NASA's UFO footage

[Guest Raden]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1dAsCOljnw&NR=1

[xclusiv8 35]

You know what boggles my mind. For thousands of years people have seen UFOs and yet now in these modern times not one single person can take a freaking high resolution or a decent picture of those so called UFOs. Dont get me wrong i belive that the universe is filled with life but come on, at least one person should be able to get a good picture or at least one that resembles something close to a ufo.

[serverandenforcer 33]

You know what boggles my mind. For thousands of years people have seen UFOs and yet now in these modern times not one single person can take a freaking high resolution or a decent picture of those so called UFOs. Dont get me wrong i belive that the universe is filled with life but come on, at least one person should be able to get a good picture or at least one that resembles something close to a ufo.

 

UFOs are camera shy

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

They use optical jammers. They won't let anybody get a solid pic.

 

I see, on the larger of the two shapes, at its upper right edge, is a shiny spot. Canopy reflecting in sun...?

Edited February 11, 2010 by Lexx_Luthor

[Rambler 1-1 9]

If somebody got a good, clear, high-res picture of a UFO, it wouldn't be unidentified anymore. Duh. You'd be able to tell what it is.

 

If they could only get a good pic of the ALIENS, however....

 

(*goes and puts on tin-foil hat*)

[+bobrock 15]

 

[xclusiv8 35]

 

 

[JediMaster 451]

What I hate is how people always talk as if UFO = "alien spaceship."

 

No.

 

It's an object, that's flying, that you can't identify. That's it. So it can be quite obviously NOT an intelligently piloted spacecraft from another world, but STILL be a UFO if you can't figure out what it is. No one should be shy to say they saw a UFO, because it happens to everyone. I'm sure those who aren't aviation fans see far more than those who are because they don't recognize as many objects!

Saying you saw an alien spaceship, though, is a different matter.

 

So in short, while an alien spaceship IS a UFO, a UFO is NOT necessarily an alien spaceship. The aliens are a "subset" of the UFO group, if you will.

 

Oh, and if it's sitting on the ground it's NOT a UFO, alien or not!!

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Jedi::

Oh, and if it's sitting on the ground it's NOT a UFO,...

uh NOT.

 

From John Fredriksen's The B-45 Tornado...my shortened words, NOT his...

 

He quotes a paragraph by Lt. Neil (47th BW). He was forced to land his B-45 unannounced at Randolph AFB, and they were welcomed with jeep escort which directed his bomber to taxi to base ops where a line of blue suits and red carpet was laid out just for them. The B-45 crew were met *inside* their airplane door and congratulated. According to Neil, the whole base thought it was their first B-57 delivery, but apparently they beat the B-57 a bit early.

 

"They didn't even know what a B-45 was -- none of them."

 

(also describes combat flight simmers, and The Sims developers too )

 

So there was this like total UFO just sitting there on red carpet, right in front of base operations.

 

Also the best reason I've seen yet never to claim civilians are "ignorant" hehe.

[FastCargo 412]

Bulls**t.

 

It's a UO...NOT a UFO if it's on the ground.

 

FC

[xclusiv8 35]

Bulls**t.

 

It's a UO...NOT a UFO if it's on the ground.

 

FC

 

WORD!

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Yea but they flew in there, and (I guess) flew out, so ... hehe.

 

Flying carpet too.

[+kreelin 2]

Does any of you guys ever read this document ?

 

I find it very interesting.

Rockefeller-Briefing-Document.pdf

[Slartibartfast 153]

Mork calling Orson come in Orson...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdz4dCMGbbw

 

Seriously folks who would want to fly a gazillion miles to this backwater of the galaxy just to have fun...

 

There is a very good probability of life out there but is it any more evolved than we are ?

 

As to UFO's I ahve seen some stuff in my life that defies explantion but isn't that all part of the mytery of life ?

[ezlead 42]

As to UFO's I ahve seen some stuff in my life that defies explantion but isn't that all part of the mytery of life ?

 

 

Right On Slarti!!

[JediMaster 451]

 

As to UFO's I ahve seen some stuff in my life that defies explantion but isn't that all part of the mytery of life ?

 

 

Me too, it was called C-SPAN. *rimshot*

[Silverbolt 104]

Does any of you guys ever read this document ?

 

I find it very interesting.

 

C'mon man , tease us a little bit more please !

maybe we can finally see some shots of this baby flying escorted by the tomcat?

