Blast From The Past - July 28, 1952: Air Force Urges Top Scientists To Scan Saucers

Mt Pleasant Times-News
7-28-1952

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New Book Offers UFO Insight Missing From Blue Book

By Billy Cox
Floriday Today
12-28-05

     Maybe it was inevitable - given as how conflict had been hammered into his consciousness since the U.S. occupation of Vera Cruz in 1914 - that Douglas MacArthur would frame his farewell address to West Point in apocalyptic terms.

     The old Army general went head-to-head with some of the 20th-century's biggest militarists (Kaiser Wilhelm, Tojo, Chairman Mao); surely, his 1962 warning to cadets about an "ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy" was a glib metaphor.

     Except for a niggling little controversy that won't go away. And on the 36th anniversary of the termination of Project Blue Book - the official U.S. Air Force study that concluded unidentified flying objects weren't a threat to national security - examining government failures should be an annual media ritual each December.

     For decades, MacArthur's name has been linked to the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU), a top-secret military outfit allegedly founded in the 1940s to investigate UFOs. Long regarded as apocryphal by critics, the IPU's existence - if not its mission - was confirmed by the Army on at least three different occasions in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

     In its most recent accounting, the Army Intelligence and Security Command stated in 1990 that "the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, Scientific and Technical Branch, Counterintelligence Directorate, Department of the Army . . . records pertaining to the unit were surrendered to the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with Operation Bluebook."

     Naturally, there's no mention of the IPU in the Blue Book archives. In Indian Harbour Beach, retired USAF colonel Bill Coleman, once the top Blue Book spokesman and former chief PIO for the Air Force, has a succinct reaction to the IPU: "Never heard of it."

     "Majic Eyes Only," a new book by UFO investigator Ryan Wood, offers fragmentary glimpses into the IPU from government documents. Most intriguing - although it's been around for some time - is a letter from Gen. George Marshall to President Roosevelt. Shortly after American anti-aircraft batteries opened up on a UFO gliding over Los Angeles in 1942, Marshall claimed the Army Air Corps recovered debris that was "in all probability of interplanetary origin."

     "The challenge is, you become a buff on military intelligence history," says the author from his home in Broomfield, Colo., "but you never find what you're looking for. Anything truly damning and powerful has been cleaned up."

     George Orwell, who would've appreciated that sort of precision, once put it this way: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." But in this less articulate era, we just say it's time to stop pointing fingers and move on.

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Out there: A Top-Ten List For Aliens

By Martin Kidston
The Independent Record
12-29-05

I get tired of all those top 10 lists and New Year’s resolution stories this time of year.

     There’s the top 10 local stories, the top 10 Montana stories, the top 10 AP stories, health stories, business stories and Dave Barry’s top 10, too.

     My question is, how can you plan ahead when you’re always looking back?

     The truth is, these top 10 lists are an easy way out when there isn’t any “real” news. So to be a sport, I’ve made my own top 10 list for lack of other work.

     Needless to say, it was a big year for local “otherworldly” circles, to include UFOs, Big Foot stories, and other oddities that don’t get much publicity or get laughed at when they do.

     You certainly won’t find them on any top 10 list.

     Lynda Cowen, a 1963 graduate of Powell County High School who now lives in Texas, discussed her recent docudrama, “The Secret of Redgate,” this year, even though she filmed the movie last year in Deer Lodge.

     She told me her film was inspired by her brother’s own UFO encounters as a boy. The stories down in that small prison town are strange. I used to live there but I never heard any talk of UFOs. Back then, it was arsenic in the Clark Fork River and the local lumber mill that got all the attention — that and the prison siren that sounded curfew at 10 p.m. every night.

     “My brother consciously remembers having a lot of encounters with aliens as a child — playing with them as a child,” Cowen told me over the phone in March. “No one ever talked about this stuff growing up.”

     The film propelled Deer Lodge to the fore of Montana’s most mysterious destinations. The film also won the “People’s Choice Award” at the UFO Congress in Texas — selected by 700 people from 15 films as a matter of fact.

     This year’s talk of UFOs was nothing new. Last year, Timothy Good — perhaps the world’s leading UFO authority — came to Helena to interview Leo Dworshak.

     Dworshak’s book, “UFOs Are with Us — Take my Word,” shares his own alien encounter as a child. But what strikes me as strange is not Dworshak’s alleged encounter but rather how Good, who lives in England, found out about it.

     It seems that Good heard of Dworshak through a man named Lucius Farrila.[sic] And who’s Farrila [sic]you ask? He runs a UFO news clipping service in Arkansas.

     At any rate, even Art Bell’s “Coast To Coast AM” was interested in that story. They called me trying to track down Good. I don’t know if they ever connected though.

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UFO Described As 'Dark Metallic Disc' Photographed Over Philippine Village

Not a bird or plane? It must be a UFO

By Al Jacinto
The Manila Times
12-30-05

     ZAMBOANGA CITY: An unidentified flying object was sighted hovering over a quiet village in Zamboanga City.

     The object, which appeared metallic, was spotted in the remote village of Lumbangan, about 10 kilometers east of Zamboanga.

     A witness claimed to have a photograph of the UFO hovering above a hill in the village. “I was taking pictures of the people digging for scrap and did not notice the flying object until I browsed the photographs from my laptop computer four days later.”

     “I was aghast at the picture and could not believe it. Of the three frames of photographs taken in the same site, the flying object appeared only on the second frame. It was not on the first frame and gone on the third,” he said.

     He said the object resembled a dark metallic disc with what appeared to be a dome on its top and it emitted neither sounds nor smoke. It was unknown if there were other witnesses, but he said some 70 people were in the garbage dump at the time the UFO hovered behind them.

     “It was past 10 in the morning and I am sure I heard no sound of aircraft in the village. The UFO was behind just up there,” he said.

     The witness reported the sighting to an international scientific research organization in the United States, the UFO Evidence, and sent a copy of the photograph.

     The Wikipedia website defines a UFO as “any airborne object or optical phenomenon, detected visually or by radar, whose nature is not readily known. Interest in these objects stems from continued speculation that some of them may be the products of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

     There have been numerous UFO sightings in the Philippines in the past.

     Filipinos reported seeing UFOs in 1979 in Cebu, Bohol and Negros. On April 19, 2000, a UFO was spotted near a beer brewery office in Manila. On June 28, 2002, a UFO was spotted hovering over a remote village in Polomolok town in South Cotabato.

     Two sightings were again reported in Dumaguete City on December 15 and March 11 in the same year. On January 16, 2004, a disc-shaped flying object was seen over San Jose del Monte, Bulacan. Many other sightings have been reported since 1990.

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Greys Matter

by Sean Stubblefield
The Student Operated Press
12-28-05

"Assuming the correctness of my perceptions, this book, then, becomes a chronicle not only of my discovery of a Visitor's presence in the world, but also one of how I have learned to fear them less." ---Whitley Strieber; author of Communion

     In 1947, U.S. Army Lieutenant Walter Haut was ordered to announce, in an official Army news release, that a flying saucer had landed in Roswell, New Mexico. And so he did. However, almost immediately after, that claim was retracted— on second thought-- and substituted with a feeble story about a misidentified weather balloon. Yeah, because up close these two things look so much alike and are easy to confuse with each other.

     And then poor Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer sent to investigate the “alleged” alien craft — I mean, weather balloon-- on which that supposed report is based was set up by his military superiors as the patsy for making that clumsy “mistake”. Be aware and advised, a crashed weather balloon does not leave the amount or type of debris reportedly found at the crash sight. What’s really going on here?

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UFO Files Held From Public Because of Abestos?

MoD cites asbestos fear in rejecting information pleas

By Ian Cobain
The Guardian
12-28-05

     Thousands of the government's most sensitive secret documents are being held back from publication under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that they may be contaminated by asbestos.

