SUBJECT: REWRITE OF PREVIOUS UFO RELATED UPLOADS FILE: UFO2313 Captured from CLEVELAND FREENET, October 10, 1987 OVERVIEW AND REWRITE OF PREVIOUS UFO RELATED UPLOADS [Rick Dell'aquilla] Astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan, the acknowledged guru of professional UFO "skeptics", has been quoted as saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Another of the better known of these professional UFO skeptics, Phil Klass, has admitted the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere than planet Earth, although he finds no convincing evidence that UFO phenomena indicate visitation to Earth by alien intelligence. In his book, COSMOS, Dr. Sagan postulates a formula that suggests that many, perhaps most, stars have planets, and that the number of potentialy technologically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy can be estimated by the formula: N* X fp X ne X f1 X fi X fe X fL = N, Where: N* is the number of stars in our galaxy (about 400 billion) fp is the fraction of stars with planetary systems (about 1/3) ne is the number of planets per system suitable for life (2) f1 is the fraction of the suitable planets on which life actually arises (about 1/3) fi is the fraction of inhabited planets on which intelligence evolved and fe the fraction of inhabited planets on which a technical civilization developed (fi X fe = 1/100) and fL is the fraction of a planetary lifetime over which the technical civilization survived. (< .0000001%) Dr. Sagan's computation indicates that N ( the number of extant technical civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy is about Ten Million (10,000,000). This means that even though only .0025% of the stars in the Milky Way have technologically adavanced civilizations, there are about Ten Million (10,000,000) such civilizations in our galaxy. Dr. Sagan's estimate of 10,000,000 inhabited and technologically advanced planets in our one galaxy, of, course, does not in and of itself prove that UFO phenomena represent a manifestation of any one of them. However, it does indicate that in dealing with matters of such magnitude, even assuming a "low probability", (in this case, .0025%) there remains an astoundingly large number of potentially inhabited and highly developed civilizations in our part of the universe. Highly unusual, startling, and completely credible documentation concerning UFOs has been disclosed under the Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), is a statute by which citizens may compel the government to release certain documents. This documentation (7000 pages approx.) has been obtained by litigation with such agencies as the FBI, CIA, NSA, USAF, etc.). Much information is still being withheld from the public and remains to be disclosed, since the bulk of these documents have not been released by the government, under the "National Security" exemption in the statute. In view of the extraordinary revelations contained in these documents, there may be very much more, and even more disturbing, information yet to be revealed. The authenticity of the documents is not arguable, since they have been released directly from the federal agency involded to the U.S. District Courts. Among the UFO cases established by the official documentary evidence is the Bentwaters sighting of a few years ago. RAF Woodbridge/Bentwaters are two adjacent USAF bases (Strategic Air Command) on land in Eastern England leased by the U.S. Air Force from Great Britain. As such, these are high security installation and storage sites for nuclear weapons. Over the Christmas season of 1980, several British newspapers carried banner headlines of a unique UFO report, unique in the sense that the information was obtained through an OFFICIAL USAF DOCUMENT RELEASED UNDER THE FOIA. The report was prepared by the second in command of the base, Lt. Col Charles I. Halt, a trained observer with a military career he presumably would not wish to place in jeapordy with outlandish or otherwise unsubstantiated UFO claims. Yet, can one explain the fact that he has never retracted a word of the following report, was never reprimanded for making a false report, and indeed, was later promoted to Brig. General? The report states: "1. Early in the morning of 27 Dec 80 (approximately 0300L), two USAF security policemen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty chief respond- ed and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The indi- viduals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights under- neath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate. 2. The next day, three depressions 1 1/2" deep and 7" in diameter were found where the object had been sighted on the ground. The following night (29 Dec 80) the area was checked for radiation. Beta/gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens were recorded with peak readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle foRAGRAPHS 2 AND 3. (Emphasis added.) (Signed) Charles I. Halt, Lt. Col, USAF Deputy Base Commander " Moreover, in a 1984 CNN documentary on the Bentwaters case, current and former USAF security personnel independently confirmed the contents of the Halt report. A former military policeman, "Airman Gregg," stated, " I saw some kind of spaceship from someplace not of this Earth." A former Master Sgt., who was part of the team that investigated the landing site, said the team found three depressions in the soil, 12 feet apart, in an equilateral triangle. One officer who is still