'Why Would Anyone Promote a Space Alien/Hybrid Fetus Hypothesis in the First Place?'

Five years ago this little dead thing was the star of Steven Greer’s crowd-funded documentary “Sirius.” Now, it’s giving him the momentum to promote a four-hour $85 per ticket conspiracy marathon in May. (Credit D. Tarr)

He’s doing it for America

Still recovering from how the mainstream media went bounding off last week for that bogus Buzz Aldrin-lie detector-space aliens nothin’burger. Yeah, they all went for it. The very same crowd that glommed onto last month’s exemplary reporting from defense-industry journalist Tyler Rogoway. Rogoway’s stuff went viral for using FOIA to acquire recorded exchanges among airline pilots, air traffic control, and the FAA as they tried to make sense of UFOs injecting themselves into crowded commercial corridors. But the corporate newsies, at

By Billy Cox De Void 4-13-18

least in terms of numbers, made no distinction between FAA data and the Aldrin hoax. And I’m too bummed out to rehash the Buzz particulars here.

What’s most disappointing is, just when I was hoping the MSM might’ve turned the corner on discernment and proportion, this week’s snipe hunt comes on the heels of last week’s equally sensationalized non-news headlines about the deformed remnants of a miscarriage discharged into a Chilean desert a couple of hundred years ago. Wonder how many expectations were dashed by the announcement:

Nope, sorry folks, buzzkill, the unfortunate little specimen isn’t a space alien after all – just one of those curiosities that happens in vitro from time to time.

Why would anyone promote a space alien/hybrid fetus hypothesis in the first place? Well, not just anybody would. But Steven Greer, the Disclosure Project/“Ambassador to the Universe” guru, isn’t just anybody. In 2013, he featured the little dead bugger in a conspiracy documentary called “Sirius.” De Void took a peek at it back when the six-inch cadaver’s origins were still a mystery. Had this recent reality check – published in the journal “Genome Research” by genetic scientists at two California institutions – arrived without Greer banging the drum for ET DNA for the past five years, how many people would’ve paid attention?

Look, De Void is about to take a week’s worth of vacation, so I don’t feel like putting much thought into this blog today (obviously). And if there’s anything you want to sound off on between now and when I get back, let ‘er rip, OK, just don’t expect your posts to instantly pop up, on account of the ongoing spam avalanche that now requires me to approve each and every comment, which sucks. But I’m signing off with this latest disappointment for one reason: the media’s not-a-space-alien-baby-after-all lovefest has resuscitated the otherwise neglected and irrelevant Steven Greer. This week, his email teasers for coverage have been incessant. And you know what? Here’s the surprise: I’m finally beginning to come around. I’m beginning to think the man is onto some true clarity.

Clarity doesn’t come cheap. That’s why he’s forced to charge up to $6,000 for “Ambassador to the Universe” training seminars. And after watching his visionary video-link rebuttal of the “Genome Research” magazine article, I can only pray there’s not a Jack Ruby at the corner of the frame hoping to nip it in the bud.

According to Greer, the desiccated corpse, nicknamed Ata, for the Atacama Desert, where it was discovered, is “probably a PLF – a programmed life form” from Out There, the same place The Truth Is. But you’re dead wrong if you think this controversy is about a stinkin’ mini-corpse. Greer says “the future of the human race … is at stake here.” And he’s rightfully demanding to know who – who specifically, at the NY Times, the BBC, CNN, etc. – got co-opted to parrot the “outrageously wild, implausible conclusions” drawn by authors of the “Genome Research” piece.

Here’s the good news. Greer’s links show me how to obtain the unfettered truth. For $19.95, I can buy the DVD explainer “Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World’s Greatest Secret,” plus I get the accompanying book thrown in for free. For free. Or for $14.99, I can get a streaming version of “Unacknowledged: The Campaign That Ends Illegal UFO and Free Energy Secrecy.” Or for $155, I can buy an entire DVD catalogue of Greer’s clarity, “The Untold History of Disclosure.”

But yo, wait up, I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet:

Instead of shrinking from the “kleptocracy of the petro-fascists” who control the world, Greer is doubling down. On May 12, in Tempe, Arizona, the truth-teller the Deep State fears most will be getting revenge with a four-hour presentation that’s so long, it can barely be contained with mere words. It’s called, verbatim, “The Atacama Coverup: How Global Disclosure is being hijacked by the Intelligence Community AND Close-Encounters of the 5th Kind: The Ultimate Civil Disobedience Action.” Just $85 a ticket. Can’t make it in person? You’re covered. Just $35 for the webinar.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m only one person – what can one person possibly do to fight back? Here’s how: Demand an investigation into academic misconduct. Greer is dispensing phone and email contacts to Stanford University’s Office of General Counsel. Stanford researchers were among those who studied Ata. Also: Bombard the Cold Harbor Genome Laboratory Press with email complaints, too. Greer has that contact info as well. Let them know you’re onto their shenanigans and you won’t let them get away with it.

If the media doesn’t cover Greer’s presentation in Tempe, we’ll know they’ve been silenced by the petro-fascists.

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See Also:

Controversial Study of a Remains Who Ufologists Called ‘Alien’

Alleged Alien Remains Confirmed as Human – Research Protocols in Question

UFO Documentary Reveals “Humanoid of Unknown Classification” | UFO NEWS

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Airline Pilots Protest U.S. Government Secrecy on UFOs: the Big Story the Elite Media Buried

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By Robert Hastings The UFO Chronicles 1-3-16

     On December 22, 1958, a New Jersey newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, published the startling article above.

