Tag: Japan

Man in Black to play legendary UFO insider in new movie… but no UFOs on the radar

by UFO updates on Jan.19, 2012, under Breaking News

By Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers

Men in Black star Tommy Lee Jones has secured the part of General Douglas MacArthur in the upcoming historical drama, Emperor, which ComingSoon.net describes as “an epic story of love and understanding set amidst the tensions and uncertainties of the days immediately following the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.” MacArthur – as the de facto ruler of post-War Japan in his role as Supreme Commander of the occupying forces – will be a major character in the story.

Emperor is based on a screenplay by David Klass (Walking Tall, Desperate Measures) and Vera Blasi (Woman on Top). It stars Matthew Fox as General Bonner Fellers, “one of MacArthur’s leading Japanese experts, who, at the end of World War II, is charged with reaching a decision of historical importance: should Emperor Hirohito be tried and hanged as a war criminal?”

ComingSoon.net continues:

“Interwoven with this nail-biting political thriller is the story of Fellers’ love affair with Aya, a Japanese exchange student he had met years previously in the U.S. Memories of Aya and his quest to find her in the ravaged post-war landscape help Fellers to discover both his wisdom and his humanity and enable him to come to the momentous decision that changed the course of history and the future of two nations.”

Politically fascinating material, for sure, and more than worthy of the silver screen treatment. Also fascinating are General MacArthur’s alleged ties to the UFO issue and public statements he made about what he perceived to be a potential threat to Earth from extraterrestrials. In a speech to cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in May, 1962, MacArthur said:

“We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms, of harnessing the cosmic energy... of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy.”

The General made a similar statement to the Mayor of Naples, Achille Lauro, in 1955. In an October 7 meeting between the two men that took place in New York, MacArthur told Lauro that the nations of Earth would one day be forced to “make a common front against attack by people from other planets.”

MacArthur and President Truman, Wake Island, Oct. 15, 1950

What inspired such seemingly bizarre comments from MacArthur may never be known for sure, but certain ‘whistleblowers’ have suggested that the General was intimately involved with the UFO/ET issue, both during and after the War.

Disclosure Project witness Buck Sergeant Leonard Pretko (USAF retired), for example, is on record with his story of how, in the early 1950s, one of MacArthur’s personal security guards told him that “General Douglas MacArthur was very familiar with the Roswell incident, the crash material, and also the bodies because he himself has seen them.”

Another Disclosure Project witness, Sergeant Clifford Stone – who claims to be a deep insider on the UFO/ET issue – goes even further. Stone says that MacArthur was in charge of the Army’s Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU), which is thought to have been established sometime during the early-to-mid-1940s.

In September 2000, Stone told Disclosure Project Director Steven Greer that the IPU “continued all the way through to present day. Names have changed and records still haven’t surfaced.” Stone, also said that the IPU bore fruit:

“It came to conclusions that were not popular, i.e. interplanetary spacecraft. And they [the IPU] continued to do exactly what they do today and that is to be part of a multi-intelligence operation in the recovery of objects of unknown origin, particularly those that are of non-Earthly origin.”

Stone went on to tell Greer that the IPU’s purpose is to “get raw field intelligence data, and process that data into some type of useful intelligence product to disseminate to the field – to those people who have a need to know.”

“MacArthur definitely had physical evidence,” said Stone. “From the documentation I saw [while working this issue in the Army], I was not able to ascertain exactly what that evidence consisted of, but it was there.”

The IPU is intriguing. Still shrouded in mystery, the existence of the unit was not formally acknowledged until 1984 (approximately forty years after its formation) when UFO researcher William Steinman made an enquiry about the IPU with the Army Directorate of Counterintelligence. In response to Steinman’s enquiry, Lieutenant Colonel Lance Corine explained that:

“The unit was formed as an in-house project purely as an interest item for the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. It was never a ‘unit’ in the military sense, nor was it ever formally organized or reportable, it had no investigative function, mission or authority and may not even have had any formal records at all. It is only through institutional memory that any recollection exists of this unit.”

Three years later, in 1987, UFO researcher Timothy Good made a similar enquiry with the same office. The response was brief and clearly intended as the Army’s final word on the subject – but it was also encrusted with a twinkly UFOlogical nugget: the IPU’s files, it turned out, had long ago been handed over to Project Blue Book – the US Air Force’s long-running UFO investigations program that was disbanded in 1969.

Colonel Anthony Gallo Jr, Director of Counterintelligence, informed Good that the IPU “was disestablished during the late 1950’s and never reactivated. All records pertaining to this unit were turned over to the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with operation ‘BLUEBOOK’.”

Letter to Timothy Good confirming that the IPU's files were turned over to Blue Book

That the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit was associated with the UFO issue is hugely significant in light of the unit’s name: this was not a unit concerned with the discussion or investigation of advanced German or Soviet technology; it was not concerned with flocks of geese, weather balloons, swamp gas or other unusual atmospheric phenomena as explanations for UFOs. No, the IPU’s UFO concerns were“interplanetary” in nature...

in·ter·plan·e·tar·y:

adj.

Existing or occurring between planets

Some UFO researchers believe that the IPU was established in response to the Battle of Los Angeles, in which flying elliptical objects – still unidentified to this day – were sighted over LA on the morning of February 25, 1942. The unknown objects were greeted by heavy but seemingly ineffectual artillery fire from the US Army. Six civilians were killed during the “raid.”

It is notable that, to date, no documentation from the IPU whatsoever has been officially released. However, a number of leaked documents – the authenticity of which is debatable – paint a truly eye-popping picture of the IPU’s activities during the 1940s. In one document, dated March 5, 1942 – just nine days after the Battle of Los Angeles – General George C. Marshall states in a Top Secret memo to the President:

“This Headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin."

Marshall continues: "As a consequence I have issued orders to Army G2 that a special intelligence unit be created to further investigate the phenomenon...” Thus was established the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, which, so the story goes, would soon be headed-up by General MacArthur in close cooperation with General Marshall himself.

IPU field order instructing the officer in charge (OIC) to lead a counterintelligence team (including a scientist and medical doctor) to the Roswell crash site and to provide a report by 28 July. This leaked document is dated 4 July, 1947.

Admittedly, rumours of MacArthur’s involvement with the IPU have never been fully substantiated, but then neither have rumours about J. Edgar Hoover’s romantic feelings for his FBI number-two man, Clyde Tolson. Clint Eastwood nevertheless saw fit to explore these rumours in his recent biopic of the FBI head honcho, J. Edgar – a movie in which the UFO issue receives not one mention, despite reams of official FBI documentation detailing Hoover’s forty-year preoccupation with flying saucers.

I am certainly not suggesting that all biopics of historical figures whose lives have intertwined with the UFO mystery should devote screen time to the issue (though, in a post-disclosure world, this may well become the norm), but how refreshing it would be for just one Hollywood screenwriter, just once, to draw inspiration from beyond the established historical meta-narrative and to transcend generic conventions when penning biopics of heavyweight political, military, and intelligence figures. John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, James Jesus Angleton, Margaret Thatcher – all have had varying degrees of knowledge about the UFO issue, and all have been the subject of award-winning Hollywood movies in which the term “UFO” is not once uttered.

The upcoming Emperor may tick all the boxes required to receive an Oscar (and no doubt Tommy Lee Jones is already making space on his awards shelf), but ask yourself: what would you rather the focus be in a movie about MacArthur – a predictable cross-cultural romance as promised by the synopsis, or, instead, a legendary military leader in a war-torn land, deeply concerned, not only by weighty post-War terrestrial matters, but also by “interplanetary” events quietly but dramatically impacting our world (details of which are known only to the most highly polished of officialdom’s top brass), all the while trying desperately not to drop the ball for fear that enemy nations will exploit these otherworldly phenomena to their military advantage...

Now that’s a movie I’d pay to see. Sadly, I think I’ll be waiting a while to see it.

No Saucers in this Hoover: J. Edgar biopic will side-step UFO issue

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December 22, 2012….DECEPTION, DELUSION or a PSYOPS TOOL?

by Norio Hayakawa on Jan.09, 2012, under Breaking News

Extremely weird but psychologically fascinating message about December 22, 2012 by Japan's self-proclaimed visionary, Kaoru Nakamaru (who claims to be Emperor Meiji's granddaughter):

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Top 12 List: 2012 Sky Watching Events

by UFO updates on Jan.02, 2012, under Breaking News

Quadrantid meteors and 11 other big skywatching events of 2012

CSMonitor.com- What lies ahead sky-wise for 2012? What celestial events might we look forward to seeing?

Joe Rao, SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist, selected what he considers to be the top 12 "skylights" for this coming year, and list them in chronological order. Not all these events will be visible from any one locality … for the eclipses, for instance, you'll probably have to do some traveling … but many can be observed from the comfort of your backyard.

And you won't have to wait long for the action to begin. On Jan. 4, the Quadrantid meteor shower will peak with an estimated 100 meteors per hour, according to NASA.

Hopefully your local weather will cooperate on most, if not all, of these dates. Clear skies!
- Joe Rao

1. Quadrantid meteor shower (January 4, 2012)
This meteor shower reaches its peak in the predawn hours of Jan. 4 for eastern North America. The Quadrantid meteor shower is a very short-lived meteor display, whose peak rates only last several hours. The phase of the moon is a bright waxing gibbous, normally prohibitive for viewing any meteor shower, but the moon will set by 3 a.m., leaving the sky dark for a few hours until the first light of dawn; that's when you'll have the best shot at seeing many of these bluish-hued meteors.