on active duty with the USAF corroborated these statements and added that motion pictures and still photographs of the site were also taken. (denied by the USAF.) Lt. Col. Halt ordered a hightened state of alert for the following night, on which night a four-man perimiter patrol reported seeing strange lights in the sky outside the back gate that, "were unlike the pattern of any known aircraft." They requested and were given permission to investigate. They found that an INTENSE light was eminating from a clearing in the forest at the end of the runway. One security officer said that as they approached, all the hair on their bodies (even under their hats) stood on end, "like therre was a big static charge in the air." They loaded their M-16s. "We didn't know what we were encountering; and we knew it was something beyond our realm of experience. We had never experienced anything like that before. About that time, we decided to get the...out of there." The armed security police ran off and encountered about 30 more security police (led by Lt. Col. Halt) in about a half-dozen vehicles on a nearby road. Halt and a three man team, including Sgr. "B" ( a USAF security officer still on active duty) approached the clearing. The Sgt. later said, "right now, I do believe that UFOs exist. Up to this point, I had been skeptical. Now I believe there may have been someone else there." Larry Warren, a former security officer, has come forward without anonymity and has withstood a blistering attack by the professional skeptics on his personal integrity, who claimed he was a drug user or flat out, a liar. These unsubstantiated charges were later retracted by the skeptics. Warren maintains that more happened on the second night that is not included in the report or on the tape. Warren states, "I was very close...At one point we saw people, or whatever you want to call them, coming out. There were three of them..they stood there...actually floated...our base commander was there (Lt. Col. Gordon Williams)." Although the USAF originally maintained that "no audio- visual documentation of the incident exists," a FOIA action unearthed a 20 minute audio tape made by Lt. Col. Halt which describes segments of events over a seven hour period of this second night. Among routine recordings of the levels of radioactivity and the other evidence referred to in the Halt report, the tape describes Lt. Col. Halt's EYEWITNESS UFO SIGHTING made at the time of the recording. Skeptics have maintained that Lt. Col. Halt and his men mistakenly sighted the Orford lighthouse about ten miles away. Although a lighthouse beacon can be a source of a single light point, there the similarity to the Halt report and tape ends. Lighthouse beacons do not leave radioactive "Landing Marks" in the soil. A single beacon is not simultaneously visible in two different directions (180 degrees apart-north and south) In fact, at one point, Lt. Col. Halt describes four separate lights at the same time, that moved about independently of each other then disappeared. It is not likely that the beacon would have been shut off in the middle of the night, just as it is improbable that the Deputy Base Commander of a highly sensitive nuclear base (and at least a dozen of his men) could have confused a lighthouse beacon, in a location he was no doubt familiar with, with the highly unusual lights he describes--let alone that the confusion would have lasted in excess of one hour. The lighthouse explanation simply does not stand up under close scrutiny. When this position collapsed, the skeptics then turned to challenging the personal integrity of the men who spoke out--and the discussion got ugly. These men were alleged to be drug users and the skeptics maintained that these security personnel were, in the words of one noted skeptic, "hallucinating Keystone Cops." At one point, the tape records Lt. Col. Halt (excited and breathing rapidly) saying, "It's (the UFO) moving out...It's moving fast!" Another security officer remarks, "There's one on the right heading this way too!" Halt continues, "They're both heading north. Hey! Here! Here...Here he's coming from the south! He's coming toward us now! WEIRD!...Now we are observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. THIS IS UNREAL!" To repeat, this is an authenticated audio tape, obtained under the FOIA, which has never been retracted by Lt. Col. (now Brig. General) Halt or any other USAF official. Any OBJECTIVE review of this evidence indicates that the government is (or should be) VERY interested in the matter of UFOs, despite its official position that it discontinued all investigations in 1969. Indeed, many scientists are convinced that more study of UFOs is needed. e conducted the investigation entirely on his own. On July 9, 1985, Senator Exon wrote a letter stating, "...while additional information on the subject of Bentwaters AND OTHER UNEXPLAINED UFO INCIDENTS (emphasis added) may exist, I can find no evidence of a coverup..." This letter was written significantly after the light- house explanation was first proposed and apparently the Senator also found the lighthouse description unacceptable, chosing rather to call the incident an "unexplained UFO incident." Although Senator Exon has refused further comment on Bentwaters, in a letter dated August 14, 1985, he stated, "I have put in more time on this matter than any other case since I have been a U.S. Senator." I leave it to the reader to judge the importance at least one busy U.S. Senator felt