The key passages follow here:

A group of more than 50 top commercial airline pilots, all veterans of more than 15 years with major companies, yesterday blasted as ‘bordering on the absolute ridiculous’ the Air Force policy of tight censorship, brush-off and denial in regard to unidentified flying objects—flying saucers.

One termed the Air Force policy ‘a lesson in lying, intrigue and the Big Brother attitude carried to the ultimate extreme.’ Each of the pilots has sighted at least one UFO, the majority several...‘ We are ordered to report all UFO sightings,’ said one, ‘but when we do, we are treated like incompetents and told to keep quiet...’ This pilot also pointed to a Joint Chiefs of Staff order giving top radio priority to UFO reports anywhere in the world and specifying that any pilot who fails to maintain absolute secrecy afterwards is subject to a maximum of ten years in jail and a fine of $10,000.’

The “order” mentioned was a regulation promulgated by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—the heads of the military services—designated JANAP-146, which required military and commercial pilots who had sighted a UFO to immediately file, while still airborne, a CIRVIS (Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings) report. The purpose of such real-time reporting, including a required mention of the unidentified aerial object’s altitude and direction of flight, was to allow the nearest U.S. Air Force base to launch fighters to investigate the sighting.

The regulation also mandated strict secrecy relating to a given report, warning the pilot involved that he would potentially risk severe penalties if he filed a CIRVIS report and subsequently discussed the sighting publicly.

This rare journalistic breach in UFO-related security—essentially a public protest by dozens of highly respected professional pilots—was quickly bottled-up. No wire service picked up the article—which would have potentially resulted in it being published in hundreds of newspapers nationwide—and there was no investigative follow-up of what was clearly a major story by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME magazine, or any other journalistic heavy-hitter in the U.S.

Indeed, by 1958, the American elite media had essentially ceased to publish/broadcast serious stories about the UFO phenomenon, instead going for dismissive, light-hearted articles and broadcasts which poked fun at persons who reported “flying saucers”, followed-up by pronouncements by U.S. Air Force public relations personnel which assured Americans that UFO sightings were due to misidentified manmade aircraft or not widely-recognized meteorological/astronomical phenomena—and certainly not the result of something as exotic as spacecraft from elsewhere in the universe.

However, beginning in the 1970s, as the result of various Freedom of Information requests, unauthorized disclosures by former military and intelligence agency personnel, and the findings of one U.S. Senate hearing, the public gradually became aware of a concerted, covert campaign by the CIA to use the media to influence public opinion on various national security-related subjects and situations, including UFO sightings. This decades-long propaganda program is thoroughly documented in The Missing Times: Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up,by the late journalist Terry Hansen, which is available as a $2.99 e-book at Amazon.

And, apparently, the CIA’s UFO-debunking media campaign is continuing. As recently as 2013, the agency issued a tweet, alleging that roughly half of all UFO sightings in the late 1950s were the result of its secret U-2 spy plane flights. This absurd claim had already been discredited—the first time it was made—by UFO researchers who published vetted UFO databases which demonstrated that the vast majority of UFO sightings during that era could not even remotely be associated with U-2 overflights. Indeed, the CIA’s claim had even been dismissed by former USAF UFO Project Blue Book chief, retired Lt. Col. Robert Friend, who had gone on-the-record, saying that there was no link.

More recently, the Smithsonian Channel broadcast an episode of its UFOs Declassified series, titled “Pilot Eyewitness” which very obviously tried to discredit UFO sightings by commercial pilots, while at the same time pointedly omitting any mention of the CIA-orchestrated cover-up of one of them—the 1986 Japanese Airlines incident in Alaska—according to retired Federal Aviation Administration supervisor John Callahan, who has openly discussed a CIA-directed meeting at FAA headquarters shortly after the incident.

While the program noted Callahan’s revelations about the existence of the meeting—after all, he had already discussed it in various interviews available on YouTube—it carefully avoided mentioning the lead CIA officer’s admonishment to Callahan and the other attendees, “This event never happened, we were never here, we’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.”¹

And why was such secrecy warranted? According to Callahan, the officer said that if the government “ever came out and told the American public that [the aircraft crew] ran into a UFO out there, it would cause panic across the country.”²

My two previous articles, I’m Not a UFO Expert but I Play One on TV and Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified: Simple Debunking or CIA Disinformation? discuss the network’s biased and inaccurate portrayal of the UFO phenomenon and ask whether incompetent research and prejudice—or, on the other hand, intentional misreporting—is responsible for the glaringly propagandistic series.

Perhaps significantly, a longtime Smithsonian organization employee, Frederick C. Durant III, was a former CIA analyst and the author of the agency’s 1953 Robertson Panel Report in which CIA-sponsored scientists recommended secretly using the mass media to debunk UFO sightings. The previously-mentioned book, The Missing Times,presents several documented examples of covert agency influence on the reporting of UFO-related stories by the elite media over the years and is highly-recommended.

While a number of airline pilots—from various countries—have in recent years begun going on-the-record about their personal UFO sightings, the topic is still largely taboo in the industry and the elite media. Hopefully, in the future, more and more pilots will follow the example set by their predecessors in 1958 and bravely discuss the hidden reality so clearly and defiantly reported in the Newark Star-Ledger article.

References:

1. Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, Harmony Books, New York, 2010, pp. 222-229

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdT_5eCZaRo

Visit Robert's Site ►

See Also:

Smithsonian Channel’s UFOs Declassified: Simple Debunking or CIA Disinformation?

