UFOs

[RottingCorpse]

In another thread Nacho brought up three separate UFO stories that ran within a week of each other. It got me thinking about UFOs so I pulled out my copy of "Alien Agenda" by Jim Marrs. It's conspiracy theory literature at it's best, but I'd say there's some fire in all that smoke.

Anyway, I must have never read the chapter on Foo Fighters and Nazi Flying Saucers because it flabbergasted me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_UFOs

Wiki doesn't mention it but Marrs goes into deep detail about all the high ranking Nazi scientists we assimilated into American life for access to Nazi weapons technology.

Specifically he suggests that Head Nazi Scientist Hans Kammler didn't commit suicide, but continued his weapons work in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Kammler

It's craaaazy shit, man . . . so crazy it could almost be true.

[nacho]

Yeah, the Foo Fighter stuff is fun.  And, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles

[RottingCorpse]

And then there's the Maury Island incident, a real sphincter clincher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maury_Island_incident

[RottingCorpse]

The Majestic 12 documents. To many UFOlogists, they're the smoking gun of a government cover-up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_12

[RottingCorpse]

Betty & Barney Hill . . . the first widely publicized abduction case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction

[RottingCorpse]

The 'Alien Interview' Footage. Purported to be footage smuggled out of Area 51 that shows a debriefing of an alien who crash landed on Earth. UFOlogists are torn as to its authenticity.

[nacho]

Just once...just fucking once...I want to see a video or a photo of something supernatural taken by a proper camera.

And I don;'t mean a film camera.  I mean, you can get better images from a $10 webcam, or a 7-11 security camera.  When a jet fighter blows up a bunker, you get an image as clear as day.  When it's chasing a UFO, it's like they're using a Kodak black and white Super-8 from 1967. 

[RottingCorpse]

I feel the same way. Camera technology has evolved to where an idiot can take a clear picture without trying.

Of course, then there's the government cover-up theory that says any clear photos are confiscated before they get disseminated. The way the internet and movie piracy works, I don't see how that would be possible.  Once something's out there, it's out there.

[nacho]

UFO's in the news!

Here's the report from my groovy funky paranormal weirdo site:
http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/11/hitlers-plan-use-alien-technology.html

And it's since been picked up:
http://blastr.com/2010/11/new-report-says-there-is.php

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8139811/Nazi-spaceship-film-sparks-UFO-debate.html

Now, we should take these reports with a grain of salt.  The Iron Sky guys have proven, over the last six months, to be geniuses with guerrilla media.

[RottingCorpse]

I linked to Kammler above. Lots of interesting stuff there as aliens or no, it seems almost certain that the Nazis were developing some form of flying disk/saucer technology. (And all of it was a precursor to the stealth and VTOL technology employed by most modern military aircraft.)

All that aside, if real, those pictures are amazing no matter what.

[nacho]

Haha!  First post, Nacho! Good morning!

My excuse is that I've been taking Tylenol Cold all day.

[RottingCorpse]

http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/24686978

[nacho]

Black triangles!  Have fun with this, RC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_triangle_(UFO)

[RottingCorpse]

SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes

If E.T. phones Earth, he'll get a "disconnect" signal.

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. "... This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle.

"We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds," he added. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

The SETI Institute's mission is to explore the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. This is a profound search, it believes, because it explains our place among the stars.

The program, located on U.S. Forest Service land near Mount Lassen, uses telescopes to listen for anything out of the ordinary -- a numerical sequence of "beeps," say, or crackly dialogue from an alien version of a disembodied "Charlie" talking to his "Angels." The entire program was set up to prove what once seemed unthinkable: In the universe, we are not alone.

Lack of funding

But funding for SETI has long been a headache for E.T.-seekers. NASA bankrolled some early projects, but in 1994, Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada convinced Congress that it wasn't worth the cost, calling it the "Great Martian Chase" and complaining that not a single flying saucer had applied for FAA approval.

However, successful private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.

Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working in concert. But what's lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.

This is the responsibility of UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university's major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support. Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.

About $5 million is needed over the next two years, according to Tarter. She hopes the U.S. Air Force will help, because the array can be used to track satellite-threatening debris in space. But budgets are tight there as well.

Astronomers mourn

The Allen array is not the only radio telescope facility that can be used for SETI searches. But it is the best; elsewhere, scientists have to borrow time on other telescopes.

Meanwhile, other SETI projects will continue, such as the "setiQuest Explorer" (www.setiquest.org), an application that allows citizen scientist volunteers to look for patterns from existing data that might have been missed by existing algorithms. Through a new partnership with "Galaxy Zoo" (www.galaxyzoo.org), this project runs in real time, so discoveries can be followed up on immediately.
Bay Area astronomers mourned the hiatus of the SETI program and expressed concern about the future.

Rob Hawley of the Peninsula Astronomical Society called it "unfortunate. The Allen scope was a wonderful experiment. "... Hubble gets all the press, but there are lots of limitations."

Amateur astronomer Sarah Wiehe of Palo Alto said, "just knowing SETI is there was significant for us. This is a setback."
"If we miss a distant signal," she added, "it would be a terrible loss."

[RottingCorpse]

New book says USSR was behind Roswell UFO

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that's already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it--maybe.

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre-looking, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation  of the HG Wells story "War of the Worlds," produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles' day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)

And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the "Angel of Death," Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of "alien-like children."
According to Jacobsen's source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: "They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes."

Is any of this true? There's no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified--as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.

Still, lack of proof hasn't exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for "area 51 book." And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.

Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: "Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. 'Area 51' is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation."

But sci-fi provocation may be all the book generates. After all, without the government coming out and saying what happened back in 1947, even if there was no conspiracy, the stories of the "Roswell Incident" will remain just that.