UFO Encounter #293

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ISSUE 293 JUNE-JULY 2017 INSIDE:

70Years of the FLYING SAUCER Nazca Uncovered UFOs and Romanian Fighter Pilots

Daniel Ramirez

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UFO ENCOUNTER


UFO ENCOUNTER ISSUE 293 JUNE-JULY 2017

59 YEARS IN PUBLICATION

the COMMITTEE public meetings President

: Sheryl Gottschall

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Public Meetings are held on the last Friday of every month [except December] at 7.00pm sharp at the Kenmore Library, Meeting Room 3, Kenmore Village Shopping Centre, 9 Brookfield Road, Kenmore.

2017 meeting dates:

Friday June 30 2017, 7.00pm Friday July 28 2017, 7.00pm Friday August 25 2017, 7.00pm Friday September 29 2017, 7.00pm Friday October 27 2017, 7.00pm Meeting topics are advertised on our website, on Facebook, or how about joining our email list for all the latest updates? Email us at info@uforq.asn.au for more information.

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phone: [07] 3376 1780 email: info@uforq.asn.au web: www.uforq.asn.au UFO ENCOUNTER


from the

EDITOR

Believe it or not, this past month marked the 70th anniversary of two of the most seminal events in UFO history – the Kenneth Arnold ‘flying saucers’ and the Roswell UFO crash. Back in June 1947, when UFOs were hitting the headlines with alarming regularity – and an even more alarming reality – it must have seemed like the world was coming to a very certain demise. World War II had ended just two short years earlier with the deployment of the most destructive weapon ever to have been used by man, and the global population was bound tightly in the grip of post-war trauma, living in a world full of suspicion and doubt. It was bad enough that people were feeling threatened by their neighbours, but now, with the advent of the ‘flying saucer,’ a different kind of threat had reared its ugly head. When Kenneth Arnold’s ‘saucers’ hit the American headlines, the military must have thought the whole WWII shebang was starting all over again. Suspicion was rife that the objects Arnold saw were more terrestrial in nature – secret Russian or German aircraft encroaching on US airspace. But the crash of the Roswell UFO must surely have sucker-punched that idea out of the ring. The world suddenly had to re-evaluate – not only what was going on in our skies, but what must have been, by extrapolation, going on in our universe. Defence against an ET threat was no doubt instantly on the conference table, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Ronald Reagan’s ‘star wars’ project got a foothold in both space and the human psyche. Ostensibly the ‘star wars’ project was designed to defend the USA against more earthly threats, but all those YouTube videos of satellites shooting at UFOs tell us otherwise. Fast forward to 2017, and to the 70th anniversary of the ‘flying saucer,’ and we discover that the US military now has two dedicated combat units stationed out in Colorado, somewhat prosaically christened the ‘space aggressors’ (see article page 16). The 26th and 527th Space Aggressor Squadrons’ main job (they say) is to prepare the rest of the US Army for a ‘war in space.’ Now, we shouldn’t get too excited about this statement, as we’re being told that this ‘war in space’ is going to be against a more earthly superpower – China, for example, because China is advancing rapidly with its space exploration and apparently that constitutes a threat. But China is still a long way away from a ‘war in space’ (so far as we know). Russia is similarly cited as being a potential threat, but that threat isn’t now, and it isn’t even likely (no matter what CNN and NBC keep on telling us). So what, then, are the 26th and 527th Space Aggressor Squadrons for? (And please note the interesting choice of title. Not ‘space defenders.’ Not ‘space monitors.’ But ‘space aggressors!’) The Vice Admiral of Stratcom (US Strategic Command) told a gathering in March this year that, ‘While we’re not at war in space, I don’t think we could say we’re exactly at peace, either.’ What, exactly, does that mean? Yes, one day there may be threats to the global electronic infrastructure, which depends heavily on satellites. Take out those satellites and our systems go down – a country (or even the planet) could easily be crippled by such an event. One of the things the ‘space aggressors’ are doing is training the military to deal with life ‘without access to space’ – which apparently means life without access to Google Maps.

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It’s interesting that the military is preparing for such an eventuation. Are they worried China will take out our communications systems? Or could it be that they have been watching too many episodes of ‘Doomsday Preppers’ and are concerned about ‘end time’ scenarios – solar flares, pole shifts and other disruptions to our communications and power supplies. Such events could well destroy our entire way of living and revert us back to talking to each other via tin cans on strings... if any of us can remember how to make string, that is. The funniest (unintentionally funny, since it’s probably just me laughing) part of the article is when a certain General Hyten talks about a training exercise entitled ‘A Day Without Space.’ Apparently one day, at the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the military replicated what would happen if US Forces were ‘deprived of satellite communications and global positioning data.’ In the General’s own words, the outcome ‘was not good. We were not ready to do that.’ This is what made me laugh. Old-schoolers would have made mincemeat out of General Hyten’s troops if they had been there, since they can read paper maps, use a compass, and get by very nicely without mobile phones, thank you very much. The young folk of today – up to and including the latest generation of military personnel, it seems – apparently can’t function without Siri glued to their ears. Perhaps the war in space, when it comes, will need to be fought by people over 50? During our last great war, carrier pigeons were considered one of the most efficient means of communication behind enemy lines. A few years later a UFO crashed at Roswell, the debris of which provided the impetus that led us to the technologicallydependent state we find ourselves in today – and in one fell swoop deprived a million pigeons of their jobs. Are we standing on the brink of another great revolution – one that will take us back to the stone age, and one for which the US military is already preparing itself for? Before anybody panics, the total collapse of our technological world won’t be all bad… It’s true we’ll have to re-learn how to write (using our hands), how to find our way to parties without a GPS (dust off those old street maps, people), and look at each other when we talk instead of staring down at our phones (because, you know, there’s always somebody more interesting who might be needing our attention). But also, and most importantly, and after 70 years of patient waiting, the great war in space is going to give all those unemployed pigeons something useful to do….

lee

...this issue UFO Reports . . . 4 Darwin: 1955 . . . 6 Spaceship Earth . . . 7 UFO Encounters of Romanian Fighter Pilots . . . 9 Crop Circles . . . 12 70 Years of the Flying Saucer . . . 13 Unearthing Naszca . . . 15 Not the Headlines . . . 18 UFO ENCOUNTER


UFO reports Glasshouse Mountains, April 24 2017, 11.05pm

Marcoola, Sunshine Coast, 29 May 2017

At around 11:05pm last night I gazed out the window to the southwest and saw this standout swirling collection of very distant lights merged into a star shape (a bit larger than a normal star in the sky) to the southwest above my neighbour’s roofline - something different to the background constellations. I first thought it was a prominent pulsating star, but the fact that it was moving very erratically really grabbed my attention. I watched these suspended lights at some distance dance, pulsate, hover, zip back and forwards in a narrow track between the sky and the Glasshouse Mountains for a good 30 minutes before it sank below my view. I used my neighbour’s roofline as a reference point. I thought that this was incredible and could not believe what I was witnessing. It reminded me of a firefly dance.

A woman was outdoors sitting on the balcony of her apartment, five storeys high. She saw lights in the shape of a triangle moving across the sky in a straight line in a southwest direction, at a very low height of 11 storeys of her building.