I’m Not A UFO Expert But I Play One on TV: Smithsonian Channel’s New Debunking Series

Thousands of Airline Pilots Witness UFOs

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

“…The Dreck That Passes For UFO Coverage in America…”

Fried-brain recovery

By Billy Cox De Void 3-17-15

      It occurs to me, as I scrape the crust from my eyelids and glance at the March calendar over there, that I haven’t posted a single item this month. So I have a confession to make. I blacked out on March 4, somewhere around the second sentence of a blog by Alan Boyle on NBC’s website. The part where it said “Surveys consistently show that about a third of all Americans think alien spaceships are real.”

Boyle posted a link to a 2012 National Geographic Channel survey about UFOs — not “alien spaceships” — in which 36 percent of respondents said they “believe” in UFOs, whatever that means. To fill up the rest of the white space, he threw in the old appeal-to-authority fallacy with this graph:

"'Why is the evidence so poor?’ said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and director of the Center for SETI Research. ‘One really good case might clinch it for them.’" I remember reading that part just before I hit the floor. (Shostak has made a career of saying there’s no good UFO evidence, but when presented with evidence, he recuses himself from reviewing it on the grounds that he’s not an expert.)

Anyhow, here’s what I think happened immediately after ingesting the latest corporate jellybeans. I think I’d been pretending for way too long that my capacity for absorbing the dreck that passes for UFO coverage in America was infinite. I thought the human brain had no need for bilge pumps, that it could just soak up every last drop of pointlessness without consequences, that everything you didn’t need would auto-purge via aeration or some other natural process requiring no manual input. Instead — with a final hosing from NBC — the sludge evidently slopped over its containment walls and splashed onto some neural circuitry. A pop and fizz of sparks, a thin puff of smoke, flickering lights, and that's all it took to crash the whole system.

When the skilled technicians who huddled with me in recovery showed off what remained of the filter, the results were gruesome. The screen was clotted in decades of gnarly slag, an opaque buildup of winks & nods, cliches, puns and hyperbole; the entire unit had to be replaced. Medical professionals suggested I quit De Void altogether and try filling the cleared space with something of value, something tangible or, failing that, something with a healthy resolution as a possible outcome.

I suspect they’re right. De Void began reviewing what passed for headlines on The Great Taboo over the last two weeks and realized I hadn’t missed anything. Some people were still arguing about the Roswell alien slides, even though they’re not going to be released for another two months. That's an efficient and productive use of time. And there were the usual unending squabbles over the authenticity of still and video images at home and abroad. The only person trying to forge new ground was Jimmy Kimmel, whose job as a comedian gave him cover to nudge President Obama into a shallow conversation on UFOs. Safely cushioned with the prerequisite good-natured gibes and audience laughter, the exchange mirrored his 2014 chat with Bill Clinton, which left the hard-cores combing through scraps of body language to interpret for clues to the truth.

So this is the first day of the rest of my life. It's St. Patrick's Day and I'm still alive and I'm grateful for this second chance. It's time to save my brain and start writing about little green men.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

"Corporate Media’s Latest Orgy of Ineptitude Over UFOs — AGAIN"

"...The Pathetic State of The Mainstream Media’s UFO Coverage"

The Missing Times - News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

"Corporate Media’s Latest Orgy of Ineptitude Over UFOs — AGAIN"

At least nobody got killed

By Billy Cox De Void 1-24-15

     Don’t even waste your time reading this one today, because it’s so inside baseball, so utterly constipated and confounding I want to set my head on fire and swan-dive into a pond of gasoline. Yeah, that’s right, it’s the corporate media’s latest orgy of ineptitude over UFOs — AGAIN — so you guys can just step back and move right along while I ingest an emetic and hurl.

Whoa whoa whoa. Whoa. At ease. Deep breath, visualize world peace. Context first. Remember the context.

Ahem. OK:

In 1970, shortly after shutting down Project Blue Book, the Air Force moved its UFO files to Maxwell AFB in Huntsville, Ala. And just to settle on definitions, these weren’t actually formal studies. As Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla, the Blue Book director, stated in 1968, “Our primary responsibility is to collect data and then check the subjective material to see what the stimulus might be . . . We're not an investigative force. . . . We collect data. It's a misnomer to think we investigate.”

Furthermore: These files were never secret; you had to schedule an appointment, but you could read them yourself. Among the first to comb through the 100,000-plus hard-copy documents was Fund for UFO Research founder Don Berliner. In 1974 or thereabouts, Berliner spent a week at Maxwell, writing down names of the eyewitnesses for potential followup material. Some of those names were found only in newspaper articles; Blue Book was big on collecting and saving clippings.

The files were shipped from Maxwell to the National Archives and Records Administration in 1975 and compressed into 94 spools of microfilm. "A lot of people wanted to see them," says Berliner. "They were really popular.” So, in 1976, reservists Xeroxed the stuff for transfer into public-release microfilm. But with a hitch. A USAF review board ordered the worker bees to black out eyewitnesses' names. “They even censored the names of people mentioned in the newspaper accounts,” says Berliner. “They cited privacy reasons, but that didn’t make much sense to me, considering how the names had been available for so long. What it meant was, if you were a researcher, you couldn’t go back and reinvestigate the cases.”

Nevertheless, even though Berliner — and who knows how many others — had already recorded eyewitness names before the clampdown, FUFOR decided to purchase the entire catalogue of censored Blue Book microfilm. And that was pretty much that, until 1998, when one of Berliner’s associates who was visiting NARA called to say he was actually looking at the raw unedited microfilm records, complete with unredacted names. “I said are you sure? He said yeah, they’re on the original 16 millimeter film. So I told him to use our credit card and order a complete set.” FUFOR sprang for about $3,000. “But we got the original version with all the names.” So much for the embargo..