From the eastern half of North America, a single observer might count on seeing as many as 50-to-100 "Quads" in a single hour. From the western half of the continent the display will be on the wane by the time the moon sets, with hourly rates probably diminishing to around 25 to 50 meteors.

2. Feb. 20 to March 12: Best evening apparition of Mercury
In February and March, the "elusive" innermost planet Mercury moves far enough from the glare of the sun to be readily visible soon after sunset. Its appearance will be augmented by two other bright planets (Venus and Jupiter), which also will be visible in the western sky during this same time frame.

Mercury will arrive at its greatest elongation from the sun March 5. It will be quite bright (-1.3-to-0 magnitude) before this date and will fade rapidly to +1.6 magnitude thereafter. Astronomers measure the brightness of objects in terms of magnitude, with lower numbers corresponding to brighter objects.

3. March 3: Mars arrives at opposition
On March 3, the Earth will be passing Mars as the two planets wheel around the sun in their respective orbits. Because Mars reaches aphelion — its farthest point from the sun — on Feb. 15, this particular opposition will be an unfavorable one. In fact, two days after opposition, Mars will be closest to Earth at a distance of 62.6 million miles.

Compare this with the August 2003 opposition when Mars was only 34.6 million miles away. Nonetheless, even at this unfavorable opposition the fiery-hued Mars will be an imposing naked-eye sight, shining at magnitude -1.2, just a bit dimmer than Sirius, the brightest star, and will be visible in the sky all night long.

4. March 13: Brilliant "double planet"
The two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, team up to make for an eye-catching sight in the western sky soon after sunset. They will be separated by 3 degrees on this evening, Venus passing to the northwest (upper right) of Jupiter and shining nearly eight times brighter than "Big Jupe." Although they will gradually go their separate ways after this date, on March 25 and 26, a crescent moon will pass by, adding additional beauty to this celestial scene.

5. May 5: Biggest full moon of 2012
The moon turns full at 11:35 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time and just 25 minutes later it will arrive at its closest point to the Earth in 2012, at a distance of 221,801 miles. Expect a large range in ocean tides (exceptionally low to exceptionally high) for the next few days

6. May 20: Annular eclipse of the sun
The path of annularity for this eclipse starts over eastern China and sweeps northeast across southern and central Japan. The path continues northeast then east, passing just south of Alaska's Aleutian Island chain. The path then turns to the southeast, making landfall in the western United States along the California-Oregon coast. It will pass over central Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona, the extreme southwest corner of Colorado and most of New Mexico before coming to an end over northern Texas.

Since the disk of the moon will appear smaller than the disk of the sun, it will create a "penny on nickel" effect, with a fiery ring of sunlight shining around the moon's dark silhouette. Locations that will witness this eerie sight include Eureka and Reading, Calif.; Carson City, Reno and Ely, Nev.; Bryce Canyon in Utah; Arizona's Grand Canyon; Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico and just prior to sunset for Lubbock, Tex.

A partial eclipse of the sun will be visible over a large swath of the United States and Canada, including Alaska and Hawaii, but no eclipse will be visible near and along the Atlantic Seaboard.

7. June 4: Partial eclipse of the moon
This partial lunar eclipse favors the Pacific Ocean; Hawaii sees it high in the sky during the middle of its night. Across North America the eclipse takes place between midnight and dawn. The farther east one goes, the closer the time of moonset coincides with the moment that the moon enters the Earth's dark umbral shadow.

In fact, over the Northeastern United States and eastern Canada, the only evidence of this eclipse will be a slight shading on the moon's left edge (the faint penumbral shadow) before moonset. Over the Canadian Maritimes, the moon will set before the eclipse begins. At maximum, more than one-third of the moon's lower portion (37.6-percent) will be immersed in the umbra.

8. June 5: Rare transit of Venus across the sun
The passage of Venus in front of the sun is among the rarest of astronomical events, rarer even than the return of Halley's Comet every 76 years. Only six transits of Venus are known to have been observed by humans before: in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 and, most recently, in 2004.

The next one will occur in the year 2117. When Venus is in transit across the solar disk, the planet appears as a distinct, albeit tiny, round black spot with a diameter just 1/32nd of the sun. This size is large enough to readily perceive with the naked eye. HOWEVER ... prospective observers are warned to take special precautions (as with a solar eclipse) when attempting to view the silhouette of Venus against the blindingly brilliant solar disc.

The beginning of the transit will be visible from all of North America, Greenland, extreme northern and western portions of South America, Hawaii, northern and eastern portions of Asia including Japan, New Guinea, northern and eastern portions of Australia, and New Zealand. The end will be visible over Alaska, all of Asia and Indonesia, Australia, Eastern Europe, the eastern third of Africa, and the island nation of Madagascar.

9. Aug. 12: Perseid meteor shower
Considered to be among the best of the annual displays thanks to its high rates of up to 90 per hour for a single observer, as well as its reliability. Beloved by summer campers and often discovered by city dwellers who might be spending time in the country under dark starry skies.

Last summer a bright moon wrecked the shower by blotting out many of the fainter streaks, but in 2012 the moon will be three days past last quarter phase on this peak morning – a fat waning crescent presenting only a minor nuisance for prospective observers.

10. Nov. 13: Total eclipse of the sun
The first total solar eclipse since July 2010. Virtually the entire path of totality falls over water. At the very beginning, the track cuts through Australia's Northern Territory just to the east of Darwin, then across the Gulf of Carpentaria, then through northern Queensland, passing over Cairns and Port Douglas before heading out to sea.

The rest of the eclipse path, including the point of the maximum duration of totality (4 minutes, 2 seconds) is, unfortunately, pretty much wasted by falling over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

11. Dec. 13-14: Geminid meteor shower
If there is one meteor display guaranteed to put on a very entertaining show it is the Geminid meteor shower. Now considered by most meteor experts to be at the top of the list, surpassing in brilliance and reliability even the August Perseids.

Bundle warmly against the winter chill; you can start observing as soon as darkness falls on the evening of Dec. 13 as Gemini starts coming up above the eastern horizon and continue through the rest of the night. Around 2 a.m. when Gemini is almost directly overhead, you might see as many as two meteor sightings per minute … 120 per hour! And the moon is new, meaning that it will not be a factor at all.

12. Dec. 25: Christmas evening and Jupiter
On Christmas, many will be looking skyward and wondering what that brilliant silvery "star" is hovering just above the waxing gibbous moon. It's not a star (or Santa returning to the North Pole), but the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, serving as a sort of holiday ornament with our nearest neighbor in space to cap off a year of interesting and predictable sky events that we all can enjoy!

More...

* Special thanks to - Joe Rao , Space.com and the Christian Science Monitor.

** Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

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Earthquakes And Asteroids – November 2011

by UFO updates on Nov.06, 2011, under Breaking News

The bulls-eye shows epicenter of the 5.6 magnitude Oklahoma earthquake, which took place at 10:53 p.m. CST, November 5, 2011. Click on image to enlarge.

*
Shake, Rattle and Roll!
by Sunny Williams, Lights in the Texas Sky

Near Earth misses by asteroids and Earthquakes, where and when you don't expect them to be. It's almost too much excitement!

It was a couple of minutes before 11:00 p.m. Saturday night, November 5, 2011, when I was rudely shaken from bed.

I had gone to bed early but my spouse (Joe) was up watching TV, when suddenly the bed started bouncing and shaking like one of those vibrating motel beds. I could even hear the thumping of the bed legs on the floor. So could Joe and as soon as he heard my exclamations of surprise, he came running to see if I was alright.

Come to find out, his recliner had also been doing the Watusi, along with the ceiling fans and anything else not nailed down.

Well after that rude arousal I certainly couldn't sleep, so I got up and checked Google News. Sure enough, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake had hit Oklahoma, the epicenter located near Sparks, 44 miles northeast of Oklahoma City, at a depth of 3.1 miles.

By now you all know I live near the town of Breckenridge, Texas. That is just a bit over 200 miles SW from OKC but I've read that the Oklahoma tremblor was felt up to 300 miles away. That's some major shaking.

There was only one other time that I felt the earth shake this bad; that was when we were stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, back in 1974-75. I believe an earthquake shook the Oregon coast, which reverberated up into Washington state.

The Oregon tremble was my first experience with quakes but we actually had dishes and window panes rattle during a shake in South Texas, back in the late 80s. It was centered somewhere east of Waco but didn't amount to much.

Now I don't know about you but for a born and raised Texan, experiencing an earthquake is unnerving, to say the least. I've lived through tornadoes and even a hurricane but to have the ground beneath me let me down, now that's a bum deal right there.

What's next, an asteroid?

More news on the Oklahoma earthquake:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/06/us/oklahoma-earthquake/?hpt=us_c2
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57319310/5.6-mag-okla-quakes-rattle-nerves/

*

Prepare to duck! Another asteroid headed our way.
by Sunny Williams, Lights in the Texas Sky

Due on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 6:28 p.m.EST, an asteroid dubbed 2005 YU55 will come within 202,000 miles of Earth, before racing back out into space. That is about 38,000 miles closer to us than our own moon.

Carbon-colored and dark, the asteroid measures some 1,300 feet wide. It will be the closest visit by a space rock this size in more than three decades.

