Curiosity, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, has been busy exploring the red planet. The recent discovery of shiny particles in the Martian soil excited researchers, but another discovery by Curiosity could steal the spotlight.
Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Curiosity’s on-board Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument recently detected the presence of methane gas on Mars. As Space.com explains, “On one hand, methane can be geological in origin. But then there’s the prospect that the gas is biotic, or caused by living organisms — meaning it could be the gaseous residue of long-extinct microbes or even the output of Martian organisms alive and well today.”
Researchers are understandably enthusiastic about Curiosity’s methane detection, but scientists discovered methane in the planet’s atmosphere back in 2003. In that case, a research team opted for the geological explanation. According to an article published by ScienceDaily in May 2012, researchers were able to show that methane escapes from a meteorite “if it is irradiated with ultraviolet light under Martian conditions.” Therefore, the team concluded that the methane detected in the Martian atmosphere is a result of high-energy UV radiation triggering the release of methane from meteorites.
A Mars dust devil. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA)
Nancy Atkinson of Universe Today reported another possible explanation for methane on Mars in September 2012–dust devils. A team of researchers, led by Arturo Robledo-Martinez from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, Mexico, published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, detailing their proposal that “the discharges, caused by electrification of dust devils and sand storms, ionize gaseous CO2 and water molecules and their byproducts recombine to produce methane.”
With methane having already been detected in the Martian atmosphere, Curiosity was expected to detect the gas on the planet’s surface. But the variability of the methane Curiosity detected wasn’t expected. The next step is to monitor the methane levels over time to track variation. Chris McKay, space scientist and Mars specialist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, explains that, if the methane levels remain constant, “then this can be reconciled with normal processes and a meteoritic source of organics,” but “if it’s highly variable, then all bets are off.”
Microbiologist Dr. Tyler Kokjohn commented on the latest incredible claims put
forth by Dr. Steven Greer, suggesting Greer's lack of verifiable details make
his assertions all but impossible to accept at face value. Greer continued his
ongoing public discussion concerning an alleged dead extraterrestrial being,
this time enhancing the storyline with alleged world authorities involved in its
analysis. Kokjohn countered by pointing out Greer's tale is virtually void of
any established scientific protocol whatsoever, and informed this writer that
supposing any such authorities would jeopardize the validity of such an
unprecedented discovery is an insult to intelligence.
Kokjohn further
pointed out that producing X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans, as Greer
claimed were obtained, requires certain authorization and specific equipment.
Only “a damn fool or an utter ignoramus,” Kokjohn wrote on UFO
UpDates List, would attempt such procedures without conditions of full
biological containment, even if they received clearance to use the equipment
under such extraordinary circumstances.
“Who wants to get their CT scan
after ET was in there?” Kokjohn asked.
Kokjohn went on to inform us that
the lack of opportunity for independent verification makes Greer's claims
virtually meaningless from a practical perspective. He added that scientists and
professional researchers most certainly know this to be the case. Dr. Kokjohn
additionally wrote:
Time for Disclosure
Funding scientific research
is always a gamble. If investigators are truly traversing uncharted territory,
predicting results and anticipating experimental pitfalls may be almost
impossible. How does one maximize the odds an investment in a research project
will produce tangible results? Use the 3 Ds - Disclosure and due
diligence.
Before any money is allocated, scientists perform a detailed
due diligence assessment of the investigator’s skills, the equipment available
and work plans. Investigators with a strong track record of experience and
publications in the areas they propose to explore, who have the necessary
facilities and equipment available for their use and who put forth a clear plan
of work will be favored heavily. Investigators are expected to disclose
preliminary results that bolster the central research hypothesis and provide all
information that will enable their proposals to be evaluated fully. In addition,
investigators must stipulate that the research will be conducted following all
applicable guidelines and regulations for biosafety and work with human
subjects. It is very simple, if you want money, it is up to you to prove you can
actually run something besides your mouth and do it safely.
Dr. Greer has
offered a pale imitation of the evaluative process used by scientists. He
asserts recognized experts are collaborators, he (or someone) holds exciting
preliminary data and research is proceeding apace. All good components of strong
research, the problem is he does half a job and just quits right there. Failing
to disclose the qualifications of key investigators, providing a work plan to
judge or allowing not even so much as a glimpse at supporting data stymies any
hope for informed, unbiased assessments completely. For a guy who carved a
career niche out of demands for disclosure, he appears remarkably reluctant to
either acquire full information from his collaborators or provide a full story
to the public.
