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Friday, October 10, 2008, 5:03 pm
Once again, with gusto
If you're the only Washington lobbyist dedicated to bringing UFO disclosure hearings to Capitol Hill, you've gotta believe daylight is just around the next bend. Otherwise, what's the point?
Stephen Bassett, Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, has been chasing daylight for more than a decade now. And the corner keeps elongating before him like a malevolent Slinky.
Bassett’s latest just-around-the-corner gambit is called the Million Fax on Washington at at http://www.faxonwashington.org/. He wants to flood the new president-elect — as well as senators and congressmen — with a million taxpayer letters, faxes and e-mails between the election and inauguration day in January.
Here’s his theory: It’s no accident that countries like France and England have been dumping government UFO records into the public domain over the last few years. Bassett thinks they’re pressuring Uncle Sam to follow suit, and that if Washington drags its feet, the Old World will take the lead — by distributing gun-camera footage of UFOs acquired by their respective military forces.
“Look, the United States is well on it way to irrelevance,” Bassett says. “Every first world country has an air force and every one has umpteen hours of gun-cam footage in their archives taken by chase planes. The pressure on the government (for disclosure) is probably greater now than it’s ever been.”
Clearly, Bassett is anticipating the end of the Republican regime and its propensities for secrecy. He says the key to motivating Americans to write is by awakening them to the new-energy windfall embodied by UFO technology locked away in classified vaults.
He says the Dems are already poised for a revolutionary, New Deal-like, energy-based economic recovery plan called the New Apollo Project (see http://apolloalliance.org/). One of its big boosters is John Podesta, the former Clinton White House aide who called for an end to the UFO coverup in 2002 and 2003. Bassett suspects Podesta’s think tank, the Center for American Progress, will be tight with an Obama administration. By writing the new presidential transition team, taxpayers can tell Washington they’re paying attention.
“Hey, you want change? I got your change right here,” Bassett says. “Joe Sixpack only gives a damn about what affects him and his family. Well, what if he had access to ET technology that’s as good as we think it is? What if he knew, if it were out in the open, he could pay 75 cents a gallon for gas, or he could heat his home for $5 a month? You think he could find 10 minutes out of his day to demand access to that technology from a new administration?”
Bassett says he wants the letter-writing initiative to occur between Nov. 5 and Jan. 20 because of the traditional post-election news cycle lull. Maybe a million letters is unrealistic; he says he’d settle for 30,000-40,000.
Then again, the fates could conspire against him once more, like they did in the autumn of 2002.
Six Octobers ago, Bassett collected enough signatures to run as an independent congressional candidate from Maryland, where he campaigned for UFO transparency. Unfortunately, voters in the Eighth Congressional District were too busy dodging sniper fire from psycho killers John Muhammad and John Malvo to worry about deep-space fastwalkers zipping across the monitors of NORAD tracking stations.
What if voters don’t respond this time around?
“If only a thousand letters come in?” A sigh on the other end of the line. “I may have to reassess my life plans.” -
Friday, September 26, 2008, 1:08 pm
The economy's tanking, but ...
De Void knows what you’re thinking:
“My 401(k) is on fire. My house is worth $45,000 less than what I paid for it. I’m losing $$$ driving to work. If I lose my job, I’ll have to eat the cat. I’m tweezering the gruesome splattered chunks of my mutual funds from the fresh splinters in the walls and ceiling. Why won’t the U.S. Air Force comment on the Stephenville UFO?”
Well, forget Stephenville. Dr. Michael Swords, retired history professor at Western Michigan University, says you’d need a time machine to understand the USAF’s dysfunctional PR relationship with this stuff.
“Alexander The Great once asked Aristotle what it’d take to teach him geometry quickly,” Swords says from his home in Kalamazoo. “Aristotle said, ‘There is no royal road to geometry. And there isn’t a royal road to this, either. This is one of the most complicated fields in world history.”
You’d have to revisit the late 1960s, when the USAF was looking for a way to wriggle off the UFO accountability hook. Its mechanism was the University of Colorado study of UFOs, whose bogus conclusions that the phenomenon did not and never would produce compelling science stirred a tempest of controversy even before they were published in 1969.
Swords has spent countless hours evaluating that amazing ruse, which was endorsed by the National Academies of Science despite the fact the U of C’s dismissive conclusions were at sharp odds with raw data reflecting alarming percentages of unknown explanations for UFOs. He added his dissent to the growing body of skepticism in the Journal of UFO Studies nearly 20 years ago.
In June, Swords and Mutual UFO Network’s national research director Robert Powell traveled to Texas A&M University to examine files kept by the one of the Colorado Project’s late panelists, physical chemist Roy Craig. After sifting through 1,500 pages, they discovered even more evidence that its late director, Edward Condon, had produced a $500,000 report (in 1960s dollars, remember) designed to fit pre-assigned conclusions.