"This is not a potentially hazardous asteroid, just a good opportunity to study one," National Science Foundation astronomer Thomas Statler says. NASA and the NSF plan a series of radar telescope and other observations starting Friday, aimed at mapping the asteroid's surface and chemistry.

"The radar measurements should be pretty spectacular," Statler says.

At a quarter of a mile across, an asteroid this size landing in Earth's ocean would trigger a magnitude-7.0 earthquake and 70-foot-high tsunami waves some 60 miles away, according to Jay Melosh of Purdue University in Indiana. Such impacts are thought to come about once every 100,000 years.

“We’re extremely confident, 100 percent confident, that this is not a threat,” said the manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, Don Yeomans. “But it is an opportunity.”

Lucky us, asteroid 2005 YU55 will be back in 2028.

*

In April 2010, this radar image of the near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 was taken by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. On Nov. 8, 2011, this large space rock zips by Earth again and will be surveyed by radar, visual and infrared equipment.
CREDIT: Space.com/NASA/Cornell/Arecibo

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Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth

(Reuters) - A huge asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the moon Tuesday, giving scientists a rare chance for study without having to go through the time and expense of launching a probe, officials said.

Earth's close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST (2328 GMT) Tuesday, as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles from the planet.

"It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great -- and rare -- chance to study a near-Earth object like this," astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon," Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55's approach, which will be visible from the planet's northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States," Yeomans said. "It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by."

Scientists suspect YU 55 has been visiting Earth for thousands of years, but because gravitational tugs from the planets occasionally tweak its path, they cannot tell for sure how long the asteroid has been in its present orbit.

"These sorts of events have been happening for most of the lifetime of the Earth, about 4.5 billion years," Fisher said.

Computer models showing the asteroid's path for the next 100 years show there is no chance it will hit Earth during that time, added Yeomans.

"We do not think that it will ever impact the Earth or moon (but) we only have its orbit calculated for the next 100 years," he said.

Previous studies show the asteroid, which is blacker than charcoal, is what is called a C-type asteroid that is likely made of carbon-based materials and some silicate rock.

More information about its composition and structure are expected from radar images and chemical studies of its light as the asteroid passes by the planet.

"I've read that we will be able to see details down to a size of about 15 feet across on the surface of the asteroid," Fisher said.

NASA is working on a mission to return soil samples from an asteroid known as 1999 RQ36 in 2020, followed by a human mission to another asteroid in the mid-2020s.

Japan also plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission in 2018.

Source

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2011/10/01 (EN)

by UFO updates on Oct.01, 2011, under Breaking News

English language editing: Martin Shough
Administrator: Kentaro Mori

FOTOCAT - STATUS REPORT
Physically, FOTOCAT is an Excel spreadsheet of UFO and IFO cases in which a photographic image has been obtained on film, video or digital media. It contains 27 data columns to register the date, time, location, province and country, explanation (if one exists), photographer’s name, special photographic features, references, etc. When completed, the full catalogue will be posted on the internet, for free access to the worldwide UFO community.

• Case Number
The number of photographic happenings archived by FOTOCAT is 10,685 as of end of August 2011.This total breaks down as follows:

1762-2005	10,450
2006 Argentina, Spain (general)	169
2007-2008 Spain (general), Ball lightning	54
2009-2010 Spain (military), Ball lightning	12

PUBLICATIONS BY THE AUTHOR
Papers, articles and research reports by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, just published or reedited.

• Military UFO sightings of 1975
I am pleased to present a paper (in Spanish) entitled “Escuadrón de Vigilancia Aérea Nº 5: Los informes perdidos de 1975” (Air Surveillance Squadron #5: The Missing Reports of 1975) at the following link: http://www.ikaros.org.es/g047.htm

It gathers UFO documentation generated in EVA-5 radar station, code-named Kansas, located in the Aitana range, near Alcoy (Alicante, Spain). In the year 2000, but only known recently, the Spanish Ministry of Defense released a publication that included 3 unknown UFO sightings witnessed by military personnel, which occurred in 1975. The pertinent pages of the publication are included, with a prologue written to explain the context in which these documents were originally requested by the Air Command from EVA-5 (but never provided) to be used in the 1992-1999 declassification of the Spanish Air Force UFO files.

This introduction places the reader behind the scenes of the declassification process and shows the efforts made by the Air Force to rescue lost reports, which I was privileged to observe firsthand. I hope this new historical contribution, free and uncensored, is of interest to scholars in these issues.

I want to thank Matías Morey of the Ikaros Foundation (previously Anomaly Foundation) for his outstanding editing work.

• Latest on Official UFO Releases
My paper “State-of-the-Art in UFO Disclosure Worldwide” was first published by June 2009, and it was updated in December 2009. Many Government actions have taken place since then, especially some very active declassification processes. Brazilian colleague Ademar Gevaerd encouraged me to review it to include the latest developments (of which I was keeping close track) and a new version of the paper, updated September 15, 2011, can be downloaded now from: http://tinyurl.com/3b3qh5q

The section of the paper which has been most modified is the template showing disclosure actions by country. It has been revised for data improvement and refinement, as well as to collect major release developments that occurred in the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, and Brazil. Also, changes have been made for USA (Other agencies than the USAF), Australia, Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Chile, Peru, and Denmark. Finally, countries like Indonesia and Japan have been added to the list.

I hope the reader will find this compilation useful and educative.

• Interview for Italy
The Notiziario SOLARIS, a digital UFO magazine directed by Pasquale Russo, from the major Italian organization CISU, has just released its June 2011 issue. It contains an interview with me that you can read in Italian in pages 7 to 14 here:
http://tinyurl.com/3ttvbum

INTERNATIONAL ASSISTANCE
This section gives acknowledgments and thanks for cooperation and assistance received from new collaborators.

• Books Received
Thanks much to Chris Aubeck, coauthor with Dr. Jacques Vallee of the book Wonders in the Sky, for sending a copy of this interesting volume. Instead of a classical book review, I have decided to go a step beyond and have the 20 case stories in the book concerning Spain studied, with the assistance of two top UFO analysts, Manuel Borraz and J.C. Victorio Uranga. This review process takes time, and I expect to have it ready for the following blog’s update.

• Invited Book Review: Luis R. González Looks at Eddy Bullard’s Last Book
After the courtesy of Thomas E. Bullard of sending me a copy of his book The Mystery and Myth of UFOs (University of Kansas, 2010, www.kansaspress.ku.edu), I started to read it and take notes to give shape to a critique when I learned that Luis González, the most prolific review writer in Spain for UFO books in English, had finished his own commentary on this edition, so I asked him to let me publish it in my blog. Thanks to his kindness, most of his review is released here.

Bullard examines UFOs, abductions and myths.

Thomas Eddie Bullard (born 1949) is an American folklorist best known among us for his research into UFOs and the abduction phenomenon. His articles have been published in the Journal of American Folklore and the Journal of UFO Studies, among other journals. As this is his first book professionally published, it merits a somewhat detailed review.

His interest in UFOs began in childhood, when as he settled down one November morning in 1957 to read the latest news about Sputnik, an article caught his eye about an unidentified egg-shaped object that passed over a highway in Levelland (Texas) and caused car engines to stall. Bullard read books and magazines by the likes of Ray Palmer, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, and many NICAP publications, joining NICAP and APRO himself in the 1960s. He studied at the University of North Carolina, and earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1982. His doctoral thesis was titled "Mysteries in the Eye of the Beholder: UFOs and Their Correlates as a Folkloric Theme Past and Present".

During his thesis investigations he studied a great number of newspapers and centered on the 1896-97 “airship wave”, publishing one of the first scholarly efforts on this subject: The Airship File. In the 1980s, the Fund for UFO Research asked him to make a study of abductions so Bullard began a large-scale comparative analysis of about 300 alleged cases of alien abduction, some of them dating to the mid-1950s. It was perhaps the first time an academic had examined the phenomena, and it remains a landmark effort. His findings: an intriguing coherence and a fairly consistent sequence and description of events.

My critique of these findings has been published elsewhere (1) but I consider that its role in the acceptance of the alien abduction phenomena as fact has been pivotal. Nowadays, the author seems to have somehow reconsidered them and admits that:

p. 279: The abduction account chronology becomes, in this view, not the course of a real experience but the formal sequence of ascending action, dramatic climax, and resolution that characterizes a standard form of storytelling.

Even if he still considers that:

p. 280: An appeal to cultural learning explains many UFO-related ideas but not all striking parallels of UFOs with religion, mythology and folklore….

As a more scientifically sophisticated source for this principle of indirect influence, Bullard points out that the notions of innate content or processes common to all mankind (like Jung’s archetypes) have fallen out of favor, and suggest the action of selective behavior guided by cognitive universals as a venue worth exploring. Fascinated by the alien abduction phenomena, in the 1990s Bullard updated his findings and tried to tackle several of the objections made by skeptics such as the use of hypnosis or alleged investigator bias, and his present opus shows him to be a matured ufologist worth debating with.

