Ufo encounter 252

february/march 2010

252

45th year of publication

this issue: aleksei leonov and ufos

-www.uforq.asn.au bimonthly

journal

ufO encounter

of

ufO

research

queensland

1

ufO encounter issue

252

february/march 2010

cOmmittee Chairperson - Sheryl Gottschall (07) 3376 1780 Vice-Chairperson - Gale King Secretary - Lee Paqui Treasurer - Martin Gottschall Public Relations - Sheryl Gottschall & Tino Pezzimenti (07) 3376 1780 Membership - Gale King - (07) 3311 4948 Sightings - Martin Gottschall (07) 3376 1780 Book Sales - Sheryl Gottschall Librarian - Patricia McDougall Committee - Tino Pezzimenti Roy Kalecinski Mary-Ellen Tooma

bimonthly journal of

ufO research

editorial staff

queensland inc established 1956

www.uforq.asn.au info@uforq.asn.au phone: 07 3376 1780

Editor - Lee Paqui Editorial Subcommittee notice to contributors Sheryl Gottschall We welcome contributions to UFO Encounter but reserve the right to make amendments to submissions without consulting the author. Please Martin Gottschall direct contributions to:The Editor, UFORQ, PO Box 15222, CITY EAST, UFORQ, PO Box 15222, CITY EAST, QLD 4002, Australia Australia. Email: info@uforq.asn.au

copyright Original articles in this publication may be reproduced if the source and author are acknowledged. Where the word 'copyright', or the copyright symbol Š appears with an article, or where materials have been reproduced from an acknowledged source, permission to reprint should be sought from the author or source given.

advertising While we welcome advertisements, the Editor reserves the right to refuse those that do not suit the concept or quality of UFO Encounter. UFO Research Queensland recommends readers make their own assessment of any material advertised.

notice to advertisers Please include with your submission your name, address and payment, and ensure that these details are legible. All cheques are to be sent to the Secretary, at the address above, and are to be endorsed to UFO Research Queensland. Advertising rates are quoted in Australian dollars. For overseas advertisers, payment should be made by international money order or bank draft in Australian dollars.

advertising rates Full page - $80.00; Half page - $50.00; Quarter page - $30.00; Eighth page - $20.00; Classified advertisements - $1.00 per line or part thereof

2

ufO encounter

from the

public meeTing

editor

proGramme LEGION MEMORIAL CLUB

28 Church Street, Fortitude Valley

The United States government is killing the space program.

Well, okay, not quite killing it. But they’re making sure that NASA is no longer responsible for sending astronauts into space. President Obama stated this January that ‘NASA needs to get out of the business of ferrying astronauts into space,’ and has decreed that private organisations will be responsible for that duty instead.

How interesting.

And how terrifying.

Yes, I am a cynic. I’m also (very occasionally) an optimist. I do believe that if public funds are used for space exploration, then the public will be the recipient of any new and valuable knowledge or assets that are found using that money. I mean, isn’t that how it works? (Yes yes, I know that isn’t really how it works, but let me have my fantasies, okay?)

So what happens when a private corporation uses its own funds for space exploration? If the representatives of these corporations should find something interesting out in space while they’re piloting their own ships, which they built and fuelled with their own money, are they beholden to tell the rest of the world anything about what they find?

Short answer is:‘No’!

We can clearly see what this means for the planet, but what does it mean for Ufology?

It means that the first off-world contact could be completely out of our hands. It means that unscrupulous businessmen could possibly be responsible for the first face to face communication between a human and ET in outer space.

It means that they get to say the first words, do the first dance, and more importantly, do the first exploitation – because like the Spanish, the British and the Dutch of the last great years of exploration, these people are not pushing into space for noble reasons.

Nope.They’re out to make a buck.

And don’t’ think it won’t happen.

Exploitation is innate to humanity – it’s spliced neatly into our genetic code and cannot be removed. It’s probably the reason why ET has kept such a distance for so long…

lee

ufO encounter

Last Friday of the month, 7.30pm For further information please see inside back cover

10 2010 MARCH 26 20

JUNE 25 2010

10 2010 APRIL 30 20

10 2010 JUL JULYY 30 20

MAY 28 2010

10 2010 AUGUST 27 20

CAN’T MAKE IT TO A PUBLIC MEETING? Tune in to the Paranormal Panel on Radio 4BC (1116AM) every Tuesday night from 9.00pm (AEST). Listen to representatives from UFO Research Queensland talking about UFOs. Call in with questions or comments, or report your own sighting.

Can't get 4BC? http://www .4bc.com.au http://www.4bc.com.au

Welcome to our Blogosphere! http: //uforesearchqld.blogspot.com http:/

252 cOntains: sightings.........................................4

> psychic persuasion ...............7 aleksei leonov and ufos.........................................8 what are we thinking.........13 the aerospace arms race at roswell.................................14 news .................................................15 "Ignorance doesn't kill you, but it does make you sweat a lot.

- Haitian proverb 3

June 2009 - feBruary 2010 Hervey Bay, QLD, June 16 2009, 8.30pm-9.00pm

Gold Coast QLD, August 12 2009, 7.15 pm

Five witnesses observed a large object in the north-west sky emitting red and green lights. It started to move doing right angle turns and spiraling against the stars. The witnesses watched the movements for two hours.

On another occasion the caller’s son witnessed an object “like a photocopier light or a white fluorescent tube” fly sideways across the sky. He couldn’t guess the altitude as it disappeared over the horizon. He saw it in total for ten seconds.

A woman observed three round orange lights moving overhead to the south. They had come from the east making no noise and were “pretty big”. Two of the lights were seen for about one minute, the other light stayed about five minutes. They moved in line formation in a clear sky.

Tweed Heads, Gold Coast, June 18 2009 1.30am A man observed a green light like a star moving east towards Coolangatta Airport. It then moved off like a shooting star to the west over the horizon in 1.52 seconds. A couple of weeks later he saw a washed out green light in the sky. Then on the 25th of July at 10.15pm near Murwillumbah while heading northbound he observed a heavy fog and the same green light speed over the mountains.

Mermaid Beach, Gold Coast, August 1 2009 8.30pm A woman saw two red lights traveling from the north-west across the sky side by side. They then seemed to flip so they were one above the other as they continued to travel remaining the same distance apart. She observed them in total for four minutes as one faded out, then the other.

Townsville, QLD, August 2 2009, 2am A family was sitting around a camp fire when directly above the group appeared three disks. One took off at great speed and two moved in a different direction but stayed in view. The third went in the opposite direction to the first leaving a white trail. The witness has had a number of sightings. The witness is an Indigenous Australian and waiting to be admitted to train in healing work.

4

Thornlands, Brisbane, August 28 2009, 6.50pm A man and his family observed a light brighter than the stars coming from the south-west. It looked like a white ball moving at less than aeroplane height.

There was no sound and the object changed to an orange colour as it faded out while moving away. The sighting lasted about three to four minutes, the sky was clear and the object moved in a straight line at a steady speed.

Cedar Grove near Jimboomba, September 4 2009 The witness has been seeing UFOs for years and has observed an object in same place for the last two months. It is a moving white light that changes to red, dims, then returns to its original position in a flash.

Undisclosed location, NSW, September 15 2009 A 30 year old male was referred to us. He reported he has seen a [space]ship at age 13 or 14. He’s had reptilian-like beings disturbing him and had a panic attack after the first time he saw them. He feels hostile intent from them but they couldn’t abduct him like the greys do for some reason. The reptilians he’s seen have doglike features, long ears against their head and stand upright with dog-like legs. He’s had many abduction experiences with the greys and has memories of seeing himself naked on a table having blood tests. He feels angry and violated by them.

On one occasion he was on a ship and

saw someone sitting on a “throne” like he was the commander. He saw many people like South Americans or Mexicans in prison cells hooked up to machines that seemed to be sucking the life out of them that powered the ships. The people seemed drugged and not coherent and held captive like prisoners. The greys wanted him to go with them but he said “no way”. He wonders why they showed him these things if they wanted to encourage him to go with them. He’s been told that if we knew what was really going on with planet Earth we would throw our hands up and not want any part of it.

On another occasion after calling out for help with his encounters, he had the experience of a human-looking being appearing to him who looked like Jesus.

The being placed his hands on his head then disappeared. Three days later a white object that had been lodged underneath his tongue for years fell out.

It was small like a pill, oval with little bumps over it. He caught it in his hand and noticed it was vibrating and moving around. He was so upset about his experiences he threw it away not wanting anything to do with it.

On another occasion he woke up and found liquid like water coming out of his nose and a sharp pain in his head.

He had a childhood encounter with a cloaked and hooded demonic being with cat-like eyes. It appeared beside his bed after his mother awoke and she felt its presence but didn’t see it. He was sitting up against the wall with fear thinking it was going to kill him.

He had also seen a little girl dressed in white when he was living by himself. He had dark entities attacking him. The girl kissed him on the lips and his lips tingled.

She said, “there, they won’t hurt you any more”, and the entities left the house

ufO encounter

screeching. After this he couldn’t stop laughing for three days.

seemed to last for 30 seconds. He didn’t remember having any other reactions.

On another occasion he was living in the country. He “received” a message to go to a particular place so he jumped on his motorbike and rode off. On the way his bike broke down and he realized he wouldn’t make it back to town that night and would have to sleep in the bush. Then a thunderstorm approached and he thought “that’s just great, why the hell am I here?” Next thing a car appeared out of nowhere right next to him. He didn’t hear or see its approach and expected he should have. A man was driving with a female passenger. The woman asked if he wanted a ride which he gladly accepted. She said to him, “have you seen the lights in the forest.

Have you seen the lights change to people? That’s why we’re here, to look for the lights in the forest.” Then the couple drove him 20kms in the opposite direction to where they were headed to return him to town.

Then he felt a bit of shock, then more shock as he realized he was driving into the outskirts of Grafton. The clock in the service station he drove into said 11.50pm, but he didn’t expect to arrive until 12.50am. Somehow he had driven to Grafton arriving far earlier than expected and had no recollection of the drive from the Ellangowan State Forest to Grafton, approximately 85kms.

On another occasion he was outside having a drink and a cigarette when a man dressed in white appeared from the bush. He was dressed like an Indian or Egyptian (not quite the same) in a long white shirt with baggy long white trousers.

He had his hair cut short and neat with an immaculately trimmed goatee beard.

The man asked “when are you going to stop poisoning yourself?” then disappeared.

On another occasion he saw a short being with powdery blue skin wearing a spacesuit. The being had pointy ears, jet black hair cut around his face and bushy eyebrows. He wore a dark leather suit with something wrapped on his arm like a weapon that could fire a laser beam.