In 2007, a history website digitized the Archives’ censored version of Blue Book and placed them online. It wasn't newsy enough to rate MSM coverage back then. A year or so ago, just for grins, Berliner called the Archives and asked if he could see the original uncensored 16 millimeter files, “and they said ‘Absolutely not.’ I said ‘Well, would you like a copy? I’ve got one.’ They didn’t think that was very funny.”

So try to imagine the bewilderment, in extremely small hardcore circles, over the MSM clusterf*#! when the Open Minds website announced on Jan. 12 how those Blue Book files — the ones with the censored names, which have been languishing in the public domain online for nearly eight years — were now available in John Greenewald’s Black Vault database without charge. Greenewald, a Los Angeles rez, has been downloading FOIA-acquired government documents — on UFOs and other federal matters — onto his site since he was a teenager in the Nineties. What happened a week after Open Minds produced its piece caught Greenwald off guard, as he states in an email to De Void: “I never claimed this is the first time they hit the web, but rather, I got them compiled then just converted them to a much easier to use format. Crazy how the media works sometimes.”

Crazy? That’s being charitable.

From the New York Daily News to the Washington Post, from Fox News to the Chicago Sun Times, this sucker couldn’t have made a bigger splash if Larry Flynt belly-flopped from the second floor. And the reliable cliches (“The truth is out there — now on the web,” USA Today; “Is the truth out there?”, Christian Science Monitor; “It’s enough to make Mulder and Scully seethe with envy,” CNN) were the least of it. This was a magpie chorus to see who could mangle the most facts with the least effort possible (“Blue Book was shut down in 1985 ...”, Fox31 Denver). Even the Air Force Times screwed it up, calling it the “Air Force’s top secret files on sightings ... by a California man who spent nearly 20 years hounding the government to produce them.”

NBC’s Today Show anchor Natalie Morales alerted the nation with this especially piquant intro: “The U.S. Air Force just released the files to a top secret government program called the Project Blue Book, launched to investigate more than 12,000 UFO sightings ... NBC News has reached out to the Air Force and we are waiting for a response.”

(Psst, Natalie: You're still waiting because they don't take you seriously, girl ...)

Again, just to reiterate, the media had kittens over the Blue Book files sans noms. Were Greenewald's Black Vault database all he had to work with, Minnesota researcher Tom Tulien never would’ve been able, in 2011, to add eyewitness gravitas to his indictment of the arguably most significant and embarrassing UFO incident in the USAF’s official records. This one involved a UFO incursion over the Strategic Air Command base in Minot, N.D., in 1968. Seriously, check it out at minotb52ufo.com This one’s got everything — nuclear missiles, security-team recon, air and ground sightings, radio communications outages, and radarscope confirmation from a B-52 in flight. The brass didn’t know what the hell to make of that one. They officially blamed everything from Sirius to Vega to plasmas to ball lightning. Nearly 50 years later, the USAF veterans who were there remain incredulous over the whitewash.

“The story’s good, it’s remarkable,” says Tulien, “but the real value is what it tells us about Air Force procedures and protocols. Blue Book was always a public relations stunt — you just don’t find SAC investigating UFO cases. But that’s exactly what happened this time because this was serious. And the Minot report fell right through the cracks.”

Minot was so good, with an assist from Tulien, even Peter Jennings took a peek and included it in ABC's “UFOs: Seeing is Believing” in 2005. But Jennings’ cursory report barely scratched the surface. Imagine the impact the media could make if it directed national attention to the night The Great Taboo punctured American security surrounding the most dangerous weapons the world has ever known. But press coverage of real news? That would be even more unbelievable.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

Air Force UFO Files 'Have Been On-Line for Years'

Air Force UFO Files: Media Misinforms; Greenewald Sets Record Straight

Project Blue Book Declassified - Really?

USAF UFO Project Blue Book Files Go Online for Free

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Air Force UFO Files: Media Misinforms; Greenewald Sets Record Straight

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By John Greenewald The UFO Chronicles 1-22-15

     First off, I never, EVER, made it appear these documents were newly declassified. The media created that, and many outlets copied each other. Many of the stories you see, I was never even interviewed for, yet I am quoted extensively.

Second, I went out of my way to say these documents have been available, even in some places online, during the course of the interviews I did do. But, I converted them to a comprehensive and user friendly database, that quite simply was a format that was not available anywhere else and this was the first time the public could get unrestricted access to them. IE: it was free, required no registration, was searchable, and you could download them all with a few clicks in PDF format.

Third, I gave credit to the investigator who compiled the 130,000 jpeg images, which he then started circulating for someone to figure out how to convert them to a better format about 8 months ago. For a couple months, no one did anything with them (but circulated a torrent file), and although I offered to help store the files on the web, I felt I wasn’t smart enough to convert them to something that was web-friendly. After about 3 months, and I noticed no one cared or was able to take the project to the next level, with the full knowledge of the one who compiled the data, I built the entire database. Converted 130,000 jpeg images (which are just about as useless as microfilm, but at least they were digitized) to a user friendly format.

Here was the full process

• I created the scripts to convert the 130,000 jpegs into more than 10,000 .pdfs

• I then created acrobat action scripts to OCR (text recognition) 10,000 pdfs and at the same time, created filters to pass the images through to make them more readable to the human eye then their existing format

• I then programmed the entire site in HTML 5, built the indexes broken down by decade, and uploaded the 220GB of material to my server

• I then created a massive search engine that mined the 10,000 pdfs and created a searchable index which is what you see today

The original compiler wanted no credit but to that of a nickname which is what I’ve given out and posted on my page as the top, #1, credit.

There have been a select FEW that are going around claiming quite a bit, and attacking me personally. What the media says, or reports on, is out of my control but I have done everything to the best of my ability to circulate the proper information, nothing but the facts, and give credit to where credit is due.

