Edmonton hosted a major UFO conference this weekend at the Telus Conference Centre at the U of A. Apparently this was not a big deal for the blogosphere or for the MSM other than local media. Other things got in the way. However it is important since...
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico, where some believe the U.S. military covered up evidence of an alien craft. And this weekend, Edmonton's TELUS World of Science, a respected museum complex, hosted a two-day UFO conference exploring the possibility of intelligent alien life.
Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who maintains that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, told nearly 200 delegates during the conference's opening lecture Friday night at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton that journalists and scientists are ignorant of the evidence supporting the fact that interstellar travellers have visited.
Friedman, who believes government covered up an alleged discovery of alien wreckage and bodies in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, said that many eyewitnesses of UFOs are silenced by a "laughter curtain" and fear ridicule if they report their sightings.
German scientist Von Braun was at Roswell during UFO crash
Before Roswell the first UFO sighting in he United States that included alien bodies occurred in Nebraska in 1884.
There is also the case in 1952 of an apparent extraterrestrial visitor to Flatwoods, W. V.
Then there is the video documented mass sightings that occurred in Arizona in 1997.Apparently Bill Richardson Democratic candidate for U.S. President has some insider knowledge about UFO's. After all his state hosts many kinds of aliens as well as those at Roswell. But it's a question that is not likely to make the YouTube debates, unfortunately.Paradigm Research Group, which held a news conference at the National Press Club yesterday to demand that presidential candidates support a "truth amnesty" to end the "government-imposed truth embargo on the facts confirming an extraterrestrial presence."
The likeliest beneficiary: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who wrote a foreword to the "Roswell Dig Diaries," a UFO book. "As a 25-year-old he was an employee of a secret CIA extraterrestrial liaison program," Webre explained. "He has inside knowledge."
Dan Ackroyd was not at the Telus Conference, too bad, that would have sure generated more publicity for this important event.
Aykroyd is the "Hollywood consultant" for Mufon (it stands for Mutual UFO Network), which seems to involve keeping abreast of developments in the UFO-sighting world and promoting the organisation. "Basically, [Mufon are] scientists from all kinds of disciplines that have formed this group to analyse what is real and what is a hoax. Now you could say every one of them is a fake - that footage of 200 whirling white dots in the sky, or the Phoenix Lights [a series of lights seen over Phoenix, Arizona, in 1997] - which 17,000 people saw - the Tinley Park sightings in Illinois, where whole suburbs saw these triangles and wedges go over at three miles an hour. Is it a mass hallucination? If so, why is it appearing on digital cameras and film? They're coming and going like taxis."
Akroyd is like many of us an amateur UFO buff and Canadian.And Canada has its fair share of UFO sightings.
Canadian UFO Sighting Reports - January - August 2007
Still beside amateurs there are a lot of credentialed scientists who take the study of UFO's seriously. And we have to remember that those who have actually experienced space flight have also seen UFO's.
A statement on a new documentary on the Apollo 11 Moon missions has broken a long silence by United States Astronauts on the reporting of UFOs. The documentary quotes Buzz Aldrin as stating without reservation that the Astronauts saw a UFO that paced them for a time during their journey to the Moon. This information was kept secret by NASA for all of these years. This is an extremely important revelation for UFO believers, and hopefully a nudge for non-believers. The documentary shows us a short piece of UFO footage taken from "later" NASA missions, but says that the object is similar to what the three Astronauts of Apollo 11 saw.
Mr. Aldrin described the UFO as a cylinder, while Armstrong said it was "really two rings" Two connected rings". Collins also said it appeared to be a hollow, tumbling cylinder. He added, "It was a hollow cylinder. But then you could change the focus on the sextant and it would be replaced by this open-book shape. It was really weird."
Even more strange was the experience of Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Armstrong, after they reached the Moon.
According to an Associated Press story of July 20, 1969 published in the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, the astronauts sighted eerie lights inside a crater near the point on the Moon where their lunar lander was due to touch down the next day.
In December 1965, Gemini astronauts James Lovell and Frank Borman also saw a UFO during their second orbit of their record-breaking 14 day flight. Borman reported that he saw an unidentified spacecraft some distance from their capsule. Gemini Control, at Cape Kennedy told him that he was seeing the final stage of their own Titan booster rocket. Borman confirmed that he could see the booster rocket all right, but that he could also see something completely different.
