Mysterious space plane has landed after three years in orbit | Boing Boing

908 days, this US military plane has been "orbiting Earth for unknown reasons." More on BoingBoing.net:

Mysterious space plane has landed after three years in orbit | Boing Boing

Brings up all kinds of shadow government conspiracy speculations, doesn't it?

Seth Shostak:The Great UFO Debate

By way of Alfred Lehmberg (where I followed this link) who offers his own excellent commentary on the musings of Seth Shostak, we have the . . .

  The Great UFO Debate: "The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth."(Seth Shostak)

The "weird news?" Why so? Shostak's thing has always been that the reality of ET is quite reasonable, just out there, not anywhere near here.

Shostak writes that "…recent television shows" depict aliens landing and doing all kinds of things to our planet and its inhabitants:

". . . alien craft are violating our air space, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre (and, in most states, illegal) experiments on hapless citizens."  (Shostak)

Mr. Shostak dahling, do you really think aliens give a hoot about the legalities concerning abductions and what not?! (Now, an interesting angle here -- one whose entertaining of thought eludes practically all skeptics and some, even, UFO researchers, is that many of the alien/UFO episodes are conducted staged by our own.)

And then there's paragraphs about lights, sightings, atmospheric conditions…all mistaken for UFOs and not proof of ET. Which, I will concede, is sometimes true. But that is not the issue here and I suspect that Seth Shostak knows this. The following -- in which Shostak refers to aliens who "melon-ball" human flesh, illustrates my point:

"What about those folks who have experienced alien beings first-hand? Abduction stories are an entirely separate field of study and one which I won't address here . . . "

Why won't you deal with abductions Mr. Shostak? What skeptics and debunkers consistently ignore, or, just don't get, is that you can't have one without the other. I don't mean to say that all encounters with strange beings are aliens-from-outer-space encounters, or that all UFO encounters include abductions. But many UFO encounters do include abductions, as well as missing time and a long list of weirdness. You can't look at one piece of this puzzle and decide on its solution while ignoring the rest of the scene.

The fact that we don't know where UFOs originate -- as if all UFOs should or do originate from the same source -- doesn't make this fact "goofy" as Shostak says. Again, he ignores the vastly intriguing array of possibilities. To Shostak, the ET question is a simple one with a simple answer. Black, white, either, or, this not that, and that's all there is.

Finally, we have the predictable and highly disingenuous comments from Shokstak. The first is his regurgitation of the skeptic cliche that the witnesses need to provide proof, not the other way around:

"The burden of proof is on those making the claims, not those who find the data dubious."

And here:

"If there are investigators who are convinced that craft from other worlds are buzzing ours, then they should present the absolute best evidence they have, and not resort to explanations that appeal to conspiratorial cover-ups or the failure of others to be open to the idea."

Well, many a researcher and witness do provide what they have, what they know, what they've seen. I can only report on what I saw, no matter how odd, and what I've experienced. Missing time? Sorry, I don't have any proof, which is not the same as evidence, which I also do not have; not even much on theories about what or why. Just that it did. (At least twice.) Sure, someone could have slipped me a mickey, or something was glitchy in my brain… then again, if the latter, that would have to be true for the other witness who was with me -- both times. And who also has had his own life long experiences of the UFO kind. Shostak doesn't consider these contexts, these connections of experience.

So all I can do, all any witness can do, is report what happened. And the honest researcher or collector of lore has to include it all and look at it all. Shostak does not. He is  stuck on his belief that ET is possible, and alive in space, while concurrently holding the opinion that no such thing is possible here on earth.

Instead of deciding before the fact what will be considered and what won't, participants in this quest need to work together. Don't tell me missing time was imaginary, or that someone slipped me a mickey. Look at the history of my experience in context of the phenomena. 

Where Did It Go?

(And, what was it?)


Last week or so I wrote about a strange star or planet that I saw. I tried to determine what it was; possibly Jupiter... did some searching and all kinds of posts on forums, including Above Top Secret, of people seeing a similar looking object/star/planet in about the same place in the sky. I've gone out looking for it since then, but haven't seen it. I realize stars move and all kinds of things such as atmospheric conditions affect how or when you can see objects but it's unusual that it's just plain completely gone. Really, the thing was spectacular, and "dripping" tails, multi-colored.

The USSR Cause for Roswell? - Muddled Disclosures

Supposedly. Could be. In UFO World, anything is possible. Journalist Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51, acknowledges there's definitely insidious and strange events going on in Area 51 and the UFO realm generally, but it's not aliens. (No, it could never be aliens.) Jacobsen and her book is currently making the mainstream circuit, including a recent appearance on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. I knew before she came on that Stewart, who I adore, would mock any hint of alien/UFO reality, since it seems to be an affliction of the majority of the liberal-left-hip to sneer at fringe subjects. He didn't disappoint.

Jacobsen's contention is that yes, weirdness abounds but it's not aliens. It's the USSR and Nazi experiments behind the Roswell crash. And so much more, but all of these strange events have been orchestrated by humans. ET has nothing to do it, nor cryptids or vortexes or magick or anything other than human Dr. Evils.

Jacobsen has interesting ideas about what on, but there's no proof. As is admitted by everyone, but that seems to be all right, for Jacobsen is a legitimate journalist and not some tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist:

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.

