|
Post by auntym on Dec 16, 2017 12:38:06 GMT -6
www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html Nick PopeVerified account @nickpopemod
There's probably something out there, but we don't know what it is. That's the take-home message from the @nytimes #UFO coverage. This accurately reflects my own experience of this subject at the UK Ministry of Defence. It's as close as us government types can go to #disclosure George Knapp @g_knapp 1h1 hour ago
Heads were spinning at the Pentagon today. The UFO story caught many by surprise. There are so many major angles that have NOT been reported yet. NY Times finally takes the plunge, which is good, but seemingly has no idea how much has already been reported... but ignored. George Knapp @g_knapp 2h2 hours ago
News organizations are now scrambling to get up to speed on UFO subject. Wash. Post is running a front page story to catch up to NY Times. It is a topic that deserved scrutiny for decades but has been marginalized by Big Media. Suddenly, it's trendy. Welcome to the club, folks. John PodestaVerified account @johnpodesta
Lift the veil. Thanks @senatorreid. #TheTruthIsOutThere #ToTheStars****************************************************** Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. ProgramBy HELENE COOPER: www.nytimes.com/by/helene-cooper?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Byline®ion=Header&pgtype=article RALPH BLUMENTHAL: www.nytimes.com/by/ralph-blumenthal?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=Byline®ion=Header&pgtype=articleand LESLIE KEAN / DEC. 16, 2017 WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties. The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth. Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.” Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012. While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.” James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.” Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said. In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012. “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense. But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition. “Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name. U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained. Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.” Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research. Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol. “I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain. The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized. The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.” He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.) During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles. None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs. WATCH VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy posts a pair of declassified UFO videos after Pentagon admits to secret program www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/tom-delonges-to-the-stars-posts-declassified-ufo-videos-w514186
|
|
|
Post by jcurio on Dec 16, 2017 13:17:20 GMT -6
Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7497/pentagons-mysterious-program#ixzz51S3AtIBU******** Yep. If you regularly look way up there, no “contrails”, no sound, and HUGE. Has to be; if you can see it in a clear blue sky without a trail.
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 16, 2017 23:10:01 GMT -6
www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/16/does-pentagon-still-have-a-ufo-program-the-answer-is-a-bit-mysterious/23309611/ Does Pentagon still have a UFO program? The answer is a bit mysteriousby Thomson Reuters / (Reporting by David Morgan, editing by G Crosse) Dec 16th 2017 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon acknowledged on Saturday that its long-secret UFO investigation program ended in 2012, when U.S. defense officials shifted attention and funding to other priorities. But as to whether the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program has continued to investigate UFO sightings since its funding ended five years ago could rank as an unexplained phenomenon. The New York Times reported on Saturday that the hush-hush program, tasked with investigating sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, ran from 2007 to 2012 with $22 million in annual funding secretly tucked away in U.S. Defense Department budgets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Its initial funding came largely at the request of former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat long known for his enthusiasm for space phenomena, the newspaper said. Yet according to its backers, the program remains in existence and officials continue to investigate UFO episodes brought to their attention by service members, the newspaper said. The Pentagon openly acknowledged the fate of the program in response to a Reuters query. "The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ended in the 2012 timeframe," Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Ochoa said in an email. "It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change," she said. But the Pentagon was less clear about whether the UFO program continues to hover somewhere in the vast universe of the U.S. defense establishment. "The DoD takes seriously all threats and potential threats to our people, our assets, and our mission and takes action whenever credible information is developed," Ochoa said. What is less in doubt is former senator Reid's enthusiasm for UFOs and his likely role in launching the Pentagon initiative to identify advanced aviation threats. "If you've talked to Harry Reid for > 60 seconds then it's the least surprising thing ever that he loves UFOs and got an earmark to study them," former Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman said in a message on Twitter. Or as Reid himself said in a tweet that linked to the Times' story: "The truth is out there. Seriously." WATCH VIDEO: www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/16/does-pentagon-still-have-a-ufo-program-the-answer-is-a-bit-mysterious/23309611/Head of Pentagon’s secret ‘UFO’ office sought to make evidence public www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/head-of-pentagons-secret-ufo-office-sought-to-make-evidence-public/2017/12/16/90bcb7cc-e2b2-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html?utm_term=.4dd997a662ec
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 17, 2017 12:16:22 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2017/12/secret-ufo-pentagon-program-explained-Leslie-Kean.htmlSecret UFO Pentagon Program Explained By Leslie Kean | INTERVIEW – VIDEO Editor's Note:In the aftermath of the breaking news, re a secret UFO program run by the Defense Department from within the walls of the Pentagon, published by the New York Times, written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, the latter sat down with host, Aaron Gilchrest of MSNBC to unpackage it all. By MSNBC 12-16-17 Although the visuals and the host’s demeanor were typical for the media’s coverage of the topic of UFOs, regardless of the import of the now acknowledged secret government UFO program, Ms. Kean held her own; she eloquently explained the New York Times findings and detailed the investigations carried out under the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Moreover, she kept the host on topic, re the UFO phenomenon when he started to delve into aliens and the the common stigma painted by the mainstream media re the UFO matter.–FW Watch the interview below:www.theufochronicles.com/2017/12/secret-ufo-pentagon-program-explained-Leslie-Kean.html
US admits secret "X-files" project www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05rc2lr
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 17, 2017 13:24:39 GMT -6
www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/politics/pentagon-ufo-project/index.html?sr=twCNN121717pentagon-ufo-project1246PMStory NY Times: Pentagon study of UFOs revealedBy Jamie Crawford, National Security Producer / www.cnn.com/profiles/jamie-crawford Sun December 17, 2017 Former Sen. Harry Reid speaks at a rally in Nevada in 2016. The New York Times says it was his interest that spurred the creation of the UFO program. (CNN)Beyond preparing for the next field of battle, or advancing a massive arsenal that includes nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has also researched the possible existence of UFOs. The New York Times reported Saturday on the once completely classified project that began because of the intense interest in the subject by former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. According to the Times, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was launched in 2007 after the Nevada Democrat spoke to his longtime friend, Robert Bigelow, the billionaire founder of an aerospace company. Bigelow has spoken about his belief in UFOs visiting the United States as well as the existence of aliens. Among the anomalies the program studied, the paper said, were video and audio recordings of aerial encounters by military pilots and unknown objects, as well as interviews with people who said they had experienced physical encounters with such objects. In one instance, the program looked at video footage of a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet surrounded by a glowing object of unknown origin traveling at a high rate of speed in a location that officials declined to identify, the paper said. The Pentagon says the program has since been shuttered. "The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ended in the 2012 timeframe," Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson told CNN. "It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change." But according to the Times, certain aspects of the program still exist with officials from the program continuing to investigate encounters brought to them by service members, while these officials still carry out their other duties within the Defense Department. The former director of the program told the paper that he worked with officials from the Navy and CIA from his office in the Pentagon until this past October, when he resigned in protest. He said a replacement had been named, but he declined to identify them. Reid, the Times says, was also supported in his efforts to fund the program by the late Sens. Ted Stevens of Alaska, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, and John Glenn of Ohio, the first American to orbit the Earth, who told Reid the federal government should take a serious look at UFOs. And working to keep a program that he was sure would draw scrutiny from others, Reid said he, Stevens and Inouye made sure there was never any public debate about the program on the Senate floor during budget debates. "This was so-called black money," Reid told the Times regarding the Defense Department budget for classified programs. www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/politics/pentagon-ufo-project/index.html?sr=twCNN121717pentagon-ufo-project1246PMStory
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2017 13:41:57 GMT -6
Former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge hints Pentagon UFO disclosure is only the beginning: 'There's a lot more coming' Spencer Dukoff Dec 17, 2017 6:44 PM
Tom DeLonge knows the truth is out there.
And after leaving pop punk band Blink-182 to focus on exploring unexplained phenomena full-time, DeLonge is ready to share that truth — that aliens exist, that UFOs aren't actually “unidentified” and that extraterrestrial technology could save humanity — with the rest of the world.
As the founder of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, DeLonge is working with former high-ranking officials from the Department of Defense, CIA, NSA and Lockheed Martin's “Skunk Works” aerospace program.
One of DeLonge's partners is Luis Elizondo, who ran the Pentagon's top-secret UFO investigation program that the New York Times revealed in a bombshell report Saturday.
Luis Elizondo of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science. Image by: To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science
According to DeLonge, disclosures like Saturday's report are “only the tip of the spear,” and further “confirmation” of extraterrestrial life will continue to trickle out.
DeLonge claims the U.S. government has not only known about the existence of alien life for decades, but that they've also been actively experimenting with alien technologies.
And while this information has largely been hidden from the general public, DeLonge wants to lead what he believes will be an international - and perhaps, one day, intergalactic — conversation about how these soon-to-be-declassified technologies can benefit mankind.
“I know that it's fun to make snarky comments, but this isn't the kind of thing to joke about,” DeLonge told the Daily News earlier this month. “This is going to really affect a lot of people and a lot of peoples' belief systems.”
The organization has three divisions — aerospace, science and entertainment — and will attempt to “bring transformative science and engineering out of the shadows” free from “the restrictions of government priorities.”
DeLonge wants To the Stars to be owned by the public, which is why the company is relying on crowdfunding to launch. So far, To the Stars has raised over $2.1 million from more than 2,200 individual investors.