Craig stated in 1968 that Condon had drafted his recommendations “without benefit of prior reading of the other sections of the report which were by now nearing completion.”
The Colorado study’s official rendering of UFOs listed over 30 percent as unknowns. But in yet another recently retrieved 1968 memo to Condon, physicist Joseph Rush noted the disparity in the forthcoming official attitude with the facts: “This may seem an anomalous conclusion, since more of the (cases) are unexplained than explained.”
Whoa.
“The only way to write a bulletproof history is through official military documents, Freedom of Information Act documents, ironclad stuff,” says Swords. “And Air Force policy since the 1950s has been not to make encouraging remarks about this mystery to the public.
“You’ll get official statements like, ‘This incident is under investigation, we’re studying it, and there’s no need for false alarm,’ or ‘This incident has been looked into and we’ve found an explanation,’ whether it’s a balloon experiment or a flight of ducks or whatever. It’s a mistake to open your mouth up and start talking about things that are actually interesting.”
Almost as astonishing to Swords as the USAF’s ability to sustain the mindless charade for so long is the apparent behavior of the mystery that enables it.
“This phenomenon is kind of amazing, not only for what it does, but by the way it seems to gauge its impact,” Swords says. “It’s managed to be covert enough so that it doesn’t force you to admit its reality on an official, organizational structural level. It’s like this thing understands what we’re like well enough to know how far it can push without going over the top.” -
Tuesday, September 23, 2008, 12:57 pm
Make one lousy phone call
Working for Sam “I Spit On Your Grave” Zell at the Los Angeles Times these days must be extremely surrealistic, especially after the last round of layoffs in August gutted 150 editorial jobs.
The guy leaves a moist glistening trail that the hired hands have to scrub up with Brillo pads and Comet whenever his newsroom pep rallies backfire. De Void’s favorite, um, clarification emerged in February, when Executive Editor John Arthur had to issue a memo reminding employees about workplace etiquette after one of Zell’s lame exhortations:
“It’s not good judgment to use profane or hostile language and we can’t tolerate that. Looking at pornography on the job, unless in pursuit of a story, also is not good judgment ... Sam is a force of nature; the rest of us are bound by the normal conventions of society.”
OK, so the Times ain’t what it used to be. None of us are anymore, not in newspapers. Still, look at some of the UFO stuff the Times has produced over the past year. It almost makes you think there’s a glimmer of — what? hope?
In December, it wrote an editorial ridiculing “the cult of the UFO” and Dennis Kucinich. But then, after insulating itself with all the proper dismissive disclaimers, it described — almost in passing, lost in a long clause — a call for transparency by former Clinton administration aide John Podesta as “reasonable.” So very coy, almost coquettish.
In March, a reporter filed a straight-up profile on Peter Davenport, the Washington state investigator who compiles a nationwide database of UFO sightings at his National UFO Reporting Center Web site. Naturally, the piece was shaped more by Davenport’s most egregious idiosyncrasy (the guy does, after all, live in an abandoned nuclear missile silo), but hey, it wasn’t a bad read.
Then, last month, the Times sent a reporter to Rachel, Nev., to write about the weird tourists who make pilgrimages to the state-designated “Extraterrestrial Highway” in hopes of videotaping UFOs at nearby Area 51. If this angle hadn’t been written about 85,000 times over the past 15 years, it would’ve been informative.
De Void might’ve let the whole thing slide were it not for this concluding sentence: “They drive away, united in their certainty that the sky is hiding something.”
Actually, if you really think the sky is the only thing hiding something, try getting your hands on Air Force radar records and jet fighter flight logs from January over Stephenville, Tex. That’s when the Federal Aviation Administration tracked a huge UFO approaching President Bush’s ranch.
The public information office number at Carswell Field, Tex., is 817-782-7170. Seriously, LA Times, they like hearing from the media over there. -
Friday, September 19, 2008, 4:55 pm
They don't teach this in J-school
Still agog over ABC’s emasculating refusal Tuesday night to get the Air Force on record about the UFO incident Stephenville, De Void nearly wept with nostalgia this week when alerted to the existence of a 41-year-old book.
It’s called “Problems of Journalism: Proceedings of the Society of Newspaper Editors, 1967.” Veteran UFO watcher Robert Barrow (robert-barrow.blogspot.com) picked it up for $3.50 in 1968, and the chapter he blogged about involves a round table discussion between UFO researchers and newspaper editors.
Gasp — it’s true. There was a time when the USAF gave the MSM permission to ask questions about UFOs because its own official study (which turned out to be crap, but that’s another story) was underway.