Some Soviet sightings have come from very credible sources, such as Cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev, who in 1979 (while on his way to the Soviet Solyut 6 space station) claimed he saw a UFO turn toward his craft and begin tailing it through space. He gave the following report “It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side, and when we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineering structure, made from some type of metal, approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow......and inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23 to 28 meters away”. When the cosmonaut returned to earth he was debriefed and told never to reveal what he knew, and had his cameras and film confiscated.
Of course there is always the usual explanation for UFO's;
‘UFO’ was a NASA experiment
But weather balloons don't explain the Phoenix Lights or the Tinley Park Wedges nor were they floating past Apollo 11.
Nor does it explain what two experienced pilots saw over Guernsey last April or what occurred over New Zealand that same month.
The Telus Conference was at least balanced between true believers and skeptics unlike the UFO conference last month in California.
"UFOs are as probable as the reality of Atlantis, which is slightly less probable than Bigfoot being real," said John Roesch, 44.
Roesch, a director of corporate planning for the City of Edmonton, is finishing a master's degree in engineering management.
The self-described skeptic attended the conference to learn more about astrophysics.
Wait a minute Atlantis is probable. And so are Giganticus, in North America. Remember Sherlock Holmes first law; "When you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains ,no matter how improbable, is the truth."
So what is a UFO? Well it is just that. An Unidentified Flying Object. As in not-identified. I agree with this guy;
UFO is an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object. It should seem simple enough, but as we know, it’s far from simple. Something so simple has been so corroded by assumptions that we need to make sure we’re all on the same page before entering a discussion about UFOs. When I say “UFO” I mean just that: unidentified somethings. When some of you say UFO you may mean: aliens from outer space, lunatics, crazy people who see things that aren’t there, military-industrial objects, natural phenomena, wishful thinking, people who drink too much and see things, people who take drugs and see things, liars, or hoaxes.
And even though this guy has pictures he still doesn't jump to conclusions as to what they are except that they are UFO's.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or, is it from another world …
Whether or not the “disk-shape” and “slender rectangular” objects in Dave Dunford’s photos are UFOs, they sure are strange.
“I can’t say they’re being piloted by little green men, but they’re UFOs,” said Dunford of Cadillac. “I saw what I saw — they’re unidentified, they’re flying and they’re objects.”
So when they do get identified that is a good thing too, because it still is not an explanation for all UFO sightings, just a specific one. Like that NASA weather balloon explanation or this one;
UFO mystery could be down to a toy!
Following last week's story about strange lights flying around the town, we had dozens of calls and emails from residents who have spotted more unexplained objects in the nightsky.
Air traffic control officials may be at a loss to explain what has been flying around, but many callers believe they know the answer - Chinese lanterns!
Although many still dispute this and claim they are UFOs, some residents called in to say they have been releasing the lanterns into the sky over the past few weekends.
The lights can go up to a great height very quickly.
"We set them off for the kids - they love them," said Karen Redford from Langdale Close, Brownsover.
"I am sure they are the lights that people have been reporting. It seems to have caused quite a stir!"
Of course as I have pointed out here, a lot of UFO sightings, especially those in the U.S. desert states, occur near conveniently located U.S. military bases like Roswell which undertake super secret black ops, which they would rather dismiss as UFO's then what they are really building and testing.
But in doing so they used the UFO phenomena as a propaganda weapon for the Cold War, much like they did the idea of an internal Communist threat to the U.S. Government. And in some minds the two were equated. This was especially true of Hollywood of the Fifties.
The Robertson Panel: the Cia Considers UFO's
1918-1939 is sometimes called “the golden age of aviation” because of the much technological advancement made in aircraft. With World War II came better, faster airplanes and more experienced pilots. By the time the war was over, air travel was becoming firmly established across the world. The skies became the highways of the future. People started looking up in curiosity. What they saw in the skies was sometimes mundane, but sometimes astonishing. The UFO age had begun.
The early 1950s saw a surge of civilian UFO reports. So serious had the problem become, that normal intelligence duties in the CIA were being seriously impacted. Authorities were worried that if the Soviet Union or another adversary attempted to invade the US, the lines would be clogged and the government would be unable to act, so serious had UFO hysteria become. Clearly, something had to be done.