this matter demanded, to have taken so much time with this sighting. SOMETHING grabbed his interest. How do we know whether UFOs exist? We don't. What we do know is that an unusually large number of UFO reports exist, and that some, such as the Halt report, are indeed EXTRAORDINARY, in the sense mandated by Dr. Sagan. There are many common points shared by these reports (e.g. the types of phenomena reported, that the better the report the harder it is to explain away and that many reports are made by perfectly normal and sometimes highly trained personnel whose testimony on any other subject would be accepted in any court of law). We also know that our government and others continue to study UFOs, despite their official position that they do not. Many lawsuits have been filed under the Freedom of Information Act against the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, Air Force, Army, Navy, etc., which have revealed many previously classified documents confirming that the government takes the matter VERY seriously and that there are far more such documents remaining which the government refuses to disclose. Perhaps the most open government involved in the study of UFOs is France, although even they recently tightened the security of these matters. In 1974, M. Robert Galley, the French Minister of Defense, gave an interview on French National Radio in which he stated that UFOs are real and that if the public were told the amount and quality of the evidence (such as radar sightings and fighter gun camera movies) they would be very disturbed. He also revealed in the interview that the government was passing UFO information on for evaluation by CNES (the French NASA). Dr. Claude Poher was in charge of the study there. By May 1, 1977, the work of Dr. Poher was so impressive that the French government put it on a much more official basis, gave the project a substantial grant of funds and created a new division of CNES under Poher's direction. This division was named GEPAN (which stands for Group into Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena). About one year after the project started, Dr. Pierre Guerin, an astronomer working for the project wrote, "an intelligence controls the UFOs, and it is not ours." Later in the the article, Guerin said the the governments of the earth knew the truth about UFOs (that they came from an intelligence which coexisted with us on the planet and may actually control us!) but that they had no idea how to disclose this information and still maintain world order. GEPAN marked a new phase of open communication in official policy, and the project was very cooperative with ufologists, unlike governmental agencies in the United States. In a document dated February, 1979, GEPAN outlines how the study operates. There are field workers, including an early warning team who can be rapidly sent to the scene of an incident. A team of scientists of various disciplines studies the information collected in well equipped laboratories. Psychologists evaluate witnesses. The National Police (Gendarmes) are to prepare reports of incidents to be passed on to GEPAN. Of 354 reports received in 1978, 53% involved close encounters, of which 25% were classified "unexplained" and 34% "potentially unknown but lacking probative data." GEPAN states that these alarming results "pose a real question after analysis by our experts." It was at this time that GEPAN decided that "great vigilance is necessary regarding the distribution and publication of these studies. We estimate that the witnesses we have met have really seen the things which they report to us...the study of the cause of these phenomena is capable of bringing forth new knowledge." In private, Poher and Guerin were going even farther, and the French government became worried. A new director, astronomer Dr. Alain Esterle, was appointed. Less GEPAN information was released, although Dr. Esterle stated in 1981 that the work of GEPAN was proving that UFOs were indeed alien. With the growth of its work and information collected by 1982, GEPAN had tightened its security measures and a "reorganization" of GEPAN was instituted. Esterle was replaced by an engineer and Dr. Guerin released this statement in 1983: "It is not the scientists, naturally skeptical as they are, who induced the military and political leaders to refuse to take 'UFO stories' seriously. It is these authorities them- selves who are concealing from us what they know...and they have put it into the minds of the scientists to deny the existence of es believes that most sightings are misidenti- fications of prosaic objects, he estimates that 1,000 to 10,000 reports from all over the world remain for which no conventional explanation is possible. He speculates that similar events have been occurring for centuries. But despite the literal "mountain" of evidence that has accumulated over the past 40 years of government interest in UFOs, including the GEPAN program in France, not one other government is willing to openly admit that there is anything curious in the UFO phenomena worthy of study, let alone a potential security problem. He cites a remarkable public apathy, a climate of ridicule by the media and an air of apparent indifference by the world governments. But, he says, this is only an apparent indifference, as the phenomena is undoubtedly being studied somewhere in some back rooms. For example, documents obtained under the FOIA from the CIA, NSA and other governmental agencies provide undeniable evidence