What’s great about Barrow’s post is how, way back then, one of the few real heroes in any government-authorized assessment of UFOs doubted the media had the stones for the job. Physicist Dr. James McDonald, a member of the University of Colorado panel contracted by the USAF to analyze its data, told journalists they were blowing the story.
“Something is going on here of the greatest scientific interest that has been shoved under a rug, ridiculed and laughed out of court,” the former Navy cryptographer told them.
“You and your feature writers have helped ridicule it. It’s easier to write a funny story. And once the Air Force tells you there’s nothing to it, what is more logical than to say ‘People see things; there are a lot of nuts around the country’? And that has led to the net effect that very few of these are reported.”
McDonald would go on to be the leading critic of the Colorado report, a whitewash that allowed the USAF to rinse its hands of UFO transparency once and for all. But what’s also interesting are remarks made by Harvard astronomer and UFO debunker Donald Menzel, who never read a report he couldn’t explain or deride:
“The Air Force has made its mistakes. They never have had enough scientists in the project. They have failed to follow up certain sightings of special importance. To me their questionnaire is amateurish, almost cleverly designed to get the wrong answer and lose track of the facts.”
Four decades later, of course, McDonald’s pessimism has been borne out. And really, as ABC “PrimeTime” proved, you don’t even have to ridicule UFOs anymore. Just pile a lot of colorful garbage in the picture window, keep away from the Air Force, and call this exercise in paternalism whatever you want — like journalism. -
Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 5:17 pm
Hey, ABC: Reporting is believing
Not that the Air Force really had anything to fear from the hacks at ABC News. But you do have to wonder if the brass at Carswell Field outside Fort Worth were splitting a gut during its "PrimeTime" show last night and going, "What a bunch of morons! They're rippin' off Larry King!"
It’s a little too easy to get hung up in the fact that Tuesday evening’s "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing” microwaved 90 minutes of leftovers from Peter Jennings' 2005 report by the same name. Because, yeah, after all, they tossed in the whole laundry basket again — alien abductions, Roswell, the Phoenix Lights, radio astronomers vs. flying saucers, even the same old B-52 incident over Minot, N.D., from 1968.
What made this show such an inadvertent glittering jewel was its utter lack of irony. Because David Muir, the standup blow-dry who had to paint the lipstick on this pig, actually said, "Tonight, we'll report what's new."
He said that.
Now, to be fair, we can't blame it all on David. The guy had a team of writers and producers and probably a bunch of marketing suits armed with flash cards and timers warning that devoting more than six minutes on a single topic would lose the entire audience.
And did you notice how the narrative made such a breezy transition from the Phoenix Lights to NASA's Phoenix Lander, the probe that discovered ice on Mars? Aside from the word “phoenix,” neither had a thing to do with the other. So that segue had to be a group effort. No one person dreams up that sort of non sequitur by themselves.
The only “What’s New” aspect to “Seeing Is Believing” was the lead segment — the Stephenville, Tex., incident. But ABC’s irresponsible management of it attains tragic proportions only if one assumes investigative journalism, not entertainment, were the imperative.
Let’s (sigh) run through it again real quick: A massive UFO passes over a rural region of north Texas. Multiple witnesses also report jet fighters in hot pursuit. Some contend the bogey was heading toward George Bush’s ranch in Crawford.
A spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the nearby Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station (Carswell Field) denies any warplanes were in the sky that night. Two weeks later, aware that investigators with the Mutual UFO Network are filing radar records requests with various military and civilian agencies, the USAF realizes it’s about to be caught in a lie. In a pre-emptive motion, it concedes it had 10 F-16s in the air. Conducting “routine” training missions.
All military agencies in receipt of Freedom of Information Act requests from MUFON — as well as the Department of Homeland Security — stonewall the release of radar data. But it’s too late. Federal Aviation Administration and National Weather Service returns tell the story: F-16s were all over the place that night, straying out of their military operating areas and closing to within a mile of the UFO on its southeast trajectory toward Crawford. Nothing routine about this. And when the object bore down on a straight path to the Bush ranch no-fly zone, the military inteceptors were nowhere in the vicinity.
ABC compresses this stuff into a four-minute feature dominated by civilian eyewitnesses. There’s a sound bite with MUFON report co-author Robert Powell. But no serious examination of the radar data, no airing of the redacted flight logs from Carswell, not even any indication that “PrimeTime” attempted to resolve the USAF’s information embargo.
Perversely, “PrimeTime” concluded its broadcast with an exhortation from physicist Michio Kaku, who wondered if UFOs embody the technology needed to circumvent the constraints of time and space: “Let this investigation begin!”
Exactly. Because ABC can't handle it. -
Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 2:26 pm
Will the MoD squad come through?
Well hello! Since the British Ministry of Defence has been racking up beaucoup karma points for transparency over the past year for disseminating its UFO files online, what are we supposed to do with this newsflash from the weekend?
