UCP has essentially seized control of all public-sector pension plans in the province

JANUARY 14, 2021

And they’re coming for the retirement nest eggs saved by Albertans through the Canada Pension Plan, too

EDMONTON - The presidents of the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) and Alberta’s largest public-sector unions held a news conference today to condemn the latest actions taken by the Kenney government to effectively seize control of pension savings belonging to hundreds of thousands of Albertans.

“It’s not just the teachers’ pension plan that’s subject to the new terms imposed by the Finance Minister. They’re also going after the pensions of hundreds of thousands of Albertans working for Alberta Health Services, school boards, municipalities, the provincial government and universities and colleges,” said AFL president, Gil McGowan. “What’s happening is unprecedented, outrageous and brazen.”

The leaders at the news conference included McGowan, Guy Smith, president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE); Heather Smith, president of the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA); Mike Parker, president of the Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA); and Rory Gill, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Alberta Division (CUPE).

The leaders say that Ministerial Orders issued on January 4th by Alberta’s Finance Minister are essentially designed to finish the work that the government started in the fall of 2019 with the passage of Bill 22.

Bill 22 stripped all of Alberta’s public-sector pension boards of the power to choose who would manage their investments, decreeing that AIMCo – an agency that is wholly owned and controlled by the government – will be the sole monopoly provider of investment services.

What’s significant about the new Ministerial Orders is that they build on the power and control already granted by the government to AIMCo at the expense of the pension boards.

“Now, as a result of these orders, not only will AIMCo be the monopoly provider of investment management services, they will also be able to ignore the wishes of the pension plans when it comes to decisions about how the retirement savings of workers and retirees should be invested,” said McGowan.

“In other words, AIMCo and the Finance Minister will be the deciders – and the hundreds of employers and hundreds of thousands of workers who actually pay into the plans will simply have to shut up, take what they’re given and trust that the government and AIMCo will do what’s best. This paternalistic approach is entirely at odds with industry norms and with the way pensions are managed in other provinces.”

The union presidents say this is “perverse” because the money in question – more than $100 billion – doesn’t belong to the government or to AIMCo. It belongs to the more than 400,000 Albertans who have been using Alberta’s public plans, as vehicles, to save for their retirements.

“With Bill 22 and these Ministerial Orders, the Kenney government has essentially seized control of vast sums of money that is not theirs. The Finance Minister and the Premier might call this administrative reform. We call it theft,” said McGowan.

The big question is: why is the Kenney government doing this? The union leaders think they have an answer.

“We think Jason Kenney’s end game is to use the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of Albertan to prop up oil and gas ventures in the province that are having an increasingly difficult time raising money from global investors and international markets,” said McGowan. “To be clear: we are not opposed to all oil and gas investments. What we ARE opposed to is a system in which the government gives itself the power to invest other people’s money in risky ventures without their permission.”

The union leaders said they will respond to the UCP’s “pension theft” with a legal challenge and an aggressive member campaign to pressure MLAs. They will also campaign against government efforts to pull Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).

“We think what we’re witnessing with these ministerial orders is just part of Jason Kenney’s grand vision. We think the UCP is also set on seizing the retirement money that all Albertans save through CPP and handing it over to AIMCo under similar terms that have now been imposed on public-sector pension plans.”

A full copy of McGowan’s remarks can be found here.

-30-

 

An AFL Blog Series: Public Education During a Crisis - AFL

Sotomayor Says 13 People Executed During Trump Killing Spree 'Deserved More From This Court'

"This is not justice," said the liberal Justice after the state murder of Dustin John Higgs as she excoriated the court's conservative majority for essentially rubber-stamping the administration's rushed death penalties.

by

Jon Queally, staff writer COMMON DREAMS

Police officers gather to remove activists during an anti-death penalty protest in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

In a fiery dissent issued just prior to Friday night's federal execution of convicted murderer Dustin John Higgins—the 13th and likely final person put to death under the direction of the Trump administration's Department of Justice—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced the court's abdication of responsibility in recent months and said that those killed by the state under the arbitrary end-of-office deadline of Trump's  deserved better protections and due process than what they received.