     Ministry of Defence officials say the documents were stored in an area of the old War Office building in Whitehall where asbestos was discovered a number of years ago.

     Dozens of requests for information made under the FoI have already been turned down by the ministry, and a number of documents dating back to 1975, which were due for automatic release under the 30-year rule, are also being held back.

     Officials say that the contents of each file will eventually be considered for release once it has been decontaminated and copied. That process is unlikely to be completed before summer of 2007 at the earliest.

     Some 63,000 files, containing around 10m pages, are affected.

     The MoD has turned down 27 requests for information, concerning 288 files, which were made under the act.

     Of the approximately two dozen files which the Guardian has identified none appear to concern routine matters. All bear titles which suggest that they would have remained unseen for many years had the Freedom of Information Act not become law.

     One is entitled Sale of Arms to Saudi Arabia. Another is Production of Chemical Weapons, while a third is Medical Aspects of Interrogation. Several files about SAS operations in Borneo are being withheld, as are others about the financing of GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping organisation.

     There are also a number of files with intriguing titles such as Operation Tiara, Operation Grape, and Project R1, as well as some which contain details of supposed UFO sightings.

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ARGENTINA: UFO OVER NECOCHEA

INEXPLICATA
The Journal of Hispanic Ufology
12-28-05

     On the evening of December 26 several witnesses -- Marcelo Pintacuda among them, as he performed various duties at the Port of Necochea-Quequén-- noticed a large strange circcular object, yellow in color, that flew over the skies of Necochea. He managed to capture the image on his cellphone.

     The object vanished toward the west of the city after having been visible for several minutes.

     Mr. Pintacuda was engaged in supervising the unloading of fuel oil from the Antares I vessel to the Necochea Power Station, property of Centrales de la Costa Atlantica SA, which employs this fuel for operating purposes.

     The Necochea Power Station is located in the Port of Necoceha next to the Quequén River and facing the sea. Pintacuda is an agent for this branch and was engaged in fire watch activities at the time during the unloading of 8000 tons of fuel oil to the station.

     The incident is currently under investigation and the images are being downloaded presently from his Motorola C650 cellphone. The month of December has been rich in UFO activity over Necochea. We should keep in mind the cases involving employees of the DYCASA company, who are working on the expansion of the breakwater in the port itself, which also faces the Necochea Power Station.

     A considerable number of people saw this large object that vanished over the sea and toward the south. The cases involving a Necochean family that saw a similar round object as they returned home along the coastal route, and another family that sew a similar object over the beach should not be discarded.

     As we said, all cases are currently under investigation.

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)
* SOURCE: Planeta UFO

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'UFO Sightings of Illinois'

BY ROBERT ANDERSON
The Daily Review Atlas
12-27-05

     An Indiana man has published his own magazine entitled "UFO Sightings of Illinois" and is offering it for sale.

     In a telephone interview last week, Phillip Dean said he has sent a copy of the 24-page, 8 1/2 by 11-inch magazine to every newspaper editor in the state.

     "I've had a few answers back and I'll be starting on similar magazine covering Indiana, and from there I'll begin magazines focusing on UFOs in Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, New York and the nation's capital, Washington D.C."

     Dean said his fascination with unexplained flying objects started 45 years ago, when he saw an article in the Paris Beacon News.

     "It was about something that happened out West - a sighting of some objects - and that started me collecting articles," Dean said. "A friend and I talked about UFOs for years, but I never took them seriously, though I always took it for granted that they existed.

     "Of course, that led to ordering books and magazines from all over the country," he added. "As years go by, the material becomes almost like an addiction. My magazine came out this year. Getting started is the hard part, as anyone in this business can tell you. You got to first pay your dues. I've had some responses from newspaper editors south of here and north of here and in East St. Louis."

     Dean said he has sold about 15 copies of his magazine so far. He said most of the articles reprinted in his magazine are from magazines and books printed 15 to 30 years ago.

     Among the articles that interest him the most, one regards a sighting west of Paris, Ill., in which a jet plane is reportedly taken by bell-shaped object.

     "The person that saw it was a down-to-earth person. His son was on the police force," Dean said. "It happened right on his farm and not all that far away. Then two Air Force men showed up and admitted they had lost a jet in that area but saw to it that nothing about it showed up in the newspapers. The same thing happened on south edge of Paris too, over an area called 'the Y' when a bell-shaped object took a small private plane right there."

     Both of these incidents occurred in the late 1950s, Dean said.

     He conducts almost all his own research by mail, Dean said, adding that he has also talked with several "actual eye witnesses."

     The following are excerpts from the magazine:

     Aledo, Illinois, July 24, 1978

     "Mary and Robert Berglund and their 12-year-old granddaughter were driving home from Rock Island when they saw a big ball of fire in the western sky. Mrs. Berglund said that it kept getting bigger and redder. They said it appeared to land and seemed to be on fire."

     Franklin Park, Illinois

     June 17, 1979

     "Fear of being ridiculed made the campers hesitate to immediately reveal the terrifying incident.

     On May 28th, 24-year-old Camp Delaware counselor Ira Leifer led 13 boys on a hike up Blueberry Hill. The boys averaged in age from 13 to 15.

     At 3:45, the group reached the top of the hill. Few trees obscured the sky. The day was sunny and hot.

     Suddenly, a high-pitched whine was heard coming from above.

     Startled, the campers looked up. A pulsating, metallic saucer, about 20 feet in diameter, was hovering 50 to 60 feet above the ground.

     The UFO had a flat, shiny, reflective bottom, and its half-dome shape was topped by a smaller dome giving off a reddish glow.

     The entire saucer was surrounded by a purplish mist, and the glowing red dome was revolving.

     The total observation time was about 30 seconds. During this time, the saucer was completely silent. The campers stood in awe.

     When the high-pitched sound was heard again, the saucer began to move. The boys screamed and ran for their lives, realizing the UFO was after them!

     Then, just as it was about to grab them, it suddenly took off straight up.

     Ira found it impossible to control the panic-stricken group. They all raced to the safety of the camp.

     Afraid of being called crazy and irresponsible, the campers decided to keep the close encounter a secret. But after being assured by friends that UFO sightings should be reported to aid in their study, the campers bravely stepped forward and told the startling truth."

     Moline, Illinois, March 9, 1967

     "William Fisher, a patrolman of Moline police force, sighted and filmed a UFO, about 1:30 p.m. On the film it shows a glowing oval against a dark background."

     Elmwood Park, Illinois Nov. 4, 1957

     "Patrolman Joseph Lusasek, Patrolman Clifford Scahu and Fireman Robert Volt at 3:12 a.m. spotted an object about 250 feet in the air. They turned on the spotlight of their squad car on the object that was over Elmwood Cemetery and radioed Officer Daniel DeGiovanni who was on duty at Elmwood Park police station.

     "The object was a bright red-orange color and appeared to be folding into itself. It shot up about 200 feet when the spotlight hit it. Also when the spotlight hit it the object puffed out. The object took off and was last seen at 3:22 a.m. DeGiovanni saw it before it disappeared. Before sight of it was lost, it appeared to fold inward from the bottom."

     Near Havana, Ill. March 14, 1946

     "Paul Cummings Jr. was driving from Canton to Lincoln, Illinois and was about 10 miles east of Havana when he saw a bright ball of orange in color. It appeared in the middle of the road about 1 mile ahead. Douglas Gowdy was with him. The object came toward them about one foot above pavement. It occupied the whole roadbed. Paul drove off the road and both men jumped out. No sound of heat."

     Crop Circle

     MILAN, Ill. (UPI) - Farmer James Lawson doesn't know what made the perfect 40 to 50 -foot circle in his cornfield and he isn't ready to accept it was a UFO.

     "I was just making my first trip (on a combine) through the field," Lawson said. "The first thing I thought of was a UFO.

