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Post by auntym on Jan 16, 2018 15:29:11 GMT -6
www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/01/16/this-former-navy-fighter-pilot-who-once-chased-ufo-says-should-take-them-seriously/MtfbLrDhNJRrO0MEzJRbDM/story.html Leslie Kean @lesliekean 2h2 hours ago
More from pilot Dave Fravor in the Boston Globe This former Navy pilot, who once chased a UFO, says we should take them seriouslyDavid Fravor, commander of a Navy squadron aboard the USS Nimitz, had an encounter with a UFO that is hard to explain.By Martin Finucane Globe Staff / www.bostonglobe.com/staff/finucane January 16, 2018 David Fravor is a recognizable type. Affable, neatly dressed, with a men’s regular haircut and semi-rimless glasses, he’s a retired military man who works as a consultant in the Boston area. He could be standing in front of you in a Starbucks line and you wouldn’t notice him at all. But the story he has to tell is literally out of this world. Thirteen years ago, the Windham, N.H., resident was a veteran US Navy pilot at the controls of an F/A-18-F fighter jet flying off San Diego when he sighted an unidentified flying object and tried to intercept it. “I want to join on it. I want to see how close I can get to it,” Fravor, 53, said, describing his thinking as he began the pursuit. Get Fast Forward in your inbox: Forget yesterday's news. Get what you need today in this early-morning email. Then the object, which looked like a 4o-foot-long Tic Tac candy, “goes whoosh, and it’s gone.” he said. It accelerated rapidly and disappeared like no aircraft he had ever seen in his career. Fravor has been in the news recently after the New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon had a secret program that investigated reports of UFOs. The Defense Department says it closed down the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2012 after five years, but the program’s backers say it remains in existence, investigating UFO reports from service members while carrying out other duties. The story of Fravor’s close encounter accompanied the expose, illustrating the kinds of UFO stories that are hard to explain away. “I know what I saw,” said Fravor. The incident occurred on Nov. 14, 2004. It was about 140 miles southwest of San Diego, Fravor said. The commander of a squadron of more than 300 service members aboard the carrier USS Nimitz, he was flying a brand-new plane with a weapons systems officer in the back seat. Another fighter from his squadron, with pilot and weapons system officer aboard, was flying with him. It was a perfect Southern California day. The sea was calm, without whitecaps. No clouds marred the sky. A radio operator from the cruiser USS Princeton directed them to an area where the Princeton had been tracking mysterious objects for two weeks. The objects had been dropping straight down from above 80,000 feet and stopping at 20,000 feet. “They’d hang out for hours, and then when they were done, they would go straight back up,” Fravor said. When the two fighters got to the assigned location, they spotted a disturbance under the water, Fravor said. To him, it looked like something the size of a Boeing 737 airplane was underneath, causing waves to break over it. “Then we see this bright white object” above the disturbance, moving erratically, back and forth, left and right, bouncing around like a ping pong ball, he said. Fravor’s jet and the other jet were circling the spot. The other jet was high, Fravor’s jet lower. Trying to get a closer look at the Tic Tac, he began an easy, circular descent toward it. The object “starts mirroring me,” beginning its own circular ascent from the ocean, he said. “It’s at about the 2 o’clock and it’s coming up, and I’m at about the 8 o’clock position coming down,” he said, using the cap of a pen to illustrate the maneuvers during an interview at a suburban restaurant. At that point, he said, he decided to cut across and head directly toward the mysterious object. He turned, dove, then pulled up his plane’s nose — and it zoomed away. Fravor then looked for the underwater object, and saw that it, too, had disappeared. The fighters conferred with the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away. They headed toward it when the Princeton told them that radar had picked up the object again — already at the rendezvous point. When the two jets got there, the object had disappeared. Why it decided to go there of all places is a mystery, Fravor said. Nearing the end of a 24-year career in the Navy and Marines, Fravor had plenty of experience encountering other aircraft in the sky, but this one was different, he said. It was bright white, cylindrical, with rounded ends. It had no wings, no windows, no exhaust plume. And then there was that speed. “It was impressive. It was fast. It was maneuverable, and I’d really like to fly it,” Fravor said he told the executive officer on the Nimitz afterwards. He came within nearly a half-mile of it, he estimated. He and his back-seater as well as the men in the other plane saw it with their own eyes for 3 to 5 minutes, he said. “What’s unique about [our encounter] is we physically interacted and chased it,” he said. “We literally engaged it.” Later, back at the carrier, he told his back-seater, “Dude, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty weirded out.” More fighters were launched and, while they didn’t see it with the naked eye, one crew saw it on their radar and video screens, he said. A copy of the video has been released by the Defense Department. (A second video released by the government shows a different encounter on the East Coast.) In addition to the Princeton tracking the objects, Fravor said, the Nimitz and an E-2 surveillance plane in the area could also see the objects on their radars. Was there an intelligence controlling the object? “Oh, yeah,” Fravor said. “It reacted to us.” Fravor has no idea what the object was or what it was doing. He says he jokes with people that the object was the one that messed up — by being seen and chased when it wasn’t supposed to be. He got plenty of ribbing back aboard the carrier. But he said he was surprised at the lack of curiosity the Defense Department showed about the encounter, which happened in an area well-known as a Navy training ground. “I figured someone would come out,” he said. After all, they’d been tracking the objects for two weeks and surely a debriefing would be in order. But no one ever did. Fravor said if a foreign submarine had surfaced behind a carrier in the area, dire alarms would have been raised and questions would have been asked about how it had penetrated the Navy’s defense. “And yet now you have many of these objects, like a dozen of them, that are just, at will, just showing up, doing whatever they want, and going away and you can do nothing about it. And no one asks any questions,” he said. Over the years, it became just a funny story that he would tell friends — until he was contacted several months ago by Luis Elizondo, the man who once headed the Pentagon program, who asked him to tell his story to the Times. Now he’s glad the issue is making headlines. And he supports the work of the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a new group that Elizondo has joined that aims to raise money for UFO research. “I think the story needs to be told. We need to stop making jokes and start paying attention to it,” Fravor said. “This is not a US problem. This is a global issue,” he said. “Why aren’t we investigating these things? . . . If it’s like ‘E.T.’, then it’s all good. If it’s like ‘War of the Worlds’ or ‘Independence Day,’ then not so much.” He said it appears our existing technology is “way, way behind” and that if we could understand the Tic Tac’s technology it could benefit the world, leading, for example, to new sources of energy. The $22 million reportedly spent on the five-year Pentagon program was like a “rounding error” in the Defense Department’s massive budget, he said. With better funding, he believes a breakthrough could happen. “With the right money and the right focus, you can figure this out,” he said. “I think there’s enough brilliant, open minds.” Fravor describes himself as an average guy — “total middle class from Toledo, Ohio” — who’s somehow managed to have some amazing experiences. (Among other things, he appeared in the PBS documentary series “Carrier” and has flown his jet over the Super Bowl.) He said his recent appearances in the news have inspired some jests from friends, which he expected. But so far the overall reaction has been positive. Fravor, who is married and has two grown children, said his neighbors in New Hampshire haven’t said much about it. One, though, stopped by with a present: a box of Tic Tacs. Does he think he will ever see a UFO again? “Never say never. But there’s, what, 7½ billion people in the world? — and I chased it,” he said. Here’s the video taken by one of the pilots in Fravor’s squadron aboard the Nimitz. WATCH VIDEOS: www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/01/16/this-former-navy-fighter-pilot-who-once-chased-ufo-says-should-take-them-seriously/MtfbLrDhNJRrO0MEzJRbDM/story.html
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Post by jcurio on Jan 17, 2018 9:23:56 GMT -6
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Post by auntym on Jan 17, 2018 14:21:09 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/01/new-york-times-UFO-bomb.htmlWhile Waiting for the Next New York Times UFO Bomb to Drop How deep will ‘the government’ go?By Billy Cox / De Void / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/1-16-18 While waiting for the next New York Times UFO bomb to drop:
Ahh, to be a fly-sized drone on the wall of the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C ring or wherever it is they’re trying to figure out how to manage whatever comes next. Like, who, exactly, specifically, should own this month-old mess? Is the old guard hoping Trump’s tweetstreams can keep the media preoccupied with meaningless noise? After all, last month’s cookie-cutter headlines — The Guardian (“Pentagon admits running secret UFO program for five years”), USA Today (“Defense Department Confirms They Funded UFO Program”), and the New York Daily News (“Department of Defense admits to running UFO program”), etc. – raised more questions than answers.After resigning in October as a career intelligence officer, inside man Luis Elizondo told the Times in December what he knew about the DoD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program to study UFOs. Although a laconic military flack confirmed the existence of the five-year, $22M initiative that ended in 2012, not a single serious federal acronym or bigwig currently in its employ has since been held to account for the myriad questions this revelation raises. Few investigators are feeling more hamstrung by federal obstinance than Robert Powell. Founder of a research team called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, Powell is the investigative point man on two relatively recent and provocative UFO incidents. One left radar tracks and confused military pilots over Stephenville, Texas, before creeping to the very edge of restricted airspace over President Bush’s Crawford ranch in 2008. The other was an ocean-dipping airborne bogey videotaped by U.S. border patrol agents over coastal Puerto Rico in 2013. The latter was documented with the same infrared technology F-18 Navy jets used to acquire the riveting UFO sequences at the center of the Times reporting in December. Powell, who also co-authored an indispensable history about what happened when honest scientists studying UFOs confronted military roadblocks after World War II, did a very smart thing in July. That’s when he resigned as the Mutual UFO Network’s research director, for reasons too pathetic to waste time with here. Suffice it to say, there aren’t a lot of grant dollars going to an outfit whose leadership includes a prophetess renowned for channeling ancient wisdom and insight from a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior named Ramtha. Hello, MUFON? This is the MacArthur Genius Foundation’s board of directors calling, and we’re trying to book Ramtha for a TED talk? Anyhow, before all that, in 2016, Powell started pounding the military bureaucracy with FOIAs in hopes of authenticating the 2004 F-18 incident, which had slipped quietly into the public domain at an independent naval aviation blog in 2007. At the Open Minds online forum in October, Powell detailed his largely unsuccessful efforts to render an accurate accounting of what happened off the coast of San Diego nearly 18 years ago, and it’s worth a read. On 11/14/04, the UFO in question obliged military cameras during training exercises. Five naval components were involved, including the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and the USS Princeton, a guided missile destroyer. Powell dispatched FOIAs for details about the encounter to the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Marine Corps, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Naval Air Warfare Center, the Naval Air Facilities Engineering Command, Naval