"Sotomayor's dissent... will be remembered long into the future as one of the most thorough, resounding indictments of this administration's reckless, immoral, illegal effort to execute as many people as possible, as quickly as possible." —Sister Helen Prejean

"This is not justice," Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting objection (pdf), backed only by Justice Stephen Breyer, which stated that the nation's highest court "repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes, often at the Government's request, allowing it to push forward with an unprecedented, breakneck timetable of executions."

As CNN noted, Sotomayor in her statement argued the government should have proceeded with "some measure of restraint" instead of moving with an "unprecedented rush" amid questions concerning the Justice Department's drug protocol, the Federal Death Penalty Act and other disputes.

According to Business Insider:

Sotomayor also condemned the federal government for fast-tracking the executions of two men who tested positive for COVID-19 — Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs — by arguing that a sooner execution would put the inmates out of their potential misery. Sotomayor dissented against the federal execution of Johnson a day earlier on January 14 because he was intellectually disabled and not afforded judicial review. 

Six of the 13 inmates killed since July have been Black, and a Death Penalty Information Center report from September 2020 showed that Black Americans are almost 30 times more likely to face the death penalty for the murder of a white victim than the other way around.

Putting the 13 people killed by the federal government since Trump's DOJ lifted a self-imposed ban on executions last July in "historical context," Sotomayor lamented that the U.S. has killed more people in just half a year that it had in the previous six decades combined under Trump.

"[T]he Court has allowed the United States to execute thirteen people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny," she wrote, "without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised. Those whom the Government executed during this endeavor deserved more from this Court. I respectfully dissent."

"The Court made these weighty decisions in response to emergency applications," reads the objection, "with little opportunity for proper briefing and consideration, often in just a few short days or even hours. Very few of these decisions offered any public explanation for their rationale."

Longtime anti-death penalty opponent and activist Sister Helen Prejean said the dissent will go down in history:

As Common Dreams has reported, Trump's killing spree of recent months has resulted in new and elevated calls for Congress to finally step in and abolish the death penalty once and for all.

"State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty, which kills Black and brown people disproportionately, has absolutely no place in our society," said Rep. Ayana Pressley (D-Mass.) last week as she, along with incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), re-introduced legislation to ban federal use of the death penalty.

"Ending the federal death penalty—which is as cruel as it is ineffective in deterring crime—is a racial justice issue and must come to an end," Pressley said. "We must finally abolish this inhumane form of punishment and put an end to Donald Trump's unprecedented killing spree. I am grateful for the partnership of incoming Chairman Durbin and my colleagues in this effort."

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

ASK JARED WHO HE SOLD THE VACCINES TO

Trump 'Answer Immediately for This Deception'States "thought they were getting more doses and they planned for more doses and opened up to 65 and up, thinking they were getting more."

by

Kenny Stancil, staff writer

Seniors and first responders wait in line to receive a Covid-19 vaccine at the Lakes Regional Library on December 30, 2020 in Fort Myers, Florida. (Photo: Octavio Jones/Getty Images)

Earlier this week, the White House said the federal government would soon release coronavirus vaccine doses stored for second shots, but governors expecting increased shipments discovered Friday that no national stockpile exists, and now they are demanding that President Donald Trump's administration be held accountable for deceiving the American public.

"Governors were told repeatedly by [the Department of Health and Human Services] there was a strategic reserve of vaccines, and this week, the American people were told it'd be released to increase supply of vaccine," tweeted Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) on Friday. "It appears now that no reserve exists. The Trump admin. must answer immediately for this deception."

State officials nationwide—who on Tuesday had been instructed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar to broaden inoculation eligibility criteria—learned roughly 72 hours later that the so-called vaccine reserve had already been exhausted by the time they were told to plan for a surge in supply.

"The Trump administration had already begun shipping out what was available beginning at the end of December, taking second doses directly off the manufacturing line," The Washington Post reported Friday. 