Bullard now admits (even defends) that thinking about UFOs can be understood as myth creation and devotes the main part of the book to develop this thesis, but also from the beginning he tries not to pass judgment on the reality of the phenomenon. This ambivalence (could it be described as cognitive dissonance?) is evident through all the text. Let me mention some examples:

p. 120 – If so many witnesses could be wrong about airships, a shadow of doubt necessarily falls over all other UFOs. So many saucers after 1947 in contrast with so few before are embarrassing as well; so is the responsiveness of descriptions to the prevailing ideas of the time. These facts argue not for a coherent phenomenon that bridges the ages, but for a creation of the social imagination.
p. 197 – Whether these possibilities have not yet appealed to fantasy or the UFO experience offers them no opportunity to take root, their omission demonstrates that UFO narratives are not comprehensive copies of cultural models but maintain some degree of independence.
p. 200 – The likeness of UFO representations to cultural sources proves nothing for or against a UFO phenomenon, only that whether the theme is large or small, cultural models provide meanings for an experience and ways to communicate it to others.
p. 249 – One trend apparent in ufologists’ characterization of aliens is gravitation towards exemplary types like saviors, exploiters, or conspirators (…) Such fluidity of image suggests that UFO occupants as we understand them owe more to interpreters’ predispositions than to hard fact about aliens.
p. 270 – Equally hard to credit is sixty years of stagnation in UFO technology. The technology of the one civilization we know –our own- changes rapidly. Yet supposedly far-advanced UFO aliens have made few improvements or model changes in their craft since 1947.
p. 285 – PSH (Psycho Social Hypothesis) critics mistake these similarities for a verdict when they are only diagnostic tools. Whether all UFO reports describe a myth or some fraction distort a real phenomenon depends not on arguments and possibilities but on whatever evidence there might be for a genuine unconventional phenomenon.
p. 304 – In broader perspective, people also report seeing angels and ghosts as legitimate experiences (…) Processes of human error can just as well carry over from one type of experience to another. Either ufologists accept one anomalous encounter and reject another by arbitrary choice, or they must admit that blind faith in eyewitness testimony is unjustified even when the eyewitness is sincere and honest to a fault.

What are the reasons why Bullard doesn’t take the last step and become a PSH defender? The popular ETH (Extra Terrestrial Hypothesis) receives a good pounding throughout the text, including one of the best explanations about the mythical stance represented by the Roswell case. Some examples and poignant insights:

p. 125 – Since the early 1950s the ETH has held much the same position in ufology as evolution theory in biology. It is the indispensable connecting thread that makes sense of everything.
p. 163 – The ETH cosmology is unimaginative and staid. It accommodates rather than innovates.
pp. 220 to 225 – Without a compelling reason such as the panic argument had lent the 1950s suspicions, in the 70s the secrecy lacked a motive equal to its imagined magnitude. The 1980s began with the unification of scattered beliefs and a spectacular rewriting of UFO history under the influence of a new rationale, a conspiracist’s messiah that ushered in two feverish decades of creative paranoia…. Roswell handed the faithful a secret as big as they had always wanted…. Ufology stays wedded to its conspiracies, with claims milder only by degree.
p. 230 – Extraterrestrials succeed today like distance and the supernatural in bygone times, as a blank page of possibilities, a premise to excuse any amount of strangeness, any defiance of natural law or logical contradiction…
p. 245 & 246 – Though the alien classroom is gentle in one case (Space Brothers) and rough in the other (Abductions), both images oppose the secular view of an impersonal universe with what is, ultimately, a religious outlook… The broader message behind these accounts of ET intervention fulfills the hope that Earth is not isolated, accidental or inconsequential in the vastness of space.
p. 262 – Popular ufologists typically welcome claims that confirm a chosen belief and reject or ignore even the strongest negative evidence… Tendentious selection of data allows the construction of a desired image of reality, just not a very likely one…. The ETH applies one and the same solution to every problem, so for all questions, from the statues of Easter Island to gaps in human memory, aliens, aliens, and more aliens are the answer.
p. 282 – The day-to-day business of the (ET) UFO myth is essentially a maintenance chore. Proponents build and preserve the communal understanding, spread it to the uninformed, defend it against attacks from nonbelievers, and enforce orthodoxy within the ranks…. A consequence is that UFO thinking has little need for experience, only the illusion of it…. With the necessary answers already in place, questioning becomes selective, not a matter of asking whether alleged events are real but how they fit into the accepted framework.

Bullard’s way out is to defend the existence of a real phenomenon (the experiences) without admitting the logical inferences derived from its mere existence, especially the unavoidable question of its apparent intelligence. Speaking about consistency in UFO reports, he considers (taking into account the example of urban legends) that the imaginations of those who report UFOs from all over the world should not be so restricted, should not display inhibitions lacking a factual anchor (p. 299 - abduction reports repeat one another to the point of monotony….) On the other hand, neither should people describing their experiences sometimes see more than expectations prepare them to see, unless some other ingredient enters in the mix.

Bullard avoids a central problem (pointed out many years ago by Allan Hendry): the class of UFOs and the class of IFOs are really statistically indistinguishable, so it seems that there certainly are some unavoidable restrictions over human imagination. Besides, it could be argued that each UFO/IFO case always includes a peculiar item marking its individuality (the scarf worn by one of the Hill’s abductors, the “Star Wars” figures seen in the Spanish landing case at Turís, etc.), so maybe not fulfilling expectations is a way to reintroduce human imagination into the play. Another point to consider is the role of conscious or unconscious censorship by the witnesses themselves, but also by the investigators.

Bullard claims there are strong UFO cases that pass the following tests:

1. The alleged event fulfills basic authenticity requirements.
2. Quality testimonial and instrumental evidence supports it.
3. The strange quality of the alleged event lies not in the vagueness of inadequate description but in the unusual character of well-specified incidents.
4. A coherent account emerges from reports of independent witnesses.
5. The alleged event bears some similarities to other accounts.
6. The alleged event differs in some respects from expectations.
7. The report of an alleged event has undergone strenuous critical examination but survives alternative explanations.

Luis R. González (right) and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, during a summertime meeting.

But none of the examples he mentions fulfills all the criteria. We are still waiting.

In his Introduction, Bullard differentiates between “skeptics/debunkers” and “critics”, but cannot avoid mixing them up again in his critical comments about the PSH. I would like to mention a couple of examples:

p. 257 – Little of the appeal to abnormal psychology survives head-on collision with the facts. Actual studies counter armchair theories with findings that UFO observers and abductees are free of psychopathology or temporal lobe disturbance, neither are they marginal, maladjusted, or inclined to reject mainstream culture (…) How important hypnosis is to the recovery of abduction memories became doubtful when considering an experiment with eleven abductees that uncovered new episodes in only two subjects, while two others remembered nothing new under hypnosis and seven simply elaborated on episodes consciously remembered (2).

Considering the few studies made, their small and heterogeneous samples, the virtual absence of strict protocols, and the lack of replications, I would say that neither conclusion is proved. Besides, abnormal psychology proposals never pretended to be the only explanation, each worked (or could work) for a small subset of incidents/experiences. But I agree with the author that the general proposition that abductees have their experiences because they suffer from a deviant psychological profile seems to have been refuted.

Even if the author fails to take the final step (towards the PSH) -or maybe for this reason-, I strongly recommend this book for a serious analysis of the mythical component of the UFO phenomenon.

(1) Luis R. González, "El aprendiz de Procusto", La Nave de los Locos, 13, January 2002, pp. 19-33.
(2) John A.D. Duncan, “Psychological Correlates of the UFO Abduction Experience: The Role of Beliefs and Indirect Suggestions on Abduction Accounts Obtained during Hypnosis”, Ph.D. diss., Concordia University, Montreal, 1998, pp 119, 144, 149-150.

The complete book review by Luis Gonzalez can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/3gnyh7o

• Various
*Dutch UFO researcher Theo Paijmans is providing FOTOCAT Project with newspaper accounts of UFO photographic cases from both Netherlands and elsewhere of the 1950s and 1960s, where good tips are found.

*Richard Heiden has been one of our most loyal and regular helpers, as well as a most appreciated friend, since many years ago. A never-ending source of good information and a translator of some of my papers, Heiden recently renewed his backing to the continuing progress of FOTOCAT by submitting lots of Xerox copies from classic oldies but goodies like the Canadian Saucers, Space & Science UFO journal. Thank you so much, Rich.

*Greek cases in FOTOCAT amounted just to 8 until Hellenic researcher Thanassis Vembos agreed to cooperate to update the records for Greece. Consequently, the catalogue entries have been revised, improved and enlarged up to 15 cases. Not a large number but it gives a measure of the proportional increase that might be expected when local researchers volunteer work to the project.

UFO accounts containing pictures only started in Greece in the 1970s (2 entries), followed by another 2 in the 1980s. The decade of 1990s generated 4 events and the period 2000 to 2005 produced 7 more reports of this kind. This is a tendency also observed in other countries: the popularization of photographic cameras and domestic camcorders, coupled with a generalization of the UFO concept due to the media. Only 5 occurrences are known to be explained (lenticular cloud, fake, aircraft, lens flare, and reflection). This is a measurement of the little analysis performed on the cases to date.

*Recently we were contacted for cooperation purposes by Philippe Ailleris. Based in the Netherlands, Ailleris launched 2 years ago a project, the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Observations Reporting Scheme, which aims to approach the UAP from a professional, rational and scientific perspective. Its objectives are to provide amateur and professional astronomers with a formal mechanism for reporting any unexplained phenomena they observe when studying the sky, and contribute towards a better understanding of transient atmospheric phenomena by explaining the most common causes of UAP misidentifications for the general public. We at FOTOCAT Project reckon this is a valid idea, and recommend interested people to learn more from http://www.uapreporting.org

Philippe is the author of “UFOs and Exogenous Intelligence Encounters”, a position paper published 2011 by the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) that can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/3jem9db

Pablo Petrowitsch, still kicking ufological grounds.

