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Post by swamprat on Aug 23, 2012 17:10:41 GMT -6
De Void
The history we don’t knowThursday, August 23, 2012 by Billy Cox The most important book on the origins of our current policy on The Great Taboo — UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry — arrives at one of the most portentious moments in human evolution. Primary author Dr. Michael Swords knows this. He has no expectations of success, among either popular audiences or in academic circles. 'With rare exceptions, the source documents portray a continual strategic manipulation of what the public should hear from government authorities about the phenomenon.' -- Dr. Michael Swords/CREDIT: theufochronicles.com At a forbidding 580 pages, UFOs and Goverment is essentially dead on arrival. And not necessarily because people don’t read anymore, but perhaps because they can’t stick with it. A recent Newsweek cover story broke the bad news. Next year, for the first time, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will list “Internet Addiction Disorder” as the new frontier in digital culture. Memory degradation, heightened anxiety, compulsive behaviors, eroding attention spans — the expanding litany of fallout from our addiction to the virtual world can now be quantified as it lights up pleasure receptors on brain maps, a scenario one researcher likens to “electronic cocaine.” Chinese studies are identifying a “shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory and other information.” From this woozy milieu, we pan for whatever particles of clarity the UFO phenomenon may present, amid CGI and the rumors and the chat rooms reinforcing paranoia and “skepticism” and the full range of dreck in between. Yet, all are rooted in a sequence of events that emerged more than 60 years ago, from the wreckage of World War II, when the United States and the world at large were caught flat-footed by a mystery that endures today. Swords, who taught the history of science technology at Western Michigan University and is an emeritus professor of environmental studies, has drilled deep into the vein of primary sources and — along with eight co-authors and contributors — produced an authoritative look at the high-level disarray, inter-agency tensions, and the military’s improvisational attempts at information management even as honest scientists struggled to give them the truth. The broad strokes are familiar: Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, the game-changing 1952 wave, the subsequent CIA Robertson Panel, the Condon Committee travesty, etc. What separates this accounting from its predecessors are the details harvested from obscure archived material and FOIAs, all of them channeled into a cogent narrative arc that reads like an epic tragedy. Even for co-author Robert Powell, the Mutual UFO Network’s science director whose radar reconstruction of the 2008 Stephenville UFO has been greeted by four years of Air Force silence, the book was a revelation. “It seemed like there was something on every page I’d never heard of before,” says Powell, the first reader on Swords’ manuscript. But there are no interactive features here, no click-on links or little green men or Illuminati agents in the shadows to sex things up. Even the minefield of Roswell is given short shrift, but only because “government documents related to this case are conspicuously absent or of dubious authenticity,” Swords writes, “and this text is concerned only with a well documented historical narrative.” What Swords does document, with formidable indexing, bibliography and appendix, are crimes not only against the scientific method, but against intellect as well. But in revisiting those flashpoints with entirely justified incredulity and indignation, Swords concentrates not so much on the baffling events as on the organizational reaction to them. “I wanted to write something foundational, but I knew that was not going to occur by focusing exclusively on the phenomenon itself,” Swords says from Kalamazoo. “You have to use something about its impact on human beings, history in the traditional sense, how do human beings cope with whatever it is you’re writing about.” UFOs and Government belongs on those history shelves. Few will read it. But De Void will linger here for the next few posts. Because as Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Outside a small circle of UFO scholar-geeks, this book offers a glimpse into the largely forgotten world that put us in the vacuum that cripples us today. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13203/the-history-we-dont-know/
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Post by swamprat on Aug 25, 2012 21:19:17 GMT -6
The Sarasota Herald Tribune
De Void
The best minds of my generation Friday, August 24, 2012 by Billy Cox With an eye for the sort of detail that put him on the front lines of 20th-century spacefaring, physicist Hermann Oberth gave a 1958 speech on the UFO drama that couldn’t have gone over well with the Pentagon brass. Noting how “the disks always fly in a manner as if the drive is acting perpendicular to the plane of the disk,” the mentor to rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun remarked upon how UFOs often glow upon acceleration, which could reach bone-pulverizing, radar-recorded speeds of “19 km/sec.” 