[GwynO 16]

nteresting article from Fortean Times about the military and the UFO phenomenon, I know, I know, yawn yawn been there before, but this one really is a refreshing breeze of sanity on an otherwise ever growing dung heap of BS fantasy written about UFOs. No cover ups of little green men needed to connect the dots here, just some very interesting and rational explanations of those oft cited "proof" cases of UFOs on radar.

 

(Text from the Forten Times website)

Weapons of Mass Deception

 

Washington, 1952: How the CIA created the flying saucer craze By Mark PilkingtonJuly 2010 FT266

 

 

On 19 July 1952 – and again on the 26th – an event took place that must have seemed as unthinkable then as it would be considered impossible now: Washington DC was buzzed by several unidentified aircraft. These fast-moving phantoms hopped like fleas across radar screens and evaded all attempts to intercept them with jets; they made fools of jumpy Air Force personnel and generated front-page news all around the world.

 

The incident illustrated perfectly the threat that UFOs posed to America’s defence establishment, which carried painful memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor and now lived in the shadow of the burgeoning Soviet atomic programme, and would shape the UFO phenomenon – and the attitude of America’s custodians to it – for the next 60 years.

 

Although the case has been dismissed as a dramatic example of a temperature invers ion – whereby objects on the ground are picked up on radar and appear as aircraft – the facts are complex enough to deserve more than a simple brush-off, and may point to a deliberate attempt to exploit the phenomenon.

 

But who by? And for what purpose?

 

 

UFORIA

America’s relationship to the flying saucer changed dramatically between 1949 and 1953. After two years of intermittent “UFOria” sparked by Kenneth Arnold’s original 1947 sighting, by late 1949 it looked as if the public might finally be losing interest in the elusive intruders. This was largely thanks to the Air Force’s Project Grudge, which had spent the year doing its best to play down public enthusiasm for the phenomenon – largely by ridiculing it – and, most importantly, inocul ating its own pilots against the UFO bug.

 

In late December 1949, however, all Grudge’s hard work came undone thanks to an article in the hugely popular men’s magazine True. “Flying Saucers are Real” by pulp author Donald Keyhoe, a retired Major from the US Marine Corps naval aviation division, was a shocking exposé of the Air Force cover-up of the awful truth – that flying saucers were real, and they were from Outer Space.

 

Although the Extraterrestrial Hypo thesis (ETH) had always been a contender for the discs’ origin, until then most people, civilian and military, thought the saucers were American or possibly Soviet in origin. Even Kenneth Arnold had spoken publicly of his belief that what he saw were experimental US craft, perhaps powered by atomic energy. It was these comments that caused him to be drawn into the Maury Island UFO affair in July 1947, a bizarre honey-trap involving Air Force Intelli gence, the FBI and, possibly, the powerful Atomic Energy Commission. Arnold was lured to Tacoma, Washington, by the promise of UFO debris, but his investigat ion inadvertently led to the deaths of two Air Force intelligence agents (the newly-formed USAF’s first ever casualties) in a plane crash and a lucky escape for Arnold in his own aircraft.

 

Although Arnold wouldn’t have known it, the Air Force did have a nascent atomic aircraft project at the time – Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft – so it’s not surprising that he became the subject of an intense investigation, especially given how seriously the US authorities took the threat of Soviet infiltration. It was only eight months since the Venona intelligence decryption project – so secret that not even Presidents Roosevelt and Truman knew of its existence – had made its first breakthrough, and the situation it unravelled was nothing short of devastating. Venona identified Soviet moles inside the Man hattan Project and in government bodies including the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA in 1947), the Army Air Force, the War Production Board (chief spymaster Victor Perlo headed the Aviation Section) the Treasury, the State Department, and even amongst President Roose velt’s trusted White House administrators. The United States was paranoid, and with good reason: there really were Reds under the bed, including the four-posters at the White House.

 

The strange brew of technology and paranoia that led to the first outbreak of the UFO bug was fomented by the breakdown of relations between the US Air Force and the Navy. As they fought over post-war funding, each side accused the other of corruption in pursuing government contracts and leaked one another’s internal documents in what was described by some as a civil war. Things deteriorated so badly that a chronically depressed Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who had previously headed the Navy, leapt to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, an incident that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories.