Sea Systems Command, and Naval History and Heritage Command. All he got were goose eggs. Powell was incredulous. “So you’re telling me we have five assets and you don’t have any documents on any of those assets from that day, no deck logs or anything?” he says. “That’s unbelievable.” Following Powell’s appeal last April, which also copied members of Congress, the Navy managed to produce contemporary anecdotal emails from service members who stated they’d heard about or seen the F-18 video. All told, Powell wound up with nine names of USMC or Navy officers with knowledge, peripheral or otherwise, about the event. He continues to explore those leads. Thanks to the NY Times’ blurb about how the Pentagon’s UFO program was initiated by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Powell is now pumping the DIA for info on F-18 incident, too. The most important witnesses to step forward are retired Navy pilots David Fravor and Jim Straight, who went on to talk about pursuing a bogey that was painted by surface radar, was invisible to in-flight radar, and pulled maneuvers that appeared to crumple the laws of physics. Unless and until official provenance of that footage is established, says Powell, the pilot testimony is much more convincing than stand-alone video. “We need more documentation. We need to show a FOIA paper trail that establishes a chain of command,” Powell says. “So much of what I’m hearing doesn’t make sense. The Navy can’t find anything, so how can the DIA or the Defense Department have information the Navy doesn’t?” The defense bureaucracy is clearly at odds with itself. Again, it’d be great to eavesdrop on the contortions playing out within those privileged circles, because a credible, cogent government narrative ratchets this thing up to a very serious level. Maybe, one day sooner than we think, those of us who’ve long advocated for more transparency will get a sharper understanding of what it means to be careful what you wish for. But if the Times keeps doing decent journalism, turning back is not an option, not anymore. Even if — or especially if — it undercuts our conceits about having the fastest, stealthiest, baddest bells and whistles in the sky. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15614/deep-will-government-go/
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Post by auntym on Jan 17, 2018 14:37:22 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/date/2017/12/ don't know how i missed this article, but here it is... What a week!By Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/Friday, Dec 22, 2017 The other day I watched astronomer/Hayden Planetarium director/Carl Sagan “Cosmos” legacy heir Neil deGrasse Tyson lose it on CNN. The topic was the Pentagon’s newly revealed UFO research program. And the flummoxed “rock star of science explanation,” as Tyson was introduced, was so worked up he was practically incoherent. “The evidence is so paltry for aliens to visit earth, I have no further interest,” he said. “Let other people who care, go ahead. And when you finally find some aliens, bring them into Times Square. No, no,” he corrected himself with coercive chuckling, “there are too many weird people.” Obliging laughter from Tyson’s hosts. “And try not to come back during Comic-Con where the aliens would just blend in,” he continued. “Go to the county fair or something where there’s a uniformity of who’s there.” Hi, Sarah! Can you tell the President we’ve got a pool going on back here about when your boss will start issuing UFO tweets? Tell him the kitty’s over $10,000, and that if he tweets before Christmas, at least two of us will be able to buy toys for our kids this year? Oh yeah. The county fair. Monster trucks and funnel cakes. Blue-ribbon livestock. Those people. Look, the truth is, Tyson is actually cool with space aliens. So long as they know their place, confine themselves to distant shores on the far side of the cosmic ocean, and work the keyboards with SETI radioastronomers. But yo, wait up – he’s still talking: “—and everybody’s got a high definition video camera on them now. We have video footage of rare things that, you know, happened but no one saw it happen, like buses tumbling in tornadoes. In the day, you didn’t say oh, a bus is about to tumble, let me go back and get my video camera to film this. No, you got your tail outta there. Everybody’s got a video camera. I’m just waiting for images of people visiting … having tea with aliens on the spacecraft.” Say what? “Fine, we don’t know what it is, keep checking it out. Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien.” Say no more, got it. When it comes to investigating for possibilities in our own back yard, let somebody else do the work. Nope, this isn’t the sort of sputtering discourse we’ve come to expect from the normally unruffled and eloquent personality scientist. But neither he nor we have ever seen a time like this. The revelation of a $22 million Pentagon study of UFOs. State of the art gun-cam thermal footage with embedded metadata. Captured by F-18 jet fighters and professionally analyzed. An officer with an elite military unit – an eyewitness, to boot – telling global audiences “I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying, that has the performance, the acceleration — keep in mind, this thing has no wings.” Plus a lineup of blue-chip advocates for more extensive study, officials who most definitely are not labeling what’s going on as the handiwork of space aliens. People with titles such as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, like Chris Mellon, who recently left the Pentagon. “Um, you know, that’s speculation,” Mellon responded when asked by a CNN reporter if he was talking extraterrestrials. “I think what we need to do is get serious about finding answers. Speculation is cheap and easy, what we need is more hard data.” Judging from his multiple appearances, this is a guy who isn’t going to shrink from the lights, who understands the media’s role in making people listen or read. “Until the public engages,” he said, “we’re really not gonna make progress and headway. It’s a democracy, people have to be invested and care about it for something like this to be really understood.” Mellon’s assertion about democracy may need an update, but never mind. America’s traditional stable of talking heads has never been challenged this way before. And that makes it easier to understand why folks like Tyson look off their game. Especially when the former director of that Pentagon Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, refuses to draw conclusions about the evidence. “We’d rather let the data drive the conclusions,” he told HLN, “(rather than let) our opinions and our conclusions drive the data.” That sounds like, well, jeez, your gig, Dr. Tyson. Science. When it comes to UFOs, Seth Shostak, like Tyson, is where newsies typically go whenever they want The Reliable Rational Angle. Senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Shostak has welded his career to the theory that ET will be discovered at a manageable arm’s length, but most certainly not in our own atmosphere. For many in the SETI clique, searching for ET is a zero-sum game, where considering evidence for one is incompatible with weighing evidence for the other. So they tend to avoid the other and resort to the sort of speculation that too often characterizes UFO “believers.” Their argument usually opens with perfunctory equivocation about how, yes, there are many things we see in the sky that we don’t understand, yes, yes – but that doesn’t mean they’re space aliens. Then they trot out anthropocentric behavioral analogies they use to buttress their degreed perspectives. Like the old saw Shostak regurgitated for Business Insider this week. “They’re the best house guests ever,” Shostak said of whatever’s going on upstairs. “Because if they’re here, they’re not doing anything … They send a huge fleet of spacecraft, preferably shaped like dinner plates, just to fly around and get people agitated but otherwise not do a thing. It’s a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing.” Y’know, he’s right? They sure aren’t behaving like the Spanish did when they reached the gates of Tenochtitlan. Go on, Seth: “They don’t try and take any of their land, they don’t bring any disease, they don’t do anything; they just sort of walk around at the fringes of their settlements, leading to puzzling sightings, but that’s it.” I wonder what this week has been like for these tunnel-visionaries. Did they voluntarily process The New York Times coup? Or will they ingest it only after being drugged, bound, and held hostage to the Ninth Symphony like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”? This can’t be pleasant. But this is definitely terra incognita. For the first time in more than a year, I’ve woken up every morning actually looking forward to browsing the news feed to see what kind of legs this thing has. For now, the story is everywhere, NPR, Forbes, NBC, ABC, CBS, Axios, Esquire, Space.com, Fox, Popular Mechanics and everything else I’ve missed. An emboldened reporter from The Hill asks White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Trump believes in UFOs, and if her boss intends to restore research funding, which supposedly went lights-out in 2012. “I feel like I already want to pass on this question,” Sanders replies as the giggles subside, “given that you’ve got aliens sitting among you.” No one knew she was this witty before. “Somehow or another that question hasn’t come up in our back and forth over the last couple of days but I will check into that and be happy to circle back.” She said happy. Ralph Blumenthal, co-author of the Times story, even took the opportunity to explain his approach. “So how does a story on U.F.O.s get into The New York Times?” he begins. “Not easily, and only after a great deal of vetting, I assure you.” Front-end journalism from other media presses forward. Veteran KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp in Las Vegas scores a sit-down interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid, who instigated the program in 2007. Knapp also contacts other sources, who tell him “the effort resulted in three dozen thick reports, some of them several hundred pages in length, as well as another three dozen or so technical reports which projected how this kind of exotic technology might usher in a new era of aviation, and what that might mean.” In summary, reports Knapp, “Reid said the study produced voluminous reports, but was canceled because of fears within the intelligence community, fear not only that the story would leak out, but fear based on religious beliefs of those who felt UFOs might be Satanic.” So even Satan’s doing the war on science thing now. Great. Reid also referenced the research of UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, who has more than 150 veterans on record discussing the phenomenon’s spooky activity over nuclear weapons facilities. Imagine the White House press corps if the phenomenon’s tampering with our WMD gets any traction: “Sarah, can you tell us if President Trump is trying to sign a deal with UFOs to get them to disable North Korea’s nuclear arsenal?” Reid even tells Knapp his phone’s been ringing off the hook since the Times story broke, that he’s been fielding calls from members of Congress and business leaders alike. In fact, earlier this week, defense techno-giant Raytheon touted its own critical role in the UFO story by reminding readers that its very own Advanced Targeting Forward Look Infrared sensor — aka AN/ASQ-228 in Navy parlance, installed on carrier-based F-18s — was responsible for acquiring the footage. Stated the chief engineer for Surveillance and Target Systems at Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems, “We might be the system that caught the first evidence of E.T. out there.” So there’s that. On the other hand, if precedence holds sway, the attention-challenged press will get bored soon enough, revert to form, and start sniffing around for more accessible VIP bedroom scandals. That’s where I’d put my $$$. But if nothing else, at least De Void will look back someday, fondly, at this moment, this week. The week the media broke from covering the same old repetitive dispiriting Beltway fatcat horror show. The week the media swerved off the rez, nodded politely at the same old celebrity authorities, and at least feigned interest in chasing the biggest story of all time. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/date/2017/12/
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Post by auntym on Jan 20, 2018 14:08:35 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/01/luis-elizando-former-head-of-secret-ufo-program.html Saturday, January 20, 2018 Luis Elizando Former Head of Secret Pentagon UFO Program Describes Five Categories of UFOs There is a taboo around the knowledge of extraterrestrial phenomena: Luis Elizondo