A former Royal Air Force Wing Commander told the British media that he and a number of military and civilian colleagues tracked a formation of UFOs on radar in clear skies for 20 minutes over southern England in 1971. And that the warplane giving chase was rendered obsolete by the accelerating velocity of its targets.
You’ll have to read about it at places like http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ufos/article1682846.ece because, curiously, this one hasn’t been posted yet on the British National Archives Web site. In fairness, the MoD hasn’t completed the process of downloading its files — that process could take years. Still, this wouldn’t have been news if the story had already been out there. Assuming it’s true.
Critics have long charged the MoD’s data dump as a PR lark because none of the released documents have been rated higher than “classified” in military parlance. Certainly, the incident described by Alan Turner, the former head of air traffic control at RAF/Lossiemouth, indicates the Brits had a security problem, at least in the summer of 1971.
Back then, Turner was the duty military supervisor at RAF/Sopley, on the lookout for Soviet probes, when his post was startled by the sudden appearance of bogies skirting Salisbury Plain at 3,000 feet.
According to Turner, ground controllers at Sopley, Heathrow and RAF/Neatishead — not to mention a Canberra bomber — tracked the half dozen or so intruders as they climbed to 60,000 feet at speeds that exceeded the capabilities of the RAF. Afterwards, Turner said he impounded the tapes and the radar film, collected individual reports from all eyewitnesses, and passed it along to the squadron commander. Two days later, during an interrogation with two unidentified authorities, he said he was told to keep a lid on it until cleared to talk.
Turner, who retired from the RAF with a Wing Commander’s rank in 1995, first told his story to British UFO researcher Philip Mantle last November, after being informed by a superior that “nothing could be confirmed.” Mantle claims to have vetted Turner’s credentials.
In an e-mail to De Void, Turner, 64, says he wouldn’t hazard a guess as to the security rating of an event like this:
“As far as any MoD classification is concerned I have absolutely no idea what it would have been as it isn't the sort of thing they would have told me. Within the military there is something called the ‘Need To Know’ principle meaning if one needs to know one will be told. If one does not need to know one will not be told irrespective of ones security clearance.”
Furthermore, Turner says he’s lost touch with his military comrades on duty that day. Nor does he recall the exact date of the event. Clearly, more corroboration is needed here, says Nick Pope, who worked the MoD’s UFO desk from 1991-94.
“It doesn't surprise me that nobody has yet stepped forward to corroborate Alan Turner's story,” he states in an e-mail. “The Royal Air Force is an inherently secretive organization and the default position - especially for someone of Turner's age - is to say nothing. I suspect that behind the scenes, calls are being made and emails sent, as his contemporaries decide whether or not to break cover and say something - either to confirm or refute.”
Or, hey, maybe the MoD will defuse the whole thing by producing the documents during its next round of declassification. Oddsmakers, start your engines! -
Thursday, September 11, 2008, 12:57 pm
9/11's Potemkin Village
As the nation pauses for 9/11, let us also remember that, despite billions of dollars invested in a new security bureaucracy, American airspace is no more secure today than it was seven years ago.
Federal Aviation Administration radar records indicate that the U.S. Air Force was powerless to stop a mysterious aerial incursion from surging toward President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., in January. The 77-page analysis posted by the Mutual UFO Network in July has been neither challenged nor rebutted by military officials. Nor have any scientists emerged to take issue with any of the technical points raised by the MUFON study.
Nor have government authorities bothered to refute last year’s study assembled by the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. That 155-page report described how a UFO parked itself over the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s busy O’Hare International for 18 minutes while ground crews watched the object burn a circular hole in the cloud cover upon its departure.
Our government’s refusal to acknowledge these meticulously detailed reconstructions, along with the media’s failure to press for answers, creates a vacuum that can only be filled by vigilant taxpayers demanding accountability from this Potemkin Village. Maybe the citizens of Arizona are best positioned to elevate this conundrum into what it’s been all along — a political issue.
Long before the “Phoenix Lights” incident drew international attention in 1997, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater made repeated and now well-publicized attempts to flesh out the UFO mystery. But not even the lion of modern conservatism could get past the locked doors of Gen. Curtis LeMay, the former Air Force Chief of Staff.
Several months after countless Arizonans were startled by the massive UFO cruising their skies 11 years ago, Goldwater’s successor, John McCain, defended the military cover story that warplanes were conducting routine maneuvers that night in a letter to a constituent (at http://bp2.blogger.com/_PXeDY3KOwgA/R7XBpEcLPnI/AAAAAAAABic/XiYKW7nikQU/s1600-h/Phoenix+Lights+McCain+Ltr+Pg+(1).jpg):
“I believe that these exercises, culminating in the release of many flares simultaneously, provide a reasonable explanation for the appearance of the peculiar lights that evening.”