     "I thought 'holy smokes, what is this?' "The corn stalks are flattened in neat rows and clockwise swirl, hidden from the nearest intersection but visible from inside the field.

     "It feels weird. There's no road coming in, " said Lawson, 70. "It could've been here quite a while but the ears are still on the stalks. Maybe it's been a month or so."

     Since 1980, more than 600 similar circles have been reported in Britain with 250 recorded in 1989. Crop circle reports have also come in from the Soviet Union, Japan and New England..."

     Carbondale, Illinois Southern Illinoisan October 18, 1973

     "It didn't make any noise," Downs said.

     Interested persons may reach Dean by mail at Phil's Catalogue, P.O. Box 177 West Terre Haute, IN 47885.

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25th Anniversary of The Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident

UFO enthusiasts gather in forest

More than 100 people are expected to gather in a Suffolk forest on Tuesday night to mark 25 years since a famous UFO sighting.

BBC News
12-27-05

     During the nights of 26 and 27 December 1980, US servicemen at RAF Woodbridge and Bentwaters reported mysterious lights in Rendlesham Forest.

     The strange lights included a glowing metallic triangle and a hovering object with red and blue lights.

     UFO enthusiasts are hoping there might be more sightings during the night.

     Brenda Butler, a local resident who has written about the events of 1980, believes the sightings of 25 years ago were real.

     Patrol car lights

     "People who were coming up the Butley Road and who were in Woodbridge, Melton, Leiston and all around the area saw structured craft," she said.

     "And that's not the first time - we can go way back to the 1600s and we've had lights in the sky and in the forest."

     In 2003, Kevin Conde, a former US security policeman said he had been responsible for the lights in the forest.

     He said he and another airman shined patrol car lights through the trees and made noises on a loudspeaker as a prank.

     "We just drove through the forest flashing the lights through the fog," he said.

     Despite Mr Conde's claim, some witnesses do not believe they saw patrol car lights in Rendlesham Forest.

     US Air Force Sergeant John Burroughs said: "The blue lights coming down from the sky...I still have never heard of any technology capable of doing what I saw happening."

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"Klinikowski Was Stationed at The New Mexico Air Force Base in Summer 1947 When The Military Recovered a Flying Disc in The Desert"

Catasauqua native navigated way through WWII, Roswell


Walter Klinikowski, 84, has done what most 'would never do.'

By Tom Coombe
The Morning Call
12-25-05

      Say the name ''Roswell'' and some people immediately think of gray-skinned space aliens with oval-shaped heads and shadowy government agents in black suits.

     Walter Klinikowski, a Catasauqua native and retired Air Force colonel, is not one of those people.

     Klinikowski was stationed at the New Mexico Air Force base in summer 1947 when the military recovered a flying disc in the desert. Many people believe they found — and have subsequently covered up — an alien spacecraft. Klinikowski has another theory.

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Guests Treated To a Rare Sturgeon -- and a UFO

By Tom Stienstra
The San Francisco Chronicle
12-25-05

     Off in the distance over San Francisco Bay, the small silhouette in mid-air looked like a military helicopter on a mission. It appeared to be heading slowly straight at us, descending toward our boat in northwestern San Pablo Bay.

     We didn't want to take our eyes off our rod tips. That is because the bite of a big sturgeon, a one-second pull-down, can come and go in the quick moment it takes to look away.

     But the black object continued its descent and approach. Terry Radov stole a peek and suggested it might not be helicopter after all . . .

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An Explosion on the Moon

So you thought nothing ever happens on the moon?

By Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
12-23-05

      December 23, 2005: NASA scientists have observed an explosion on the moon. The blast, equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT, occurred near the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) on Nov. 7, 2005, when a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid slammed into the ground traveling 27 km/s.

     "What a surprise," says Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) researcher Rob Suggs, who recorded the impact's flash. He and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, "we caught one," says Suggs.

     The object that hit the moon was "probably a Taurid," says MSFC meteor expert Bill Cooke. In other words, it was part of the same meteor shower that peppered Earth with fireballs in late October and early November 2005. (See "Fireball Sightings" from Science@NASA.)

     The moon was peppered, too, but unlike Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to intercept meteoroids and turn them into harmless streaks of light. On the moon, meteoroids hit the ground--and explode.

     "The flash we saw," says Suggs, "was about as bright as a 7th magnitude star." That's two and a half times dimmer than the faintest star a person can see with their unaided eye, but it was an easy catch for the group's 10-inch telescope.

     Cooke estimates that the impact gouged a crater in the moon's surface "about 3 meters wide and 0.4 meters deep." As moon craters go, that's small. "Even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't see it," notes Cooke. The moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide.

     This isn't the first time meteoroids have been seen hitting the moon. During the Leonid meteor storms of 1999 and 2001, amateur and professional astronomers witnessed at least half-a-dozen flashes ranging in brightness from 7th to 3rd magnitude. Many of the explosions were photographed simultaneously by widely separated observers.

     Since the Leonids of 2001, astronomers have not spent much time hunting for lunar meteors. "It's gone out of fashion," says Suggs. But with NASA planning to return to the moon by 2018, he says, it's time to start watching again.

     There are many questions that need answering: "How often do big meteoroids strike the moon? Does this happen only during meteor showers like the Leonids and Taurids? Or can we expect strikes throughout the year from 'sporadic meteors?'" asks Suggs. Explorers on the moon are going to want to know.

     "The chance of an astronaut being directly hit by a big meteoroid is miniscule," says Cooke. Although, he allows, the odds are not well known "because we haven't done enough observing to gather the data we need to calculate the odds." Furthermore, while the danger of a direct hit is almost nil for an individual astronaut, it might add up to something appreciable for an entire lunar outpost.

     Of greater concern, believes Suggs, is the spray—"the secondary meteoroids produced by the blast." No one knows how far the spray reaches and exactly what form it takes.

     Also, ground-shaking impacts could kick up moondust, possibly over a wide area. Moondust is electrostatically charged and notoriously clingy. (See "Mesmerized by Moondust" from Science@NASA.) Even a small amount of moondust can be a great nuisance: it gets into spacesuit joints and seals, clings to faceplates, and even makes the air smell when it is tramped indoors by moonwalkers. Could meteoroid impacts be a source of lunar "dust storms?" Another question for the future....

     Suggs and his team plan to make more observations. "We're contemplating a long-term monitoring program active not only during major meteor showers, but also at times in between. We need to develop software to find these flashes automatically," he continues. "Staring at 4 hours of tape to find a split-second flash can get boring; this is a job for a computer."

     With improvements, their system might catch lots of lunar meteors. Says Suggs, "I'm ready for more surprises."

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THE FAITH-BASED SCIENCE OF SUSAN CLANCY

By Bud Hopkins
Intruders Foundation
October 2005

      The literate world is well aware that a controversy about the reality of the UFO phenomenon has raged for decades. Arrayed on one side are the enthusiasts - the casual, the serious and the bizarre - along with thousands of highly qualified pilot-witnesses, high-ranking military personnel, intensely interested scientists, and even an astronaut or two. All regard the hundreds of thousands of global sighting reports as a scientific problem of major significance, and all demand that science finally conducts a thorough, objective investigation. Centrally opposed to this position are a large number of mainstream scientists, most of whom are not only indifferent to the subject of UFOs, but also grossly uninformed about the weight of the evidence. Allied with them is a strange amalgam of groups that includes official spokesmen for the United States Air Force, Bible Belt Fundamentalist preachers such as Pat Robertson, and a small but vociferous band of self-described "rationalist" debunkers (who probably look upon their religious brethren as hopelessly superstitious). Clearly, the battle against a scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon makes strange bedfellows.