The former director of the Pentagon program dedicated to investigating possible sightings of UFOs explains in the importance of continuing with this type of program. By W Radio 1-10-18 Transcribed By Dave Haith W Radio: Mr Luis Elizondo, good morning and thank you very much for being with us at W radio. I would like to ask you if you as an official at the Pentagon, had enough proof, or solid proof, that could lead you to believe that there's life outside of the Earth? Luis Elizando: Thank you very much for having me on your program. What we looked at on our program was two fold - what was it and how it worked? As a result of our analysis and ten years worth of study and information, leads us to believe that these phenomena are not from any one country that we know. So the question is, if they from outer space, or inner space or any space in between, that is a question that we still don't know, but we are fairly certain they're not from here. W Radio: Mr Elizondo, why the Pentagon wanted to have a secret program watching the phenomena and these UFOs? Why wouldn't it publish this material this proof or this analysis that the Pentagon had? Luis Elizando: I believe the answer is for two reasons. One, there is a tremendous social stigma or taboo against officially recognizing the phenomena and, two, I believe it is very difficult for any national security apparatus to have identified a problem or potential threat and not offer a solution. In this case you have phenomena that are in a certain air space. We do not know what it is, we do not know how it works, and there's nothing we can do about it. And that is a very uncomfortable topic for any government to have internally or externally. W Radio: Mr Elizondo, from the phenomena and incidents that you knew when you were at this program, what was the one that really surprised you or the one that you said, ok this is what makes me believe that there's life outside of the Earth? Luis Elizando: I think every day was a surprise. There was no one single incident. It was a slow steady flow of information coming in, either through eye-witness accounts or through radar or through video, that began to paint a very compelling picture for all of us. I think furthermore for your listeners' understanding, we are talking about objects that can be sub-categorized in five different observables. Those observables include extreme maneuverability, hyper-sonic velocities, low observability, transmedium travel and, lastly, positive lift without any type of obvious signs of aerodynamics or thrust, or propulsion. These objects are displaying characteristics that far exceed anything we know currently in the world's inventory. W Radio: Mr Elizando, regarding the name of the program at the Pentagon that you worked with, it is described as a 'threat', do you really think there is an actual threat from outer space to the Earth, to our planet? Luis Elizando: I think in national security, we always have to assume anything can be a threat until we can prove it is not a threat.....as an example, we lock our doors and night, we turn on our alarm systems and we lock our windows because there is a potential there might be a threat. There probably won't be, but there might be. In this particular case, if you can imagine waking up every morning and seeing muddy boot prints in your living room, every morning even though you've locked your doors and you've locked your windows and your alarm is on. In this particular case, nothing is stolen from your house, nothing is missing, no-one is hurt but at the end of the day you still have muddy boot-prints that aren't yours in your house. W Radio: Mr Elizando, I would like to ask your opinion around the possibility of this topic that these investigations and analysis, could be a main part of a President Trump administration or that this program could be re-opened in the near future? Luis Elizando: Well, I think that's a very good question. We, in the office that I came from, are all apolitical, meaning we don't get paid to take sides, so whether it's Democrat or Republican or an Independent in office is really inconsequential for us, but our hope is that whoever is in office, whether it's Trump or it's anybody else, we'll look at the data and allow the data to speak for itself, then at that point, hopefully be able to increase funding and the necessary budget to continue the program in a far more robust manner. I think it's important for you listeners to know the program never went away. The program was never officially disestablished. Parts of the funding may have ended in 2012 but then more funding came in 2013 but more importantly than that, is that the effort was never stopped, never halted. So the program continues to move forward and in my opinion, whoever's in charge, whoever is the President at the time, needs to allow the data to speak for itself and increase funding for additional research and analysis into the phenomena. W Radio: Mr Elizando, there are two different scenarios: one is that life in outer space is possible and that it actually exists, and the other one, is that this different life that lives outside of Planet Earth might come to this planet and visit us. So this solid proof remains unknown for us to understand that this life really happens and they might come to Planet Earth. NASA hasn't even recognized this possibility. Why, if you have observed that there is life at outer space, no-one including NASA has recognized it? Luis Elizando: Well, keeping in mind that NASA has already recognized the possibility in fact they funded in part our SETI program. SETI is by definition Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence and millions and millions of dollars were invested of US taxpayer money to build radio telescopes for exactly that purpose. I would submit to you, if we are willing to invest millions of dollars on the off-chance we might hear a conversation somewhere in deep space, and here we have pilots who are in charge of multi-million dollar weapon systems with top secret clearances who are telling you they are seeing something right here, right now. I would submit to you, our money is probably better spent listening to the pilots and looking at the hard radar data, and looking at the videos, and trying to figure that out, instead of hoping that we might hear some conversation maybe ten million light years away. NASA has already acknowledged the high degree of possibility that we are not alone in this universe. I am not saying that what we are seeing here is necessarily outer space, or as I said before, or inner space or the space in between. I have my personal opinion. But if it's not from here, it's from somewhere else. The binary discussion of, is it from here, or is it from outer space from an alien or is it not - I'm not sure if that's even the right question because there's a lot of different scenarios and possibilities. I do not think it's an either/or question. I think there are several other options of the origins of what we're looking at. W Radio: Mr Elizando, I would like to know your personal opinion about or around these UFOs might have for coming to Planet Earth or our planet - why would they want to do that?
Luis Elizando: All I can do is put this in a human context. So let's look at this question from the human perspective. Why does mankind do anything we do and why do we explore the horizons? Sometimes we explore the horizons for our sheer curiosity. It's in our DNA, it's in our genetics. Other times we explore to exploit - to take resources and to do something that is to our advantage as a species. Other times we do it to study and to learn. There's many reasons why mankind goes... pushes the limits and goes beyond his horizon and it could well be the same thing for any other living organism out there. Again I can only speak to the intentions looking at mankind and our history, why we do what we do. There could be a whole range of reasons: they could be natural resources, it could be the fact that hydrogen is so abundant here in a very dense form with water, it could be to observe our evolution as a species, it could be reconnaissance, in some cases I've heard people say it could be what we refer to as preparation of the battlefield, you know, to determine if this planet we live on is something... that is something attractive for another species. I can't answer that question very well, cos it's simply put - I just don't know. I think there's a whole, if you will, spectrum of reasons why something or someone should be interested in this planet. Why are we interested in Mars? Why are we interested in putting mankind on Mars? Why are we interested in putting human beings in outer space in space stations? W Radio: Well Mr Luis Elizando thank you very much for being with us on W Radio. Have a good day. www.theufochronicles.com/2018/01/luis-elizando-former-head-of-secret-ufo-program.html
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Post by auntym on Jan 23, 2018 15:43:01 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15617/ex-cia-chief-keep-studying-ufos/ Ex-CIA chief: Keep studying UFOsby Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/Posted on January 22, 2018 Here’s De Void asking John Brennan about The Great Taboo/CREDIT: RCLA Normally I don’t run photos this big. But this one’s too big to shrink. Sorry for the inconvenience. Notebook dump: Shortly before taking the stage Monday morning at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota to discuss his career as a Central Intelligence Agency officer, John Brennan paused backstage for a few questions from the press. Thirty-seven years in intel, his last four as President Obama’s CIA chief, 2013-17, Brennan had the ear of the president in 1994-95. That’s when he delivered Bill Clinton’s President’s Daily Brief. And this was the so-called Rockefeller Initiative era, when billionaire Laurance Rockefeller persistently lobbied Clinton’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to release all government documents on the UFO issue. Clinton left office without finding those documents, but former First Lady/former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to make UFO transparency an issue during her 2016 presidential run. Last month, The New York Times broke the story about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program, complete with F-18 pursuit videos and interviews with pilots and the project director, Luis Elizondo. The $22 million study was officially conducted between 2007 and 2012, but Elizondo said research is ongoing. The AATI program is said to have generated three dozen separate reports, none of which have been released. Five years ago, same venue, Ringling College Library Association Town Hall Lecture Series, Sarasota, Van Wezel, backstage, De Void grabbed a sound bite from one of Brennan’s predecessors, then-recently retired CIA director/Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Months earlier, the CIA’s ex-Hollywood image-spinner, a guy named Chase Brandon, had gone on record about finding a box in the CIA Historical Intelligence Collection crammed with official documentation of the alleged 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M. Said he found it during the mid-1990s. Gates, a friend and colleague of Chase Brandon, declined to challenge Brandon’s story. “As director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense,” Gates told De Void in 2013, “I think I have had every security clearance that there is available in the United States government. I first joined the government 46 years ago and I have never seen one shred of evidence or one report of any kind of UFO or remains or cadavers or anything.” That said, here’s Brennan, the man who worked Gates’ old job until 2017, on the record today, when queried about the Pentagon AATI initiative. America’s spymaster was cordial and unblinking: “I think over the past several decades there have been a number of phenomena that have been observed by pilots, both commercial pilots, both military pilots, that are basically unexplained. Maybe it’s the result of some type of atmospheric conditions or something else. And so I think the Pentagon rightly is trying to understand whether or not any of these phenomena have implications as far as national security is concerned. Some people refer to it as UFO, an unidentified flying object, it’s something that is observed but there is no determination about what its origin or provenance is. “During the course of my career, both in the CIA as well as the White House, I was aware that there were endeavors to try to discern what some of these phenomena are.” Me: What did you learn? “That most of them remain unexplained. But that shouldn’t mean that we don’t continue to pursue it. And try to apply the latest technologies and the latest science to understand what may be going on. “We know that a number of our adversaries continue to try to look for gaps and vulnerabilities in our national defense so anything that might take place in the air, in the atmosphere, is something that I think is rightly an area for pursuit on the part of our intelligence community and Defense Department.” The schedule was tight. Onto the next question. My kingdom for another five minutes … devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15617/ex-cia-chief-keep-studying-ufos/
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Post by jcurio on Jan 23, 2018 16:24:06 GMT -6