It looked like a reconnaissance mission to me. As though the “craft” was monitoring a specific area and observing a set grid boundary. It was gradually sinking to the south towards NSW as it “worked” the sky, then the object would zip from the left to the right etc, but remain within a “boundary.” Incredibly way too fast (amazing agility) through the sky to be an aircraft or helicopter or anything manmade. Very erratic/fantastic shuffling speeds. No noise. I rushed outside in the crystal clear starry night to follow up and get a clearer view, and it was clear to me that this was something really extraordinary. I was witnessing a UFO. I swear it. There was no other reason for it - something I could not identify. I tried to record it on my mobile, but the light emanating from it was too low to capture it.

Withcott, 29 May 2017, 4.00am I looked out the window around 4.00am on the morning of about Monday May 29 – the morning of the widespread fog. An object with an egg-shaped point was pointed back more away from me to the SE. The lights out my way were very bright, so I got my camera and set the focus in and put the camera against the window and pressed the button. It took a couple of seconds to go off----but I had forgotten to shut down the flash. When I looked back at the UFO, it was just disappearing. I thought the cloud would go but it was the very widespread fog arriving. Looks like I have missed again, but I will take the chip to a photography shop to see if they can blow it up --- but I think I was just a second or two too late. My first UFO sighting came from my neighbour who in 1922 saw a UFO take off with a great roar and flame streaming out the back. It sped up and kept going up until out of sight. The poor man told no-one until he heard me spouting about the one I saw in 1967. Look how they have developed in almost 100 years.

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Witness description: “This thing, whatever it was, flew directly overhead. It was so very low, and I could see the lights were in a kind of channel and were made up of two parts that fitted together in a tessellation. It was not really visible apart from the underside from which I could see it was a large triangle shape. Our balcony looks out over the ocean. There were ships on the horizon and they had their lights on. The triangular lights came from the north direction at a diagonal. The object itself was silent, that is what struck me as being weird because it was very close and relatively low in the sky. Immediately after it passed overhead there was a strange sound -- a lowish rumble not very loud. There were also some light beam flashes but they seem to come from the area of the ships so may not be connected. When the lights passed overhead I could see them very clearly.”

Gold Coast, 3 June 2017 I have just witnessed strange lights in the sky at the Gold Coast and I am very curious about what they are. I was on my bike heading home to Mermaid Waters, when I saw like a bolide in the sky. It was like a very slow but very bright shooting star, with a sparkling trail. I thought I was very lucky and stopped to watch it. Then a second one appeared, very close to the first one. Then I thought it was fireworks but without sounds or colours and too high. When I saw a third one appearing, I took my phone out of my pocket to film it. What I saw next was four bright lights appearing successively. They seemed to be located above the ocean and moving north. I filmed them. I first thought of a natural thing, but their trajectories are quite erratic. Solved: A clip of this UFO sighting was posted on YouTube by the witness (see link below), however it turned out to be Gold Coast skydivers with flares performing at the ‘Chuting Star’ skydiving display for Seafire 2017. Witness footage: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SSkDplsRCQ4 Photo courtesy of Gold Coast Skydive https://www.facebook. com/GCSKYDIVE/

UFO ENCOUNTER


Brisbane, 8 June, 2017 Around 20-30 minutes out of Brisbane, coming from Adelaide, I saw an ongoing series of lights at ground level following along with our plane for almost 5 minutes. The lights were huge, easily seen from 30,000+ feet and just shot on and off like a headlight but I’m guessing they must have been the size of football fields. The light pattern was following along in line with the plane, but at ground level, kind of like a Christmas tree pattern, it would scatter along the ground in various directions and then it would finish in a giant single light burst, then disappear for maybe 30 seconds and the pattern would start all over again, following along with the plane the whole time. I calculated an 860km/hr flight speed -- whatever this was could not have been cars or street lights as it stretched almost 70km, the size of the lights from that altitude were also very large, many times larger than a street or stadium light normally appears from the air. From my best guess it was tracking us on the south side of Warwick, possibly all the way from Sundown National Park to Passchendaele State Forest, but it could also have been less likely on the Goomburra northern side of Warwick. Attached is a flight map [above] of the exact path our plane took and a quick drawing of sort of what the light pattern looked like.

www.paradigmshift.com.au

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UFO ENCOUNTER


DARWIN 1955 Whilst undertaking a survey of UFORQ’s sixty years of sightings records during 2016, a small number of unusual reports from interstate came to light. Not being reported from Queensland, we could not include these reports in our 60-year retrospective of UFO activity in our great state, but we present them for you now....

Darwin, 1955: Myself and a friend were fishing on the Darwin wharf for barramundi.

I worked at the time for Burns Philp, who owned the wharf, and one of our ships was in, and some of its crew were also fishing from the wharf. Someone said, ‘Jesus, what’s that?’ We looked to the bow, and then up – directly above us and about the size of a full moon and surrounded by light at the edges but with a dark centre, was this thing. We simply watched it for a few minutes, and then the lights changed colour and it slowly got bigger and bigger. It got as big as a room, and then as big as a house, when someone said ‘it’s coming down on top of us!’ My friend and I galvanised into action and raced to our car parked beside the wharf building. It wouldn’t start. The thing made no sound whatever as it stopped, suspended in air. It was round and huge. Then it slid away, like on a breeze, over to the middle of the harbour and then stopped.

For some minutes it sort of tilted towards us and we could see the top storeys – ‘we’ meaning us and several guys on the ship.

There were three storeys [on the object], and the two upper ones had windows right around. They were lighted, and after several minutes something could be seen moving inside by the changing density of the light, just exactly like seeing people in a lighted house move past the windows. No-one said ‘aliens’ or ‘UFOs’ or anything. I wouldn’t think anyone knew the words back then. This thing remained motionless for 10 minutes or so, and then it tilted another way as if showing off. One of the boys on the ship said ‘get the camera,’ and I imagine they did. The thing then straightened up and lights came on on the under-edge of it, and it moved to a neck of land across the harbour. It didn’t rise perceptibly because it barely diminished in size. At this point I got the car started and raced up the wharf and into town. People were out everywhere staring at the UFO. At 3.00am the next morning, or near enough, I was told the object was watched as it moved over the RAAF base at Longshore. All told it was seen in Darwin skies for 1 hour and 20 minutes before it took off in the direction of the Arafura Sea. They had photos for the paper as well, but it was said there was no proof. The RAAF had scrambled some Sabre jets to for a look – at that point in time our entire Northern Defence consisted of 5 Sabre jets. The entire town was agog, and the next day articles in the paper confirmed my sightings and with the promise of ‘more tomorrow.’ Tomorrow never came.

