Article by Sandra Erwin June 4, 2020 (spacenews.com)
• The launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on May 30th that took NASA astronauts to the International Space Station was the “culmination of perhaps the most successful private-public partnership of all times,” said Colonel Eric Felt, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Space Vehicles Directorate. In a SpaceNews online event June 4th, Felt noted that Space Force will be far smaller than the other U.S. military services, so it plans to follow the NASA playbook and team up with the private sector. “The Space Force is going to be the most high tech of all of the services,” said Felt.
• Public-private partnerships, like deals with SpaceX and Boeing, have saved NASA billions of dollars. There are many commercial capabilities that can be used to meet military needs, with “hybrid architecture”. For example, commercial companies already have powerful sensors and data analytics systems to track and investigate space objects. The Space Force’s AFRL is looking into public-private deals to use these commercial satellites to enhance its “space domain awareness”, allowing Space Force to monitor every object in outer space. (see video below)
• Another application using private satellites in low Earth orbit is for the deployment of sensors for the Air Force’s ‘Advanced Battle Management System’, allowing the military to integrate and analyze data from space rather than from the more vulnerable command-and-control airplanes flying over enemy territory.
• Next year, AFRL plans to launch an experimental ‘cubesat’ satellite equipped with a ‘Link 16’ encrypted radio frequency data link, widely used on U.S. military and NATO aircraft and ground vehicles to share information, as a communications network relay in space. With “one of these Link 16 transponders (attached to) each of these low Earth orbit satellites, you would basically have Link 16 capability everywhere all the time,” said Felt.
• Private companies deploying broadband satellite constellations in low Earth orbit would be candidates for partnerships where these commercial satellites would also host government communications. The Defense Innovation Unit of the AFRL and the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center have been talking about setting up a ‘space commodities exchange’ where space services could be traded like commodities. “The space domain awareness data might be a great example of the kinds of things that the Space Force could purchase through a space commodities exchange,” said Felt.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force will be far smaller than the other military services but way more dependent on technology to do its job. While the Space Force will develop satellites and other technologies in-house, it also plans to follow the NASA playbook and team up with the private sector, said Col. Eric Felt, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate.
Colonel Eric Felt
Speaking at a SpaceNews online event June 4, Felt said NASA’s commercial crew program is “super exciting” and one that the Space Force can learn from.
The launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on May 30 that took NASA astronauts to the International Space Station was the “culmination of perhaps the most successful private-public partnership of all times,” said Felt.
The Space Vehicles Directorate, located at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is one of the organizations that Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett agreed to transfer to the Space Force. Felt said his office will remain at its current location but approximately 700 people will be reassigned to the Space Force.
“The Space Force is going to be the most high tech of all of the services,” said Felt.
Public-private partnerships like NASA’s commercial crew deals with SpaceX and Boeing have saved NASA billions of dollars and serve as a “powerful model” that the Defense Department could adopt, said Felt.
1:02:30 video on military/corporate partnerships for Space Force (‘SpaceNewsInc’ YouTube)
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• Cuban science fiction writer, Daína Chaviano, thinks that the UFO phenomenon is real. But he wonders why the Pentagon waited until now to declassify the Navy UFO videos that have already been on the internet for years. “How can they say now that they have declassified recordings that years ago were all over the internet and that have already been the subject of numerous (studies) by experts?” asks Chaviano. His Venezuelan colleague and fellow sci fi author, Ibrahim Buznego, believes that everything is part of a “preparation plan”.
• The US Department of Defense recently published video recordings of three UFO sightings by Navy pilots, one from 2004 and two from 2015, which had previously been leaked and circulating on the internet since 2007 and 2017. “I couldn’t help but be outraged,” Chaviano told Spanish news agency Efe. Why these three videos, when “there are many more videos of that kind(?)” There are many other UFO videos “taken by pilots from different countries and branches of the aviation industry” that have already been analyzed by organizations such as MUFON,” says Chaviano.
• Buznego is surprised that at a time when the daily lives of millions of people seem to be taken out of a science fiction book because of the coronavirus, it is the Pentagon that remembers the extraterrestrial phenomena. The US Air Force “has been preparing us for a long time” said Buznego, who, like Chaviano, is based out of Miami. “It comes like a drop by drop,” says Buznego. Why does the Pentagon “quarantine” UFO disclosure when it’s an ‘open secret’?
• At 13 years old, in the sky over his native Venezuela, Buznego “observed an immensely large light that was leaving a striking trail. This object was going through the mountain range along the horizon.” Buznego believes that everything that has now happened “is part of an extraterrestrial search program” that started when NASA sent a signal into space in the 1980s from Puerto Rico.
• Last March, Chaviano was the winner of the ‘Florida Books Awards’ for the best book in Spanish for his novel, The Children of the Hurricane Goddess. Chaviano is bothered by the bad intentions of those who try to discredit scholars of the UFO phenomenon. “The UFO phenomenon is a real fact,” says Chaviano. “Those of us who have seen it, filmed it or studied it know it with as much certainty as the governments themselves that try to hide it or silence (UFO disclosure).”
• “The fact that there are idiots who have ‘tricked’ (ie: faked) videos does not detract from all that material recorded by the thermal and infrared cameras of military or civil aircraft and helicopters. I have spoken with military pilots who have seen (UFOs) and who have told me, ‘I don’t know what they are, but they are not ours’,” meaning the entire human species, says Chaviano.