"Health officials across the country who had anticipated their extremely limited vaccine supply as much as doubling beginning next week are confronting the reality that their allocations will remain largely flat, dashing hopes of dramatically expanding access for millions of elderly people and those with high-risk medical conditions," the Post reported.

"Health officials in some cities and states were informed in recent days about the reality of the situation," the newspaper noted, "while others are still in the dark."

Like Inslee, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) tweeted Friday that she received "disturbing news" on Thursday about the absence of a federal stockpile. She said the news was confirmed by Gen. Gustave Perna of Operation Warp Speed, which is overseeing vaccine distribution efforts.

"I am demanding answers from the Trump administration," said Brown. "I am shocked and appalled that they have set an expectation on which they could not deliver, with such grave consequences."

"This is deception on a national scale," she added. "Oregon's seniors, teachers, all of us, were depending on the promise of Oregon's share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us."

While the White House's "initial policy was to hold back second doses to protect against the possibility of manufacturing disruptions," unnamed state and local health officials told the Post that the "approach shifted in recent weeks."

Health officials knowledgeable about the matter were told that Operation Warp Speed "stopped stockpiling second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the end of last year," the Post noted. "The last shots held in reserve of Moderna's supply, meanwhile, began shipping out over the weekend." As the newspaper reported:

The shift, in both cases, had to do with increased confidence in the supply chain, so that Operation Warp Speed leaders felt they could reliably anticipate the availability of doses for booster shots—required three weeks later in the case of the Pfizer-BioNTech product and four weeks later under Moderna's protocol.

But it also meant there was no stockpile of second doses waiting to be shipped, as Trump administration officials suggested this week. 

State and local officials are "angry and bewildered by the shifting directions and changing explanations of supply," the Post reported. As one unnamed official put it, states "thought they were getting more doses and they planned for more doses and opened up to 65 and up, thinking they were getting more."

Robert Cruickshank, campaign director at Demand Progress, called the Trump administration's bait-and-switch on stockpiled vaccines "horrific."

Critics say that news of the nonexistent reserve of doses underscores the extent to which the federal government has bungled the vaccine rollout, along with the broader response to the Covid-19 pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 390,000 people—and counting—in the U.S. alone.

The Associated Press reported Friday that less than 2% of the population in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina had received the first dose of the vaccine at the start of this week, according to data from those states and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In late December, Common Dreams reported that if the U.S. failed to accelerate the rate at which vaccines were allocated, it would take nearly a decade for the country to inoculate an adequate number of Americans to get the pandemic under control.

"We should have had major warehouses located around the country so that as soon as the FDA greenlighted a vaccine, it could quickly be delivered to hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country," Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued at the time. "We should have been prepared to start inoculating millions of people the day a vaccine was approved. This is a massive policy failure."

To make up for the slow start, Cruickshank said that President-elect Joe Biden "needs to immediately use the Defense Production Act to massively speed up vaccinations."

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Friday wrote a letter to the heads of Operation Warp Speed in which the congresswomen explain how to "fully embrace using the Defense Production Act to bolster our vaccine supply."

"Thousands are dying from Covid-19 each day," Porter said. "We can't waste anymore time."

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

Earthquake Swarming at Mt. Hood Volcano! 1/17/2021

USGS REPORT

WORKERS OF THE WORLD DEMAND THE BOSS PAY YOUR TAXES

Employers fear they will have to pay staff tax bills

'Sources said there was growing concern among employers that the unpaid tax will fall to them.' 


Fearghal O'Connor, INDEPENDENT.IE

January 17 2021 

Concern is growing among employers that they will come under pressure to help staff with the tax bills they have been landed with in recent days, according to taxation experts.

Thousands of workers who were placed on the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme by their employers - or who availed of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment - now face tax bills, potentially of thousands of euro.

Employers seeking to pay tax back on behalf of workers who they had placed on a Government Covid subsidy during the summer have been told by Revenue that benefit-in-kind rules will not apply to the extra payment.