     A few years ago, when those of us in the research community heard rumors of a two-tiered scientific investigation to be undertaken at Harvard University by experimental psychologists Richard McNally and Susan Clancy, we were curious but wary. Dr. McNally, we were told, intended to test a group of self-described UFO abductees for the presence of certain symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He would employ as a model a similar test used years before, in which a group of Vietnam veterans tape recorded their traumatic war experiences and then, at a later time, were scientifically measured for signs of stress as they heard their taped accounts played back. Dr. Clancy planned to employ a word memorization test, which was supposed to reveal a subject's tendency towards false memories. Unfortunately, neither McNally nor Clancy intended to carry out any actual investigations of UFO abduction reports or examine any physical evidence. They would remain in the laboratory, limiting their project to the ostensibly scientific testing of their abductee subjects' veracity.

     Early in the Susan Clancy enterprise, any hopes I had for her objectivity evaporated when I learned that her purported abductee subjects were to be self-selected. She had placed ads in a number of newspapers, asking for those who believed they had had UFO abduction experiences to contact her. Little or no vetting took place, and her unscientific protocol thus opened the laboratory door to anyone who claimed to be an abductee. Her subjects were not a group whose accounts had been investigated and accepted as reliable by experienced researchers, but instead, Clancy accepted virtually anyone who came in off the street and told her they were, indeed, abductees. Some of her subjects had such tenuous, even vapid reasons for believing they were abductees - a "mysterious bruise" or a "vague feeling" - that knowledgeable researchers would have immediately shown them the door. The uncritical Dr. Clancy, however, made them part of the "abductee" group she studied!

     Anyone familiar with the phenomenon is aware that very few abductees will come forward to discuss their experiences publicly, or to subject themselves to "testing" of any kind by people or organizations that they do not know and trust. Doing so would be to run the very real risk of becoming targets for career-threatening ridicule. Obviously, the more highly credentialed abductees are the most hesitant to volunteer as test subjects because they have the most to lose. Neither the NASA research scientist, the NASA engineer, nor the many psychiatrists, psychologists, police officers and military professionals who, over the years, have reported their abduction experiences to me, would ever involve themselves in what might well turn out to be sensationalist and incompetently mounted tests of one kind or another. Adding to that basic flaw in her study, my second concern had to do with the fact that neither Clancy, whom I had twice met, nor McNally made any attempt to contact Dr. David Jacobs or me. They were both undoubtedly aware that the two of us have accumulated between us masses of data after decades of work with literally hundreds of abductees. We were never consulted on any issue, nor was our help in vetting test subjects called for. In retrospect, Dr. Jacobs and I could have easily prevented the two testers - innocent of the complex work of actual investigation - from making many of the egregious errors which have so seriously damaged their work.

     The results of McNally's test for signs of posttraumatic stress disorder were significant. Those reporting abductions showed virtually the same intensely emotional reactions upon hearing their taped accounts replayed as did the Vietnam vets when they heard the tapes of their traumatic war experiences. But as we soon learned in McNally's analysis of the test results, the devil was not in the details themselves but in his interpretation of the details. He announced that, since we "know" that UFO abductions don't exist, all of his subjects' accounts have to be false memories. And since they registered just as powerfully as "true" memories, what the test shows, he explained, is that "false" memories can be just as traumatic as "real" memories! This classic illustration of "heads I win, tails you lose" circular reasoning provides a perfect example of ideology trumping science. Unfortunately, as astronomer J. Allen Hynek once remarked, science is not always what scientists do. In effect, McNally seemed to be saying that even if his own test results support the traumatic reality of the abduction phenomenon, that fact changes nothing since UFO ABDUCTIONS JUST DO NOT EXIST, and that somehow, someway, he will make his test results fit his hypothesis! McNally's ideological interpretation of the test results - a clear example of "faith-based science" - is just as rigid in its way as the creationists' willful denigration of evolution, no matter what the fossil records have revealed.

     Susan Clancy's word memorization test as an indication of false memories is far more tenuous than McNally's test for the presence of posttraumatic stress. (This is perhaps not the place to go into its technical inadequacies, other than to reiterate what I have already said about its fatal flaw - the reliance upon an unvetted, self-selected sample. I will return to the specifics of her work in a later paper.) Instead, the problem I would like to discuss is her use of a rather simple word memorization protocol to ratify her belief that a subject's demonstrably traumatic memories are false. Clancy baldly stated in an early newspaper interview that she assumed everyone would accept the idea that all abduction experiences were false memories, because "everyone" knew there were no such things as UFO abductions. This, she apparently thought, was settled truth - and another illustration of irrational, faith-based science. So, at the outset of their work, neither she nor McNally intended to raise even the possibility that such things as UFO abductions might have occurred, let alone to actually investigate that possibility. The ideology they shared assumed that such experiences were, ipso facto, false memories, a theory the two seem to believe as fervently as the Pope believes in the virgin birth.

     Another analogy comes to mind. Instead of a group of abductees, imagine an equal number of women who have reported rape experiences and who are now to be tested by a pair of experimental psychologists. The psychologists state at the outset that they do not believe any of these women were actually raped and are proceeding on that assumption. Thus their goal is not to investigate the veracity of the women's claims but to discover a way of establishing their "tendencies to fantasize and form false memories." Since the testers "know" in advance that these rape memories are false, no police investigation into the alleged rape accounts is necessary - no examination of physical or medical evidence, no visits to alleged crime scenes, no interviews with possible witnesses, and no checks on the reputations of the rape victims. In short, nothing will be undertaken that might support the reality of their experiences. An outrageous, even inhumane idea, of course, but analogous to the Clancy-McNally attitude to UFO abductees.

     As I pointed out above, Clancy carried out no investigation of any of her subjects' abduction reports - no inquiries into supporting witnesses, no visits to alleged sites, no search for physical evidence, no interviews with friends and family members. Everything she did apparently took place in the laboratory, by way of her word memorization test and personal interviews, though she apparently lacked a firm grounding in the literature, history or complexity of the UFO phenomenon. Recently I appeared on "Larry King Live," along with Clancy and several others, when one of the guests showed a blow-up of the world-famous Trent UFO photographs from McMinnville, Oregon, arguably the best-known UFO photos in existence. They were prominently featured in "Life" magazine in 1950, and have been reproduced hundreds of times since in many publications. What's more, in 1969, after careful analysis, an investigator for the skeptical Condon Committee described the McMinnville photo case this way: "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses." Optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee has investigated this case thoroughly, flying to McMinneville, interviewing the Trents, their family and neighbors, taking his own test photos from the same location, and carrying out literally months of optical analysis of the original pictures. Maccabee's work has been published widely, but the photos themselves should be familiar to anyone with even a cursory involvement in UFO study and research. Yet, during the Larry King program, abduction authority Susan Clancy glanced at the photos on the monitor and said something like this: "that could be anything...someone who threw up a hubcap or a Frisbee or something." Her evident ignorance of this case, and, by extension, of the literature and history of the UFO phenomenon, was aptly illustrated by this glib, contemptuous wisecrack, a remark one might expect to hear late at night in a Texas barroom, but not from someone holding a Ph.D. degree from Harvard. Earlier, when King asked her how she became interested in the subject of UFO abductions, she began her answer this way: "I've been studying aliens for..." Studying aliens? Again, this peculiar description of her work in the laboratory is not what one would expect to hear from an experimental psychologist on an ostensibly serious TV program.

     Though as a faith-based scientist, Susan Clancy has no problem asserting her absolute belief that all UFO abduction accounts are nothing more than false memories, she is left with the problem of explaining how these memories are generated. By what process can many thousands of extremely similar accounts from around the world come into the heads of this multitude - especially since her colleague, Richard McNally, has established that abduction memories have essentially the same traumatic qualities as memories of the Vietnam War? Clancy's solution was to cobble together a melange of theories, many of them mutually contradictory, in an attempt to account for the power and similarity of these "false" memories. Abduction researchers have long been familiar with the explanations Clancy offers, and over the years we have refused to deal with many individuals whose abduction accounts are either extremely tenuous, lacking in evidence, or easily explained away. Where we differ from Clancy is that she insists upon her a priori belief that every abduction case can be explained away by her various theories and that no actual investigation is necessary, whereas experienced investigators, being scientific skeptics, believe that abduction accounts, accompanied by supporting evidence of various types, deserve investigation before firm conclusions about their credibility can be drawn.