• Last September, Buznego joined a Facebook group that organized an “invasion” of the US Air Force base in Nevada known as Area 51. He was one of the around one hundred people who attended the event to find that there were “soldiers outside who prevented us from entering.”
• Buznego’s fictional novel, SERES, part of a trilogy, begins at the end of the Second World War with “Operation Paperclip”, the mission to bring Nazi German scientists into the United States after the war. The plot then travels to 2019 when a pair of scientists move to Ohio to work in an ultra-secret laboratory that studies extraterrestrial activity. Buznego says that the novel is 40% true, featuring documentary research on the Nazca Lines in Peru and the pyramids of Egypt and Chichén Itzá, in Mexico.
Daína Chaviano
Cuban science fiction writer Daína Chaviano affirms that “the phenomenon UFO it’s a real event ”, but he is surprised that the Pentagon has declassified in the mid-forties of COVID-19 Videos that have been on the internet for years, while his young Venezuelan colleague Ibrahim Buznego believes that everything is part of a
Ibrahim Buznego
“preparation plan”.
“When I saw the headlines about the alleged declassification of those videos by the Pentagon, I couldn’t help but be outraged,” Chaviano tells Efe.
“How can they say now that they have declassified recordings that years ago were all over the internet and that have already been the subject of numerous analyzes (even on TV programs) by experts?” Asked the writer, a reference in science fiction in Spanish.
The US Department of Defense It published last Monday the recordings of three sightings of unidentified flying objects by Air Force pilots, one from 2004 and two from 2015, which had previously been leaked and had been circulating on the network since 2007 and 2017.
Author of the novels “The man, the female and the hunger” (Azorin Prize 1998) and “The island of infinite loves”, among other works, Chaviano affirms that there are many more videos of that kind.
They have been “taken by pilots from different countries and branches of the aviation industry” and have already been analyzed by organizations such as MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), the most respected NGO in the investigation of UFO activity, with 30,000 cases under their belt.
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Article by David Axe April 15, 2020 (nationalinterest.org)
• During the Iran/Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian F-14 Tomcat pilots successfully employed the F-14’s long-range, heavyweight AIM-54 Phoenix missiles to shoot down enemy planes. Over the decades, Iran has continued to repair and upgrade its surviving F-14s, scouring the globe for parts in defiance of a US government embargo. While the U.S. retired its’ F-14s in 2006, Iran still operates its’ forty remaining F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, some of history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft.
• Since then, Tehran has built three major nuclear facilities that could, in theory, be used to assemble atomic weapons. When this became public knowledge in 2002, “A number of reconnaissance UAVs (‘unmanned aerial vehicles’) were sent to collect intelligence to prepare for a possible attack” by Western forces, according to a 2013 story in Combat Aircraft magazine by Babak Taghvaee. In 2004, Iran deployed a task force composed of eight F-4E fighters and eight F-14s, plus a former 707 airliner and a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with sensors and radios to protect its nuclear facilities.
• Iran’s Tomcat fighter jets have reportedly come in close contact with mysterious aircraft while defending its airspace. The Iranian task force believes these were CIA drones with “astonishing flight characteristics.” The UAVs could jam radars and disrupt jet interceptors’ navigation systems. They could hover and fly at night. They flew “outside the atmosphere” at hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 10, while most air forces around the world struggle to reach Mach five. And they emitted a telltale blue light that led to their nickname: “luminous objects.”
• In 2009, the US Air Force and the CIA deployed the RQ-170 Sentinel drone based in southern Afghanistan within short flying distance of Iran. In December 2011, a Sentinel crashed on the Afghanistan-Iran border and was captured by Iranian troops. In 2013, Iranian fighters tried to intercept American Predator reconnaissance drones outside Tehran’s airspace. A US Air Force F-22 stealth fighter blocked the intercept with some Top Gun-style maneuvers. However, neither the Predator nor the Sentinel is a particularly high-flying drone. Neither has the electrical power to scramble radars and navigation gear, and neither can hover or glow blue.
• In 2012, one of these hypersonic drones allegedly shot down an Iranian F-14. Wrote Taghvaee: “In several cases … F-14s faced them but were unable to operate their armament systems properly.” “One Tomcat taking off to intercept a luminous object on January 26, 2012 mysteriously exploded, killing both crewmen,” implying that the UAV drone was responsible.
• [Editor’s Note] Did these US Air Force drone UAVs look anything like a tic tac?
Here’s What You Need To Remember: Rumors abound that the Air Force and CIA operate a stealthy new drone that has not been disclosed to the public. Even if they do, it’s unlikely that the new UAV is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic flight—the Pentagon is still struggling to reach Mach five.
Iran is the only other country besides the United States to operate arguably history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft, the F-14 Tomcat. And the Islamic republic has worked the twin-engine, swing-wing fighters hard.
The F-14s played a major role in Iran’s war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Iranian Tomcat pilots were the only ones to successfully employ the F-14’s long-range, heavyweight AIM-54 Phoenix missile to shoot down enemy planes.
In the decades after the war, Tehran repaired and upgraded the surviving F-14s, scouring the globe for parts in defiance of a U.S. government embargo.
The Americans retired their F-14s in 2006, but around 40 of Iran’s Tomcats remain active. Their main role is defending Iran’s nuclear sites. It’s a mission that has brought the interceptors in close contact with some very mysterious aircraft, according to a bizarre and fascinating 2013 story in Combat Aircraft magazine by reporter Babak Taghvaee.