To help those wondering whether to contribute money to his
effort, Dr. Greer could disclose some of the data and allow persons unaffiliated
with the project or documentary to assess the value of his results thus far. How
about revealing the names and qualifications of your expert collaborators? Since
they are part of a team that is working on what would be the greatest discovery
of our age, wouldn’t they want to have their names front and center? What is
their expert opinion of the data? Let’s see the CT data and with it the
particulars regarding the equipment that produced the scans and the
computational parameters employed for image acquisition. While you are at it,
how about the name of the institution supporting this work – you know, the
organization that allowed the use of its CT facilities, computers and
technicians to acquire and analyze the images. Did anyone (like an Institutional
Review Board or Biosafety Committee) express concerns about putting a dead
unknown entity inside a specialized piece of rather expensive equipment? Better
yet, did anyone ask about how work with a possible entity unknown to science
would be conducted in a safe and responsible manner?
Those are pretty
easy questions, ones any scientist doing such a project would be able to answer
– before any work commenced. Will the doctor follow his own
prescription?
Though not connected to these UFO mysteries, this discovery is puzzling nonetheless. According to Beforeitsnews, "the body of a perfectly preserved, carefully mummified an alien was found buried in an ancient pyramid. A mysterious creature from between 150 and 160 centimeters was found by an archaeologist near Lahun when exploring a small pyramid near the Dynasty doceaba of Senusret II." Continue reading for one more picture, a bonus video, and additional information.
According to Egyptian sources, the alien mummy was discovered by Dr. Viktor Lubek, Czechoslovakian citizen and retired professor of the University of Pennsylvania. Archaeologist located the hidden compartment while conducting an investigation into a small pyramid south of the main pyramid, Senusret II, which contains the queen of the pharaoh. At the site also found some gold and clay mixtures covering the body, and traces of cloth linen like appearance, the skin covering the enigmatic being.
"The truth is, that every expert who has seen the mummy have concluded that it is not of earthly origin," said the source. "There is a sense that this is an alien who somehow ended up advising an Egyptian king." But everyone in the government is moving away from that conclusion that would support the new ideas that the ancient Egyptians had help from aliens in building their extraordinary civilization. "The Egyptians refuse to believe that their heritage came from outer space."
In the early to mid 1950s, numerous people, all across the planet, claimed contact with human-looking ETs from far-away worlds. The aliens in question were usually seen attired in one-piece-outfits, while sporting heads of long blond hair. Not only that: the cosmic visitors assured those of us who they deemed worthy of contact that they were deeply concerned by our warlike ways. They wished us to disarm our nuclear arsenals, live in peace and harmony with one another, and elevate ourselves to whole new spiritual levels. The aliens in question became known as the Space Brothers; while those whose lives were forever changed by their encounters with such alleged extra-terrestrial entities were an elite body of people known as the Contactees.
It was against this background of high-strangeness that many of the Contactees found themselves watched closely and secretly by none other than J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. Indeed, I wrote about many of the now-declassified FBI files on the Contactees in my 2006 book On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. But, just recently – and thanks, specifically, to good mate and fellow Fortean, Greg Bishop – I obtained a copy of the Bureau’s file on a certain friend of the Space Brothers who still provokes controversy years after his death, and whose FBI dossier I had previously not seen: George Hunt Williamson.
Williamson – also known, at various times, as Michael (or, according to the FBI, Michel) d’Obrenovic, Ric Williamson, and Brother Philip – was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926, became entranced by the occult in his teens, and evolved into a significant player on the flying saucer scene of the 1950s. Indeed, in 1954 he famously combined his fascination with the occult and flying saucers by trying to contact extraterrestrial-intelligences with a home-made Ouija board.
It was also in 1954 that the FBI sat up and took notice when Williamson planned to speak at an event in Ohio with yet another Contactee, Truman Bethurum. Beyond any shadow of doubt, the number of people who can claim aliens wrecked their marriages is infinitely small. But, such claims have been made – the most memorable being that of construction-worker Bethurum. His idea of a close encounter was very different to those of other UFO witnesses: his alleged liaisons in the summer of 1952, atop Mormon Mesa, Nevada with Space Captain Aura Rhanes, a supposed citizen of the planet Clarion, ultimately led his outraged wife to file for divorce!