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UFO ENCOUNTER


the evolution of a phenomenon... There is a definite advantage to remaining in a field of study for a long time, in my case nearly thirty years, because not only do you see the evolution of information in your area of interest, you also witness the changing perspective by others of what you’re studying. The UFO phenomenon is no exception to this. When I entered the UFO arena in 1988, it was after I had been introduced to the classic contactee literature a few years previously by my late father-in-law who had seen George Adamski [image right] speak at the Brisbane City Hall in 1959. Adamski’s books along with Daniel Fry, Elizabeth Klarer, Howard Menger, George Hunt Williamson etc, lined my bookshelves, and still do. Rightly or wrongly they have become the classics that will always have a special place in my heart, but more importantly, it was these classic accounts that led me to believe they had buried within their pages a secret handbook for dummies on how to create an advanced society. You see, after reading them I came to believe that if we could have contact with peaceful, advanced alien civilizations who seemed to have little health problems, no need for money, and was self-ruled by people of strong social and environmental values, then the human race might have a chance at learning how to do the same. In my way of thinking, those books were of great import to the UFO community and added the soul back into UFO research, which was fast slipping away in the call for a scientific approach. Not surprisingly, when I raised those cases for discussion on various discussion email lists, which were popular prior to the social media forums of today, I was howled down by skeptics, nuts-and-bolts researchers, and downright disinformation agents! This group knowingly, or unknowingly, had become the conspirators of the

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“contactee taboo” that had washed not-so-silently over these cases from the past. So, sadly, these cases have disappeared into the annals of UFO history, forgotten by our modern UFO initiates who remain unaware of them, many of who have now become enamoured with the socalled Starchild culture. So when I read ‘Interrupted Journey’ by John G. Fuller, George Adamski and the amazing account of the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, my eyes were opened to the greater aspects of the UFO phenomenon. I soon started hearing more about these types of accounts first-hand from witnesses, followed by the publication of books about similar experiences by pioneering investigators Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs. Those alien abduction stories left me chilled, confused, and angry that these experiences were taking place. For ten long years through the 1990s I heard first-hand from many hundreds of witnesses who came forward to our organisation reporting similar experiences, and frankly I didn’t know what to think anymore. People being abducted by aliens and having not only tissue samples removed, but unborn foetuses? Not to mention the X-rated reports of humans forced to have sex with some of these aliens, or in some cases with each other! It was absolutely outrageous in the true literal sense, and many UFO researchers refrained from reporting these cases due to their own embarassment, bias, or worse,

UFO ENCOUNTER


concern over the loss of their own credibility. The UFO phenomenon then took another turn around the year 2000, when witnesses began reporting mixed motif cases. These often involved the typical alien abduction experience, but now also included contact with other races of ETs that was of a more positive nature. Some witnesses felt that the positive ET contact was to Elizabeth Klarer intervene in their abduction events to possibly undo, repair or heal what the abducting little “grey aliens” were doing. This is when the confusion factor really hit the fan, and was yet another point of embarkation for the age old question of whether ET contact was indeed good or bad. After that emergence the field of UFO research became even more spiritualised, entangling it in what we see today with very little attempt to establish evidence, and an ever-growing push to perceive all ET contact as positive, enlightening, and for the benefit of humanity. Well I don’t share that warm, fuzzy, feel-good approach to alien contact like some do in the UFO community. My perspective is driven by my experience of interviewing that overwhelming number of witnesses who reported alien abduction experiences during that bizarre decade of the 90s. Since those times I have as yet to find anywhere near the amount of positive reports to match the numbers of frightening and traumatising cases of people that I interviewed. They are but a fraction in comparison.

Over time I’ve witnessed a disturbing push from researchers like Dr Richard Boylan, the late Dolores Cannon, Barbara Lamb, Mary Rodwell and the new organisation F.R.E.E., to almost, but not quite, deny all those hundreds of thousands of alien abduction cases that were reported during that enduring decade. Those cases will never be forgotten, at least in my mind, and I guess in that way I’ve become an advocate for the witnesses I interviewed who were left distraught and desperate to reclaim their lives and reintroduce some sort of normalcy to it. For that I make no excuses because as a researcher I feel I must represent the content of those cases as honestly as I can, and in doing so bring some balance to our perspective of what is taking place. The UFO phenomenon is a real mystery in the truest sense of the word. I wish I had the answers but I don’t. I only have inklings, clues and guesses that I see in the mirage of distant horizons. Clarity is elusive and witness testimony difficult to comprehend. The most important tool we have for discovering the reality of what is taking place is to keep balance in our investigations, take an eclectic approach, and make room in our mind for new information as it arises. It will emerge as it always has, calling us to grow into new questions. The challenge will be to prepare ourselves for the answers that they bring.

Sheryl Gottschall Sheryl is a UFO and paranormal researcher who has had her own ET contact experience and UFO sightings, as well as a near death experience and many other experiences with the paranormal. She is also the president of UFO Research Queensland Inc and you can contact her on 07 3376 1780 or info@uforq.asn.au. You can also message her via Facebook.

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UFO ENCOUNTER


UFO Encounters of Romanian

Fighter Pilots Dan D.Farcaş PhD

In Romania, military aviators have also had UFO encounters, like their counterparts in other countries. And in the same way as everywhere else, they have refrained from commenting on these incidents in public. This explains the fact that we know of only a few such cases, all taking place before 1993, and reported by military pilots – all of whom had retired a long time ago. I summarize in the following some of these cases as they have been reported directly to me by the winesses in question. Captain Commander Mihai Bărbuţiu, a retired pilot born in 1929, had been a military pilot since 1951. On a summer evening in 1957 he was appointed leader of a flight at the airport of CaracalDeveselu, used as a backup for the main airport of Craiova, just in case of any operational problems. At one point, he was informed that an elusive unidentified target was seen on radar which was appearing and disappearing. To intercept it, a MiG-17 fighter took off from Craiova, with the pilot Captain Adalbert Bodiş (now a retired commander who lives in Cluj-Napoca). Bărbuţiu could hear his colleague reporting that he had located the target on the radar and, after a while, that he could no longer see it. At one point, Bărbuţiu and a sergeant saw an unidentified flying object coming towards them from the village of Deveselu, above the railway. Thinking that it could be a foreign military aircraft, both of them hid under the “station” (a flight management point) in a six wheeler truck parked near the runway. They saw on the ground a circular light with a diameter of about fifty to one hundred meters. It was an unreal light, so powerful “you could see every blade of grass.” It was impossible to see the shape of the source of light, as if you were looking at a projector. The light lasted about 20 seconds. Afterwards, the object departed to the east. The pilot could still not distinguish its shape. Then he announced on his

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radio to his colleague Bodiş that the object had passed right over the airport, heading for the city of Slatina. Bodiş tried to find it without success. Nobody asked Bărbuţiu to make an official report, but the witnesses were advised to not discuss the incident. In 1958 Bărbuţiu was moved to Timişoara, to a fighterinterceptor regiment. Here he went through various roles until he became squadron commander. One night in 1966-1967 he was on a flight from Cluj-Napoca to Oradea, with two MiG-19 supersonic fighters. At one point, Bărbuţiu saw an object in front of him. He saw the aircraft of his colleague, Colonel Gheorghiţă, on radar, but not the object. Then Bărbuţiu asked Gheorghiţă if he could see the target on his radar. Gheorghiţă answered that he could see it visually but not on the radar. Then the command station asked them what they could see. Bărbuţiu said: “There’s an object here that we don’t see on radar, but we can see it with our naked eye. We don’t know what it could be.” He noted later that he could only see two lights with an alternating red and green flash, with a deep dark red light at the top and an unnatural green light at the bottom. It could not be mistaken for an airplane.After that incident Bărbuţiu was called to Bucharest, where he signed an undertaking that he would not disclose anything of what he saw. In those days – he said – things were very serious with military secrets. The next incident was during the night a month or so later. Two MiG-19 fighters performed, at 12,500 meters, a routine exercise. Bărbuţiu was the “hunter,” to intercept his comrade-in-arms Dumitru Răducanu, (then a major; deceased in 2015). Finishing the exercise, the two fighters headed, in formation, to Timişoara airport. A dense mass of clouds, from 6500 to 10500 meters, was