I'm impatient and cynical with this distracting crap, because it's muddled disinfo. (Which is probably an oxymoron.) Jacobsen's story gets attention, while all the other UFO stories, including abduction stories sans Nazi bastards-Dr. Evils-government experiments, continue to go utterly ignored, utterly mocked. Meanwhile, journalists, writers, researchers, scientists -- those "respected journalists" and the like --  who know nothing of the esoteric world yet decide to take a swim in the sparkling waters for a look-see are blind to what they consider nonsense. They come out with one small bit, show it off as the latest in theory, and happily go back to their rational worlds. Everyone thinks something groovy-weird has just been revealed, and all has been solved: including the "nonsense" of UFOs. Because, as has just been proven, no such things exist. It was really Russia, or Nazis, or ...

We're not done yet. The fact is, there very well could be some truth to these theories. Nick Redfern's book Bodysnatchers in the Desert  brought explored the idea of human experiments and manipulations as the cause for Roswell. MILABS are a very real possibility, and some UFO witnesses and researchers have been writing about this for a long time. Ironically, among UFO researchers, the MILAB "conspiracy" doesn't get much attention.

It's not that Jacobsen's story couldn't be true, or, some of it could be true...it's that once again, our attention from the reality of the UFO phenomena is trivialized and further pushed out to the edges. UFOs, the mainstream continues to insist, are entertaining and fun funny, but they're not real.

If Jacobsen's contentions somehow prove to be valid, (and/or Redfern's, etc.) that is horrifying, and the world needs to know. But what will happen in that event is that the many will accept that as the explanation for all of "it." Once again, we go back to clean dichotomies, something both the mainstream and many within UFOlgy are guilty of enacting.  It has to be this theory or that theory,  it's all aliens or it's all human psychopaths.

As I said, I'm impatient with this mainstream UFO denying stuff, but Nick Redfern has a calmer take on Jacobsen's book, giving us a bit of  background and data that is helpful, even if it does push us further down the rabbit hole. (Once you've fallen in, you just keep falling...:) You can read his review here.

International Air Space and the Black Triangles

In past articles on the black triangles, I've often made the comment about the fact the triangles appear all over the world, which means they appear in international air space. I've stated that this is risky; the abrupt appearance of an unknown craft in another country's air space seems dangerous. But, if we don't know who the triangles belong to, if they're man made or alien, and so on, the issue is probably moot. However, I still assumed that the U.S. (assuming the triangles are ours) flying into the air space of other countries was a bad thing, unless of course that air space was part of NATO and so on.

No one's challenged me on my assumption or has bothered to set me straight. (Which means no one's reading what I write, :) But in talking with someone the other day who's interested in history and military stuff, I was told that at certain heights, craft flies into air space all the time. And if the craft is astoundingly fast, as the triangles appear to be, and their origin is unknown (presumably) no harm can come to either craft or nation. If a black triangle appears in China, who would China respond to? Not enough time or data to analyze to determine where it came from.

This is all very nuts and bolts and it's an area I am not at all familiar with or even too interested in -- I'm not an aviation maven or military buff -- but it is important to have some sense of these kinds of things to help us in our studies of UFOs.

So far, the triangles remain true UFOs. They may very well be man made, but we don't know that, not yet. Even if they are man made, there are a lot of mysteries surrounding the triangles. One being: are the triangles based on alien technology? If not, it is still an incredible creation; these triangles are huge and incredibly fast, even downright spooky. What is their purpose? They've been around for decades, why the continued secrecy?

If the triangles are man made (either the U.S. or some other nation) and are flying in the skies of the world, as they clearly are, are they doing so with the complicity of other governments? Or is there just one, or a very few, governments having their way with the rest of the world? In this scenario, we hardly need aliens here, we seem to be doing a good enough job on our own involving issues of deceit, subversion, secrecy, disinformation, and agendas.

My strong interest in the triangles is rooted in my own personal sighting. Which really wasn't very dramatic, given the experiences of so many other witnesses to the triangles. An example is the sighting of the Bale brothers from Oregon, who saw a triangle while camping in Idaho.

The triangle sightings continue, and have been occurring for so long, I think that for some researchers it's become almost a boring topic. Probably because of my own sighting, and my insatiable curiosity when it comes to unsolved fringe mysteries, I remain intrigued by the triangles. Alien or man made, almost doesn't matter, because the phenomena of the triangles is so weird (decades long event, fantastic speeds and maneuvers, odd effects upon witnesses, global appearances, secrecy, etc.) the topic stands on its own as a fringe object of study.

Wanted: Volunteers for Mars Experiment

The European Space Agency wants volunteers; half a dozen people to play astronaut here on earth for almost a year and a half. Volunteers will be placed in isolation tanks inside mock spaceships. (The isolation tanks are only part of the routine, they won’t be in them for the entire time.) Not only will the volunteers be in isolation tanks, they won’t have contact with anyone. Communication will be by radio. They’ll be sealed up inside a “research institute” in Moscow:
The goal is to gain experience about the psychological challenges that a crew will face on a trip to Mars.

So far, they’ve had about 150 people apply. 19 of those were from women.
Read more: Space pioneers wanted for 520-day Mars experiment

The Sun and the Moon

Dazzling new images reveal the 'impossible' on the Sun by Hazel Muir:

The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode.

Earth Without A Moon - Pre-Lunar Civilizations, by UFO Area:

There was a time in the early history of our planet, some 100 million years ago, or even less when there was no Moon in the sky.

Our ancestors recall the time when a pre-Lunar civilization lived on this planet without a Moon.