     Her first explanation - one that is currently popular with debunkers of every stripe - is that abduction memories are formed during episodes of sleep paralysis, a relatively rare neurological event that usually lasts a matter of seconds. The sleep paralysis explanation has been eagerly seized upon because a sizeable percentage of UFO abductions occur at night, in the subject's bedroom. There are, of course, myriad objections to the sleep paralysis theory, but it clearly self-destructs before one central problem: the large percentage of UFO abductions which occur in the daytime, when the abductee is up and about, driving a car, taking a walk, playing in the front yard, or even, in one case, driving a tractor. In fact, for the first twenty years of UFO abduction accounts, I am aware of none that reportedly took place inside one's home or bedroom. So, as science decrees, if a theory does not fit the data, it must be rejected.

     Clancy also indicts the use of hypnosis as the medium by which false memories are implanted in unsuspecting clients by unscrupulous hypnotists. The problem with this theory is that about 30% of the thousands of UFO abduction reports researchers have investigated were recalled without the use of hypnosis. Beyond that, virtually all abductees recall at least some aspects of their experiences without hypnosis. Otherwise, they would have had no reason to contact an investigator in the first place. In the light of these facts, the "hypnosis explanation" as to how "false" abduction recollections are generated also collapses.

     It should be added that further doubts about the efficacy of hypnosis in inducing false memories have been raised by recent experimental studies, such as the work of psychologists Steven Lynn and Irving Kirsch. They summarize their results this way: "The most appropriate conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that hypnosis does not reliably produce more false memories than are produced in a variety of non-hypnotic situations in which misleading information is conveyed to participants." It is also a matter of record that many hypnotherapists with no knowledge of the abduction phenomenon have, to their surprise, uncovered traumatic abduction recollections in subjects with whom they were working. In fact, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist highly skeptical of UFO reality who was treating Betty and Barney Hill for post traumatic stress, uncovered details of their terrifying abduction experience in what is now seen as the first systematically investigated UFO abduction case. Obviously, during hypnosis, his personal skepticism had no effect whatsoever on the Hills' recollections. There are many reasons to trust the process of hypnosis, if it is handled carefully and skeptically, with the use of false leads and other validating techniques (all of which I have discussed elsewhere). But it should be clear by now that objective science must reject Clancy's theory that hypnosis per se is implicated in the wholesale generation of false memories.

     One of the early theories used to explain UFO abduction reports insisted that such experiences were nothing more than a new "space age religion." Since the gods are supposedly dead, abductees have invented encounters with "godlike" alien beings to replace them. But that highly speculative theory was discounted years ago by serious researchers on both sides of the issue because of yet another major problem: the vast majority of UFO abductees feel that their abductions have been deeply traumatizing - sometimes even physically painful and injurious - and that the small, hairless, big-eyed UFO occupants they describe are anything but godlike. (Richard McNally's own test results buttress this abductee view). It should be pointed out, however, that one occasionally comes across an abductee who is fully aware of the emotional trauma he has suffered, but who is nevertheless willing to regard these experiences as being, in some way, spiritually uplifting. For such people, this positive view of traumatic events is probably a coping strategy, similar to that of certain battered wives who will not complain to the police, but instead insist that their abusive husbands really do love them. Perhaps, for some battered wives as well as for some traumatized abductees, this kind of coping strategy is a way of retaining one's self esteem by fighting off the sense of being a helpless victim and by insisting that somewhere, somehow their ordeals must have a silver lining. One is reminded of the many victims of Hurricane Katrina who have lost everything but whom, when interviewed on television, cling to the idea that their ghastly experiences have somehow been transformative and spiritually uplifting.

     Equally damning of Clancy's religious explanation is the fact that the UFO reports of many abductees in more primitive cultures describe exactly the same details as do abductees in more advanced cultures, and yet these more primitive people work assiduously to make their UFO experiences fit into the schema of their traditional religions. Thus, in a well-known Zimbabwe incident, the natives who described small, white-skinned aliens in shiny one-piece jumpsuits insisted that they were the ghosts of their ancestors, who can now, apparently, fly around in wingless metal discs. Clancy would have us believe that many previously religious people have simply dropped their traditional beliefs and begun to worship the abducting aliens in a new kind of "false-memory religion," but in cases such as this African incident, the natives did the opposite. They forced the conventional "space age" UFO and the white-skinned aliens they had actually observed into strained conformity with their pre-existing religious beliefs. Thus their UFO experience can be seen as strengthening their traditional beliefs, rather than replacing them.

     Another shaky explanation Clancy mentions is that of media contamination. According to this idea, perfectly normal people are so influenced by something they've seen on TV or read in a book that, like helpless sponges, they adopt details from other people's abduction accounts and thus weave tenaciously held false memories from "an odd bruise" or a "strange feeling" or something equally tenuous. It is unnecessary to point out that experienced investigators would, at the outset, recognize these "wannabes" for what they were and refuse to deal with them. Furthermore, it seems obvious that these newly minted "wannabes" would be among the first to answer Clancy's ads soliciting abductees for her tests, because, in doing so they would achieve legitimacy by becoming part of her sample. Thus the central point of her "contamination" argument brilliantly exposes the original and most damaging flaw in her methodology: the self-selected and therefore completely unrepresentative nature of her subjects.

     So who were the people Clancy was attempting to test? Were there some apparently legitimate abductees among her sample? Possibly. Were there wannabes, publicity seekers and emotionally unstable people among her sample? Undoubtedly. And under these conditions, what kind of valid generalizations could she possibly make about the UFO abduction phenomenon?

     In the light of these crippling problems in her methodology, we must briefly consider which areas of the complex, many-sided abduction phenomenon which Clancy's faith-based attitude refused to consider. What kinds of data did she overlook? Here, briefly, are some examples:

# 1. She included no study of the patterns of well-known and clearly defined physical sequelae - scoop marks and straight-line cuts - that frequently appear on individuals after their abductions.

# 2. She included no reference to the patterns of ground traces - altered soil, tree branches snapped off from the top down, affects on the surrounding foliage, etc. that are often discovered at UFO landing sites after abductions.

# 3. She made no mention of the eye-witness testimony of neighbors observing a UFO hovering over a house where an abduction is taking place; of witnesses who search in vain for an abducted child who is later found outside a fully locked house; of the incidents in which the police are summoned because of the temporary disappearance of a baby from his crib or a child from her bedroom, but who turn up, unobserved, an hour or so later; or hundreds of similar cases in which abductees are known to be inexplicably missing.

# 4. She made no mention of the bizarre errors the UFO occupants often make, such as returning individuals from group abductions wearing someone else's clothes; replacing abductees in the wrong room or building after an abduction; or returning an individual to her bedroom in a locked and bolted house with her feet soiled and the back of her nightgown covered with damp leaves; or any of the scores of other such significant errors.

# 5. She made no mention of the hundreds of cases in which two or more individuals are abducted at once, and whose traumatic memories match in every detail.

# 6. She made no mention of a few accounts - such as the Travis Walton case or the Linda Cortile abduction - in which numerous witnesses see all or part of the abduction as it is being carried out.

# 7. She made no effort to interview the friends and family members of the people in her sample, or in fact anyone who might have insight into their general trustworthiness and emotional soundness. Instead, Susan Clancy alone, because of her faith in the non-existence of UFO abductions, decided that all of her subjects' abduction accounts were false, and that all of their traumatic recollections were nothing more than false memories. She is therefore implying - indirectly but absolutely - that none of her subjects can tell the difference between dream and reality. To the public at large, this means, in effect, that an experimental psychologist with a Harvard degree believes everyone claiming UFO abduction experiences is suffering from a form of mental illness.