The Iranians believed the objects were spy drones belonging to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, sent to sniff out Tehran’s suspected atomic weapons program. But they attribute to these alleged unmanned aerial vehicles flight characteristics and capabilities far beyond what any known drone can achieve.
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• In spite of the fact that the US Navy video recorded the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of San Diego in 2004 and two other UFO videos in 2015, which were published in December 2017 by the New York Times, a new report acquired by Motherboard (Vice) shows that it was the US Air Force that conducted an investigation. (see Vice article for actual report)
• The Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) looked into the classification of the videos called “GoFast,” “Gimble,” and “FLIR.” (FLIR was the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO video; the Go Fast and Gimble videos were taken off of the US East Coast in 2015) (The AFOSI are known as “The Real Men in Black” in the UFO community.) The videos were ultimately released to the NY Times by Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy’. The AFOSI determined that while a declassification request had been made for these videos, it was never granted. Therefore, the videos were technically still classified.
• The AFOSI investigation also confirmed that Luis Elizondo did in fact run the Pentagon’s UFO program, the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, which did investigate UFOs. It was Elizondo who applied for the release of the three UFO videos before leaving his position as an intelligence specialist in the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s Office to join ‘To the Stars’. The Pentagon had falsely denied both the program and Elizondo’s role in it.
• While some assume that Elizondo ‘side-stepped’ regulations in releasing the videos, a former colleague claims that any process errors were the fault of the ‘Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review’ agency, and not Elizondo. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough agreed with this appraisal.
• According to the report, the videos were submitted to multiple offices within the Navy for review, and it was determined they contained “No sensitive symbology or other items of concern.” The videos were determined to be “Unclassified and For official use only.” Apparently, there was some confusion as to the videos’ origin and classification status. By April 2018, both the AFOSI and the Air Force’s ‘Unauthorized Disclosure Program Management Office’ had reversed their initial finding by declaring the videos ‘unclassified’ and the matter ‘closed’.
• But why was the Air Force investigating Navy videos in the first place? In December of 2019, DoD spokesperson Susan Gough said she would look into the matter but has since failed to respond to numerous follow-up requests by Motherboard. Other journalists such as Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone have experienced similar stone-walling by the DoD.
• When asked his view, Elizondo stated, “Even though there was no wrongdoing on the part of my office, there are still elements within the Pentagon who are very sensitive about this topic and are unhappy with this information being brought forward for public discussion.”
A new document acquired by Motherboard shows that the Air Force launched an investigation into the release of classified UFO videos by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge’s UFO outfit To the Stars Academy.
Luis Elizondo
At the end of last year, we revealed the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations had looked into several videos, which The Pentagon claims show “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UFOs. This news was particularly curious considering the videos were initially filmed by the Navy (not the Air Force) in 2004 and 2015. Since the videos were published in a New York Times article in December 2017, the Air Force has refused to discuss anything related to UFOs.
The new document, obtained from the Air Force Office of Investigations (embedded below), shows that after that New York Times article, AFOSI looked into the classification of the released videos, called “GoFast,” “Gimble,” and “FLIR.” Originally, it found “all three videos were classified” and that, though a declassification request had been made for these videos, it was never granted. As we reported in December, AFOSI has become known as “The Real Men in Black” in the UFO community.
The AFOSI investigation also contradicts the Pentagon’s claims that Luis Elizondo, the man who says he ran the Pentagon’s UFO program, called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, never worked on UFOs at all.
Though his name is redacted, the investigation is clearly focused on Elizondo, who left the Pentagon, spoke to the New York Times, and has since joined DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy. Before leaving his position as an intelligence specialist in the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s Office, it was Elizondo who applied for the release of the three UFO videos.
In the years since the videos’ release, the Pentagon has contentiously denied the existence of a current Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and has denied that Elizondo investigated UFOs for the DoD. This appears to be disputed by this investigation. The AFOSI report states, “[Elizondo] disclosed his involvement (to several news outlets) with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which focused research issues on Unidentified Flying Objects.”
Similar to what’s implied in the OSI report, since Fall of 2019 when the Pentagon made it known the videos weren’t cleared for public release, the court of public opinion has widely assumed Elizondo was responsible for side-stepping regulations and releasing the videos before leaving the DoD.
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Article by Kerry Harvey April 9, 2020 (stuff.co.nz)
• The second season of History Channel’s “Project Blue Book” opens with a two-part episode involving the Roswell, New Mexico “crashes” in 1947, which many are convinced the US government covered up. Then it delves deeper. Laura Mennell, the actor who plays Dr. Hynek’s wife, Mimi, says, “We’re even dealing with the issue of the CIA mind-control program that was going on at the time.” “There’s some really crazy stuff that I loved reading about and finding more about and I think the audience will too.”
• Project Blue Book is a fact-based historical drama revolving around secret US Air Force investigations into UFO encounters and unexplained phenomena, undertaken by astrophysics professor and Project Blue Book head, Dr J Allen Hynek (played by Aiden Gillen, Littlefinger in Game Of Thrones) in the 1950s and 1960s.
• “It’s one of the biggest mysteries of all time,” said Mennell who plays Mimi Hynek. “I think it would be pretty ignorant to dismiss everything. I think there is something to the mystery of UFOs. What that is exactly I don’t know. Will we fully know during our lifetime? Who knows? But it’s pretty exciting.”
• The Hyneks were indeed real people. Their sons are now heavily involved in the series’ production. Hynek’s Blue Book partner in the show, Captain Michael Quinn, is inspired by USAF Captain Edward J Ruppelt, the first director of the real-life Project Blue Book and other characters are similarly based on historical figures.