*Pablo Petrowitsch is a legendary figure in scientific-oriented UFO research in Chile. An engineer by education and profession, now he is 81, still works part-time and continues following his passion, the study of UFOs. In the sixties, I was in regular touch with Pablo’s organization UFO Chile, but during a few decades we lost our relationship, one that we have resumed in the last months. Señor Petrowitsch has a computer-based catalogue of UFO reports in Chile, from which the photographic cases have been extracted to check with FOTOCAT. As a result, CHILE FOTOCAT has increased in a number of new entries. Further collaboration with our project is in progress at the time of writing.

GALLERY OF PHENOMENA
This section will display a sample of UFO photographs or footage whose study is revealing or educative at least.

• Pursuit on the Highway
In October 2008, a radio program by Marisol Roldán spread the news that a Pep Jamandreu and his wife Anna (with their 3-year-old daughter) while returning from Vinaroz (Castellón) to Manresa (Barcelona) "last July 24th" (later I learned it was in 2004), around 9 pm and at the height of the town of Santa Margarida i els Monjos, saw "a light that was beginning to move in horizontal direction (sic) at low speed." Alerted by the phenomenon, which he defined as a "spy satellite", Pep recorded the phenomenon with his video camera. The brief recording, that you can watch below thanks to the kindness of the author, José Fernández Jamandreu, only shows a tiny light.

In a recent message received from Martí Flò, president of CEI Barcelona, he explained that the inquirer who went to investigate the matter on site had found with certainty that there were "signal lights of some parabolic dishes in a station of Telefónica (Spanish Telecom) along the highway, in the exact spot where the UFO was seen." On the other hand, researcher Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga had already warned us of the prominent presence of the planet Jupiter in the sky the evening of this day. Truly the star-like appearance of the video-recorded phenomenon much more resembles an astronomical body than anything else.

Stellar map for July 24, 2004, Vinaroz to Barcelona. Courtesy J.C. Victorio Uranga.

But the news featured in the mentioned radio program went on to say that the most spectacular event would come later. But this is what the witness himself wrote to us in October 2008:

Yet the intense one came after a long time driving almost in silence, when Anna said: Pep, look, look! What is this? How hefty! Just running parallel to the moving car, about 8 or 10 m away, a huge contraption of 6 or 7 m in diameter, was like watching us and following us in parallel to the car to our speed, flying low ... in the center you could see as a sphere of which some metal bars emerged to join in a large metal circle, in turn with several white lights flashing intermittently, placed both in the metallic bars and in the circle ... it was like a big sun, sometimes it seemed spider-like ... the total elapsed time would say it was around 30 minutes.

Let us consider the logic of the facts. After an explainable UFO sighting, we are told a fantastic episode. It is nonsensical to video-record a light in the sky seen momentarily and not do it when you have a real flying saucer moving parallel to your vehicle for half an hour. It was midsummer in Spain, on a major motorway with traffic queuing: where are the other potential witnesses? We have given the witness the option to confirm our assumption that it was an excess of imagination – he has responded in indignation: “my wife and I know very well what we saw”. He knows he has the burden of the proof, but he cannot prove anything. Moreover, he admits to have exaggerated very much the duration due to the effect of the excitement (yet it was reported 4 years later). “But I understand that they only reveal [themselves] to those who can see them”, he retorts in a recent email. Let it go.

• Fruitful Armchair Ufology
Who said that armchair ufology is fruitless? Having a PC and due access to internet can achieve good results, and the following is a clear example. A few weeks ago, Ray Stanford consulted me about any FOTOCAT information related to some pictures taken at Fargo, North Dakota. On page 257 of Aimé Michel’s book Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, there is a paper by Lex Mebane on the 1957 wave, and a note on three alleged “mother ship with satellites” photos obtained on November 9, 1957.

As usual, I provided the references I had. It was found out that the earliest news about the event was published in The Sunday Fargo Forum of the following day, November 10, 1957. The pictures were snapped by a staff photographer named Alf T. Olsen. I had no actual images of the story and I suggested that Stanford get the original press account. He did it.

A few days letter I received an email from Stanford. It read in part:

The fabled “cigar” photos of Fargo, North Dakota, can now be laid permanently to rest. Greg Gilstrap of the Fargo Public Library found the article and sent me the pdf document attached. It turns out it was all a joke by the photographer, using an actual cigar, etc. On the second page we see the cigar’s band and the confession of what was done.

See the original clipping at: http://tinyurl.com/3gwt48v

• The UFO Triangle Hoax
A person by the name of Patrick Maréchal surfaced last July to confess he had faked the famous triangle-shaped, 3-lighted UFO photograph of Petit-Rechain (Liège, Belgium) on April 4 1990. Probably the most notorious image of the UFO wave over Belgium in the early nineties, its celebrity reached all continents. In spite of the fact that only one slide had allegedly been taken and that the supposed witness and photographer were anonymous, it concentrated the weight of the physical reality of the UFO phenomenon for many people and students alike.

The problem is not –again– that ufologists’ legs have been pulled. Many ufologists are so prone to believe that they can be deceived very easily. The problem here is that scientific analyses seemed to prove that the document was extraordinary. Ever since the beginning, there was a choir of voices claiming it was a hoax. Others defended its materiality and its exceptionality. Some of them supported this by using knowledge from science and technology.

It is fruitless to harass those who were on the side of the gullible. If only this new example would serve to demonstrate how fallible and weak the UFO evidence is, then we could learn a lesson.

A form of art: the fake of April 4, 1990 at Petit-Rechain (Belgium).

• Airborne Foo-Fighters?
La nave de los locos (Chilean UFO journal) published in its number 32 of July 2005 some strange aerial photographs. Taken by Orlando Esparza from an Avianca flight bound for Aruba Island (Caribbean) on April 6, 2005, between 10:48 and 10:52 hours, nothing weird was spotted at the time he used his digital camera to take pictures through the plane window.

Flying over the Caribbean on April 6, 2005. © Orlando Esparza.

It was the son of the photographer, a UFO enthusiast, he who wrote to the magazine wondering if this was an example of “foo-fighters”. We have consulted Andres Duarte, photo analysis expert, who has solved the problem masterfully. Duarte reported:

"These are drops of water on the airplane window. If it were cavities in the glass the image seen through them would not be reversed, but it is, so these may not be bubbles or holes, it must be something slightly convex and transparent to produce the inverted image seen through each of them. The trail shown above the larger drop is water from the drop vaporizing by the warm air inside the plane and it condenses on the cold surface of the window. The drops are not deformed by gravity because they are very small. Its size and distance from the camera was estimated from the circle of confusion of the image of the larger drop in the photo. That size was found to be 2.7 mm, a thin drop of that size on a glass can hold on it suffering little deformation. "

Calculations made on the image and acquired data follows:

EXIF and camera data
Sensor size = d = 5.27 mm
FNumber = N = 5.60
FocalLength = f = 5.00 mm
ExifImageWidth = W = 2304 pixels
Measurements of the drop image
coc = c = 12 pixels
Angular size = t = 40 pixels
Calculations
c = 12 pix*d/W = 12 pix*5.27 mm/2304 pix = 0.027 mm
Distance to camera = S = f^2 /(N * c) = 5.00^2 /(5.60*0.027) = 160 mm
Visual field = FOV = 2*atan (d/2f) = 56°
Angular size = t = 40 pix*FOV/W = 40 pix*56°/2304 pix = 0.97°
Resulting linear size = T = 2S*tan(t/2) = 2.7 mm

I thank Andrés Duarte for his analysis. No doubt we will resort to his expertise shortly.

CATALOG TALLY
This section will provide basic statistics produced from the FOTOCAT database.

• Reports by Time of the Day: 1947 to 1999
One of the typical features to study in UFO catalogues is the time distribution of sightings. FOTOCAT still has a large number of reports pending to be reviewed to extract information and “punch” data into the proper columns. This shortfall –that will be corrected in due time- applies to the hour. Exact time data is only known for 4,447 events. If there are other 1,600 cases where this information is not available in the case file (and probably never will be), there are still around 4,000 reports needing data transference to catalogue columns. In spite of these constraints, we are plotting cases by time of the day.

In successive blog updates we will compare two sets of cases, entries for the period 1947 to 1999 (2,884 reports) and entries for 2000-2005 (1,373 reports), to look for similarities or differences. In turn, we will collate “positive” cases (unexplained) with “false positives” (explained) as far as this datum is concerned. For the first period to study, this is what we have:

	Positive	False+	Total 1947-1999
Number	1,474	1,410	2,884

The allocation of all cases by 24 hours of the day appears in the following graph:

The correlation coefficient between the two series is very high, as much as 0.9299 (it means that both sets of data behave similarly from a statistical viewpoint), which is not what you would expect between data of –apparently- diverse nature, i.e. if unexplained phenomena had an origin distinct from explained accounts.

