Published on 15 Jun 2012 by openmindstv
Friday, 15 June 2012
Spacing Out! Ep. 7 - Ben McGee talks spaceflight, and the new NatGeo Ufo show (Video)
Ufo News Links For Friday 15th June 2012
theozfiles: PAY ATTENTION SCIENCE, SKEPTICS AND MEDIA, ASTRONOMERS DO SEE UFOs
‘E.T’ or ‘Alien’? Scientists debate nature of extraterrestrials – ScrippsNews
Roswell UFO Festival – How Much Money Does It Bring In? | Top Secret Writers
Baltic Sea ‘UFO’ still cloaked in secrecy – Examiner
Woman claims photos show UFO over Lake Wylie - WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC
Mysterious Object in Illinois Identified – WIBQ
Animal Forteana: Farmer blames heat rays for cows' deaths - New Brunswick - CBC News
There Was Once A Darker Sequel Planned For E.T. – 411mania.com
UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock: Picture - More Charged ORBS Observing Another Thunderstorm
Exploring Extraterrestrial Sand Dunes in Arizona – United States Geological Survey
The Orange Orb: Tim Beckley's HELLFIRE AND BRIMSTONE: The Dark Side of UFOLOGY
The Science Behind The Search For Extraterrestrial Life – Vermont Public Radio
Two UFOs noticed simultaneously in Armenian sky (PHOTOS) | Armenia News - NEWS.am
Another spiral ‘UFO’ lights up the sky. And it IS a spaceship – Discover Magazine
Why are there spaceships in Medieval art?
UFO in Night Skies Over Huntington Beach and New Mexico – OC Weekly
Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology: Spain: UFO Case Histories of Ceuta
Reported UFO sighting in Mitchellville creates buzz online – Des Moines Register
Disc-shaped UFO Captured in Greece Photographs of Rainbow
UFO Festival Could be Landing Soon in Presidio – NewsWest9.com
Real Cowboys Meet Real Aliens In New Book by UFO Researchers
Conference set to be out of this world – Ripley Today
UFO Digest Newsletter June 14, 2012
Prometheus 101: The Science Behind Ridley Scott’s Vision of Aliens Populating Earth – Time
UFO Seen Flying Over Moons Surface (Video)
Published on 10 Jun 2012 by Hibernate2012
"What is happening on the moon? If these satellites, birds, insects or extraterrestrial UFOs?"
2012 crop circle season in full swing
England’s crop circle season is in full swing, with at least two new designs appearing in fields during the first week and a half of June. According to Steve and Karen Alexander’s website TemporaryTemples.co.uk:
The English crop circle season starts, tentatively, in May though occasionally a formation has been known to arrive as early as April. In these months the formations are few. The major events happen in late July and early August. By far the best time to visit is last weekend in July/first weekend in August.Steve has photographed crop circles for more than twenty years, and he and Karen publish annual year books that contain all the circles that appear each year. They also publish photos of the latest circles on their website. One of the latest patterns appeared on Saturday, June 9 in field of young winter wheat in the Wiltshire area of Woodborough Hill.
Woodborough Hill crop circle. (Credit: Steve Alexander)
This crop circle consisted of three similar designs that, according to crop circle researcher Lucy Pringle, resembled “Sun Fish.” The website CropCircleConnector.com reports that the field’s farmer did not want the designs drawing crowds into his field, so he mowed the crops down, and the crop circle is”now effectively gone.”
Another recent crop circle appeared in a Manton Drove, Wiltshire barley field on Saturday, June 2.
Manton Drove crop circle. (Credit: Steve Alexander)
One expert suggests this Manton Drove crop circle was created by humans. According to This is Wiltshire, Dr. Horace R. Drew explains, “It is often hard to tell whether a new crop picture might be paranormal or human-made.
Polar Clock 3 screen saver. (Credit: Pixelbreaker.com)
Recently I found a new method to detect human ‘board marks’ from aerial images, by using a standard Photoshop program to reduce midtone contrast.” Drew further states that the Manton Drove crop circle shows “a series of regularly striped features, which could perhaps be human board marks.” And Drew feels there is nothing clever about the design of this circle either, suggesting the human designers simply copied “a ‘Polar Clock 3’ screensaver that can be downloaded free off the web.”
Some crop circles possess certain characteristics indicating mysterious origins, but many are proven to be human-created. For more images and information about the mystery of crop circles, visit Steve and Karen Alexander’s website.
UFO Sighting In 1952 Kicked Off Britain's Behind-The-Scenes Flying Saucer Debate
By Lee Speigel
RAF pilot Sgt. Roland Hughes, nicknamed "Saucer Sam," poses with his jet in 1952 after his encounter with a UFO.
When Queen Elizabeth II, who recently celebrated her Diamond Jubilee marking her 60-year reign in Great Britain, took the throne in 1952, another subject was also causing a bit of a buzz on both sides of the Atlantic -- UFOs.
In fact, Britain's former prime minister, Winston Churchill, became very curious about the subject after sightings on two consecutive weekends in July 1952, when unidentified objects flew in the restricted air above the White House and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. They were seen by more than one radar facility and by Air Force jet fighter pilots who were scrambled to investigate the incidents.