Sources said there was growing concern among employers that the unpaid tax will fall to them.

Marian Ryan, consumer tax manager with Taxback.com said that while some larger employers had agreed to pay the bill on behalf of employees others were now under pressure to do so.

"The weight of the issue is likely to weigh even heavier on their shoulders as the preliminary statements are made available by Revenue and their employees receive notification of the tax owing," she said.

Employers want to " help their employees in any way they can, but the vast majority are not in the financial position to be able to cover the liability for the employee".

After US Capitol attack, some Republican Party officials are adopting war talk long used by far-right extremists, white supremacists

By JAY REEVES and JULIE CARR SMYTH
ASSOCIATED PRESS |
JAN 16, 2021 

Supporters listen as President Donald Trump speaks as a

 Confederate-themed and other flags flutter in the wind 

during a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evan Vucci/AP)

THE TREASONOUS FLAG OF THE CONFEDERACY GOT TO THE CAPITOL

THANKS TO TRUMP IT IS SAID THAT LINCOLN WEPT

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — Warlike imagery has begun spreading in Republican circles after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters, with some elected officials and party leaders rejecting pleas to tone down rhetoric calling for a second civil war.

In northwestern Wisconsin, the chairman of the St. Croix County Republican Party was forced to resign Friday after refusing for a week after the siege to remove an online post urging followers to “prepare for war.” The incoming chairwoman of the Michigan GOP and her husband, a state lawmaker, have joined a conservative social media site created after the Capitol riot where the possibility of civil war is a topic.

Phil Reynolds, a member of the GOP central committee in California’s Santa Clara County, appeared to urge on insurrectionists on social media during the Jan. 6 attack, declaring on Facebook: “The war has begun. Citizens take arms! Drumroll please….. Civil War or No Civil War?”

The heightened rhetoric mimics language far-right extremists and white supremacists have used for years, and it follows a year of civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer and its links to systemic racism. Some leftists have used similar language, which Republicans have likened to advocating a new civil war.

The post-Floyd demonstrations prompted governments and corporations alike to reevaluate, leading to the removal of Confederate symbols across the South and the retirement of racially insensitive brands.

Then on Jan. 6, demonstrators stoked by Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election brought symbols of the Old South to the siege of the Capitol, carrying Confederate flags inside and even erecting a wooden gallows with a noose outside the building.

Democrats say the uptick in war talk isn’t accidental. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said Trump began putting his supporters in the frame of mind to make the opening charge years ago and is “capable of starting a civil war.”

“Since his first day in office, this president has spent four years abusing his power, lying, embracing authoritarianism (and) radicalizing his supporters against democracy,” she said in arguing for impeachment. “This corruption poisoned the minds of his supporters, inciting them to willingly join with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and paramilitary extremists in a siege of the United State Capitol building, the very seat of American democracy.”

There are parallels between now and the run-up to the Civil War, including a fractious national election that ended with presidents — Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Joe Biden in 2020 — who millions rejected as illegitimate victors, said Nina Silber, co-president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

Lincoln won the Electoral College but came away with only a plurality of the popular vote in a four-way race. Biden won the popular vote by 7 million over Trump and defeated him decisively in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. Dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the results failed, some of them turned away by federal judges Trump himself nominated. Then-Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department could find no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the election’s outcome.

[The latest] Are Republicans headed for a pro-Trump, anti-Trump civil war? ‘Hell yes, we are,’ says Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger. »

While the same geographic split doesn’t exist today as when the Civil War started in 1861 and there is no mass preparation for all-out conflict, Silber said white anger and resentment fueled both eras.

“At the time of the Civil War, this took the form of Southern white men angry at the idea that the federal government would interfere with their right to own Black slaves. Today, I think this takes the form of white people who believe that Black and brown people are making gains, or getting special treatment, at their expense,” Silber, who teaches at Boston University, said in an email interview.

Just as happened generations ago, partisans are using strident words and images to define the other side — not just for policies with which they disagree but as evil, said George Rable, a retired historian at the University of Alabama.