There is, however, an anomaly. The 21-hour peak in positive cases (9.3% of total) is not followed by the false+ cases with the same intensity (only 6.0%) and the curve very visibly breaks in this point. If this has any meaning or is just an artifact of a limited sample is not known now. When the number of instances managed has doubled, once more data have fed into the current spreadsheet, we will observe if this effect re-emerges or not.

In our following update, the period 2000 to 2005 will be inspected.
(Thanks to Dr. Laura Ballester Miquel.)

REFERENCES & NEWS
This section is devoted to delivering information on research, articles of note, books, symposia and other news from selected sources which are considered worthy of the attention of serious-minded UFO investigators.

• CEIII Cases Turned Mundane
Sometimes we find Spanish UFO cases in international references or in catalogues as anomalous events, when local students have discovered these are explained. It is not my purpose to list all such cases. I just wish to note here for general knowledge four examples of classic alleged UFO landings with occupants that finally became instances of mundane occurrences.

On January 28, 1976, near the town of Benacazón (Sevilla), José Fernández Carrasco reported to have seen a booth-like object and two humanoids. According to his testimony, there was missing time involved and the witness was hurt and had to go to a hospital. Investigation by a journalist team under the leadership of José Manuel García Bautista had access to medical and judicial records, interviewed the doctor who originally examined the witness and talked to his closest family to find out that the UFO tale pretended to uncover the sad truth: he had been severely beaten by family members of his young gypsy girlfriend who was pregnant. They threatened him with death if he’d tell the truth.

The following article explains what really happened (it is in Spanish):
http://ojo-critico.blogspot.com/2007/03/lo-nunca-dicho-del-caso-benacazn.html

On February 13, 1981, in the municipality of Fuentecén (Burgos), Luis Domínguez Díez, reported having seen a large set of lights close to the ground and a box-like sort of “robot” which echoed the sound of a dog barking. Burns and holes in the soil were found. An in-depth, on-site inquiry performed by Juan Marcos Gascón revealed that it was a fraud invented by the father of the supposed observer, the owner of a public bar, in order to attract clientele to the business. The alleged witness burned gasoline over the ground and produced three holes manually.

There is a detailed report (in Spanish language) here:
http://misteriosdelaire.blogspot.com/2011/04/un-robot-extraterrestre-en-burgos.html

On June 22, 1976, the physician Francisco Padrón León was riding a taxi at Gáldar, in the Atlantic Ocean island of Gran Canaria (Canary Islands) when he saw what he described as a large sphere coming out from the sea and ascending to grow in diameter up to the size of a 10 to 20-story building, a sight that lasted 20 minutes. In the interior of the sphere the witness said he saw giant figures and some devices.

A paper by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Ricardo Campo presented evidence that it was a globe of ionized air in the atmosphere produced by the firing of a covert US Navy, submarine-launched Poseidon missile, as part of a number of weapon tests developed in the Atlantic range in the late 1970s. The doctor suffered a pareidolia effect (motivated by his eccentric beliefs) while seeing the missile flight.

The following two references document this and other UFO-missile sightings in the area: http://www.ikaros.org.es/misiles.htm (in Spanish), and “Navy Missiles Tests and the Canary Islands UFOs”, International UFO Reporter, Volume 29, Number 4, July 2005, pages 3-9 and 26 (in English.)

This is the last example. On March 19, 1997, two members of the Local Police of L’Escala (Gerona) saw a large luminous globe of orange color hovering near the ground, 50 meters away. The Moon-like, lighted sphere was stationary and silent. Inside, a tall being was sighted. It was observed during a few minutes. A case study by engineer Manuel Borraz showed how the Moon was at that precise azimuth at that time (4.05 am) near the horizon, its setting being at 4.15 am. An example of Moon illusion plus a pareidolia effect combined solved the apparently eerie sighting.
A report (in Spanish) of this occurrence is available at the following link
http://misteriosdelaire.blogspot.com/2008/01/lescala-girona-un-encuentro-demasiado.html

• Various
*Provided by a source in the Ministry of Defense of France, a good resource, notably for European UFO researchers, is the list of French launches of ballistic strategic missiles 1965-1993, ground-to-ground (SSBS) and sea-to-ground (MSBS) at: http://fuseurop.univ-perp.fr/1sbs_f.htm
It allows us to occasionally correlate UFO events to actual missile launches, especially for Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. One may find more than one surprises comparing such data.
(Merci to J.J.S.)

*In our last update we included a paper by Paolo Toselli on a large collection of Ph.D. dissertations all over the world. Our Portuguese friend and colleague Dr. Joaquim Fernandes writes to indicate that his own thesis was not in the inventory, an omission I rush to correct now: It is entitled "O Imaginário Extraterrestre na Cultura Portuguesa. Do Fim da Modernidade até meados do século XIX” (The Extraterrestrial Imaginary in the Portuguese Culture. The End of the Modernity by Mid-Nineteenth Century), and it was made at the Porto University in 2005.

*A quite interesting paper on the recurrent phenomena of Marfa lights is one authored by Karl D. Stephan, James Bunnell, John Klier and Laurence Komala-Noord under the title “Quantitative intensity and location measurements of an intense long-duration luminous object near Marfa, Texas”, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol. 73, 2011, pp. 1953-1958, which is hereby in pdf format: http://tinyurl.com/3fu2dl7

It covers the analysis of a 3 hour-long bright light appearing at ground level at Mitchell Flat, between Marfa and Alpine, Texas, on June 3, 2005, registered by two different automatic stations set up and operated by James Bunnell in the area where the so-called Marfa lights develop.

In particular, I am grateful to Mr. Bunnell for having provided a data spreadsheet with 6 Marfa lights photographic events for the FOTOCAT records, related to the images appearing in his excellent web site http://www.nightorbs.net/

*Sagar Ghimire’s Texas State University thesis on Marfa lights was presented on August 2010: “Spectroscopic Measurements of Natural and Artificial Light Sources”, this work was prepared in the Department of Engineering Technology and can be fully downloaded from here: http://ecommons.txstate.edu/engttad/2/

A related paper on this same subject is K.D. Stephan, S. Ghimire, W.A. Stapleton and J. Bunnell, “Spectroscopy applied to observations of terrestrial light sources of uncertain origin”, released in the American Journal of Physics 77(8), 2009, pp 697-703, available at http://uweb.txstate.edu/~ks22/pdfs/MLPaper_AJP.pdf
(Thanks to Roberto Labanti.)

*Optical effects in the atmosphere are a subject of keen interest to any student of UFOs. Therefore I am suggesting the reading of the following article, where a new natural phenomenon called Crown Flash is aptly described and imaged:
http://forgetomori.com/2011/science/a-new-natural-phenomenon-crown-flash/
(Thanks to Kentaro Mori.)

*Talking about atmospheric optics, there is a curious video footage of parhelia recorded November 7, 2008 in Peru. Marco Barraza reports that this day was an unusual day in Lima, Peru. The sky turned dark suddenly and the temperature dropped considerably, something infrequent for this epoch of the year. A heavy rain also fell and thunder was heard over the city. This video was captured by a student at the Catholic University with his camera phone.

Always wishing to better document this type of phenomena, I sent the video clip to a foremost world authority in atmospheric physics, Dr. Robert Greenler. He kindly answered: “I would guess that the video is of sun dogs. It shows a sun dog on either side of the sun with the typical red inner edge and the vertical elongation that is a common characteristic of this effect.” (Personal communication to V.J. Ballester Olmos, November 22, 2008.)

Yes, these images show a bright sun dog (a.k.a. mock sun or parhelion). For those who do not know, the black body in the center of the sun is produced by the light saturation of the CCD image sensor of the digital camera. Photographs for an identical specimen of parhelia –made by Wim Van Utrecht- can be seen here:
http://www.caelestia.be/OP-HA-01.html
http://www.caelestia.be/OP-HA-02.html

See how parhelia are produced in Les Cowley’s extraordinary web site on atmospheric optics: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/dogfm.htm

The Peruvian sun dog presented above is the same type of phenomenon we reported in a previous entry of this blog, as the “Phenomenon of Reinosa” at:
http://fotocat.blogspot.com/2009_10_21_archive.html

*Latin American ufology of the best intellectual quality is to be found in La Nave de los locos (The Ship of the Fools), edited by Chilean journalist Diego Zúñiga, it is €10.30 or US $14.00. With 37 issues to date, it qualifies a good reporting, covering both the Hispanic and international UFO scene.
http://www.lulu.com/product/tapa-blanda/la-nave-de-los-locos-n%c2%b0-37/12107110

* Cockpit chronicles of weird encounters by pilots, an interesting account of surreal airborne experiences can be found in this illustrated article by Kent Wien:
http://www.gadling.com/2011/03/11/cockpit-chronicles-six-surreal-sights-seen-by-pilots/
(Thanks to Tim Printy.)

* FOTOCAT Report #6, “An Approach to UFO Pictures in France” included a number of photographs, some well known, others not, of the mystifying effects of a snapshot taken from a moving car when a country scene is traversed by a material body during such a short lapse that it is not even recognized. Generally, these are road posts that appear very blurred in the final print with an appearance similar to a disc-shaped object that seems to be taking off from ground. See the paper at:
http://www.ikaros.org.es/fotocat/approach.pdf

In the online UFO report “Filer’s Files” (George A. Filer) corresponding to August 12, 2009, another picture of this kind was published, as made in Ontario (Canada). No date or details have been provided by the source, nevertheless I am including it here as an additional example of this peculiar class of image.