      For me, in the absence of any actual investigation of their accounts, such a radical, blanket condemnation by Susan Clancy of her innocent and naively trusting subjects is both ethically reprehensible and a disgrace to science.

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KGB's Secret UFO Files Finally Made Public

Pravda.ru.com
12-22-05

     Files comprising the famous Blue Folder have been declassified a while ago. The prominent Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich got the folder from the KGB in 1991. These days Mr. Popovich holds the position of honorary president of the Academy of Informational and Applied Ufology. The folder contains numerous descriptions of UFO flights and reports on some (mostly failed) attempts taken by the military in order to catch the aliens.

     Aliens acknowledged back in 1968

     In 1968, 13 leading aircraft designers and engineers of a brand-new aircraft section of the Soviet Committee on Space Technology and Exploration forwarded a letter to the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin. Actually, it was a request to set up a special organization for the study of UFOs. A reply to the letter was signed by Academician Shchukin. It is an amazing document per se:

     "A number of competent organizations of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Chief Directorate of Meteorological Service, Defense Ministry and a few other agencies considered the issue of nature of the so-called flying objects. The organizations involved in the study of the atmosphere and space have been instructed to register and do research on any cases of UFOs for identification purposes. The USSR Academy of Sciences is charged with general monitoring of the phenomena, and therefore a special organization for the study of UFOs is not required."

     "It was a real breakthrough," says Vladimir Azhazha, president of the above academy and keeper of the Blue Folder. "The authorities not only acknowledged the existence of UFOs for the first time, they also showed their great interest in the issue," adds he.

     "We got hold of the Blue Folder only in 1991," says Mr. Azhazha. "Pavel Popovich was given the folder after requesting reports on the cases of UFOs. I received the folder from Popovich, it was a 124-page compilation of reports about the encounters with UFOs. The reports filed by authorities, military units COs and eyewitnesses. It took us a long time to get rid of some doubts before making the folder public," says he.

     Mr. Popovich saw an UFO only once while flying in a passenger plane from Washington to Moscow. According to him, the object looked like a shining triangle that popped up out of nowhere, for awhile it flew near the plane at about 1,000 km per hour before vanishing without a trace.

     Despite the cover letter that effectively denied any special program by the KGB for monitoring the UFO activities, the contents of the folder indicated the opposite. It is quite obvious that the Soviet secret police launched thoughtful investigations in several cases e.g. an anomaly observed near the village of Burkhala of the Magadan region on October 21, 1989. The report on the incident says: "The eyewitnesses claim to have watched a red shining sphere circulating above the village for half an hour." The northern lights are reported to have shone extremely brightly all night long following the incident.

     The flying disks vanished in thin air after the explosion

     KGB agents looked high and low trying to figure out what happened at the airport of the city of Mineralnye Vody on December 15, 1987. According to the airport dispatchers, at 23.15 the flight No 65798 reported an incoming "object resembling an aircraft with its headlights on." The radars showed no aircraft whatsoever. Three minutes later the UFO was gone as reported by the flight No 65789.

     The crew of another plane also observed the UFO flying in that area. The clock read approximately 23.20. According to crewmembers, the UFO left a fiery trail in the air. The crews of the both planes reported that the UFO had disappeared after the flash resembling an explosion. A villager reported a burning plane flying over his village at 23.30. The eyewitness said the plane then disappeared. The eyewitness found no wreckage or other evidence of a plane crash.

     No manholes found in the "Martian" spacecraft

     From time to time the military made attempts to deal with UFOs independently. In August 1987, servicemen of an antiaircraft unit based on the Tiksi Peninsula tried to "get to know better" an unidentified flying object that appeared on a radar screen. The report from Colonel Lobanov, a duty officer of the military unit No 45038, said: "An unidentified target detected by the radar station of the commandant"s office of the antiaircraft unit at 05.45 Moscow time." The target moved at a speed varying from 0 to 400 km per hour. At 06.55 a helicopter MI-8 took off for a closer examination of the object. Suddenly, the object became invisible. Another aircraft, the AN-12 was flying in the vicinity at the time. At 3600 m the crew reported an emerald cloud with a few traces of purple and dark spots visible in the middle. Two inverse trails were reported behind the cloud.

     An incident occurred in the Leningrad Military Region in early August of 1987. Five officers were dispatched to the northern part of Karelia to accompany an object of unknown origin that had been located near the city of Vyborg. The object was said to be 14 m long, 4 meters wide and 2.5 m high. The military failed to open the "extraterrestrial can." Eventually, the object disappeared from the hangar late September.

     On July 28, 1989, the arrival of an UFO spread panic among the personnel of a military unit stationed in the vicinity of Kapustin Yar, in the Astrakhan region. Corporal Valery Voloshin was on duty in the communications center at the time. He filed the first report on the case.

     Researchers believe the Blue Folder is an invaluable source of information. According to Mr. Azhazha, all reports and evidence on record indicate that intelligent life forms control the objects that mean no harm to human beings. At least no case of an attack by UFO against man was found in the folder.

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". . . For 50 Years or More, Paranormal Activity Has Been Reported, Including UFOs . . ."

Las Vegas Based Scientists Study 'Skinwalker Ranch'

George Knapp
Investigative Reporter
KLASTV.com
12-21-05

      A team of scientists based in Las Vegas has been conducting a study that may be different from anything that's ever been tried. The research is focused on a ranch in rural Utah where, for 50 years or more, paranormal activity has been reported, including UFOs, Bigfoot, mutilated animals and poltergeists. Some call the place Skinwalker Ranch, and George Knapp of the I-Team is the only journalist allowed to visit the property.

     Oil executive Gregory Todd is one of the hundreds, if not thousands of northeastern Utah residents who've seen weird objects -- call them UFOs -- over their homes in the past 50 years. The Utah basin has also been a hotbed of other strange activity including Bigfoot encounters and mutilated animals.

     In a basin known for an array of unexplained phenomena, the epicenter of high strangeness seems to be a picturesque spread known to many as Skinwalker Ranch. Native Americans who live near the property advise members to steer clear because, they say, this is the path of the skinwalker, an evil force.

* Special Thanks To Christian Macé

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Tributes To Walter Haut

     I first met Walter Haut in the 1990s. He was the consumate gentleman who always had a kind word and a mischievious smile. He was stalwart in his assessment that his fame in the UFO community and beyond was undeserved. Of course, he was as wrong as he could be, as history has a way of illuminating a moment in time.

      Over the years I had the opportunity to sit and visit with him privately and in groups. I interviewed him twice for the record. Once was in 1999, when a French film production company visited me and I took them to Roswell to meet Walter. It was during that filming session that Walter admitted to me the first of several blockbusters. I asked him if the alleged disc recovery was a cover-up. He replied that it was and admitted for the first time that he actually was in the meeting when General Roger Ramey declared that the disc recovery was to be denied and that the weather balloon story would be the cover story.

      In 2001, Dennis Balthaser and I interviewed Walter for the record and recorded it on digital tape. It was during that interview that we discovered things about Walter that nobody outside his family really knew. Walter was very generous and left for history his acknowledgment that he had actually seen the wreckage and the body, which he described for us.

      Fame never altered Walter Haut. He remained a soft-spoken man who loved to see young people visit the museum. His hope was that they would get a better understanding of Ufology and maybe, just maybe, they might be led to eductional rewards in science.

      I shall miss his easy-going smile. I do remember one tidbit I haven't really shared with many in the field of Ufology. While the French film team was at the museum, I talked with Walter off the record. I told him that I thought the most obvious place to take a recovered alien body(s), would be the infamous Lovelace Clinic. It was founded by Col. William R. Lovelace in the 1940s and many classified projects were performed there for the government. Walter leaned back against the front visitor counter and smiled for a long, long time. He said, "You are extremely astute." Of course I tried to get him to open up more, but his smile and he walked slowly away.