“I think both then and now, we need to worry about the unanticipated consequences of overheated rhetoric and emotions,” he said. “Secessionists then hardly anticipated such a bloody civil war, and their opponents often underestimated the depth of secessionist sentiment in a number of states.”

State Rep. Tim Butler, a Springfield Republican who represents the same area as Lincoln did in the state legislature, condemned the attack on the Capitol during a speech on the Illinois House floor and urged more Republicans to speak up.

[The latest] Trump’s Senate trial pending, Mitch McConnell tells Republican senators it’s a ‘vote of conscience’ »

“If you’re not stepping up and denouncing this, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, I don’t have a place for you ...,” Butler said. “The favorite son of this city was murdered because of a civil war as he was president. I’m not going to see a civil war on my watch, I can tell you that.”
The question is whether those stoking the war talk can be controlled by the more moderate elements within the party, or whether they will become the dominant voice.

Randy Voepel, a state Assemblyman in California, backtracked after referencing an earlier war — the American Revolution — in a Jan. 9 San Diego Union-Tribune article: “This is Lexington and Concord. First shots fired against tyranny. Tyranny will follow in the aftermath of the Biden swear in on January 20th.”

More than three dozen veterans and officials have called for Voepel to be expelled from office. He has since revised his war-like rhetoric with a condemnation of the “violence and lawlessness” at the Capitol and a call for healing.

The other California Republican, Reynolds, said he has no plans to step down from his local party position. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he wasn’t trying to incite violence with his “war has begun” rhetoric, but simply reporting what he saw on television: “My statement was that this can’t happen. I was condemning it with my words. It was taken out of context,” he said.

[The latest] Vice President Mike Pence calls Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to congratulate her, offer assistance »

Democratic state Assemblyman Evan Low isn’t buying it. He called for Reynolds’ resignation, telling the Chronicle that the man he has known for two decades was “a genuine and warm human being” but was radicalized by Trump’s “poison and lies.”

In Missouri, state GOP Chairwoman Jean Evans had enough of the war talk. She resigned after she was barraged by calls from Trump supporters, some of whom demanded a military coup to keep Trump in office “no matter what it takes.”

“There’s a lot of good Republicans right now who totally disagree with what’s going on,” she told KMOX. “It’s been very scary and frightening and un-American from my perspective, and definitely not part of the conservative party I embrace.”

Andrew Hitt, the Republican chairman in Wisconsin, faced off against the St. Croix County party without initial success, describing the call to war as an “ill chosen phrase” and urging its removal.

Despite his plea and those of Democrats and a Republican sheriff, the post remained defiantly in place until a week after the Capitol attack. The website went dark Wednesday without explanation, and the county GOP chairman, John Kraft, resigned on Friday. He did not return a call seeking comment.

Silber, the Civil War historian, said she is worried the attack on the Capitol wasn’t the last stand for enraged Trump supporters.

“I think we can see how well-organized right-wing militia groups have become and how well armed they are, and that makes for an extremely explosive situation,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be ‘war’ in the technical sense, but there could be an extended period of violent attacks.”

Carr Smyth reported from Columbus, Ohio. Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; David Eggert in Lansing, Mich.; John O’Connor in Springfield, Ill.; and Don Thompson in Sacramento, Calif., contributed to this report.

DO NOT SNORT SHROOMS EITHER

Magic mushrooms grew in man’s blood after he injected them as a tea

A U.S. man was hospitalized with organ failure after he injected himself with a tea made from psychedelic mushrooms, which later started growing in his veins.

© Joe Amon/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images This file photo shows Mazatec psilocybin mushrooms ready for harvest in their growing tubs on May 19, 2019 in Denver, Colorado.

The unusual and dangerous episode is described in a case report published in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. The unidentified patient, 30, ultimately survived.

Doctors say the patient had tried to use the so-called "magic" mushrooms as an alternative treatment for his bipolar disorder, after skipping his usual course of medications.

