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Showing posts with label The National Atomic Testing Museum. Show all posts

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Blockbuster Revelation Withheld; Air Force Colonel William Coleman (Ret) Says, "To Hell With It, Maybe I’ll Take It To the Grave!"

A muffled bang, but no harm done

By Billy Cox
De Void
9-26-12

Like a lot of others who follow The Great Taboo, Allen Palmer had high hopes for Saturday night’s UFO panel discussion at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. After all, one of his five guests, former Blue Book officer Bill Coleman, promised a “blockbuster” revelation.

What the retired Air Force colonel delivered was a riveting but long-publicized account of his attempts to chase a flying disc in 1955. But just as it appeared Coleman was ready to drop a bomb, the 89-year-old WWII veteran balked.

“I was absolutely certain he wanted to say something very important,” says Palmer, the Museum’s executive director. “But he decided at the last minute not to pull the trigger.

“He seems to be slightly troubled with that. There seems to be an inner tension with a duty not to violate a government trust. It’s a source of conflict with all of us,” adds the retired Navy officer.

Back in Indian Harbour Beach, Coleman admits he “pulled my punch.” Reason? “I was not challenged by the audience.” Meaning? “It was the usual crowd — people wanting to talk to me about what they experienced, about how they found little pieces of metal in their chest and nose and crap like that.

“Rest assured, I met a lot of fine people there, particularly the ones who organized it. I just wanted to talk to people who would be able to comprehend what I was saying. But it was more like the people in the audience wanted me to listen to them,” says the USAF’s former chief PIO. So I just said to hell with it, maybe I’ll take it to the grave.”

Well, goodbye to all that. But judging from the scant media reflections on the event, Palmer and the Museum did themselves no harm Saturday night. The panelists had all the right credentials, and although they may not have raised the discussion bar, it was a smart idea in a mainstream forum, which is exactly what this field needs.

And there was also healthy tension between former Army colonel John Alexander, whose book UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities argues the phenomenon is real, but the military isn’t hiding anything, and Charles Halt. Halt is a key character in the alleged 1980 UFO incursion near an air base in the UK. The retired lieutenant colonel directly challenged Alexander’s position by declaring a clandestine government agency was keeping UFO data in lockdown. But as Palmer pointed out, Halt failed to name names. “Maybe he’s right, maybe that’s the case,” Palmer tells De Void. “But if you’re going to make that case, you should be able to produce the evidence for it.”

Palmer says he hopes to offer the Museum as a forum to sift through whatever evidence may be out there. He’ll host a SETI discussion with radioastronomer Seth Shostak on Nov. 3. Some 220 listeners — a standing-room crowd — turned out Saturday night.

“What I’m interested in is the process of investigating UFOs, the science behind it, taking a good honest look at the 5 percent of unknowns and applying science and physics to this thing,” Palmer says. “I’m not interested in the goofy stuff or personal attacks.” Long range goal: “This is one of the great fertile fields of public interest, and I’d like to see it used as a way to get young people interested in science and math and physics.”

Takers? The National Atomic Testing Museum is easy to find.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Charles Halt, Former Air Force Colonel, Accuses U.S. Of UFO Cover-Up | UFO NEWS

By Lee Speigel
The Huffington Post
9-24-12

LAS VEGAS -- Former Air Force Col. Charles Halt accused the federal government of a UFO cover-up that involves a secret agency to deal with what might be extraterrestrial visitations.

"I'm firmly convinced there's an agency, and there is an effort to suppress," Halt told an audience of 200 people Saturday night at the Smithsonian-affiliated National Atomic Testing Museum.

Two former Air Force officers who were part of the infamous Project Blue Book -- the military's official UFO investigation in the 1950s and '60s -- and a former investigator with Britain's Ministry of Defense were among the panel of speakers for a program entitled "Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed."

Halt, pictured above, was the deputy base commander of the RAF Bentwaters military base in England and one of numerous eyewitnesses to several UFO-related events at Rendlesham Forest in December 1980. He believes the observed UFOs were either extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin.

"I've heard many people say that it's time for the government to appoint an agency to investigate," Halt said.

"Folks, there is an agency, a very close-held, compartmentalized agency that's been investigating this for years, and there's a very active role played by many of our intelligence agencies that probably don't even know the details of what happens once they collect the data and forward it. It's kind of scary, isn't it? . . .