The CIA responded by forming a committee to investigate the thousands of UFO reports and choose a course of action. The committee, headed by Howard Percy Robertson came to be known as The Robertson Panel. Robertson was a distinguished physicist, a CIA employee, and a director of the Defense Department Weapons Evaluation Group. He drew upon six friends and colleagues of scientific importance to fill the panel. Some of the more famous scientists on the board were Luis Alvarez, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1968; and Samuel A. Goudsmit, who was a head of one division of the Manhattan Project and jointly proposed the theory of the electronic spin. Other members were Frederick C. Durant, missile expert; Thornton Page, astrophysicist; Lloyd Berkner, physicist; and Allen Hynek, astronomer.
The Robertson Panel wasted no time in formulating their official report. They concluded that 90% of UFO sightings could be readily identified with meteorological, astronomical, or natural phenomenon, and that the remaining 10% could be explained with detailed study. They furthermore stated that such study would be a waste of time. Their final recommendation stated “That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”
Based on their recommendations, a public relations committee was assembled to reduce public interest in UFOs. Believers subscribing to such notions were painted as foolish and irrational. This effort drew upon the resources of renowned scientists as well as celebrities and mass media. Even the influential Disney Corporation was involved in the debunking effort. From this point forward UFology has been seen in disrepute among scholarly circles, and UFOs have become a subject of the fringe communities.
A 22-year study by the Air Force of nearly 13,000 claimed sightings of UFOs ended with three no's:
No unidentified flying object evaluated by the Air Force was ever found to threaten national security.
No evidence submitted concerning UFOs represented evidence of technology or scientific principles beyond modern knowledge.
No evidence indicated that any of the sightings was of an extraterrestrial vehicle.
The Project Blue Book report, based on 12,618 UFO sightings reported between 1940 and 1969, remains the federal government's final word on the subject.
"Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the Air Force," according to a government fact sheet on the matter.
A 1997 paper issued by the CIA Centre for the Study of Intelligence titled CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs 1947-90 by Gerald K. Haines points out "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned (secret) reconnaissance flights over the US. This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project".
Thus the Australian Government was secretly informed that UFO sightings were US spy craft, while the US population was kept in the dark, fuelling UFO conspiracy theories active even today.
The formerly secret study concludes: "Like the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the UFO issue will probably not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says. The belief that we are not alone in the universe is too emotionally appealing and the distrust of government is too pervasive to make the issue amenable to traditional scientific studies of rational explanation and evidence."
Secrecy about UFOs and Extraterrestrials shows the true colours of an aspiring U.S. Global Empire
Although stories of strange objects in the sky go far back in time, the problem received little attention until World War II. At that time, military personnel from Allied and Axis countries reported unconventional objects in the sky, eventually known as foo fighters. In retrospect, this development is not so surprising. First, human aviation had become widespread for the first time. Above the clouds, thousands of pilots suddenly had the kind of visibility that no one ever had before. A second reason was the invention of radar, which extended the range of human vision by electronic means. Moreover, it seemed reasonable to assume that the odd sightings were related to the war itself, perhaps experimental technology.
One might have expected such sightings to vanish after the war's end in 1945. Instead, they increased. In Europe in 1946, then America in 1947, people saw and reported objects that could not be explained in any conventional sense. Wherever sightings occurred, military authorities dominated the investigations, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Unknown objects, frequently tracked on radar and observed visually, were flying within one's national borders and, in the case of the United States, over sensitive military installations. The war was over. What was going on here?
Initially, some Americans feared that the Soviet Union might be behind the "flying saucer" wave. This possibility was studied, then rejected. At a time when the world's fastest aircraft approached the speed of 600 mph, some of these objects exceeded - or appeared to exceed - 1,000 mph. What's more, they manoeuvred like no aircraft could, including right angle turns, stopping on a dime, and accelerating instantly. Could the Soviets really have built something like that? If so, why fly them over all over America and Western Europe? To experts, the idea seemed farfetched at best, and fifty years later, their conclusion stands.
If not Soviet, could the objects have been American? The possibility was studied and rejected for the same reasons. The speed of sound was not broken until October of 1947: was it really credible that, prior to this, the Americans had secretly discovered a hypersonic anti-gravity technology?