 

The feud also meant that neither side was showing the other its new toys, which in the Navy’s case meant the brand spanking new XF-5U flying flapjack, a saucer-like, propeller-driven Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft, of which at least two fully functional models were built. The flapjack neatly fits the silhouette of the whooshing, heel-shaped aircraft photographed by William Rhoads over Phoenix, Arizona, on 7 July 1947 (the first photograph of the UFO era) and also the aircraft described in the USAF’s first internal saucer report as a “thin metallic object” seen flying over Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards AFB) in California the following day.

 

Was the Navy taunting its rivals with its superior technology? Were Keyhoe’s True article, and a pro-ET follow-up by Robert Mclaughlin, head of the Navy’s miss ile programme at White Sands, all part of the game? Certainly the timing of the art icles was infuriating to the Air Force, coming just as Grudge seemed to have put a lid on the simmering saucer mania.

 

Whatever intentions lay behind them, the True articles helped to transform flying saucers from something of a joke into a respectable topic for research and discuss ion amongst American men of all ages: the era of scientific ufology was born.

 

 

VISITORS FROM SPACE

The DC overflights were the culmination of a series of events that cast the mould for the UFO myth as we know it. The first was the release of Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still in September 1951, a film that perfectly crystallised America’s flying saucer moment. With its message of peace brought by the Christ-like extra terrestrial Klaatu and enforced by Gort, the robot policeman with the power to destroy the Earth, it reflected the hopes and fears of what an encounter with beings from Outer Space might bring, while cannily echoing the role that America felt it could, and should, play on the world stage.

 

The film coincided with, or, some might say, sparked, a sudden surge of UFO witness reports, many from within the armed forces. In response the Air Force issued JANAP 146(B), which instructed members of all the armed forces to report sightings of unknown aircraft and made the unauthorised release of information about a UFO incident a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a 10,000 dollar fine. With the Soviets watching America’s every move, UFOs – and that included clandestine balloons, missile launches and test flights of new aircraft – were a growing intelligence and security problem that needed to be contained.

 

Another key moment came in April 1952, when LIFE, America’s most popular magazine, ran an article entitled “Have We Visitors From Space?” As if UFOs weren’t enough of a draw, the issue featured a pouting Marilyn Monroe on the cover, making it irresistible to any red-blooded American male.

 

“The Air Force,” the article began, “is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation; here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” Its authors, HB Darrach Jr. and Robert Ginna, had spent a year in consult ation with the Air Force, so the pro-ET tone was a surprise to many, who expected them to play down the hype. Instead, the article gave flying saucer studies, and the ETH, another boost of respectability and added to the deluge of press reports that the phenomenon was now generating, with US newspapers carrying over 16,000 UFO items in the first six months of 1952 alone.

 

All of this made America’s policy-makers nervous. In early 1952, CIA director Walter B Smith wrote to Raymond Allen, director of the secretive Psychological Strategy Board: “I am today transmitting… a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems associated with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psycho logical warfare as well as for intelligence and operations.” Smith’s concerns would prove to be uncannily prescient.

 

On two nights in July 1952, a number of unidentified objects blipped onto radar screens at Washington DC National Airport. At close to midnight on the first night, 19–20 July, seven objects were tracked 24km from the capital city, gradually homing in on the White House at about 160km/h. A bright, orange ball of light was seen from nearby Andrews Air Force Base, making “a kind of circular movement” according to an airman on the scene, before taking off at “an incredible speed” and disappearing.[1] Six bright white, fast-moving lights were also spotted by the pilot of a passenger jet flying in the area.

 

Sightings and radar tracking of “unident ifieds” continued until 3am, when two interceptors flew in to try to get a closer look, at which point the remaining UFOs vanished from the skies and from radar. They reapp eared as soon as the jets had returned to base, leading Harry Barnes, a senior Air Traffic Controller, to suspect that the UFOs were listening in on radio communications and planning their actions accordingly. Adding to his frustration, Barnes’s attempts to interest senior Air Force officials in the incident seemed to fall on deaf ears. Creating further grounds for suspicion that someone knew what was going on, Edward Ruppelt, head of the Air Force’s recently created Project Bluebook, heard nothing about the incident until he read about it in a Washington newspaper two days later.

 

On 26 July, the UFOs returned. This time, 12 were spotted on radar, again flying at a not particularly impressive 160km/h. As before, there were sightings of lights from the air and from the ground and, once more, two jets were scrambled. One of the pilots chased four white “glows” that suddenly “shot toward him and clustered around his plane”,[2] but the UFOs remained as elusive as ever.