      A bombadier who flew through the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion and gave the world news of a crashed flying disc, has no doubt trumped us all.

Rest Well, Walter

Wendy Connors
Faded Discs

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     It should be noted that the headlines, in evening papers from Chicago West, saying a saucer had been captured near Roswell were in newspapers for July 8, 1947, not July 9. The cover story.. balloon- radar reflector - went out late that day and did appear in the final edition of the Los Angeles Herald Express. All the July 9 papers carried the cover story.

1. I was the first UFO researcher to locate and speak with Walter way back in late 1978. He was always helpful and was very well respected in Roswell. He also had been a bombardier-navigator on more than 20 bombing missions over Japan during World War

2. He knew about following orders. Dr. Joseph Nickel, CSICOP's science investigator (his 3 degrees are in English)tried to tell a TV audience that the PIO just made up the story. I was on from Roswell and asked if he even knew the PIO's name. Of course he didn't. The notion that Walter would have put out the release on his own is absurd considering that the 509th was the most elite military group in the world and that base Commander Colonel William Blanchard, a West Pointer, went on to get 4 more promotions clearly indicating he knew what he was doing. Remember this was 1947.

Walter will be remembered fondly by all who knew him. Condolences to his daughters and grand children.

     Stan Friedman

ARGENTINA: A DESTINATION FOR UFOS

INEXPLICATA
The Journal of Hispanic Ufology
12-20-05

     *This isn't the first time and it will doubtless be the last. According to researchers the city of La Banda in Santiago is a magnet for aliens. Do they exist or not? That's a tough one to answer.*

     The association for the Study and Reseach of UFO Astronomy La Banda, established by renowned characters such as Andres Francisco Miotti, David Waisman, Luis Ducournau and Carlos Barragán, has operated in the city since the mid- 1980s according to a local newspaper.

     Its mission is to study and analyze all matters related to the appearance of UFOs. Delving into this subject has brought about some original conclusions.

     Andres Miotti, a former judge, spoke to the "El Liberal" newspaper with regard to some of the cases the group has analyzed in connection to possible sightings of alien spacecraft.

     One of the cases mentioned was the one that occurred in Paraje Maravilla where, according to Miotti, a smallholder had a close encounter of the 3rd kind: "The tractor driver saw a UFO. The tractor was rendered idle and it recovered power after the UFO had taken off."

     Another event occurred in 2001. "The case that surprised me the most was when a UFO was abducting a cow in a field near La Banda," remarked Miotti.

     "While he did not acknowledge it at first, the witness to the event finally admitted that at two o' clock in the morning he got up to go to the lavatory. It was then that he saw a strange craft hovering over the field, busily trying to abduct a cow," he added.

     The Association continues to function, although with less members than before. Miotti remarked that until not long ago, he received eyewitness testimony from people who had witnessed supernatural events from various departments in the region.

* SOURCE: INFOBAE.com

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)

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HAS THE MYSTERIOUS CHUPACABRAS RETURNED TO ENTRE RIOS?

INEXPLICATA
The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

     The strange deaths of deer in a hunting preserve in the department of Uruguay has become a source of concern to local residents. These are female specimens that turned up mutilated and whose gentalia and reproductive organs were removed.

     During recent days at the La Medalla Milagrosa ranch, located some 50 km from Concepción del Uruguay, near the banks of the Uruguay River, the events became a source of great concern among locals and left authorities mystified.

     As could be observed, the animals had their genitalia and reproductive organs removed with incisions similar to the ones seen in bovines during 2002, a situation that caused a stir in various parts of the country.

     In the light of these events, specialists in the study of UFOs and extraterrestrial life visited the site and covered 3000 hectares in search of evidence. Locals and persons in charge of the ranch claim having seen helicopters and allegedly luminous objects over the area, but there is not proof at this time to substantiate this. Uno was at the site yesterday and surveyed the preserve with Juan Rios, the person responsible for the site.

     Rios stated that all of the animals had been found dead next to some of the barb wire fences that divide the parcels; another deer slain during early morning hours was found on the trail - a case that can be added to the ones found on previous days.

     All of the deaths involve females whose reproductive organs, genitalia and anuses are missing, as well as part of their backs on the right side. Incisions appearing instantaneously cauterized cuts can be seen -- a circumstance which drew the notice of veterinarians, including the expert attached to the police. Moreover, all of the feemales were lying on the same side, with their necks twisted in the same way, as if they had received a strong electric shock, according to sources.

     The La Medalla Milagrosa ranch is an important hunting preserve visited permanently by national and international political figures, top-level sportsmen and artists, who come to the country in strict secrecy to enjoy hunting vacations where distinctive samples of deer, buffalo, boar and antelope can be found.

     The location is truly magnificent for activities of this sort, but has also been a source of attraction for poachers who cause damage to the facilities and steal valuable specimens that have been brought in for reproduction --situations that often represented great sacrifice by the owners when it came to fighting them with police assistance.<

     Juan Rios has been in charge of the site for some 10 years and is aware of what this represents, but what took place in recent days has left him intrigued. "We have found dead does along a 1000 meter stretch, [all of them] presenting strange incisions. No blows or bullet holes are visible, and there are no bloodstains in the are," he told Uno worriedly.

     Rios assured us that a round and luminous object that rises and moves in an irregular manner can be seen periodicaly over the area, which has drawn his attention. Moreover, he said that local residents have seen black, unmarked helicopters descending, which are thought to be persons visiting the site to study what is going on.

     "No one can explain what is going on. They say it already happened with other animals and that they took samples for analysis. The incisions are perfect and identical over the same part of the body. Burn marks produced by an electrical element are visible," he said, waiting for some sort of answer to the enigma, which has produced curiosity in the media. "We are constantly on watch every night, but nothing could be found. The animal that was killed early this morning (yesterday) we found with you, but in spite of being on guard, we neither heard nor saw anything."

     There is no doubt that the event is a source of controversy. There are those who insist that it is the activity of a person who wishes to foster fear or uncertainty, but there are also those who claim that we face a non-terrestrial phenomenon. The fact is that it all resembles what has been going on for little more than three years, when on June 26 2002 the first case of mutilated cattle was found on the shores of the Uruguay River before spreading to the rest of the province. The method of incision is very similar, with the difference being that the cows were being found without jaws or tongues at that time. With time, everything became anecdotal and forgotten, but the phenomenon has arisen again.

     Strange though it may seem, persons dedicated to exobiology reported to the site.

     Ernesto Eduardo Lavorde, 63, a native of Gualeguaychu and host of the Enigma de los Tiempos radio show, participates in many meetings or conferences on the subject. Given his specialty, Lavorde acknowledges having been a witness to events of these characteristics. In a conversation with Uno, he highlighted that many UFO landing sites have been found in Gualeguaychu, which have been corroborated by scientists.

     "These events lead us to believe that there is something behind all of this that is related to the subject. I think we could be witnessing a creature facing extinction and for this reason it is experimenting with animal organs, said Lavorde, who believes in the existence of aliens, intraterrestrials and ultraterrestrials.

* SOURCE: El Once Digital

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)

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CATTLE MUTILATION IN VERTIZ

NEXPLICATA
The Journal of Hispanic Ufology
12-17-05

     Four Argentine Frisian cows ("holando argentino") were found dead and mutilated some days ago at the "Los Hermanos" ranch in the vicinity of Vertiz, La Pampa.

     The leaseholder, Gustavo Steib, stated that "...from one day to the next, cows that were about to give birth were found dead, missing their genitalia, the nipples of their udders and a patch of hide, whose circular incision was perfect."

     Steib added that "...one of the cows had an incision in the medullar area of its neck and another incision in the carretilla," expressing his surprise at the precision of the incisions, which he classified as "clean and almost cauterized - it's like cutting and sealing at the same time to avoid hemorrages."

