THE UFO CHRONICLES

Friday, October 26, 2007

UN Issues 'Final Wake-Up Call' on Population and Environment

By James Kanter
International Herald Tribune
10-25-07

PARIS: The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are "among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century," he said.

The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those that the UN issues on the environment and called it "the final wake-up call to the international community."

Over the past two decades the world population has increased by almost 34 percent to 6.7 billion from 5 billion; similarly, the financial wealth of the planet has soared by about a third. But the land available to each person on earth had shrunk by 2005 to 2.02 hectares, or 5 acres, from 7.91 hectares in 1900 and was projected to drop to 1.63 hectares for each person by 2050, the report said.

The result of that population growth combined with unsustainable consumption has resulted in an increasingly stressed planet where natural disasters and environmental degradation endanger millions of humans, as well as plant and animal species, the report said.

Steiner said that demand for resources was close to 22 hectares per person, a figure that would have to be cut to between 15 and 16 hectares per person to stay within existing, sustainable limits.

Persistent problems identified by the report include a rapid rise of so-called dead zones, where marine life no longer can be supported because of depletion of oxygen caused by pollutants like fertilizers. Also included is the resurgence of diseases linked with environmental degradation.

The report is being published two decades after a commission headed by the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland warned that the survival of humanity was at stake from unsustainable development.

Steiner said many of the problems identified by the Brundtland Commission were even more acute because not enough had been done to stop environmental degradation as flows of goods, services, people, technologies and workers had expanded, even to isolated populations.

He did, however, identify some reasons for hope that pointed toward better environmental stewardship.

He said West European governments had taken effective measures to reduce air pollutants, and he praised efforts in parts of Brazil to roll back deforestation in the Amazon. He said an international treaty to tackle the hole in the earth's ozone layer had led to the phasing-out of release of 95 percent of ozone-damaging chemicals.

Steiner said more intelligent management of scarce resources including fishing grounds, land and water was needed to sustain a still larger global population, which he said was expected to stabilize at between 8 billion and 10 billion people.

"Life would be easier if we didn't have the kind of population growth rates that we have at the moment," Steiner said. "But to force people to stop having children would be a simplistic answer. The more realistic, ethical and practical issue is to accelerate human well-being and make more rational use of the resources we have on this planet."

Steiner said environmental tipping points, at which degradation can lead to abrupt, accelerating or potentially irreversible changes, would increasingly occur in locations like particular rivers or forests, where populations would lack the ability to repair damage because the gravity of a problem would be far beyond their physical or economic means.

Looking ahead, Steiner said parts of Africa could reach environmental tipping points if changing rainfall patterns stemming from climate change turned semi-arid zones into arid zones, and made agriculture that sustained millions of people much harder.

Steiner said other tipping points triggered by climate change could occur in areas like India and China if Himalayan glaciers shrank so much that they no longer supplied adequate amounts of water to populations in those countries.

He also warned of a global collapse of all species being fished by 2050, if fishing around the world continued at its present pace.

The report said 250 percent more fish are being caught than the oceans can produce in a sustainable manner, and that the number of fish stocks classed as collapsed had roughly doubled to 30 percent globally over the past 20 years.

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Witness to Roswell Flying Saucer Incident Tells His Story

By Pat Sherman
Signon San Diego
10-26-07

ESCONDIDO – Retired Air Force veteran Milton Sprouse clearly remembers the summer day in 1947 when he returned to Roswell Army Air Field aboard the B-29 bomber Dave's Dream from a three-day maneuver in Florida.

The Escondido resident, then a corporal and engine mechanic in the Army Air Forces could not believe what his ground crew was telling him: a UFO had crashed in the New Mexico desert, on a ranch 70 miles away.

The story made the front page of the Roswell Daily Record: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer,” read the headline.

According to the July 8 story, “the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced ... that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.”

The craft supposedly had been recovered after the ranch owner notified the sheriff's department, who sent Maj. Jesse Marcel and a team to investigate.

“Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk,” the story stated. “After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters.”

The next day, the paper retracted the story, claiming that the recovered object was a weather balloon – an account the government stuck with until 1995. It was then announced that the weather ballon story had been fabricated to cover up Project Mogul, a top-secret project involving two-dozen high-altitude neoprene balloons designed to detect Russian nuclear explosions.