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Sunday, September 16, 2012

UFO Files – Secrets Revealed: Colonel William Coleman (Ret) "Insists He’s Got a 'Blockbuster' Up His Sleeve"

UFO panel a blast from the past

By Billy Cox
De Void
9-11-12

Not surprisingly, National Atomic Testing Museum executive director Allan Palmer has triggered a whinefest for having the gall to sponsor an upcoming lecture billed as “Military UFO Files: Secrets Revealed.” Mainly it’s coming from the How can you sully the Smithsonian brand with little green men? crowd. Palmer doesn’t care. Although the Atomic Testing Museum is affiliated with the Smithsonian, it isn’t a subsidiary. And when it comes to UFOs, like most reasonably intelligent people, the retired Navy commander would prefer an independent inquiry to a laughably outdated government fact sheet.

“Well it is a little risky, because we’ve got something of a reputation to uphold,” says Palmer, whose remarkable Museum in Las Vegas routinely displays loaner material from the Smithsonian. “But I feel strongly that the (UFO) story has not been covered properly, and that not a lot of true science or analytical thought has gone into it.”

True enough. Ergo, on Sept. 22 in Las Vegas, Palmer is convening five well-vetted panelists — John Alexander, Charles Halt, Nick Pope, Bob Friend and Bill Coleman — for the provocative “Secrets Revealed” discussion. Question: Considering how the collective experiences of these old hands have been bouncing around in the public domain forever, what can they offer that we don’t already know?

Plenty, insists Palmer. For instance, Bill Coleman, the retired Air Force colonel and former Project Blue Book mouthpiece, insists he’s got a “blockbuster” up his sleeve. “I’m 89. I won’t be around much longer,” Coleman says from his home in Indian Harbour Beach. He says he’s resisted multiple third-party efforts to pry it out of him before said date.

Coleman, who once chased a daylight disc in the summer of 1955, only to discover his report had unaccountably vanished from the Blue Book archives, co-produced the “Project UFO” series for NBC in 1978-79. Until several years ago, he was working on a related memoir, but was unable to finish it. But he shared his story with Merv Griffin in the Seventies, as well as on the nationally-televised “UFO Coverup Live” in 1988.

Coleman should fit right in at the Atomic Testing Museum, dedicated to showcasing artifacts from one of the most extraordinarily weird epochs in American history. In the spring of 1955, he volunteered for eyewitness duty at the Nevada Test Site, and he’s lucky to be alive. Get a load of this account, and the twist at the end:

The World War II veteran and 36 military colleagues have settled into 4.5-foot deep trenches bordering the shot tower, maybe 3,000 yards from ground zero, to watch the latest edition of a 14-part nuclear bomb series called Operation Teapot. Actually, they’re not watching it at all; their backs are facing the bomb. Coleman has his head swaddled in blankets. At t-minus 13 seconds on the countdown clock, the wind takes an abrupt shift and blows directly toward the trenches. But it’s too late for ignition abort.

When the bomb goes off (Coleman says he was told the yield was more than 50 kilotons, or nearly three Hiroshimas), he can detect its light through the fabric. Easing up for a peek, he and his trenchmates see an anthropomorphic dummy fixed to a post behind them is ablaze. The needle on the scintillator is pegging into the red, making the zone so hot the command center refuses to send trucks. “I said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’” Coleman recalls, but another officer says no, they’d be getting dusted by fallout the whole march back. So they wind up trekking toward ground zero instead, through the burning “doom town” structures and the blasted armor, including an upside-down heavy tank flung 200 feet from its original anchor. “We were trapped there for four hours,” says Coleman, who came to within 1,200 yards of the fireball’s spread. “I never really quite got over it.”

Coleman hit the decontamination scrub-down twice before he was allowed to leave quarantine. Within three years, he was diagnosed with leukemia. “I asked the doctor how bad it was,” Coleman recalls. “He said ‘Buy as much insurance as you can.’ He gave me four months to live.”

As a last resort, Coleman consulted a family physician, who prescribed two quarts of “some kind of tonic,” he says. Coleman says he never found out the ingredients, but it was a red liquid that tasted awful. “I have no idea what happened,” he says. “But suddenly, the leukemia went away. I’ve got to blame it on the Lord.” So far as Coleman knows, he’s the sole surviving witness from the trench. “All those other guys,” he says, “are dead.”

De Void is betting that nothing new Coleman can offer about UFOs will match a miracle cure for cancer.