• “We’re not making a documentary but, yeah, we’re definitely infusing some real-life aspects into the show, particularly the cases,” Mennell says, adding she is amazed how much was kept from the American public – and the world – in the 50s and 60s.
• “Project Blue Book was one of the first versions of fake news in a way. It misinformed the public to quell any possible mass hysteria that could have happened,” says Mennell. These were real-life cases. There were over 12,000 of them and a little over 700 are still unresolved to this day.
• Mennell’s character Mimi has a revelation in PBB season 2, transforming from a typical 50s domestic housewife into a UFO hunter herself. Her friend, Suzi (Ksenia Solo) is revealed to be a KGB spy. Says Mennell, “Even if we could prove one of those cases – and I think there’s some pretty great evidence in our show – we’d have the quintessential truth of one of the greatest mysteries of all time.” “… [B]ut for people who love Mimi and Susi, give it a bit of time … they will reconnect and when they do some pretty crazy things will definitely happen.”
• [Editor’s Note] Project Blue Book has become one of my favorite shows. It is well written, superbly directed and acted, and doesn’t sugar-coat the UFO subject matter. It is a great series. And it appears that season 3 will take Dr. Hynek and Captain Quinn to Antarctica. I can’t wait! (see deep dive discussion of Project Blue Book Season 2 by cast and writers in Hollywood Reporter YouTube video below). Also, I’ll bet you didn’t know that Michael Malarkey, who plays Captain Quinn, was once an alt rock singer. (see one of Malarkey’s music videos below)
Canadian Laura Mennell has no trouble going where few actors have gone before in Project Blue Book.
Laura Mennell as ‘Mimi Hynek’
The fact-based historical drama revolves around secret US Air Force investigations into supposed UFO encounters
Michael Malarkey as ‘Captain Quinn’
and unexplained phenomena, undertaken by astrophysics professor – and Project Blue Book head – Dr J Allen Hynek (Aiden Gillen, Littlefinger in Game Of Thrones) in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mennell didn’t know much about UFOs, alien sightings and the like when she was cast as Hynek’s wife Mimi but she quickly became fascinated by the subject.
“It’s one of the biggest mysteries of all time,” says the 39-year-old actor, admitting she is now open to the possibility that humans are not the universe’s only inhabitants.
“I think it would be pretty ignorant to dismiss everything. I think there is something to the mystery of UFOs. What that is exactly I don’t know. Will we fully know during our lifetime? Who knows? But it’s pretty exciting.
“There was some infrared footage released in the last couple of years of this 40-foot-long Tic Tac-shaped craft up in the sky. Stuff like that is bizarre and fascinating. I don’t know how that can’t stir up more questions in the general public.”
Although Project Blue Book is based on fact, it is still a drama.
34:44 minute round table discussion of Project Blue Book Season 2 (The Hollywood Reporter YouTube)
4:00 minute Michael Malarkey music video “Captain Solitaire” (Michael Malarkey YouTube)
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Article by Becca Martin-Brown April 5, 2020 (nwaonline.com)
• Terry Lovelace had a career as a trial attorney and staff lawyer with the office of the Attorney General. Before that he was a medic in the US Air Force. He has a family and has been married for 46 years. He seems to be a stable, well-adjusted person. But Lovelace has also written of his experiences with “entities not from Earth” in his 2018 book: Incident at Devil’s Den: A True Story.
• Because of these recurring episodes, Lovelace has been diagnosed with PTSD twice in recent years. He says that writing his book and speaking at public conferences has been therapeutic for him. And speaking at UFO conferences has largely been a positive experience. He insists that these alien encounters are true. “If you think I’m a liar,” says Lovelace, “there’s nothing I can do to change that. Have a nice day.”
• Lovelace had long suffered from nightmares, and he hated being in wide-open, exposed places. But it wasn’t until he was jogging in 2012 that he noticed that whenever he’d hit the 2-mile mark, a place just above his knee would go numb. Medical tests revealed an unexplained piece of metal the size of a fingernail implanted in his leg. There was no entrance scar. He had no memory of ever being injured there. He’d never had surgery.
• When Lovelace was about 8 years old, he started seeing ‘little monkey-like people’ in his bedroom at night. As an adult, he would see UFOs, sometimes when he was alone, sometimes with his Air Force buddy, Toby, or his wife.
• In 1977, Lovelace was stationed at an Air Force base in Missouri. One day, he and Toby made the unusual decision to go camping at Devil’s Den State Park in in Arkansas. They found a remote spot on a summit, pitched a tent, and settled in for an evening of sky watching and taking photos of animals and the beautiful scenery. 24 hours later, Lovelace and his friend believe they were taken aboard a spacecraft before being returned to the campsite. Says Lovelace, “[W]hatever they did to me, Toby got a double-dose of it.” The two men never spoke about it, except when Lovelace reassured Toby that he wasn’t crazy and it really did happen as he remembered it.
• Now that Lovelace has written a book and spoken at UFO conferences, he says that something about his story seems to resonate with his audience members. He’s received some 1,300 emails from people who claim they too have had experiences with ETs. “There’s a core group of about 700 that really ring true,” Lovelace says. “There’s a certain commonality that runs through them. They start by saying, ‘You’re not going to believe this’ — and then they tell me unbelievable stories that I absolutely believe.”