According to Sprouse, five of his crew were called to the site to collect the remaining debris and load it onto a flatbed truck. Sprouse was ordered to stay with Dave's Dream in case the military should suddenly need the craft.

“I had reservations of what all they were telling me, because each one of them told something different,” he said. “I thought, 'I don't know.' ... Later on, when it all started coming out in piecemeal, you could put it together and tell what they said was true.”

As years passed, Sprouse grew more comfortable talking about the Roswell Incident.

Author and ufologist Thomas J. Carey interviewed Sprouse three times with co-author Donald Schmitt. Sprouse is mentioned on page 233 of their new book, “Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up.”

During his first interview, videotaped at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, Sprouse was reluctant to talk about the incident, Carey said.

“He was a career Air Force guy, and they're the least likely to speak because of their pensions,” Carey said. “When I interviewed him over the phone in 2001, I got a little more information, and then I interviewed him again last year and got even more. It was an evolution of coming forward.”

Today, as Sprouse recounts the incident, he leans forward in earnest, a conspiratorial gleam in his eyes.

About 500 soldiers sent to the crash site were lined shoulder to shoulder and ordered to scour the property for debris, he said.

“They lined them up and then said, 'We want you to go through this ranch the way you're facing until we tell you to stop, and we want you to pick up everything unnatural,'” Sprouse said.

“When my crew got back (from the crash site), we talked for weeks,” he said. “They told me everything and I believe them.... They told me, 'Milt, it's true.' ”

Among the material discovered was a maleable, foil-like material that could be laid flat with no creases after being squashed into a ball.

Whether fact or lore, one of the most intriguing pieces of the puzzle are reports of five diminutive green bodies allegedly recovered with the UFO. Sprouse believes it.

A staff sergeant in his barracks was called to the hospital shortly after the crash, he said.

“He and two doctors and two nurses were in the emergency room, and they brought in one of those five humanoid bodies that they had recovered,” he said. “They said, 'We want this dissected and we want a complete history of how it functions and the parts and everything.' ”

The next day, the man from his barracks was transferred from the base, Sprouse said.

“We never heard from him again,” he said. “We asked and (they said), 'Oh, we don't know nothing about it.' ... I heard later that both nurses and both doctors were shipped different directions and nobody ever knew where they went.”

Sprouse recalled an interesting conversation with the owner of a funeral home in Roswell several years later.

“We had some friend of ours that died, and he said, 'Hey Milt, I want to talk to you,' ” he said. “He says, 'You know the base come to me and wanted five children's caskets.' That was two or three days after the crash. I said, 'No kidding.' He says, 'I only had one, and I told them that.' They said, 'One won't do us very good,' and they went somewhere else and got them.”

The day the UFO story ran, the debris was allegedly loaded onto two B-29 bombers, one of them Dave's Dream, and sent to a base in Fort Worth, Texas.

Sprouse and Carey believe the material was then shipped to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where they say it remains today.

“We believe some of the stuff was loaned around, but the main repository was the foreign technology division at Wright-Patterson,” said Carey, who holds a master's degree in anthropology and served briefly in the Air Force. “We've heard stories over the years of people who say that they're still trying to figure out what that stuff is.”

Various rumors suggest that pieces of the ship and the bodies were stored in a mysterious Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson.

Derek Kaufman, who works in Wright-Patterson's public affairs office, was tentative when broaching the subject of Roswell and Hangar 18. He said the base tracks all such phone inquiries.

“We might get a couple of queries a month related to strange phenomena. ... Someone who believes that they've seen something very unusual – low-flying, strange aircraft or something along those lines,” Kaufman said. “Folks who are UFO enthusiasts are typically the people that inquire about Hangar 18 or about Roswell, but a lot of them don't seem to be credible queries. They seem to be folks bordering on the fanatic. ... I'm hard-pressed to describe where Hangar 18 even is located.”

Asked if there was any material from Roswell transferred to the base in 1947, Kaufman said, “I'll just defer to what reports have been exhaustively investigated and are now available to the general public.”