As for why the FBI took so much interest in the Bethurum/Williamson gig, the answer is very simple. The government was already keeping tabs on Bethurum, for one particularly interesting reason: he had made certain statements linking his experiences with Aura Rhanes to matters of a communist nature. In Bethurum’s own words:
“Two or three fellows who had sons in Korea and who read a lot in the newspapers about the Communist underground in this country, were convinced in their own minds that I was, if making contact with anyone at all, making it with enemy agents. They even went so far as to tell me belligerently that they intended to get guns and follow me nights, and if they caught up me having intercourse with any people from planes, airships of any kind, they’d blast me and those people too.”
And, as an amusing aside, it also led the FBI to refer to Aura Rhanes in its files as a “ravishing woman commandant”! Even the Bureau, it seems, was infected by Aura’s hotness!
Next on the cards for the FBI was a development that occurred in March 1955. Hoover’s agents noted in secret memoranda that, along with one Henry Maday, Williamson had then-recently established The Flying Saucer Council of America, which – the FBI also noted – was championing and promoting a new documentary-style film on flying saucers titled We’ve Seen the Saucers.
More alarming to officialdom: Williamson had apparently got his hands on priceless film-footage of UFO activity that appeared in the film. Reportedly, the footage showed “the astounding sighting at White Sands, New Mexico when two saucers trailed an experimental rocket to an altitude of one-hundred ten miles above the earth, and then speed off at the incredible speed of 7,200 mph.”
Of this matter, the FBI carefully recorded that the film at issue “was procured in California by Ric Williamson,” one of the man’s several pseudonyms.
Also in 1955, the FBI noted in its file on Williamson: “…according to an article in the Detroit Times on March 10, 1949, Ray L. Dimmick, a Los Angeles businessman, had seen a wreckage of a flying saucer which he said crashed near Mexico City. Dimmick reportedly inspected the wrecked saucer at a secret military installation at Mexico City and was escorted there by Mexican business associates. Dimmick described the saucer as being forty-six feet in diameter. He reported that Mexican officials and some scientists believed it was from Mars or another planet. He was reportedly told by Mexican officials that the Saucer was piloted by a strange type of man twenty-three inches tall. He said the pilot was killed in the crash. Dimmick stated that military and government officials from the United States inspected the Saucer.”
The FBI then immediately thereafter turned its attentions to Williamson and matters of a crashed UFO nature: “Ric Williamson and Henry Maday while in Saginaw, Michigan, prior to conducting a Flying Saucer Council program, met a prominent photographer of Saginaw, who stated that his son had revealed to him the following: The photographer’s son was stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Base about the time of the incident described in the March 10, 1949 Detroit Times above and while at Wright-Patterson Air Base, a huge semi-truck came to the Air Base with heavily canopied material jutting out, of immense size.”
Echoing the claims that Wright-Patterson AFB is home to the legendary Hangar 18 – a supposed secret storage-area on-base where crashed UFO materials are held – the FBI noted of the “canopied material” that: “…no one seemed to know anything about it except that it was driven to a far hangar where no windows or accessible doors could be discerned.”
As far as the declassified files are concerned, the next entry in the FBI’s dossier on George Hunt Williamson dates from 1962. Its subject matter: the possibility that Williamson had been involved in the smuggling into the United States of priceless Mexican artifacts of an historic and archaeological significance.
For a while the FBI deeply pondered on whether or not they should get further involved in the pursuit of a potential crime that had occurred outside of its jurisdiction and in another country – Mexico – but finally dropped the matter; rather fortunately, it must be said, for Williamson. There is one particularly curious aspect of this particular affair: a number of the relevant documents are heavily censored according to category B1 of the Freedom of Information Act. Intriguingly, B1 covers nothing less than matters that may have a potential effect on US national security.
Williamson might have overstepped the line to a degree with his Indiana Jones-style escapades in Mexico in 1962, but they hardly seem like matters that would have had a bearing on issues relative to the national security of the United States. Unless, of course, there are additional files on Williamson that the FBI has still yet to declassify, and which remain behind closed doors for reasons tantalizing and unknown.
And there, so far as we can tell at least, ends the FBI’s surveillance of George Hunt Williamson. Enigmatic, controversial and shrouded in mystery until the very end, he died in 1986, a figure by then largely forgotten by, or completely unknown to, the UFO research community of the day. But, maybe, not forgotten by the FBI.