• [Editor’s Note] Apparently, Lovelace remembers a triangular UFO craft. This casts doubt that it was actual extraterrestrials that abducted him and his friend. It sounds more like a “MILAB” or ‘military abduction’ using the Air Force’s TR3B craft, with a little mind control thrown in for good measure.
Lovelace in the USAF
It’s hard to dismiss Terry Lovelace as a crazy man. He was an EMT and medic in the Air Force, earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, worked as both a defense attorney and in the offices of the attorney general — oh, and he’s been married to the same woman for 46 years and raised a reportedly happy and functional family.
Lovelace says he never intended to tell the rest of his story — or to write a book about it — until he took up jogging in 2012. Although he’d always suffered from nightmares and hated being in wide-open, exposed places, it was then he noticed something about his body he couldn’t explain. Every time he’d hit the 2-mile mark, a place just above his knee would go numb. Finally, medical tests revealed an unexplained piece of metal the size of a fingernail implanted in his leg.
It wasn’t shrapnel; he’d never been in active combat. He’d never been through surgery. There was no entrance scar. And he had no memory of ever being injured — or did he?
sketch of the triangle craft
Lovelace is the author of “Incident at Devil’s Den: A True Story” and one of the speakers on the roster at the 33rd annual Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs, which has been rescheduled for July 24-26. What happened at Devil’s Den in 1977 was the worst event in a lifetime of interactions with what he believes are entities not from Earth.
“I want to be clear from the start,” he says in the introduction to his book, published in 2018. “I’m not on a mission to change your mind about the topic of UFOs or the existence of alien life. … I planned to take my story to my grave.” But having started to tell it two years ago this month, when his book came out, Lovelace says the experience of speaking at UFO conferences has largely been positive.
“After 40 years of speaking to juries, I have zero anxiety speaking in front of people,” he says. “I just tell my story as honestly as I can without embellishment. People appreciate it, and something about the story seems to resonate with them.”
He has also received some 1,300 emails from people who claim they too have had experiences with ETs.
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Article by Douglas Charles March 23, 2020 (brobible.com)
• In a YouTube video (see below), astrophysicist Scott Manley discusses the US Air Force’s use of a secret craft known as the X-37B. The USAF has deployed the small, reusable robotic space plane over the past ten years in classified payload missions in low Earth orbit.
• Manley, who holds a Masters in computation physics, recounted the X-37B’s history as a NASA project that saw its first flight in 2005. A ‘White Knight’ carrier aircraft would carry the X-37B to its launch altitude and release it. After several tests, it made a successful drop and flight in 2006 where “the thing flew beautifully”. Under autonomous control, the craft landed perfectly in the center of the runway, but ran off the end sustaining minor damage. But NASA repaired it and conducted further flawless test flights.
• It was then that the US Air Force took notice and built an X-37B of it own under a classified DoD project. Being an autonomous craft, “There is no cockpit, or windows, or anything like that for people inside, but there is a payload bay door that is a couple of meters long,” says Manley.
• Manley says that “there have been five flights with this vehicle” so far. There are actually two separate X-37B vehicles having “subtle differences in their hardware.” The X-37B has a large engine in the rear with control thrusters at the front and rear, neatly integrated onto the surface of the craft. The original NASA design called for a pair of engines using hydrogen peroxide and a kerosene-based jet propellant. The Air Force version uses more volatile propellants.
• Manley believes that the US Air Force “…is testing hardware for future satellites.” “They can test the electronics, sensors, propulsion, thermal control systems…[to] assess how it performs in space and how it [degrades] over time.” Manley says that while NASA uses its X-37B with the International Space Station, the Air Force would prefer to keep its upgraded classified version away from prying eyes.
Scott Manley
According to details recently reported by the Daily Express, “The U.S. Air Force has a top-secret mission in
space that uses an old NASA project to ‘test hardware’ in the cosmos before officially launching it.”
That information was shared by astrophysicist Scott Manley with his 1.03 million subscribers on his popular YouTube channel. (Manley notes in his bio that he is not a professional YouTuber, he has a day job, and doesn’t take sponsored content for his videos.)
In his video titled “Everything We Know About The U.S. Air Force’s Secret Space Plane – The X-37B,” Manley discusses the classified missions that the Air Force has been carrying out for the past 10 years in low Earth orbit using a small reusable robotic space plane designated X-37B.
Manley, who holds a Masters in computation physics, states in the video while discussing the history of the plane, “NASA’s X-37 would see its first flight in 2005, carried under the White Knight, the carrier aircraft that would take the spaceship one vehicle to its launch altitude, where it would perform its prize-winning flights.
“So it did several captive carry tests and in 2006 they finally got to drop it and test it and the thing flew beautifully under a fully autonomous control, it aimed for the runway, it put itself down gently in the center of the runway and ran off the end where it sustained some minor damage.
12:37 minutes – Scott Manley describing the NASA/USAF X-37B (‘Scott Manley’ YouTube)
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Article by Luke Dormehl March 14, 2020 (digitaltrends.com)
• The United States launched Explorer 1, its first satellite, into space on January 31, 1958. Since then we have ramped up our reliance on these orbiting objects with every passing year. Today, there are over 2,000 active satellites in orbit belonging to both governments and private industry with more going up all the time.
• Three-star US Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, who retired in July 2017, is worried about satellites. He’s not worried about the tremendously increasing number of satellites in Earth’s orbit. He’s worried about other nations’ capabilities to disable them or knock them out of orbit. Says Bogden, “Space is a new warfighting domain. Our job is to try and help the Department of Defense to become space warfighters.”