“What we're trying to do is make sure the story of the millennia and the technology of the millennia are owned by the people from day one,” Delonge said. "Part of our strategy has always been to throw it all out in the open so people can't come and try to shut it down from some weird office at NATO or the United Nations or the United States or whatever."
DeLonge hopes that To the Stars will use previously classified information about alien technologies to achieve breakthroughs that government agencies like NASA have been uninterested in exploring.
One such innovation is what DeLonge refers to as “engineering the space-time metric,” which is being developed by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a longtime government physicist and a current To the Stars partner.
“It's like a time machine,” DeLonge said. “You get into this craft and you turn it on — boom! — you're in China in one minute as a ball of light.”
Other To the Stars projects will seek to revolutionize human space travel, combat climate change, improve national security, enhance genetics, harness telepathy and more.
“All the things (people have) heard about and seen are the first step of 20," DeLonge said. “There's a lot more s--t coming.”
More info about To the Stars Academy and the Offering Circular can be found here: dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/#offering-circular
www.nydailynews.com/amp/news/national/tom-delonge-hints-pentagon-ufo-disclosure-beginning-article-1.3705817?__twitter_impression=true
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 18, 2017 15:52:31 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/12/about-that-u-s-government-ufo-program/ Hmmmmm...the other side of the coin? About That U.S. Government UFO Program…by Nick Redfern mysteriousuniverse.org/author/nredfern/ December 19, 2017 Correct me if I’m wrong, but am I the only one who is not overwhelmed by the new revelations www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/17/pentagon-admits-running-secret-ufo-investigation-for-five-years concerning UFOs and the U.S. Government? In fact, I have to say that I’m completely underwhelmed by it all. Now, yes, it is undeniably interesting that there should have been a program, one which was carefully not revealed for years – at least, not to the public and the media. Until now, that is, as a result of the revelations of a few days ago that appeared in the New York Times. See this link. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.htmlYes, all of this demonstrates that there are those within government who have an interest in UFOs, and to the point where they were willing to fund a program to re-address UFOs, decades after the Air Force’s UFO program, Project Blue Book, was shut down (in 1969). But, let’s take a look at what the new revelations really tell us. As we are told, the only reason why the program ever existed in the first place was because Senator Harry Reid (having a deep and personal interest in the UFO phenomenon) pushed and pushed the government to take a new and renewed look at the subject. As a result of Senator Reid’s actions, yes, the program was created. But, as the New York Times makes it clear to us, the bulk of the money went to, and I quote the newspaper, “an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow…” So, the government was not planning on readdressing the UFO phenomenon until Senator Reid made an approach. And yes, the government finally decided to do something – and what they did was to provide most of the the funding to the aerospace research company of a friend of Reid. But, when it comes to the matter of the overall, annual U.S. Department of Defense budget, that figure was minuscule. If this really was a top secret UFO program, far more money would have been channeled into it, and we would not be hearing about it at all. I have had people contact me to say that all of this is evidence of secret UFO programs and (as one person put it to me) “the new inheritors of MJ12.” Well, for a start, the MJ12 saga is *bleep* and something which kept Ufology busy for not just years but for decades. And where has it led us? Nowhere, that’s where. Now, I don’t dispute the possibility that there could be top secret UFO programs hidden deep in the heart of the government, the military and/or the intelligence community. In fact, I would be very surprised if such things don’t exist. mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/12/the-mj12-documents-the-governments-position/But, a project that only existed because a senator kept trying to make it happen – followed by the government finally dishing out the money outside of government – does not sound like a top secret program of highly-classified proportions. And certainly not one which had access to alien bodies and crashed UFOs, as a Facebook friend suggested to me -in all seriousness – just a few hours ago. Let’s keep all of this in perspective: government agencies often throw money at outside enterprises and for all sorts of reasons. And, yes, the existence of the program is usually not spoken about. At least, not until it surfaces into the public domain – as was the case this past weekend. So, yes, I do find the latest news to be slightly intriguing. But, look at how the group came together, look at how the Government largely handed the work outside, and look at the fact that it was all shut down after half a decade. What we see is the kind of thing that goes on all the time in government. What we’re not seeing is evidence of “the U.S. Government’s Top Secret UFO Project.” Such a program might exist, but this wasn’t it. mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/12/about-that-u-s-government-ufo-program/
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 18, 2017 16:09:21 GMT -6
Nick PopeVerified account @nickpopemod 6m6 minutes ago
As an example of how the UK media is covering the Pentagon #UFO story, here's a BBC TV news report:
Interview with Nick Pope on Pentagon UFO Study
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Dec 18, 2017 17:11:55 GMT -6
So far. I tend to agree with Nick Redfern. Time will tell, but we've been down this road before.....
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 19, 2017 13:32:04 GMT -6
www.cnn.com/2017/12/18/politics/luis-elizondo-ufo-pentagon/index.html CNNVerified account @cnn 19h19 hours ago
"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," says former military intel official Luis Elizondo, who ran the Pentagon's UFO Unit Former Pentagon UFO official: 'We may not be alone'By Eli Watkins www.cnn.com/profiles/eli-watkins and bob Todd, CNN / www.cnn.com/profiles/bob-todd-profile Tue December 19, 2017 (CNN)A former Pentagon official who led a recently revealed government program to research potential UFOs said Monday evening that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth. "My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Luis Elizondo said in an interview on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." A pair of news reports in The New York Times and Politico over the weekend said the effort, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was begun largely at the behest of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who helped shore up funding for it after speaking to a friend and political donor who owns an aerospace company and has said he believes in the existence of aliens. Elizondo told The New York Times he resigned from the Department of Defense in October in protest over what he called excessive secrecy surrounding the program and internal opposition to it after funding for the effort ended in 2012. Elizondo said Monday that he could not speak on behalf of the government, but he strongly implied there was evidence that stopped him from ruling out the possibility that alien aircraft visited Earth. "These aircraft -- we'll call them aircraft -- are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Elizondo said of objects they researched. He said the program sought to identify what had been seen, either through tools or eyewitness reports, and then "ascertain and determine if that information is a potential threat to national security." "We found a lot," Elizondo said. The former Pentagon official said they identified "anomalous" aircraft that were "seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics." "Things that don't have any obvious flight services, any obvious forms of propulsion, and maneuvering in ways that include extreme maneuverability beyond, I would submit, the healthy G-forces of a human or anything biological," Elizondo said. The Times' report on the government UFO study included a pair of videos of pilots remarking on something mysterious they were seeing. One of the pilots, retired Cmdr. David Fravor, told CNN that he had witnessed an object that looked like a "40-foot-long Tic Tac" maneuvering rapidly and changing its direction during a flight in 2004. Ryan Alexander of Taxpayers for Common Sense expressed dismay about the program and cast it as a waste of money in a piece that aired on CNN's "The Situation Room" on Monday. "It's definitely crazy to spend $22 million to research UFOs," Alexander said. "Pilots are always going to see things that they can't identify, and we should probably look into them. But to identify them as UFOs, to target UFOs to research -- that is not the priority we have as a national security matter right now." For his part, Fravor said the money spent on the program was a drop in the bucket relative to the military's over half-a-trillion-dollar annual budget. Politico reported that after Elizondo stepped down from the Department of Defense, he went to work for To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a company co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge that says it looks into issues surrounding government secrecy and unidentified objects. In a statement Monday, Reid continued to defend the program. "I'm proud of this program and its ground-breaking studies speak for themselves," the statement read. "It is silly and counterproductive to politicize the serious scientific questions raised by the work of this program, which was funded on a bipartisan basis." WATCH VIDEOS: www.cnn.com/2017/12/18/politics/luis-elizondo-ufo-pentagon/index.html