Wright-Patterson's Web site includes a section titled “UFOs and other strange phenomena” that includes links to the Air Force Freedom of Information Act Web site and a 993-page document titled, “The Roswell Report: Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” In the report, the government meticulously makes its case debunking the Roswell Incident.

According to the report, the bodies recovered at the site were not alien beings, but crash-test dummies used to test high-altitude parachutes.

UFO enthusiasts say they couldn't have been dummies because the parachute tests weren't conducted until nearly a decade later.

“That's a non-starter because that project didn't get under way until the mid-'50s,” Carey said. “These mannequins were a good 6 feet tall, they looked human and they were in regular flight suits. There's no way you confuse those for little aliens with big heads.”

Asked if there are any remnants of the mysterious event stored at Roswell, Rob Young, a historian with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson, answered, “I would not know. I've never seen anything like that. ... To my knowledge there is not.”

Sprouse believes the Roswell Incident is a far-reaching cover-up that leads as far as the White House.

“The presidents are briefed on everything ... classified, unclassified, whether they'll acknowledge it or not,” Sprouse said. “Clinton, says, 'I don't know nothing.' Carter says, 'I don't know nothing about that.' Bush won't even talk about it.”

Sprouse's wife, Peggy, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, is skeptical about the UFO story. She's been to Roswell with her husband and said once was enough.

“Been there, done that,” she said. “I never did believe it and still don't believe it.”

Sprouse, who will speak at the Nov. 18 meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, seems to be enjoying his part in keeping the story alive.

Has the government ever asked him not to speak about Roswell?

“No, but I worry about it,” he said. “I'm getting all these telephone calls on that report, and I often wonder if it's somebody looking into this.”

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Dorothy Kilgallen: British Official Says, "Objects [UFOs] . . . Originate From Some Other Planet"

Official Tells Kilgalllen Saucers Originate From Other Planet (INS) 5-23-1955 (Crpd)

- click on images to enlarge -

By International News Service
[Translated From Spanish]
May 23, 1955

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Flying Saucers in Turkey or "Vue 6 " Software?

By stevenng2020
10-23-07

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Puerto Rico: UFO Reported in Guanica's Vivones District

By Jose A. Martinez E
10-20-07

A strange yellow light was reported today (Saturday, October 20th) in the Vivones District of the city of Guanica. Mr. Dolores Toro and his wife, accompanied by a niece, were chatting calmly when they suddenly heard a sound described as "when a damaged hen's egg explodes." Shortly after, the witnesses reported seeing a reddish light appearing from the balcony to the house, and then passed in front of them. A neighbor [interviewed by J.A. Martinez] remarked that she had seen the strange light that lit her house "like daylight", according to Mrs. Diana Santiago, a neighbor of Mr. Toro.

Mrs. Santiago thought at first that Mr. Toro was shining a flashlight into her home, and he quickly told her that no, that it was that strange light that came out of nowhere and vanished. Another local resident was able to see the luminous object as it descended from the sky and according to her, the object that caught everyone unawares had something like "two tails".

Weather conditions: It had rained earlier in this area, not torrential however. As many people are aware, electric power lines may have a reaction to the rain which causes them to buzz, becoming only louder with the rainfall. When the case involving the reddish light took place, the rain had stopped for a number of hours and the night sky was completely clear and starry by 6:56 p.m., when Mr. Toro allegedly heard the buzzing sound. The possibility that the event was a natural phenomenon cannot be dismissed.

* Source: ARGUS-PR

More . . .

See Also:

Scott Corrales Talks UFOs

Lajas - The UFO Capital of Puerto Rico

SHARE YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

In the Orbit of UFO Enthusiasts

By Joe Heim
The Washington Post
10-21-07

As a meeting spot for UFO enthusiasts, Logan's Roadhouse might seem a tad unlikely. But once a month or so, the back room of the bustling, busily decorated chain restaurant in Fairfax becomes the mother ship for area ufologists (yes, that's what they prefer to be called). They gather there to snack on chicken tenders and chili, and exchange sightings and extraordinary stories in the company of like-minded people who won't think they've completely lost their marbles.

"When I first started 20 years ago, it was a bunch of old guys with their pocket protectors, but now the meetings are getting more diverse," organizer Sue Swiatek says.