• One of the greatest threats to American satellite assets is the new ‘hunter-killer satellites’. These can fire jets of plasma to blast objects out of orbit. They are claimed to be useful in cleaning up space junk – shooting at an inactive satellite until it eventually disintegrates in the Earth’s atmosphere. But a hunter-killer satellites can also knock an active satellite from its designated orbit, rendering it useless. Bogden says that these hunter-killer have already been deployed by rival nations into space.
• Bogden is also concerned about foreign satellites getting too close to our satellites, or even smashing into them – called a “conjunction” of satellites. But hunter-killer satellites can also disrupt an active satellite by merely getting close to it, disrupting its maneuverability and its electro-magnetic field.
• Another threat involves anti-satellite missiles fired from the ground. China, India, and Russia have all demonstrated such weapons as a show of force.
• Knocking out satellites has the potential for massive damage. From a military perspective, satellites carry out worldwide sensing and imaging, and space-based communications, which are crucial for global voice and data communications on Earth. We also rely on satellites for GPS, or the global positioning system. Loss of these capabilities, says Bogden, could put America at an enormous ‘warfighting disadvantage’.
• For example, in January 2015, the US Air Force took just one of its GPS satellites offline. Somehow a fractionally wrong time was accidentally uploaded to the remaining satellites and caused twelve hours of severe problems. Global telecommunications networks were compromised. Police, fire and EMS radio equipment in parts of the US stopped working. BBC digital radio was knocked out for a couple of days for many people. And an anomaly was detected on electrical power grids. All from a time discrepancy of just thirteen-millionths of a second. If several satellites were disabled, it would be nothing short of a disaster.
• To avoid this type of scenario, we rely on a 1967 ‘Outer Space Treaty’ among Russia, Britain and the United States that provides guideline in settling disputes regarding the allocation of resources in space, and a 1963 treaty prohibiting nuclear explosions in outer space. But sixty years ago we didn’t consider space a ‘war-fighting domain’ as we do today. As Bogden says, “[W]e felt that no-one would [ever] threaten our space assets.”
• [Editor’s Note] Just like our electric grid and the internet, we are completely dependent on the 2218 satellites currently orbiting our planet (that we know of). And the world’s military and commercial titans are just starting to ramp up the number of satellites that will be deployed in the near future. The Pentagon has announced a National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA) satellite constellation consisting of seven layers of military capabilities. The first layer alone will deploy hundreds of satellites. (see Exoarticle here) The US, Russia and India all have its own GPS navigation system satellite constellations. (see Techworm article here) And one of the Pentagon’s NDSA layers will be an entirely new back-up GPS system. Yet all of these government satellites will be dwarfed by the commercial use of satellites in the future. Elon Musk alone plans to deploy up to 45,000 internet satellites in a SpaceX Starlink mega constellation. It’s no wonder that the Pentagon’s ‘first offensive space weapon’ is a ground-based satellite communications jamming system. (see The Drive/The Warzone article here)
Of course, this ‘modern’ anti-satellite weapons technology is primitive compared to what we truly have in space already, unknown to the vast majority of the world. It appears that the deep state will use a new military space race as their next Cold War distraction from what is really going on. Still, our inexorable encroachment into space only increases the odds that the secret space programs and the ubiquitous extraterrestrial presence will have to reveal itself to the world.
“The bottom line,” said retired three-star general Chris Bogdan, “is that we want to learn how to fight in space. Just as we know how to fight on air, land, sea, and, in some respects, in cyberspace. Space is a new warfighting domain. Our job is to try and help the Department of Defense to become space warfighters.”
Bogdan knows a thing or two about militarized combat. Over a 34-year career in the U.S. Air Force, Bogdan rose from a test pilot, flying no less than
Lieutenant General (ret) Chris Bogdan
30 different aircraft types, to the rank of lieutenant general. For the last five years of his career, before he retired in July 2017, he was program executive officer for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program for the Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, and 11 allied nations. He has one of those grizzled, no-nonsense voices which suggests that he has forgotten more about warfighting before breakfast that day than you’ve ever known in your entire life. On balance, that’s probably not a bad guess.
a hunter-killer satellite
Right now, Chris Bogdan is worried about satellites. But not for the same reason that many people are. Recently, satellites have gotten a bum rap. Astronomers have sounded the alarm regarding the plan of individuals like Elon Musk to launch enormous, sky-blotting mega-constellations of satellites. Bogdan doesn’t seem to be so tied up in knots about extra stuff being shot into space, however. Instead, he’s far more concerned about the stuff that’s already in space being shot down. Or, at least, being tampered with.
He’s particularly uneasy about things called hunter-killer satellites, deployed by one of the United States’ “pure adversaries,” being used to screw with America’s network of “space assets.”
A new kind of threat
A hunter-killer satellite represents a new kind of threat. In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2018, researchers from the Australian National University describe a hunter-killer satellite that can fire jets of plasma to blast objects out of orbit. They suggested that such a satellite could be used to help clean up space junk; shooting it down until it eventually disintegrates in Earth’s atmosphere. But such a tool could be used for more malicious purposes as well. A hunter-killer satellite might damage or purposely knock off-course a crucial active satellite, thereby negatively impacting its ability to operate.
“What we’re most concerned about is what we call conjunction,” Bogdan said. “That’s a space term describing two things colliding in space. But you don’t need to actually hit something in space to affect it or reduce its capability. You can fly a hunter-killer satellite close enough to a satellite that you can disrupt maneuvering or its electro-magnetic field to do a host of different things.”
