UFO stories involve such characters.For some people that cannot grasp this fact, they lose their jobs. Supposedly, in 1989 there was a huge crash of a flying saucer in Canada that the military tried covering up. A gentleman, calling himself only "Guardian" contacted the head of a UFO group, MUFON, and told him he had videos and evidence from the crash. This fellow, Bob Oeschler, swallowed the hook, the line, the sinker, and a fair portion of the reel itself. When some friends of his were able to duplicate the 'evidence' from the video using some fireworks and a remote-controlled airplane, it looked like he was in trouble. When they discovered that the 'aliens' shown in the video were twin brothers to a plastic mask that you can buy in any mall or costume store, Oeschler found himself unemployed. This is, as far as I know, the only time that a UFO enthusiast has been censored for being too enthusiastic. Anyway, I could go on and on about this stuff. I'm sure that, since I badmouthed Betty and Barney Hill a little bit back there, I'll be getting a pile of angry emails. To those of you who read this, I challenge you to a public debate at a time and location of your choosing, to which I will arrive armed to the teeth with cold, hard logic and common sense. To the rest of you, stop reading this tripe and apply yourself to something useful, like studying actual science.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

ALIEN ABDUCTION REPORTS ARE RISING

A few quick questions: Have you seen beams of light come into your room through a window? Have you ever woken up startled? Do you have chronic sinusitis? Do you have to sleep against a wall? Ever been afraid of your closet? Have ringing in your ears? A fear of doctors? Had the feeling you were going crazy? Are you aware of the cosmos, interested in ecology, the environment, vegetarianism?
Did you answer "yes" to one or more?
The good news is, welcome to the club. The bad news is, according to a study conducted in 2002 by the Roper Center for Public Opinion, these are a few of 58 positive indicators that you might be one of the 3.7 million Americans who say they have been abducted by aliens.
Even better news? There's about to be a bunch more of you.
It seems that you can Google "alien abduction," read big books, do extensive research and still come up with one conclusion: The more TV you watch, the more knowledge you have of the appearance and behavior of abducting aliens. And the more knowledge you have, the more likely you are to be abducted.
Or think you've been abducted. Or are willing to try to convince the rest of us that you've been abducted, experimented on, had your eyes pulled out, your private parts probed and your nose implanted with some kind of thing that only the aliens can find on careful review.
So with the loyal sci-fi audience success of the new alien-themed dramas Threshold on CBS and Invasion on ABC -- last week, they netted 6 million and 3 million viewers, respectively -- the aliens might be coming soon to a back road, bedroom or bus station near you.
Ever since 1966, when Betty and Barney Hill first went public with a tale of aliens sampling their DNA, there has been a virtual epidemic of alien takings.
The abduction of the Hills made big news at the time. In 1961, the couple had reported only seeing bright lights. But in 1966, when they went to a hypnotist, Betty revealed her brave endurance of a painful nose probe and, as if that weren't enough, she gave researchers a star map she'd glimpsed while aboard the ship.
Barney was a little less specific under hypnosis. So the practitioners asked him to draw a picture of his abductors. He did: big bald head, little slanty black eyes, no mouth, skinny. Today, it's a kind of prototype of creatures known by alien experts as "grays."
Thing is, Barney's description was exactly what the aliens had looked like on an episode of The Outer Limits. That episode, "The Bellaro Shield," had aired a little more than a week before Barney drew his picture.

Many believers

According to the Roper poll -- which, it should be noted, was conducted for the Sci-Fi Channel -- "two-thirds of Americans say they think there are other forms of intelligent life in the universe, and nearly half say they think UFOs have visited the earth in some form or that aliens have monitored life on earth. In fact, more than one in three believed that humans have interacted with extraterrestrial life forms."
As to alien kidnappings and probings, "one in five Americans say that abductions have taken place." And among those who believe in abductions, one-third claim to have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, a close encounter.
Elizabeth Loftus, the much-acclaimed psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who successfully debunked the theory of repressed memory, said television "gives visual plausibility to an abduction explanation" for any number of things -- nightmares, moles on our skin, loneliness, sexual abnormalities. People simply want to understand why they are experiencing some abnormal, frightening or confusing things.
In the 1980s, those same symptoms were typically explained away as "suddenly remembered sexual abuse," she said. It depended, she said, on which kind of therapist was consulted.
"If you were steered to a satanic therapist, it was Satan doing it," she said. "If you went to an alien-abductionist therapist, it was the aliens. If you went to a therapist who believed everything stemmed from forgotten child or sexual abuse, bingo, that was it."
Loftus, who has served as an expert witness on many such cases, has proved in the laboratory that such memories can be implanted. The problem in those cases, she says, is that there is no evidence that any of that -- the alien abduction, the sexual abuse, the satanic visitation -- ever occurred. (No doubt, she said, tragic and horrible sexual abuse does occur, but rather than being repressed, it is vividly remembered. The kind that needs to be "suggested" to a patient is something else altogether.)
Susan Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard University, agreed. In her just-published book, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Clancy postulates that increased claims of abduction are "false memories," which are not the same as lies. They are created explanations, maybe even a part "of a larger spiritual quest," she said. "They're looking for answers to something bigger. They are looking for a meaning they don't get from science."
And where do they get the palette?
In the 1950s and '60s, Clancy said, aliens were represented in movies as robots or serpents, but the Outer Limits-Barney Hill drawing won the day. That's who people see. That's who they expect to see.
"Today," Clancy said, "my 2-year-old, who can't tell you the difference between a dog and a cat, can pick out the right alien. TV taught her that."