Some beings give him the impression there is a war going on and we’re part of it. He said, “it has something to do with a battle over territory. All is not well on planet Earth”. This man doesn’t share the view that greys are loving beings and feels disturbed that people believe it.

Ellangowan State Forest, NSW. Occurred 1984 A man loaded his truck at KR Darling Downs in Brisbane with the intention of delivering goods to Casino then Grafton.

After unloading at Casino he continued his journey. H was driving along the road that ran through the Ellangowah State Forest, and all of a sudden everything lit up as bright as day. He leaned forward to look up to his left and saw a green ovalshaped object about 100 metres from his truck and 50 metres off the ground. It was the size of a house and pacing his car. It had a fuzzy outline and was dark green. He sat back and continued driving, feeling wonder and surprise which

ufO encounter

...from THe

email...

Mudgeeraba, Gold Coast, Monday January 18 2010, evening Tonight we were saying goodbye to family members at Mudgeeraba on the Gold Coast and looked up at the night sky. My son saw two objects near the ‘saucer’ (Orion), one going east and the other going west. I wasn’t quick enough to see the one going east but I saw the one going west. It was travelling very fast and because of a street light over the road we did not see where it ended. The suggestion was it was satellite/s, is this true and if not what would it/they be please?

Noosa, Tuesday January 26 2010 My wife and I were lying on Noosa beach last night just looking up into the sky when we noticed a bright flashing light.

(By the way, neither of us had had a drink!!) The light flashed a couple of times but with no mathematical sequence. At first it appeared to be travelling in a north to south direction, but then disappeared. Then in about two minutes time it flashed again a few times, once again very erratically, but this time in an east to west direction, again without any mathematical sequence. It then disappeared. The light was bright and there was no sound whatsoever. I initially thought it was a satellite, but it seemed too bright for one and going too fast. Then, I thought maybe it was a plane but it had no other lights and there was no sound at all. Not only that but if it was a plane it would have flashed mathematically and not changed direction like it did, and would not have disappeared the way it did either. The sky was bright and cloudless in the direction where we were looking. There is more than likely a logical explanation

but I couldn’t find one so I thought I would let you guys know about it.

Randwick NSW, January 31 2010, 11.50pm At around 11:50PM last night 31st January 2010, whilst looking out from a Randwick, third-level balcony facing a city skyscraper, I heard a very loud engine that sounded like a plane. When I looked up there was a very large white shuttlelooking object with numerous large red and blue lights shining very brightly from underneath.

I am afraid I was the only witness as far as I know. It was like nothing I have ever seen before. The sheer sound of the engine and the bright lights was enough for me to believe this was no ordinary vessel. [Editor’s note: this object was quite likely the Russian airlifter that visited Australia at that time – it looks remarkably like a space shuttle.]

Amamoor, Qld, Friday February 5 2010, 8.30pm We were outside having a cigarette when I looked up and saw a small bright light travelling north across the sky. I called my wife to look at it too. Then another UFO suddenly appeared, very bright and travelling north at twice the speed as the first UFO, as if it was chasing it!!, well, they must have been mates, because the first UFO stopped and waited and as the second UFO got closer, they then took off together and disappeared.

Intrigued by the first sighting I ran inside and got my son and we all continued to watch the sky.... then a large UFO appeared in the west, brighter than any light I have seen, travelling in a southeast direction very fast and high above the horizon. These sightings were NOT a weather balloon, plane, meteorite, Chinese lantern , swamp gas, or any other explainable phenomena — there were three witnesses, and we have noticed on a clear night we can see two to three UFOs a night, and only now have we started to report them as this place has become a major hotspot.

Eastern New South Wales, 1978, reported December 11 2009 Whilst travelling between Armidale and Coffs Harbour via Ebor and Dorrigo across the Great Dividing Range in Eastern N.S.W, at approximately 0130 hrs in the morning in late winter 1978 on a clear night, I sighted an object glowing in colour (goldish).This seemed to cross my viewing range approximately 2 miles ahead of me in the shape of an oval (but a brick thrown looks like a oval from a distance) from the top left hand side of my windscreen

5

to the bottom of the right hand side, going out of sight behind hills, the glow remaining for a bit longer. I travelled on to Dorrigo and slept outside the local Police Station.

Travelling on to Coffs Harbour and relaying my story to a family member (my father) I was told I was nuts. A friend of the family was listening to the conversation and disagreed with my father, and then informed us of a sighting that he and several members of his family (12-15 people) had seen a few months earlier whilst attending a wedding along the Coast - a silver object some way out to sea between the ocean and some clouds. They re-entered the function centre and informed the Manager, who returned with them and sighted the object and then went back into the Office to get a camera. The object disappeared just before he returned. This occurrence and the story relayed to me has stayed with me all these years. I’ve told it many a time, some believing and some not.

Dakota USA, 2003 I recently found your site (www.policeufo.com) and wondered if you would be interested in my sighting.

I have attached the report [right] just as it was made.

In 2003, although I had reported this sighting to MUFON, I was told by The North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation not to talk about this because I had testimony in court coming up, and they were afraid that the defense attorney would make me out to be crazy and discredit my testimony. I waited until 2007, after I had resigned, to start making this public. I have been researching UFOs for a long time and am focused now on getting to the bottom of it.

I want all of the other officers who read this to know they are not alone. Thank you for making this site.

Larry Gessner Former Sheriff Sheridan County ND Many thanks to PoliceUFO (http:// www.policeufo.com/) for allowing us to use this report.

NEW STANTHORPE AFFILIATE! If you live in the Stanthorpe area and you, or someone you know, has seen a UFO, why not report it to our new Stanthorpe Affiliate?

Carol Watson Stanthorpe Skies 0403 918 336; email: mosaicart62@hotmail.com PO Box 513, Stanthorpe, QLD 4380

6

ufO encounter

PSY CHIC PERSU ASION: PSYCHIC PERSUASION:

An Extrasensory Connection to the UFO Phenomenon STEVE BASS, CERT-II State Section Director, Mutual UFO Network Fellow, Research Institute on Anomalous Phenomena, Kharkiv, Ukraine Copyright Š 2009 by Steve Bass. All rights reserved

A retired engineer takes a midnight walk to check his mailbox. Like most retirees, he is a regimented individual who typically checks his mail early in the afternoon, shortly after it is delivered. This allows him to respond to anything that might irk him, such as an erroneous bill or a jury summons. During his nighttime sojourn to the end of his driveway and back, he has the irresistible urge to look at the sky. Not just any part of the sky, but the very portion of sky which in seconds reveals a strange light. He watches as this strange light approaches his location and transforms into a large dark triangle shape with lights on each tip, seeming to lower in altitude as it approaches to just a hundred feet over his head.

The retiree moves to the side of his house for a better look. He has resided in this house for many years and is aware that the sky is not visible from where he has now chosen to stand. Why choose this location to try to spy a better look?

At the same moment across the street, his neighbor comes out to smoke a cigarette and observes the strange shape drawing near. Despite being within yards of the retiree, he never notices him.

Seemingly seconds later, he has completely smoked the entire cigarette, a practice that normally takes him ten to fifteen minutes. At this point, the craft is no longer visible and he walks back into the house, thinking nothing more about it until the next morning. Why did the neighbor come out at the exact time the craft was appearing overhead? With an unobstructed view, why not notice the retiree standing literally yards from him?

The last thing the retiree remembers before walking back into the house is watching the dark shape move off in the direction of the rear of the house. If interested in a better look, why does he not move to the rear of the house to watch the shape depart?

URU

What happened in the amount of time that the neighbor saw the craft and finished his cigarette? What could he have seen had he not blacked out? Why did he assume nothing had happened out of the ordinary and continue with his normal nighttime activities?

There seems to be a recurring theme in many unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UFO sightings. Unaware of why, a man is suddenly compelled to go to a seemingly random location. This might be in the form of an urge to go outside into the open, or to drive themselves into a desolate area, only to find themselves witness to an unbelievable, often earthshattering event.

A man gets lost driving to work one night.

A job he has held for many years, he is quizzical about his situation. Having passed the exit off the interstate that leads to his place of employment, he drives to the next exit. Instead of coming around and getting back on the interstate, he chooses a country road for the trip back. He stops at a deserted intersection intending to turn left, but in mid turn, he stops and looks straight ahead, just in time to see an anomalous light zoom over his car from behind and disappear in the distance, the whole sighting lasting mere seconds. Had he been looking into his turn, or gotten back on the interstate, or even got off on the correct exit, he would never have witnessed this.

This external influence might be similar to, but not quite like mind control since there seems to be no loss of consciousness or blacking out. This could be through manipulation of seemingly natural urges or temporarily affecting memory. Upon further reflection, the event is seen as unexplainable. This phenomenon might best be labeled Psychic Persuasion.

those psychic contactees being instructed to make themselves available, possibly for the task of witnessing a sighting or being abducted? Or are some of us so sensitive that we know when an extraterrestrial is nearby?

A psychic quality to UFO sightings has been considered by the Ufological community to some degree, but like so many theories, mainly to the extent of throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what would stick. The existence of trace evidence makes any but the concept of psychic persuasion obsolete. Whether we are referring to hallucinations or extreme forms of mind control, neither result in trace evidence, such as irradiated materials, photographic evidence, or truly mass sightings such as the Phoenix Lights, massive grouping of lights observed in the area of Phoenix, Arizona on March 13, 1997. The Phoenix Lights [below] remain unidentified to this date, despite the best efforts of U.S. Air Force disinformation specialists and pseudoskeptics such as those associated with the increasingly irrelevant Center for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

I did not intend to sit here and opine about the psycho-physiological machinations required to accomplish psychic persuasion. Please understand that I am not a psychologist, and would never pretend to be. (Unlike some scientists who try to be Ufologists, but can only attain the rating of close-minded and ignorant skeptic.) But it does not require a traffic engineer to recognize a stop sign.

Are some of us being contacted telepathically by extraterrestrials? Are

publications

URU PUBLICATIONS, PO Box 202 Katoomba NSW, 2780 Phone 02 4782 3441; Email randhgilroy@optusnet.com.au

ufO encounter

7

RUSSIAN PILOT-COSMONAUT

D UFOS AND ALEKSEI LEONOV AN

Philip Mantle & Paul Stonehill

US INTELLIGENCE REPORT In this article, we will attempt to find out Pilot-Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov’s true opinion about UFOs; and, regardless of his true UFO reality beliefs, reveal some information previously unavailable in the West information about this distinguished, brave, talented, intelligent, and very complicated human being, one of the first Soviet cosmonauts, one of the last remaining original Russian space explorers.