How far away from deployment does he think these hunter-killer satellites, developed by those who don’t have America’s best interests at heart, might be? “I believe they’ve already been deployed,” he said.
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Article by Sandra Erwin February 28, 2020 (spacenews.com)
• On February 28th at the Air Force Association’s annual winter symposium in Orlando, Florida, SpaceX founder Elon Musk joined the commander of the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, Lt. Gen. John Thompson (both pictured above), for a “fireside chat”. “How do we make Starfleet real?” Musk asked the audience of US Air Force airmen who are now transitioning to the Space Force.
• Musk said that the future of air warfare is in autonomous drone warfare. “The fighter jet era has passed.” The ‘ticket to the future’, says Musk, is to make extensive use of reusable launch vehicles rather than expendable boosters. “I think we can go a long way to make Starfleet real and these utopian futures real.” Of course, Musk is referring to the type of rockets that his SpaceX company builds such as the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets which are ‘partially reusable’, and the new Starship vehicle currently in development which is ‘fully reusable’.
• The military will test Musk’s reusable rockets for the first time with the upcoming Falcon 9 launch of a GPS satellite on April 29th. The Space and Missile Systems Center will allow SpaceX to attempt to land the booster on a droneship at sea.
• In 2018, SpaceX was turned down on a bid for a Launch Service Agreement contract that would help to fund the Starship’s development. The Air Force awarded LSA contracts to three other companies, prompting SpaceX to file a legal challenge that is still pending.
• Musk cast Starship as an example of “radical innovation” that will keep the United States in the lead as other nations like China advance their space capabilities. “I have zero doubt that if the United States does not create innovations in space, it will be second in space.” Musk says that Starship will enable access to deep space and the eventual colonization of Mars. He encouraged rival companies to start building fully reusable vehicles like Starship and create a more competitive industry. Musk suggested there should be more ‘disruptive competition’ in the defense industry.
• [Editor’s Note] Musk strongly advocates “radical innovations” in space and “more disruptive competition in the defense industry” that will keep the United States in the lead as other nations like China advance their space capabilities. But what are these radical innovations? Eighty-year-old rocket technology. Apparently, the deep state military industrial complex wants to continue to hide its advanced exotic technologies, such as anti-gravity that the US Air Force uses in their advanced TR3B black triangle craft, and portable nuclear fusion reactor propulsion which the US Navy has publicly revealed in recent patent filings. (see ExoArticles here and here)
The deep state also wants to continue hiding the fact that the US military has deployed these technologically advanced spacecraft since the US Navy’s Solar Warden fleet in the 1980’s. Since then, these types of spacecraft have traversed not only the solar system, but the galaxy. Space travel within the solar system using these advanced propulsion technologies – not rockets- has become routine.
Who better to do the deep state’s bidding than the thoroughly compromised Elon Musk, who denies the existence of such advanced spacecraft and the presence of extraterrestrials? Musk isn’t interested in revealing the truth. Musk is only interested in the US government buying his revamped rocket technology to make himself a fortune.
ORLANDO, Fla. — In his first appearance at a military conference since the establishment of the U.S. Space Force, SpaceX founder Elon Musk gave his usual pitch on the virtues of reusable rockets. But he tailored the message to an audience of airmen who started their careers in the U.S. Air Force but are now transitioning to a new service and pondering the possibilities.
Elon Musk: keeping the Deep State’s secrets
“How do we make Starfleet real?” Musk asked to roaring applause during a one-hour fireside chat with the commander of the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center Lt. Gen. John Thompson Feb. 28 at the Air Force Association’s annual winter symposium.
Musk then answered his own question, insisting that reusable launch vehicles are “absolutely fundamental” to achieving whatever space ambitions the military might have, including staying ahead of China.
Many of Musk’s comments on reusable rockets were repeats of what he said at a previous appearance at an Air Force conference Nov. 5 in San Francisco, where he also sat down with Thompson.
On Friday, Musk made multiple references to the fictional Star Trek “Starfleet” to hammer the message that reusable rockets are the ticket to the future. “I think we can go a long way to make Starfleet real and these utopian futures real.”
But none of this can happen as long as the military continues to rely on expendable boosters, said Musk.
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Article by Leigh Giangreco February 25, 2020 (gen.medium.com)
• Last year, President Trump created the new branch of the Air Force: the Space Force. Trump declared, “American superiority in space is absolutely vital and we’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough.” So we asked second-in-command Lt. General David Thompson (pictured above) what the hell will Space Force do?
• What is the Space Force actually going to do? Three examples of what Space Force does and has been doing as part of the Air Force for years are: 1) keeping track of the more than 26,000 orbiting objects in space including operational satellites, expired satellites, and space debris; 2) tracking missile launches and providing warning to Americans and our allies, as we did several weeks ago when the Iranians launched a missile attack at the al-Asad base which resulted in no casualties; and 3) supporting GPS navigation for everything from smart phones to ships at sea.
• What do you do as Space Force’s second-in-command? I assist General Raymond, our commander and chief of space operations, in making sure that all forces are trained and equipped to conduct satellite tracking operations and ground sensors across 134 locations worldwide. We operate with a $12 billion annual budget and 26,000 personnel.
• Are you coordinating with NASA as well? Cape Canaveral is an Air Force/Space Force station that launches military, commercial, and NASA rockets. NASA has its own space center next door that launches the moon missions. But every interplanetary probe that NASA has launched, except one, flew on an Air Force or Space Force rocket.