UFO ENCOUNTER


below them. It was also a full moon. At one point he saw before him, with the naked eye, at a great distance, a curious looking flying object. The pilot said nothing, because he remembered the unpleasant discussions after the previous sighting. When his colleague reported seeing something, the command from the ground asked – “What’s there?” So, as Bărbuţiu was commanding, he reported that it was an unidentified object. The ground radars saw only the two Romanian military aircraft. The flight command asked the pilots to try to force the unknown object to land. Bărbuţiu said he did not have enough fuel. Then Răducanu received an order to fire a warning volley to intercept the unidentified aircraft. Bărbuţiu, curious, moved towards the object to try and get a closer look at it. He stated that when he passed under it, he was surprised that he flew for ten or fifteen seconds in the shadow cast by the object. He felt also an “electric pressure,” as when you are close to a very strong electric field. The jet’s navigation devices went haywire. He declared that “It was as huge as a football field. It was grey in colour, circular in shape, had no wings and no portholes… I said myself that it must be an object from another planet.” Then Bărbuţiu began his descent. He went out of the clouds at about 6500 meters. Răducanu said he armed the guns and approached the object, preparing to fire a volley to force it to follow him. But as he reported this to the ground command, the target disappeared. When Bărbuţiu, by chance, looked back, he saw that the object was now following him. As he remembers, he was scared to death. He automatically reported that the object was nearby. Then he received an order to try to fall behind it and to force it to come into land. As he recounts “I said to myself that if this object had technology so advanced, that if I would now arm the cannon and shoot, then my projectile could explode in the pipe. So, I decided to arm the cannon later perhaps when I will be closer to the airport, just in case.” At some point, the object passed in front of him and began to climb toward Serbia. In an instant Bărbuţiu started to climb with it. When he reached 10,000 meters and looked down, he was just above Belgrade and the Danube. The object was in front of him but he reported that he was low on fuel and so he turned and landed his aircraft.

Fighter pilots from Regiment 57

While he was in pursuit of the object he had taken some photographs with a machine-gun camera, but they were confiscated by the counterintelligence officer. Once again, the two pilots had to undersign a commitment that they would not talk and would not tell anyone about the incident. Another case, where there was physical evidence as well, occurred in 1970 or ‘71. Based also in Timişoara, Bărbuţiu was on a mission with a MiG-21. While preparing for landing, at around midnight, at an altitude of 500 meters he entered into an area of strong and unexplainable turbulence. Suddenly he felt a blow to his aircraft and saw a bright light. His first guess was that he had collided with something, and he reported to the command post that he would eject. But when he saw that the plane continued to fly and respond to his commands, he instead decided that he would try to land. He had no idea what had happened; no object was seen on radar or with the naked eye, and he landed without any problems. Meanwhile, because of the incident, there were on site the division commander General Puiu, the chief engineer of the regiment, the division chief engineer, a doctor, an ambulance etc., as happens in such situations. The pilot descended, as usual, from the left-hand side of the plane, where he was expected. General Puiu remarked only that the additional, large, fuel tank, already empty, which should be under the belly of the plane, was missing. But after the general left they discovered that, on the right hand side, the rocket launcher from the embedding of the plane was bent about 30 degrees, and the other, on the same wing, at about 15 degrees. The launchers had no rockets, but they are steel girders a meter and a half long, made of a special alloy of chromium-vanadium. It would have been a huge shock to bend them, probably the same shock that produced the release of the extra fuel tank. The fuel tank was retrieved, after a while, in a sunflower field, nestled in the ground without a scratch. Nobody offered any explanation as to what had collided with the plane. Another interesting case was when, in 1992, during a November night, three military helicopters were recalled from an exercise when they encountered an unidentified aerial phenomenon near the city of Buzău.

Sketch of the UFO pilot Bărbuţiu encountered

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The helicopters had to accomplish a night flight in a triangle, from Buzău to Urziceni city and to return after passing over Mizil town. The weather was ideal for flying, with an unusually clear sky. At first, they were flying at an altitude of 100 meters and at a speed of 150 km/h. All seemed to be running smoothly and the pilots of the three helicopters

UFO ENCOUNTER


occasionally looked out to view the cars circulating at that time on the European road 85 to Urziceni. Retired Colonel Marcel Smoleanu, today deputy chairman of the Buzău branch of the veteran pilots association ARPIA, led the first helicopter. He reports that: “It was an easy task for training. The helicopters had no weapons. On each helicopter was a pilot, a co-pilot and a technician. We left at around 22.00, expecting to return at around midnight. It was an uneventful flight which allowed us all to relax. We listened quietly to some soft music playing on a radio station.” “At one point I froze with my hand on the stick, when I suddenly saw approaching from the left a bright red sphere. It was huge, with an estimated diameter of nearly 20 meters. There was no change of colour, no flickering, no noise and no trail of smoke. The object began to fly in parallel with the helicopters.” “I tried to explain to myself what it could be and, at one point, I thought that it was possible that this strange object was not manufactured on earth. I also asked my colleagues if they could see the same thing and they confirmed they could. I was so shocked by what happened to us, that I could not speak,” said Smoleanu. “I was mesmerized. Later I thought it must be a UFO, something from another world.” The pilot did not look at the helicopter’s instruments, so he does not know if the object interfered with them or not. However, he said, the engine was not disturbed in any way and worked perfectly.Frightened by the unusual experience, Smoleanu asked the pilots in the other helicopters: “Do you see what I see?” They confirmed they did. Then, they obtained the confirmation of the military bases nearby that there was nothing in the air except them. After tens of seconds in which the pilots did not know how to react, the object made some unusual manoeuvres. “At one point, our unknown object had accelerated sharply and reached an incredible speed. It went suddenly from flying next to us and – making an impossible turn, at an angle of 90 degrees, without reducing speed – it cut across our path. It entered our flight path so I therefore made a turn to the left and I slowed almost to a hover. After this manoeuvre our object disappeared,” adds Smoleanu. “As suddenly as it appeared, it was gone.” It was there one minute and gone the next. The flight exercise was stopped immediately. The school Commander reported to General Alexandru everything. The next morning the General said to the crew members: “gentlemen, watch what you say, because you have not seen anything last night! Do you understand? You have seen nothing…” and made a gesture as though he would pull a zipper over your mouth. Smoleanu was to break his silence about this incident in an interview in 2012 with journalist Florin Mitu, from Buzău, and after a while told the story to the investigators at ASFAN. In the fall of 2013, Florin Mitu identified and interviewed a second key witness, Lieutenant Colonel, now retired, Doru Drăgoi, who was shift manager that night at the command point at the military airfield Buzău. He remembers that he was called in on an emergency by a Captain who was “at the tube” (radar screen), when he saw an unidentified target very close to the three helicopters. “That object appeared different from our helicopters and much bigger. After I saw that the UFO was close to possibly colliding with our helicopters we informed the

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flight leader, demanding to bring the helicopters in to land.” After getting some additional information, the flight leader agreed to do that. Afterwards, Doru Drăgoi was called once again to look at the radar screen. There were more than ten targets, making strange movements in the Mărăcineni–Săpoca area (several kilometres north-east of Buzău). They flew as if they were helicopters in a line until they reached Săpoca, then, one by one, they each made a 180 degree turn and then disappeared . “Witnesses later joked that they had a UFO base at Săpoca.” There was yet another surprise. Doru Drăgoi said: “When I came out of the command post, I saw the clear sky, the stars and bright objects crossing from east to west at an amazing speed. I knew from the flight information that no earthly object was flying there at that time.” A few days later a Major from the higher Command came and wanted to see the records of the radar. Then he said that if something similar happens in future, they should immediately report directly to Bucharest, “Because these objects toy with us too much….” The list of military pilot UFO encounters is more extensive than I can outline here. In my book “UFOs Over Romania” you can find other accounts, including a UFO above the Alexeni Air Force base in 1984; a huge, V-shaped UFO that flew over the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Force base in 1989, with tens of witnesses; and a Romanian “MiG-21 Lancer” fighter hit by “UFOs” in 2007. In the same book there are accounts about the sightings and opinions of UFOs of the late Doru Davidovici, a fighter pilot and bestselling writer, or of Dumitru Prunariu, a Romanian astronaut and a three star general. Artwork by Daniel Ramirez; photos courtesy of Dan D.Farcas.