I think furthermore for your listeners' understanding, we are talking about objects that can be sub-categorized in five different observables. Those observables include extreme maneuverability, hyper-sonic velocities, low observability, transmedium travel and, lastly, positive lift without any type of obvious signs of aerodynamics or thrust, or propulsion. These objects are displaying characteristics that far exceed anything we know currently in the world's inventory. Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7497/pentagons-mysterious-program?page=2#ixzz5536v0Kle
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Post by auntym on Feb 2, 2018 15:50:41 GMT -6
www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-man-who-headed-up-secret-government-ufo-study-speaks-out/948480491 I-Team: Man who headed up secret government UFO study speaks outBy: George Knapp / Feb 02, 2018 LAS VEGAS - A secret Pentagon program to study unknown aerial objects -- otherwise known as UFOs -- may not be finished after all. The civilian contractor for the program was Bigelow Aerospace, based in Las Vegas. Their contract ended in 2012, but the man who managed the program inside the Pentagon thinks it is still operating. His name is Luis Elizondo, and most of us first heard his name last October when he stood on a stage with rock star Tom DeLonge and other government insiders. Elizondo said he had spent 10 years as the head of a secret study of unidentified aerial objects. He also was instrumental in the release of official UFO videos recorded by military pilots. The I-Team sat down with him earlier this week to ask, among other things, why the Pentagon considered UFOs to be a potential threat. "Is it a threat? And if it's a threat, is it the Russians or Chinese? These are the normal questions, whether dealing with terrorism or weapons of mass destruction or you'd ask for any national security issue de jour, and yet here we are with something that....." Reporter George Knapp: "Doesn't fit." Luis Elizondo: "That doesn't fit, doesn't fit." Elizondo has spent most of his adult life protecting his country, on active duty in combat hotspots, handling terrorists at Guantanamo, and at the Pentagon, where he was the point man for AATIP, the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program. That program collected and analyzed information about encounters between the U.S. military and spectacular but unknown technology, what some would call UFOs. "My job in the government at the time with AATIP was two-fold, to determine what it was and how it worked, not really focusing on who was behind the steering wheel or whatever. If we can answer the first two things, everything else we will be able to explain later," Elizondo said. He says that even his immediate supervisor in the Pentagon was unaware of the program. Only a small list of people scattered in different branches and agencies had a need to know. The word threat is built into the name of AATIP, and even though the unidentified craft being reported by pilots and others didn't launch an Independence Day type attack on humanity or zap major cities with death rays, the defense department had to consider the possibilities. The so-called Tic Tac UFO, for instance, was detected over several days in 2004 by personnel with the U.S.S. Nimitz battle group off the coast of San Diego. It didn't attack, but it demonstrated vast superiority over America's most advanced defense systems. "I think if you were to take this issue that we've seen and we have something coming into our air space that we control that has a Russian star on the tail or a North Korean tail number, I think people would have a much different reaction and response because there's something we can identify and say, this is in our air space and shouldn't be here," Elizondo said. "You DOD, you CIA, you DHS, have the responsibility of protecting us, how did this happen? And yet, here we have the same scenario but there are no flags or numbers on the tail. In fact, there may not even be a tail on some of these things, and yet it's crickets. Nobody wants to have that conversation." In 2007, a small group of senators led by Nevada's Harry Reid, initiated a program to change the culture surrounding UFO reports. Reid was motivated, in part, because of classified reports he'd read about UFO encounters over U.S. nuclear bases in which atomic weapons were somehow disabled. "The communications in the missile defense installation was shut down. It didn't happen once. It happened more than once," former Senator Harry Reid said. "We have things in ships at sea, things in the water. What is that?" Reid says he was also concerned that if adversaries like Russia or China could master the technology displayed by the Tic Tac or other UFOs, the U.S. military would be at a great disadvantage. Elizondo agrees. "I think it is ridiculous to presume that other nations that are very sophisticated, very capable, aren't looking at this as well. I cannot go into detail about why I think that, but I am very confident they are aware," Elizondo said. The program set up by the Pentagon to assist AATIP was housed at Bigelow Aerospace in southern Nevada. The contract ended in 2012, but Elizondo believes some version of the study is ongoing. Elizondo thinks it makes sense to study Tic Tacs and other UFOs and compares it to how you might react if someone pierced your home security system. "The first thing you do, you come down your stairs as you look in your living room, you see muddy boot prints in your living room on the carpet that weren't there the night before. Nothing has been taken out of your house, nothing has been disturbed, no one has been harmed and yet every night, despite you locking the front door, closing the windows and turning on the alarm, there are muddy boot prints that keep showing up on your carpet. now, is that a threat?" So, what about those Pentagon videos? Are they legit? And when will we get to see more of them released? Tonight at 11 p.m., Luis Elizondo will tell us more about those dramatic encounters, why he left the pentagon, and what his new job will be, working with other former insiders at something called To The Stars Academy. WATCH VIDEO: www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-man-who-headed-up-secret-government-ufo-study-speaks-out/948480491
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Post by swamprat on Feb 2, 2018 20:07:29 GMT -6
'US Government has 'crystal clear pics of UFOs chased by military' claims former insiderTHE US Government is keeping "crystal-clear" images of "real UFOs" chased by military pilots from public view it was sensationally claimed today.
By Jon Austin Published: Feb 2, 2018
Nick Pope, a former investigator of the UFO phenomenon for the British MoD, was reacting to claims made by experts that recent "UFO" footage released by the US Government was probably just a plane.
Yesterday, Express.co.uk revealed that in a radio podcast of the Big Picture Science Skeptic Check, produced at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, a panel of experts looked at the shocking radar video footage and the consensus was the object shown was just infrared heat from plane engines misidentified by US Navy pilots.
The US-based SETI Institute is a collective of scientists looking for evidence of alien life in the cosmos.
However, Mr Pope argued the footage should not be dismissed by SETI so readily.
He said: "I saw the SETI Institute's sceptical comments about the Pentagon UFO videos and thought I'd chip in, as I think they've misunderstood or failed to take account of something fairly important about this.
"While I agree that the videos themselves don't prove anything, I think the criticism of them is based on a misunderstanding. What many people don't seem to appreciate is that these videos haven't been illegally leaked - they've been declassified and legitimately placed into the public domain.
"Self-evidently, therefore, there's nothing in them that the US government, military or intelligence community regards as particularly sensitive.
"Yes, it's a big deal that military jets were chasing these objects, but while they weren't able to catch or identify them, the videos in and of themselves don't prove the pilots encountered extraterrestrial spacecraft.
"The real issue relates not to the grainy imagery that's been released to the world, but to the classified analyses that will have been undertaken by intelligence staff.
"When I worked on the MoD's UFO project we received a steady stream of photographs and films from the public, and from time to time, over the years, RAF pilots encountered UFOs and sometimes managed to get some gun camera footage.
"We'd send this material to the Defence Intelligence Staff and to a unit called the Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre (now subsumed within the Defence Geospatial Intelligence Fusion Centre at RAF Wyton).
"These imagery analysts are very bright people and have tremendously sophisticated tools at their disposal to enhance and analyse photos and videos.
"This is exactly what AATIP and other US intelligence community personnel will have done with these UFO videos, using their own IMINT (imagery intelligence) specialists.
"The detailed results of these analyses, perhaps including enhanced, crystal clear images of what the pilots encountered, haven't yet been made public, and may never see the light of day.
"In summary, sceptics may not be impressed by the blurry videos that have been made public - and I take their point - but somewhere in the US intelligence community there will be considerably more impressive material.
"However, whether any of this can be declassified and made public remains to be seen."
The video made global headlines in December, when a New York Times article revealed the existence of a top-secret US Department of Defense department which investigated the UFO phenomenon for five years from 2007 to 2012.
The Advanced Aerial Threat Identification program (AATIP) had a £16million budget to investigate any threat posed by unidentified objects observed by the military.
It was headed by Luis Elizondo, who resigned from the DoD last October to help set up the To The Stars Academy with former Blink 182 singer Tom DeLonge to further UFO research privately.
The article also revealed the radar camera footage from a US Navy aircraft flying off the coast of San Diego in November 2004, which was said to show a UFO that "defied physics."
This footage was part of the so-called Nimitz UFO incident, in which several US Navy personnel reported seeing several tic-tac shaped UFOs over the sea, a case that was investigated by the AATIP.
Mr Elizondo later went on record to say the case, and others looked at by the AATIP, showed "there was very compelling evidence that we are not alone”.
Other debunkers have agreed it could well be a plane.
UFO believers discussing the SETI broadcast on debate website Reddit.com were not amused by the claims.
One posted today: "So our naval pilots are not trained or experienced enough not to be surprised and shocked by what are almost certainly distant jet exhausts?
"Also, he said 'the apparent strange movement of the object was just the camera itself moving, and the banking of the plane in pursuit.'
"Likely story, guys! Our military pilots are just igannant potatoes in those cockpits with zero training? We just trust them to operate the most advanced and expensive aircraft known to man, but it's Idiocy up there apparently according to this guy. Give me a break."
Watch Luis' interview: www.express.co.uk/news/weird/913631/Pentagon-UFO-aliens-UG-Government-crystal-clear-image-UFO
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Post by swamprat on Feb 3, 2018 9:43:31 GMT -6
The SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) broadcasts a discussion called "Big Picture Science" in an attempt to involve citizens in their program through fund-raising. Every so often, they do a "Skeptic Check" version. This is their latest effort in that area. It is a response to the release of Defense Dept. info on the secret UFO program.
My position continues to be, we must look at THIS "Skeptic Check" edition skeptically. As I've said before, the SETI Institute has to be furious that Bigelow got all that money instead of them. Secondly, if aliens are found to be visiting Earth, SETI is out of a job. Thirdly, because of scientific rigor, peer review, the need for correlation and confirmation, it is difficult for some scientists to think outside the box.Skeptic Check: New UFO EvidenceSETI Institute, Big Picture Science
Post Date: January 29, 2018
Hosts: Seth Shostak, Molly Bentley
Guests: James Oberg - Space journalist, historian and former NASA employee James McGaha - Retired Air Force pilot, astronomer and director of the Grasslands Observatory Ben Radford - Deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a Research Fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
It was a shocker of a story, splashed across the New York Times front page: The existence of a five-year long, hidden Pentagon investigation of UFOs. With one-third of the American public convinced that aliens are visiting Earth, could this study finally provide the proof?