Psychedelic mushrooms contain psilocybin, a drug that causes intense hallucinations when ingested through food or drink.

According to the case report, the unidentified man made a tea out of some mushrooms, then ran it through a filter and injected it into his body. He fell ill a few days later, and showed symptoms of jaundice, diarrhea, fatigue and nausea. He also vomited blood.

The man's family rushed him to a Nebraska hospital, but he was too confused to answer doctors' questions about his health.

Doctors ran a battery of tests and found that his liver was damaged, his kidneys weren't functioning properly and he was on the verge of organ failure.

They also conducted a blood test and were shocked by what they found: the pulverized mushrooms had begun sprouting in the darkness of the man's bloodstream.

Doctors put the man on a ventilator to keep him breathing and gave him antibiotics and antifungals to stamp out the spores. He ultimately spent 22 days in hospital and will remain on the antifungals and antibiotics over the long term, doctors say.

Researchers have been investigating psilocybin as a treatment for anxiety and depression for years, but the research does not recommend injecting mushroom tea — or any hallucinogenic drug, for that matter — straight into your veins.

The authors of the case study say it shows that more public education is needed around the drug.

They also injected a bad pun into the title of their case report, calling it "A 'trip' to the ICU."

The CIA released thousands of UFO documents online. Here’s how to read them

The CIA has declassified a massive, long-awaited trove of documents related to UFO sightings over the last 70 years, stoking excitement among those who want to believe in aliens — and frustration among those who want to actually find the proof.

© TTSA/YouTube An unidentified aerial phenomenon is shown on a U.S. navy jet's infrared sensors in this still image from video obtained by TTSA.

Now the truth is (perhaps) out there in a .ZIP file, though it might take some dedicated digging to find it. The documents deal primarily with UFOs, which by definition remain a mystery

Read more: Pentagon officially releases three leaked ‘UFO’ videos

The Black Vault, a UFO enthusiast site and clearing house for related government files, recently published approximately 2,700 pages of the declassified documents provided by the CIA. The new disclosure amounts to over 2,700 pages of scanned documents involving Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which is the U.S. government's term for UFOs.

The CIA told the Black Vault that the disclosure includes its "entire" collection of UAP documents, though there's no way to know for sure.

Site founder John Greenewald, Jr. spent decades trying to get his hands on the documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws, and he finally succeeded last year. The CIA dumped the files onto a CD-ROM, so Greenewald uploaded everything to his website on Jan. 7.

The full archive is available for download through the Black Vault site. It consists of 713 PDF files with sequentially numbered titles. Specific cases are impossible to find without opening each document, and some of the documents are decades-old scans that are hard to read.

Nevertheless, the Black Vault has done its best to make each document searchable.

"Many of these documents are poorly photocopied, so the computer can only 'see' so much to convert for searching," Greenewald writes on his website. He also suggested that the CIA had deliberately made the documents hard to parse, perhaps to slow people down.

Greenewald and other eager ET hunters have already started combing through the documents and posting their suspicions online.

The Black Vault hosts more than 2.2 million pages of government documents obtained through approximately 10,000 FOIA requests, Greenewald says.

The site also has a history of obtaining high-profile disclosures. In 2019, for example, a U.S. navy spokesperson confirmed that three leaked government videos of UFOs were legitimate.

Read more: U.S. navy confirms UFO videos from Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge are real

The Pentagon declassified the videos and released them to the public last year, citing the need for pilots to feel comfortable reporting such phenomena.

The disclosure stoked new excitement about the possibility that alien life might have visited Earth, though there remains no definitive proof of such claims.

Speculation flared up again late last year after Israel's former head of space security claimed there was a "Galactic Federation" of aliens who didn't want humans in their club. He also claimed that the heads of the U.S. and Israel were in touch with the aliens, and that the extraterrestrials had helped set up human bases on Mars.

He did not provide evidence to support his claims.

Read more: Aliens and ‘Galactic Federation’ exist, ex-Israeli space chief claims

Congress demanded last December that the Pentagon release some of its classified UAP-related documents within 180 days, as part of a bizarre add-on to the United States' latest COVID-19 relief bill.

