THE UFO CHRONICLES


nam et ipsa scientia potestas est
- Knowledge is Power -

     A BRITISH resident in Cyprus yesterday reported seeing a UFO as he traveled along the Nicosia-Larnaca highway on Wednesday night.

     The man, who did not wish to be identified, said the UFO had been witnessed by several other motorists who had all slowed down their vehicles to watch the spectacle at around 8.45pm.

     “At first I thought it was a helicopter. It was in front of me and as soon as saw it I started slowing down and so did the people in front of me and then it speeded up at an incredible speed, hundreds of miles an hour in seconds and literally disappeared in front of our eyes,” the man said.

     He said the sighting happened at around 8.45pm. He said al the cars in front of him had slowed down trying to digest what they had seen.

     “It was amazing. I don’t know what it was but it was bizarre. It was up in the sky. It looked like the kind of height of a low-flying plane or a helicopter. That’s why I didn’t immediately think it was odd and then as it started to move and speed up I thought, ‘This is weird’. It was bright white sphere of light hovering slowly,”

     The man said he checked online yesterday morning and found that UFO sightings were not all that uncommon in Cyprus.

     “I had heard about UFOs. I’m not a sceptic but I think you can’t really comment unless you have had an experience and for me when I can’t have a sane explanation for what I see… I can’t think of anything else it could be. It was not the kind of thing you could miss. It was incredible,” he added.

     Police said yesterday no one had reported any UFO sighting, as did the Larnaca Airport Control Tower.

     “The only thing written in the log book for that time last night is ‘We need new chairs for the control tower’,” said one Civil Aviation official.

     The official said however that the radar does regularly register what seem to be aircraft but which disappear after three revolutions of the radar.

     “We call them Angels,” said the official adding that they generally put these ‘phantoms’ down to weather interference. “Of course we are angels here ourselves,” he said.

     Ioannis Fakas from the Fakas Institute of Astronomy said nothing had been reported to him either. In fact he said he had been called to Limassol to look at a reported crop circle in a field outside the town.

     He decided however that the crop circle, which was around 150 metres wide, was probably man-made. Crop circles, which are said to be mathematically precise designs imprinted into a field of crops without actually damaging or killing the plants, are often associated with aliens.
Fakas said he believes people see UFO’s but does not believe they are of alien origin. As an astronomer he said he does think it’s logical that life must exist elsewhere in the universe, but does not believe they visit earth.

     He said that research has shown that 93 per cent of all UFO sightings are explainable.
“I don’t believe men from other worlds would come all the way here and then try to hide from us,” he said.

     Whatever they are, UFOs have been spotted over Cyprus on many occasions in the past. In March 2002 a Swiss playwright who had just retired to Paphos, said he spotted a silver, saucer-shaped object 'emerging from the clouds' as he walked along the beach. The UFO apparently hovered before 'floating down' and disappearing behind some rocks."

Linda Leblanc said she and John Knowles, her partner at the Paphos-based Pyschognosia, which looks into paranormal incidents, said they had seen UFOs on several occasions over Coral Bay.

     She said Wednesday’s sighting by the British resident was interesting as there appear to have been other witnesses. “We keep a roving eye on things and of course we are always looking ourselves,” she said.

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     Portland, Me. — A mysterious ship that has been cloaked in secrecy since it docked in Portland's harbour three weeks ago may carry equipment used to observe a U.S. Air Force rocket on a top-secret mission, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

     The rocket's flight path would take it over the ocean on a trajectory roughly parallel to the U.S. and Canadian East Coasts, the Portland Press Herald reported. The air force could launch the rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., as early as Friday.

     The Sage has been tied up at Portland for about three weeks, and people on the waterfront have been speculating about the nature of its mission. Some believe it is has been deployed to track the Space Shuttle Discovery.

     The ship's captain is not talking, and neither are the air force, NASA or Lockheed Martin, a defence contractor that apparently leased the vessel.

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     RNU.com – (Raiders News Update) A feature article this week by Space Daily asks us to "Imagine if the illustrious Sherlock Holmes lived in modern times. He might decide to take on the challenge of solving the mysterious disappearance of the Beagle 2, a British spacecraft that vanished without a trace after entering the atmosphere of Mars on Christmas Day, 2003."

    Perhaps Sherlock would find that the Beagle 2 went the way of many other spacecraft, "vanished" by a mysterious force that is as yet unknown to human explorers. Two-thirds of all international missions to the red planet have failed under similar circumstances, some from technical glitches no doubt, maybe even all of them.

     "On the Other Hand, My Good Watson, the Game is Afoot!"