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 19, 2017 20:37:41 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15603/day-earth-didnt-stand-still/ The day the Earth didn’t stand stillPosted on December 18, 2017 by Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/I haven’t felt like this since the Berlin Wall went down in 1989. But even then, there were signs that something massive was afoot, judging from the fissures running the entire length of the Iron Curtain. When that bell tolled, I was still disbelieving. The wall had been with me since childhood, since I’d begun considering the world at large, and in my mind, that sprawling bloody divide was as intractable as a mountain range. Tuning in to its dismantling was like watching the Grand Canyon dissolve in a time-lapse blur. Unprecedented — the Defense Department concedes this UFO outran an F-18 jet fighter in 2004/CREDIT: ABC News On Saturday, just nine shopping days before Christmas, shortly after noon, I logged on to discover the Earth had shifted again. Only, this time, there was no warning. Yeah, there was that To The Stars Academy video presentation thing back in October, with an impressive cast of insiders issuing brief statements about their knowledge of and/or interest in UFO activity, and their intentions of bringing sobriety to the controversy. But they presented no evidence. And over the decades, we’ve seen plenty of other bright, informed people stepping forward to lend true skepticism to the stalemate, only to fade away due to a lack of media oxygen. Furthermore, if a breakthrough was going to happen, it was primed for a Hillary Clinton administration, but certainly not under what we’re dealing with now. It’s been more than a year since Clinton and campaign manager John Podesta tried – and failed – to turn The Great Taboo into a campaign talking point. Not one major mainstream media wheel bothered to take the bait and ask what they meant, or why neither feared losing credibility or political capital by confronting this historically toxic issue. Trump came to town instead. And competence in virtually every department proceeded to fall apart immediately. Who wants to talk UFOs now? Yet, there it was, suddenly, in the dead-news zone of a Saturday afternoon, The New York Times and Politico, lighting up the Internet with a one-two punch about a hidden, $22 million, Pentagon special access program (SAP) instigated by three powerful veteran U.S. Senators, exposed by a whistleblower attached to something called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, and accompanied by authentic government footage of an F-18 jet fighter giving chase to what appears to be an axis-tilting, heat-emitting UFO at 25,000 feet, complete with cockpit chatter. Finally. After half a century of worthless press releases and a mullet wrapper called Project Blue Book, the Pentagon owns up. Extraordinary – a highly compartmented SAP that makes uninformed Defense Department PIOs look like liars or stupid, and guaranteed to reinvigorate the most sensationalist paranoid conspiracy mongers. But it does in fact beg many questions: How many other related SAPs are researching this stuff? And how much more gun-cam footage exists? For starters. Equally extraordinary is that the Times – huzzahs to Leslie Kean – bothered to show up and play it straight. The Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) thermal imaging acquired by the Navy Hornet is the same technology employed by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol when it videoed an equally freaky UFO as it hurtled through the night sky over Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, in 2013. That thing not only sliced into the water, it split into two separate flying objects after reemerging. The sequence hit the Internet shortly thereafter, and the provenance of the footage was established several years ago, but the media ignored it. The same way it ignored a radar-record analysis confirming eyewitness reports of F-16s checking out a UFO that beelined for the no-fly zone over President Bush’s ranch in Crawford in 2008. The big difference this time around, of course, is the willingness of a former intelligence officer and DoD Aerial Threat analyst named Luis Elizondo to man up and risk the consequences of going public. That’s huge. It also helps to have a “donor class” bigwig, i.e., Las Vegas hotel magnate Bob Bigelow, offering cover for the research. When it comes to UFOs, Bigelow and his data collection project – to which the Federal Aviation Administration has deferred all public inquiries about “flying saucer” encounters – have been operating in plain sight forever. In 2010, for instance, Bigelow told the NY Times that “people have been hurt [by UFOs]. People have been killed.” But the Times reporter never asked WTF? As recently as May, the man who wants to put tourists in space reiterated his belief to “60 Minutes” that ETs have been and are continuing to visit our planet. Salon.com – one of the many news platforms to follow the leader after the story broke – pointed out that the $22 million used to finance Elizondo’s SAP amounts to less than 0.004 percent of the U.S. budget. Still, taxpayers are going to want to know what $22 million buys in the UFO arena these days, especially since that funding went to Bigelow Aerospace. And that’s where, according to the Times, we can presumably find “metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Since taxpayers paid for it, we deserve to see it. Where we go from here depends on major-media stamina. Much of the followup coverage of this weekend’s bombshell was predictable. There were the usual “truth is out there” clichés, blatant mistakes (one even said the Pentagon spent $22M a year during the program’s official run from 2007-2012), and a few knuckle-headed takeaways. One of the dumbest and sadly typical offenders, The New York Post, weighed in with a “We’re Not ‘A Loan’” banner and a subhead that read “Pentagon spent $22M to study alien ‘visits.’” The piece is illustrated with a mug shot of a little green man, along with a photo from the 1985 “Cocoon” movie with a caption that reads “Far Out!” Where are these dingbats drawing their inspiration? Putin? This is the sort of lame detritus likely to prevail unless the Fourth Estate gives this story the sort of attention it deserves. Regardless of what happens next, however, the foundations of this debate have changed. This is not something the DoD can jam back into the bottle, at least not without some major explaining, which it hasn’t had to do since boarding up Blue Book in 1969-70. For generations, in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary, American taxpayers have been patronized by glib Authorities & Experts assuring us that nothing beyond our control is unfolding in our atmosphere. The media have been complicit housecats. But that all went sideways in the blink of a single news cycle. With any luck, what happened on Saturday afternoon should be the beginning of an overdue accounting on the limits of even our most advanced technologies. It’s time we face our future honestly, and start acting like adults. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15603/day-earth-didnt-stand-still/
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 19, 2017 22:55:02 GMT -6
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/12/19/the-aliens-are-coming-and-no-one-cares/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.72fb6d892d08 The aliens are coming, and no one caresBy Molly Roberts / www.washingtonpost.com/people/molly-roberts/?utm_term=.f1c8fecf23a2December 19,2017 A sign near Area 51 in Nevada. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)Hold on to your tinfoil hats. The New York Times reported this weekend that the Pentagon houses a program devoted to the study of unidentified flying objects. The Defense Department claims the 10-year-old initiative has been shut down, but others say the funding ended and the work went on — between officials’ other duties, in the shadows, as mysterious as its extraterrestrial subjects. The government, apparently, thinks those subjects are real enough to have spent $22 million per year on probing their whereabouts. (Skeptics point out that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) requested much of the initial funding and that most of it went to an aerospace research company run by a longtime billionaire friend of his.) The program gathered recordings of reported UFO sightings, including military footage of a glowing ship shooting through the sky. It also collected metal alloys of, well, alien composition. Its director declared in a 2009 briefing summary that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact.” And we don’t care. Well, some of us do. The extraterrestrial exposé has prompted some commentators to raise a digital eyebrow. But mostly, the possibility of alien invasion has not managed to break through the Trump bubble. It’s not prompting columnists to columnize, or even that many tweeters to tweet. We’re too busy placing bets on whether special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation will meet an early end, or crying out against misbegotten votes by moderates for a very bad tax bill. We have no time to contemplate the cosmos. This makes some sense. The aliens might be coming, but they’re probably not coming anytime soon. Rate hikes and health-care collapses and an unopen Internet, on the other hand, may all be here to ring in the new year. It’s hard to worry about a threat that might not even exist when there are so many threats that do, right here, right now. And it’s even harder to think about extraterrestrial life not as a threat but just as a thing, or as an idea. It’s too distant. What’s the point? I don’t know much about what lives beyond our solar system, or even what lives beyond Earth. Scientists, as far as I can tell, think statistics say that aliens are out there somewhere, but whether we can reach them or they us is far less certain. I definitely don’t know the proper price tag to put on finding out more. But I do remember the eclipse. It says something that it took the sun disappearing for us to tear our eyes away from Trump and look somewhere else for a second. But however disheartening the all-consuming chaos of today’s politics may be, this summer’s astrological rarity was a reprieve, and a comfort. A total solar eclipse, those who have seen one all seem to say, reminds you that the universe is very big and you are very small. On one level, that’s terrifying. No one likes to hear they don’t matter. On another level, it’s reassuring to think that each of us is connected to some transcendental community. Even if we don’t matter alone, we matter together — as a collective piece of something much, much larger. Extraterrestrial life tells us the same story. It’s less tangible than the eclipse, and it will take more than dark glasses to get a good look. But it also situates us in a vast universe that makes us feel both tiny and tremendous at the same time. It tells us there’s a lot we don’t understand, and a lot we never will, but that we’re all striving, seeking and sometimes finding together. So we should talk about aliens this holiday season. Not only because it’s important, and our ho-hum response so far belies the striking reality that the Defense Department believes they’re closer than we knew, but also because the continued hunt for nonhuman intelligent life, amid all the uncertainty, is part of what makes us human. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/12/19/the-aliens-are-coming-and-no-one-cares/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.72fb6d892d08
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 20, 2017 14:45:48 GMT -6