Dan D. Farcaş, born in 1940, graduate in mathematics and physics and a PhD in mathematics and computer sciences, was a computer specialist at the Polytechnic University of Timisoara (1962-67), where he made the first computer simulations of neural networks in Romania. From 1991 to 2010 he was director, deputy director or senior expert of the Computing and Health Statistics Centre of Ministry of Health Romania, temporary advisor to the World Health Organisation (1997-2001) and expert in Health for Romania to the European Commission (2007-2010). Since 2013 he has been a member of the Committee for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the Romanian Academy. In 2011 he became president of the Romanian Association for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (ASFAN). Farcaş has published over 25 books in the fields of computer science, mathematics, ufology, and memoirs. He has published over 1000 articles and has participated in numerous radio and TV shows, most of them related to UFOs. His new book UFOs OVER ROMANIA is out now on Amazon. http://flyingdiskpress.blogspot.co.uk/

UFO ENCOUNTER


Crop Circles Sheryl Gottschall

...their enigma remains Ever since my friend and crop circle researcher, Leonie Starr, first visited Australia in 1990 and gave a presentation about the crop circle phenomenon at one of our meetings, crop circles have remained as intriguing to me as they ever were. Something magical switched on inside many of us at that time, capturing our imaginations when we gazed upon them, even if we didn’t know why. I’ve often looked back to that time and tried to analyse exactly why their images drew us like moths to a flame. What were they? Were they a means of communication from extraterrestrials? Were they communications from ‘mind-at-large’, our collective consciousness? Or could the magic they cast upon all who gazed at them be as simple an explanation that they were images which we know speak to our creative unconscious nature? It’s really hard to know, but what I do know is that when our organisation has manned a stand at various festivals, it’s the crop circle images that first draw people fifty metres across a crowded space, bringing them to a halt as they survey the photos of these enigmatic formations. Yes, they certainly weave their spell upon us mere mortals. In the early days of the phenomenon, UFO researchers became very interested in crop circles as they presented mostly as simple circles with a swirled pattern, not unlike the classic “saucer nests” found in Australia during the 1960s. Then during the 1990s we saw the simple crop circles begin to evolve into glyph-like patterns, and after some years began to develop into more complicated shapes representing fractal geometry. Then we had the resurgence of the circular formations but this time containing many circles and introducing complexity that sometimes requires mathematical genius to understand them.

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So it came as some surprise that during the height of the phenomenon in the 1990s, researcher Colin Andrews, along with others, made the public statement that 80% of crop circles were manmade. However that statement didn’t seem to make too much difference, because for those seriously studying the phenomenon, it was the remaining 20% that kept us fascinated and have continued to do so ever since. Many have raised questions as to the origins of crop formations – are they made by extraterrestrials, non-human intelligences, Gaia herself, or humanity’s collective consciousness? These are questions that we have struggled to answer and there still remains no definitive understanding, despite our own assurity at times. Down the years we’ve seen the evolution of formations from simple circles to glyphs and back to simple circles, but now with complex patterns seemingly containing significant meanings. So what is going on? Well I just can’t say, but they continue to be beautiful and a delight to look at, so I’ve gathered together a small collection of some of the formations from this year’s season to enjoy for yourself. A huge thank you goes out to the Crop Circle Connector for posting reports of these formations year after year on their website. To help them to continue to report on these formations I would urge you to become a member via their website at www.cropcircleconnector.com.

UFO ENCOUNTER


SEVENTY YEARS OF THE FLYING

SAUCER would you like milk with that?

lee paqui

The era of the flying saucer began seventy years ago, on June 24 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold observed nine strange objects flipping ‘like fish’ between the mountainous peaks of Washington state.

objects he had seen that day – ‘disc,’ ‘plate’, and ‘pie-pan’ being among the many descriptors being bandied about. The armchair psychologist might read something into that – possibly that Kenneth Arnold was obsessed with food.

It happened a few minutes before 3.00pm on a sunny summer day, and Arnold had been heading towards the town of Yakima when he detoured towards Mt Rainier to help look for a U.S. Marine Corps transport plane that had disappeared in the area. He was hoping, maybe, to have a chance of claiming the $5,000 reward ($56,000 in today’s money) that had been offered for its recovery.

If Arnold had been a mechanic, he may have have described the objects as ‘hubcaps.’ Were he an athlete, ‘discus’ might have been his preferred term. Neither of these would have been any less annoying than ‘flying saucer,’ but on such vagaries of time and place is history made. It is ironic that the most technologically advanced flying craft this planet is ever likely to see were compared to the most pedestrian of kitchen objects – and unfortunate that the one comparison that stuck in the human psyche forever was the now-ubiquitous ‘flying saucer.’ A Gallup Poll from August 1947, a mere two months after Arnold’s sighting first hit the papers, found that 90% of Americans had heard the term ‘flying saucer’ – not even saturation advertising has a hit rate as successful as that.

Just as Arnold was ready to give up his search, his attention was caught by a bright flash in the sky. Concerned he might have been about to collide with another aircraft, Arnold looked around and observed an echelon formation of nine bright, shining craft. Thinking that he may have been witnessing a new type of military jet, Arnold noted with some surprise that the craft were unbelievably thin and flat, and minus the tails he expected to see on a jet. The nine objects maintained formation as they flew past him at unbelievable speed – Arnold estimated 2,700 kilometres an hour – and passed between his plane and the mountains. He could see them clearly outlined against the snow-covered peaks, and he later described them as convex in shape, with the leading object being curved into a crescent or half-moon shape. It wasn’t as though unidentified disc-shaped flying objects hadn’t been seen before. Indeed they had, as far back as the 1920s. What elevated Kenneth Arnold’s sighting to the pre-eminent position on the long roll-call of strange things to be seen in the sky was the fact that he talked about it – and he talked about it to everyone. The next day Arnold was interviewed by reporters. When trying to describe the objects’ movements, Arnold likened them to flying ‘saucers’, which is where our seventy years of ‘flying saucer’ trouble unfortunately began. It’s only natural, when you’ve seen something extraordinary, to want to share that experience with others by describing it in terms that a fellow human would understand. Other than ‘saucer,’ Kenneth Arnold provided reporters with a number of comparisons by Kenneth Arnold with a sketch of one of which to describe the his ‘flying saucers’