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      Philip Morrison, one of the youngest physicists to work on the Manhattan Project and a leading voice in post-World War II efforts to contain the bomb, has died. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus, who was also one of the godfathers of the search for extraterrestrial life, was 89.

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WINNIPEG – Local stargazing experts have been fielding dozens of calls from people who spotted a massive meteor in the daytime sky over western Manitoba on Saturday.

Scott Young of the Manitoba Museum's planetarium says calls are coming in "fast and furious" from people who saw or heard the meteor, which passed over Riding Mountain before exploding high over the St. Ambroise area, north of Portage la Prairie.

"About half the people only heard it because of the sonic boom – the explosion – and people were thinking maybe it's a plane crash or something like that. They ran outside and would see this cloud of smoke that was expanding in the upper atmosphere that was visible for tens of minutes," says Young.

"The people who saw it described it as a flaming baseball or a Roman candle with all sorts of flames and trailing smoke arching across the sky and then detonating in a final explosion. Sounds like a spectacular sight."

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     The late comedian Jackie Gleason, reportedly a UFO buff, also receives mention in the book. Back in 1973, Carlson writes, Richard Nixon supposedly took Gleason "to see the preserved remains of space aliens at a secret facility at Homestead Air Force Base. According to the story, the aliens were recovered from a crashed flying saucer back in 1953."

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     One local man reportedly told Westerly police at 8 p.m. that he saw a UFO burning across the evening sky from Shelter Harbor to Misquamicut.

     A young motorist headed toward the beach on Route 78 in Westerly described the blue-green streak in the sky as a "phenomenon."

     It was not a plane. It was not a flare from a boat in distress. But it was a phenomenon, of sorts.

     A meteor shower Sunday night sparked a flurry of frantic phone calls to police departments across New England from people who saw bright lights moving in the sky, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said.

     The FAA announcement came after the eyewitness accounts from boaters, stargazers and concerned callers throughout the Northeast. And law enforcement authorities searched for distress signals on the coast and flaming aircraft. Westerly received two calls about the apparent meteor, police Chief Edward A. Mello said.

     Stonington police received six phone calls from residents informing police that an airplane may have gone down.

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     Houston, Tx -- The Hubble Space Telescope has taken about 750,000 images in its 15 years in space. Now astronomers have released two more pretty pictures to celebrate the anniversary of the telescope's launch on April 24, 1990.

     The images were to be released Monday, but they were provided in advance to the media and were posted to a British Web site Friday afternoon. Space.com contacted the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble, to verify that an embargo had been broken and that the images were now available for publication.

     While Hubble's future is uncertain, its capabilities are unquestioned as the sharp-eyed observatory continues to produce stunning photographs of faraway places.

     The new images are fresh views of two of the most famous objects previously photographed by Hubble.

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      Scientists have recovered precious bits of solar wind from a Colorado-built spacecraft that crashed in the Utah desert last year, information they expect will help them understand the solar system's birth.

     Genesis, a $264 million NASA craft built by Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County, traveled three years and 1.86 million miles to bring solar dust back to Earth.

     NASA had repeatedly said scientists should be able to glean information from the spacecraft's smashed wafers, which collected particles blown off the sun's surface.

     Seven months after the September crash, they've done it, Roger Wiens, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said Wednesday.

     "Several analyses now have shown that we have the solar wind we were looking for," said Wiens, who has been closely involved in NASA's Genesis mission.

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     An alien asteroid belt may have been spotted circling a mature star nearby. The observations, made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, reveal a dense ring of dust around the star that might arise from rocks colliding and smashing each other apart.

     Alternatively, the dust could come from a “supercomet” almost the size of Pluto, said Charles Beichman of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, at a NASA news conference on Wednesday.

     Beichman and his colleagues used Spitzer to observe more than 80 Sun-like stars, including one called HD69830, which lies 41 light years away. Its infrared spectrum suggested it has a thick disc of warm dust grains surrounding it. The dust could be produced in a busy asteroid belt if large rocks are colliding every 1000 years or so, replenishing the ring.

     “These grains are probably the signpost of an asteroid belt around 25 times more massive than that orbiting our own sun,” says Beichman. The dust seems to lie inside an orbit equivalent to that of Venus, much closer to its star than our own asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter.

     Earlier observations had revealed asteroid belts around young, massive stars. But HD69830 is a mature star, about half the age of the Sun and with 20% less mass. If confirmed, the new asteroid belt would be the first detected around a star similar to the Sun.
Rubble shepherds

     “We’re really interested in understanding more about the asteroid belts of mature stars, because they tell us more about our own sun and whether our own planetary system is the norm or exceptional,” says Beichman.