'The appearances are usually described as disks, sometimes as balls or ellipsoids. It sometimes happens that these disks place one upon the other, the largest in the center, the smaller toward the ends, to form an object the shape of a cigar, which then flies away with high speed.' -- Hermann Oberth/CREDIT: kiosek.com “The accuracy of such measurements has not been doubted,” he wrote on a somewhat disjointed notecard cited in a new book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. “If there would be only 3 or 4 measurements, I would not rely upon them and would wait for further measurements, but there is existing more than 50 such measurements the wireless sets (radar) of the American Air Force and Navy, which are used in all fighters, cannot be so inaccurate that the information obtained with them can be doubted completely.” Did you get that? The “Father of Space Flight” is making extrapolations from the military’s own data. Significantly, the Hungarian-born scientist didn’t deliver that speech in the States where, by 1958, candid appraisals of The Great Taboo were unofficially verboten. Instead, he spoke out in Germany, shortly after leaving his U.S. employers at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal lab in Huntsville, Ala. Today, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics honors his sanctioned inquiries with the Oberth Award for outstanding individual achievement in space science. A more complete tribute to Oberth’s legacy (“They are flying by means of artificial fields of gravity,” he declared in 1972) should prompt the AIAA to recognize scientists for groundbreaking UFO research. But those prospects are untenable, thanks largely to the forces that drove the honest brokers underground decades ago and left behind the debilitating inertia that persists today. Dr. Michael Swords began tracking our national cognitive dissonance as a teenager, when he first read USAF Capt. Edward Ruppelt’s The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects in 1956. Today, at 72, with the publication of UFOs and Government, the retired science professor has completed a lifetime’s worth of work that begs a series of what-if scenarios, not the least of which is: What if the world’s brightest minds, e.g., Hermann Oberth, had been encouraged to openly investigate UFOs before the fix was in? How might our history — world history — have been different? As a former editor and researcher with The Journal for UFO studies, Swords has long been frustrated by history’s gatekeepers, their aversion to rendering the complete story of postwar America as UFOs zig-zagged through the early stages of the Cold War. The Western Michigan University emeritus professor says UFOs and Government’s mission statement is to plug that gap as a reference book. “I can’t send the best condensation of this material to academic journals, except maybe to some folklore ha-ha kind of deal,” says Swords. “Editors say to you ‘There’s no way I want to publish something this controversial.’ It’s a fantastic sociology that leaves me constantly amazed.” Certain his primary sourcing will stand the test of time, Swords says UFOs and Government isn’t for his peers, but perhaps for a more distant generation of bolder and more adventurous academics. “I don’t think I’ll ever have a significant impact on academia; all I can control is the quality of my work,” he says. “The (Freedom of Information Act) stuff tells you what’s going on in the other side of the mirror, exactly what was embedded into that world. Now it’s there for anyone who is curious and might want to know what happened.” Spoiler alert for those in that category: The military’s lead in the flying saucer fiasco packed a body blow from which science has yet to recover. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13224/the-best-minds-of-my-generation/
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Post by skywalker on Aug 25, 2012 22:42:46 GMT -6
This book sounds interesting, swampy. Any idea how much it will cost? I bet at 500 plus pages it isn't cheap!
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Post by swamprat on Aug 26, 2012 9:30:20 GMT -6
Here you go, Sky: Amazon.com UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, Clas Svahn and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos (Jul 5, 2012) $29.95 Paperback Order in the next 31 hours and get it by Tuesday, Aug 28.
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Post by swamprat on Aug 28, 2012 6:12:38 GMT -6
The Sarasota Herald Tribune
De Void
A furtive glimpse of candorMonday, August 27, 2012 by Billy Cox It’s not likely we’ll ever get the backstage reconstruction of high-level military chatter surrounding the sprawling UFO that lit up radar systems in 2008 while it was tracked all the way to President Bush’s Texas ranch. No doubt it was fascinating. If history surrounding The Great Taboo teaches us anything, we know that consensus is a rare commodity. Rewind to 1951, to a come-to-Jesus meeting convened by Gen. Charles Cabell at the Pentagon. These were the days before the U.S. policy of official indifference had been institutionalized. Cabell is the director of the USAF’s Office of Intelligence. He has finished reading a breaking report from the Air Defense Command, and the spit has hit the fan. “I want an open mind. In fact, I order an open mind.” Cabell is warning his small audience he expects a reliable status report on the entire UFO situation. “Anyone that does not keep an open mind can get out now. As long as there is any element of doubt [about what this phenomenon is] the Project will continue.” A press leak about a UFO encounter near Fort Monmouth, N.J., has unleashed torrents of headlines. Radar operators made contact on a target that was later spotted by a T-33 pilot and a major along for the ride. The witnesses reported the thing was disc-shaped. After conducting a 90-degree evasive maneuver as the plane attempted to pursue, the flying saucer vanished faster than anything in the U.S. arsenal and collapsed American technology into obsolescence within a span of seconds. Cabell wants truth. A lieutenant working the ongoing and hopelessly flawed official Air Force study, then known as Project Grudge, informs the General the report is plagued by neglect and incompetence. Someone suggests the civilian engineers attending this session be sequestered. Cabell tells them to stay put. “What do I have to do to stir up the action?” Cabell wonders aloud. “Anyone can see that we do not have a satisfactory answer to the saucer question.” Following a protracted silence, Cabell steams, “I’ve been lied to, and lied to, and lied to. I want it to stop. I want the answer to the saucers and I want a good answer.” Then-Lt. Ed Ruppelt, who took notes, wrote “Col [Edward] Porter (whom I considered to be one of the most totally incompetent men in the Air Force for reasons other than the UFO Project) was his old stupid self and said that he still thought that the project was a waste of time … [Cabell responded] by saying [Grudge] was the most