Several years later, however, when asked at a press conference about UFOs, McCain wasn’t laughing (see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4686586251683588658): “I think it’s of great interest. I would point out to you that there was a case a couple of years ago in Arizona of some lights that were seen over Arizona and that has never been fully explained.”
So which is it? What does McCain know?
In 2007, fellow Republican Fife Symington, the former Arizona governor who initially ridiculed the Phoenix Lights, admitted he’d seen the damned thing himself. He called it “enormous. It just felt otherworldly. In your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly."
It’s time for the “maverick” presidential candidate to figure out what’s going down in his own back yard. There’s never been a better moment for the folks who put McCain in office to demand a little more straight talk at the next town hall forum. -
Tuesday, September 09, 2008, 4:31 pm
Brits jeering extradition
Gary McKinnon, the computer geek who attained notoriety for hacking U.S. military and NASA files in search of classified UFO data in 2001-2002, just lost his final appeal in the European Court of Human Rights. That means he’s headed for America, where McKinnon is charged with inflicting nearly $1 million in damages to government property.
According to News.scotsman.com, the 42-year-old Glasgow native is “a broken man” over the prospects of spending decades in American prisons. Even though an excitable federal prosecutor described McKinnon as “the biggest military computer hacker of all time”, don’t expect this case — and the larger issue it raises about U.S. involvement with in UFOs — to hold the MSM. After all, Britney Spears is losing weight.
But that doesn’t mean the extradition isn’t creating a row in the UK, and you can almost hear the jeers at http://news.scotsman.com/uk/UFO-hacker-is-broken-man.4451456.jp. Some verbatim excerpts (with apologies to the English language):
“These idiot Americans should bl**dy well give this guys a medal, he single handed exposed thier flaws and made them look stoopid, big deal, they should have then employed him thus enabling their "top Secrets" to remain in safe hands. :
“(Americans) employed Nazi scientists, why can't they give this man a job.”
“I went to the protest yesterday because i am very concered at the continued erosion of our rights as British citizens, Successive goverments have sold out our rights to the EU and to the USA. This in effect is yet another treason agaist the crown as defined by the Treason fellony act of 1885 more info here http://www.iits.dircon.co.uk/newalliance/constlaw.htm”
“Scotland, stay proud and protect democracy and not the real losers!”
“What's even more amazing is that Gary managed to find what he was looking for under the influence of cannabis. NASA and the Pentagon must be embarrassed by their ridiculous lack of security.”
“Back in 2003 the British asked for two US A-10 pilots to attend a Coroners inquest (not a trial) into the friendly fire death of a British Soldier (Lance Corporal Matthew Hull). Then there was the friendly fire deaths of Flight Lieutenants Kevin Main and David Williams a Tornado crew shot down by the Americans, also the news reporter Terry Lloyd, whom US marines shot dead during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. How about the eight lads in the first gulf war? That's just a few mate but on all occasions the Americans have refused to co-operate in all the inquests by not making their people appear to answer questions. That's just answer questions, not stand trial. Now I know this hacking is a civilian thing mate but co-operation should work both ways.”
Appears extradition has touched a nerve in the Isles. -
Friday, September 05, 2008, 11:45 am
Bambi vs. The Volcano
The latest attempt to breach the stupefying Air Force info-lockout surrounding the Stephenville UFO comes from Texan Mark Murphy.
It probably won’t make any difference — bureaucracies from the Department of Homeland Security on down are treating Freedom of Information Act queries about this rip in the defense fabric like one-ply toilet paper. Still, it’s always instructive to see an elected official get stiffed by the government.
Murphy is a city councilman in Stephenville, which was buzzed by an enormous UFO on the evening Jan. 8. What made it more interesting were the F-16 jet fighters that apparently shadowed the intruder, which was flying without a transponder.
“Actually I was travelling from Glen Rose that evening very close to the main sighting, but I didn't see it,” Murphy states in an e-mail to De Void. “That night and for several nights afterward we could hear a lot of military activity, including helicopters. It was not all limited to that night only. We almost never hear military jets around here, maybe 4-5 times a year. There were dozens that week.”
Since the Air Force refuses to discuss the UFO, Murphy’s fishing for an explanation about why it sent its planes outside the military operating area on a “routine training mission” into civilian air space. Citing the disruptive nature of the unannounced and low-flying jets as well as “what some consider negative publicity for our town,” Murphy wants not only an accounting but evidence of corrective action, such as notifying local authorities prior to future routine training missions.
Murphy insists he’s acting as a private citizen, not in an official capacity. However, “Input from several residents prompted me to file the complaint,” he writes. “We aren’t a bunch of UFO conspiracy nuts down here. We want to know what was going on and why. Though we’re finally getting calmed down and back to normal. Personally, I’ve seen no evidence of space aliens, but I admit to the possibility.”