At the end of the day, the media and the hundreds of thousands of people a day who are now hitting the archive obviously were not aware these records were available, so even though some of the news stories became factually incorrect, who cares? Regardless of that fact we can easily set them straight on, the mass media attention, much of which is very good press, is all fantastic for this field.

Those that are beating a dead horse, are simply wasting time.

Visit John's Site . . .

See Also:

Project Blue Book Declassified - Really?

USAF UFO Project Blue Book Files Go Online for Free

AREA 51: U-2s, UFOs and Operation Blue Book – Recent Declassified CIA Documents

Air Force Investigation into UFOs – Vintage Interview | Project Blue Book | VIDEO - 1966

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Project Blue Book Declassified - Really?

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By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 1-20-15

"the only 'news' here is that John has provided us with another site where we can see these files"

      I’m watching the ABC Evening News, something I attempt to avoid because there is so little news in the broadcast (but that’s another story) and they tell me that the Project Blue Book files are now declassified and on line. I’m wondering what they mean because they have been on line for quite some time.

They’re referring to John Greenwald’s efforts to post all of these files at his Black Vault website, and his effort is commendable. But NICAP had many of the files on line for years and I have never found a gap in the Fold 3’s Blue Book files also on line. Or, in other words, the only “news” here is that John has provided us with another site where we can see these files.

ABC also seemed to suggest that this was something new. The Air Force had finally released all of the files of its investigation, except, of course, they did that in 1976. I made a trip down to Maxwell Air Force Base and spent time going through the files*. Anyone could have done it but the fact the files had been declassified hadn’t been announced publically. There had been some sort of announcement in an Air Force bulletin that I happened to see, so I made arrangements to take a look.

And once those files were transferred to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., they were more accessible to the public. You could buy the microfilm copies for something like eight or ten dollars a roll back then, but there were ninety some rolls of them. Over the years I actually managed to obtain a full set of the microfilms, so I’ve had all of the Blue Book files in my office for a couple of decades.

The statistics “announced” by ABC didn’t tell the whole story either, and they seemed to think Blue Book began as a result of the Roswell UFO crash (Roswell isn’t even mentioned in the Blue Book files except a short paragraph in a newspaper clipping that is part of another file), but actually the idea for an investigation can be traced back to December 1946 and probably had more to do with the Ghost Rockets of Sweden and some sightings in the US than it did with either Roswell or the Kenneth Arnold sightings. I laid this out in Government UFO Files, along with documentation to support the idea.

They said that 701 cases of the some 12,000 remained unidentified but the truth is that many of the cases are labeled, but not identified. These are labeled as “insufficient data for a scientific analysis.” In many of those cases all the information necessary for a complete investigation is included, but it is labeled that way. This was an attempt to reduce the number of unidentified cases by labeling them as something else and that is all that it was.

In addition to that, many cases that are labeled with a solution are clearly in error. For example, the Portage County UFO chase of 1966. (It was on April 17 and involved several police officers, deputy sheriffs and their supervisors and a stylized version was seen at the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. See also my posting here on May 20, 2014 for more information.). It has been explained as a combination of Venus and a satellite. The police officers saw the satellite in the west and as it passed over them, as they chased it across Ohio and into Pennsylvania; their attention was then drawn to Venus. The trouble here, as outlined in the Project Blue Book files is that there were no satellites visible in that part of the United States at that time of the morning. Letters and other documents in the Blue Book file prove this, yet the satellite portion of the solution is allowed to stand.

To make it worse, drawings made by the police officers show what was visible in the sky. Those drawings mark the position of the UFO, that of the moon, and that of Venus. Or, to put a point on it, the police officers did see Venus and identified it as such. But the label on the case, which is clearly in error, is allowed to stand and the case is shown to have a solution.

There are many such cases in the Blue Book files. Cases in which the solutions are simply not borne out of the documentation available. Yet we continue to hear about only 701 unidentified cases when the number is probably closer to 5000 when the solutions are examined carefully and those labeled as insufficient data are included. Insufficient data is not a solution, but is a label other than unidentified.

It was good to see a news report that treated UFOs seriously. It was not so good to see facts and figures used that were clearly inaccurate. I’m sure John knew the difference but I’ll wager that the reporter looked at a few things on line, misunderstood them, and ran with his story. The best thing about all this is that you don’t have to believe me. You can look it all up in the Black Vault.

*Bob Cornett and I might have [been] the first outsiders to go through the Blue Book files. The first thing we did was list all the unidentified cases complete with the names and locations. When the files were released into the public mainstream the names had been redacted. We could, of course, put the names back in… but the job of redacting was poorly done and in most of the case files you can find the names. A complete listing of the unidentified cases is available in Project Blue Book – Exposed in both hardback and as a Kindle ebook.

I will note that Jack Webb, in preparation for his TV series about Project Blue Book paid to have all the files microfilmed. We all owe him thanks for doing that.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

USAF UFO Project Blue Book Files Go Online for Free

AREA 51: U-2s, UFOs and Operation Blue Book – Recent Declassified CIA Documents

Air Force Investigation into UFOs – Vintage Interview | Project Blue Book | VIDEO - 1966

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

"...The Pathetic State of The Mainstream Media’s UFO Coverage"

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A cup o' kindness yet?