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Arnold, in one of his numerous interviews, had been reported as saying that Army pilots had told him that before going into combat they were briefed “that they might see objects of similar shape and design as I had described and assured me that I wasn’t dreaming or going crazy”.’ In fact, prior to Arnold’s ‘flying saucers’, the Air Force had used the term ‘unidentified aerial objects’ (UAE) to describe the unusual craft their pilots occasionally encountered, which indicates that the phenomenon was causing them enough concern to have been awarded a category in the manual. In instances where the Air Force deemed a report of a UAE to be ‘of significance,’ and where the observer was considered to be reliable, a UAE was graduated to the status of ‘unknown,’ and it was the ‘unknowns’ that garnered the most interest from the Air Force. However, so successful was the new term ‘flying saucer,’ that the Air Force – despite already having its own sensible terminology – adopted its use, along with another term that was 100% guaranteed to cause uncontrolled rolling of the eyes – the ‘flying flapjack.’ But back to Kenneth Arnold and his pie pans. Arnold, flying hungry over the mountainous terrain of Washington, observed his ‘flying saucers’ on June 24. Two weeks later, on July 8, a press release issued by the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico stated that base personnel had recovered a ‘flying disc’ – using, you will notice, a variant of Arnold’s recently coined ‘flying saucer’ terminology. It must have been exciting for the personnel of the Roswell Army Air Field to be on the verge of solving a mystery that had captured the country’s imagination for weeks, and we can hardly blame Major Jesse Marcel for wanting to tell everybody about it. Unfortunately for Marcel, the Air Force didn’t share

UFO ENCOUNTER


his enthusiasm and they promptly stomped upon his head. ‘Flying saucers?’ No such thing. Nothing to see here, folks. But lost amongst all the media hubbub was the important fact that rancher Mac Brazel claimed that he found the Roswell UFO crash debris on or around June 14 – a whole ten days before Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting. Brazel later said that it wasn’t until he read the newspapers that he made a connection between the strange metal debris he had found in the desert and the ‘flying saucers’ everybody was talking about. It wasn’t until three weeks after that, on July 7, that he decided to tell the local sheriff... who told the Air Force... who told the newspapers... and the rest is history. Strange to say, but without Kenneth Arnold’s ‘flying saucers’ being on the front pages of all the papers, it’s probable that the Roswell UFO crash may never have become public at all. Simply put, if ‘flying saucers’ had not been fresh in people’s minds, Mac Brazel would never have told the sheriff about what he had found. And even if he had, what kinds of conclusions would the Air Base personnel have come to about the strange debris in the desert if they didn’t already have ‘flying saucers’ on the brain? Would they have ever made a connection between that strange, bendy metal and ‘flying saucers’? Would they have been quite so horrified at the sight of the tiny bodies purported to have been found in the wreckage if they hadn’t gone out there with the expectation of finding Men from Mars? How would the Roswell incident have played out if ‘flying saucers’ hadn’t so suddenly taken over the public mind? In fact, how might history have changed if Kenneth Arnold had kept his ‘flying saucers’ to himself? The four week period between the months of June and July 1947 were witness to a significant flap of ‘flying saucer’ sightings across the United States. Some of the more prominent incidents include (but are not restricted to): [Mid-June 1947: U.S. Marine Corps transport plane disappearance (Washington) triggers public hunt.] June 14 1947: Roswell debris found by Mac Brazel (New Mexico) June 21 1947: Maury Island incident (UFO sighting with debris, Puget Sound, Washington) June 24 1947: Kenneth Arnold sighting (Washington) June 24 1947: 16 separate sightings of Arnold’s ‘flying saucers’ are reported by witnesses July 4 1947: United Airlines sighting of 9 ‘flying saucers’ in formation (Idaho) July 7 1947: Rhodes UFO photos (Phoenix, Arizona) July 7 1947: Mac Brazel directs authorities to location of Roswell UFO crash debris (New Mexico) July 8 1947: Major Jesse Marcel’s public announcement of Roswell ‘flying saucer’ crash debris recovery July 12 1947: 8 ‘flying saucers’ observed over Tulsa (Oklahoma) It may be pushing it to see a link between the disappearance of the U.S. Marines plane in Washington and the crash of the Roswell UFO in New Mexico, but could the two have been connected? Did one cause the other – a cataclysmic collision that sent the plane spiralling to certain doom in the mountains of Washington, while the UFO was ricocheted across the country at ridiculous speed to smash down in the New Mexico desert? Without a specific date for the plane’s disappearance* we can never make a connection, but even if we discount the idea we

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can’t completely rule out the possibility that Arnold’s ‘flying saucers’ may have been responsible for a plane’s disappearance at Mt Rainier – Arnold’s echelon formation of flying discs were seen in the exact area where the plane was thought to have disappeared. Had the UFOs been lurking in the area for a while and could they have caused the plane to crash? On the flip side of this coin, if the Roswell UFO had crashed on or before June 14 as Mac Brazel believed, was it possible that the objects that Kenneth Arnold observed 10 days later on June 24, and the heightened UFO presence in the skies of the United States at that time, constituted some kind of ET search party for the downed UFO? Could it be that the UFO flap of June-July 1947 was a result of the Roswell crash, as opposed to a building up towards it? Just one day after the Roswell UFO crash made the front page of the Roswell Daily Record, the US Army Air Force and the FBI established a joint investigative body to formally look into all this ‘flying saucer’ business – clearly things were getting out of hand. Surprisingly, this same investigative body concluded three weeks later that ‘this ‘flying saucer’ situation is not all imaginary… something is really flying around.’ It wasn’t until 1953 that the USAF started using ‘UFO,’ or ‘UFOB,’ in its procedures manuals, but no matter how hard they tried there was simply no separating UFOs from the term ‘flying saucer.’ It is no doubt unfortunate for the militaries of the world that ‘UFO’ came to be irrevocably associated with ‘flying saucers’ and the ever-hysterical lunatic fringe – it’s also unfortunate for UFO researchers, who are sadly tarred with the same brush. Love it or hate it, the term ‘flying saucer’ isn’t going anywhere. Its use evokes a range of conflicting emotions – just about everything from wonder to embarrassment. In 70 years it has attracted enough emotional baggage to keep a psychiatrist busy for a thousand years, yet in all that time nobody has come up with anything effective enough to supersede it. We might not like it, but let’s face it, it could have been so much worse – Arnold also described his UFOs as appearing like ‘fish flipping in the sun’… We should at least be grateful that ‘flipping fish’ didn’t overtake ‘flying saucers’ when the newspapers were dishing out euphemisms. *An online search of military crashes for 1947 – yes, there is a such a thing – failed to discover any information about this specific event, its cause, or whether the missing aircraft was ever recovered. But it must have been considered serious (or mysterious?), since a substantial dollar amount had been offered for its discovery….Unless the crash never happened… And the public was being sneakily enlisted to look at Mt Rainier for something else entirely...