www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-exclusive-sen-reid-discusses-ufo-study/883885259 I-Team Exclusive: Sen. Reid discusses UFO studyBy: George Knapp Posted: Dec 19, 2017 LAS VEGAS - The existence of the UFO study was first reported by the I-Team back in October. That's when a high-ranking intelligence officer in charge of the program quit to take a job with a private company. Over the weekend, news of Harry Reid's role in the study surfaced in news reports. The senator gave his only on camera interview to the I-Team's George Knapp. Harry Reid's interest in UFOs dates back to 1989 because that is when George Knapp first had conversations with him on the topic. In the years since, Reid quietly collected more information, met with scientists, intelligence officials, and other experts, and finally authorized a study that was carried out by a company created by a Las Vegas billionaire. Since the story broke on Saturday, Reid has been bombarded with media requests, but he gave his only on camera interview to the I-Team. The release this weekend of videos recorded by military pilots is unusual because, officially, the U.S. government stopped collecting information about UFOs back in 1969, when the Air Force canceled Project Blue Book. But in the decades since, pilots and others continued to encounter technology that is beyond anything known on earth. Video footage of unidentified aerial phenomenon coi.tothestarsacademy.com/"If China, Russia, Japan, other countries are doing this and we're not, then something is wrong because if the technology, as described and the way people see this movement took place in anything we have available to us, it would kill everybody. They couldn't withstand the G-forces. something sitting there, whom, down it goes," says former U.S. Senator Harry Reid. His interest in UFOs extends back to the 1980s. It was rekindled in the 90s when Reid spoke to senator and former astronaut John Glenn about unknown aerial objects. Reid eventually met in a secure room in the U.S. capitol to ask Senators Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens if they would authorize funds for a quiet but serious study of UFOs. Both agreed. I-Team Reporter George Knapp: "Are you glad the story is out?" Harry Reid: "I'm very glad, because now we have scientific evidence." Reid says he is proud to have had a hand in kickstarting the Pentagon study, and contrary to some media reports, the information collected was impressive. "For nearly the next decade, I ran sensitive aerospace identification program focusing on unidentified aerial technologies, it was in this position that I learned the phenomena is indeed real," says Luis Elizondo, To The Stars Academy. Until three months ago, Elizondo worked directly for the secretary of defense and was the Pentagon's point man for collection of data about mysterious encounters. When he announced in October that he'd been in charge of a 10-year UFO study, the news was largely ignored by mainstream media. Now, it has blossomed into a huge story, in part because Reid acknowledges his own role in getting the funds approved. "Even though this was a secure program,we wanted to make sure people couldn't complain about it that it was some sweetheart deal. No, it was put out to bid," Reid says. The contract was posted for months. The winning bid came from Las Vegas space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, a billionaire who had funded his own UFO studies for years. Bigelow built secure facilities inside his aerospace company. At its peak, the study had 46 scientists working at the Nevada facility, writing reports and analyzing data that came in from the military. Rapid response teams were dispatched to the scene of UFO events. Over five years, the project cost a total of 22 million. it wasn't a money maker for Bigelow. "I'm sure the reason it helped is that he gave the best cost. He was willing to build the infrastructure and build everything on his own because he liked the topic," Reid says. In some news stories about the UFO study, anonymous staffers say Reid stopped supporting the study because it produced no solid information. So, why did the study end? Reid and others involved in the project say one factor is that intelligence officials were petrified that someone would find out about it and it would end up on the front page of a newspaper. And there were other officials who had religious objections. The I-Team will have more exclusive content Wednesday, including specifics on what was learned during the study, and which UFO incidents were the most unusual. WATCH VIDEO: www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-exclusive-sen-reid-discusses-ufo-study/883885259
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 21, 2017 14:09:13 GMT -6
www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-ufo-study-focused-on-us-military-encounters/885013955 I-Team: UFO study focused on U.S. military encountersBy: George Knapp / Posted: Dec 20, 2017 LAS VEGAS - A once-secret Pentagon study of UFOs may be finished, but according to published reports, the U.S. government is still collecting information about encounters between unknown aircraft and our military. So far, the government has not released official reports or findings from the study that was headquartered in southern Nevada, but the man who authorized that study knows a bit about the content. Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid gave the I-Team and exclusive interview. One critic of the UFO study said on Cable news Tuesday night that of course, we should study unknowns that are encountered by military pilots, but we shouldn't study those UFOs. The study conducted here had input from the best and brightest trained pilots and other observers, back up by radar returns, instrumentation and -- sometimes -- physical evidence. One account came from a bomber pilot who later became a U.S. senator. "I was flying and there was an object next to me. I couldn't get rid of it, I slowed up, it was there. I sped up, it was there. I would dive, it would be there. I called. Nothing on radar," Reid said. The story told to Harry Reid came from Republican Senator Ted Stevens, whose experience as a World War II bomber pilot was shared during a closed door meeting at the U.S. capitol. Reid says that meeting in 2007 led to funding for a clandestine study of UFOs. Reid had been approached by an unnamed intelligence official who felt the topic deserved study because of decades of spooky encounters between the U.S. military and unknown aerial objects, like one off the California coast in 2004. UFOs as big as airliners played cat and mouse with the USS Nimitz carrier group several times over a three week period. An object shaped like a gigantic Tic Tac performed seemingly impossible maneuvers. Another video recorded by military pilots caught glimpses of what the aviators said was a fleet of unknown aircraft. "They are outmatched by a technology they've never seen. Clearly this is not an experimental aircraft, but whose is it?" said Chris Mellon, former intelligence official, To The Stars Event. News of the encounter was first unveiled back in October during the launch of a public benefit corporation called To The Stars Academy, the bigger story was missed, namely that the video had been analyzed in the study initiated by Senator Reid. Results from the study have not been made public. Reid says the program cast a wide net, and included incidents with clear national security implications, such as chilling reports in which UFOs hovered over American nuclear missiles bases, as portrayed in a documentary UFOs and Nukes. "It's in the documents. Scores and scores of men come out, look up wondering what that is. They wouldn't leave. Communications in the missile defense system was shut down. It didn't happen just once. It happened more than once," Reid said. He adds, the study investigated reports of USO, unidentified submerged objects, and it incorporated the UFO files collected by other nations which have been more open about the issue. One aim of the study was to find out the origin of the craft. Intelligence officials ruled out the Russians or Chinese but Reid says our adversaries are likely ahead of us in trying to duplicate a far-superior technology. Reporter George Knapp: "Are there indications that Russia and China are studying it? Harry Reid: "The answer is yes." Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow, whose aerospace facility housed the UFO study team, says he signed a strict non-disclosure agreement and cannot discuss the findings. Reid says 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 who felt that UFOs might be satanic. Reporter George Knapp: "Did you hear that, that it's evil? Harry Reid: "Yes. I think there are a lot of people who don't like it for a number of reasons and religious views. It didn't fit with what they wanted to spend money on." Persons familiar with the five year study told the I-Team 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. Thursday, Senator Reid talks about whether we need Congressional hearings on UFOs. WATCH VIDEO: www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-ufo-study-focused-on-us-military-encounters/885013955
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 21, 2017 14:30:25 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Dec 21, 2017 15:31:35 GMT -6
See post up in the media section. Knapp, Cameron, Burroughs, and Howe on KGRA radio tonight.
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 22, 2017 13:43:33 GMT -6
www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-pentagon-ufo-study-catches-attention-of-congress/885843051 I-Team: Pentagon UFO study catches attention of CongressBy: George Knapp Posted: Dec 21, 2017 LAS VEGAS - Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid thinks it might be time to hold congressional hearings into the mystery surrounding UFOs. In his only television interview, Reid told the I-Team about the pivotal role he played authorizing a secret Pentagon study of UFOs that ended five years The project was based in Nevada, carried out by Las Vegas businessman who is no stranger to paranormal investigations. In fact, Robert Bigelow's mysterious Skinwalker ranch played a role in the Pentagon investigation. A picturesque ranch in northeastern Utah, shunned by its Native American neighbors and long considered a hotbed of UFO sightings and other unexplained phenomena, played a pivotal role in the creation of the once-secret Pentagon study of unknown aerial objects. In the mid 90s, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow bought the property and sent in his research team, the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, to study the ranch and the larger Uintah Basin. Over the next 10 years, NIDS scientists had dramatic encounters with the unknown, including daylight mutilations of livestock, mysterious aircraft, and discarnate entities. "The ranch is not just UFOs. Performances of anomalies go back many years," said Robert Bigelow. The I-Team's 2007 conversation with Bigelow, his first on camera interview on any subject, never aired but he told us that his NIDS team experienced more than 100 baffling encounters, though they had no idea what was behind it. "And that we don't have to worry about aliens coming and taking us away. That's for somebody else to talk about," said former U.S. Senator Harry Reid. When Senator Reid and colleagues authorized funding for a Pentagon study, they made a point of saying it was not a search for little green men. The