Blur motion effect in Ontario. Not so exceptional.

*An unrecoverable loss. A friend that I will miss is Hilary Evans, who passed away July 27, 2011, a first magnitude scholar, an intellectual of the world of anomalistics, an open mind, and a true British. His books are a mine of information and ideas, his correspondence a treasure, and the memories I hold of the time we spent together when we met in the USA, Spain and while I was invited to his English house are unforgettable. This is not an obituary, just a way of saying goodbye to an old friend and colleague.

Readers will find here one of the many tributes to him, by Clas Svahn: http://www.ufo.se/blogg/14245

Hilary Evans at his UK home, a portrait by V.J. Ballester Olmos.

VOLUNTEER WORK
FOTOCAT is a very ambitious project: it attempts to bring together all photographic UFO cases generated in the world. Most published in the specialized literature, others in raw periodicals and on the internet. The number of sources to consult is incalculable in the form of books, journals, magazines, newspapers, web sites, blogs, and other internet media. UFO students and organizations hold files that need to be reviewed for completeness. Therefore, we are offering you the chance to help our project. Please find below a number of alternatives, and let us know which one is best suited to you.

Donate photographic materials, case files or literature to be included in the FOTOCAT database and have it preserved for posterity. You can use the following postal address: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos Apartado de Correos 12140 46080 Valencia Spain
Collate and check your own (personal or organization) files of UFO photographic cases with FOTOCAT, to expand the catalogue. To this end, we will supply with state, region, province or nation-oriented listings to active researchers.
Extract information about photographic cases from listed books
Extract information about photographic cases from listed UFO journals
Extract information about photographic cases from listed blogs, web sites
Search and correspond with listed sources holding collections of UFO photographs
Investigate missing data (date, location) for certain available UFO pictures or recordings
Perform expert analysis of UFO photographs or footage

Please write to us at ballesterolmos@yahoo.es to establish the proper protocol for your collaboration.

Comments Off :*Sagar Ghimire’s Texas State University, Ademar Gevaerd, Administrator, Aimé Michel, Air Command, Air Force, Alf T. Olsen, Allan Hendry, Alpine, Andres Duarte, Anna, Anomaly Foundation, argentina, Atlantic Ocean, Australia, author, Barcelona, Belgium, Benacazón, Brazil, Canada, Catholic University, caused car engines, CEI Barcelona, Chile, Chris Aubeck, CISU, Concordia University, Concordia University, Montreal, Denmark, Department of Engineering Technology, diagnostic tools, Diego Zúñiga, Digital Camera, digital media, Donald E. Keyhoe, Easter Island, Eddy Bullard, engineer, EUR, European Space Policy Institute, Fargo, Fargo Public Library, Federal Government, flying Saucers, France, Francisco Padrón León, Fuentecén, Fund for UFO Research, GALLERY OF PHENOMENA, George A. Filer, Gran Canaria, Greece, Greg Gilstrap, Hellenic researcher, Hilary Evans, Ikaros Foundation, Indiana University, Indonesia, internet media, investigator, Italy, J.C. Victorio Uranga, Jacques Vallee, Jamandreu, James Bunnell, Japan, Joaquim Fernandes, John A.D. Duncan, John Klier, José Fernández Carrasco, José Fernández Jamandreu, José Manuel García Bautista, journalist, Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga, Juan Marcos Gascón, Kansas, Karl D. Stephan, Kent Wien, Kentaro Mori, large metal circle, Laura Ballester Miquel, Laurence Komala-Noord, Lex Mebane, Lima, Local Police of L’Escala, Luis Domínguez Díez, Luis Gonzalez, Luis R. González, Major, Manuel Borraz, Marco Barraza, Marfa, Marisol Roldán, Martí Flò, Martin Shough, Matías Morey, Mediterranean Sea, metal bars, Midsummer Day in Spain, Ministry of Defense of France, natural law, New Zealand, North Carolina, North Dakota, Official, Ontario, Pablo Petrowitsch, Paolo Toselli, Pasquale Russo, Patrick Marechal, PDF, Peru, Philippe Ailleris, photographer, physician, Porto University, Portugal, Poseidon, President, prolific review writer, proper protocol, Ray Palmer, Ray Stanford, reporter, researcher, Ricardo Campo, Richard Heiden, Robert Greenler, Roberto Labanti, Santa Margarida, Sevilla, SOLARIS, Spain, Spanish Ministry of Defense, Spanish Telecom, Spectroscopy, spy, staff photographer, Stanford, strict protocols, Surveillance Squadron, Sweden, Texas, Thanassis Vembos, the American Journal of Physics, The Netherlands, The Notiziario SOLARIS, the Straight, Theo Paijmans, Thomas E. Bullard, Thomas Eddie Bullard, Tim Printy, translator, UFO Chile, UFO Disclosure Worldwide, UFOS, United Kingdom, United States, United States Navy, University of Kansas, University of North Carolina, USD, Van Utrecht, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Volume, www.kansaspress.ku.edu, Xerox more...

NASA NEWS and Commentary

by UFO updates on Aug.30, 2011, under Breaking News

A Russian Soyuz rocket launches the unmanned Progress 44 cargo ship from Baikonur Cosmodrome on Aug. 24, 2011 to deliver fresh supplies to the International Space Station. The rocket and spacecraft crashed in eastern Russian just over five minutes after liftoff.
CREDIT: RSC Energia

Space Station Crew Closely Watching Russian Rocket Crash Investigation

Space.com- Astronauts on the International Space Station are keeping a close eye on the investigation into the recent crash of a Russian rocket in order to learn how it will impact their mission in orbit.
The Soyuz rocket was carrying Russia's Progress 44 supply ship for the International Space Station, which was expected to deliver 3 tons of supplies to the orbiting lab's six-man crew. Instead, the rocket and cargo ship crashed in eastern Russia after a malfunction in the booster's third stage forced an engine shutdown.

"It's a pity the launch of Progress resupply vehicle didn't go well. Experts have worked on the investigation of its various impacts," station astronaut Satoshi Furukawa of Japan wrote on Aug. 26, two days after the crash, on Twitter, where he posts updates about his mission as @Astro_Satoshi. "But, as there are plenty of supplies to support the crew, we'll be fine for a while."

Since Russia's Federal Space Agency uses similar versions of its Soyuz rocket design to launch unmanned Progress vehicles and its crewed space capsules, officials want to make sure that they are safe to carry astronauts and cosmonauts. The next Soyuz to ferry a crew to the station was slated to launch Sept. 22 to replace three astronauts who are due to return home on Sept. 8.

Those plans may now change, the astronauts said. It's possible that the launch of the new station crew will be delayed until the crash investigation is complete, and that may force the three returning crewmembers to stay in orbit longer than planned.

"We don't have a lot of decisions made yet because we want to make sure we have the right course of action," station astronaut Ron Garan, of NASA, told SPACE.com from orbit Thursday (Aug. 25). "So we're going to take a little bit of time to think about it and make sure we have all the facts together before we go on and have a game plan." [Video: Station Crew Discusses Rocket Crash with SPACE.com]

Garan is one of the three astronauts who would have to extend their stay on the space station. They were due to land next week to end a six-month spaceflight.

"Up here, we're in kind of a wait-and-see mindset," Garan said. "We're fully prepared to support whatever decisions are made."

NASA will hold a press conference today at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) with the latest on the crash's impacts on the space station crew.

Russian rocket inquiry
Before the Progress 44 crash, Russia was expected to launch four Soyuz rockets —two carrying new crews and two with unmanned Progress cargo ships — as part of the regular flight schedule.

If the investigation into last week's rocket crash isn't completed quickly, NASA and its space station partners may consider cutting the orbiting lab's crew size in half, from six people to three, or even leaving the space station unmanned for a time until flights can be resumed, station managers have said. Space station flight planners have until October to decide to shift down to a three-person crew, they added.

[Photos: Building the International Space Station]

"If things extend too long, which we don't have any indication today that's the case but given the anomaly we have to be prepared, there is an ability to operate station with less than six crew if that becomes necessary," NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffering told reporters last week just after the rocket crash.

With NASA's space shuttle fleet retired (the final flight was in July), Russia's Soyuz space capsules are the only vehicle currently ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Robotic cargo ships built by Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency also make deliveries to the orbiting lab.

NASA currently has contracts with two private U.S. spaceflight companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, to provide unmanned cargo deliveries to the station in the next few years. Test flights for those vehicles are expected in the coming months. NASA also plans to eventually use commercial spacecraft for astronaut launches, too.

However, Russia's string of rocket and satellite failures in the last year that has caused some concern among U.S. lawmakers and experts since the country is also the sole avenue for American spaceflight until the new private spaceships become available.

Suffredini said he is confident NASA's Russian partners will find the cause of the Soyuz rocket malfunction and resume flights as soon as it is safe to do so.

"We're trying, right now, to give our Russian colleagues time to collect the data," Suffredini said. "Really, what you need right now is time."

Space station crew size cut ahead?
The space station currently has enough supplies to support a full, six-person for about 50 extra days beyond the scheduled Sept. 8 return of Garan and his crewmates, Suffredini added. There are enough supplies to support a smaller crew through at least March 2012, when the next European space freighter is due at the station, he said.

Suffredini also said that, barring an unforeseen major system or equipment failure, the space station could be even be flown without a crew for up to a year. Such a move, however, would be unprecedented.