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Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Grant Cameron asks, "Are UFO Secrets About to be Revealed?"

By Grant Cameron
www.presidentialufo.com
9-4-12

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses." – George Bernard Shaw

Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us. - Senator Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, 1998

There has been a lot of excitement about the upcoming Area 51 presentation at a Smithsonian Institution affiliated museum in Las Vegas. The UFO lecture event was recently detailed in a Huffington Post piece written by Lee Spiegel. The implication being put out by the event organizers is that we are about to learn some UFO secrets.

Military UFO Files Secrets To Be Revealed at The National Atomic Testing Museum (Video) | UFO NEWS

Those holding their breath should stop immediately because nothing of significance is going to happen. Holding your breath will not bring UFO disclosure – just death.

The five speakers that have been chosen to present at National Atomic Testing Museum as described are:

Ret. Army Col. John Alexander: Former military insider who created the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group -- a group of top-level government officials and scientists brought together to study UFOs.

Ret. Air Force Col. Charles Halt: Former base commander of the RAF Bentwaters military base in England and vital eyewitness to the amazing UFO-related events at Rendlesham Forest in December 1980, where he believed the observed UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin.

Ret. Air Force Col. William Coleman: Former USAF bomber pilot, chief of Air Force public information and producer of NBC's "Project UFO" series.

Ret. Air Force Col. Robert Friend: Former director of the Air Force's Project Blue Book from 1958 to 1963. The fifth guest at the museum's upcoming UFO lecture is former U.K. UFO desk officer Nick Pope.

John Alexander described the speakers to Spiegel as “high credibility vetted sources… who have worked with the military, all of whom certainly agree that UFOs are real, and I think most of them would say it ought to be researched."

That the good news.

Now for some observations that might just represent the true reality of what’s about to happen on September 22 in Las Vegas:

• All of the speakers have held government security clearances, and therefore what they say has to be kept in context. Despite the claim that the lectures will be “Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed” there will be no classified disclosures of material.

• Being former US military ( with the exception of Pope) they will probably follow the official government position on UFOs. In case people have forgotten or missed it, the official government position on the subject is ““The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

• If any of them do reveal classified information that would counter the official government position on the subject, they know they would expect a letter like the Pentagon just sent to the author of the upcoming Bin Laden raid tell-all “No Easy Day” Matt Bissonnette. In that letter the Pentagon stated “In the judgment of the Department of Defense, you are in material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements you signed in 2007. Further public dissemination of your book will aggravate your breach and violation of your agreements.”

• The four American speakers at the Area 51 lectures are patriotic Americans who know the rules of classification and will not violate their national security oaths to reveal classified UFO secrets that might be held by the United States military.

• Their security clearance oaths, however, make them like convicts on parole. They have been expected to use misdirection, silence, and lies to cover classified material in the past, and anything they now say will always be has to be surrounded by doubt, even if what they are saying is true. That is because the national security aspects of the UFO subject will always trump the truth. If they know the truth about UFOs, and it’s classified, their job is to protect the secret. Spin it anyway you want to, but that is the truth.

• So with five former government people with security clearances, what can we expect? How about the government part line? Unidentified objects exist but they pose no threat to national security and there is no evidence to indicate that the objects are extraterrestrial visitations. There are lots of crazy people in the UFO field. Money should be spent to study the mystery.

• Three of the five speakers are on record as stating Roswell is explained by a Mogul balloon operation. If that isn’t national security trumping logic and truth, then nothing is.

• Chase Brandon, the former CIA media liaison to Hollywood, who described himself as the second most powerful public voice for the CIA after the CIA Director, will not be a speaker at the “Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed” event. Perhaps this is because he has stated openly and on the record in a number of recent interviews that he discovered a box at CIA headquarters with material in it that indicated Roswell was a crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft with bodies and there has been a cover-up of this key historical event. Organizers certainly wouldn't want this testimony to break the intended flow of the information that will be presented.

• There will be a call by many if not all speakers for further study of the UFO mystery. The call for an investigation sounds like a good idea. However, there has been one of those studies already. It was known as USAF Project Blue Book and it was shut down in 1969. It concluded that there were 2% hoaxes, and about 22% unexplained.

• What were the unexplained? Well no one at the Air Force could tell – they were just unexplained and might well have been explained as Mogul balloons if there had been more evidence. They were just unexplained- no explanation necessary. The only thing that the USAF could be determined for sure is that there was no evidence that they were extraterrestrial, or a threat to national security.