primary aim was to identify, analyze, and eventually duplicate the other worldly technology that had been demonstrated in multiple dramatic encounters involving the U.S. military. "The phenomenon is real," said Luis Elizondo, former Pentagon official. The man who ran the Pentagon's study, Luis Elizondo, resigned in October and has since said the technology of these craft is beyond anything known on earth, but he declines to guess where it originates. No one involved wants to mention space aliens, for obvious reasons. "I'm not into that," Reid said. "I'm interested in science, what's going on in our world." Investigating the source of the UFOs is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Although Bob Bigelow dissolved his NIDS team and ended the study of the Utah ranch, in 2007, a book written about the property caught the attention of the DIA and Senator Reid. Bigelow's previous experience in putting together a team to investigate weird phenomena was likely a factor in the decision to award him the contract to study UFOs. And sources familiar with the study say, Pentagon investigators returned to the Utah ranch several times during a three-year period. When the New York Times broke its story, it reported that Bigelow built a special secure facility at his aerospace plant to store unknown materials supposedly obtained during the UFO study. "I don't know. I don't know anything about exotic materials, but a lot of talk about it," Reid said. What he does know is that the explosion of news coverage about the UFO issue has caught the attention of Congress. Reid's phone started ringing immediately, he says, people from Congress and the business community who've always been interested in the subject but were afraid to admit it. Reid thinks the time may be right to re-launch a formal inquiry. "Now that it's out, why shouldn't they do this? Reid said. "You take an airplane, the cost of one military airplane. The cheapest one we have. Give that money to this research. It's more important than one airplane. We have enough bombs and bullets to take care of us for a long time, but not enough to understand the future?" In all, about $22 million was spent from 2007 through 2012 before the study formally ended. Robert Bigelow no longer owns the Skinwalker Ranch. He sold it to another party last year. WATCH VIDEO: www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-pentagon-ufo-study-catches-attention-of-congress/885843051
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 22, 2017 14:33:17 GMT -6
www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/we-may-not-be-alone-ufo-report-times Leslie Kean @lesliekean 1h1 hour ago
Nice story in Vanity Fair covering more of the back story at the Times********************************************** “We May Not Be Alone”: Inside the Times’s U.F.O. Report “It was a story about government, and fights over funding and priorities,” Times executive editor Dean Baquet told me. “And it was damn interesting.”by Joe Pompeo / www.vanityfair.com/contributor/joe-pompeoDecember 22, 2017 Reid speaks to the press at the Capitol on September 13, 2016 before his retirement. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.Prior to 2017, the possibility of a story about the existence of U.F.O.s landing on the front page of the Sunday New York Times seemed about as likely as a U.F.O. touching down, say, on top of the Times building on Eighth Avenue. But this has been a year where reality has been bent, distorted. So to read, in a sidebar to the Times’s December 17 U.F.O. exposé, about two Navy pilots and a radio operator describing a jet’s oceanic encounter off the coast of Southern California with an aerial phenomenon of unknown origin—“It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen”; “I have no idea what I saw”—was not as surprising as it might have been if there was not someone with orange hair in the Oval Office. The signs were there—we’ve been getting ready for them. The main story, which focused on a now-defunct Pentagon program, nurtured by Harry Reid, to investigate the existence of U.F.O.s, finally crashed through a barrier between fringe and mainstream that’s been cracking for much of the past two years. In the following days, one of the pilots related his experience in painstaking detail on CNN. (“It’s easy to doubt what we can’t explain, but when you actually see things . . . ”) Luis Elizondo, who exposed the program after resigning from the Department of Defense two months ago in protest of “excessive secrecy and internal opposition,” as the Times put it, appeared on the network as well. “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” the long-serving former intelligence officer said in a real interview that aired on CNN in prime time. On MSNBC, one of the authors of the Times story, Ralph Blumenthal, talked about the existence, inside a Las Vegas storage facility, of “some material from these objects that is being studied so that scientists can try to figure out what accounts for their amazing properties . . . It’s some kind of compound that they don’t recognize.” For Times editors, the primary considerations that led to the A1 publication of “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” were more earthly in nature. “The reason this was a story was because the Pentagon acknowledged it had spent $22 million of taxpayer money to investigate U.F.O.s from 2007 to 2012—and because Harry Reid had pushed for the funding, and was proud of it, on the record,” Washington Bureau Chief Elisabeth Bumiller, who oversaw the reporting, told me. “We talked about it the way we talk about all stories—it had to be airtight.” Bumiller also noted that “the story did not have a huge presence on A1 in print—it had only a small run on the front. On the Web, it had great play, in part because the video was so compelling.” (On that note, it topped the most-e-mailed and most-viewed lists, and a Times spokeswoman said: “Millions of people have read the story. It continued to draw large audiences days after publication. The videos that accompanied the story got huge audiences, too.”) Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, agreed with Bumiller’s assessment. “It was a story about government, and fights over funding and priorities. And it was damn interesting,” he said. “That feels to me like the makings of a story worth putting on the front page.” As big as this moment was for the Times—“This is probably the most-watched and looked-at story The New York Times has run in a long time,” Blumenthal said (perhaps with some hyperbole, given Harvey Weinstein) during his MSNBC interview—it was even bigger for Leslie Kean, who shared a byline with Blumenthal and Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper. To be sure, Kean told me that it’s “something I have spent over 15 years working towards.” Kean is an investigative science journalist who has written extensively about U.F.O.s, including a 2010 book from Crown Publishing, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, that made the Times’s Best-Seller list and featured a foreword from longtime Clinton aide (and U.F.O. buff) John Podesta, who helped Kean settle a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit she had filed against NASA to obtain information regarding the 1965 crash of an unknown object in Pennsylvania. She’s a seasoned reporter with bylines in an array of mainstream publications, who began her career as a foreign correspondent covering Burma. (She is also the niece of former New Jersey governor Tom Kean.) If you Google “U.F.O. journalism,” Kean occupies the top search results, including a 2010 Columbia Journalism Review interview in which she recalls, “When I first took the subject on, I was really embarrassed. You go to a party and people ask you what you do, and when you say you’re a journalist, you’re just hoping nobody asks you what subject you focus on. You don’t want to tell because people laugh.” Kean is the one who got the initial tip from Elizondo. She took it to Blumenthal, a veteran Times contributor who still writes for the paper and has known Kean for years, who then pitched it to Baquet. “At a confidential meeting October 4 in a Pentagon City hotel with several present and former intelligence officials and a defense contractor, she met Luis Elizondo,” Blumenthal wrote in a behind-the-scenes account for Times Insider. “This was big news because the United States military had announced as far back as 1969 that U.F.O.s were not worth studying . . . She spent hours with him reviewing unclassified documents.” Cooper was looped in to work her Pentagon connections and to interview Reid, and the reporting took off from there. “It was important that we not take anything on faith,” Blumenthal wrote. “This field attracts zealots as well as debunkers, and many Americans remain deeply skeptical that the phenomenon exists as popularly portrayed. In draft after draft, we took pains to let the investigation speak for itself, without bias.” Over e-mail, Kean told me this wasn’t just about getting the story into a venerable newspaper like the Times, but that it was also crucial “that the story uncover official participation in investigating the unidentified objects. That is the most important element.” Kean insisted that the Times appearance hadn’t changed her work. “Although there is unfortunately plenty of fringe activity when it comes to U.F.O.s, my work has always avoided that,” she said. “I do not consider this subject fringe when I report on it, because I only report on credible, corroborated information. I have written for a range of mainstream media and my book was noted for its journalistic integrity and factual approach to a subject that needs more attention. The irrational stigma and ridicule around the topic has been a hard hurdle to overcome.” Since the Times story broke, Kean said, she has been flooded with new tips—legitimate and otherwise. She said she expects to pursue follow-ups with additional revelations. I also asked her if the new revelations had an impact on her own beliefs. “I don’t think this is a matter of belief,” she said. “We still don’t know a lot about the unknown vehicles, but we do know that they exist, and they are physical.” But when I asked Baquet the same, he replied: “I wouldn’t say it made me a believer.” www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/we-may-not-be-alone-ufo-report-times
|
|
|
Post by jcurio on Dec 22, 2017 15:04:53 GMT -6
Reid had been approached by an unnamed intelligence official who felt the topic deserved study because of decades of spooky encounters between the U.S. military and unknown aerial objects, like one off the California coast in 2004. UFOs as big as airliners played cat and mouse with the USS Nimitz carrier group several times over a three week period. An object shaped like a gigantic Tic Tac performed seemingly impossible maneuvers. Read more: theedgeofreality.proboards.com/thread/7497/pentagons-mysterious-program#ixzz521fU1k9M******** “Sounds” like the same way that David P. that does the serious search based on missing people, was “approached”. ~just saying~
|
|
|
Post by jcurio on Dec 23, 2017 10:54:36 GMT -6
Couldn’t they just store it at area52?