poorly written, unconclusive piece of unscientific tripe’ that he’d ever seen.” Well, we know Cabell’s misgivings worked out. This scene, well known in UFOlit, is excerpted from the recently published UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, and is just one thread in a broader tapestry. Co-author Robert Powell, a veteran of nanotech and semiconductor research, says the bureaucratic dynamic of the 1950s is depressingly contemporary. “It reminded me of the corporate world, which is what I came out of,” he says from Austin, Tex. “I don’t think it’s a conspiracy so much as it is a CYA deal. This is like the 9/11 study, where you had all these different agencies not sharing information. What we know is that the government took this problem seriously; they knew then and they know today this is a real phenomenon. “The difference is, they don’t have to acknowledge it today. I think someone could write a whole book on the psychological aspect of this culture of denial.” Good thing Ruppelt saved his notes. The original recording of Cabell’s candid ire was destroyed under orders. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13232/a-furtive-glimpse-of-candor/
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Post by swamprat on Aug 30, 2012 18:37:44 GMT -6
The Sarasota Herald Tribune
De Void
? + $$ = scienceThursday, August 30, 2012 by Billy Cox For Mark Rodeghier, the very idea of a Pentagon study of The Great Taboo is like seeing how well a catfish does with roller skates. He uses a geological analogy. “Why would we think the military should study earthquakes?” says the scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. “They’re just not set up that way. They’re set up to defend us against a national security threat.” ... But lay a little decent scratch on the table and watch how those closed minds open right up./CREDIT: mostlyforme.comRodeghier’s point is raised, with example after mind-bending example, once more in the thoroughly depressing and essential UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, which examines the roots of the stalemate in which The Great Taboo languishes today. Although the mystery was initially imposed upon Pentagon strategists fretting over Soviet technology at the end of WWII, analysts quickly dismissed Russian and other conventional terrestrial origins. But the military’s continued role as the nation’s designated UFO investigative arm blew countless opportunities for science. Case in point: the half-assed collection of witnesses and data in Levelland, Tex., following a dramatic, interactive event in November 1957. Primary UFOs and Government authors Michael Swords and Robert Powell revisit the night when a glowing, egg-shaped UFO descended upon the west Texas town and temporarily stalled eight cars and trucks. Witnesses to this famous “vehicle interference” encounter included police and a fire marshal. The USAF sergeant dispatched to the scene a few days later spent a whopping three hours in Levelland, then another three hours in Lubbock 20 miles down the road, and reported back to Ent AFB without interviewing seven primary witnesses. His commanding officer ignored the auto blackouts — as well as the fact that one witness watched a UFO linger on the road ahead for perhaps as long as four minutes. Although the sergeant described the cloud ceiling as “unlimited,” the colonel in his report suggested the witnesses had been duped by electrical storms and/or ball lightning. The local weather service indicated there were no storms or rain in the area that evening, but the verdict of Project Blue Book — the USAF’s formal study — was equally unambiguous: “Weather phenomenon of electrical nature, generally classified as ‘Ball Lightning’ or ‘St. Emo’s Fire,’ caused by stormy conditions in the area, including mist, rain, thunderstorms and lightning.” In 1980, CUFOS’ Rodeghier produced the first serious analysis for this and other vehicle-interference cases, which enjoyed a freakish and unprecedented spike in 1957. His investigation gave him an informed angle on the challenges facing an institution uncommitted to its charge. “You’d be shocked at how small the Levelland file is — the Air Force wanted to sweep it under the rug. It isn’t cheap to do UFO science; it isn’t cheap to do science,” says Rodeghier, whose lack of funding forced CUFOS to shutter its research department years ago. “This is a field science. It really does cost thousands and thousands of dollars to do right.” One of the problems with Levelland was that none of the vehicles sustained permanent damage; once the phenomenon passed, they all powered up. Nevertheless, a thorough investigation would have required getting automotive engineers to examine the electrical systems for clues. “As much as we appreciate eyewitness testimony, you need instrumented data to work with,” Rodeghier says. “In this case, were microwaves involved, or radio waves? What was it? Maybe they’d been magnetized. But people kind of object to having their cars taken to the lab without compensation. We never had that kind of money.” With UFOs still radioactive in academia, maybe the key to breaking the impasse, Rodeghier suggests, is an end run using the Kickstarter option. Kickstarter, the online site for “crowd-funding” projects, allows small donors to earmark contributions to eclectic pet projects. Since its 2009 debut, Kickstarter reports pledges of $27,638,318 for 68,224 specific initiatives, with 44 percent brought to successful completions. “If you can get the funds,” he says, “you’ll find good people who can do the science.” It’s reassuring to see how easily money can cure the cooties. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13241/science/
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Post by skywalker on Aug 30, 2012 22:18:38 GMT -6
Here you go, Sky: Amazon.com UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, Clas Svahn and Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos (Jul 5, 2012) $29.95 Paperback Order in the next 31 hours and get it by Tuesday, Aug 28. That's a little bit out of my price range for a book...especially since I hate paying full price for them. This one is sounding very interesting though.