 

Another media flurry followed, leading to an Air Force press conference at the Pentagon, its largest since World War II. In his 1956 memoir The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt describes the scene as chaotic, with General John Samford of Air Force Intelligence doing his best to be noncommittal about the sightings and focusing on calming fears that they were stray guided missiles or new American aircraft. When asked directly whether the objects had been US secret weapons, Samford gave the oblique and enigmatic response: “We have nothing that has no mass and unlimited power.” Then came Captain Roy James, a radar specialist from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson AFB, who pointed out that at least some of the radar returns were the result of a temperature inversion, a layer of warm, moist air on top of cool air on the ground, which had caused radar systems to detect a steamboat and other large objects at ground level. Rupp elt himself was unconvinced by the explan ation – in fact he’d hastily cooked it up without having time to study the incident properly – but the press lapped it up and that, for now at least, was the end of that.

 

The following month, technical specialists from both the CIA and the Air Force met to discuss the UFO problem and, having rejected both the secret weapon and ET hypothesis, agreed that the sightings were down to a combination of misperceptions and ‘mental conditioning’ by the media. H Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, wrote to Director Walter B Smith to suggest that they investigate the extent to which the phenomenon could be “controlled… predicted” and “used from a psychological warfare point of view”. Noting that “a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible”, he worried about the potential for mass hysteria and that in the event of a Soviet attack, neither civilian nor military observers would be able to “distinguish hardware from phantom”.

 

To address the UFO question, in January 1953 the CIA convened a secret panel under Dr Howard Percy Robertson, dir ector of the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluations Group. Over four days with long lunch breaks, they watched UFO films, read reports and listened to testimony from experts in various fields, before reaching a conclusion similar to Chadwell’s. While the UFOs themselves seemed to present no “direct physical threat to national security”, the reporting of them did, “clogging… channels of communication by irrelevant reports” and creating a ‘cry wolf’ situation that could lead to so many false alarms that genuine hostile actions might be ignored. What’s more, the general interest in the subject threatened to inculcate “a morbid national psychology in which skilful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behaviour and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority”.

 

Flying saucers could make a rebel out of you – or worse, a Communist. The national security agencies were, therefore, to “take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired”. The authorities were now at war with ufology.

 

 

ECM + CIA = UFO

Born in New York in 1922, Leon Davidson had always been something of a scientific prodigy. By the age of 13, he had declared himself a chemical engineer, and a few years later he would be plucked from his PhD course at the engineering school of Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project. He eventually became a supervising engineer at the Los Alamos laboratories, working for many years in the nuclear industry.

 

Like many scientists working in the late 1940s and early 1950s within what President Eisenhower would later term the “military-industrial complex”, Davidson became fascinated with the UFO problem. Soon after starting work at Los Alamos in 1949, he joined the lab’s Astrophysical Association, an in-house flying saucer group interested in, amongst other things, the strange green fireballs seen around New Mexico. While no official explanation for the fireballs was forthcoming, Davidson gradually came to believe that secret military tests lay behind these and most other UFO incidents, including the Washington overflights. In the splendidly titled essay “ECM+CIA=UFO”,[3] Davidson described the basic Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) technology available to the Air Force by 1950:

 

“A ‘black box’ in our bombers would pick up the enemy’s radar impulses; amplify and modify them; and send them back, drowning out the normal radar return from the bomber. The modification could be a change in timing or phase and could cause the ‘blip’ on the radar screen to have an incorrect range, speed, or heading.”[4]

 

The origins of this new technology lay in a wartime incident, when Navy scientists noted that the proximity of several powerful ships’ radars during the South Pacific campaign produced phantom returns known as the “galloping ghosts”. These, the scient ists realised, could be put to good use in deceiving the enemy. A March 1957 article from Aviation Research and Development magazine discussed how this ghosting technology had improved and was now entering the civilian domain:

 

“A new radar moving target simulator system which generates a display of up to 6 individual targets on any standard radar indicator has been developed… to train radar operators… and for in-flight testing of airborne early-warning personnel… Target positions, paths, and velocities can… simulate… realistic flight paths… Speeds up to 10,000 knots are easily generated… The target can be made to turn left or right… For each target there is… adjustment to provide a realistic scope presentation.”[5]

 

Davidson recognised this description as being close to what was seen on radar over Washington in July 1952 – and he thought he knew just who had been behind it: “Since 1951, the CIA has caused or sponsored saucer sightings for its own purposes. By shrewd psychological manipulation, a series of ‘normal’ events has been served up so as to appear as quite convincing evidence of extra terrestrial UFOs… [including] military use of ECM on a classified basis unknown to the radar observers who were involved.”[6]