While the Air Force eventually quieted growing public concern about these events by claiming the objects were nothing more than temperature inversions, Churchill sent a now-famous memo on July 28, 1952, to Lord Cherwell, Britain's Secretary of State for Air.
In the brief note, seen below, Churchill asked: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience."
"I would say that the skeptics in the British establishment would have included Lord Cherwell and one believer would have been Lord Dowding," said Nick Pope, who ran the Ministry of Defense's UFO Project between 1991 and 1994.
On his website, Pope references a piece written by Dowding in the July 11, 1954, edition of the Sunday Dispatch:
"I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nation on Earth," Dowding wrote. "I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some extraterrestrial source."
The response to Churchill's UFO memo was that a previous study had concluded the flying saucers were most likely something easily explained, like birds, balloons, optical illusions, conventional aircraft and hoaxes.
But those explanations didn't seem to hold up against the story of a Royal Air Force fighter pilot whose dramatic UFO encounter took place just two days after Churchill's original memo seeking accurate UFO information.
On July 30, 1952, while the U.S. Air Force and the public were still coming to grips with the UFO activity over Washington, Flight Sgt. Roland Hughes was engaged in a training flight over West Germany.
Hughes reported he was intercepted by what he described as a "gleaming silver, metallic disc" that paced his jet before accelerating away. What lended credibility to this case was that ground-based military radar tracked the UFO flying at impossible speeds.
Hughes eventually told his story to Duncan Sandys, the U.K.'s aviation minister, seen below, who completely believed the pilot's story.
This, according to Pope, began a behind-the-scenes UFO debate between British officials.
"You had this 'perfect storm' of a reliable witness and the radar evidence that backed it up," said Pope.
"After Hughes made his post-flight report, it got kicked up the chain of command and he was sent to see Sandys, who didn't go so far as to say it was extraterrestrial, but he used this case as sort of ammunition in the ongoing debate," Pope told The Huffington Post.
The documents which detail the pilot's encounter and subsequent communications between officials were found by David Clarke, a media law and journalism instructor at Sheffield Hallam University, who is also the official consultant for the British National Archives.
"Roland Hughes died in 2009, but he told his story to his son, Brian, who has produced a very detailed account of what his father told him, which he passed on to me," Clarke told HuffPost.
"What we've got is a jigsaw puzzle with only about a third of the pieces," added Clarke, whose book, "The UFO Files," was published by the National Archives in 2009.
No other relevant documents about this UFO encounter have survived, which, according to Clarke, would have been produced by British Air Intelligence and the Royal Air Force.
"This was something that was seen by an RAF pilot over West Germany and at the height of the Cold War, when there was great tension between the East and the West. You would expect that any intelligence agency worth their salt would not want to ignore a story of this kind," Clarke added.
David Clarke discusses why Winston Churchill might have covered up UFOs:
Clarke believes there was really no mystery about how Churchill felt about UFOs.
"Churchill was only interested in UFOs because the subject was constantly in the newspapers and there was so much interest in America, in Washington, D.C., where they had sightings in 1952.
"But the interesting thing is that, at the same time, there were a number of important people in the British establishment who had become convinced that UFOs existed, and one of them was Duncan Sandys, who was actually Churchill's son-in-law at the time."
Mars Rover to Use New Techniques in Search for Alien Life
By Orion Jones
What's the Latest Development?
Thanks to increased confidence in new landing technology, NASA scientists are shrinking the target area for the Mars rover Curiosity, which will touch down on the red planet this August. "We’re trimming the distance we’ll have to drive after landing by almost half," said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, meaning Curiosity could reach Gale Crater, an interesting piece of Martian real estate, months earlier than originally planned. Once at the crater, scientists will direct the rover to collect and analyze soil samples for signs of past life.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Rather than search for microbes like the Viking missions of the 1970s, Curiosity will look for places and times which may have supported life on the alien surface. One of the most interesting features of the Gale Crater is a 3-mile high mound of debris known as Mount Sharp. The rise is believed to be a geographical record of Mars the same way in which rock layers define different time periods on Earth. "Organic carbon compounds in an environment are one prerequisite for life. We know meteorites deliver non-biological organic carbon to Mars, but not whether it persists near the surface," said John Grotzinger, the mission’s project scientist. "We will be checking for that and for other chemical and mineral clues about habitability."
‘UFO’ causes stir in DC (Video)
Drivers on Washington, DC’s Capital Beltway were surprised by what appeared to be a flying saucer being transported by a flatbed truck on the night of Wednesday, June 13. But according to Fox News, Maryland State Police confirmed that the strange craft was actually the X-47B unmanned drone aircraft made by Northrup Grumman. The craft was reportedly being transported from West Virginia to Patuxent Naval Air Station in Maryland.
X-47B (Credit: Northrop Grumman)
If this sounds familiar, it’s because residents of Cowley County, Kansas also saw what they thought was a UFO being transported on the back of a truck last year. But the military reassured the public that the saucer-shaped craft was simply the X-47B unmanned drone.