Our research of Pilot-Cosmonaut Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov and his views about unidentified flying objects begins with a declassified report from the Department of Defense Intelligence of the United States of America. The report number is 2 723 1209 70, the date is August 19, 1970. (http://www.dia.mil/ publicaffairs/Foia/ufo2.pdf) The information contained in the report dates back to May 18, 1970. The subject is Soviet Space Development, and the country in question is Japan. There, in Yokogama, in the Tokai University in Kanagawa Prefecture, a distinguished Soviet cosmonaut Leonov was giving a lecture at the Shohan Annex. The cosmonaut talked about Soviet experiences in space; and future plans of the USSR regarding space exploration (including a mammoth space station, which the USSR planned to put into orbit).

Leonov also expressed disbelief in UFOs. Leonov talked about several subjects that day. One had to do with improvement of the Soviet space capsule brake equipment.

The other was the confirmation of Soviet Moon data by U.S. astronauts. This confirmation interested American military intelligence, and we think we know the reason: like the CIA, they heard about early (and classified) Soviet attempts to reach the Moon. By the way, it is quite likely that Leonov was instructed to misinform people in the West about UFO sightings in the USSR. Two years before Leonov’s speech in Japan, an organized attempt by Soviet scientists and military researchers to conduct UFO research independently (via television broadcasts and other means) was ruthlessly crushed.

UFOs continued to remain a taboo subject in the Soviet Union.

This fascinating episode of Soviet UFO research history (unparalleled elsewhere in the world) is described in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon.

8

We believe that even back in 1970, Leonov had to know about UFO sightings reported by other cosmonauts. He really does not deny any such reports.

Here is what Leonov revealed to the Japanese about Soviet exploration of the Moon: The Soviet Union has a well-coordinated program for travel to the Moon and has compiled complete and detailed data concerning conditions on the Moon through its Moon station. It has photographs of the Moon’s dark side and complete data on the make-up and characteristics of its surface, the Moon’s gravity field, etc. “The US astronauts who landed on the Moon only confirmed what we already knew.” he said.

Then, Leonov addressed the Japanese audience on the subject of UFOs. The speaker said he does not believe in the existence of unidentified flying objects.

Why, he asked, would the flying saucers, if they do exist, be seen only over the United States, France and Italy? He said there is no record of any of the Soviet observatories, which are manned by highly trained technicians, ever having seen a flying saucer.

The source of the information of the DIA for the report was a Japanese government agency official.

Was this is a crude but intentional misinformation attempt? A well-placed functionary of the Soviet space program, Leonov knew what was really happening at the observatories. Or was he simply following the orders?

Fascinating is the extent to which the Soviets went to hide the facts that the astronomers did see UFOs. Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon (latest book

by Mantle & Stonehill) has a chapter that lists UFO reports and observations by Soviet astronomers, scientists that have received top training in their field. Some of their observations had been published in the Soviet media, in the 1960s, well before Leonov embarked to Japan. Yet, the Soviet newspaper PRAVDA stated on February 29, 1968, that astronomers who carefully observe the sky day and night, never see “flying saucers”. Both the cosmonaut and the newspaper concealed the true state of affairs; but the history of Soviet UFO phenomenon research proves that UFOs were of interest to astronomers, and UFO observations had been reported by astronomers of the Soviet Union.

[Pilot, Cosmonaut, and the first man to walk in space, Aleksei Leonov]

THIRTY YEARS LATER: LEONOV’S INTERVIEWS, OATHS, AND REVELATIONS On March 23, 2005, fourteen years after the USSR had disintegrated, Leonov was interviewed by a Russian publication Drugoye Vremya (RIAN Agency). The press-conference was in honor of the 40th anniversary of his space walk. He said that all Earthlings very much want that there be someone except us, but alas, in the confines of the Solar System, there is no intelligent life (he really meant other than human beings-PM/PS). And Leonov added: “I declare it with full responsibility”. Leonov went on: “As a military person, I headed a commission for the research of unusual space phenomena, and I swear to you, not even one occurrence had been established by us”. Leonov said that the unusual objects observed from the Earth, as a rule, had to do either with special meteorological phenomena or rocket launches of spacecraft as their exhausts had taken extremely peculiar shapes in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

(Rockets launch spacecraft carrying cosmonauts and astronauts that orbit Earth and travel into space. These rockets, like the ones used to launch probes and satellites, are called by NASA launch vehicles. In Russian, they are called kosmicheskiye raketi-PM/PS). “Crosses with gigantic rings around them, especially in the clear wintry weather, could be observed for an extended period of time in the area of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (space launch facility PM/

ufO encounter

PS), in the Saratov region, and over Baikonur after the launch of the Soyuz launch vehicles. Many people saw them, and took the rings to be UFOs; retold to each other, and thus legends were born”, clarified the cosmonaut. Leonov had other arguments, too. “Till now, nowhere in the world has there been taken even one clear photograph, where one could look at, and unambiguously assert that, yes, this is a UFO. Why are there no such photographs now, when almost everyone has a photo camera in their mobile telephone?”

This was, as far as we could establish, the first time that Pilot-Cosmonaut Leonov mentioned the “commission “(also referred to as “committee” elsewhere) he had headed. This commission had investigated UFOs. As far as we can determine, the commission was not with the SETKA program (top secret official Soviet joint military and academic project for the research of UFOs. The program is described in Paul Stonehill and Philip Mantle’s article: Setka: A Secret Soviet UFO Research Program - DAWN OF THE SECRET PROGRAM http://www.ufoinfo.com/ news/setka.shtml What commission did Leonov head? Where are its findings? What cases have been investigated?

Next, Leonov was interviewed by Russian magazine Biznes (issue 25, June 19, 2006).

We will translate Leonov’s statements as closely as possible; every word, we believe, had been carefully chosen. He stated that for a long time he had headed a committee that had followed unidentified objects.

Leonov said that he is certain, in the Solar system, there is no intelligent life other than the one on Earth. There may be life at the level of microbes (since water has been discovered on Mars). There is life, undoubtedly, somewhere in the Universe.

But it is out of reach. The closest star to our Galaxy is five light years away. Imagine, traveling five years at the speed of light.

We are not skilled to do so, for now. But he is certain that the extraterrestrials had visited the Earth. All world religions have testimonials: an Enlightener flew in, left followers, and then ascended, that is, flew away…”

On April 29, 2009, an interview with Leonov interview was published at the Russian Kaleidoskop website.

It is a fascinating piece of information, because Leonov is clearly trying to discredit Marina Popovich (Soviet cosmonaut and UFO researcher), and contradicts other Soviet cosmonauts who reported UFOs. He states the following: “When I had worked in the Cosmonauts Training Centre (Star City, or Zvyozdny gorodok in Russian, is a

ufO encounter

military research and training facility near Shchyolkovo in the Moscow region, 32 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

Russian cosmonauts have lived and trained in Star City at the Yu.A.Gagarin State Scientific Research-and-Testing Cosmonaut Training Center since the 1960s-PM/PS), I headed the Commission for UFOs, and collected all evidence.

Unfortunately, there has not been one fact that would not raise doubts. But when one listens to Marina Popovich, one gets such cheerful notion that around us not only do the flying saucers fly about, but also do humanoids walk with red lanterns and a siren.”

We will discuss Marina Popovich in this article, at a later stage.

Then Leonov reiterates that there is no intelligent life within the Solar System.

Those are his exact words. Leonov continued: “There is life that can have lowest forms, but in our understanding, there is no intelligent life. There are various testimonies, but no scientific corroboration for them. At the same time, there are numerous artifacts on Earth that demonstrate that someone had visited our planet. But that happened long ago. Written language on Earth has been in existence no more than four thousand years. Prior to that, everything was conveyed through words, and every person would add something. In my understanding, religion, no matter who worships what, has a common foundation; it is enlightenment, ascension. No matter what one takes, Hinduism or Russian Orthodox Christianity, we see that (someone-PM/ PS) “arrived”, “flew in”, “told”, “created students and disciples”, and “ascended with thunder and lightnings”. A solution suggests itself: four to five thousand years ago someone had been here. The writing tradition did not even preserve that. But there remain phenomena and testimonies that force doubts whether or not intelligent beings visited the Earth. Most likely, they did. However, so far we do not see them. There is much talk, that Grechko (famous Soviet cosmonaut-PM/

[An early photograph of the first team of Soviet Cosmonauts]

PS) had seen them, that during the flight they were accompanied by UFOs; that, allegedly Volodya Kovalenok (another famous Soviet cosmonaut; see Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon for the fascinating observations attributed to him during the Fifth Expedition; as well as other UFO reports and observations revealed by Soviet and Russian astronauts-PM/PS) had seen them, too, and talked (with them? or about them?Leonov’s statement is not clear -PM/PS).

“But in fact, when one begins to look in depth, it turns out that these objects are ours, manually made. Pails, cylinders made from polished duralumin that had been thrown away from the station were poorly hermetized, and thus retained their shapes, and from the side they looked like unknown objects. Nothing more and nowhere else had appeared.

But people, who go about and talk about this, use their privileges and fame”.

Then, Leonov directly mentions Marina Popovich.

“About ten years ago, Marina Popovich, who today is the president of the Central Asian and Kazakhstan Collegium of Ufologists, wakes us up at one o’clock at night, and beckons to look at a UFO. We ran to the balcony. Yes, there is a saucer moving over the forest. I tell Marina, we are erecting a building there and are using a big horizontal crane 22 stories tall. Her daughter as well as my daughter, they ran to see; come there (and see-PM/PS) the crane. One month later, there was a ufological congress in (Saint –PM/PS) Petersburg. After the congress, I read in Znaniye magazine: On such and such date, at such coordinates a UFO was observed. All our family had observed, plus we invited the Leonov family, who also observed and confirmed. I meet (later-PM/PS) with Marina, and say: Why? It is not true. She responds to me: Yes, not true, but interesting. But now, when she makes a speech and starts saying about something, I just smile, and think: you go ahead and listen, but everything will be completely different, if they arrive”.

More questions arise after Leonov’s interview.

Why does he launch an attack on Marina’s credibility? While Marina is attacked, what of her former husband, Pavel Popovich, one of Russia’s most famous cosmonauts, a former colleague of Leonov’s, a UFO research proponent who headed SOUYZUFOTSENTR and obtained the KGB UFO files from the Deputy Chairman of the KGB, N. Sham in 1991 (see Philip Mantle’s article The Real

9

KGB UFO Files at http:// www.ufodigest.com/news/0308/ kgb.html); that very Pavel Popovich who himself witnessed a UFO and has helped coordinate Kosmopoisk, an independent civilian field expeditionary and research entity, engaged in the study and research of anomalous phenomena (ufology, cryptophysics), borderline and futuristic scientific breakthroughs? Why is Leonov silent about Pavel Popovich, but outspoken about Marina? Has her research uncovered something that bothers him, and perhaps those from the commission he had headed?