Odds on Murphy getting satisfaction from the USAF: Bambi vs. The Volcano. Still, it’s nice to see a public servant doing his job. Or trying to. -
Wednesday, September 03, 2008, 3:16 pm
Everything is broken
“Broken hands on broken ploughs/Broken treaties, broken vows,/Broken pipes, broken tools,/People bending broken rules./Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,/Everything is broken.”
And that was from 1989. Bob Dylan should try this gig. Nearly a month after requesting an Air Force response to Mutual UFO Network’s analysis of the mysterious events near Stephenville, Tex., on Jan. 8 (http://www.mufon.com/documents/MUFONStephenvilleRadarReport.pdf), De Void has officially slipped down the rabbit hole.
“You need to contact the FAA.” That’s the latest and apparently last word from Maj. Karl Lewis of the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base at Carswell Field. “I cannot answer for what the FAA reports.”
In August, De Void e-mailed a link to Lewis on the MUFON report, which used Federal Aviation Administration radar records to chart the flight patterns of F-16s and a UFO as the latter operated with impunity near restricted airspace.
While the FAA and the National Weather Service responded to MUFON’s Freedom of Information requests, the military has refused to release its own radar records, and redacted the flight logs of 10 jet fighters. The civilian data creates a clear timeline of everything that happened that evening, but Maj. Lewis won’t acknowledge the validity of the charts.
“Anybody can come up with a graph and symbols like that,” Lewis says. “We can’t speculate on the MUFON report because that’s speculative. We made our press release in January. You need to talk to the FAA.”
OK, Carswell’s January press release stated that it had erred when Lewis initially said there were zero military planes in the sky that night. The officially amended number was 10. But that press release didn’t address the UFO seen by civilian eyewitnesses on the ground. The MUFON report did, with radar returns that backed them up. It came out in July. How is a USAF press release issued in January relevant to new data made public in this summer?
“You need to contact the FAA,” Lewis says.
OK, just for the hell of it: Is Carswell Field responsible for policing the airspace around President Bush’s ranch in Crawford?
“I can’t speculate on our operational capabilities,” Lewis replies.
Oh, and by the way, just for the record, MUFON report co-author Robert Powell says he and colleague Glen Schulze ran their analysis past two FAA veterans before they published it. “But,” says Powell, “they wanted to remain anonymous because they didn’t want their involvement to affect their jobs.”
Wonderful!
But wait — De Void’s not done yet. Ever heard of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers? Their Web site bills them as “The world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology.”
Glen Schulze is a life member of the IEEE. Six weeks ago, he suggested De Void contact the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology in hopes of finding qualified professionals in the radar field who could independently assess the integrity of the MUFON report.
Six weeks after getting non-responses to e-mails and shrugging indifference from a PR flack at IEEE’s headquarters in New Jersey (De Void will not name names; she probably doesn’t get paid enough), the problem is obvious:
Everything is broken.
“We’ve become a society of sound bites,” says Powell from his home in Austin. “The media isn’t really interested in this story unless you’ve got people talking about what they saw in the sky and waving their hands around. If you’re just dealing with pure numbers and dry facts, you may as well forget it. I guess the best weapon to use against it (the MUFON report) is to ignore it.”
Everything is broken. Discount rates for China and Saudi Arabia. -
Wednesday, August 27, 2008, 1:06 pm
The big tent in Denver
Still scanning the headlines out of Denver to see if Jeff Peckman got his audience with Barack Obama or the Democratic Party’s platform committee.
Since the MSM has found time to name Florida as the Worst Dressed Delegation, and to turn a rum peddler dressed as Captain Morgan into a street phenom (http://www.khow.com/cc-common/political/article.html?feed=104707&article=4148526&lc=political), Peckman’s at-bat can’t be far behind.
You remember Peckman. You saw him on Letterman a couple of months ago. He wants to get Denver voters to approve an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission that would help Mile High City residents prepare for interaction with space aliens. On a meager $75K budget.
He’s posted the proposed ordinance online at http://www.extracampaign.org/uploads/EXTRA_BI_Denver_City_Atty_draft__web.pdf. De Void’s favorite provision — the part about coordinating “information and exhibits about extraterrestrial cultures and technology at Denver’s cultural and scientific facilities” — is so quixotic that De Void’s first thoughts are derivative: Oh my my, oh hell yes, honey put on your party dress!
Look, don’t underestimate this guy. He knows how to draw a crowd as well as Captain Morgan does. In May, Peckman and an alleged UFO contactee named Stan Romanek generated international headlines for staging a press conference around an authentic home video of a space alien peeking into Romanek’s bedroom. True, it kinda sucked that only a single grainy frame of that footage was released, but hey, a lot of media attended and Peckman wound up on Larry King.