 

A 1957 incident that took place over the UK appears to be a classic case of radar spoofing at the expense of a terrified American pilot (see FT242:34–35). 25-year-old Lieut enant Milton Torres was based at RAF Manston in East Kent, then an outpost for America’s Strategic Air Command. On 20 May, Torres received the order to scramble his F86D Sabre in pursuit of a large aircraft the size of a B52 bomber, picked up on radar about 24km away. He was given the order to arm his weapons and fire on sight, something that no airman would expect to have to do over the Kent countryside, except in time of war. As he feared, he was informed that the aircraft was hostile and probably Russian.

 

Torres and a wingman in another Sabre hurtled towards the object at Mach 0.92. It now registered as the size of an aircraft carrier, but zipped about on his radar screen like an insect. He was ready to fire a full salvo of 24 rockets at the intruder, yet neither he nor his wingman could see a visual target. Was the aircraft invisible? Suddenly the radar signature disappeared and the Sabres were called back to base. The next day, a shaken Torres was visited by a trench-coated American who claimed to be from the National Security Agency. The mystery man warned Torres that if he ever wanted to fly again he would keep his mouth shut. And for 30 years, he did.[7]

 

By the early 1960s, the CIA and NSA were collaborating on a project known as Pallad ium, designed to provide the Americans with electrical (ELINT), communications (COMINT) and signals (SIGINT) intelli gence from Soviet aircraft, ships, submarines, ground radars and missile batteries. The technology allowed the CIA to create ghost aircraft that would be detected on Soviet radar, while the NSA monitored the way in which the phantoms were received, tracked and transmitted. These ghost aircraft could be ‘built’ to order in any shape and size, and could fly at any speed or altitude.

 

Former CIA signals specialist Eugene Poteat describes a complex operation during the Cuban Missile Crisis that used both the Palladium system and submarine-launched metallic spheres on parachutes to confuse Cuban radar. Poteat’s CIA team flew a radar ghost into Cuban airspace, prompting fighter planes to be scrambled to intercept. Using the Palladium system’s controls, the CIA kept their phantom aircraft just ahead of the Cuban fighters, waiting for the right moment. Then, when the NSA team heard that the Cuban pilot was about to shoot their ghost plane down, “We all had the same idea at the same instant. The engineer moved his finger to the switch, I nodded yes and he switched off the Palladium system.”[8] Another UFO, another pilot’s unbelievable tale.

 

 

TRACKS AND TRACES

So were the Washington UFOs an early attempt to put the galloping ghosts under human control? It had been seven years since the phenomenon was first observed on radar screens, plenty of time to tame and contain the phantoms, and a number of clues would seem to suggest that Davidson’s suspicions were not unreasonable, even if he was perhaps accusing the wrong agency of conducting the tests.

 

Davidson notes that during the month that the overflights took place, due to alleged runway repairs, the Air Force interceptors tasked with protecting the capital were moved from their usual home at Andrews AFB, 6.4km from DC, to New Castle, Delaware, 145km away. This considerably delayed the jets’ arrival on the scene and would have prevented them from identifying the source of the radar returns, which were only flying at 160km/h. He also wondered whether the bright lights seen on the nights in question were created by the ‘Hell Roarer’, a missile-bay-mounted magnesium lighting device that burned at 10 million candlepower and had caused a flood of saucer reports when tested by the Air Force over Connecticut in October 1951.

 

Adding to the intrigue, days after the incident General Samford told theNew York Times: “We are learning more and more about radar… [which is] capable of playing tricks for which it was not designed.”[9] Was this a tacit admission that someone, perhaps the Air Force, had pulled a fast one over the Capital? Is it a coincidence that four years later Samford became the second director of the National Security Agency, which rout inely used the Palladium system alongside the CIA?