     Astronomers say the amount of rubble is surprising because debris around stars tends to disperse over time. They suspect a giant planet might be trapping the rubble in orbit, just as Jupiter’s gravity shepherds rocks in our own asteroid belt into a series of bands.

     However, so far there have been no direct sightings of any planets around HD69830. And if any existed in the warmer inner regions of the system, they would probably be hostile to life. They would be pelted with rubble and suffer mass extinctions of any life every million years or so, Beichman expects.

     A second possibility is that the dust around HD69830 comes from a giant comet slowly boiling away near the star. But to generate so much dust, the comet would have to be at least 25 times bigger than comet Hale-Bopp, which blazed spectacularly through the skies in 1997. And the required close-in orbit would mean the comet would boil away relatively quickly, making this scenario rather far-fetched.

     Beichman hopes future observations of the star by Spitzer and other telescopes will discover the true source of the dust by pinning down its detailed chemical make-up.

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     HAYWARD — Trying to explain paranormal phenomena has never been at the top of AARP's nationwide agenda, but the local chapter believes retirees might have something to learn about unidentified flying objects.

     UFO investigator Ruben Uriarte of Union City plans to address local retirees during an AARP meeting today at the Hayward Public Library's Weekes Branch on Patrick Avenue.

     Uriarte, 53, the Northern California director of the Mutual UFO Network and a maintenance employee at the New Haven Unified School District, said more and more Bay Area residents are overcoming ridicule to report UFO sightings.

     Uriarte said the Central Valley skyline over Interstate 5 is one of the top spots for sightings.

     "I think people are just becoming more aware," Uriarte said. "There's better communication through the Internet and outreach efforts."

     Uriarte said more reported UFO sightings also mean more hoaxes, but he said his organization has interviewers trained to determine whethersightings could be legitimate.

     "They could be mistaken for other things, but our role is to investigate," Uriarte said.
     "What they are looking for, a lot of times, is an explanation, and we try to provide that."

     Uriarte is scheduled to give a historical overview of the subject of UFOs, along with crop circles.

     The talk is free and expected to begin at 1:30 p.m. and last until about 3 p.m.

     The Weekes Branch is located at 27300 Patrick Ave.

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     Ufo expert reveals what's really out there. In 1991, Nick Pope landed the greatest job in the Government. He worked for the Ministry of Defence fielding hundreds of UFO reports from the public. Known as the real Fox Mulder, he controversially spilled the beans in print after he left his post in 1994. Bizarre beamed him onto the Mothership to discuss anal probes, alien rape and spooky kites...

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     WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military will begin using an elaborate network of cameras and lasers next month to scan the skies over Washington and flash colored warning beams at aircraft that enter the nation's most restricted metropolitan airspace.

     About a dozen high-powered cameras at unidentified locations will be able to zoom in on an airplane anywhere in the restricted airspace, which covers a 30-mile radius around each of the Washington area's three major airports. Red and green laser beams attached to the cameras will then warn the aircraft to leave the area.

     The new warning system will allow North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, officials to constantly scan the area from facilities thousands of miles away, using radar and the infrared cameras with 360-degree capability. Local pilots said they supported the new effort but were concerned that many pilots would not be able to understand what the laser beams mean unless the government launches an intensive education effort.

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     The Russian aviation concern EKIP has signed an agreement on cooperation with Naval Air Systems Command, U.S. Department of Defense company. Two companies will be developing an aircraft that resembles a flying disk. The flying tests of the aircraft are slated for 2007. Its wholesale manufacture should be launched five years later.

     The development of the craft started back in 1992. Despite its initial commitments to allocate funds for the project, the Russian government backed out of the plan in 1995. The company failed to find any Russian investors.

     However, things have recently changed. USA and China expressed interest in the EKIP project. The Americans say that the machine will make a perfect plane to combat forest fires and fly over oil pipelines. EKIP will reserve all the rights for the aircraft while its production can be launched both in Russia and in the USA. Negotiations with China are still in progress.

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     An unmanned NASA spacecraft designed to track and link with other orbiting craft has failed to rendezvous with a US military satellite 765 kilometres above the earth.

     The 225-kilogram Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) craft experienced a mishap in orbit late on Friday that caused it to divert its path, NASA said.

     The DART craft, 1.8 metres long and 90 centimetres in diameter, was supposed to manoeuvre within five metres of the satellite, a NASA spokeswoman said.

     The spacecraft came within 90 metres of its target, a military communications satellite.

     The DART craft was launched from an aircraft at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Friday as part of a $US143 million mission.

     It was designed to test technology to eventually track and dock with other crafts without human guidance or intervention, allowing future unmanned spacecraft to carry cargo to orbiting space stations or repair disabled satellites.