So this week, The Fierce Urgency of Now is reportedly compelling Peckman to lobby the Dems to adopt a UFO disclosure plank. Maybe he could bring some pressure to bear by co-hosting another media event with Romanek and releasing another frame from that space alien film. After all, this issue is too important to be trivialized. -
Tuesday, August 26, 2008, 7:10 pm
Write to the general
It’s reassuring to know the U.S. Air Force is keeping tabs on everything. Take today’s in-house stories compiled online by the USAF News Agency.
There’s a nice feature on a member of the Peterson AFB family who helped Iraqis in Basra with contract paperwork to rebuild that city’s infrastructure. Randolph AFB is extending an Air Force scholarship to a Ukranian-born American teenager to attend medical college. There’s an update on Georgia relief efforts, about how Air Force and Navy transports are running tons of humanitarian supplies to that East European island of democracy.
Oh, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz spoke about leadership values at a conference in San Antonio yesterday. “We are Americans,” Schwartz said, “and we’re going to prove that our team is worthy of the trust that the American people, the joint team, the Congress and most of all our airmen and their families have placed in us.”
You name it, these guys are all over it — unless, of course, you’re asking about why they won’t release records concerning its F-16 sorties over the Stephenville-Dublin area of Texas on the evening of Jan. 8.
This is sounding like a broken record — sorry — but it’s been 16 days now since De Void first attempted to get a formal statement from the USAF on that event. No reason to belabor the details again here, you can scroll down for the history in previous posts.
One might think, given the Mutual UFO Network’s July release of FAA radar records indicating the USAF failed to react to a non-responsive bogey pressing down on President Bush’s Crawford ranch, Gen. Schwartz himself would be happy to refute that study and set the record straight. That would really — how’d he put it? — “prove that our team is worthy of the trust of the American people.”
The 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base at Carswell Field isn’t even bothering to return phone calls about it anymore. It’s easy to stonewall when the rest of the moribund MSM isn't curious about unidentified intruders preparing to violate restricted air space in this post-9/11 age.
So here’s a suggestion: Forget Carswell, it’s not their call. If you’re seriously interested in transparency, take a whopping seven minutes out of your busy day and write a note to Gen. Schwartz at the Pentagon. Snail mail makes a better impression than e-mail. Send it to Air Force Chief of Staff, 1670 Air Force Pentagon, Washington, DC 20330-1670.
Gen. Schwartz began thinking on his feet during the white-knuckle evacuation of Saigon in 1975. He’s the first cargo pilot ever appointed as USAF Secretary and the first non-fighter pilot to occupy that office since 1982. He’ll get to the bottom of this Stephenville thing if you're motivated enough to buy stamps. -
Monday, August 18, 2008, 12:45 pm
For candor, try history
Hey, kids: Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the Air Force not only acknowledged the reality of UFOs, but also the fact that its top-shelf warplanes were ineffectual at containing insolent bogeys routinely violating restricted American airspace without authorization.
These days, the USAF is forced to pretend it’s not happening and hope Americans won’t do anything drastic, like put pressure on their elected officials to squeeze the books. It’s a dysfunctional way of doing business, but the big bluff has been working well enough for nearly 40 years.
While French, British and a number of other foreign governments continue to dribble out bits and pieces of what their respective defense networks have been monitoring Up There, you have to go back half a century to find any redeeming candor among the American military establishment re: UFOs. If you’re unacquainted with the material, visit the library.
Go back to 1956 and “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” by former USAF Capt. Edward Ruppelt. Ruppelt has his share of critics charging the late director of Project Blue Book with back-channel deceptions of his own. Whatever. Try to imagine a contemporary USAF official starting off a book today with an admission that a jet fighter attempted, unsuccessfully, to blow one of those infuriating UFOs out of the sky with cannon fire.
The event occurred in the summer of 1952, when two F-86 Sabre jets were scrambled in response to a bogey bearing down on a U.S. air base, the identity of which Ruppelt declines to name. The pilot who got a visual described it as shaped “like a doughnut without a hole.” He opened fire on the thing from about 1,000 yards, then watched it leave him behind on a lighting-quick climb.
Adding another layer of intrigue was how the unit group commander ordered the incident report destroyed. The only reason Ruppelt found out was that an extra copy had been smuggled out to Air Technical Intelligence Center in Dayton, Ohio, which was charged with trying to figure this stuff out.
And those were the good ol’ days.
It’s now Day 8 in De Void’s efforts to get a USAF reply to the FAA radar records that tracked a UFO closing to within 10 miles of the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Jan. 8. Not even Houdini could hold his breath that long. -
Friday, August 15, 2008, 4:53 pm
USAF still silent on Stephenville
It’s been five quiet and patient days now since De Void began pressing the U.S. Air Force for a response to MUFON’s report on the UFO tracked by FAA radar near Stephenville, Tex., on Jan. 8.