We consider how this story came to light and what the $22 million program has produced. Does the existence of a secret study mean there’s now decent proof of extraterrestrial craft in our skies? We take a look at the evidence made public so far. And why, six years after the study ended, are we learning about it now?
Note: When you click on this URL, just below the post date, you will see a tiny "start" triangle. Click on that to listen to the fifty minute discussion: www.seti.org/BiPiSci/newUFOevidence
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Post by auntym on Feb 3, 2018 12:26:39 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/02/the-secret-ufo-program-and-absolution.html Saturday, February 03, 2018 The Secret UFO Program and Absolution By Billy Cox De Void 1-30-18 Vindication on the links Maybe the only tangible payoff for Dom Armentano as a result of last month’s revelations about the Pentagon’s UFO research project www.theufochronicles.com/2017/12/pentagons-mysterious-ufo-program.html is that his golfing buddies don’t think he’s crazy anymore. That may not sound like a big deal, but consider: Armentano grew up in the 1950s, when the radical new communications technology of television began to find an audience. Sixty years ago this month, he tuned in to the Armstrong Circle Theatre, a live, scripted variety show produced by CBS that often dramatized current events. On that particular evening, retired USMC Maj. Donald Keyhoe was on deck. He’d written a number of articles and books on what were then called flying saucers, and he charged the Air Force with concealing information from the public. The moment Keyhoe tried go off-script, the director cut his audio feed, with millions watching, a move that begat one of the original and enduring American conspiracy genres. The ensuing public clamor prompted CBS to issue an acknowledgement that “This program had been carefully cleared for security reasons,” with the paternalistic assertion that “public interest was served by the action taken by CBS.” Two months later, in damage-control mode, CBS scheduled Keyhoe for an unrehearsed interview with a young Mike Wallace. Keyhoe showed Wallace a copy of his earlier prepared statement, the one military censors redacted prior to the Circle Theatre appearance. Keyhoe had wanted to challenge the USAF’s contention that just 1.9 percent of all UFO cases were unknown; in fact, the Air Force had hidden the real figures inside something called Blue Book Special Report 14, which indicated 19 percent were unknown. Wallace, ever the provocateur, confronted Keyhoe with a critique from a popular columnist who wrote that “flying saucers are products of, for the most part, quote, pranksters, half-wits, cranks, publicity hounds, fanatics in general, and screwballs.” This was Armentano’s introduction to The Great Taboo. His career track – advocate for libertarian policies, economics professor at the University of Hartford, adjunct professor with the Cato Institute – guided him safely away from those labels, but he kept a close eye on news from the fringe. So when The Times delivered its 12/16/17 scoop about how the Defense Department maintained a UFO research program, Armentano felt absolved enough to crow about it to the Indian River Press Journal near his home in Vero Beach. “The deep intelligence state has known for at least 70 years that some UFOs were real,” he argued in an op-ed on January 17. The “decades-long public policy of secrecy and denial,” Armentano went on, “is foolish and dangerous in the extreme and puts our entire democratic process at risk.” He reminded Press Journal readers what happened to him in 2008, immediately after the paper published his call for federal transparency on UFO. That’s when Cato terminated its relationship with him, even though Armentano’s article never mentioned or hinted at his affiliation with the libertarian think tank. A Press Journal editor had attached a Cato blurb to his byline. “I won’t deny that this latest op-ed played a role in our decision,” Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz informed Armentano, even as the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program was quietly conducting its business, from 2007-12, at a cost of $22M. “Some day we may look back and wish we’d listened to you. But for now this strikes us as not an issue that we want to have as part of Cato’s research agenda.” Armentano never asked Cato to add UFOs to its agenda, but no matter, Boaz couldn’t handle it, and it didn’t end there. Armentano got another reality check the following year, this time when he approached the Christian Science Monitor about writing an editorial on UFOs. It wasn’t as if Armentano was some unknown Goober. In May 2009, CSM published one of his opinions about President Obama’s new antitrust regulations. But this time around, just four months later, the Monitor said sorry, no thanks. “UFOs,” explained CSM editor Josh Burek in an email to De Void, “are simply not on the public policy radar screen, not at a time when we’re debating health care reform, cap and trade, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea, the recession, etc.” Furthermore, “Dom’s essay, like so many others, simply didn’t rise to a sufficient level of public salience and/or newsworthiness.” That last part was a little peculiar, because Armentano hadn’t even submitted his essay for review, only as a topic proposal. Anyhow, Burek’s judiciousness apparently served him well. Today, he’s the director of Global Communications and Strategy for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs. Last week, career intelligence officer and former CIA director John Brennan told the Herald-Tribune he was well aware of official government inquiries into the UFO dilemma, and he voiced support for sustained research. But Armentano’s Press Journal piece, which called for “open Congressional hearings and full disclosure,” merely echoed the position Brennan’s distant predecessor, Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, took in 1960. In a UPI article carried by the Times, Hillenkoetter, the nation’s first CIA director (1947-50), voiced his dismay over the military’s hoarding of UFO data. “Behind the scenes,” Hillenkoetter declared, “high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He accused the USAF of imposing a gag order on its personnel. So it’s been a long journey for Armentano. A decade ago, “most of my professional colleagues in law and economics thought I’d lost my mind” following the Cato fiasco, he declared in the Press Journal this time around. Now that the former director of the Pentagon program has gone public, the Conspiracy Nut moniker doesn’t fit anymore, and Armentano’s golfing partners aren’t giving him much crap lately. Are they bringing new eyes to the subject now? “No, not really,” Armentano tells De Void. “I don’t think they’re all that interested.” Psst — NY Times. Time for the followup. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15620/vindication-on-the-links/
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Post by auntym on Feb 4, 2018 22:09:24 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/01/ufos-what-has-us-government-been-hiding.html Friday, February 02, 2018 UFOs: What Has the U.S. Government Been Hiding? On Dec. 16, three experienced journalists posted a bombshell story on the New York Times website: The Pentagon had authorized a secret research project (2007-2012) to study unidentified flying objects. By Dom Armentano tcpalm.com 1-16-18 Even more importantly, Luis Elizondo, the Pentagon project coordinator and a career intelligence officer, later asserted that in his opinion some UFOs were real objects and appeared to demonstrate a technology that the U.S. did not have and did not understand. [...] In short, the deep intelligence state has known for at least 70 years that some UFOs were real; yet it has chosen to keep the information in support of that conclusion either confidential or simply denied that it even existed. But a decades-long public policy of secrecy and denial on a subject as important and mind-bending as UFOs is foolish and dangerous in the extreme and puts our entire democratic process at risk. CONTINUE READING: www.tcpalm.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/01/16/what-has-u-s-government-been-hiding-ufos-guest-column/1035870001/
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Post by swamprat on Feb 8, 2018 13:09:08 GMT -6
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Post by auntym on Feb 11, 2018 18:26:13 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15626/now-the-counterpunch/ Now the counterpunchPosted on February 8, 2018 by Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/Nearly two months after The New York Times dropped the bomb about the Pentagon’s UFO research program, the Skeptics have had a chance to catch their breath and regroup. To be sure, the Times piece caught everybody off guard, and clearly there’s a ton of reporting left to do. Unfortunately, the media clamor that followed the Times’ coup has tapered off, and the only thing we’ve learned about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program since then comes courtesy of KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp. The Times’ primary source, the recently retired Army intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, stated in December the AATIP was operational from 2007-2012, but he added it was still being maintained in an unofficial capacity with an assist from the Navy and the CIA. Last week, in a little nugget that would appear to bear him out, Elizondo told Knapp the so-called “gimbal video” — the one that showed gun-cam footage of a Navy F-18 pursuing a UFO – was recorded in the skies above Florida in 2015. The original, carefully worded NYT story, which was accompanied by that video, mentioned an event off San Diego in 2004. Many readers, including yours truly, inferred the gimbal footage referenced that 14-year-old incident. Is this a true unknown or the infrared profile of conventional airplane exhaust? Skeptics are making a case for the latter and challenging the credibility of the Navy pilots who chased this thing/CREDIT: U.S. Department of DefenseThat begs the question: Why did it take us two months to learn the gimbal video was from 2015? The date, time and place of that encounter should’ve been included with the Times’ original reporting in December. The fact that it wasn’t suggests the reporters have fragmented information and are still piecing the scope of this thing together. And, in the absence of followups, the Skeptics are filling that space with counterarguments that aren’t implausible. The most recent explanation for the gimbal video is a post by Committee for Skeptical Inquiry contributor Ian Williams Goddard. “By happenstance,” Goddard says in a YouTube explainer that went up last week, “the gimbal footage presents a fantastic confluence of visual confounders that produce a coherent illusion of a gravity-defying flying saucer.” Goddard reminds viewers that the F-18 video was obtained with infrared optics, which record only heat emissions, not the actual object itself. He goes to great lengths to illustrate how camera movement can account for what appears to be rotation by the F-18’s target. Goddard’s conclusion is that the Navy pilots were actually confused by the exhaust from a distant but conventional aircraft. Without additional information from the To The Stars Academy, the investigative team that’s ostensibly calling the shots here, detractors are beginning to command the conversation. And you can always detect a Skeptical agenda by how quickly its advocates employ buzzwords that many serious researchers tend to avoid. Goddard informs us that “Rotating infrared signatures are not necessarily evidence of extraterrestrial technology,” and few would argue that. The E word is implicitly pejorative, since there’s no observational way to prove the origin of a UFO without “Gliese 581c” or “Trappist-1″ stamped on the fuselage. Last week, on the SETI Institute’s “Skeptic Check” podcast, astronomer Seth Shostak and sidekick Molly Bentley empaneled the usual suspects to weigh in on the mystery. Shostak dusted off the familiar old trope – “The single video released does not provide conclusive proof of alien visitation” – and gave the mic to folks like astronomer and Center for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) consultant James McGaha. McGaha, a pilot and retired USAF officer, attacked the credibility of the Navy pilots who shared their eyewitness accounts with the Times in December. McGaha asserted that only astronomers like, like, well, McGaha, are