     The DART craft "placed itself in the retirement phase before completing all planned proximity operations, ending the mission prematurely", NASA said.

     NASA would convene a board to investigate the reason for the mishap, the agency said.

     NASA said the DART program accomplished some key goals during its mission, meant to last 24 hours.

     The craft would enter an unstable orbit and burn up within 25 years, NASA said.

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     SCIENTISTS are warning they cannot predict where a giant asteroid will go after it passes close to the Earth.

     The huge ball of rock, labelled 2005 MN4, will pass within 25,000 miles of our planet on Friday, 13 April, 2029. The asteroid is large enough to flatten the state of Texas or part of Western Europe.

     After the near-miss, the Earth’s gravity may deflect the asteroid into a new orbit.

     Dr Benny Peiser, an anthropologist and asteroid hazard expert from Liverpool’s John Moore’s University, said: "In all likelihood it will produce an orbit that will not intercept the Earth, but we don’t know, and that’s the problem."

     Some experts, including former US astronaut Russell ‘Rusty’ Schweickart, are calling for the asteroid to be tagged with a radio transmitter, so scientists can monitor its movements more closely.

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     LANDERS - The Integratron, designed by the engineer George Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine, will be honored as a historical site by the Ancient and Honorable Order of E. Clampus Vitus, Billy Holcomb Chapter 1069, in cooperation with the Morongo Basin Historical Society in a special dedication ceremony at 10:30 a.m. May 1 at the Integratron in Landers.

     Approximately 400 "Clampers" - members of the histoical E. Clampus fraternity - are expected to be in attendance from throughout the Southwest. The public is invited to attend the dedication ceremony and the ensuing docent-led tours.

     The monument's plaque will read in part: "In 1947, (George) Van Tassel began operating the Giant Rock Airport a short distance northeast of here, and in 1953 initiated communications with extraterrestrials. He subsequently hosted 17 spacecraft conventions for UFO enthusiasts.

     "The purpose of the Integratron is the rejuvenation of the human body, similar to recharging a battery, and basic research in time travel.

     "According to Van Tassel, the Integratron is located on an intersection of powerful geomagnetic forces that, when focused by the unique geometry of the building, will concentrate and amplify the energy required for cell rejuvenation. This energy is created by the revolution of an external ring at the shoulder of the building, generating electrostatic forces that are fed to the stator centered in the lower room."

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     Should we be looking for extraterrestrial civilizations, rather than just listening for them, as we do in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project? That is the suggestion of a French astronomer, Luc Arnold, in his paper Transit Lightcurve Signatures of Artificial Objects. He believes that the transit of large artificial objects in front of a sun could be a used for the emission of attention-getting signals.

     In his paper, he describes the expected lightcurve signatures expected from passing objects of various shapes across a sun. The challenge is to use a shape that provides an unambiguous signature.

     In his 1970 classic Ringworld, science fiction author Larry Niven describes the discovery of an enormous artifact; a ring of material that completely surrounds a star, providing a staggering amount of living space. The alien species that discovered the star asks humans for their opinion on what they have found:

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By Nick Pope
4-12-05

     I've been involved in several recent features that have promoted British ufology.The first was an interview in the current (May)issue of Bizarre, a somewhat risque magazine that does nonetheless carry some more informative articles from time to time. The interview's on page 114. I also did a double page feature in Take It Easy, colour supplement to The People - a UK national Sunday newspaper. The feature ran last Sunday.

     Associated with this were six radio interviews (including British Forces Radio), one of which was syndicated to a further 26 local stations.

     The above features were the result of an unusual collaboration between myself and a PR company who had commissioned me to promote the rental release of Species III on DVD and VHS. While some ufologists are uncomfortable about implying a connection between sci-fi and ufology, I take the view that opportunities to promote ufology should be taken when they arise.

     Finally, the May issue of the popular science and technology magazine Focus is now available and features a major article on UFOs. I promise it's got nothing to do with me or Species III.

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Slide Show By Hastings Featuring J. Allen Hynek

Expert gives UFO presentation Monday

By Scott Waltman
American News
4-15-05

     For some reason, aliens seem to have an interest in the nuclear weapons of the United States.

     So says Robert Hastings, an independent expert on unidentified flying objects who will be speaking at Northern State University next week. His 90-minute presentation will begin at 9 p.m. Monday in Room 127 of the Johnson Fine Arts Center.

     Hastings said the declassified documents and on-the-record comments he will share will prove to those willing to listen that UFOs do exist. Most of the documents and comments come from former federal government and military officials.

     After a 30-minute video, Hastings will lecture for an hour.