Eerie coincidences

So where does this leave the famous Stanford, Ky., abduction case -- which many believers cite as the one that can't be explained away -- nearly 30 years after its original telling?
On Jan. 6, 1976, Mona Stafford, Louise Smith and Elaine Thomas, three ordinary rural Kentucky women, reported that they had been driving on U.S. 27, 35 miles from Liberty, their hometown, when their car came under the control of outside forces, they said. A glowing laserlike beam sucked them off the road. Then things kind of went blank.
When the women came to, they said, they found themselves in the car -- but all were missing about 90 minutes of their memories. They called the police the next day. Their story was in all the papers. Polygraphed, they were unshakable.
Coincidentally, The UFO Incident, an NBC-TV movie starring James Earl Jones as Barney Hill and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was first shown Oct. 20, 1975, just 10 weeks before the eerie episode on U.S. 27. In fact, the number of reported UFO abductions after that television movie aired simply mushroomed.
Also, the National Enquirer tabloid had offered a cash prize of $100,000 for definitive proof of extraterrestrial life, but in 1976, the year of the U.S. 27 incident, the prize was bumped to $1 million. In the decade before 1975, there had been 50 abduction-type reports -- about five a year. From 1976 to 1978, the rate was about 50 a year.
Still, the Kentucky case remained famous because the women -- two are now dead and one moved west, where she could talk about the experience and not be ridiculed, she said -- stuck to their story. The academic who hypnotized them and the Lexington police lieutenant who polygraphed the trio are both dead. The Mutual UFO Network investigator who interviewed them is likewise unreachable.
Abduction reports tend to come in waves, almost as if they are the fashion. Why? Because socially, the experience has no downside. Unlike people who are sexually abused or who are victims of satanic rituals, alien abductees tend to be proud and talkative about the experiences. It makes them special. It has done something else, Harvard's Clancy said. Three good decades of TV and movies have made aliens less scary than, say, terrorists. So we embrace them, especially now. ABC and NBC, the networks behind Invasion and Threshold, are counting on it.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Super-conducting Quantum Interference Devices

Super-conducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) are tiny sensors that detect and measure very small magnetic fields (or more accurately magnetic flux). Very advanced SQUIDs are now helping scientists track the extraterrestrial UFOs and reverse engineer their technologies. Very advanced Low Temperature SQUIDs (LTS) because of their superior quality and sensitivity, in spite of perceived logistical problems of using liquid Helium cooling (4.2K or -269°C) are being used for UFO detection and observation.
According to defense research scientists, a network of LTS SQUIDs with sophisticated follow through detection and analyzing computation sensors can not only track the invisible extraterrestrial UFOs under electromagnetic flux generated stealth, they also model the behavior, flight patterns, propulsion systems, stealth technology in use, communication devices and techniques and also the intensity of electromagnetic flux the extraterrestrial UFOs are using.
According to some scientists, the UFOs watch us quietly, model our activities and under deep stealth study our technical achievements. Interestingly, the advanced network of SQUIDs are allowing terrestrial technologies to model, observe and reverse engineer the advanced extraterrestrial technologies from the alien UFOs. According to some scientists, the SQUIDs network can form an effective device of modeling electromagnetic flux generated from natural and artificial sources. The network can even create electromagnetic images of the interior of an UFO space craft. That helps in viewing the inside of an UFO through the magnetic imaging eyes..
With SQUIDs the extraterrestrial UFOs understand that they are being watched under an electromagnetic periscope. According to scientists they do not show any reaction as if one day human civilization would have known about their existence any way.
Courtesy : SQUIDs

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

28 reports of UFO sightings in Wales

THE Ministry of Defence has investigated 28 official reports of UFO sightings in Wales in the past three years. The close encounters include a black object hovering over Rhyl, a flying disc over Newport and a spinning craft with legs spotted in the skies above the Valleys.
The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show that there were seven sightings in 2002, eight in 2003, four in 2004 and nine so far this year.
An MoD spokesman said it would be a waste of money to investigate the sightings fully, but believed there were "rational explanations" for them. A THIRD of Welsh children with Asbos can't understand the restrictions on their behaviour because they suffer from learning difficulties, it has been claimed. Research by the British Institute for Brain Injured Children (Bibic) suggests 55 of Wales' 166 Asbo holders have mental problems which mean they can't understand. Bibic spokeswoman Pam Knight said, "We have got a situation where a third of these youths might not understand the terms of the Asbos".