of continuing official interest in UFOs. Noyes congratulates his former colleagues at the MOD on their ability to pretend to take no notice of the stranger incidents reported to them. Noyes believes that the Bentwaters case in 1980 is one of the most important UFO cases in history. It was this case that encouraged Noyes to finally write the UFO book he had long considered. He chose the fictional format because it permitted him to enter into various speculations which would not otherwise be possible. U. S. Senator Barry Goldwater (Arizona) is a retired USAF General, with TOP SECRET CLEARANCE, who attempted to gain access to a storage facility alleged to contain dead aliens at Wright-Patterson AFB. He was refused entry since he did not have, believe it or not, a high enough security clearance. On December 3, 1974, Goldwater wrote the following letter: "...I made an effort to get in the room at Wright-Patter- son Field where the information was stored and I was denied this request, understandably." On March 28, 1975, Senator Goldwater wrote again: "...The subject of UFOs has interested me for some time. I made an effort to find out what was in THE BUILDING AT WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE WHERE THE INFORMATION IS STORED THAT HAS BEEN COLLECTED BY THE AIR FORCE, and I was denied this request. IT IS STILL CLASSIFIED ABOVE TOP SECRET..." (Emphasis Added). Other prominent Amercans have also gone on record that the UFO phenomena is worthy of serious study, for example: 1. President Carter asked NASA to explore the possibility of investigating UFOs. 2. When he was in Congress, President Ford called for Congressional investigations of UFOs. 3. Astronaut Gordon Cooper said, "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets." 4. General Nathan Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reputed member of MJ-12, wrote a secret memo on September 23, 1947, in which he stated to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces on the subject of "Flying Discs": " a. The phenomenon reported is something REAL and not visionary or fictitious. b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. c. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena, such as meteors. d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered EVASIVE when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely." (Emphasis in Original). It is now clear that the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book was merely a public relations effort to show something being "done" about UFOs. It is equally clear that the real effort was, and continues to be conducted elsewhere. In 1969, the U.S. Air Force closed it's public UFO data gathering effort known as "Project Blue Book." Since that time, all inquiries to the Air force requesting information on UFOs were met with standard form letters indicating that, since 1969, the Air Force no longer is involved in UFO investigation and that the reports gathered by Project Blue Book have been archived and are available elsewhere. Lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act have obtained significant official documentation verifying an on- going uninterrupted concern with UFO investigations by the Air Force, belying its publicly stated position on the matter. A Joint Army Navy Air Force Publication (JANAP 146) requires reports of any sighting which could be a threat to national security. UFOs continue to be sighted by military personnel and are reported under this regulation. Indeed, important UFO sightings and reports, even before 1969, were not processed under Project Blue Book, but were and are collected and investigated elsewhere by the military. An Air Force document dated October 20, 1969, which proposed termination of Project Blue Book, states, "Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, AND ARE NOT PART OF THE BLUE BOOK SYSTEM (Emphasis Added)...reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through standarddeemed to constitute a threat to national security under JANAP 146, are considered by the regulation as something different than missles and aircraft. Moreover, the term "UFO," as used in these regulations, is given very clear definition. Illustrations in Air Force Intelligence manuals at least as far back as 1953 represent UFOs as large, disc-shaped craft with transparent domes and portholes around the edges. A U.S. Navy publication (OPNAV 94- P-3B), titled "MERINT Radiotelegraph Procedure," shows UFOs as a separate class from missles and aircraft. In fact, an illustration under the UFO heading shows a Saturn-shaped disc. Obviously, this does not even approach "final proof" of the existence of UFOs. But it does constitute EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE as suggested by Dr. Sagan in that it establishes that those responsible in our government take a serious attitude toward UFOs, despite the public pronouncements to the contrary. The official documents released under the FOIA establish an intense governmental interest in UFOs over at least the past 40 years. These monumental efforts are completely irreconcilable with the notion that UFOs are nothing more than the imaginations and misidentifications of a misguided and gullible populace. In reviewing the many uploads to this board, I felt there should be a more streamlined way to present the above ideas for consideration and discussion. Your responses are invited. --------------------------------------- ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************