What artifacts does Leonov mention in his interview? He does believe in ancient astronaut visitation possibility (paleocontact, the term Russian ufologists use to describe the hypothesis). What does he know of Kovalyonok’s and Savinikh’s observations in 1981 and what has Leonov heard about the alleged contact described in our book (and based on Cosmonaut Beregovoy’s revelations as reported in the Russian media)?

What about other observations reported

by Kovalyonok during his years in space?

How does Leonov know that everything will be completely different if “they arrive”, and different in what way?

On May 29, 2009, an interview with Leonov was published in Russian Izvestiya newspaper. He was asked whether UFO enthusiasts tried to communicate with him. Here is how the cosmonaut responded: “I am fed up with them! Today, there is not even one occurrence, for which one could not find a natural explanation. But people very much want not to be alone. I do not exclude the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrials. Moreover, I think that someone had visited the Earth some time ago. There are too many signs of the interference of other beings, more developed than human beings. But all the evidence about this (interference or intervention-vmeshatel’stvo in RussianPM/PS) has to be collected in fragments, because the writing exists several thousand years, and prior to that, everything was recorded by oral tradition”.

On May 30, 2009, another interview was published in Fakty i kommentarii, a Ukrainian newspaper. Leonov was asked whether, while in space, he observed UFOs. He again mentioned the UFO commission he headed, and his duty to collect all evidence. He reiterated that there has not been a single fact that would not raise doubts (but Leonov did not provide the direct answer to the interviewer’s question-PM/PS).

Leonov went on to repeat the story of Marina Popovich and the crane. A few more details were added (“Indeed, we see luminescence that if one really wishes to, could be mistaken a saucer”...”There is a projector (on the crane-PM/PS) that they turn on at night. When clouds are

10

low, the ray rests in the clouds, creating a luminescent circle that resembles a UFO”).

At the end of the story Leonov asks us to forgive Marina Popovich. Then he adds that he is certain that within the Solar System there is no intelligent life, except for the one on Earth. “Man (human being-PM/PS) is the apex of what the Creator has created. And, of course, our planet (is, too-PM/PS)”.

Leonov was interviewed by Russia Today on July 20, 2009. When asked about UFOs, the cosmonaut replied: “Belief in UFOs is just as stupid as the claim that the Americans never landed on the Moon”. But he said that for him, there is still one phenomenon he cannot explain: It’s those circles in the fields.

Leonov stated that “it’s not a hoax, and you can’t fake one. What is it? No one has been able to explain”.

MARINA POPOVICH This courageous woman is a distinguished test pilot, a scientist with a doctorate degree in flight technology from the University of Leningrad, a Lt. Colonel, and a highly decorated aviator.

Today Marina Lavrentyevna Popovich heads a private aviation company. She is a journalist, and a published author of six books. Because of her efforts, Russian ufologists were able to find out many hidden facts of their country’s UFO research and covered-up incidents.

She had personally observed UFOs three times in her life, once during an expedition to the Pamir Mountains, to find the Yeti. There were forty people in the expedition, including her daughter, and they all observed a UFO from an altitude of 4000 meters up the mountain. A spherical object over a nearby gorge emitted a ray. Another time she and her husband observed a giant UFO over the Mitino area. It was a giant, elongated object, some 250 meters long. An airplane flying below it was barely seen. She estimated the object to be at the altitude of 20 kilometers. The UFO left behind a vortex trail.

The UFO observation Leonov refers to is this one (our information came from Russia years ago, from her interview with ANOMALIYA newspaper in 1996).

The last time (as far as we knew in 2007) Marina Popovich observed a UFO was in June of 1996, at 3:00 a.m. The object made no sounds, but produced complex maneuvers. It also emitted pulse-like bursts of illumination. Marina woke up her spouse and guests, and they also observed the object.

Here, we have obvious inconsistencies with Leonov’s account, but cannot confirm Marina Popovich’s account.

Were the “guests” she mentioned, actually Leonov and his family, her neighbors? We have no way to confirm the truthfulness of either account.

Marina Popovich had almost graduated from the cosmonaut training school many years ago. But she was dropped from the program after Pavel Popovich, the general she was married to, convinced high officials that she was not suited for space flights. By doing so he probably saved her health. If anyone is qualified to define what a UFO is, it would be this remarkable woman: she flew all Soviet aircraft, from AN-22 transport planes to MIG-21 supersonic jets. She holds 90 flight records.

Marina Popovich is a very clear-headed person: according to her, 90 percent of sightings are not UFOs but easily explainable phenomena. She mentioned a laboratory in Tver that was assigned the task of interpreting UFO photographs sent to them. Just like her, the researchers there could not explain 10 percent of sightings.

Marina Popovich is firm in her beliefs. She is certain that the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci, the writings of Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Ray Bradbury were technological transmissions from outer space. The three men have been used as mediums. She considered former Soviet President Gorbachev to be an extraterrestrial “front man”, because he caused profound historical changes.

When Paul Stonehill met her in 1991, she was sure that the secret Soviet files on UFOs would become public. At the time

[Marina Popovich]

ufO encounter

Marina Popovich became something like a spokesperson for Soviet UFO study groups. She estimated that it would be a long while before all such secret files will be open for inspection. Marina Popovich knew of over 14 thousand UFO sightings that took place in the USSR between 1966 and 1991. When she spoke at the Whole Life Expo in Los Angeles in 1991, she broke the news that underground ufologists in the USSR who went public with their beliefs were either fired or placed in psychiatric hospitals. But even Marina Popovich was not aware of many strange UFO sightings and phenomena that took place in the Soviet Union, and came to light after 1991. She was kind enough to share information and photographs with the Russian Ufology Research Center in Los Angeles. Marina Popovich is a concerned ecologist, because she was able to find out the horrible damage inflicted on Russia and other countries that comprised the USSR. She saw rivers drying up, dying lakes and ponds, ozone holes, and toxic spills.

Russia’s ecology was ravaged even before the Chernobyl incident. The economic plight of Russia in the 1990s and poverty in her native land greatly saddened her.

As for UFOs that cannot be explained by natural phenomena, being a trained pilot she takes them for what they are: spacecraft of extraterrestrials. Marina Popovich is certain that human beings are not the only intelligent creatures in the Universe and those others are indeed paying us a visit.

In 1991 Marina Popovich showed Paul Stonehill a photograph that Phobos 2 made before its demise. It depicts a gigantic cylindrical object approximately 25 kilometers long. After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to earth, the Soviet probe disappeared.

But Marina Popovich told Paul Stonehill that the Glavkosmos (Soviet Space program), knew all along that whatever it was that destroyed the Soviet probe in 1989, was created by artificial intelligence.

We have done an extensive research of the Phobos 2 spacecraft disaster, and mysterious circumstances surrounding the mission and its aftermath. Our findings are presented Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon. The mysteries of the Martian moonlet are of great interest to at least some people in the world. On August 6, 2009, in an interview to C-SPAN cable television program, American astronaut Buzz Aldrin said: “We should visit the moons of Mars. There’s a monolith there - a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once every seven hours”. The moonlet in question is Phobos. As far as the secrets of the moonlet, well, Marina Popovich tried her best to get the world to pay attention to them, as did others, such as Professor Burdakov. Apparently, Americans know

ufO encounter

[Soviet Soyuz rocket]

quite a lot, too; and others, hence, the new joint mission Russian-Chinese mission to Phobos is in the works.

There is a person in Ukraine who happened to know both Marina Popovich and Aleksei Leonov quite well.

Valentin Vasilyevich Petukhov had a distinguished Communist Party career in the city of Yevpatoria (today, a major Ukrainian Black Sea port). From 1967 to 1980 he headed the city’s Communist Party Committee, and thus, controlled the city. Before that, he was the deputy secretary, i.e., second in command. The cosmonauts arrived to Yevpatoria because during the Soviet era, the city housed a special secret facility for cosmonaut training, as well as space tracking and flight control center at the Kalamitsky Bay. The cosmonauts had a nickname for Petukhov; they called him Papa Valya.

He has great memories about “Lyosha” Leonov. At the same time, Petukhov’s family befriended Marina Popovich, who was then married to Pavel Popovich. They were really close friends, he revealed in the interview with Ukrainian newspaper Bul’var Gordona on March 27, 2009.

Marina is a famous test-pilot, a brave, willful, and valiant woman, stated Petukhov. She came to Yevpatoria as the aircraft commander; the airplane was flown in for repairs in the city’s stationary aviation works of the Black Sea Navy’s air force (SAM-20). She presented Petukhov’s family with her book, and many photographs.

FAIRY TALES? While writing this article, the authors have researched dozens of Russian and Ukrainian sources. We believe that we have stumbled upon the best explanation for Leonov’s statements about UFOs (and Marina Popovich) in a very interesting

post at a Russian UFO discussion forum at http://www.ufolog.ru/forum/.

The author (his name is Vlad) of this post, dated April 18, 2008, revealed that he had a scientific and military background, and he stated his opinion because someone else at the forum repeated arguments of scientists and some military officials about UFOs. In particular, the oath of cosmonaut A. Leonov that during the time he had been the chairman of UFO phenomena research, that he never encountered anything “amazing”.

Vlad wrote that he had conversations with those who served in the Rocket Forces, the air defense, pilots, the KGB personnel, and even submariners (he had numerous friends). Practically, they all stated (unofficially) that one way or another, they either personally had encountered UFOs, or their departments had received information about UFOs. Vlad does not want to go into details because there are too many, and (he is being honest), it’s too boring for him to discuss them. But he does mention that his acquaintance in the air defense forces asserted that they were instructed to discern UFOs from aircraft on the radar screens. Then Vlad recalled that while he served in the army, he repeatedly and personally observed that the regiment’s officer on duty had a “log of the flight of satellites”. But what satellites could be there in an infantry regiment, asked Vlad. The only means of observation they had were binoculars.

The log Vlad refers to had entries that had nothing to do with satellites. Then he goes on to discuss Leonov’s oath (he does not think much about its worth), and refers to Marina Popovich. She was the wife of a cosmonaut, a distinguished test-pilot, Hero of Socialist Labor; and she set 101 aviation records. And she mentioned more than once that she had witnessed UFOs on three occasions. Think about it, wrote Vlad, why would she lie to the entire nation? Has she nothing better to do than study a made-up fiction?

Moreover, let us remember our very famous ufologist Ajaja, continues Vlad.

He is a former military man, and had begun his UFO research under direct orders of the Russian Navy HQ, as too many reports about UFOs came there from military seamen. His first work was titled Hydrosphere aspects of UFO problem.

(More about Soviet USO, unidentified submersible objects, Ajaja and Naval counterintelligence research is detailed in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon-PM/PS). Certainly, the Navy HQ has jokers, or “old women from a village”, right? Vlad adds that he could write much and tediously, but what for…The matter is clear, anyway.