NBC Washington reports that this is the second X-47B to be transported through the DC area. One reportedly arrived in late 2011, but created much less of a stir than this recent one.
The military is hinting at an increased presence of drones in the area in the coming months, cautioning people to “be careful and pay attention to the road if you’re driving when you see them!
From the Pyramids to the Pentagon
By Nick Redfern
Available now is my new book, The Pyramids and the Pentagon: The Government’s Top Secret Pursuit of Mystical Relics, Ancient Astronauts, and Lost Civilizations, which focuses on what the official world knows – or suspects – about a whole range of mysteries of the fog-shrouded past. They are mysteries that cover such issues as the construction of the Pyramids of Egypt, the Atlantis-related beliefs of Edgar Cayce, the nature of Noah’s Ark, a possible Face on Mars-Egypt connection, and much more of a so-called “ancient astronauts” nature. And there’s another, equally weird saga I cover in my book…
In terms of key and integral world events, 1947 was a year of profoundly deep and significant proportions. United States President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, which paved the way for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first, priceless collection of what have famously become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls was found in caves at Qumran, an ancient and historic site on the West Bank. At the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, a collection of fruit-flies made history when they became the first living creatures to reach the fringes of space, after being blasted into the skies above aboard a captured German World War Two-era V-2 rocket.
The age of the Flying Saucer was famously ushered in, after an American pilot – Kenneth Arnold – witnessed nine strange-looking aircraft flying close to Mount Rainier, Washington State. And, many UFO researchers believe, an alien spacecraft crashed on harsh, remote desert land outside of the small New Mexican town of Roswell. Singular, unconnected events in a world constantly in a state of change, development, and wonder, or integral parts of a greater, and very old, puzzle guided by the mysterious hands of destiny, fate and grand design?
Most people would probably say the former. But, sometimes, the majority are wrong, devastatingly so, even.
Close to 1,000 in number the Dead Sea Scrolls – as they have become popularly and famously known – represent a veritable treasure-trove of early written material from almost every book of the Old Testament, chiefly dating from around 150 BC to 70 BC. Their amazing discovery dates back to February 1947, when, along with his young cousin, a certain Muhammad edh-Dhib, then only a teenager, stumbled across a series of caves at Qumran, on the northwest side of the Dead Sea – which borders Jordan to the East, and Israel to the West. Upon exploring one particular cave, edh-Dhib was amazed to find within it a number of ancient texts, carefully and faithfully recorded on aged parchment.
edh-Dhib excitedly scooped up the items and, with his cousin in-tow, raced back home to his family’s Bedouin camp to show them his discovery. It didn’t take long before word got around that something unusual had been unearthed. In fact, matters began to spiral with extraordinary speed when talk of the scrolls began to heat up in and around Bethlehem – particularly so when yet more scrolls were found in the area, collectively at no less than eleven caves, and throughout a period of time that extended right up until to 1956.
Those immediate times after edh-Dhib’s discovery were distinctly wild and turbulent ones. The Syrian Orthodox Church expressed its firm interest in seeing the scrolls, as did representatives of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Interested parties in the Vatican secretly negotiated to buy up some of the scrolls, others – in the field of biblical archaeology – scrambled to see them and examine them, and some scholars called for the scrolls to be placed under official control and oversight – lest they might be spread far and wide, possibly even becoming catastrophically lost or destroyed. Fortunately, this latter scenario did not happen.
What did happen, due to circumstances provoked by the turbulent Arab-Israeli War of 1948, was that the scrolls were hastily transported to Lebanon for safe-keeping. Six years later, they were up for sale – and were ultimately sold for $250,000 and transferred to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. Then, after the Six Day War of 1967, the scrolls ended up at the Shrine of the Brook – an arm of the Jerusalem-based Israel Museum – where they continue to reside to this very day. There is, however, yet another story of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is one filled with, and fueled by, dark conspiracy and involves none other than the CIA.
While extraordinary findings were being made at Qumran, historic events were unfolding in the United States. Back in late 1944, one William J. Donovan – who was the founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arguably the earliest incarnation of what eventually became the CIA – mused upon the idea of establishing the ultimate intelligence-gathering agency.
It was designed to act as the nation’s focal point for securing and analyzing data relevant and vital to U.S. national security and the defense of the nation. The ambitious idea was of great interest to the president of the day, Franklin D. Roosevelt. With the battle still on to defeat the hordes of Adolf Hitler, Italy, and Japan, however, survival was the primary name of the game.
The result, it was not until July 26, 1947, two years after world peace had been restored that this ultimate secret agency finally came into being, when Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, Harry S. Truman, passed the National Security Act. The Central Intelligence Agency was duly born.
The very idea that the newly-created CIA might have played an integral, albeit deeply clandestine, role in the saga of the Dead Sea Scrolls sounds manifestly bizarre in the extreme. But, in this particular case, the old adage about truth being far stranger than fiction really does apply, as my book, The Pyramids and the Pentagon makes very clear…