The $100 billion space station has been continuously inhabited by crews of various sizes, from two-person skeleton crews to a full complement of six, since the first crew took up residence in 2001. The space station was completed earlier this year after more than a decade of orbital construction. It is larger than a football field and can be easily spotted by observers on Earth at night if they have clear skies and know where to look.

Space station officials are hopeful Russia's Soyuz rocket crash will be solved in time for the next scheduled launch of a Progress cargo ship, which is slated for late October.

On the space station, the astronauts said they, too, are confident that Russia's rocket issues will be solved, and that they are ready for any challenges, be it a decision to extend the current crew's mission or cut the station crew size in half temporarily.

"Obviously, I would have mixed feelings … I mean I've been away from home for a long time. But a lot of people are away from home doing things that they believe in," Garan said, adding that at the very least he'd have more time to share his spaceflight experience with people on Earth. "So there's an upside and a downside and whatever the decision is, I think it will be what's best for the program and we'll fully support it."

Read more here.

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'Suitcase' Nuclear Reactors to Power Mars Colonies

Image credit: NASA

Discovery News- Nuclear power is an emotive subject -- particularly in the wake of the Fukushima power plant disaster after Japan's March earthquake and tsunami -- but in space, it may be an essential component of spreading mankind beyond terrestrial shores.

On Monday, at the 242nd National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Denver, Colo., the future face of space nuclear power was described. You can forget the huge reactor buildings, cooling towers and hundreds of workers; the first nuclear reactors to be landed on alien worlds to support human settlement will be tiny.

Think less "building sized" and more "suitcase sized."

"People would never recognize the fission power system as a nuclear power reactor," said James E. Werner, lead of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Idaho National Laboratory.

"The reactor itself may be about 1 feet wide by 2 feet high, about the size of a carry-on suitcase. There are no cooling towers. A fission power system is a compact, reliable, safe system that may be critical to the establishment of outposts or habitats on other planets. Fission power technology can be applied on Earth's Moon, on Mars, or wherever NASA sees the need for continuous power."
Tumbleweed WATCH VIDEO: New concepts for Mars-probing rovers would use Martian wind to move around the planet.

Obviously, this will be welcome news to Mars colonization advocates; to have a dependable power source on the Martian surface will be of paramount importance. The habitats will need to have a constant power supply simply to keep the occupants alive. This will be "climate control" on an unprecedented level.

Water extraction, reclamation and recycling; food cultivation and storage; oxygen production and carbon dioxide scrubbing; lighting; hardware, tools and electronics; waste management -- these are a few of the basic systems that will need to be powered from the moment humans set foot on the Red Planet, 24 hours 39 minutes a day (or "sol" -- a Martian day), 669 sols a year.

Fission reactors can provide that.

However, nuclear fission reactors have had a very limited part to play in space exploration up until now. Russia has launched over 30 fission reactors, whereas the US has launched only one. All have been used to power satellites.

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), on the other hand, have played a very important role in the exploration of the solar system since 1961.

These are not fission reactors, which split uranium atoms to produce heat that can then be converted into electricity. RTGs depend on small pellets of the radioisotope plutonium-238 to produce a steady heat as they decay. NASA's Pluto New Horizons and Cassini Solstice missions are equipped with RTGs (not solar arrays) for all their power needs. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), to be launched in November 2011, is powered by RTGs for Mars roving day or night.

RTGs are great, but to power a Mars base, fission reactors would be desirable because they deliver more energy. And although solar arrays will undoubtedly have a role to play, fission reactors will be the premier energy source for the immediate future.

"The biggest difference between solar and nuclear reactors is that nuclear reactors can produce power in any environment," said Werner. "Fission power technology doesn't rely on sunlight, making it able to produce large, steady amounts of power at night or in harsh environments like those found on the Moon or Mars. A fission power system on the Moon could generate 40 kilowatts or more of electric power, approximately the same amount of energy needed to power eight houses on Earth."

"The main point is that nuclear power has the ability to provide a power-rich environment to the astronauts or science packages anywhere in our solar system and that this technology is mature, affordable and safe to use."

Of course, to make these "mini-nuclear reactors" a viable option for the first moon and Mars settlements, they'll need to be compact, lightweight and safe. Werner contends that once the technology is validated, we'll have one of the most versatile and affordable power resources to support manned exploration of the solar system.

Sadly, I suspect the biggest hurdle facing space fission power won't be the viability of its technology, but the bad press nuclear power receives, on Earth and in space.

Read more here.

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Comments Off :ACS, American Chemical Society, astronaut, basic systems, Colorado, date, Denver, Department of Energy, electricity, electronics, energy, energy source, European Space Agency, Fission power technology, food cultivation, Idaho National Laboratory, International Space Station, James E. Werner, Japan, Mars Science Laboratory, Mike Suffering, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Orbital Sciences, PEN, power technology, private U.S. spaceflight companies, Ron Garan, Russia, Russia's Federal Space Agency, Satoshi Furukawa, space station program manager, SpaceX, station astronaut, Station Crew Discusses Rocket Crash, Suffredini, Twitter, United States, waste management more...

Fireballs and Explosions in the Sky

by UFO updates on Jun.24, 2011, under Breaking News

Depiction by SW/LITS

June 30, 2011 will mark the anniversary of the day that a catastrophic event happened 103 years ago, over a remote area known as Tunguska, Siberia, Russia.

On the fateful morning of June 30, 1908 at 7:17 a.m., a giant fireball sped north across the Tunguska skies. Deafening explosions could be heard 300 miles away and a fiery cloud filled the horizon. Those who were within 40 miles of the blast were knocked to the ground, some even knocked unconscious and a few reindeer herders closer to the explosion and exposed, were killed.

Witnesses claimed to have observed a bright blue bolide trailing a column of dust, moments before the blast.

In the aftermath around "ground zero", lay a devastated land. What wasn't vaporized immediately, was charred and flattened. Though no crater was found at the time, 80 million trees covering nearly 1,000 square miles lay stripped, charred and flattened, with their bases pointing towards the center of the blast.

Tunguska, Siberia
The Aftermath of an explosion 4 miles above the Earth's surface.

Due to this event, the night skies over Europe and Asia were set aglow for several nights, the night sky bright enough enough to read a newspaper at midnight and for several months around the global, 'atmospheric transparency' was reduced.

It is still speculated today, that the event was caused by a comet fragment, or possibly an asteroid at least 50 meters across, which exploded approximately 4 miles above the surface of Earth. This explosion generated a force of 10 to 15 megatons of TNT, or 1,000 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.

Other explanations for the Tunguska Event vary from a black hole passing through the Earth, or antimatter explosions, to an alien space ship exploding. One piece of evidence found in the soil of Tunguska, were microscopic silicate and magnetite spheres. However, no larger meteorite pieces were found, so the debate rages on.

One thing is for certain, something exploded over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. Could it happen again? The answer is "yes" and it has happened, just recently, though no where near the extreme of Tunguska. Here is just a small sample:

http://www.universetoday.com/21959/exploding-colorado-fireball-100-times-brighter-than-the-moon-video/

http://www.meteoritesusa.com/meteorite-articles/meteors-fireballs-explosions-over-southeast/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8190171/Spectacular-meteor-fireball-explosion-over-Britain-leaves-stargazers-buzzing-ahead-of-Geminid-space-shower.html

http://meteoriteblog.com/large-meteor-fireball-over-pa-explosions-sonic-booms-heard/

I received another comment on recent posts [Man Reports Explosion In Sky Over Granbury, Texas- 6/21/2011 and Update! Man Reports Explosion In Sky Over Granbury, Texas- 6/21/2011], this time from a man in Ohio. He writes:

Well, here in Ohio, Shaker Heights by the Great Lakes, there was a large explosion in the sky right before the thunder storm ended on Tuesday evening. Funny thing is, it sounded like a plane had just hit the ground and exploded, or imagine a thousand blasts of artillery fire at one time. It did no damage, no lights went out, no fires, no wires down or anything, just a bright orange reddish light that lit up not only the sky but the inside walls of our homes and shook the ground. Afterward people came out of their homes looking around, trying to figure out what it was yet, there was no mention of it has been broadcast on the news or any explanation of what it was.
It's as if the media, weather service and authorities want to pretend it never happened but it did and our neighborhood witnessed it!!

So, are these exploding bolides (extremely bright meteor/fireballs)?
The questions are: just what is the exact cause of the explosions in our night skies, are the authorities hiding the truth and if so, why? -SW

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Mujahidin Mansion or Sorcery Crime Scene?

by Peter Fotis Kapnistos on May.09, 2011, under Breaking News

In Islamic lore the mujahidin were in ways similar to the the samurai of Japan, who had strict rules of honor and combat. They were the military nobility in the upper ranks of society. The warrior class was skilled in martial arts and practiced an ethical code like the concept of chivalry.

Comments Off :Japan more...

Earthquake Domino Effect Revisited

by Tony Elliott on Apr.12, 2011, under Breaking News

In a revisit to my article" 8.9 Quake Sets earthquake Domino Effect In Motion" in which I present the evidence that a single quake of large magnitude will set off other large quakes and volcano eruptions shortly after the initial event. Many earthquakes above magnitude 6.0 have occurred in the world and volcano eruptions have also happened since the now upgraded to 9.0 Japan quake struck Honshu Island 3/11/1.