Vlad concludes his post, going back to Leonov. Regardless of all his doubtless merits, he is but an all-Russia story-teller of fairy tales with a kind smile. But a story-teller against his will. Once he said

1

11

something without thinking it through, and now he has to “save his face”. That is why he swears oaths, although all realize what kind of oaths these are.

The most vexing aspect (for Leonov, adds Vlad) is that he would like to take his words back, but it is too late.

Vlad mentioned that he had observed something unusual in the sky, too. Whom should he believe, he asks, his own eyes or Leonov. And, by the way, adds Vlad, Leonov talks very intricately, with cunning, when he states that he personally had not seen anything amazing. But he never talks for everyone.

Vlad concludes his post with a question: “I think I have clarified the situation?”

He certainly did for the authors of this article.

A LEGENDARY PERSON Leonov told Russian newspaper Izvestiya on May 29, 2009 that he does not consider himself to be a legendary personality.

Despite his illustrious career and position in the Soviet hierarchy, Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov was not just a Homo Sovieticus. He was born in Siberia, in May of 1934. His father was arrested in 1937, accused of being “an enemy of the people”. Two years later he was acquitted, but those years were very harsh on Aleksei and his family (eight children and his mother); they were “members of the family of an enemy of the people”, lowest of the low, and as he recalled, a number of his neighbors simply came to their home, and took whatever they wanted, including little Aleksei’s clothing.

Later in life, Leonov was expected to become a professional artist. But he loved aviation too, and the young man was then flying jets and studying engineering. In 1959, the 25-year old Leonov was picked as one of the first 20 Cosmonauts.

He was the first person to step out of a spacecraft and walk in space (1965).

Leonov was also commander of the Soyuz spacecraft that took part in the first rendezvous between Soviet and United States spacecraft (1975). Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot, cosmonaut, military scientist; writer, artist and talented painter…

Once, during the Soviet era, Leonov purchased an American Ford, but since it was not proper for Soviet cosmonauts to drive American automobiles, he was forced to sell it.

Once, Leonov helped Russian female cosmonaut Savitskaya sneak out of the confined quarters (before her scheduled flight), and take back streets to get to the stores to buy materials to sew together a blouse. Leonov and Savitskaya sewed lead pieces into the sleeves, so that she could wear

12

(Savitskaya smuggled the blouse into the aircraft) it and surprise her colleagues during the flight’s weightlessness. Did Leonov ever speak with her about the experience she and her colleagues had in 1984, when “angels” entered the Soviet spacecraft (we described the incident in detail, in Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon)? He never speaks about it.

How many other stories about UFOs and aliens has Leonov (who has worked 35 years in the Cosmonauts Training Centre) heard, but does not reveal?

There is a story that before the Baikonur launches, Leonov had a special tradition: he would gently push the cosmonauts with his knee “under their backsides”, before they would climb the ladder to their spacecraft. He is also superstitious, like most other cosmonauts.

Very few people know that when Sergey Korolyov died, three cosmonauts made a secret pact to bury his ashes on the Moon.

Sergey Pavlovich Korolev was a designer of guided missiles, rockets and spacecraft, former prisoner of the Gulag – this victim of Stalin’s purges became the multi-talented chief designer of launch vehicles during the early years of the Soviet Union’s space program.

The cosmonauts knew that the Central Committee of the Communist Party would not let them do it (they would probably want part of Lenin’s ashes to be buried first in lunar soil). The three acquired the ashes and hid them in a special capsule kept by Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin perished later. So did Komarov, another famous Soviet cosmonaut who died prematurely.

Leonov is the only one remaining. The Soviets did not land on the Moon, and the capsule was eventually lost.

Pilot-Cosmonaut Leonov strongly rejects claims that Americans made up their Moon mission. He is adamant that the Americans were on the Moon; Soviet radars monitored everything, and Leonov and his colleagues were able to observe the Americans, and root for them.

Leonov was one of the cosmonauts who were being trained for the Soviet manned Moon mission. He was actually in charge of the training as the Soviet lunar team commander. Yet, the program was closed (after Korolyov’s death) and Americans became the first humans to walk on the Moon. The training was extremely harsh, and three Soviet cosmonauts lost their lives in the process.

In 1992 Leonov, Major General of the Soviet Air Force was let go from the Armed Forces, five years before his scheduled retirement. He was upset that no one needed him, and decided to dedicate himself to painting. But Leonov was wrong. He was hired to be the president of Alfa-Kapital, an investment fund; they knew of his connections with the militaryindustrial complex, and his managerial skills. In 1998, the year of the Asian crisis

and Russia’s default, Leonov became the Vice President of Alfa-Bank, and significantly expanded the bank. He has traveled to the United States on many occasions, as a businessman.

Leonov lives in the house he designed himself, near the Star City. His painting studio is on the third floor. Leonov is involved in philanthropy, and helps children with heart diseases (his paintings have been sold for substantial amounts).

He said in one of his interviews that he often dreams of flying, whether in aircraft; or in spacecraft into the deep space…and becomes sad. He is over 75 years old, and has suffered a heart attack before; now he has heart problems. But his spirit is strong.

In April of 2009, during the cosmonauts meeting with Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, Leonov was able to save the Cosmonauts Training Centre training aircraft from being turned over to the Air Force for its transportation needs.

Medvedev treated him with great respect.

Leonov considers alien invaders to be a threat. But the invaders he is afraid of are meteorites (in his words, akin to the Tunguska phenomenon). What would happen if a meteorite was to fall on Moscow or London? Yet, virtually no attention is paid to the issue. Leonov calls for a new international prevention system to be created (Izvestiya, May 29, 2009).

This is more important than travel to Mars, added the Pilot-Cosmonaut. Despite his age he continues to be a pioneer in many fields and his highly respected by all that know him or have worked with him. He is a true hero of Russia in every sense of the word, although we disagree with his opinion of Marina Popovich.

Whether he knows more about the UFO phenomenon than he has publicly stated remains to be seen, but his many comments on the possibility of ancient astronauts is a curious one and nothing he says would surprise us.

MYSTERIOUS SKY – Soviet UFO Phenomenon By Philip Mantle & Paul Stonehill is available via Amazon.

ufO encounter

Oliver Hallen is a ufologist based in England. Having been involved with this subject for over 20 years, he has conducted many varied research projects which include running his own newsletter ‘debris field times’, writing a monthly UFO column for the Congleton Chronicle newspaper, acquiring assorted documentation from various sources and contributing articles to ‘Anomaly’ magazine's website.

From airborne anomalies and alleged alien contact to ultraterrestrials and time travelers, ufology has captured the imaginations and caused fevered debate among many people the world over from the past, present and will no doubt continue to in the future. But what exactly can be found when examining the thinking in this subject? Like so much here, it can be like trampling over a minefield.

It’s surely correct to say though that people, like ufology itself, can be a mix of the predictable and unpredictable, the outright bizarre and plain ridiculous.

As seen throughout the years, the collection of diverse cases, theories and ideas which have come about and continue to never cease to fascinate and surprise, usually for all the wrong reasons. People seem to really underestimate the ingenuity and contradiction of humankind from the opposite perspectives of logic and irrationality. Curious thinking in all this can be seen in many forms like the dismissive attitude to one esoteric theory whilst believing in another. Why and how some weird and unproven theories gain more attention, respectability and following than others is rather inquisitive. Is there a gauge as to which something odd can be compared and are there varying degrees of strangeness or is it simply how much they become accepted, disliked or ignored by both researchers and the mainstream that influences the outcome? Humans naturally have an inherent desire for the extraordinary, but it’s through this desire that such possibilities of level headed research and thinking can be lost, bringing with it unfounded theories and conjectures which only make it harder for the researcher populace. I do understand and accept that people should have the freedom to believe whatever they want, but they should also have the common sense to investigate and question in a rational manner.

In the cold light of day the fact is that absolutely nothing has ever been discovered to prove any paranormal theory as being remotely correct, and yet many people still have total confidence that a mysterious viewpoint is the strongest motive for what is supposedly being experienced. With every passing year ufology has been stationary in regards to the authentication of an anomalous theory or theories. Concerning this, the field has continued over the years to broaden its scope in certain respects with both good and bad results, but there is nothing in regards to the finding of an esoteric answer or answers which has broken new ground for the proponents of this to show as genuine evidence for what they believe. The question of proof with relation to this is definitely a very contentious issue.

Regarding the absolute conviction of certain

thinking?

Oliver Hallen

ufologists, if they are privy to some groundbreaking data that will blow the subject wide open on a paranormal front, then let’s see it. Well, they don’t have any, but what they do have is a personal confirmation of their own beliefs misconstrued as an overall answer for everyone. The way in which ufologists can join the dots is obviously wrong, tying events and concepts together with no solid evidence.

Lamentably, the possibilities in all this are really only limited by ones own imagination and willingness to believe. Ambiguity can be a real issue here too as it can be misinterpreted as strangeness. However, the truth in this comfort zone is that nothing can be proved to be incorrect yet at the same time; nothing will ever be proven right.

When looking at the actions of particular researchers either in the real or digital world, it gives a good impression of how they can use circumstances and location as a means of simply broadcasting their views and knowledge with many of the old cases, issues and egos also being recycled. I am a supporter of free speech in ufology, but when it gets employed as nothing more than a vehicle to push ones own agendas without consideration for anyone else then it becomes very much worthless. An example of this can be found in a personal experience which I will recount for you.

Back in July of 1998, I attended Stoke-OnTrent’s 2nd UFO Conference in England. Near the end during a question and answer session, one of the speakers took a query from a man in one of the front rows. He proceeded to talk about the supposed alien-pyramid connection whilst interrupting attempts to provide feedback and generally being rude.

From what I can recall he eventually sat down, his question not satisfactorily answered. It seems to be that many people, including the one mentioned, forget that freedom of speech is as much about listening as it is about talking.

Its actions like this that does nothing to try and push the subject forward or endear them to fellow researchers and others. Trying your best to force your own theories and opinions on everyone causes nothing more than resentment. This is one reason I am always very cautious as to who I converse with and what about regarding ufology. These people need to understand that they are not special, nor do they have some divine right to centre stage with which to voice their opinions. We should all acknowledge that none of us are truly experts in this field, not from a paranormal view point anyway, because, and I’ll state it again, nothing concrete has been discovered or proven.

When I ponder about my time involved in ufology, which is over 20 years now, I can personally say that nothing has truly convinced me that anything strange is going on at all.