• What will change with a new study conducted by science, the government, or the media? We will log another 50,000 sightings of objects flying around the skies. Classified information will be out of bounds. Lots of money will be spent and in the end we will come to the conclusion that there are 2% hoaxes, 22% unexplained, and that there is no firm evidence to indicate that any of the sightings were shown to be extraterrestrial, or a threat to national security. The National Academy of Sciences, with only a 4% belief in the phenomenology may proceed to make sure that any new UFO study is the last study that is ever conducted. As John Alexander has warned about this call for a new UFO study, “Be careful what you wish for.”

• So what will happen? Coleman, who has been absent from the UFO community for many years is suddenly reappearing from his long seclusion to speak. He will tell his tale of chasing a UFO in his B-25 bomber in the 1950s. He will defend the Air Force Blue Book study and state that Roswell was a Mogul balloon. He may even speak of a book he has been writing on UFOs for many years.

• Coleman will not talk about his signing of a contract on behalf of the Pentagon for the Pentagon to do a UFO documentary called “UFOs, Past, Present, and Future.” He will not talk about his pulling of the now infamous Holloman AFB film back to the Pentagon in the mid 1970s from producers Bob Emenegger and Allen Sandler. According to the producers showed a UFO land on the runway and aliens emerge from the craft to be greeted by Holloman base officials. He will not explain why he ordered the Holloman alien landing film back to the Pentagon just before the documentary was nearing its final stages. He will not talk about how the Pentagon provided 8 seconds of the film to be put in the final documentary release.

• Coleman will not talk about meeting the high ranking intelligence official code named “Falcon” on the set of a UFO documentary in 1988 called “UFO Cover-up Live” in Washington, and being very surprised that this official was involved in the UFO subject.

• Robert Friend will defend the conclusions of Project Blue Book which makes sense as he was one of the directors of the project. He will agree with Coleman that there is no proof of extraterrestrial visitation, and this includes the Roswell event.

• If asked he would talk about a significant 1959 event that he was involved with where senior officials at the CIA were channeling an alien by the name of AFFA at the National Photographic Interpretation Center, a TOP SECRET CIA building in Washington where all the U-2, SR-71, and satellite spy film was analyzed. The museum will not ask him to talk about it so you won’t hear the channeling session or about the flying saucer the CIA officials saw out the window during the event. You will not hear about how Friend tried to investigate the case further, and how he was told by his commanding General at WPAFB to drop it.

• Col. Charles Halt’s presentation will come the closest to presenting actual military UFO secrets when he tells his story of the UFO occurrence he was involved with at the RAF nuclear base adjoining the Rendlesham Forest in December 1980. It would be nice if he tells of talking to the NSA about the Rendlesham event and being told that they had a big file on it but that he (Halt) did not have a need to know. Maybe he will, but probably he won’t.

• Col. John Alexander will give his standard UFO lecture that UFOs are real. He will continue saying that the government doesn't care about UFOs and there is no government UFO cover-up. He will say “the government is telling the truth.” He will call for amnesty for military who have been involved with the UFO subject, and call for an independent scientific study hopefully devoid of the ridicule that has surrounded the subject for many years.

• Actually, it doesn't really matter what Alexander says, because every researcher listening will simply turn to the next researcher and say, “What do you think about John Alexander?” In the UFO world that question is running a close second to the question, “What are UFOs?” Even Alexander keeps the mystery about himself going as he plays the role of a Man In Black erasing the audiences minds with his Neutralyzer at the end of each lecture.

• Nick Pope has unfortunately become the John Alexander of the UK. No matter what he says there will be the same doubt over his presentation. Researchers will turn to the person beside them and say, “What do you think about Nick Pope?” It is the same question of reservation intelligence services had over defecting Soviet spies during the cold war. You will never know for sure if Pope is on their side or ours. It’s not Pope’s fault. That’s the price you pay when you used to work for the other side.

The Area 51 “Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed” lectures will be much like the Democratic Convention in North Carolina. It will be carefully scripted to ensure there are no Clint Eastwood moments where people like Chase Brandon will distract people from the intended message.

Lots of people will attend. Lots of money will be gathered. Nothing earth shattering will occur. No secrets will be revealed. The media will be move on to the next story. The scientists will be unimpressed. The government will continue to in the words of President Barack Obama “keep our secrets on this.” We will return to the world of UFOs that we have known for the last 65 years.

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