     He further highlighted that "...the flesh takes two or three days to rot, but in this case it only took 12 hours," stressing the fact that he found that the color of the flesh turned to a dark greyish color, "almost leaden", following an incision.

     It was also remarkable that despite the fact that flesh was removed from the animal for examination, the rest of the carcass was unmolested by carrion animals.

* SOURCE: CIUFOS-LAPAMPA

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)

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UFOs OVER SANTA ROSA

INEXPLICATA
The Journal of Hispanic Ufology
12-19-05/span>

     At 22:00 hours on December 17, 2005, three witnesses saw a source of light approaching from the North, detected at 25 degrees N, which at a given time made a sort of turn to the right, vanishing suddenly.

     At 22:50 hours that same day, two adults and a minor saw three luminous objects traveling in single file over Santa Rosa, moving from South to North.

     These objects were detected at 70º S and vanished toward 45º N,following a displacment pattern similar to the [star] formation known as "Las Tres Marías" [The stars of Orion's Belt -- transl.note] as regards the separation between the objects, their volume and luminosity; the first of them presented a lessser luminous intensity than the remaining ones.

* Translation (c) 2005. Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology (IHU)

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Blast From The Past - August 3, 1957: Boy Sees Flying Saucer Land!

The Evening Reporter
8-3-1957

- click on image to enlarge -

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What Was That UFO In Space?

Smithsonian Magazine
12-18-05

      Ten days before Christmas 1965, as a distant war was intensifying and the city of New Orleans was slowly recovering from a hurricane's devastation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration got an early holiday present: astronauts Walter M. "Wally" Schirra Jr. and Thomas P. Stafford, aboard Gemini 6, rendezvoused in space with Gemini 7, piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.

      Schirra and Stafford maneuvered their capsule to within a few feet of the sister ship for the first, historic, prearranged meeting in space.

      The maneuver required the most exacting pilot and computer control of a space vehicle yet attempted. Its success demonstrated to Mission Control that when it came to linking two vehicles in space, Houston did not have a problem.

      Then, just before Stafford and Schirra were scheduled to re-enter Earth's atmosphere Dec. 16, the pair reported they had sighted some sort of UFO. Schirra re-counted the moment when Staf-ford contacted Mission Con-trol in "Schirra's Space," a memoir he wrote with Richard Billings:

      "We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit. ... Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon. ... You just might let me pick up that thing. ... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit."

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UFO Sightings in Russia — Wrap up for 2005

Komsomolskaya Pravda
12-19-05

     Russian intelligence agencies have repeatedly stated that no UFOs have ever been spotted over Russian territory. However, witnesses from the general public continue to contradict these reports with stories of their personal encounters with the paranormal.

     Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has put together the most reliable of these reports and come up with a list of UFO sightings in Russia and other post-Soviet countries for 2005.

     Crop Circles

     This year 18 cases of crop circles have been reported in Russia’s regions — this is six cases more than last year and almost twice the number for 2003.

     Mysterious signs were seen in all parts of the country — as far afield as the Komi Republic and the Far East, and as close to Moscow as the Voronezh and Novgorod regions. But just like last year, the southern Krasnodar region has had more crop circles than any other region.

     Meanwhile, local people are not too thrilled by the unexplainable phenomena. In fact they are more troubled by ufologists who put up their tents in the fields, hoping to catch the unknown artists red-handed.

     UFO Caught on Film at the Yenisei River

     “This May I took visiting relatives out to see an ice drift on the Yenisei,” nurse Raisa Kireyeva from the town of Igarka says.

     “We stopped at the bank, I was speaking and gesturing and my son was taking pictures. We neither heard nor saw anything suspicious or unusual, so we were totally shocked to see some object hanging in the air over my head when we had the photographs printed.”

     The woman took the picture and the negative to the Eternal Frost Museum,

     At first the experts were skeptical about the photograph... “We’ve had so many of them.” But after an examination they had to admit the strange object in the picture was neither a fake nor faulty film.

     “We checked all the negatives,” the director of the Eternal Frost Museum’s department in Igarka, Alexander Toshchev, said.

     “But even when we magnified the image many times, the ’saucer’ remained very distinct.”

     Astronomers Prove Continuous Reports of UFOs Over the Crimea

     For many years people have reported the UFOs they have spotted in the sky above the Crimea in Ukraine, in the seaside city of Yalta. Astronomers at Crimea’s Physical Astronomy Observatory decided to finally prove or disprove these reports.

     The researchers indeed located a reddish ball that floated in the sky for about ten minutes, slowly changing its color from red to light yellow, and leaving a path of smoke in its wake.

     The astronomers estimated the UFO was about 400 km away. So, in theory, the object could actually have been a secret flying device that the Turks were testing across the sea.

     Extra Terrestrials Trim Russian Watermelons

     This September bright luminous orange-colored objects, round in shape, became a familiar sight in the village of Yevseyevka in the Primorye region of Russia’s Far East. Enormous lights moved across the sky in the evenings, disappearing from view and then returning again.

     The balls demonstrated strange ’behavior’: they froze for some time, started moving again, changed their path of motion, sent out rays of light towards one another and what’s more, each ball beamed bright lights towards the ground.

     A local farmer conducted an experiment on Sept., 7. When the balls appeared in the dark sky, Yuri Galayev took his torch and signaled to one of the balls, turning the torch on and off. The ball responded immediately with identical signals.

     The next morning when the Galayevs went to their watermelons field they noticed a weird pattern on one of the watermelons. They remembered the day before the pattern had not been there, and came to the conclusion it was a note from their night visitors.

     The watermelon was taken to a well-known Primorye biologist and ufologist Valery Dvuzhilny.

     “I studied the fruit, both the healthy and the impacted tissue,” Dvuzhilny said.

     “This could not be done by insects, bacteria nor by some fungi — none of these could produce such a symmetrical pattern.”

     The patterned watermelon is not an isolated case in the region. In September 2002 two watermelons with complicated pictograms on them were found in the field of farmer Nikolai Schislyayev.

     “Well, let them draw, I don’t care as long as they don’t steal from the field,” the farmer said.

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1:01 pm: Lt. Walter Haut, Spokesman Who Announced Wreckage of Flying Saucer in Roswell, Died at 83!

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Santa Fe New Mexican
12-18-05

      ALBUQUERQUE - The man made famous for issuing a news release that said a flying saucer landed in Roswell has died.

     Army Lt. Walter Haut, a former spokesman for the Roswell Army Air Field, died Thursday in Roswell, his daughter, Julie Shuster, said. He was 83.

     Haut listened closely on July 8, 1947 as base commander Col. William Blanchard dictated a news release about a recovered flying saucer and ordered Haut to issue it.

     The Roswell Daily Record newspaper ran a bold headline July 9, 1947: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region."

     The same day, a statement was released saying it was only a weather balloon.

     "I guess they changed their mind," Haut told The Associated Press in 1997.

     Haut said he never was told exactly where the flying disc reported in his news release was found nor did he, himself, ever see a UFO.

     But he remained a believer.

     "There must have been something in the skies at that time," he said. "There's just too much evidence."

     Haut and two other men founded The International UFO Museum in 1991 where he was president until 1996. More than 2 1/2 million people have visited the museum since it opened in 1992, Shuster said.

     It wasn't until the late 1980s that Shuster said she and her sister learned about the flying saucer incident, not from their father but from a book.

     "It was not a topic of conversation at the dinner table for anybody involved," she said.

     Haut, born June 3, 1922, in Chicago is survived by his two daughters, Shuster and Marabeth Fields of Roswell, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren..

     A viewing is scheduled Monday in Roswell at the LaGrone Funeral Home. Funeral services are set for 11 a.m. Tuesday at Trinity United Methodist.

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