And if you want to find out more about what the FBI thought of the man himself, you can do so in a new edition of Williamson’s book, Road in the Sky, which has just been republished by Timothy Green Beckley and which includes a 22-page article from me on this strange saga of Space Brother-based spying in the early years of the Cold War…
Pros: Accessible, engaging turn-based action. Open-ended gameplay allows for limitless play time. Cons: This game is extremely difficult — newcomers to strategy games, be warned. Camera angles can be unwieldy at times. A good video game makes your heart race. Graphics, sound and atmosphere all play a role in the excitement. But truly great games don’t excite you in a superficial way. Instead, they worry you, making you fret every decision in the game. And no contemporary game makes you reconsider every decision like “XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” a new release developed by Firaxis Games. Firaxis’ new game builds off the success of its spiritual predecessor, “UFO: Enemy Unknown,” which was developed by MicroProse and released in 1994. “UFO” is a classic in the turn-based strategy genre — a game that relies on a turn system for players to make their moves around the game world. Today, “UFO” is universally regarded as one of the top 10 games of all time. One of the founding games of its genre, “UFO” succeeded as a turn-based tactics game because of its keen sense of risk and reward. This equation of risk and reward revolves around time units, a limited resource players use to move their squad around the game. Once a player runs out of time units, no more actions can be taken in the turn, and the squad is at the mercy of the opponent until the end of the turn. How many time units to save or spend — how much risk to take — is the central point of this game. Like its predecessor, “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” capitalizes on this basic equation. “XCOM” centers its plot on a fictional alien invasion in the not-so-distant future. The player is cast as a nameless, faceless commander of a special operations group intent on defending Earth from extraterrestrial invaders. This group receives its funding from a council of 16 countries. The game is separated into two parts — base management and missions. At the start of the game, the council of countries gives the player a basic base to manage. It is the player’s job to deal with alien encounters in such a way that the panic level in each of these countries does not pass a certain threshold. Failure to do so triggers panicking countries to withdraw funding. Panic level is just one of a host of issues to micromanage at the base. While this backdrop isn’t especially compelling, players have never flocked to the turn-based tactics genre for the stories. What matters is the gameplay. Base management is not the selling point of this game, but the pleasant user interface and straightforward objectives it provides ensures that players’ main focus can be their missions.
Accordingly, the fun of “XCOM” takes place out on missions, not at the base. These missions operate on the turn system, the core game mechanic in “XCOM.” Each turn, you have the opportunity to move your squad around the map, fire their weapons at opponents, or use items to aid your squad. What follows is a series of difficult decisions about which of these actions to take. Placing your team around the map foolishly will lead to a quick and deadly finale for your “XCOM” experience. But taking risks with your squad — say, exposing them to an opponent’s line of sight — may lead to a greater reward, such as luring the enemy into a trap. No matter what, after your turn is complete the computer opponent’s turn unfolds without any opportunity for you to rectify mistakes, so the game forces you to think deliberately about every decision.
And think you will. “XCOM” is nothing short of excruciatingly difficult, and the challenge forces players to learn constantly from past mistakes. While frustrating at times — particularly when your whole squad is wiped out due to a single error — the game is fair. Although you may lose often, it is always evident where your mistake was and how to fix it in later missions. The turn-based tactical goodness of “XCOM” is a delightful reimagining of the classic “UFO.” The graphics and sound are stellar for a game in this genre, capturing the sci-fi setting of the game while not being too unbelievable. While it might be frustrating at times, the game keeps you coming back for its addictive risk-reward system. Overall, “XCOM” is an action-heavy jaunt through turn-based tactics and a definitive classic of the genre.
Flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects can distract pilots and cause accidents.
Between about 8 and 10 o'clock on the night of March 13, 1997, hundreds of people near Phoenix reported spotting mysterious clusters of lights in the sky. A number of witnesses said that many of them seemed to come from a brightly lit, V-shaped craft, the size of at least several football fields.
"It was astonishing, and a little frightening," one local resident said. School administrator Susan Watson still remembers watching with her children as the massive object she describes as a "floating" city passed silently over their home. Air National Guard spokesmen later suggested the witnesses may have seen military flares that were dropped that night, while some proposed that observers were confused by aircraft flying in formation. But these explanations left many unsatisfied, particularly one witness who, for a decade, was reluctant to acknowledge he had also seen the vehicle: Fife Symington III, Arizona's governor at the time.
"I'm a pilot, familiar with most aircraft," Symington now says, "and what I saw is nothing like I've had any knowledge of."
Thousands of unidentified flying objects are reported each year by the public. The fascination with UFOs has become a fixture of contemporary culture and a staple for science fiction writers and supermarket tabloids. But in response to the central question—are they alien spacecraft?—most officials and academics dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial visitations as unlikely in the extreme.