     One story he will share is from 1967. That's when evidence shows UFOs hovered over missile silos near a Montana Air Force base, temporarily causing the weapons to malfunction.

     "There is, for whatever reason, a nuclear (weapon)-UFO connection," he said.

     Government documents also refer to UFOs violating the airspace over Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hastings said. Many nuclear weapons are designed at the New Mexico lab.

     Hastings said that perhaps the most interesting document in his collection is a 1950 note to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It says that "flying saucers" crashed in New Mexico and were secretly recovered by the Air Force. The craft, according to the memo, were flown by "bodies of human shape, but only three feet tall."

     In all, Hastings said hundreds of government documents available to anybody through the Freedom of Information Act refer to UFOs.

     Hastings was at an air traffic control tower in Montana at the time of the 1967 incident. That's what piqued his interest in UFOs. He's been doing independent research since 1973, reviewing documents and interviewing people. Since starting to lecture at colleges in 1981, he has spoke at more than 500 schools.

     There are skeptics in every audience, Hastings said. However, he said, most people he talks to give him favorable feedback. He said that may be because people who attend his lectures have an interest in UFOs and, perhaps, an inclination to believe in them.

     Reliable public opinion polls show that about half of Americans believe in UFOs, Hastings said.

     Even ardent non-believers are welcomed to Hastings' free talk. He simply reminds detractors that there's a difference between having an opinion and having an informed opinion.

     In publicity information, Hastings writes that he is "not condemning any government agency for its policy of secrecy regarding UFOs, but I believe that the American public should be given the facts."

     Hastings lives in Surfside Beach, S.C. While in this part of the country, he is also speaking in Dickinson, N.D. and Peru, Neb.

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     DEER LODGE — Stories in this dusty cow town come a dime a dozen, hardly a surprise given its hold on the old prison, the new state prison, its historic cattle ranch, and its fabled car museum. But here, 50 miles southwest of Helena, stories of a different sort have become the talk of the town — stories exposed by a former Deer Lodge resident and her new docudrama, "The Secret of Redgate."

     From her Texas home, Lynda Cowen, a 1963 graduate of Powell County High School, attributed the making of her new film to her brother's own UFO encounters as a kid. The results have propelled Deer Lodge to the front of Montana's most mysterious destinations.

     "My brother consciously remembers having a lot of encounters with aliens as a child — playing with them as a child," Cowen explained. "We didn't know anything about them growing up."

     The stories came out years later, grabbing Cowen's interest. She met writer Jim Marrs through her "remote viewing" classes in Texas, and together, the two decided to investigate the stories.

     Cowen returned to her old stomping ground, surprised at how many Deer Lodge residents were willing to come forward with their experiences. She soon had more stories than she could use in her movie.

     "We went back to Deer Lodge for two weeks and found out there were a lot of people with this experience, all the way from young high-school kids to people in their 80s," Cowen said. "No one ever talked about this stuff growing up."

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     The August 6, 1966 issue of Saturday Review magazine had several pieces on “flying saucers” by Science Editor John Lear.

     In one, Lear uses for his set-up the book, Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan and I/S. Shklovskii, and quotes Carl Sagan extensively from an interview with him.

     Sagan advises that there is evidence for extraterrestrial visitors about 10,000 years ago, and goes on to say that such visitors make return visits every 10,000 years. (The aliens who stopped by 10,000 years ago were the ancestors of a peoples we know as Sumerians.

. . . More at RRRGroup.blogspot.com

     A research group at Cambridge think that the universe might once have been packed full of tiny black holes. Dr Martin Haehnelt, a researcher in the group led by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, will present new evidence to support this controversial idea at the Institute of Physics conference Physics 2005 in Warwick.

     Most cosmologists believe that supermassive black holes grew up in big galaxies, accumulating mass as time went on. But Haehnelt says there is increasing evidence for a different view ñ that small black holes grew independently and merged to produce the giants which exist today.

     Haehnelt points to evidence from recent studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This radiation, sometimes called "the echo of the big bang" has been travelling unaltered through space since the universe was just 400,000 years old. At that moment the universe cooled through a critical point, letting CMB radiation travel freely for the first time ñ as though a cosmic fog had lifted. But new evidence shows that 10 to 15 percent of this radiation has been scattered since then. This indicates a re-warming of the universe which nobody had expected.

     Haehnelt explains that this could indicate an era in which small black holes were commonplace. "Matter accreting around a black hole heats up," he explains, "and this heating could be a sign that small black holes were widespread in the Universe at that time."

     If small black holes merged to form the supermassive variety found at the centres of galaxies, there could be telltale evidence. Such a merger begins with two black holes going i