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Post by swamprat on Sept 6, 2012 17:25:31 GMT -6
Another write-up from Billy on the book: The Sarasota Herald-Tribune
De Void
The anonymous fact in quarantineThursday, September 6, 2012 by Billy Cox In 1978, as a young ordained Episcopal priest in Utah, Richard Thieme was introduced to the first tremor of an earthquake that would rearrange his world view. A decorated Vietnam combat veteran assigned to Hill Air Force Base outside Ogden unloaded the UFO thing on him. It wasn’t a confession, exactly, but the two were alone in the quiet church basement. The USAF pilot — who would retire a bird colonel — had no first-hand experience with The Great Taboo. But he knew people and he spoke with confidence. He said things like “We chase ‘em but we can’t catch ‘em.” Thieme was at a loss for words and offered little more than an audience. “He turned his head away and looked concerned, perplexed,” Thieme recalls. "The plain truth is that this now-opened Pandora's box of science may contain almost any kind of disagreeable surprise; and thus the experts can no longer say with assurance, 'This is silly, that makes sense'"-- Political columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, 1952/ CREDIT: bestbloggingtipsonline.comOver the next 15 years in the clergy, Thieme would hear variations of the same story, often emotionally charged and usually in confidence, from other pilots afraid to talk openly because of the stigma. The apparent demonstrations of technology so highly advanced it appeared mystical prompted Thieme to challenge institutional thought. He left the ministry in 1993. “Everything was going through the looking glass of transformation,” he says. “I was profoundly affected and felt compelled to restructure my idea of reality.” Today, Thieme is an author and professional lecturer on the impact of high technology on society and human evolution, with an emphasis on information security. His writings have appeared in venues as eclectic as Forbes, Salon and the International UFO Reporter. But his most recent credit is as a contributor to UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. He helped edit the 580-page book, and his masters in English lit helps account for its accessibility. Perhaps no other leg of that journey through the past is as poignant as the brief window in 1948, when analysts with the USAF’s first formal study, Project Sign, rigorously followed a trail of evidence to the only conclusion that seemed to make sense, the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Those were the days when authorities, like guided-missile chief and Navy commander Moulton Taylor, could offer candid speculation without fear of ridicule: “If we can build such craft, what is to prevent others from doing so, assuming that a similar order of intelligence exists on other planets? You and I may see the day when we will be united with Russia defending this planet against attack from space.” Inevitably, momentum turned, and Sign’s ETH report, prepared by Air Materiel Command, was rebuffed by the USAF’s Director of Intelligence and replaced with less threatening summaries. But considering how the enduring phenomenon gives no indication of abating, nothing has shaken Thieme’s conviction that “ETH is the least unlikely hypothesis.” “(Physicist) Richard Feynman said the most powerful thing in the world is an anomalous fact,” Thieme says. “’If this is true, what else must be true?’ I understand what the data is, but what is the big picture, what is the meta picture? What we want is for people to see the nose of the camel sticking out of the tent; we want them to ask about the rest of the animal inside that tent.” But after four decades of official neglect, getting enough of the right people to ask the right questions is likely an archaic notion. Thieme remembers his last conversation with Richard Hall, the meticulous researcher who died in 2009. He asked Hall, who had spent much of his lifetime working bureaucracy’s endless checkerboard, what he saw as the next move. “He said, ‘It’s probably not up to us — it’s up to them.’” Obviously, Hall wasn’t referring to the government. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13248/the-anonymous-fact-in-quarantine/
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