 

The clearest hint that the Washington sightings were no accident was given to Bluebook’s Edward Ruppelt a few days before events kicked off. Ruppelt wrote that he and a scientist “from an agency I can’t name” had a two-hour discussion about UFOs, at the end of which the scientist made a ‘prediction’: “Within the next few days… they’re going to blow up and you’re going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings… in Washington or New York… probably Washington.”[10] A few days later it happ ened, just as the scientist had said it would. As Ruppelt complains in his book, Air Force Intelligence were the last to know about the Washington event and when Ruppelt then tried to get from Wright Patterson (near Dayton, Ohio) to DC to investigate, he found that he couldn’t get a staff car to take him there: “Every time we would start to leave,” he wrote, “something more pressing would come up.”[11]

 

A final tantalising piece of the puzzle comes in a memo sent from Dr Howard Clinton Cross to Edward Ruppelt on 9 January 1953.[12] Cross was a metallurgist working at the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private research body that was processing all the Air Force’s UFO data under the codename Project Stork. The memo, classified Secret, points out that the CIA’s Robertson Panel was due to meet in less than a week’s time and that Project Stork and the Air Force’s Air Technological Intelligence Center should work out beforehand “what can and what cannot be discussed at the meeting”.

 

Why would the Air Force consider restricting the information that they shared with the CIA, and what might that information have been? Given the Agency’s concern that the Soviets might use the UFO hysteria to launch a phantom attack over the US, it also seems odd that no one on the Robertson panel mentioned that the technology to do so was already available – and that it might have been responsible for the Washington flap. Was this one of the things that Cross wanted to keep back from the CIA? In the same memo, Cross recommends that “a controlled experiment be set up” to launch “many different types of aerial activity” over a target area and then assess civilian and military responses to these false UFOs. Was it the Air Force – and not the CIA as Davidson believed – who were behind the incident? Had Stork already made a special delivery over Washington DC?

 

 

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Whether the Washington “invasion” of July 1952 was the result of accident or intrigue, and whichever department, if any, was behind it, the event focused the attentions of the US establishment on the UFO’s potential as both a weapon and a threat. From now on, the CIA, the FBI, the Air Force and the NSA would keep a close eye on what civilian UFO groups were doing and saying; the Air Force and the CIA would collaborate to use Project Bluebook to mask spyplane flights over the USA and USSR, while the CIA and NSA’s ghost planes flew rings around disorientated pilots.

 

Over the next six decades, the UFO mythology, and those who engaged with it, would continue to be exploited, steered and shaped by America’s armed forces and intelli gence agencies. Who knows how differ ently things would have evolved if the UFO community had paid more attention to Leon Davidson, ufology’s lost prophet.

 

 

 

 

Notes

1 Jerome Clark: The UFO Book, Visible Ink, 1998.

2 Ibid.

3 Leon Davidson: “ECM+CIA=UFO”, Saucer News, Feb/Mar 1959.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 “US airman Milton Torres told to shoot down UFO when based at RAF Manston”; Times, 20 Oct 2008.

8 Eugune Poteat: “Some Beginnings of Information Warfare, Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960–1975”, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 42, No.1, 1998.

9 New York Times, 30 July 1952.

10 Edward J Ruppelt: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,Doubleday, 1956.

11 Ibid.

12 The document was discovered by astronomer and UFO researcher Jacques Vallée in 1967, though it wasn’t made public until the publication of Vallée’s diaries in 1992.

Edited September 17, 2010 by GwynO

[Windrider 0]

I remember an incident a few years ago ( October 30, 2007 ), a Romania Mig-21 Lancer C was struck by a UFO.

There are some videos on youtube:

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N_IAcjTpKk

 

I will translate the important parts of the videos for I am sure you don't speak Romanian.

> The mig was flying at 6500 m ( 21,325 feet ) when it struck a UFO ( OZN in Romanian );

> The canopy was broken;

> There were 2 solid objects numbered on the video recording;

> The mig landed safely;

> The authorities have confirmed the event;

> The possibility of bird strike and ice was excluded;

> And they said that the video recording is bad because of the collision;

> In the end this event is studied at universities worldwide !?.

 

I don't realy know, it might be ice from white vapor trails caused by airliners but that is a wild guess.

 

And it might be part of the mytery of life ......, what do you think?

 

 

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Recon balloon or gondola package? We've been floating them across Russia and wherever since 1950s, and they've collided with a number of aircraft.

[JediMaster 451]

The video isn't bad because of the collision, it's bad because it's ALWAYS bad. Film cameras were far superior to video when it came to actually SEEING what is going on. Watch WWII gun camera footage, or Korea, or Vietnam...then watch Gulf War video...ugh.