You shouldn’t believe in something just

?

ufO encounter

?

what are we

because it’s a possibility or popular as there needs to be so much more than this, but you must be willing to listen and consider what other people think, respecting their views even if you disagree with them. We must question ourselves as to how and why exactly we become the people we are through our involvement in ufology and how it ultimately affects our lives, contemplating our actions and considering their influences on future generations. Physical experiences and influences play a role in how our personalities and opinions are shaped, but these can be just as open to interpretation and as questionable as the rest when dealing with this in a ufological framework. For instance, an event that one person sees as negative could be viewed in the opposite way by another.

A point to make though is that I do feel people like to maintain the mysterious and sensationalistic aura that surrounds this field, one reason being how much more interesting it is than the truth even if it goes against logic. Regrettably, some people it seems couldn’t care less about information and facts to the contrary where a good story is involved. Lets face it, people love mysteries and what better place to find one than in ufology where the possibilities are, in theory, limitless. It’s this grand and inexplicable quality which is so alluring to many folk, covering different perspectives and backgrounds.

Being a very deep and complex issue though, the psychology in ufology is a point that always needs to be factored into research, but it can seem at times that human behavior can be just as strange as that of purported ufological events that are witnessed. Consider it yourself when involved in study if you have not previously. Try to go beyond your own train of thought and into the heads of others both in and out of the subject, looking at other ideas, information and possibilities.

Someone else’s view through your own eyes can bring a new range to your research. It’s always interesting to see the attitudes of ufologists across different countries and cultures, how the field is handled both positively and negatively by them and such public channels as groups, the media and on the internet. However, having come across it so much myself as well as you probably have, it’s a real shame that infighting, prejudice and distrust can have such a strong presence, but I guess that its not surprising its so prevalent here as it is and has been throughout humanity in general.

When contemplating all this at a fundamental level I personally believe that concerning issues of the heart and head, the ufological community for the most part needs to take a long, serious look at itself.

13

The Aerospace Arms Race at

ROSWELL

David Seals ©

Extraterrestrial warfare is not a fantasy of science fiction. Today, terrestrial wars are being coordinated from space, and it began back during World War Two in New Mexico, when billions of dollars were already being spent on Star Wars research and development, at Los Alamos, White Sands Missile Range, and Roswell.

Today, this Aerospace arms race is shaping up to be the largest industrial project in Earth’s history. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) in the 1990s had an official budget of $3.5 billion, but President Bush changed the name of the space weapons development organization to Missile Defense Agency (MDA) with an annual budget of $10 billion; and that doesn’t count an estimated $75 billion annually that goes into space technology programs at the National Reconnaisannce Office (NRO), National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Energy, NASA, and others.

The Pentagon maintained that the 1991 Persian Gulf War was the “first space war” where it was able to field test new technologies and begin implementing the doctrine of “full spectrum dominance.”

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, 70% of the weapons used in the initial attack were directed to their targets via military space satellites.

How did it come to this? My father was an AAF pilot stationed at Roswell during World War Two, with the 509th Composite Bomb Group, where I was born in 1947, and I grew up on U.S. Air Force bases all over the world. Like many of us kids I could tell an F-86 from a B-36 where they were just a dot high up in the wild blue yonder.

We loved the Air Force, and so did Dad. He was not only a pilot, who eventually attained the rank of Lt. Colonel, but he worked on the Titan missiles as a communications and intelligence officer, and was stationed at Langley AB and the Pentagon too.

I remember one time he came home, in Virginia in the mid-60s, disgusted with the corruption of the ”damn contractors” at McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed. “They got their arms in the cookie jar up to their shoulders!” he exclaimed, pouring a stiff scotch and water. He wanted to get out of the USAF because it was all just “big business” by then, and as soon as he got in his 20 years he retired to a quiet little Colorado mountain town.

But we all knew the tensions of the Cold War, and for as long as I can remember my generation of “war babies” has lived with giant aerospace industries building more and more atomic and hydrogen bombs,

14

supersonic B-52s and massive nuclearpowered submarines full of multiple nuclear warheads, ICBM silos all over our beloved West, and impending holocaust any time with Russia or China or Israel nuking their many Arab enemies. It was some sort of inexplicable crisis that began with Hitler and Pearl Harbor, apparently, and culminated with Hiroshima. Nobody seemed to understand it or how to stop it.

Dad always defended Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the standard argument of his generation that the annihilation of those Japanese cities was necessary to save American lives, and end the Pacific War. He also had a personal stake in it, since he was a pilot instructor who sent a lot of those B-29 crews over Japan, and he took his orders directly from Col. Paul Tibbetts who flew the Enola Gay that dropped the Hiroshima uranium bomb and whom Dad said “was the best pilot in the Air Force.” I remember General Tibbetts coming to our house several times when I was a kid, after he and Dad had been playing golf and stopped at the Officers Club afterwards, and he had dinner with us, joking, and rumpling my hair. He seemed like another of many good friends of our family, as we had many on Air Bases where we were stationed all over the world.

When the UFO story about Roswell came out in 1980 with the book ‘Roswell Incident’, a whole new parameter was added to our family history, and the understanding of that period. While the Air Force continued to deny there had been a “Disc” that landed or crashed in 1947 - contradictory reports said it landed, while others said it crashed researchers kept digging up witnesses and documents that said otherwise. Although no really hard physical evidence has been found of the “Flying Saucer” that the Roswell newspaper headlined on July 8, 1947, based on an official news release from the public information office of the Roswell Army Air Field, lots of military and civilian eyewitnesses and residents report there were at least one or two craft that were not man-made, and they were piloted by strange unearthly aviators.

The more the story has grown over the years, into many books and movies and cable-TV documentaries, the more the Air Force continues to insist there was no mysterious Disc and that it was really a case of mistaken identity about weather balloons of various sorts. Why? When they were the first to say they had recovered a strange Disc, they quickly denied they had anything and it was nothing. They laughed it off.

Some theorists postulate the USAF did it to get control of a burgeoning interest in post-

war America in Flying Saucers, since people were both fascinated and frightened by the possibility of some other paranormal life force out there in the Wild Blue Yonder. It is an axiom of Intelligence Agencies to “control and discredit” anything that isn’t in their purview, and the Air Force certainly has its own powerful office of Intelligence, purportedly serving the cause of National Security against any and all enemies foreign or domestic. After World War Two especially they didn’t want to take any more chances, especially in the dangerous new Atomic Age. Flying Saucers were almost an aberrant outgrowth, in their view, of the human leap into outer space, as Hitler’s V-2 rockets and jet engines were taking man farther and further from normal human boundaries.

America hurriedly began its own rocketry programs at White Sands, using Hitler’s scientists like the brilliant Werner von Braun.

President Truman put a vast network of plutonium and uranium factories around the country to work, building at least 7-9 new A-Bombs a month in 1945, 1946, and 1947.

President Roosevelt, apparently, had authorized several billions for the construction of the factories during the War, under the leadership of General Groves out of the Pentagon, and who was in charge of the scientists at Los Alamos building the supersecret Super-Weapon.

The Aerospace arms race had begun.

Today, the Roswell UFO Incident remains a dichotomy in people’s minds, where it is either a childish amusement, or a profoundly mysterious phenomenon. Why? How can something like a Flying Saucer matter in this dangerous Cold War world with tens of thousands of weapons of mass destruction that can kill just about every living thing on Planet Earth? Why does the idea of Unidentified Flying Objects relate to more direct facts about our very survival as a species? Surely there are more pressing concerns about world hunger, epidemics and diseases, and Nuclear Holocaust.

Roswell, nevertheless, is precisely about the pressing calamity of the militarization of space. In 1945, B-29s took off from there laden with weapons to firebomb Tokyo, and eventually to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That there is still an aura of supersecrecy around not only the Discs of 1947 but the Stars Wars technology of today suggests a profound connection between extraterrestrial, or space, war, and the paranormal suspicions of the human spirit.

Men are building a “space plane” right now that has the capability of taking off from an ordinary runway like any other plane, flying through inner space to the other side of the

ufO encounter

world in an hour, drop a devastating thermonuclear attack on China, for instance, and then return home to base.

The Pentagon is selling this space plane to the Congress and the public as the successor to the outdated, and increasingly expensive, space shuttle.

The Chinese and Russians are fully aware of these developments, and in 2007 China tested a rudimentary anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon, warning the United States that it won’t allow any one country to be “Master of Space”, as the Air Force Space Command logo reads.

The United States responded in 2008, using the excuse of a falling satellite, to show the world it had the capability to knock out an object in space. The Navy fired a “missile defense” system from an Aegis destroyer into space and successfully hit the crippled satellite (one of thousands routinely orbiting our planet).

The test was a clear warning to Russia and China that we have offensive capabilities that could be used as part of a growing U.S. first-strike policy.

China has recently introduced a resolution into the United Nations (the creation of which was one of Roosevelt’s last acts before he died in 1945) calling for a new treaty to ban weapons in space. PAROS, the Prevention of an Arms Race in Space, would outlaw all weapons in and through space - including Lockheed’s military developments on Mars, through NASA but the United States has opposed it.

While the rest of the world economy is staggering under a severe financial recession, the aerospace contractors that my father hated so much are booming. Just one example is the ludicrous Space Station, which NASA originally promised taxpayers would cost only $10 billion.

They’ve now spent $100 billion and it’s not nearly finished.

They’re also looking to the Moon as a military base. Astronaut-Senator (and Marine officer) John Glenn has proposed a bill to Congress, which already has a secret and unspecified multi-billion dollar budget, that the United States “needs” armed space stations and bases on both the dark side and the light side of the Moon, as the top of a “gravity well”. He writes, “Nature reserves decisive advantage for L4 and L5, two allegedly stable libration points that theoretically could dominate Earth and moon, because they look down both gravity wells. No other location is equally commanding. Armed enemy forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rivals.”

The Pentagon and the defense industries are working 50-75 years ahead of the rest of us. If that also means they have to control and discredit any philosophical opposition to them, such as a more peaceful idea about extraterrestrial life forms, and a phenomenal world view that does not include interstellar warfare, then that’s what they’ll do. They’ve already turned Roswell into a joke in the minds of lots of people, a mere cartoon or myth from the nursery infancy of mankind.

ufO encounter

NEW ZEALAND MOD PREP ARES TO PREPARES RELEASE CLASSIFIED UFO DOCUMENTS

lights’ sightings which made world headlines in 1978/79. UFOCUS NZ staff member and former Chief air traffic controller of Wellington International Airport, John Cordy, witnessed the Kaikoura lights on airport control centre Suzanne Hansen, Director UFO Focus New Zealand Research Network; radar, and states, “I hope the files will validate the reality of the sightings, and www.ufocusnz.org.nz vindicate key witnesses who observed January 27 2010 Over the past 14 months,New Zealand’s UFO them, and faced ‘trial by media’.”