Let us pause here to assess the situation. What we can see is that, at some point during the mid-1940s, the intelligence apparatus of the United States, as well as of several other nations, had reason to believe that there were artefacts in the skies that did not originate from America, Russia, Germany, or any other country. Within the U.S., these objects violated some highly sensitive military air space, and did not appear to be natural phenomena. One may presume that the affected national security authorities made it an immediate obsession to determine the nature and purpose of these objects, and we may infer that the issue probably became a deep secret by 1946, or 1947 at the latest.
And speaking of commies from outer space, the famous Hill case has those undertones, an attempt to discredit local civil rights activists who were an interracial couple in the beginning days of that movement.
It is the first documented alien abduction and Stratham resident Kathleen Marden has intimate knowledge of all the details.
Marden has released an in-depth account of the abduction this month titled, "Captured!: The True Story of the World's First Documented Alien Abduction, The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience," written with the help of ufologist Stanton T. Friedman. The book reveals never before published, eye-witness accounts of the Hills' extraordinary encounter with the space vehicle, 11 alien figures and the hypnosis sessions that exposed their onboard experiences.
The Hills said they encountered a flying saucer on Sept. 19, 1961, while on a trip through New Hampshire's White Mountains.
Marden was 13 when her aunt called the next day to notify her family. Marden said she sat listening near the phone. "My mother told me what Betty said ... that they had a close observation of a UFO and that it had come down low enough so that they could see a double row of windows with a red light on each side," she said. "She told my mother that Barney went into a field and had actually seen the occupants of the craft and that when they were driving rapidly away from the area, the craft hovered, probably over the vehicle, and they heard a series of beeping, code-like beeping sounds, on the trunk of the vehicle."
The lives of her aunt and uncle, who were social and political activists, are also discussed in the book. The two were active in the civil rights movement, were two founding members of the Rockingham County Community Action Program, and were very involved in church, Marden said.
Question: There was a TV movie in the 1970s about an interracial couple abducted by a UFO. Can you tell me the title and if it's on video?
Answer: That's "The UFO Incident," a 1975 TV movie with Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones as the couple and Lou Wagner as "The Leader." The movie isn't currently on video.
So if UFO's are a relic of the cold war why are we seeing an increase in their activity, especially in the former Soviet Union.
The Zond center for the study of anomalous phenomena claims that Ukraine has seen an increase in UFO activity over recent years. "While in the 1990s we had 10 to 15 reports a year, now their number has increased to 20-30. Most of them are accompanied by photos and videos. Witnesses understand that if they have seen something unusual in the sky they must tell researchers about it," said Artyom Bilyk, the center's learned secretary.
In scientists' view, the increase in reported sightings is explained by the proliferation of technology, as more and more people have access to cameras, video cameras, camera phones and so on. But even controlling for the increase in available technology, the UFO phenomenon is now observed more often than before.
UFOs attacking Ukraine. Video
UFO - A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY?
Researchers are not joking when they say UFO appearances over Ukraine may threaten its national security. "Such flying machines may well be spying apparatus sent by other countries, or flying test prototypes from within and outside Ukraine," Bilyk said.
In addition, UFOs may pose a direct threat to witnesses' health and safety.
UFOs interacting with the environment sometimes produce distortions in biological life (altering plants and animals), increase radioactivity or electro-magnetic fields, and generate other fields of an unknown nature. Occasionally UFOs leave noticeable environment effects.
The Truth is Out There.
Even when it comes to revealing faked UFO sightings.
Remember the badass "UFO in Haiti" video that was all the rage last week? Big surprise, guys: It was a fake. The LA Times did some investigating and figured out just who was behind the convincing video. Yeah, I know, you wanted to believe. But it turns out the video was an exercise by a French computer animator who did work for the Michel Gondry stunner Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The UFO video was just an experiment, something he whipped up in one day and threw online. He did it as a test for a movie he's working on, but wasn't trying to make a viral hit or anything. Because somehow he didn't realize that an amazingly realistic and awesome UFO video would catch on on YouTube. Welcome to the internet, Frenchy. [LA Times]
For an interesting web page check out Best UFO Resources
SEE:
UFO News
Suffield Base Canada's Area 51
Cryptozology Part 1
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