UFO ENCOUNTER


unearthing Sheryl Gottschall

NAZCA Nazca in Peru has many strange large ground markings called petroglyphs which seem to still defy explanation by researchers. But the latest mystery to emerge from the Nazca region is the discovery of some mummies that look far from human. This lead was brought to the attention of Gaia TV by investigative journalist Jaime Maussan, well known to the world-wide UFO community. Gaia TV decided to investigate further by flying a team, including scientists, to Lima Peru to observe for themselves the ancient mummified humanoid. Here they were joined by forensic expert Dr Jose de Jesus Zalce Benitez, biologist Jose de la Cruze Rios from Mexico, and surgeon and radiologist Dr Edson Salazar from Cusco, Peru. The team was soon joined by Dr Konstantin Korotkov from Russia, the President of the St Petersburg university. This is a pretty impressive line-up of people who can’t afford to waste their time on hoaxes, so we can safely guess they had been sent preliminary reports of this mummy find as well as reports on the other smaller mummies found in the region, before they took the time to make the trip and devote potentially weeks to investigate this case. On June 20 2017, Gaia TV posted three clips updating their subscribers about the case. In one of these clips Michael Aseev PhD from Russia, head of the genetic analysis department for the Russian Academy of Science, stated that his team was able to identify this strange creature as female due to the missing Y chromosome. The team also discovered during testing, a strange herbal smell that came from their sampling that some suggested was a result of the mummification process similar to the process used by ancient Egyptians. Other observations were that the mummy had no ears, was 168cm in height, and the carbon data findings identified it as its age of origin as being somewhere between 245AD and 410AD. Scans revealed that all internal organs were also intact as opposed to ancient mummification techniques where they were removed and stored in earthenware jars.

structure and the hands show enlarged thickened metacarpals in the palms of the hand and the same enlarged thickened bones in the feet. After the team dissected the body they decided to search the surrounding area to see if there was anything they could find that would link to it. Surprisingly they found petroglyphs in the nearby mountains that depicted three fingered beings, the same as the bodies they had found. These three fingered depictions are commonly found in the history of the people of the area suggesting a relationship between these discovered remains and the drawings of the ancient peoples of Peru. To date, all the scientific experts from different fields working on this project surprisingly agree that this is a historic find that will change many paradigms in science and the consciousness of humanity as a whole. They now await the results of further DNA testing to determine the certainty of the mummified beings origin, and if this remains inconclusive, at the very least there will need to be an announcement of a new species on Earth that we have had no record of until now. The full report to date is available online at gaia.com which is a subscription TV site available to subscribers for $9.95/month. In the meantime we will bring you further updates as they become available. So watch this space!

Forensic expert, Dr Benitez, stated that the five metacarpals in the hands were merged through three bearings to the three fingers, and the three fingers had five to six phalanges, meaning that they are way longer than human hands. “It’s not clear as to how this being would use their hands but they would be much more flexible than human hands, attaching rather than gripping like ours. The white resin on the body was wiped off revealing skin like a lizard, naturally creating more intrigue around this case than answers. Could this indeed be actual evidence for reptilian extraterrestrials that some witnesses report? Musculoskeletal radiologist M.K. Jesse from the University of Colorado Hospital, stated that bones of any mammalian skeleton are incredibly complex and extremely hard to produce, so it should be easier to tell if these are truly authentic bones. Scans reveal no suture lines in the skull which appears to be a solid

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UFO ENCOUNTER


‘Space Aggressors’ Train US Forces for Extraterrestrial Conflict https://www.seeker.com/space/ space-aggressors-train-us-forces-forextraterrestrial-conflict

In a large, tin-roofed warehouse near Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, members of a team of modern space warriors spend their days hatching plots to defeat the US military in extraterrestrial combat. They’re called Space Aggressors. Their job is to act like the enemy during mock space battles to help US units prepare for a conflict that may one day extend into the cosmos. “We play the bad guys,” said Captain Christopher Barnes, chief of training for the 26th Space Aggressor Squadron. “Our job is to not only understand the different types of threats and potential enemies, but also to be able to portray them and replicate them for the good guys, our Air Force.” The 26th and 527th Space Aggressor Squadrons are headquartered in a two-story warehouse at Colorado’s Schriever Air Force Base, stocked with advanced radio and satellite equipment and nicknamed “the barn.” Behind the building, antenna dishes trace the sky. While attacks by the Space Aggressors are simulated, senior US military and intelligence officials warn the threat in space is very real. America relies heavily on space assets to project force around the globe, from launching missiles to directing warships across the seas. Indeed, the Global Positioning System, or GPS, is actually a group of 31 high-orbiting satellites owned by the US government and operated by the US Air Force. Some worry that disrupting America’s vast network of satellites and ground-based systems could send US forces back to an antiquated era of targeting, communications, and navigation systems — deeply undercutting battlefield superiority. Rhetoric from US military officials about the need to bolster American defensive position, and even offensive capabilities, in space has ratcheted up amid concern that Russia and China are rapidly developing anti-satellite weapons. “While we’re not at war in space, I don’t think we could say we’re exactly at peace, either,” Vice Admiral Charles Richard, Deputy Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, known as Stratcom, told a conference in Washington DC in March. “We must prepare for a conflict that extends into space.” In his remarks, Vice Admiral Richard pointed to press reports that “China is developing an arsenal of lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns, and high-powered microwave weapons to neutralize America’s intelligence, communications, and navigations satellites.”

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In April, Stratcom Commander General John Hyten told a Senate committee hearing that in addition to bolstering defenses, “we have to build an offensive capability to challenge their capabilities in space as well.” The Space Aggressors aim to simulate attacks a real adversary might use, so US forces can practice overcoming them. “We study threats to the space realm, either coming from space or based on land,” said Captain Barnes. “If we can’t directly replicate them with hardware, then we figure out if there’s a software solution or some way we can train people to the point where they can fight through them, if they have to, in a conflict.” One tactic Space Aggressors are known to employ is called “brute force jamming,” which involves sending powerful signals over satellite networks to garble the original message. Many details of their operations, however, remain secret. In addition to wargaming in a contested space environment, US troops are also training to fight without access to space — in case one day they have to. Six years ago, the Air Force held a study called “A Day Without Space” at the Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada that sought to replicate what would happen if American forces were deprived of satellite communications and global positioning data. “It was not good,” General Hyten told the Senate. “We were not ready to do that.” Following the study, the military “relearned” techniques for fighting without access to GPS or satellites — using alternate tools like “inertial navigation systems,” which don’t need orbiting reference points, and even compasses and maps, Hyten said. In April, the Air Force announced it would create a new position for a three-star general to serve as advisor to the Air Force Secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff on space issues — effectively, a space war czar. In the same month, the Pentagon gave the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center, which went by the confusing handle JICSpOC, a shorter and more descriptive title: the National Space Defense Center. The military also announced a new initiative aimed at deepening defense partnerships in space with US allies known as the Multinational Space Collaboration effort. That new measure will “explore methods for increased sharing, cooperation, and collaboration to preserve the safety of spaceflight, and enhance mutual security.”

UFO ENCOUNTER


what didn’t make it to...

the

HEADLINES

‘Britain’s X-Files’ reveal UFO was floating above Skegness for seven hours but RAF officials were told to IGNORE it http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ article-4639914/Britain-s-X-Files-UFO-spottedSkegness.html

A UFO was visible on military radar for seven hours above the Wash in Skegness in 1996 but officials were ordered to do nothing about it, according to a shocking document from ‘Britain’s X-Files’. The RAF was ‘overruled at the highest level’ and told to ignore the strange bright lights - which flashed red, blue and white - despite the fact several witnesses also spotted it. The Ministry of Defence was criticised for a shambolic reaction which some believed could have put the nation at serious risk in one of the country’s most mysterious UFO sightings. The UFO files have revealed that on the morning of 5 October 1996 bright lights were reported by several civilians but the Defence Secretary at the time, Michael Portillo, did nothing, according to a report from The Sun. An unnamed government official wrote to the Ministry of Defence voicing concerns. ‘The RAF is supposed to, or so I believed, to be keeping a watchful eye on activity in the UK, but seem to have no idea what is going on’, the minister wrote. Do they have standard procedure for these incidents? They had enough time to think about it, because the object was on our radar for upwards of seven hours!’ he said. ‘While I am interested in finding out what was seen, my primary concern stems from the absolute shambles that such events seem to cause’. Reports of the strange lights made front pages and were serialised in various TV shows at the time. ‘I remember this well. It was a bizarre case’, Nick Pope who was part of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO project from 1991 to 1994 told MailOnline. ‘The official verdict was that the anomalous radar return might have been caused by a nearby church spire (an effect that can happen in

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certain meteorological conditions) but, in parallel, there were visual sightings from witnesses including police officers, and these were more difficult to explain. Furthermore, the events took place in the middle of a ‘UFO flap’ where there had been numerous sightings from locals.’ The late Martin Redmond - an MP who had taken a close, personal interest in the UFO phenomenon raised the question with the MoD, Mr Pope explained. ‘He was concerned that whatever the cause of the radar return, it seemed the RAF had done nothing, perhaps because of the MoD’s notorious defensiveness when it came to the anything to do with UFOs. He felt that, at the very least, further enquiries should have been made and maybe a jet scrambled - which would have cleared up the mystery in minutes. The bottom line was that Martin Redmond felt these events highlighted a fundamental weakness in the UK’s air defence system’, he said.