Research Network, UFOCUS NZ, has communicated directly with Lt Gen Jerry US PLAN TO Mataparae, Chief of Defence Force NZ, on RETURN TO MOON the issue of the release of MOD classified UFO IS DEAD’ http://tinyurl.com/yfxwq34 sighting reports and related documents.

January 31 2010 UFOCUS NZ Director, Suzanne Hansen, says A plan to return US astronauts to the moon that initially the Chief of Defence stated,“It “is dead”,a White House adviser on space would require a substantial amount of collation, issues says, confirming reports NASA will research and consultation to identify whether instead focus on developing commercial any of that information could be released,” and space transport.“Constellation is dead,” that he was not in a position to deploy staff to the source told AFP on Friday on undertake that task, given other work condition of anonymity, referring to a priorities. program that envisioned returning to the However, the Chief of Defence also voiced moon by 2020 and using Earth’s nearest his personal perspective on the issue, “In the neighbour as a base for manned longer term, recognizing the ongoing public expeditions to Mars. interest in this topic, I would like to see a summary of information held about UFO sightings produced, in much the same way as that which is produced by the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence. Given the existing constraints, however, I cannot predict when that objective could be achieved.”

In December 2009, following ongoing communications, the Chief of Defence stated in a letter to UFOCUS NZ, “I am pleased to be able to inform you that two NZDF officers have begun the task of assessing classified files held in relation to this topic with a view to declassification. I would expect that files which are transferred to Archives New Zealand would be subject to extensive embargo periods in Florida Today newspaper first reported the demise of the program on Thursday, terms of access by the general public.” saying the plan was doomed by financial A Chief of Defence Force office spokesperson constraints in the 2011 budget. Reports advised,“The declassification of the UFO files is added that the US space agency will now a ‘work in progress’ in conjunction with work on finding a commercial solution Archives New Zealand. The files must be to ferrying US astronauts to the amended to meet new requirements of the International Space Station after the Privacy Act. “ scheduled end of NASA’s shuttle Hansen states UFOCUS NZ’s own archives program in September 2010. Astronauts contain credible and detailed UFO sighting will be able to hitch rides aboard Russian reports from New Zealand pilots, air traffic Soyuz spacecraft, but the United States controllers, and military personnel. In will need a commercial alternative if addition, the research network holds Congress approves White House plans sighting reports from members of the to scrap development of a successor to public who experienced significant UFO the shuttle program. sightings dating as far back as 1908. Some The Constellation program was launched of these prominent cases were investigated in 2004 by then-president George W

by NZ Air Force personnel, and she is Bush. News of Constellation’s cancellation hopeful the MOD files may contain their came as NASA marked its day of reports. remembrance, honouring astronauts who It is likely the files will also contain additional died in the Apollo 1, Challenger and information about the renowned ‘Kaikoura Columbia space missions.

15

OBAMA GOES COMMERCIAL WITH U .S. U.S. HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT Floridatoday.com February 1 2010

President Obama will roll out a proposed 2011 budget today aimed at launching a new generation of human spaceflight that relies on commercial companies, rather than NASA, to taxi American astronauts into low Earth orbit.

A significant change in national space policy, the move is aimed at reducing the amount of time that the U.S. is reliant on Russia to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the $75 billion International Space Station – an outpost in which the American taxpayers have invested about $55 billion. Once NASA’s shuttle fleet is retired at the end of the year, the U.S. will rely on Russia to launch American astronauts to the outpost until another domestic means can be developed.

NASA for the past 50 years has been responsible for designing, developing and operating the rockets and spacecraft flown

by U.S. astronauts. But a presidential panel last October delivered a report that suggested NASA should get out of the business of ferrying astronauts to and from low Earth orbit and instead rely on U.S. commercial companies to do that job.

Administration officials told Florida Today last week that NASA’s budget would be increased by $6 billion over the next five years, and we predict that at least $2.5 billion of that money will be directed to developing commercial crew transportation services.

ALL HUMANS ARE ALIENS FROM OUTER SP ACE’ SPACE’ Andrew Hough http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/ space/7136269/All-humans-are-aliensfrom-outer-space-scientist-claims.html February 3 2010

Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University, said new research “overwhelmingly”supported the view that human life started from outside our Earth.

The Astrobiologist said the first “seeds of life” were deposited on our plant from space 3,800m years ago. He claimed microbes from outer space arrived on earth from comets, which then “multiplied and seeded” to form human life.

His said his evidence, published in Cambridge University’s International Journal of Astrobiology, showed humans, and all life on Earth, came from aliens brought to the earth by comets hitting the planet. “Yes, we are all aliens – we share a cosmic ancestry,”Prof Wickramasinghe said.

“Each time a new planetary system forms a few surviving microbes find their way into comets.These then multiply and seed other planets.” He added:“”We are thus part of a connected chain that extends over a large volume of the cosmos. Evidence is pointing inexorably in this direction.”

16

The professor and his late colleague Sir Fred Hoyle championed the so-cllaed “panspermia” theory from the 1960s.

“Evidence from astronomy overwhelmingly supports the view that life did not start on Earth but was seeded from outside,” Prof Wickramasinghe said.“Although we have no definite knowledge how life started in the first place, once started its spread in the cosmos and survival is inevitable.”

deep minimum, which is a period of very little activity. Whether this means we will have an unusual maximum in 2012, we just don’t know.What is certain is the chances of general disruption will be far higher during this period and could disrupt coverage of the Olympics.’

Professor Harrison said missions like the SDO couldn’t prevent solar activity, but could help us to prepare for them. ‘It’s like predicting the rain,’ Professor Harrison said.

‘You can’t stop it but if you know it’s coming you can put an umbrella up.’ [Or build your bunker – Ed] DENY ALL KNOWLEDGE: HOW THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE NOW HANDLES UFO SIGHTINGS http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article1254369/Deny-knowledge-How-MinistryDefence-handles-reported-UFOsightings.html February 28 2010

SOLAR STORMS COULD DISRUPT 2012 OLYMPICS Claire Bates February 11 2010

TVs around the world could go on the blink during the 2012 London Olympics, solar physicists have warned.They were speaking ahead of the launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA’s latest space satellite will deliver high resolution images of the Sun ten times better than the average High-Definition television.

By studying the Sun in greater detail, scientists are hoping to be able to predict and better prepare for disruptive solar activity. A picture of the Sun will be snapped every 0.75 seconds using ultra-violet light.

In just one day the satellite will transmit the equivalent amount of data as 500,000 song downloads. Over time it will produce more science data than any mission in NASA history.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has four AIA telescopes, and solar arrays will collect energy from the Sun to power the spacecraft. EVE measures the tumultuous solar emissions, while the HMI will measure the magnetic field on the visible surface of the Sun. This could prove crucial as solar activity is due to hit a peak in its eleven-year cycle during the Olympics in 2012.

Professor Richard Harrison from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, told the Mail Online:‘The Sun’s magnetic field is all over the place and looks like a writhing plate of spaghetti.‘Huge clouds of energy escape from time to time in coronal mass ejections. These can carry a billion tonnes of solar material into space at nearly a million miles per hour. Such events can disable satellites, cause power grid failures on Earth and disrupt communications.’

He added: ‘Our Sun is just coming out of a

The murky world of alleged alien activity has become even more secretive because defence officials have been instructed to destroy all UFO reports they receive, it was revealed today. The bid to prevent publication of the sightings is contained in a previously secret memo.

Britain’s official UFO investigation unit and hotline were closed down at the start of December.The truth is out there: But not at the MoD where all reports of supposed alien activity will be destroyed.

Since then reports of strange sights in the skies sent to the MoD have been kept for 30 days before being thrown out, the newly released policy document shows.

This stance was adopted so defence officials would not have to publish the information in response to freedom of information (FoI) requests or pass it to the National Archives.

The memo, dated November 11, 2009, sets out the MoD’s reasons for shutting its UFO unit and ceasing to invite the public to send in details of sightings. It notes that the number of reports the department received soared last year, taking up extra resources and diverting staff from ‘more valuable’ defence-related activities.

The MoD recorded 634 UFO sightings in 2009, the second-highest annual total after 1978, when there were 750, according to UFO expert Dr David Clarke.This compares with an average of about 150 reports a year over the past decade.

The memo states: ‘The dedicated UFO hotline answer phone service and e-mail address serve no defence purpose, and merely encourage the generation of correspondence of no defence value.

Accordingly these facilities should be withdrawn as soon as possible.’

The official document covers what defence officials should do when they receive reports of UFOs in the future. It says:

ufO encounter

‘Reported sightings received from other sources should be answered by a standard letter and... should be retained for 30 days and then destroyed, largely removing any future FoI liability and negating the need to release future files post-November 30 2009.’ The memo reveals that MoD chiefs made a point of not discussing their plans to close the UFO unit with other countries because of fears this could be perceived as part of a global cover-up. It states: ‘We have deliberately avoided formal approaches to other Governments on this issue. Such approaches would become public when the relevant UFO files are released, and would be viewed by ‘ufologists’ as evidence of international collaboration and conspiracy.’

But the document includes as an annex a printout from the US Department of Defence website explaining that the American government stopped collecting reports of UFO sightings in December 1969.

Dr Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, obtained the memo through an FoI request. He said:‘This is the final rubber-stamping of the decision - they just want to totally wash their hands of the UFO business altogether. It’s just been a millstone around their necks ever since the Cold War.They have decided that whatever they do, it reflects badly on them.’

The expert said the MoD’s new policy on destroying UFO reports would make it much more difficult to uncover the truth about incidents in the future.‘It’s like they’re desperately trying to avoid having to answer FoI requests on this subject,’ he said.‘Even if something quite serious happened, perhaps where there was a near-miss with an airline, the MoD will say,‘we may have had a report on it, but we’ve destroyed it’.’

DID THE CHILEAN QU AK E SHIFT QUAK AKE EARTHS AXIS? Dr.Tony Phillips http://www.physorg.com/ news187550459.html March 11 2010

Pictures of widespread devastation leave no doubt: Last month’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake in coastal Chile was extremely strong. Indeed, say NASA scientists, it might have shifted the axis of Earth itself.

“According to our calculations, the quake moved Earth’s figure axis by about 3 inches (8 cm),” says geophysicist Richard Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

If the Earth tilted over 3 inches, you probably think you would have noticed.But that’s not how the“figure axis”works.“The figure axis defines not how Earth is tilted, but rather how it is balanced,” says Gross. Consider the following: Earth is not a perfect sphere. Continents and oceans are distributed unevenly around the planet.There’s more land in the north, more water in the south, a great ocean in the west, and so on. As a result of these asymmetries, Earth slowly wobbles as it spins.The figure axis is Earth’s axis of mass balance, and the

ufO encounter

spin axis wobbles around it.