Swiatek, a software analyst by day, is the state director of the Virginia chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a private organization that investigates and compiles data on reports of unidentified flying objects. She and her husband, Rob Swiatek, an oft-cited UFO expert, are, for lack of a better term, the first couple of Virginia ufologists.

On Saturday, they will be among the featured speakers at Mysteries of Space and Sky IV: Sixty Years of UFOs, a daylong conference open to the public at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold. Rob Swiatek's talk, "Sacre Bleu! UFOs Over France," alone seems well worth the conference's $30-$40 admission fee.

For UFO buffs, 2007 is a multiple anniversary year. It was 60 years ago that whatever happened in Roswell, N.M., happened. It was 60 years ago that the term "flying saucer" entered the lexicon. And it was 55 years ago that reports of UFOs flooded the Washington region. This very newspaper ran stories with such headlines as " 'Saucer' Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals" and "D.C. Girl Sees Saucer Float Under Clouds."

Five years ago, a new case arose when F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base to pursue what turned out to be -- dum-de-dum-dum -- an unknown craft. Spooky, huh? And because it happened exactly 50 years to the day of saucers being reported over the region, the event prompted a flurry of local ufological activity. (And, no, don't insert a "we all know how painful that can be" joke here).

Of course, UFO enthusiasts are used to having their ideas about aliens and intergalactic spacecraft ridiculed. Those who opine that there are "others" out there are bound to hear they're more than a little out there themselves. If you talk to enough of them, you realize they have heard all of the insults before: nut job, wacko, loony, space case. But perhaps the most insulting thing to call a UFO believer is, well, a believer.

To believe, they argue, is to imply that there is room for doubt. But, they tell you, if you study the cases, follow the facts, examine the evidence, there is no room for doubt. "We're not believers; we're concluders," says Paul Nahay of Silver Spring. Meet him and find out what he and other local concluders have to say about UFOs.

Queensland Invaded by UFOs

By Anooska Tucker-Evans
The Herald Sun
10-21-07

* More than 100 of nation's 120 sightings in Qld
* Most white balls that make right-hand turns
* People wary of reporting for fear of ridicule

QUEENSLANDERS are leading reporters of unidentified flying objects, with more than 100 of the 128 recorded official sightings around Australia in the past two years coming from the Sunshine State.

And according to a Queensland UFO specialist, while many sightings were ruled out as stars, planets, meteors and planes, a "significant number" remained unexplained.

UFO Research Queensland's Lee Paqui said the state's hotspots for sightings included the Glass House Mountains, Toowoomba, Warwick, Ipswich and the far north.

"The most common sightings are the orange balls, and white balls that look like stars but move and display very erratic behaviour, like they'll make right-hand turns," she said.

Ms Paqui said many people were still wary of reporting their sightings for fear of public humiliation.

The Queensland research centre began operating in 1956 and was originally called the Queensland Flying Saucer Bureau.

It receives 1000 hits each day on its website www.uforq.asn.au and has sightings dating back to 1939.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Who Built The Pyramids?

Regular guest “Dennis Balthaser” rides into the “Paracast Show” on a horse with different colors as demonstrated by his latest gig with co-hosts Gene Steinberg & David Biedny.

Most familiar with Dennis, or for that matter the Paracast show, are aware of the formers’ dedication and years of research regarding the field of Ufology, and the “Roswell Incident” in particular.

This week however, the topic of conversation isn’t about UFO’s and or their occupants, it’s about the pyramids in Egypt, and the mysteries behind them.

Friends and colleagues, as well as frequent visitors to his “award winning web-site,” are mindful of Dennis’ curio with the pyramids as well as his relationship with the “Great Pyramid of Giza Research Association”; however, listeners will certainly come to realize that Dennis has more then a passing interest in the subject.

Most would agree that the pyramids are certainly a fascinating topic of conversation; conversely the 60 minutes devoted to the matter will no doubt captivate the listener, and leave he or she scratching their respective heads.

Gene & David’s “to the point” inquiries elicited answers from Dennis that in the very least give the listener “pause” in regards to how history was written about the origins of the pyramids.

Most importantly, Dennis calls into question the date of construct of the pyramids and in particular the “Sphinx.” He talks about the scientific evidence that supports the construction of the Sphinx, which predates Egyptian society. The very idea that mainstream historians could be off by over 5000 years is mind-boggling!