Yet an increasing number of researchers and public officials say the subject of UFOs is long overdue for more serious treatment. They're a "mystery that science needs to engage in," argues journalist Leslie Kean, who spent over a decade interviewing former military officers, government officials, scientists, and eyewitnesses while accessing previously classified government records for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record.
Generally, a UFO is defined as a phenomenon in the sky—be it a light, solid object, or a combination of these—whose true nature or source can't be determined. Those who study UFOs say that some 95 percent of sightings can later be explained as ordinary man-made objects or naturally occurring phenomena, from flares and military aircraft to weather oddities or reflections of the planet Venus. But that still leaves about 5 percent that seem to defy rational explanation.
"The bottom line is we don't know what they are," says Kean, a former broadcast radio producer and veteran investigative journalist who has contributed to publications like the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and The Nation.
The public's fascination with UFOs is a modern expression of an age-old enchantment with remarkable events in the skies, notes Albert Harrison, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California–Davis and author of the 2007 book Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion, and Folklore.
"Signs from the gods, omens, and portents have been replaced by space-age visitors that have remarkable god-like qualities and power," he says.
It wasn't until after World War II that interest in space-age visitors—and UFOs—really seemed to take off, and then it did so in a spectacular way. On June 24, 1947, salesman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington when he spotted a chain of nine, brightly lit objects moving at incredible speed near the mountain's peak. Arnold described each of them moving "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water," ushering the phrase "flying saucer" into common parlance. As with many such sightings, various explanations were offered—a mirage or meteors, for example—but in the eyes of many people the mystery was never resolved.
Public interest in UFOs continued to grow in the 1950s and '60s as the idea of manned spaceflight to other worlds led many people to imagine what—or who—might be traveling the other way. As reports of UFOs proliferated, media coverage seemed to inspire even more reports. Concerned about potential threats to national security, the government began to investigate. Its most notable program, the Air Force's Project Blue Book, began in 1947 and involved the analysis of some 12,600 UFO reports over two decades, most of which were categorized as misidentified natural or man-made objects, such as weather balloons or high-speed aircraft. By the end of 1969, the Air Force declared that none posed a threat or involved an extraterrestrial vehicle. The project's leaders did acknowledge, however, that they could not come up with an explanation for about 700 of the incidents.
That margin of mystery continues to thrill diehard believers around the world, many of whom have organized into groups dedicated to studying UFOs and cataloguing and tracking sightings. The Mutual UFO Network, for example, boasts about 3,000 members in all 50 states and more than a dozen countries. MUFON receives about 500 reports of UFO sightings a month, and some 1,000 volunteers investigate what they see as the most credible ones by interviewing witnesses and collecting photos, radar data, and other evidence.
A big challenge for amateur and professional researchers is the large number of sensational reports that later prove to be hoaxes. In 2009, local television stations reported witness sightings of strange red lights moving through the evening sky around Morristown, N.J., on several days in January and February. As coverage spread nationally, the History Channel series UFO Hunters featured the story. In early April, however, two local men admitted they had created the floating lights by attaching flares to helium balloons, to poke fun at UFO investigators and to demonstrate how unreliable eyewitness accounts are. The mysterious crop circles that have for centuries inexplicably appeared in fields around the world are often held out by some UFO buffs as markings left by alien craft. But skeptics scoff, saying they could easily have been man-made. Such stories frustrate serious researchers. "It really gets hard to separate the wheat from the chaff," acknowledges Bruce Maccabee, a former U.S. Navy research physicist and MUFON state director.
In fact, many scientists and skeptics don't feel that systematically studying UFOs is a valuable endeavor.
"I just don't think the evidence is very good," says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, a research organization based in Mountain View, Calif.
But Kean is convinced that there are enough puzzling cases for officials to give the subject a fresh look. In 1999, she was given a report produced by a group of French military officers, scientists, engineers, and others examining a spate of seemingly unexplained UFO sightings across the world. She was struck by the credibility of the investigators, who concluded there was a need for more careful analysis of these "unknown flying machines" that appeared "guided by a natural or artificial intelligence." The report inspired her to review once-classified government documents and incident reports from several countries (including the United States) as well as relevant photos, radar data, and material from private sources. She also interviewed official UFO investigators for several foreign governments along with military and civilian pilots, some of whom offered firsthand accounts reported in her book.
"These are people that you have to take seriously," Kean says.