By Billy Cox De Void 12-31-14

     New Year's Eve or thereabouts is usually the rollout for De Void's annual rant on the pathetic state of the mainstream media’s UFO coverage. But frankly? This year? 2014 was so common and boring, De Void can barely stay awake long enough to finish this stupid sentence. I mean come on. Biggest story of the year? The historic, government-level partnership between France and Chile, hands down. We're talking about a trans-Atlantic bridge of aerospace engineers, physicists, astronomers and military resources, bringing transparency and skills to bear on the most mysterious and elusive challenge of the modern age. Unprecedented. And the media didn't even show up to make fun of it. Amazing. No network blowdrys to announce "And now, for a real out-of-this-world development!" No wire services to work the ol' tongue-in-cheek lead: "Although France and Chile speak different languages, their scientists are now joining forces to try to decipher Little Green Men."

Nope -- on the most significant development of the year, the no-show MSM left zero crumbs for De Void to lambaste or castigate.

What we got instead was another round of gruel so tepid and unremarkable it didn't even leave stains. From the Science Channel’s hyperproduced “Are We Alone?” series that played like a Ritalin infomercial to CNN’s Morgan Spurlock formula sleepwalk across a trail so worn and familiar he could’ve done it blindfolded while tied to a La-Z-Boy recliner, we got nothing but boxes of styrofoam packing peanuts this year. In fact, the only real network surprise was Bill Clinton taking UFO questions under studio lights; only, it was Jimmy Kimmel, not “Face The Nation.” But beneath the veneer of joviality, Clinton tensed up as he attempted to steer the conversation into loftier rhetorical terrain. An analysis of No. 42’s subtle body language by criminologist and SyFy channel investigator Ben Hansen makes you wonder how spasmodic it might've been if Clinton had been pressed for details about his relationship with UFO disclosure advocate Laurance Rockefeller. But that’ll never happen in this country.

So 2014 was a media wash, even though there were plenty of things worth paying attention to. In February, for instance, NASA announced the verification of 715 more exoplanets from the Kepler telescope surveys. By year’s end, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia listed a grand total of 1,855 confirmed worlds beyond our own solar system. These developments were duly noted, and naturally, the prospects of an increasingly congested universe suggested a prudent course might be a what-next? conversation. To that end, NASA and the Library of Congress contributed a seminar in Washington, D.C., in September. They called it “Preparing for Discovery: A Rational Approach to the Impact of Finding Microbial, Complex or Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.” Unfortunately, they cheated the public interest by leaving UFOs off the table.

Consider astronomer and session panelist Seth Shostak, whose ramrod faith in radiowaves as the best way to discover ET has produced zilch over the past half century. In May, we saw him and fellow SETI Institute colleague Dan Werthimer appealing to a congressional committee for federal funding to keep hope alive. Shostak likes to maintain a facade of receptivity to UFO evidence, but that fell apart this year when British chemist Erol Faruk publicized an account of his futile efforts to get his research on UFO-affected soil samples published in peer-reviewed science journals. Thwarted at every turn, Faruk ultimately accepted to Shostak's podcast offer to give UFO data a fair shake, and forwarded his chemical analysis to him. But Shostak declined to weigh in and conceded in an email: “... the SETI Institute doesn’t investigate UFO sightings (we don’t have the staff ... we’re a very small group.")

So 2014 reminded us, once again, that American UFO research is a lonely endeavor, bereft of institutional support and well beyond the editorial skills of corporate media. Yet, American ingenuity is enduring and inveterate. The underfunded nonprofit NARCAP continues to work quietly with aviation professionals and analyze trends pertaining to air-traffic safety. Old hands like NICAP veteran Fran Ridge keep cobbling together patchwork surveillance systems in the quest to gather more evidence, and enterprises such as UFOTOG's state-of-the-art mobile platforms forge into the unknown without compensation or even the hint of a payday. These are visionary and heroic endeavors. Maybe someday academia could come around. Witness the public UFO forum sponsored last month by an honors course at American University.

Still, research into The Great Taboo this year uncovered a truth we have become blithely conditioned to accept — access to public records, and federal accountability, is being curtailed in some curious places. It wasn’t 9/11 that put an end to our ability, via unfiltered radar records, to evaluate what may or may not being flying around in our skies. It was the 2008 Stephenville UFO incident, which put an embarrassing squeeze on the Air Force and became one of the best documented UFO flight-pattern cases in history. Today, FOIA requests for that sort of data are rejected. (Btw, USAF PIO Anh Trinh, I'm still waiting for an answer ...)

Consequently, as in so many years past, 2014 abandons us to our most cynical misgivings regarding at least some aspects of government and their function. With federal secrecy expanding in defiance of directives by both White House and Congress, we are increasingly reliant upon pilfered information to evaluate the degree to which we are being spun and played. In February, the latest batch of Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency leaks to reach the public domain was a 50-page power-point slide show, originally generated in the UK, titled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.”

For De Void, the most relevant portion of the release is labeled “Influence and Information Operations.” There is no accompanying text, but it appears to showcase a true unknown flying-disc photo from 1950, followed by more contemporary pix of the sort of props one would need to stage a hoax. “Deception,” “Dishonesty,” “Distraction,” and “Social Compliance/Authority” are among the listed “Principles” at the front of the section in this creepy manual. Clearly, you don't need UFOs to understand that reality is up for grabs. But maybe it always has been.

Anyhow, here's to 2015, and to bold new leadership on the trail of The Great Taboo. And farewell, American exceptionalism. Official revelations from the study of UFOs will be delivered in French and Spanish.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

“…He, Too, Began To Realize the MSM Doesn't Cover UFOs”

The UFO Phenomenon & The “M” Factor

The Missing Times - News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

“Symposium on Official & Scientific Investigations of UAP (UFOs)"

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Too good to be forgotten

By Billy Cox De Void 12-3-14

    Legendary reputation as the Dr. Funkenstein of holiday party monsters notwithstanding, De Void spent a decent portion of the Thanksgiving weekend in sedentary repose, reviewing DVD-archived presentations at last year’s “Symposium on Official & Scientific Investigations of UAP (UFOs)." De Void initially monitored this two-day conference with its stellar cast in lame remote abbreviated fashion when it happened in late June 2013. But after actually (finally) listening to the speakers, De Void easily recommends this package as a conversation-starter for academics fearless enough to contemplate the merits of The Great Taboo as potential brain-food curricula.