qualified to interpret weird images in the sky. “Pilots are not trained observers, and police officers are not trained observers,” he told the podcast, “and they see things in the sky all the time that they don’t understand what they are, because they don’t know astronomy, atmospheric physics, and various other things that could possibly cause lights in the sky.” Given the inherent inferiority of being a pilot without a degree in astronomy, it’s a little disingenuous for McGaha to take the word of a single helicopter pilot to discredit the dramatic 2008 Stephenville UFO incident, the subject of a 77-page report that supported multiple eyewitness testimonies with government radar records. Without revealing the helicopter pilot’s name (the pilot obviously had a degree in astronomy), McGaha said the only unusual thing happening in the sky over the Texas cowtown that night was an F-16 flare-drop exercise. Nothing to see here, folks. Also joining Shostak’s crew was Benjamin Radford, a CSI research fellow who suggested the AATIP was a “pork project” cooked up by former Sen. Harry Reid as a sop to hotelier/aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. According to the Times, the AATIP’s $22 million in expenditures included modifying some of Bigelow’s facilities in Las Vegas to accommodate “the storage of metal alloys and other materials … recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Exactly why a billionaire would do this for a lousy $22M with government strings attached is a mystery, but at least part of Radford’s concerns about funneling taxpayer money to a wealthy constituent are worth consideration. Especially if we’re dealing with hyperexotic material. Retired Johnson Space Center engineer Jim Oberg isn’t quite the unbiased observer he says he is when it comes to UFOs. In his thumbs-down critique of Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, Oberg was canny enough to steer clear of problematic radar data that bolstered pilot reports; instead, he confined his remarks to the fallibility of human perception. (Kean, as most of you know, worked with the Times on the AATIP story). When Oberg joined “Skeptic Check,” however, he raised a point that should concern us all when it comes to the clout of private-sector special interests, like Robert Bigelow. “There’s a feeling that if the UFOs are real, and he does the study,” Oberg said, “that his company would be able to make use of any discoveries, any patents, any technologies that are found.” In that event, we’d be talking serious national security implications, which makes this a conversation we need to have. This is the age of Martin Shkreli, not Jonas Salk. As for the Times reporting — guys, give us something, anything, radar records, more video, just one (1) of the alleged three dozen AATIP reports floating around somewhere out there. Let’s get this show on the road again. Soon. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15626/now-the-counterpunch/
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Post by jcurio on Feb 13, 2018 12:12:06 GMT -6
There’s a feeling that if the UFOs are real, and he does the study,” Oberg said, “that his company would be able to make use of any discoveries, any patents, any technologies that are found.” Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7497/pentagons-mysterious-program?page=2#ixzz570rD3JEi________ well..... duh. Most of us thinking citizens realize that this is why a private company would be in cohoots with a government. Can you think of any other reasons? (or vice versus) The next question I would have: There are supposedly lots of billionaires on this planet. What keeps any ONE of them from taking this topic on their own? Peer pressure? Obtaining permission from the government? (sorry)
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Post by jcurio on Feb 13, 2018 12:13:45 GMT -6
They are stalling! Stalling I tell ya!
🤥. 😴
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Post by auntym on Feb 20, 2018 18:14:46 GMT -6
Leslie Kean @lesliekean
Here is a full one hour interview with Luis Elizondo. It might answer some of the questions people have. Exclusive 60 Minutes with Luis Elizondo - Former Director of the AATIP (UFORadio International #11)Published on Feb 7, 2018 Exclusive 60 Minutes with Luis Elizondo - Former Director of the AATIP 20313.mc.tritondigital.com/WHOOSHKAA_2591/media-session/af5d94e7-135e-43f8-8529-fdfc77df308c/podcasts/podcast_2591/podcast_media/178659-ufoint11-luis-elizondo-64k.mp3On December 17th 2017, New York Times has published historic article on the front page titled: "Real U.F.O.s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know". The article described Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program which had a mandate to evaluate UFOs. Luis Elizondo was a former director of that program. In this exclusive interview that I did for Croatian Television, he explains his involvement in the program and what was learned through the years. This is the uncut version of that interview. On the date of this release, this is as far as I am aware, the longest interview with Mr. Elizondo. During this exclusive interview we covered these subjects: - Lue's career and his patents. - The AATIP timeline and the budget. - Mandate of the program. - Detection of UFO Phenomena by DOD sensors. - Witnesses, technical data and credibility factor. - The USS Nimitz UFO Incident. - 5 main categories of the UFO phenomena. - AATIP findings vs Condon Committee conclusions. - Alleged exotic materials. - Possibilities of another and more hidden UFO program. - To The Stars Academy. ... and more.
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Post by auntym on Feb 22, 2018 6:45:33 GMT -6
www.thesun.co.uk/news/5630394/baffled-us-intelligence-officers-leak-ufo-footage-themselves-to-get-help-from-unwitting-public-in-iding-mystery-objects-pentagon-x-files-project-chief-claims/ Truth is out there Baffled US intelligence officers leak UFO footage THEMSELVES to get help from unwitting public in IDing mystery objects, Pentagon ‘X files project’ chief claims Luis Elizondo said military bosses declassified and released the unexplained videos in a bid to solve the mysteryBy Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent / 21st February 2018 Luis Elizondo oversaw the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification ProgramTHE former head of the Pentagon’s real life X-Files programme revealed that defence officials released top secret UFO videos to the public - in a bid to find answers. Luis Elizondo, the former head of the top secret programme, said that two mysterious videos of UFO encounters, published late last year were released so that people could look at them and help “put together more pieces of the puzzle”. THE former head of the Pentagon’s real life X-Files programme revealed that defence officials released top secret UFO videos to the public - in a bid to find answers. The Pentagon confirmed the existence of the $22 million Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) - which investigated sightings of UFOs between 2007 to 2012 - back in December. At the same time two compelling videos of unexplained UFO sightings by US military personnel - investigated by the AATIP - were also published. Now in a video clip shared exclusively with Sun Online, Elizondo claims that he did not “trick” or gain the videos by “false pretense” - but that defence officials willingly declassified and released the footage - so members of the public could try and identify the mysterious objects in them. When asked how the once-classified videos were released, Elizondo said: “No, there was no trick and there was no false pretense. Elizondo said the Department of Defense declassified the views and allowed them to be released “The videos were released in accordance with the strict manner that DoD (Department of Defense) prescribes, following DoD manuals and regulations involving the release of information…. furthermore, an additional step was taken to have the videos reviewed by foreign disclosure representatives - in fact the most senior foreign disclosure representatives - in the department. “Ultimately it required OCA or “original classification authority” approval and review to release the videos. “So in essence, I didn't really release anything - the Department of Defense released those videos. "The documentation is held by the Department of Defense and the justification for releasing those videos were exactly as stated that was to create an unclassified database that people could then access and try to help us identify the signatures we were seeing.” He adds: “I suspect we will always get more information as people with, with additional expertise, experience and background continue to look at the videos … we will begin to put together more pieces of the puzzle. “There are experts I would submit now that are out there, perhaps within this audience that is watching this video now, that have the ability to look at some of these videos and help us have a better understanding of what exactly we're looking at.” A full recorded interview with Elizondo was shown at the International UFO Congress - in which the former AATIP manager revealed his opinion on the existence of UFOs and whether or not they should be presumed a threat. And while the Pentagon claimed funding for the AATIP had ceased in 2012 - he made it clear that the program itself had not ended. Nick Pope, who used to do a similar job to Elizondo for Britain’s Ministry of Defence told Sun Online: “The whole situation is bizarre. The idea seems to have been that when the Pentagon's imagery analysts drew a blank, they decided to put two or three videos into the public domain, to see if anyone else could solve the mystery. “Maybe this was limited to specialist aviation forums at first, but inevitably these things get cross-posted and end up on YouTube. “While I never did anything like this with any of the 'unknowns' we received at the MoD, it's certainly an imaginative tactic. “The Pentagon's processes are complicated, and declassifying something isn't quite the same as authorizing something for public release, so despite Luis Elizondo's detailed explanation, there's still controversy about whether due process was followed.” He added: "These bombshell revelations give us the clearest insight yet into the Pentagon's secret UFO project. “So far, all we've heard from Luis Elizondo are a few carefully crafted quotes in the original newspaper story, and some brief TV news interviews that lasted just a few brief minutes. “In this new video we learned a lot more about AATIP, and the man who ran it: his background, how he got involved in AATIP and became director, how they got cases from not just the military but also from the intelligence community, and how the UFO videos got into the public domain. “There's also more speculative material where Elizondo reveals what he thinks about UFOs, and the related question of whether or not he thinks they're a threat. “On this point, his view - which was the same as mine when I did a similar job in the MoD - is that until you can prove something isn't a threat, the sensible military presumption should be that it might be.” Ufologist Alejandro Rojas, who organized the International UFO Congress and shared the clip with Sun Online, said: "Elizondo's revelations regarding the UFO videos they have released thus far are a bit of a mixed bag. "It is fascinating to hear the scrutiny the release went through when the DoD chose to release the videos. It also great to hear more about what Elizondo and his group ruled out as they attempted to identify the objects in the video. WATCH VIDEOS: www.thesun.co.uk/news/5630394/baffled-us-intelligence-officers-leak-ufo-footage-themselves-to-get-help-from-unwitting-public-in-iding-mystery-objects-pentagon-x-files-project-chief-claims/
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Post by jcurio on Feb 22, 2018 10:52:39 GMT -6
The documentation is held by the Department of Defense and the justification for releasing those videos were exactly as stated that was to create an unclassified database that people could then access and try to help us identify the signatures we were seeing.” Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7497/pentagons-mysterious-program?page=2#ixzz57rAjI56h_______________ I’ll crow for “our Jo”! She’s always saying that the government doesn’t know anything more than we do! 😉 😄😄😁😊
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Post by swamprat on Feb 23, 2018 11:36:50 GMT -6
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Post by jcurio on Feb 23, 2018 11:48:24 GMT -6
Have to admit “mixed feelings” about this.....