Would Extraterrestrial Bacteria Be Dangerous To Humans? https://www.forbes.com/sites/ quora/2017/06/16/wouldextraterrestrial-bacteria-be-dangerous-tohumans/#13fc0aca7601

carbohydrates. Even if alien bacterium were able to stick to a cell surface, this alone would not establish an infection. Infecting bacteria secrete all kinds of toxins and virulence factors. These toxins and factors bind to specific human proteins. They block or modify their activity in ways that degrade cells and tissues, releasing nutrients that the bacteria can feed upon. Again, the target proteins have fairly arbitrary structures. They are the result of billions of years of evolutionary history and their precise structure - and even their existence - is not at all predictable. The chance that an alien bacterium would have evolved toxins that precisely target them is infinitesimally small. Pathogenicity is extremely rare on Earth. There are millions, perhaps billions, of species of bacteria. The number of potential human pathogens among them is very small, and only a couple dozen are able to infect otherwise healthy humans. These are bacteria that have been with us for millions of years, evolving as we evolve, becoming intimately familiar with our proteins, our cells, our immune systems. This knowledge is stamped into their genomes; it is a diary of their long association with us. It is not a book that could be written in an alien language.

The chance that extraterrestrial bacteria would be deadly to humans is zero. Not just very, very small. Zero. Pathogenesis requires intimacy. This intimacy is attained through millions of years of co-evolution. The need for intimacy is apparent when you look at how bacteria and viruses cause infections and disease. Infection requires binding to a cell surface. Bacteria (and viruses) bind to human cells through proteins that recognize human proteins and

Documentary Suggests Marilyn Monroe Was Killed Because She Knew About Aliens https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/anew-ufo-documentary-suggests-marilynmonroe-was-killed-because-she-knew-aboutaliens/

Marilyn Monroe has a small but weird role in the new documentary ‘Unacknowledged.’ Directed by Michael

UFO ENCOUNTER


Mazzola, ‘Unacknowledged’ follows Dr Steven Greer, who takes viewers through what he believes is a welldocumented history of the United States covering up the existence of evidence of extraterrestrials and suggests Marilyn Monroe was killed because she threatened to leak classified information. ‘Unacknowledged’ is currently available to stream and download on Vimeo.

Cop has ‘extraterrestrial encounter’ during traffic stop http://nypost.com/2017/06/27/cop-hasextraterrestrial-encounter-during-traffic-stop/

Police say a motorcycle officer who stopped a driver for speeding on a suburban highway north of Atlanta had an “extraterrestrial encounter” — sort of. George Gordon, a spokesman for

police in Alpharetta, says that when the officer pulled the man over Sunday, a life-size doll of a big-eyed, large-skulled alien was riding in the front passenger seat. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the encounter, saying the driver was clocked at 84 mph. Not quite warp speed, and Gordon later told the Associated Press: “He did not mention as to ‘why’ he had an out-of-this-world passenger.” The driver got off with a verbal warning — and some laughs from the officer — who took photographs of the safetybelted alien, which police later posted on social media.

NASA experiment to colour the skies over the U.S. East Coast http://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacelaunch-idUSKBN1920KG

A high-flying science experiment may colour the skies above the U.S. midAtlantic coast with bluish green and red clouds as NASA seeks to learn more about charged particles at the top of Earth’s atmosphere. A small rocket carrying 10 canisters of barium and other chemicals is due to lift off from Wallops Island, Virginia. About five minutes after launch the canisters, which are about the size of soda cans,

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will release blue-green and red vapours that will gather into artificial clouds potentially visible from New York to North Carolina.

The luminescent colours are due to sunlight interacting with the chemicals barium, strontium and cupric-oxide, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on its website. Although the flight will last about eight minutes, the colourful clouds could linger for 20 minutes, depending on atmospheric conditions. [Strontium is known to be one of the most dangerous radioactive isotopes to organic life, and compounds of Barium are known to be toxic. Copper oxides (cupric-oxide) are also highly toxic. No matter how small the quantity, considering that once these radioactive elements are introduced by NASA into the atmosphere they will eventually filter back down to earth, our editor suggests you stop breathing for the rest of the 21st century (at least).– Lee]

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join australia’s longest-running ufo organisation! Membership with UFO Research Queensland Incorporated costs $35.00 annually for membership. Your membership to UFO Research Queensland provides financial support for the work of our organisation, which is to receive and disseminate UFO reports while educating and supporting the UFO-interested public. Membership entitles you to benefits such as discounts on meeting and conference entry. You will also receive a subscription to our publication UFO Encounter [PDF format], which is published six times a year and contains Australian and international UFO reports and research articles. You can join online at http://uforq.asn.au/membership/ or send a cheque or money order made payable to ‘UFO Research Queensland Inc’ and mailed to UFO Research Queensland, PO Box 1549, Kenmore, Queensland, 4069.

public meetings

Public Meetings are held on the last Friday of every month [except December] at 7.00pm sharp at the Kenmore Library, Meeting Room 3, Kenmore Village Shopping Centre, 9 Brookfield Road, Kenmore. Access is via the lift from the undercover carpark. Admission is $10.00 for members and $15.00 for non-members. Prices are subject to change without notice when special guests are speaking. Please check our website for the latest details. Please note: Membership cards must be produced for member-discounted entry.

for further enquiries call [07] 3376 1780 or email info@uforq.asn.au

seen something you couldn’t quite explain? report your sighting one of three ways:

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CONTACTS

Queensland: UFO Research Queensland (UFORQ) Sheryl Gottschall 07 3376 1780 UFORQ Cairns Region Alec Brimacombe

0431 543 025

UFORQ Gold Coast Peter Matic

0418 750 180

Ipswich UFO Society contact: ipswichufogroup@hotmail.com QUFON, Brisbane Glennys Mackay 07 38496450

Australia: Aust Cosmic Connections Adelaide, SA Kevin Robb 0406 362 340 Blue Mountains UFO Research, NSW Rex and Healther Gilroy 02 4782 3441 UFO Research NSW, Sydney Mariana Flynn 0410 645 535 UFOPRSA, Sydney NSW Larraine Cilia

0407 894 835

VUFOA, Victoria Ben Hurle

0497 610 844

UFORQ phone: [07] 3376 1780

email: info@uforq.asn.au web: www.uforq.asn.au post: PO Box 1549, Kenmore 4069, QLD

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