De Void’s belated look at a year-and-a-half-old UFO hearing was triggered by the apparent enthusiasm from American University faculty and administrators last month over the success of a smaller but no less compelling forum in Washington, D.C. AU's key speakers — author Leslie Kean, NARCAP founder Richard Haines, and retired USAF colonel Charles Halt — were also featured at the 2013 gathering, and honors course instructor John Weiskopf expressed a desire to offer the class again. It’ll take a lot of John Weiskopfs to build institutional support for UFOs as a scholarly concern, but De Void's betting this provocative and underpublicized DVD set is strong enough to nudge forward-thinking administrators off the fence.

Pseudo-skeptic: How big is De Void’s kickback? A: Zero. But De Void was sent a comp after wondering whatever happened to the guy who scraped together a small fortune to create the ad hoc Center for UFO Research, which financed that 2013 symposium in Greensboro, N.C.

Tar Heel Kent Senter, whose cancer diagnosis spurred him into action, is still alive and struggling with multiple myeloma, which is no longer in remission. He has no regrets about the range and depth of his lineup, which included a university political scientist, a textbook-writing astronomer, and a university sociologist. But audience turnout was dispiriting. Senter says the venue could’ve accommodated 2,000 people; maybe 200 showed up. Maybe he shouldn’t have scheduled it so close to Independence Day. Maybe he spent too much on cable advertising and not enough on online marketing. Maybe he could've drawn a bigger crowd if he'd booked more Little Green Men bauble vendors in the lobby.

“I wanted this to be as scientific as possible, not talking about space aliens or that kind of malarkey,” says Senter. “We can’t even get past things flying around in the sky, much less whatever may be inside these vehicles, if that’s what they are. Other countries like France and Chile are acknowledging this without it being a taboo, but we live in a culture where people still make jokes and laugh about it — and it’s got to stop.”

Senter, whose own repeated UFO encounters began when he was a kid and could fill a weird and lengthy book, had hoped his conference might create some sustaining momentum. In fact, high level representatives from two official foreign UFO research agencies — Xavier Passot of France and Jose Lay of Chile — bumped fists for the first time in North Carolina and resumed their data-sharing discussions last month in France. But the needle barely flickered on the home front.

“Oh, people still keep pointing to my conference and talking about it,” Senter concedes. “And our state director came up to me at a conference in Winston-Salem and said she’d gotten an invitation to speak about it at a community college, and that was nice to hear.”

That was Lakita Adams, director of North Carolina’s MUFON chapter, English teacher, and one-time environmental educator with the North Carolina Zoo. Adams takes the “militant agnostic” approach to The Great Taboo, i.e., pushing no particular theory, but being persistent and public in pursuit of answers. She's been a longtime advocate for college-level engagement. But that was futile until, at the Greensboro conference, she met a Guilford Technical Community College instructor who urged her to approach GTCC admin about staging a lecture.

“It took him about 18 months to get the speaker committee to agree to it,” says Adams, who finally landed a 45-minute GTCC speaking gig in November. Maybe 100 people showed up at the auditorium, and the event was live-streamed to its other campuses. She also got an invite to speak at UNC-Wilmington next April.

“I know Kent was disappointed with the turnout in Greensboro, but I think it probably went much farther than he knows,” Adams says. “It’s difficult, especially when you know most people won’t bother to get acquainted with the good material that’s out there. But you just keep chipping away at it a little bit at a time.”

Sure enough. So here's a rare De Void commercial plug: Go to centerforuforesearch.com/buy-dvds.html and order a $69 DVD set. Nope, no Little Green Men here or riveting CGI of Chick-File-A cows getting levitated into beamships, but hey, it's not like you'll be doing any heavy lifting, like having to -- ugh! -- read a book. And when you're done, pass it along to someone of high character at your local oasis of higher learning. If they bite, get back with me and I'll pack my bags.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

"I’d Like my Children to Know the Truth [Re UFOs]," says Dying North Carolina MUFON Researcher Kent Senter

Mainstream Media Pays Heed To Senter UFO Conference | VIDEO

Scientific Research Behind UFO Sightings is The Thesis for an International Symposium in Greensboro This Weekend

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

“If Only The UFO Debate Had More Guys Like Terry Hansen”

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"Journalists who think they're too intelligent to be fooled are, in fact, the most susceptible to being fooled" – Terry Hansen

The debate IQ goes down

By Billy Cox De Void 7-3-14

    If only the UFO debate had more guys like Terry Hansen.

Author of The Missing Times: News Media and Complicity in the UFO Cover-up, Hansen took an academician’s long view of the Fourth Estate’s mangled relationship with The Great Taboo. His book was a revelation when it was published in 2000, at least for me. When he passed away suddenly last month — lucky enough, in the words of Kenny Rogers, to “break even” by dying in his sleep — it made me wish we'd had at least a few more chats.

With degrees in biology and science journalism, Hansen filed his first take on UFOs with Minnesota Public Radio in 1980 and stayed focused ever since. The Missing Times was his calling card, and it was an eye-opener, its premise rooted primarily in World War II. That’s when, facing an existential threat, Uncle Sam recruited talent like Byron Price, executive editor of the Associated Press, to head the War Department’s Office of Censorship. Before you could say boo, reports of U-boat havoc to U.S. shipping lanes off the Eastern Seaboard were being suppressed to keep Americans from getting too demoralized, if not outright panicky. And that was for starters.