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Post by auntym on Feb 25, 2018 12:13:45 GMT -6
Luis Elizondo Interview for the 2018 International UFO CongressUFO Congress Published on Feb 24, 2018 This is an exclusive interview of Luis Elizondo, the former head of a secret Pentagon project to investigate UFOs. The project was called the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP). An article on Dec. 16, 2017 in the New York Times revealing the program made worldwide headlines. Thus far, short media interviews are all Elizondo has participated in. In this exclusive interview, Elizondo answers questions from UFO Congress social media followers and friends. See the entire 2018 International UFO Congress presentation, including a review of how this revelation came about, and insight from Nick Pope, who ran a similar UFO program for the UK's Ministry of Defense, at the UFO Congress Video-on-Demand page. IUFOC Video-on-Demand: www.ufocongressvideos.com
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Post by auntym on Feb 27, 2018 22:46:05 GMT -6
www.openminds.tv/luis-elizondo-exclusive-interview-for-the-2018-ufo-congress-february-27-2018/41545
Luis Elizondo – Exclusive interview for the 2018 UFO Congress February 27, 2018 Posted by: Alejandro Rojas Open Minds UFO Radio: This is an exclusive interview of Luis Elizondo, the former head of a secret Pentagon project to investigate UFOs. The project was called the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP). An article on Dec. 16, 2017 in the New York Times revealing the program made worldwide headlines. Thus far, short media interviews are all Elizondo has participated in. In this exclusive interview, Elizondo answers questions from UFO Congress social media followers and friends. See the entire 2018 International UFO Congress presentation, including a review of how this revelation came about, and insight from Nick Pope, who ran a similar UFO program for the UK’s Ministry of Defense, at the UFO Congress Video-on-Demand page. IUFOC Video-on-Demand: www.ufocongressvideos.comCLICK TO LISTEN: www.openminds.tv/luis-elizondo-exclusive-interview-for-the-2018-ufo-congress-february-27-2018/41545
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Post by jcurio on Feb 28, 2018 11:27:44 GMT -6
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Post by jcurio on Mar 11, 2018 10:47:52 GMT -6
“They” move very fast.
Now, imagine “them” slowing WAY DOWN to look at us.
😃😄😁
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Post by auntym on Mar 23, 2018 15:07:38 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15644/an-ounce-of-prevention/ An ounce of prevention?Posted on March 22, 2018 by Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/Huzzahs to New York magazine for this week’s attempt to play the UFO thing straight, plus Eric Benson’s followup interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid. Reid raised a number of familiar but worth-repeating issues, including the social stigma that keeps pilots from filing reports. And he added this well-deserved smackdown of the mainstream media: “Let me give you something that the press has totally failed and conjured. We have hundreds and hundreds of papers, pages of paper, that have been available since this was completed,” Reid said, ostensibly referring to the work produced by the Pentagon’s once-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. “Most all of it, 80 percent at least, is public. You know something? The press has never even looked at it. Not once. That’s where we are. I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it.” Is our persistent denial of UFO activity setting the stage for lawsuits based on high-level negligence? Stay tuned/CREDIT: kiplinger.com De Void has yet to see that documentation posted anywhere, but never mind. Reid’s larger points are spot on, and the AATIP data is hardly the only material the MSM has ignored over the years. What comes first and foremost to De Void’s mind is a report titled Spherical UAP and Aviation Safety: A Critical Review. It has languished online since 2010, perhaps because its language is forbiddingly technical. Project Sphere, as it’s known, is the work of a now-dormant nonprofit called the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. Among other things, NARCAP was able to bring good science to bear on strong cases because it promised anonymity to pilots fearing professional blowback. Its work is especially relevant now, given the jet fighter video released by erstwhile Defense Department official Chris Mellon via The Washington Post on 3/9/2018. The whateveritwas that went zipping across the video viewfinder of the Navy F-18 looks like it could qualify, at least superficially, for inclusion into NARCAP’s Project Sphere. Relatively small, white or luminous, oval or ball-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) often displaying what looks like impossible aerodynamic characteristics, these elusive and transient spheres have been raising flight-safety concerns for decades. As NARCAP executive director Ted Roe reported eight years ago, “The majority of spherical UAP reports involve initial detection by aircrews. It is uncommon for ATC (air traffic control) to detect spherical UAP and vector aircraft around them though, in some instances, spherical UAP are detected on radar after aircraft request confirmation.” Among other things, Project Sphere recommended pilot-awareness training, as in-flight over-corrections when confronted with the abrupt and unexpected appearance of these UAP could end with catastrophic results. “If a jumbo jet should crash because of impact (or other negative interaction) with a UAP, the total financial burden will be enormous (along with the negative publicity and political fallout that will occur) and our present warnings (then as hindsight) suddenly will come clearly into focus,” the NARCAP summary stated. “The total financial burden of such a disaster is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the cost of doing the research now.” We got a glimpse of that potentiality two weeks ago. Tyler Rogoway, the War Zone reporter who, using recorded ATC chatter, reconstructed a November UFO/UAP event over California-Oregon that resulted in a jet-fighter scramble, came up with another gem that sounded like a case study ripped from Roe’s script. Last month, a Learjet pilot flying over New Mexico asked Albuquerque ATC if it was tracking a mystery without a transponder that had just flown overhead. ATC said there was nothing on the screen, but it alerted a nearby American Airlines Airbus to keep an eye open. Moments later, the Airbus pilot responded: “Yeah, something just passed over us, like a – I don’t know what it was, but it was at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over top of us.” Rogoway has posted the conversation online and it’s definitely worth a read. Bottom line, Mellon’s cautionary remarks in his WaPo op-ed need serious scrutiny. By citing potential technological gaps between the U.S. and its adversaries, including a nod to Vladimir Putin’s “recent chest-thumping claims about propulsion breakthroughs,” Mellon makes his best and perhaps only realistic play for getting congressional attention. No doubt his proposal to apply focused analysis on “infrared satellite data, annaD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting” will make a lot of federal acronyms nervous. But what happens if and when a plane goes down in an accident that might’ve been prevented with a little pilot training? Especially given how well-reasoned advocacy for such situational awareness has been sitting in the public arena for years. Who wants to go for a swim in that hell-broth of litigation? devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15644/an-ounce-of-prevention/
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Post by auntym on Mar 25, 2018 11:31:33 GMT -6
Leslie Kean @lesliekean
Tucker Carlson with Chris Mellon. This was Tucker's 5th piece on UFOs and the Pentagon since our NY Times story came out. Remember, this story has nothing to do with politics!
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Post by auntym on Mar 26, 2018 12:05:35 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/03/former-senator-comes-clean-on-u-s-governments-ufo-research/ Former Senator Comes Clean on U.S. Government’s UFO Researchby Brett Tingley / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/bbtingley/March 27, 2018 The recent “disclosures” of the Pentagon’s UFO research project and the accompanying videos of allegedly anomalous aerial objects caused quite a stir in the ufology world. While these releases were a rare opportunity for mainstream news outlets to discuss the UFO phenomenon in a legitimate light, many veteran researchers urged caution. In the weeks that followed, many inconsistencies and reasonable explanations for the program surfaced which cast some doubt on the claims made by Tom DeLonge’s new “To the Stars Academy” research group. In particular, many critics noted that the ties between former Nevada Senator Harry Reid who secured the funding and Las Vegas-based UFO enthusiast and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow were suspicious, reeing not of the alien or otherworldly, but of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” political favor variety. An angle which was of course amplified in certain political circles.To help clear the air and discuss what he knows about these government UFO research programs (or at least is able to discuss publicly), Reid recently sat down with New York Magazine’s Eric Benson for an interview about these programs. Reid began the interview stating that “if we’re here to talk about little green men or stuff that you want to look at that was found in New Mexico or something, I’m not interested. If you’re here to talk about science, I’m happy to do that.” Reid then goes on to fill in some backstory about how he was put in touch with Bigelow through Nevada journalist and Coast to Coast AM host George Knapp shortly after Bigelow inherited a small fortune following his father’s death. Knapp and Bigelow were both keenly interested in UFO phenomena, Reid says, and began sending him information about some of the more high-profile UFO incidents and alleged crashes like Roswell. While Reid remains skeptical about most of these claims, he says the sheer abundance of UFO reports drew him in. “Mainly what interested me is so many people had seen these strange things in the air,” Reid says, “that was interesting to me.” It was this interest – and allegations that America’s rivals were putting resources into investigating anomalous aerial phenomena – that Reid says led to securing funding for the now-infamous Pentagon UFO research program led by Luis Elizondo: What we decided to do — it would be black money, we wouldn’t have a big debate on the Senate floor over it. They would put in their defense appropriation bill, 11 million bucks. The purpose of it was to study aerial phenomena. The money was given, a directive was given to the Pentagon, to put this out to bid, which they did. Reid says the majority of the money went to Bigelow, who created a centralized storage facility for official documentation and reports of sightings, alleged alien artifacts, and other pieces of the UFO puzzle. Reid notes that one reason the UFO phenomenon hasn’t been seriously discussed in the military or government is because many career g-men are “afraid somebody will think they’re some kind of a wacko.” The Bigelow Aerospace logo bears an uncanny resemblance to the common grey alien. Could Bigelow Aerospace be any less discreet with their logo design?Reid ends the interview by attacking his interview and the press at large, arguing that the media either doesn’t want to or doesn’t have the resources to comb through the thousands of reports and documents the government (and Bigelow) have amassed on UFO phenomena. Uh, where do I sign up? mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/03/former-senator-comes-clean-on-u-s-governments-ufo-research/
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Post by auntym on Mar 27, 2018 14:57:19 GMT -6