Former United Airlines pilot Neil Daniels was one witness who shared his story with Kean. On March 12, 1977, Daniels was piloting a DC-10 on a routine flight from San Francisco to Boston. The aircraft was operating on autopilot when it suddenly started to turn left. Looking through the cockpit window, he and several other members of the United crew saw a brilliantly lit ball, roughly the size of their own plane, about 1,000 yards away. Daniels then noticed three of his compasses were pointing in different directions. After a few minutes, the glowing ball flew off at high speed. "Whatever it was, it wasn't an airplane," said Daniels, who passed away in May at his home in Los Altos, Calif. Air traffic controllers later reported they had not noticed any unusual radar traffic in the area, and the incident wasn't investigated further.
Even when government officials do try to examine a UFO sighting, they can be stymied by elusive—or vanishing—evidence. In Kean's book, a pilot in the shah-era Iranian air force describes a UFO encounter that Kean also found referenced in U.S. intelligence files. On Sept. 18, 1976, civilians and military officials at an air base near Tehran spotted a large diamond-shaped object with pulsating colored lights flying over the city in the late evening. Two fighter planes, including one piloted by the major who recounted the event, were scrambled to intercept the craft, which was also picked up on radar and described as being about the size of a 707 tanker jet. The major reported that, as he approached, the UFO seemed to emit a projectile. Believing it was a missile, the officer tried to return fire, but his weapons wouldn't respond. Though he said the "missile" appeared to land on the ground below, no evidence of it was found. The larger craft disappeared from the sky in an instant. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency review later that year called the incident "a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of a UFO phenomenon."
Kean points out that countries like France and Chile maintain official government agencies to handle this kind of investigation, but the United States does not. The Federal Aviation Administration simply advises pilots to report any incidents to private UFO groups or to local authorities if they believe property or people are threatened. This official lack of interest is a concern, Kean says, because of the potential dangers posed by some incidents.
In one case, on Nov. 7, 2006, a dozen or so United Airlines workers at Chicago O'Hare International Airport spotted a gray metallic-looking disk apparently hovering for several minutes above an airport gate before shooting upward and vanishing, leaving a hole in the cloud cover. The witnesses, including mechanics, pilots, and supervisors, shared their accounts with the Chicago Tribune, which covered the story. The FAA suggested they had seen a "weather phenomenon" and didn't formally investigate, Kean says, despite the potential intrusion of an unknown craft in the airspace of one of the nation's busiest airports.
"The FAA's mission does not involve the investigation of UFOs," says agency spokesman Tony Molinaro, adding, "Our employees didn't see anything unusual and nothing caused any operational problems that day."
In fact, many experts are more concerned about the hazards these sightings pose to aviation than about the potential for alien involvement. When flight crews are distracted by what's going on "outside the window," they are focused on that and "not flying the airplane anymore," says Richard Haines, a former senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who is now chief scientist of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private research group focused on flight safety related to unidentified aerial phenomena. Kean agrees, particularly since pilots have reported encountering some of the more bizarre sights in the sky, including metallic disks, massive cigar-shaped craft, green spheres, and highly agile objects that seem to stop, accelerate, and turn in response to a pursuing pilot's maneuvers.
Haines believes only about 5 to 10 percent of incidents ever get reported, in part because professional pilots fear ridicule and potential damage to their careers.
"I really think we need to make it permissible to study these things without risking your reputation," says John Alexander, a retired U.S. Army colonel and author of the 2011 book UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. As to the bigger issue of what actually is behind the largely unexplained incidents, or the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement, the debate is unlikely to be settled anytime soon.
Cigar-shaped UFO over the skies of Arlington, Texas in September of 2012. Everything's bigger in Texas! Video is courtesy of MrTigre3000, Skywatcher Antonio Cisneros and we thank him.
"I captured this object at a park near my house in September of this year, it is very similar to what I record at the volcano Popocatepetl in Mexico."
There are many mysteries in the solar system, but one of the most enduring
legends is that there is a UFO base on the moon. Could this be true?
Well, another bizarre video has popped up online, showing what some folks
believe is a six-sided building right there on the surface of the moon. The
video is pretty shocking. At first, the anomaly looks like just another boulder,
but when the camera zooms in, it definitely takes the shape of a hexagonal
structure.
What's really strange is that the structure slightly resembles the shape of
the bizarre alien object discovered at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. You can
view the approximately one-minute video here.
Ever since Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon,
there have been all types of conspiracy theories about what does on up there.
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin both reported seeing UFOs, but NASA may have
instructed the two astronauts to keep their mouths shut.
Of course, the moon is the perfect staging site for a UFO invasion of earth,
or to research the living habits of the human race.