The Missing Times argued that Big Media’s collusion with the feds on distorting UFO coverage was a top-down process emanating from those cozy wartime relationships. Hansen’s case was largely inferential, but his research on moguls from the Washington Post’s Katherine Graham and The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger and on into the margins with The National Enquirer’s Generoso Pope evoked some chilling perspectives. Hansen gave smaller news outlets high marks for local UFO coverage in the early postwar days. But he accused the big boys of complying with the 1953 CIA Robertson Panel’s recommendations to end “the cultivation of a morbid national psychology” allegedly perpetrated by UFOs, by “strip(ing them) of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” He touted depressing correspondences suggesting that even The Most Trusted Man In America — Walter Cronkite — may have fallen under the propaganda spell in his 1966 UFO debunking report for CBS.

De Void had several lively chats with Hansen over the years. I contended the erosion of centralized media in the digital culture pretty much laid to waste whatever was left of the alleged WWII cocoon. This was shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq; Hansen countered that the alacrity with which corporate media parroted the myriad government lies for attacking Baghdad was proof that the newsies — at least, at top management levels — remained in dependency mode, on multiple issues. He mentioned, for instance, how uncritically The New York Times swallowed and regurgitated the 2007 CIA report stating that more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and early ‘60s were due to mistaken identity of spyplanes. Yet, an independent cross-check of the actual Project Blue Book records indicates few — if any — spyplane cases had ever fallen into the UFO category.

“When it comes to the media disseminating government propaganda,” Hansen said, “that relationship exists and is still in place. I don’t think it’s changed; if anything, it might’ve gotten worse.”

Per UFOs, that’s difficult for De Void to square. More than 25 years of reporting on the fringe — for Gannett, the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, now Halifax Media — and never a discouraging word, other than a few rolled eyes from managers. Maybe that’s an indicator of what a lightweight De Void is; De Void, after all, has meager resources. What we agreed on is that, when it comes to The Great Taboo, there don’t have to be any top-down edicts anymore. Reporters police themselves nowadays.

“It’s a conditioned response,” Hansen said. “Someday I’d love to see a poll on media attitudes and how much they really know about this subject.”

Me too. But the only surprise would be the margins.

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

Terry Hansen, Noted Journalist & Author of 'The Missing Times' Has Died

A Tribute to Terry Hansen: The Journalist Who Exposed Mainstream Media Involvement in the UFO Cover-Up has Died

The Missing Times - News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up

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"Mainstream UFO Coverage Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This Clash of Titans"

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Pure fireworks

By Billy Cox De Void 7-1-14

     While we know corporate media has a glandular aversion to covering the UFO controversy, we also know the spectacle of little green man costumes and deely-bopper pageantry acts like catnip on their news judgement. They can’t help it — they pounce, they lather up in the images, they know what we like. Charlie Sheen would take a rain check on a booty call before the MSM passes on a space alien parade.

Well, it’s that time of year again, when tens of thousands of American party monsters converge in New Mexico for the annual Roswell UFO Festival, and we know the newsies will be out there in the streets, not at the lecture halls. But this year, not even The Economist — the distinguished British zine that wouldn’t normally deign to soil its white gloves with UFO skank — could resist the occasion. After reviewing sighting reports from the National UFO Reporting Center logs going back to Y2K, the periodical published its findings under the headline “Everything You Need To Know About UFOs.” And you’re not gonna believe the punchline: “(UFOs) tend to arrive in the evening, especially on Fridays, when folks are sitting on the front porch nursing their fourth beer, the better to appreciate flashing lights in the heavens.”

Whoa! Ha-HAAA! Damn! This really IS everything we need to know!

OK now, when you’re finished laughing and you’ve managed to scrape yourself off the floor, you’re not gonna believe who attacks the Economist's data — The Atlantic magazine! I know, right? But forget the title, “The Hard Data on UFO Sightings: It's Mostly Drunk People in the West” — the roundhouse is coming, man, and it's in the subtitle: “At least, that's one interpretation.”

Oh yeah, the Brits are in for a whumpin' now, and The Atlantic’s statistical analyst Derek Thompson really zings ‘em good. “What the Economist calls drinking hours,” Thompson writes, “are also the hours we're most likely to be outside looking at anything bright contrasting with the dark sky.” Ka-pow! The mouthguard comes hurtling toward spectators in the mezzanine! SportsCenter face-music highlight reel, dawg! But Thompson doesn’t stop there. The pundit notes how the state with the lowest beer consumption has a far higher UFO reporting rate than the state with the highest beer-drinking levels. And the state with the highest number of reports consumes less booze than all but six states. "There is more to the story," warns Thompson, merely winding up, "than alcohol, sheeple."

Then he polishes off The Economist with a wicked coup de grace, the kind of pile-driver stuff you'd see in the Roman Forum around 75 AD. “Have you considered,” Thompson concludes, “aliens ‘choose’ to fly over drunk people to destroy witnesses' credibility?”

Slam dunk Atlantic. Mainstream UFO coverage doesn’t get much better than this clash of titans. But hey, look at the clock -- it’s almost the Fourth. Can I knock off early and go look for UFOs at The Gator Club?

Continue Reading . . .

See Also:

Astronauts as UFO Witnesses

WEBCAST: Top UFO Events Discussed By Military Witnesses, a Government Official & Best Selling Author, Leslie Kean | VIDEO

CIA Report Names a Senator as One of The Witnesses in a UFO Sighting Over Former USSR | UFO CHRONICLE 10-15-1955

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