The unenviable man in the middle is Maj. Karl Lewis, the media chief for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base at Carswell Field. On Monday, Lewis said he hadn’t read the analysis, released in July, so he couldn’t address its conclusions.
De Void sent him the link at http://www.mufon.com/documents/MUFONStephenvilleRadarReport.pdf, and followed up with phone calls. Lewis, who’s already been burned once by getting caught outside the information loop, said Wednesday he was kicking it upstairs for comment. On Friday, the major said he was still “hammering away” for a response.
De Void doesn’t expect much; a simple “no comment” would suffice. Government bureaucracies are all pretty much alike, and the Air Force’s public position that it no longer collects UFO data is like the Drug Enforcement Administration’s robotic insistence that marijuana is a Schedule I drug on par with heroin and crank. Never let massive evidence to the contrary alter policy positions that might affect federal funding.
The downside of such calcified obstinacy is that it makes loyal employees charged with disseminating official nonsense to the real world look worthless.
When Lewis was initially queried in January about witnesses seeing the UFO being pursued by jet fighters, he said they probably mistook the planes for airliners because the USAF had nothing in the sky that night. Nearly two weeks later, Lewis had to reverse himself and said there were 10 F-16s in the vicinity.
Because the MSM never follows up on UFOs, the USAF paid no penalty for its initial obfuscation. But last month, MUFON used civilian radar records to profile an aircraft without a transponder making a beeline for restricted airspace over President Bush’s “Western White House” in Crawford. FAA data indicates jet inteceptors never responded.
Even though civilian agencies had no trouble complying with MUFON’s Freedom of Information Act requests, the military refused to release uncensored flight logs of its planes, and claimed it couldn’t find its own radar records from that night.
Memo to the brass: Do the right thing. Issue a “no comment” press release on Stephenville and quit hanging people like Karl Lewis out to dry. -
Wednesday, August 06, 2008, 4:14 pm
Admiral: Never looked for UFO data
A former high-ranking military intelligence official rumored to have been snubbed in his attempts to obtain sheltered UFO data insists he never even bothered to look for it.
“Never,” retired Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson replied Tuesday when asked if he’d ever been barred from retrieving classified material, exotic or otherwise, during his career.
Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 when he agreed to meet at the Pentagon with advocates of UFO declassification. Among them, he confirms, was Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
The driving force behind that meeting was North Carolina UFO researcher and emergency-room doctor Steven Greer. Greer founded The Disclosure Project in an effort to grant amnesty to government whistle-blowers willing to violate their security oaths by sharing insider knowledge about UFOs.
At least seven years ago (http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc788.htm), Greer was telling audiences about extracting a pledge from Wilson during that meeting to investigate special access projects involving UFO technology. But shortly thereafter, Greer claimed Wilson reported that he didn’t have the proper security clearance to inspect those files.
As Greer informed a Portland, Ore., audience in 2001, Wilson said, “ ‘I am horrified that this is true. I have been in plenty of black projects, but when we tried to get into this one,’ he was told, and I quote, ‘Sir, you do not have a need to know.’ The head of intelligence Joint Staffs. You don't have a need to know. Neither did the CIA director, and neither did the president.”
This story has been circulating on the Internet ever since, and made it into Greer’s book “Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge,” last year. But the thing didn’t sprout legs until Mitchell began discussing the meeting during what turned out to be a media blitz in July.
Mitchell avoided all mention of Wilson’s name, but in a July 4 appearance on "Larry King Live," the moonwalker told CNN audiences he’d learned the admiral “had found the people responsible for the cover-up and for the people who were in the know and were told, I'm sorry, admiral, you do not have need to know here and so, goodbye.”
Now an executive with a Minnesota-based defense contractor, Wilson told De Void he accepted Mitchell’s 1997 request “because he was a former astronaut and maybe had more credibility than some person off the street.” Wilson says he doesn’t remember who else attended that meeting, but he admitted “a certain amount of curiosity” about allegations of deep-black UFO projects.
“What is true is that I met with them,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “What is not true is that I was denied access to this material, because I didn’t pursue it. I may have left it open with them, but it was not especially compelling, not compelling enough to waste my staff’s time to go looking for it.”
Mitchell told De Void he never heard directly from Wilson after their initial meeting, but he says he trusts the veracity of the unnamed sources who told him of Wilson’s inability to penetrate security.
Mitchell said he was "shocked" by Wilson’s response to De Void, but added, “I do not wish to engage him on this matter.”
Steven Greer refused to back down.
“I was there and know what was said,” he stated in an e-mail. “I was also informed prior to the meeting that, after sending him a secret document with UFO-related code names and numbers, that he located one of the compartments but was specifically denied access to the operation.”