😆😵😇😝
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 28, 2017 13:30:39 GMT -6
www.thesun.co.uk/news/5192363/mystery-over-top-secret-ufo-programme-deepens-as-us-government-is-accused-of-backtracking-on-staggering-footage-released/UFO U-TURN Mystery over top-secret UFO programme deepens as US government is accused of backtracking on staggering footage releasedThe Defense Intelligence Agency, which ran the real-life X-Files programme, says it has not released any information, files or videos - but UFO experts claim they're distancing themselves because they aren't "ready or willing" to disclose the informationBy Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent 28th December 2017, THE mystery of a top-secret UFO programme has deepened after government officials claimed there was confusion about its purpose - while experts accused them of backtracking. The Pentagon last week confirmed the existence of a $22million programme - called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) - which investigated sightings of UFOs between 2007 to 2012. The revelation excited UFO fans around the world as it was the first time the US government had admitted investigating UFOs since 1969. The organisation's work was outed by Luis Elizondo when he told the New York Times he ran the shadowy Department of Defense programme from 2007 to 2012 and says he continued to look into the issue until he resigned in October this year. www.thesun.co.uk/news/5173269/pentagon-x-files-chief-aliens-have-visited-earth/Two bombshell videos of unexplained UFO sightings by US military personnel - investigated by the AATIP - were also published. www.thesun.co.uk/news/5162185/us-fighter-pilots-reveal-close-encounter-with-ultra-fast-ufo-that-outpaced-their-f-18-jets/However, when contacted by Sun Online, the Defense Intelligence Agency - the Department of Defense's spy arm, which first started the programme - claimed there had been some misunderstandings. They said there was "confusion" over the AATIP's purpose, and denied releasing any videos or files related to it. A spokesman for the US Defense Intelligence Agency said: "There is some confusion about this program and claims about its purpose in press reporting... the Defense Intelligence Agency has not released any information, files or videos." But Department of Defense officials disputed this response, claiming they did not know what "confusion" the Defense Intelligence Agency was referring to - and stated they had been "clear" about the programme's aims. A spokesman for the Department of Defense added: "The AATIP’s mandate, when it existed, was to assess far-term foreign advanced aerospace threats to the United States." The US Defense Intelligence Agency said: 'There is some confusion about this program'The Department of Defense said they did not know what 'confusion' the Defense Intelligence Agency was referring toThe Department of Defense said they did not know what 'confusion' the Defense Intelligence Agency was referring to The Department of Defense claim the programme ended in 2012 - however, Elizondo, chief of the Pentagon's secret UFO research initiative, said that he had continued to work with officials from the Navy and the CIA on the programme until he resigned from office in October. UFO experts have claimed that this disagreement could be the government trying to back-pedal away from the issue of UFOs - because they aren't "ready or willing" to disclose the information. Ufologist Alejandro Rojas, from Open Minds TV, which is dedicated to the study of UFOs, said: "It does seem to me like they might be backtracking. "They haven't clarified exactly what the confusion is, but I'm not surprised that they are scrambling over this now. "According to The Washington Post, Luis Elizondo essentially got the videos under somewhat false pretences. "He claimed he wanted to use the videos for training pilots - he didn't say he wanted to use the videos to demonstrate that UFOs are real, which is what's happening. "I think that's why the clips are so short and - especially with the second one - there is so little information attached to it. "I think perhaps they thought just in case somebody gets a hold of this and tries to turn it into a big UFO thing, we just won't give them much information. "It puts them in a spot because perhaps they're not ready or even willing to come out and talk about this. "And they didn't intend these videos to be used for this purpose. "It wouldn't be the first time the government has tried to spin things in a different direction on this topic. "But we've got Elizondo who led the programme going on the record to talk about it - so it's clear that they were investigating UFOs." Sun Online has now lodged a Freedom of Information request with the Defense Intelligence Agency for any other UFO files or videos related to AATIP. WATCH VIDEO: www.thesun.co.uk/news/5192363/mystery-over-top-secret-ufo-programme-deepens-as-us-government-is-accused-of-backtracking-on-staggering-footage-released/
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 31, 2017 12:35:44 GMT -6
amp.nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/new-york-times-ufo-report.html?__twitter_impression=true December 26, 2017 What the New York Times UFO Report Actually RevealsBy Jeff Wise / nymag.com/author/Jeff%20Wise/The internet went slightly more bananas than usual last weekend over the New York Times’ story implying that extraterrestrials are real and the U.S. government has been tracking them for years. Appearing first on the web on Saturday, it came out in print on Sunday as a front-page story entitled “Real U.F.O.s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know.” As if wary of the waters into which it was about to wade, the piece started out in a sober and measured tone, describing the existence of a heretofore little-known Department of Defense program, but then after the jump to page 27 loosened up and gave free rein to claims that the program had found evidence of strange aircraft that flew in seemingly impossible ways. For Ufologists who had dreamed of being taken seriously by the mainstream media, the story was a dream come true. As BigThink.com put it, “The article is shocking, and arguably represents a historical inflection point in our attitudes regarding UFOs.” Twitter user Space Traveller wrote: “How is everyone not losing it over this Pentagon #UFO report and footage?!” Even inveterate bubble-burster Neil deGrasse Tyson accepted that something was out there, reminding CNN viewers that just because an object was unidentified didn’t necessarily mean it came from outer space. The tl;dr appeared to be “flying saucers are real.” But a closer reading suggests a murkier proposition. The main source in the Times article was a former Pentagon employee named Luis Elizondo, who ran a small program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification from 2007 until it was shut down in 2012. What made the story Times-worthy was the fact that Elizondo’s account was vouched for by the man who’d arranged for its funding, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, as well as by the billionaire donor who won the contract to manage the program, Robert Bigelow. (Fox News justifiably raised an eyebrow at the men’s lucrative interconnection.) The fact that the program really existed was the part that the Times touted as its big get, but that wasn’t what set the internet on fire. What got people excited was the implication that the program had collected evidence of encounters with unidentified flying objects. In reporting this part of the story, reporters Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean were much less careful about maintaining a critical eye. “The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift,” the article asserted, later adding: “The company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. In addition, researchers also studied people who said that they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for physiological changes.” The straightforward presentation of these assertions implies that the authors believe them to be true. But they beg for elaboration. Were the produced documents credible? In what way were the buildings modified, and why was it necessary to modify them in order to store this material? What does it mean for an object to be associated with a phenomenon? What were the claimed physical effects, and were any physiological changes found? Making portentous assertions out of context is a powerful technique for creating a sense of mystery and drama. Leaving a question unanswered implies that it is unanswerable. Selectively omitting key details can make a mundane fact seem uncanny. These techniques are great for exciting an audience, but they’re better suited to Ancient Aliens than the pages of the New York Times because the net effect is to cloud rather than illuminate key issues. In this case: What exactly did Elizondo’s team uncover? The main article is decidedly short on specifics. There’s a brief reference to “footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves.” A more detailed account is provided in an accompanying sidebar entitled “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen.’” In it, former Navy F/A-18 pilot David Fravor relates his experience during a flight from the aircraft carrier Nimitz on November 14, 2004. While en route to a training mission he was vectored toward an unknown radar contact. Arriving on the scene, he witnessed a lozenge-shaped craft that moved over an agitated, churning patch of ocean, then moved so quickly that it appeared to defy physics. Embedded in the sidebar is a 76-second-long video that is described as having been taken during the 2004 encounter. It shows a fuzzy dot in the center of an infrared-camera monitor that, when zoomed in on, appears lozenge-shaped. There are no visual clues such as clouds or sea, so it is impossible to gauge distance or relative motion. Near the end, the object ducks away to the left. There is nothing about the video that in itself reads as being beyond the realm of normal physics, though it seems eerie given the article’s content. As UFO sightings go, Fravor’s account ranks as fairly credible. It’s detailed, internally consistent, and is provided by an unusually well-credentialed subject. Not only was Fravor a Navy pilot, he was a cast member of the ten-part documentary series Carrier about life on the USS Nimitz that aired on PBS in 2008. Neither the story nor the video are new, however. Both have been kicking around the internet for some time. Fravor’s tale first appeared in March, 2015, on the website FighterSweep.com, where writer Paco Chierici presented a detailed story as told to him by “a good buddy of mine and former squadron mate, Dave ‘Sex’ Fravor.” Chierici advises that it’s “one of the most bizarre aviation stories of all time … a story that stretches credibility.” In a follow-up story for the Times Insider about how the story came to be, reporter Ralph Blumenthal makes it sound like the Times scored an exclusive by getting Elizondo to open up to them, writing that he and two colleagues “met Mr. Elizondo in a nondescript Washington hotel where he sat with his back to the wall, keeping an eye on the door.” The implication is that Elizondo feared the repercussions of leaking sensitive information for the first time. In fact, when Elizondo spoke to the Times he had left government and was promoting the launch of a new venture called To the Stars … Academy of Arts & Science, a website that is trying to crowdsource donations to study paranormal phenomena. Before the Times told his story, To the Stars’ main shareholder, former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge, had previously promoted the venture on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And what, exactly, did Elizondo uncover during his five years heading a semi-secret arm of the Pentagon investigating possible extraterrestrial visitations? A visit to the venture’s website raises doubts. A video with the title “2004 USS NIMITZ FLIR1 VIDEO” is the same video seen on the Times’ website, with the addition of a detailed technical description of the infrared-imaging system that took it, along with the claim that “this footage comes with crucial chain-of-custody (CoC) documentation because it is a product of U.S. military sensors, which confirms it is original, unaltered, and not computer generated or artificially fabricated.” But no such documentation is provided. The description links to a separate page entitled “2004 USS NIMITZ PILOT REPORT.” This is a truly curious document that retells Fravor’s story in the form of a military-style briefing, with his name replaced by the word “Source,” allegedly “to protect sources and methods.” Sections of it have been blacked out, as if by a military censor, though the given date of September 7, 2017, was some 13 years after the event and 5 years after the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification had been shut down. Curiously, the file flubs some well-known aviation technology, such as equating “UAS” with “Unidentified Aerial System.” (It commonly refers to “Unmanned Aircraft System,” or drone.) It seems that To the Stars is trying to shroud Fravor’s account in a spooky fog of faux top-secrecy. This is a dicey strategy given Fravor’s prominence in online UFO circles, and gives the impression that Elizondo’s company is repackaging timeworn tales from the internet as freshly revealed government X-files. And, by extension, calls into question the Times’ wisdom in taking his claims about extraterrestrial encounters at face value. amp.nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/new-york-times-ufo-report.html?__twitter_impression=true