[Atreides 144]

Does anyone remember this incident makes you wonder, Belgian F-16 achieving radar lock on the triangle shaped U.F.O's ? oh well they did'nt land and no E.T's stepped out *sigh*

 

Wiki link

 

The sightings

 

The Belgian UFO wave peaked with the events of the night of 30/31 March 1990. On that night unknown objects were tracked on radar, photographed, and were sighted by an estimated 13,500 people on the ground - 2,600 of whom filed written statements describing in detail what they had seen. Following the incident the Belgian air force released a report detailing the events of that night.

 

At around 23:00 on 30 March the supervisor for the Control Reporting Center (CRC) at Glons received reports that three unusual lights were seen moving towards Thorembais-Gembloux which lies to the South-East of Brussels. The lights were reported to be brighter than stars, changing color between red, green and yellow, and appeared to be fixed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. At this point Glons CRC requested the Wavre gendarmerie send a patrol to confirm the sighting.

 

Approximately 10 minutes later a second set of lights was sighted moving towards the first triangle. By around 23:30 the Wavre gendarmerie had confirmed the initial sightings and Glons CRC had been able to observe the phenomenon on radar. During this time the second set of lights, after some erratic manoeuvres, had also formed themselves into a smaller triangle. After tracking the targets and after receiving a second radar confirmation from the Traffic Center Control at Semmerzake, Glons CRC gave the order to scramble two F-16 fighters from Beauvechain Air Base shortly before midnight. Throughout this time the phenomenon was still clearly visible from the ground, with witnesses describing the whole formation as maintaining their relative positions while moving slowly across the sky. Witnesses also reported two dimmer lights towards the municipality of Eghezee displaying similar erratic movements to the second set of lights.

 

Over the next hour the two scrambled F-16s attempted nine separate interceptions of the targets. On three occasions they managed to obtain a radar lock for a few seconds but each time the targets changed position and speed so rapidly that the lock was broken. During the first radar lock, the target accelerated from 240 km/h to over 1,770 km/h while changing altitude from 2,700 m to 1,500 m, then up to 3,350 m before descending to almost ground level – the first descent of more than 900 m taking less than two seconds. Similar manoeuvres were observed during both subsequent radar locks. On no occasion were the F-16 pilots able to make visual contact with the targets and at no point, despite the speeds involved, was there any indication of a sonic boom. Moreover, narrator Robert Stack added in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, the sudden changes in acceleration and deceleration would have been fatal to one or more human pilots.

 

During this time, ground witnesses broadly corroborate the information obtained by radar. They described seeing the smaller triangle completely disappear from sight at one point, while the larger triangle moved upwards very rapidly as the F-16s flew past. After 00:30 radar contact became much more sporadic and the final confirmed lock took place at 00:40. This final lock was once again broken by an acceleration from around 160 km/h to 1,120 km/h after which the radar of the F-16s and those at Glons and Semmerzake all lost contact. Following several further unconfirmed contacts the F-16s eventually returned to base shortly after 01:00.

 

The final details of the sighting were provided by the members of the Wavre gendarmerie who had been sent to confirm the original report. They describe four lights now being arranged in a square formation, all making short jerky movements, before gradually losing their luminosity and disappearing in four separate directions at around 01:30.

 

Photograph

 

 

A supposed black triangle, 15 June 1990, Wallonia, Belgium. Claimed to have been taken during the UFO wave, though released thirteen years later.In April 1990, a photo was taken of a triangular object upon which 3 lights are visible at each corner. Some people claim it to be an important UFO picture. Others are more sceptical, claiming that the photograph is a hoax.

 

Sceptics say there is no background in the photograph and that there is no element which would allow the calculation of the object's size or distance from the camera. Wim van Utrecht, a Belgian sceptic, has reproduced a copy of the photograph with devices. A computer graphics simulation method to reproduce the photograph was developed by a Belgian mathematician, Thierry Veyt at The University of Liège Laboratory of Astrophysics, wherein the apparent "shake" motion, that results in the lights of the craft appearing blurred or out of focus in the photograph contradicts eye-witness statements. This, along with the anonymity of the photographer and fact that the image was not produced publicly until 4 months after the alleged event brings the authenticity of the image into question. [4]

 

Skeptical explanations

In The Belgian UFO Wave of 1989-1992 - A Neglected Hypothesis, Renaud Leclet & co. discuss the fact that some sightings can be explained by helicopters. Most witnesses reported that the objects were silent. This report argues that the lack of noise could be due to the engine noise in the witnesses' automobiles, or strong natural wind blowing in the direction of a witness, combined with the wind due to driving a vehicle.

Edited October 27, 2010 by Atreides