“The Chilean quake shifted enough material to change the mass balance of our entire planet,” Gross says.

A shifting figure axis is nothing new. On its own, the figure axis moves about 10 centimeters per year as a result of “Ice Age rebound.” After the last great glacial period some 11,000 years ago, many heavy ice sheets disappeared. This unloaded the crust and mantle of the Earth, allowing the planet to relax or“rebound”back into a more spherical shape. The rebounding process is still underway and so the figure axis naturally moves. [ …and if you think the world spins faster these days…you’re right >> ]

A clear image of what might be an alien or ET in a space suit can be seen in one cave painting along with a classical flying saucer shaped UFO that appears to be either beaming something down or beaming something up, in what might be an ancient UFO abduction scenario. A force-field or trail of some sort is seen at the rear of the UFO. Also visible is another object that might depict a wormhole, explaining how aliens were able to reach Earth. This image may lead UFO enthusiasts to conclude that the images might have been drawn with the involvement of aliens themselves.

CHILEAN QU AK E MA Y QUAK AKE MAY HA VE SHORTENED HAVE EARTH DA YS DAYS Alan Buis http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ earth-20100301.html March 1 2010

The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day. JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth’s mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.

Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake.This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.

PREHISTORIC UFO AND ET IMAGES FOUND IN REMOTE CA VE IN INDIA CAVE Rajasthan Times February 17 2010

A group of anthropologists working with hill tribes in a remote area of India have made a startling discovery: Intricate prehistoric cave paintings depicting aliens and UFO type craft.

The images were found in the Hoshangabad district of the state of Madhya Pradesh only 70 kilometers from the local administrative centre of Raisen.The caves are hidden deep within dense jungle.

Local Archaeologist, Mr Wassim Khan, has personally seen the images. He claims that the objects and creatures seen in them are totally anomalous and out of character when compared to other, already discovered, examples of prehistoric cave art depicting ancient life in the area. As such he believes that they might suggest beings from other planets have been interacting with humans since prehistoric times: Adding weight to the ‘ancient astronaut theory’ which postulates that human civilization was established with the assistance of benevolent space-faring aliens.

EUROP A BEST BET EUROPA FOR LIFE OUTSIDE EARTH Casey Kazan http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/ 2010/01/the-solar-systems-best-bet-forlife-jupiters-europa-video.html

New research suggests that there is enough oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.

Based on what we know about the Jovian moon, parts of Europa’s seafloor could resemble the environments around Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa’s ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from

17

the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.

Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona says that the concentrations of oxygen would be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also “macrofauna”,that is, more complex animallike organisms which have greater oxygen demands.The continual supply of oxygen could support roughly 3 billion kilograms of macrofauna, assuming similar oxygen demands to terrestrial fish.

ITS RAINING FISH IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY http://www.news.com.au/national/itsraining-fish-in-the-northern-territoryreport/story-e6frfkvr-1225835295781 February 28 2010

While the Top End and Central Australia have been battered by torrential rains, a Territory town has reportedly had fish falling from the sky.The freak phenomena happened not once, but twice, on Thursday and Friday afternoon about 6pm at Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of Katherine, The Northern Territory News reports.

Christine Balmer, who took the photos of the fish on the ground and in a bucket, said she had to pinch herself when she was told “hundreds and hundreds” of small white fish had fallen from the sky.

“It rained fish in Lajamanu on Thursday and Friday night,” she said,“They fell from the sky everywhere. Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere. These fish were alive when they hit the ground.” Mrs Balmer, the aged care co-ordinator at the Lajamanu Aged Care Centre, said her family interstate thought she had lost the plot when she told them about the event.

“I haven’t lost my marbles,” she said, reassuring herself.“Thank God it didn’t rain crocodiles.”

Lajamanu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert, hundreds of kilometres from Lake Argyle and Lake Elliott and even further from the coast. But it’s not the first time the remote community has been bombarded by fins from above. In 2004,

18

locals reported fish falling from the sky, and in 1974, a similar incident captured international headlines.The small white fish are believed to be spangled perch, which are very common through much of northern Australia.

Weather bureau senior forecaster Ashley Patterson said the geological conditions were perfect on Friday for a tornado in the Douglas Daly region. He said it would have been an ideal weather situation to allow the phenomena to occur - but no tornados have been reported to the authority.“It’s a very unusual event,” he said. “With an updraft, (fish and water picked up) could get up high - up to 60,000 or 70,000 feet. Or possibly from a tornado over a large water body - but we haven’t had any reports,” he said.

NASA RADAR FINDS ICE DEPOSITS AT MOONS POLE Katherine Trinidad, http://www.nasa.gov/ home/hqnews/2010/mar/HQ_10055_moon_ice.html March 1 2010

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice.The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon,” said Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the MiniSAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “The new discoveries show the moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than people had previously thought.”

The Mini-SAR’s findings are being published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The results are consistent with recent findings of other NASA instruments and add to the growing scientific understanding of the multiple forms of water found on the moon. The agency’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper discovered water molecules in the moon’s polar regions, while water vapor was detected by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. DID THE U .S. CREA T U.S. CREAT THE EARTHQU AK E IN EARTHQUAK AKE HAITI? http://www.aroundglobe.net/2010/01/haitius-created-earthquake-in-haiti.html January 25 2010

The Russian Navy reports that the U.S. created the earthquake in Haiti.The Northern Fleet has been monitoring the movements and activities of U.S. Marines in the Caribbean

since 2008 when the Americans announced their intention to re-establish the Fourth Fleet, which was disbanded in 1950, and that Russia responded a year later, with the Fleet led by the nuclearpowered cruiser Peter the Great “by starting its first exercises in this region since the end of the Cold War.” Since the end of the decade of the 70’s in the last century, the U.S.“advanced a lot” in the state of its earthquake weapons and, according to these reports, they now use equipment with Pulse, Plasma and Tesla Electromagnetic and Sonic technology together with “shock wave bombs.”

The report also compares the experiences of these two earthquake weapons of the U.S. Navy last week, when the test in the Pacific caused an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 to strike in the area around the town of Eureka, Calif., causing no casualties. But the test in the Caribbean caused the death of at least 140 thousand innocent people.

According to the report, it is “more than likely” that the U.S. Navy had “full knowledge” of the catastrophic damage that this test earthquake could potentially have on Haiti and had pre-positioned its Deputy Commander of the Southern Command, General PK Keen, on the island to oversee aid work if needed.

According to another report, coincidentally, facts exist establishing that the earthquake in Sichuan, China on 12 May 2008, a magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale, was also caused by HAARP radio frequencies. It can be observed that there is a correlation between seismic activity and the ionosphere, through the control of Radio Frequencies Induced by force fields, which is a HAARP feature, and it can be concluded that: 1 - Earthquakes identical in depth and linearly on the same fault are caused by induced frequency linear projection.

2 - A coordinated satellite configuration can generate concentrated frequency projections targeting specific points (force fields).

3 - A diagram shows that earthquakes considered to be artificial propagate linearly at the same depth: -Venezuela, on January 8, 2010. Depth: 10 km.

- Honduras, on 11 January 2010. Depth: 10 km.

- Haiti, on 12 January 2010. Depth: 10 km.

The rest of the aftershocks occurred at depths close to 10 km.

According to the Russian report, the State Department, USAID and the U.S. Southern Command began its work of “humanitarian invasion” by sending at least 10,000 soldiers and contractors, to control Haitian territory,rather than the UN, after the devastating “experimental earthquake.”

ufO encounter

ufO research queensland

inc

www. uforq. asn. au email: info@uforq.asn.au phone: 07 3376 1780

be com e a member bec ome Membership with UFO Research Queensland Inc costs $30.00 annually for membership [$40.00 AUD for International members]. Membership entitles you to benefits such as discounts on meeting entry, Library membership, and sees six issues of UFO Encounter delivered to your door. Cheques and money orders should be made payable to ‘UFO Research Queensland Inc’ and mailed to UFO Research Queensland Inc, PO Box 15222, City East, Queensland, 4002. Overseas applications should be made

by International Money Order or bank drafts in Australian dollars.

publi c meetings public Public Meetings are held on the last Friday of every month [except December] at 7.30pm sharp.

Meetings are held at the Legion Memorial Club, 28 Church Street, Fortitude Valley.Undercover and street parking is available [see map below].

Admission is $5.00 for members and $8.00 for non-members.

PLEASE NOTE: Membership cards MUST be produced for member-discounted entry.

For further enquiries call 07 3376 1780.

ufOr q library ufOrq The Library now has over 500 books, videos and DVDs on its shelves, with new additions being made all the time - which makes it the largest UFO library in the Southern Hemisphere! Members are able to borrow books, periodicals, dvds, videos, audiotapes and other items on a monthly basis. Items are available to borrow and return at Public Meetings.

LIBRARY MEMBERSHIP IS FREE TO UFORQ MEMBERS

ufO encounter

19

-ufO research queensland inc

www.uforq.asn.au email: info@uforq.asn.au

affiliates uforq ipswich [qld]

Public Meetings are held at the Ipswich Trades Hall, Third Floor, 4 Bell Street, Ipswich, on the first Friday of the month, commencing at 7.30pm. Admission: $4.00.

Brisbane - Martin Gottschall (07) 3376 1780 contact: David Keyworth; (07) 3282 8795

sightings hOtlines

Gympie - Roma Ravn (07) 5486 4458 Ipswich - David Keyworth (07) 3282 8795 gympie ufo and research [qld] Stanthorpe - Carol Watson 0403 918 336 paranormal Public Meetings are held on the first Wednesday of every month at the Lightning Ridge - Bruce Cuming (02) 6829 2252 Community Centreplace, 24 Lawrence St, Gympie, Tully - Claire Noble (07) 4068 1538 commencing at 7.30pm. Admission: $3.00. or email - info@uforq.asn.au contact: Roma Ravn; (0754) 864 458 or Carlo Riva, (0754) 852 116

ufohsar - ufo hotline and abduction research gympie [qld] contact: Carlo Riva; (0754) 852 116

stanthorpe [qld]

contact: Carol Watson; Stanthorpe Skies, 0403 918 336 PO Box 513, Stanthorpe, QLD 4380, or email: mosaicart62@hotmail.com

consciousness development and research group [qld] contact: Kay McCullock ND, CDRG and CSETI Working Group; 0429 641 222 email: cdrg.contact@gmail.com

blue mountains ufo research group [nsw] contact: Rex Gilroy; (02) 4782 3441 email: randhgilroy@optusnet.com.au website: http://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/rexufo/australian-ufos-mainpage.html

cosmic connections [sa]

contact: Kevin Robb; 0406362340 email: krobb@bigbutton.com.au website: http://www.australiancosmicconnection.com.au/ 20

ufO encounter