www.popsci.com/ufo-aliens-military?con=TrueAnthem&dom=tw&lnk=TATW&src=SOC&utm_campaign=&utm_content=5abaa9d704d30160c244ba17&utm_medium=&utm_source= Yes, UFOs exist. But they're probably not what you think. New video of a 2004 encounter between the U.S. Air Force and an unidentified flying object has the internet asking about aliens.By Eleanor Cummins / www.popsci.com/authors/eleanor-cummins December 22, 2017 We're still struggling to make sense of the things we see in the sky.DepositPhoto On a dark and otherwise serene night back in the 1960s, my grandpa, a doctor and recreational pilot, was ferrying two lawyers to a deposition. As they bisected the state of Washington, the airborne group encountered something surreal: An aircraft unlike anything they had ever seen before was flying straight toward them. My grandpa recalled an oblong flying machine, with blinking lights and an eerie ability to hover, that tracked his movements through the sky. When he ducked, the other object also ducked. And when he rose, it rose. While it was certainly an unidentified flying object, my grandpa never claimed he saw aliens. He seemed to believe that someday, the strange visit he’d received would be explained—in earthly terms. This family memory was the first thing I thought of when I read the recent New York Times story about U.S. Navy pilots who say they saw an unidentified flying object near the San Diego coast in 2004. In the story, titled “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen,’” the Times described in hair-raising language the moment Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight saw the… thing. Unlike more common aircraft that use propulsion to move through the sky, this craft hovered. It acted almost like an anxious dog, “jumping around erratically,” but also zooming back and forth from the Navy aircraft as if it were curious about the other airplanes it had discovered. Most alarmingly, it moved fast as lightning, and seemed privy to insider knowledge. When the Navy pilots made a game-time decision to head back to their rendezvous point, the strange object somehow beat them there. Reading this would send chills radiating up and down any normal person’s spine. The accompanying video depicting the encounter—and the alarm in the pilots’ voices—does nothing to suppress that hair-raising sensation. The first question many readers asked was, could this be an alien encounter? While there’s a slim possibility (like, an infinitesimally small chance) that this really was some interstellar aircraft belonging to an otherworldly species, the answer to the alien question is probably no. As the New York Times wrote in another piece published last weekend, the U.S. government has been searching for extraterrestrial life on and off for decades. While some information remains classified, so far as we know, we haven’t found anything particularly promising. A more likely explanation for the 2004 San Diego event could be that a government agency, deep within the United States military or the military of another nation, is simply working on new, mind-boggling technologies we’re not privy to yet. Though it may feel like a less exciting rationale for the weird event, there’s immense precedent. Much of the alleged alien activity of the past 80 years has ultimately been revealed as top secret government projects. Take, for example, the hidden history of flying saucers. In the late 1950s, it seems, the U.S. Air Force really was working on Project 1794 to build a supersonic saucer. The first test of the VZ-9 Avrocar took place on Nov. 12, 1959. Hopes of a lean, mean, and circular fighting machine were high, but the prototypes never met the military’s standards. Instead of rising to an altitude of 100,000 feet, it got closer to 5,000. It never hit the right speed, either, as its shape proved pretty unstable. The top-secret project was cancelled by 1961, but visions of flying saucers have persisted. And don’t forget the treasure trove of spooky stories emanating from the infamous Area 51. Located in the sand dunes of southwest Nevada, this top-secret site has long been believed the U.S. government’s storage unit for wayward aliens and their crash-landed ships. While much about Area 51 remains mysterious to this day, in 2013, the CIA acknowledged the site really does exist—and that it has long been used for testing spy planes, like the U-2 reconnaissance plane. But most relevant is the “Roswell incident” of 1947. That summer, a UFO crash-landed on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. When the U.S. military tried to cover it up, conspiracy theories ran wild, as no one accepted the explanation offered—that the mysterious metals were just a conventional weather balloon. Today, we know from declassified documents that the myth-making machine was really a nuclear surveillance test balloon, manufactured as part of the Cold War-era surveillance operation, Project Mogul. Some of these spooky special operations have gained name brand recognition like Area 51, but plenty of smaller, but no less profound, developments have also taken place. We’ve landed on the moon, something that would have once seemed incomprehensible (and to many moon-landing conspiracy theorists, still is). We have Harrier Jump Jets capable of vertical take-offs, a type of lift long associated with alleged alien technologies. And just this week, Boeing’s eerily-named Phantom Works division announced it had been quietly working on a Batmobile-style refueling plane. You’d be forgiven if you saw either plane on a test flight and thought it came from a galaxy far, far away. My grandpa waited and waited to see the unveiling of a military aircraft that explained the Stranger Things moment he experienced all those years ago. However, he died in 2014 without a truly satisfactory explanation for that night. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong that the ship he saw (and others like it) were the product of human ingenuity (or human error). Even if none of these technological interpretations check out, natural phenomena, drones, and a million other non-alien blips could also be to blame. Aliens may be a fun explanation for what’s otherwise inexplicable, but sometimes, a UFO is just that: an (as yet) unidentified flying object. www.popsci.com/ufo-aliens-military?con=TrueAnthem&dom=tw&lnk=TATW&src=SOC&utm_campaign=&utm_content=5abaa9d704d30160c244ba17&utm_medium=&utm_source=
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Post by auntym on May 8, 2018 12:23:42 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/05/long-awaited-government-funded-ufo-reports.html Tuesday, May 08, 2018 Long-Awaited Government-Funded UFO Reports Now In The Public Domain Posted on May 7, 2018 by Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/ A question of ownershipOn Friday night, KLAS investigative reporter George Knapp in Las Vegas managed to put some of those long-awaited government-funded UFO reports into the public domain. www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-documents-prove-secret-ufo-study-based-in-nevada/1160375205 These are likely among the “thousands of pages” former Sen. Harry Reid was referencing when he told New York magazine in March about a federal intelligence agency’s cooperation with aerospace entrepreneur and Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow. nymag.com/selectall/2018/03/harry-reid-on-what-the-government-knows-about-ufos.html But the takeaway should raise one hell of a lot of red flags about transparency. Two reports, both designated “unclassified/for official use only,” bear the Defense Intelligence Agency logo, and are also labeled “Defense Intelligence Reference Document Acquisition Threat Support.” The first, dated 29 March 2010, is a 12-page analysis titled “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering,” authored by Hal Puthoff. A DIA research paper advocates “rigorous inquiry” into “advanced spaceflight technologies” capable of manipulating time and space/CREDIT: fallout.wikia.comThe second, the 26-page “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions,” is dated 2 April 2010, and written by Richard Obousy and Eric Davis. Each report is “one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Warning Office’s Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program.” De Void is in no way qualified to assess the merits of these analyses, both highly technical in nature and written for specialized audiences. There is no mention of The Great Taboo, nor are there any specific references to what might have been learned directly from the celebrated five-year study of UFOs mentioned in the groundbreaking New York Times story in December. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html What seems pretty obvious, however, is that both papers are addressing, in theoretical terms, how to emulate observed and recorded UFO flight behaviors, which are couched in careful euphemism. States one report, investigators are “examin(ing) these effects as they would be exhibited in the presence of advanced aerospace craft technologies based on spacetime modification.” They discuss “corollary side effects” of such technologies, which would “mimic known refractive index effects” and “indistinct boundary definition associated with ‘waviness’ as observed with heat waves off a desert floor.” And “yet another possibility is the sudden ‘cloaking’ or ‘blinking out,’ which would at least be consistent with strong gravitational lensing effects that bend a background view around a craft, though other technical options involving, for example, the use of metamaterials, exist as well.” In short, both studies indicate these “advanced aerospace craft technologies” could indeed bridge interstellar distances, with what would appear to be insane maneuverability, by creating conditions like a “warp bubble” that “never travels outside of its local commoving light cone and thus does not violate special relativity.” Such a scenario “would appear to mitigate against untoward effects on craft occupants associated with abrupt changes in movement.” The authors introduce calculations they insist constitute a “novel warp drive concept,” adding “it has never before been suggested that this might facilitate a new and exotic form of propulsion.” Just how many studies in the AAWAS series exist? No info in Knapp’s report on that, yet. But included with the release of these two reports is a separate “Statement from a Senior Manager of BAASS,” which should concern us all. In 2009, during the 2007-2012 time frame the DIA’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was actively investigating UFO technology, BAASS – Bigelow Aerospace Advance Space Studies – entered into a contract with the mostly volunteer civilian nonprofit Mutual UFO Network for exclusive access to its UFO data. The arrangement, financed by Bigelow, fell apart within a year; since then, MUFON’s credibility has taken major hits as a result of unrelated self-inflicted leadership moves. www.newsweek.com/ufo-sightings-mufon-2018-john-ventre-alien-extraterrestrial-905060 But as Richard Lang, who coordinated the joint BAASS-MUFON project, www.theufochronicles.com/2011/03/what-caused-failure-of-baass-mufon-sip.html pointed out seven years ago, although BAASS had access to MUFON witnesses, it conducted its own lines of inquiry as “a private research organization” that “do(es) not share their proprietary information and research with MUFON.” Given the statement released Friday evening by BAASS spokesperson Caroline Bleakley, do we now have a better look at what $22 million in government funding can buy? Bleakley wrote that Bigelow’s group included “50 full-time staff comprising retired military intelligence and law enforcement officers, PhD level scientists, engineers, technicians, analysts, translators, and project managers to create the largest multi-disciplinary full-time team in history to investigate the UFO topic.” Does Robert Bigelow have exclusive rights to exotic technology data at least partially financed by American tax dollars?/CREDIT: colonyworlds.comBleakley indicated the investigations considered “a lot more than nuts and bolts machines that interacted with military aircraft. The phenomenon also involved a whole panoply of diverse activity that included bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light, animal and human injuries and much more.” She stated BAASS regarded “the human body as a readout system for UFO effects by utilizing forensic technology, the tools of immunology, cell biology, genomics and neuroanatomy” in order to “bypass UFO deception and manipulation of human perception by utilizing molecular forensics to decipher the biological consequences of the phenomenon.” Concluding sentence: “The result of applying this new approach was a revolution in delineating the threat level of UFOs.” End of press release. And like, wow, that’s it? That’s all you’re gonna tell us? Really? And you want applause for your “revolution”? This sounds like a big-time tactical error by BAASS. Who in their right mind hangs this kind of stuff on the line and expects people to walk away without asking some very basic questions? Who paid for this research? Bigelow? Uncle Sam? Both? When do we taxpayers get to see the results? How about the names of all the contributors? What are you thinking? devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15654/a-question-of-ownership/
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