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 31, 2017 12:50:31 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2017/12/the-pentagons-newly-revealed-ufo-program.html Tuesday, December 26, 2017 'The Pentagon’s Newly Revealed UFO Research Program' – What a Week! Posted on December 22, 2017 by Billy Cox / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15607/what-a-week/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?/CREDIT: talkingpointsmemo.com 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. www.theufochronicles.com/2017/12/the-pentagons-newly-revealed-ufo-program.htmldevoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15607/what-a-week/
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Dec 31, 2017 18:24:48 GMT -6
www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/sunday-review/dad-believed-in-ufos-turns-out-he-wasnt-alone.html?_r=0 Dad Believed in U.F.O.s. Turns Out He Wasn’t Alone.By DAN BARRY / Dan Barry is a senior writer at The New York Times. / www.nytimes.com/by/dan-barry?action=click&contentCollection=Sunday%20Review&module=Byline®ion=Header&pgtype=articleDEC. 30, 2017 The year now ending has been so laden with tumultuous news that one astounding report in the exhausted final days of 2017 seemed almost routine: that for years, an intelligence official burrowed within the Pentagon warren was running a secret program to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects. Beg your pardon? That scoop, by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean for The New York Times, was underscored by a companion article that detailed how in 2004 an oval object played a game of aeronautic hide-and-seek off Southern California with two Navy fighter jets assigned to the aircraft carrier Nimitz. The object then zipped away at a speed so otherworldly that it left one of the Navy pilots later saying he felt “pretty weirded out” — as you might if you watch the video of the encounter that the Department of Defense has made public. In considering these reports, my mind turned to all those reasonable people who were dismissed and ridiculed over the years because they believed that something was out there. I thought in particular of believers who had died without savoring these official revelations. Believers like my late father. I can hear what he would have said, there at the veterans’ home, his broken vessel of a body in a wheelchair but his mind as quick and bright as a shooting star. “I’ve been saying it for years,” he’d assert, followed by a choice epithet he reserved for government officials, followed by, “I knew it.” Then, a satisfying drag on a cigarette. My father, Gene, finished high school at night and served three years in the Army; he did not attend college. But he had a fearsome intellect, read voraciously and developed a command of such subjects as American history, numismatics — and U.F.O. investigations. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he joined many others in monitoring reports of aerial anomalies, tracking down reams of redacted official reports and swapping theories about credible sightings and government cover-ups. They bandied about the names of well-known U.F.O. researchers — J. Allen Hynek, Donald Keyhoe, Stanton Friedman — and read the latest newsletters from an organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or Nicap. They remained resolute, even when many others gave up the cause after an Air Force-funded report in 1969 concluded that further study of U.F.O.s was unlikely to be of much scientific value, leading to the termination of the official Air Force program investigating the subject. To the likes of Gene Barry, the report was merely part of the cover-up. He was no astronomer or physicist. Just a working stiff who endured the anonymous drudgery of a daily commute but then, at night, often felt connected to something larger than himself, larger than all of us. While his neighbors focused on the fortunes of the New York Jets, he was contemplating whether the “wheel in the middle of a wheel” mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel referred to a flying object of some kind. If so, just consider the implications! In our family, the horizontal line separating earth and sky often blurred. My father’s supernaturally patient wife and four impressionable children carried small blue membership cards for a research and investigative organization called the Mutual U.F.O. Network, or Mufon. We applauded my father when he spoke at a U.F.O. symposium at a local university. At his behest, my sister Brenda even brought a blueprint for a spacecraft that he had received in the mail — mysterious packages often arrived in the mail — to Sts. Cyril and Methodius parochial school to ask her science teacher what he made of it. The teacher handed it back without a word. In other households of the 1960s, Barney and Betty referred only to the Rubbles of Bedrock, loyal neighbors of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. But in our home, those names might also refer to Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple who claimed to have been abducted and examined by aliens in 1961. Then there were the family outings. Every so often our parents would pack us into the Chevy station wagon for a nighttime drive to that rare Long Island hill with an unimpeded view of the sky, or to Wanaque, N.J., 70 miles away, where strange lights were said to have been hovering over a local reservoir. Gradually, we children would doze off, our necks stiff from craning. My mother, the tolerant sidekick and chauffeur, would light another cigarette, while my father continued to train his cheap binoculars on the celestial infinity, confident in the certainty of the still uncertain. Over the years, life on terra firma intruded. Career setbacks, sickness, that daily anonymous grind. My father’s unofficial cell of believers quietly disbanded — exhausted, perhaps, by government silence and the false reports caused by weather balloons, satellites and people just seeing things. Then, when my mother died in 1999, he lost the person who grounded him, the Betty to his Barney. He died in 2008, still believing without having seen, still questioning the government, still marveling at the arrogance of those who insisted we were the only intelligent life in the universe. A decade passed, and then came this month’s report of a secret Pentagon program with the delightful name of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Funded by the government between 2007 and 2012, the program investigated aerial threats that included “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or U.A.P.s — which is just a less-polarizing way of saying U.F.O.s. To hardened veterans of the U.F.O. wars, the news of the government program was less surprising than it was validating. And the video of the encounter between Navy fighter jets and an unidentified object moving at extraordinary velocity provided a helpful visual to the cause of those U.F.O. groups with long acronyms. “Very interesting, very interesting,” said Fran Ridge, the archivist of the research accumulated by Nicap, now defunct. “But the very first thing that entered my mind was — why now? Is this a distraction? Is this something to get the people’s attention off politics?” Mr. Ridge’s skeptical words reminded me of my father, who half-joked that he believed in a conspiracy — about everything. “Finally, the kimono is being opened a little,” said Jan Harden, the director of Mufon. “Personally, I don’t need verification from the government. But for the mass public, it’s important to know that there is advanced technology in our skies.” The news of the Pentagon’s program received a stunning amount of attention that included the usual dismissive commentary. “Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien,” the celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said on CNN, a comment that would have driven my father to distraction. Classic redirection, he would have railed, the tip of his cigarette reddening with rage. But my father would also have nodded in agreement to what the good astrophysicist had to say about that almost playful aerial anomaly captured on government video. “It’s a flying object and we don’t know what it is,” Dr. Tyson said. “I would hope somebody’s checking it out.” Exactly, the old man would have grunted. Been saying it for years. Dan Barry is a senior writer at The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/sunday-review/dad-believed-in-ufos-turns-out-he-wasnt-alone.html?_r=0
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Jan 1, 2018 15:36:21 GMT -6
bigthink.com/paul-ratner/what-the-zoo-hypothesis-teaches-us-about-aliens If the Pentagon Is Hiding Aliens from Us, the Zoo Hypothesis May Explain Why December 26, 2017 by Paul Ratner / bigthink.com/experts/paul-ratnerRecent revelations that the Pentagon had an actual alien-hunting division have rocked conspiracy theorists everywhere, adding fuel to the long-held beliefs of many that the government is hiding the truth from us. Luis Elizondo, the military intel official who headed the now-defunct “Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program,” which ran from 2009 until 2012, was so convinced by what he saw that he continued his search for E.T. until this day. He now has a UFO-research startup and alerted CNN that there’s “compelling evidence” we are not alone. While Elizondo’s evidence may be based on being privy to a number of unexplained encounters with flying objects, the aliens haven’t made their presence very clear. If the universe contains at least two trillion galaxies full of billions of stars like our sun, shouldn’t there be other complex life forms out there by now? It would only make sense. So “where is everybody?” as the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked about the absence of evidence and the high probability of alien existence. There are certainly many speculations about the possibility of aliens and their potential motives. It could be that there’s been no contact because they are too far away, and we need for our technologies to catch up before we meet up. They could look like something else entirely so we can’t even perceive them yet. Or maybe we underestimate the uniqueness and preciousness of humanity and we really are alone. But an idea formulated in the 70s takes a different swing at this compelling issue. The Zoo Hypothesis, proposed by the MIT radio astronomer John A. Ball in 1973, says that aliens may be avoiding contact with us on purpose, so as not to interfere with our evolution and the development of our societies. The human civilization could be essentially living in a “zoo” or a space wildlife sanctuary, where others populating the cosmos dare not go. By staying clear of us, they avoid interplanetary contamination. Perhaps the aliens are waiting for us to reach a certain technological or moral point before they will talk to us. Or they may be simply trying to protect us and themselves. You’ve seen “Independence Day” - there may be a similar movie made thousands of light years away about us. This idea of the zoo hypothesis presumes that aliens would want to have some relatively benevolent system of belief - perhaps a universally-accepted law about how to treat lower-level cosmic inhabitants. One explanation could be that a higher intelligence would not want to limit the diversity of paths in the universe by somehow interfering with other beings. The hypothesis makes the most sense in a crowded universe, if there are many civilizations which set up rules by which they govern their coexistence. Of course, if there are many extraterrestrial players, it is also doubtful that one of them wouldn’t have somehow contacted us, even if by accident. Maybe that’s what the Earth’s alien hunters are picking up on - random, unsanctioned interactions. Of course, if we put our tinfoil hats on, it also stands to reason that if there is some kind of Universe-wide law of non-interference with other species, someone at the Pentagon could be in on it. For a more in-depth explanation of the zoo hypothesis, check out John A. Ball's paper "Extraterrestrial Intelligence:Where is Everybody?" And here's what theoretical physicist bob Greene thinks about the Fermi Paradox and the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth: WATCH VIDEO: bigthink.com/paul-ratner/what-the-zoo-hypothesis-teaches-us-about-aliens
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Jan 2, 2018 15:20:19 GMT -6
Dr. Michio Kaku Verified account @michiokaku 25 Dec 2017
Are UFOs chasing our jet fighters, as recent secret documents suggest? Maybe they are experimental hypersonic drones. Or maybe aliens from outer space? I keep an open mind.
|
|
|
Post by swamprat on Jan 6, 2018 11:39:05 GMT -6
QUIET! Pipe down, you idiots! Seth doth speak!
Mr. Showstop strikes again!UFO believers got one thing right. Here's what they get wrong.The government did have a secret program to investigate odd aerial phenomena, but that doesn't mean UFOs are alien spacecraft.
by Seth Shostak Jan.03.2018
The past few weeks have been good for UFO believers. For decades they’ve clamored for “disclosure” — an admission by the government that it knows of galactic gatecrashers, and that aliens are irrefutably here. THIS ALWAYS STRUCK ME AS A CLASSIC ARGUMENT FROM IGannaNCE: WE LACK GOOD EVIDENCE TO PROVE OUR CASE BECAUSE IT’S BEEN HIDDEN.
That wouldn’t work in the courts or in science, but hey, it kind of sounds good.