Dennis’ career as a civil engineer comes into play in regards to his research, and he points out the ideologies offered by present day Egyptologists just don’t add up! He cites the flaws in the time allotted to construct the pyramids with a multitude of slave labor, and sheds light for the lay person with basics math skills, that what has been posed “just ain’t so!”

I found this latest dialogue stimulating, informative, enlightening and instilling a need to “know more,” however, there was one item I took issue with—it just wasn’t long enough!

The Paracast

See Also:

New Revelations On Haut Affidavit

Details of the Aztec Incident are Revealed By Ufologist Scott Ramsey In Recent Interview on The Paracast

SHARE YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Oregon Couple Claim They Saw UFO

By KOIN News 6
10-19-07

ALBANY, Ore. - A couple in a rural area east of Albany claim they saw what appeared to be UFOs - and they want to know if anybody else saw the same thing.

Raye Laufer and her husband, Derral, say they were smoking in their forested backyard last month in the Cascade Range foothills.

That's when they saw two long, silver, bullet-shaped objects flying side-by-side across the sky.

The couple says that neither object had lights or made a sound before they split up, with one heading east and the other toward the northeast.

The Laufers say they next saw what appeared to be a large orb silently glowing red and orange floating above treetops before it hovered over their home and then headed north.

Raye Laufer says she filed a report with the National UFO Reporting Center, which encouraged her to ask whether anybody else saw the objects.

UFOs Visit College Campus!

UFOs Visiting Anne Arundel Community College

By The Washington Post
10-20-07

Can't get your fill of spaceship and alien discussions? Hear more about UFOs from the pros at Mysteries of Space and Sky IV: Sixty Years of UFOs. Lecture topics and expert speakers at Saturday's day-long UFO conference include "Estimate of the Situation: Where Do We Stand After 60 Years?" by Richard Hall, "From Arnold to Roswell: Discs and Saucers and Mass Confusion" by Don Berliner, "The Nascent Abduction Phenomenon: The Hill Case of 1961 and Beyond" by Sue Swiatek and "60 (Or More) Years in 60 (Or More) Minutes" by Bruce Maccabee.

Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Anne Arundel Community College, Center for Applied Learning and Technology, Room 107, 101 College Pkwy., Arnold. $30-$40. 410-777-2325.

UFO Sightings in Eden

By Magnet
10-21-07

Eden residents Margaret McDonald and her grandchildren are wondering about life in space after seeing an strange object in the sky three nights in a row.

From Friday night to Sunday night on the last weekend in August, Mrs McDonald, her husband Greg and two of her five grandchildren, Tim and April Keft, watched the antics of an orange star shaped object in the night sky.

Miss Keft was the first to spot the unidentified flying object [UFO] as it approached from the north at about 9.30pm on Friday night when she took the dog outside for a stretch, and called out Mrs and Mr McDonald outside.

"When I first saw it I thought it was a star," she said.

"It was like it could see us as it did a little dance.

"Timothy [Keft] got binoculars out and saw flashing lights.

"It was very high up when it started to move and it was heading south and then it just sort of turned gradually and left in an easterly direction over the sea."

At about the same time over the next two nights the family piled outside again.

"It looked like it was more above us and it looked like it had a cross on it, it wasn't round but more like a star," Miss Keft said.

"On Sunday night it did a little dance and went south."

Astrologer David Reneke has researched UFOs for more than 10 years and currently contributes to Sky and Space Magazine.

He said there was a list of possibilities to work though before an object could be called a UFO.

"Mrs McDonald's explanation was very vivid and descriptive," he said.

He said without further investigation it was impossible to regard the UFO.

"One of top five things I ever saw came from the Ben Boyd National Park, and it was in daylight," he said.

There was more than one witness and they had evidence."

The story Mr Reneke mentioned was the filmed sighting of five or six flying objects over the sea by three Sydney men who were in Eden to film an eclipse of the sun in 1976.

Mr Reneke examined the film frame by frame and sent it to the United States for analysis where it was confirmed to be unidentified.

So is there pattern of UFO sightings in our skies at the time of an eclipse?

"No," said Mr Reneke.

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