The Pentagon is due to brief Congress on the matter in the coming months.

As of this writing, the CIA has not commented on the Black Vault release.

Are we on the cusp of another UFO craze?

By LISA SMITH MOLINARI | Special to Stars and Stripes | Published: January 15, 2021


I dug my slippered heels into our shag carpet and bore deeper into my lime-green vinyl bean bag chair, thoroughly terrified but unable to avert my widened eyes from our console television. The riveting hypnosis scene from the 1975 television movie “The UFO Incident” starring James Earl Jones was imprinting itself permanently into my impressionable 11-year-old brain.

The memory still gives me the willies, 43 years later.

The movie depicted the real-life story of Betty and Barney Hill, an average New Hampshire couple who, while driving home from a holiday in Niagara Falls on a dark, lonely road, claimed to have been briefly abducted, then medically examined, by aliens. In the hypnosis scene, Barney (played by Jones) cries out as he recalls horrifying details buried by traumatic amnesia.

Some researchers hypothesize that stories of alien abductions like Betty and Barney Hill’s gained traction in the 1980s due to media coverage of new reproductive technologies and controversial human experimentation. Others believe that reports of UFO sightings and alien encounters, which began in the 1950s, were simply “cultural mass hysteria” brought on by fear of Cold War nuclear destruction.

Like others of my generation, I remember conspiracy theories about UFOs crashing in Roswell, New Mexico and alien autopsies at Area 51. At the movie theater, I saw “Star Wars,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Alien” and “E.T. the Extraterrestrial.” I said “Nanu-nanu” like Robin William’s alien character in “Mork and Mindy.” I watched “The Jetsons” after school, and giggled when little green Gazoo appeared on “The Flintstones.” I nibbled Pillsbury Space Food Sticks and slurped Tang because that’s what astronauts did.

When you consider our cultural influences, it’s no wonder we were alien-obsessed back then. But, will recent developments in science and technology reconstitute media attention and public suspicions about intelligent life beyond Earth? Are we on the cusp of another UFO craze?

This month, Harvard’s longtime Astronomy Department Chair, Avi Loeb, publishes his new book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” in which he hypothesizes that an interstellar object named Oumuamua which passed through our solar system in 2017 was actually a hunk of alien equipment.

Last month, it was reported that astronomers from the Breakthrough Listen Project, which attempts to detect stray or intentional alien broadcasts, discovered a narrow beam of intriguing radio waves (BLC1) coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. The transmission, which was picked up by the Parkes Telescope in Australia, is the first beam NOT believed to have originated from human-made interference or natural sources. In other words, astronomers believe it may have come from intelligent life.

To complicate matters, new technologies will put more flying objects that could be confused as UFOs into the sky. The United States military currently operates more than 11,000 Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, or “drones”) in support of domestic training events and overseas contingency missions. Military drones — performing secret surveillance/reconnaissance, situational awareness, weapons delivery and battle damage assessment — range in size from the handheld RQ-11B Raven to the 32,000-pound RQ/MQ-4 Global Hawk/Triton, and fly training missions in specially designated U.S. airspace.

Also, the commercial drone industry has limited approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to develop drone fleets to expedite deliveries of small packages to consumers. Commercial drones fly between 200-400 feet overhead and are equipped with anti-collision lights at night. This rapidly growing industry currently has 1.7 million registered drones and 203,000 FAA-certified remote pilots.

With so many flying objects in our airspace and new scientific evidence supporting intelligent life beyond Earth, how are average citizens supposed to know whether the lights they see in the sky are aliens coming to abduct them, or just a flying package of K-cups from Amazon?

As for me, I won’t be looking for flying saucers, because I’ll be too busy bingeing the next alien-themed television series on Netflix, making trips to the nearest Planetarium and rereading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” Who knows? Maybe Pillsbury will bring back Space Food Sticks.

Dare to dream.

Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com, and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com

UFOs: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Collection - The Black Vault