Well, it turns out something was hidden. In 2007 Senator Harry Reid initiated a secret Pentagon program to investigate strange aerial phenomena. It ran for five years and cost $22 million. Finally, the skeptics — those who doubt that we’re hosting extraterrestrial visitors — had been shown the error of their disbelieving ways. Except that the Pentagon study seems to have found no good evidence for visitors. Yes, there was an intriguing military video purportedly showing a cluster of alien craft. But when I watched it, I noticed that the cluster was always in the center of the field of view — which suggests that these “craft” were actually caused by the instruments aboard the plane rather than something in the airspace in front of it. Experts will undoubtedly weigh in.
What would be good evidence of alien presence? Nearly every day I receive an email or phone call from someone who claims to have seen “something very important” (which I’ve learned from experience is code for “UFO”). They want to chat.
So what do I do? First off, I generally dismiss witness testimony, or, put another way, stories. It’s not that I think people are lying. But if someone tells you he saw a ghost at the mall, you’ll have a hard time doing much with that information unless ectoplasm hangs out there on a regular basis.
Witness testimony isn’t terribly reliable in criminal court cases. It’s even less useful for science.
So I ask about physical or photographic evidence. There never seems to be any of the former, but often there is imagery. Some folks won’t send it, apparently afraid that I’ll sell their pix and deprive them of a Nobel Prize or a photo royalty. The photos I do see tend to show obvious optical effects — often bright lights caused by internal reflections in the lens or color fringes resulting from the workings of the camera’s chip. Other photos show diffraction patterns caused by “hunting” of the camera’s autofocus system. Many people interpret these patterns as spacecraft markings.
A lot of the images are shot at night, making them particularly hard to interpret. Perhaps daylight is too dangerous for aliens, because then it might be possible to see detail in photos taken of them. I wonder if, when the sun is shining, they hang out underground like bats.
I’m also wary of anthropomorphic touches — for example, when someone says, “They seemed friendly and just want to establish contact” or “They’re buzzing our missile silos.” The latter is particularly goofy. Any aliens who come from the stars are way ahead of us. If you could visit America 150 years ago, would you spend time inspecting the Union Army’s cannon-making factory at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Arsenal?
Hoaxes — and of course there are some — don’t seem to be common. The people who contact me all sound pretty sincere. But the one UFO claim that has zero worth for me is: “I know what I saw.” After all, if that’s what someone asserts, there’s no room for discussion.
More than anything, I ask myself if the extraterrestrial explanation is compelling — or merely possible. Is the evidence proof-positive or only puzzling? The latter isn’t good enough.
Personally, I’m mystified by the stage illusions of David Copperfield. Did he really walk through that giant fan, or is that only a possibility? Just because I don’t know what really happened is hardly reason to conclude that he can saunter through whirling metal blades without chopped Copperfield flying into the audience.
The Pentagon study is certainly interesting, but not because it proves alien visitation. Of course, you can be sure that the “disclosure” folks will soon be claiming that UFO evidence is still being covered up. Conspiracy theories never end.
In the era of Google Earth, when every square yard of the continents has been photographed and put online, it’s hardly surprising that we have an unsatisfied craving to explore the unknown, to do what Columbus, Magellan, Cook, and others did a half-millennium ago.
Of course, in the 21st Century, a sailing vessel may no longer satisfy that need. A sailing saucer just might.
www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/ufo-hunters-got-one-thing-right-here-s-what-they-ncna834306
|
|
|
Post by jcurio on Jan 8, 2018 1:27:00 GMT -6
My stooopid question of the day?:
The people that use the word (words) “gate-crashers”, are they of the same ilk??
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Jan 8, 2018 14:24:00 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2018/01/ufo-reports-at-nuclear-missile-sites.html Monday, January 08, 2018 UFO Reports at Nuclear Missile Sites and The Pentagon UFO Program By Billy Cox / De Void / devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/ Now, about those nukes … Just how much momentum The New York Times’ reporting on UFOs will carry into 2018 depends largely on, ahem, The New York Times. Steady followup coverage of its 12/16/17 scoop on the Pentagon’s $22M Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATI) program reminds us of what we already know, that nothing gets traditional media off its *bleep* better than The Grey Lady. Reader traffic has been massive, expectations are high and, as critics point out, The Times has a ton of loose ends to address. Incentives aplenty. But just how far into the uncharted waters of this species of journalism is management willing to swim? Among the many questions raised in the stampede of copycat reporting: How, exactly, does the Defense Department justify, on national security grounds, investing millions of $$$ in pursuit of The Great Taboo? Well, for starters, retired former Senate majority leader Harry Reid points to veterans’ first-person accounts of UFOs’ apparent fascination with America’s nuclear stockpiles. An amazing story — but will the media take the bait? A leading authority on the mysterious incursions into U.S. missile fields has learned that 40 years of research haven’t accomplished what The Times managed to do in December: create a UFO buzz that lasts at least two consecutive weeks. Robert Hastings, the 67-year-old author of 2008’s UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites and producer of a 2015 documentary by the same name, has been collecting these stories since he was a teenager. In 2010, he thought he’d finally cracked the nut when CNN live-streamed a press conference he arranged at National Press Club in Washington, D.C. For 87 minutes, seven retired military retirees – including a base commander, a combat crew commander, and a missile-targeting officer – told the world how UFOs breached restricted airspace, hovered near WMD platforms, sometimes swept the facilities with lights and, in at least one case, sabotaged communications between launch control and the nuclear warheads. In short, these guys delivered the sort of testimony that would, were the elusive offenders linked to a foreign country, spark a debate over quality-control protocols safeguarding our extinction-capacity weapons. Media coverage of the press conference, however, was grudging. “It was a short-lived bump,” says Hastings from his home in Colorado. “And a week later, we were back to business as usual. It was as if it never happened.” A few places, like Stars and Stripes, played it down the middle. Others took their cues from the likes of Washington Post columnist John Kelly, who gave it the brushoff by informing readers he attended the event for the free cookies. Popular Science distanced itself by hiding behind the sci-fi headline “Paging Fox Mulder.” Alluding to reports of UFOs taking U.S. nuclear warheads off-line in North Dakota, a Wired account chimed in, “Earth is being monitored by intergalactic hippies.” And this from a Forbes reporter: “I don’t take this stuff at face value (to say the least), but I do love a grand yarn.” Hastings has more than 160 veterans’ “grand yarns” on file, but he’s not optimistic about The Times or any other news gatherer taking the UFO story to the next level. For one thing, the next level includes an entrenched, and disjointed, military bureaucracy suffering from sclerotic thinking in the glasnost department. He regards Luis Elizondo, the former Defense Department analyst who spilled the beans on AATI, as a lonely outlier. Though KLAS-TV’s coverage from Las Vegas cites anonymous sources claiming AATI-related projects produced 36 separate and so-far-unreleased reports, Hastings doubts that spigot has much water left. “Mr. Elizondo said the reason he left the Pentagon was because of resistence from unnamed persons and organizations who don’t want this sort of information out there,” he said. “It’s the same sort of resistance (USAF Project Blue Book director) Captain (Edward) Ruppelt went up against in the 1950s – he was under a lot of pressure to keep this as quiet as possible.” More ominously, however, Hastings says a discussion that dives deeper than gun-cam video and accounting ledgers would constitute the “beginning of a slippery slope” and lead to an inevitable confrontation with the UFO abduction thing. That’s a path most advocates of government transparency fear to tread. Yet, says Hastings, some veterans from the Strategic Air Command era – not many, but a handful – have reported classic missing-time scenarios that conform neatly to a very creepy and easily ridiculed subculture of “high strangeness.” Newshounds sniffing his website for leads on the WMD controversy will find a little abduction stuff in the mix as well. “It’s one thing to accept video and radar data,” he says. “But when you drift into the topic of abduction, it’s a much harder sell. It’s like a bridge too far for most people. But surveillance isn’t the only thing going on here, and there’s been a lot of compartmentalization to get around it. And I’m at a point in my life where it would be dishonest for me not to discuss this publicly.” Abduction tales are largely absent from this blog, however, because it’s been hard enough trying to goad media colleagues into taking a good hard look at simple radar records. That’s been a 10-year project. Plus, I have at least one thing in common with the SETI astronomers: If we’re talking space aliens, I prefer to appreciate them at a safe distance. Even more specifically, I don’t want to think about these whatevers in my bedroom injecting microscopic tracking devices up my whatever. It’d be like running a marathon when I barely trust my ability to walk. Anyway, here we are, closing the books on 2017, with the press engaged as never before, but on a toehold, tenuous at best. The same rules remain in play: Without the media, there is no way forward. Sustaining that interest – which could evaporate at any time – poses a unique challenge, at least in this country. Aside from The Times flat-out dropping the ball, what might it take to disperse the new-found media crowd? Apathy, or something worse? The possibilities are endless. Most likely, we’ll find out sooner than later. So bring it on. devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15609/now-about-those-nukes/
|
|
|
Post by auntym on Jan 15, 2018 17:41:48 GMT -6
Looking for UFOs: Leslie Kean on Tucker Carlson showPublished on Jan 11, 2018
Basically asks what does the government know about UFOs and why is the subject being ignored by the FAA, media, and other government agencies.
aired January 11, 2018
There's a much better clip here video.foxnews.com/v/5708337495001/?#sp=show-clips
|
|