• Will you be working with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on the commercial side? We already work pretty closely with Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos [Blue Origin aerospace], as well as a lot of the large [satellite] constellations that are in development to see their capability and technologies.
• What would a typical deployment look like? What are the major threats? Why is Space Force relevant when it seems like the U.S. military is constantly being pulled into counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East? Any of our joint forces needs navigation, position, and timing services provided by GPS. Our satellites support that need. But one of the biggest reasons for the creation of the Space Force is to protect us from potential adversaries like Russia and China who are flexing their muscles, and have made it clear they intend to remove our ability to utilize space if it comes to conflict.
• It seems a lot of people think Space Force was created to go up against Russia and China in some sort of intergalactic battle. How much truth is there in that? Half of that is correct. Space Force will monitor threats from Russia or China in space. But if it doesn’t matter to soldiers on the ground, sailors at sea, and airmen in the air, then it doesn’t matter to us. We will remain focused on our commanders in the field (on earth). We’re not battling for control of the moon or Mars.
• When did the idea of Space Force first come into being? Does this trace back to the Gulf War? The space age dawned in the 1950s and has grown up over the decades. In the early years it was used for strategic intelligence gathering and some other things. But by the time of the first Gulf War in 1990 and then Desert Storm in 1991, our space systems began to be able to provide tactical capabilities to troops on the ground. After 9/11, this need continued to increase, related to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places.
• Is it fair to say that Space Force is a Trump initiative? It was actually an initiative of all national leadership. The conversations about the need to address threats in space began in 2014 in the previous administration. The discussion increased in 2017 and 2018. But it was [Trump’s] announcement in June 2018 that really started to form the vision. So yes, President Trump had that vision, and he had a lot of participation from Congress in both political parties.
• Is this ‘on-the-ground’ satellite coordination? Or will Space Force involve astronauts in space? That opportunity to be an astronaut inside the Space Force today is almost zero. The best thing to do if you want to be an astronaut is to talk to NASA. But the rest of the world is going in the direction of the Space Force, with remotely piloted aircraft, drones, artificial intelligence, and vehicles that operate by remote control or autonomous control.
• Several other reporters have asked about the uniforms and the official song. Do you have any ideas about what the culture of Space Force will look like? Space Force needs its own culture and identity. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are all different. I’m in my 35th year in space-related activities. We already have a little bit of a culture and an identity, which will be refreshed with things like uniforms, mottos, and songs. We want to take a little bit of time to do them carefully. We want to ask the young, career enlisted members what they want the uniform to look like. The uniforms that are under design now look like military uniforms.
• Can you give us some clues? No clues, sorry! It will be cool.
• In ‘The Incredibles’ they say “no capes.” Are there any absolute nos for Space Force uniforms? We’re not talking spandex and capes. It needs to be the classic, sharp-looking uniform that reflects who we are as members of the American military.
• Okay, so the Marines have Chesty the bulldog, the Air Force has a falcon — what are you thinking for a mascot? The Marines didn’t have Chesty when they were formed. We’re going to let that develop naturally, so it has some meaning and tradition behind it.
• Do you have a favorite sci-fi movie that inspired you? I’ve always loved Star Trek and I really loved the most recent reboot. I think they’ve captured the essence of those old characters in a new and fresh way. I was always a Star Trek fan, but I didn’t join the Air Force to go into space.
Unless you’ve been living in a galaxy far, far away, you’ve probably heard of the newest branch of the U.S. military: the Space Force. President Trump created the new branch of the Air Force last year, declaring, “American superiority in space is absolutely vital and we’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough.”
The Space Force will be the smallest branch of the U.S. military — the Marine Corps is still more than 10 times its projected size — and will draw its personnel from current Air Force staff. The new branch will also absorb many of the Air Force’s existing responsibilities, including satellite operations and support for missile warning systems. Its first chief, General John Raymond, was sworn in last month.
So does signing up for the Space Force mean preparing to wage intergalactic battle? Not exactly. Instead, the Space Force is keeping its eyes on the stars but its feet on the ground, getting GPS information from satellites that helps the U.S. military operate in the field. We talked to Lt. Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s second-in-command, about the satellites his people will coordinate, avoiding space junk, and whether those new uniforms will include capes.
GEN: What is the Space Force actually going to do?
David Thompson: It’s clear that a lot of the American public doesn’t understand what we already created.
Three quick examples of what Space Force has been doing as part of the Air Force for years. A couple weeks back you heard about the satellite colliding over Pittsburgh, PA. U.S. Space Force is the force that keeps track of all of those objects — 26,000-plus objects, some of them pieces of debris, old satellites — where they are, where they’re going, whether they pose a danger to anybody. That’s one of the things that we do today in the Space Force, and have been doing for years.
Second, in the missile attacks at [Ain] al-Asad base several weeks back, you’ll recall the Iranians fired several missiles, but our crew at Buckley Air Force Base outside of Denver, Colorado, detected missiles that launched and provided warning to those Americans and our friends and allies at al-Asad, which put them all in protective shelters. Had that not happened, we might be talking about folks that died in that attack as opposed to injury. That’s Space Force.
And then we don’t just do it for the military, but we do it for the civilian population as well. How many times have you followed the blue dot on your smartphone? Have you paid for gas at the pump or in a convenience store? Have you checked the internet via your cellphone? All of those positioning things, timing synchronization activities, occur through GPS which is a U.S. Space Force [satellite] constellation. We do that not just for the general public but for ships in the ocean, airplanes, forces in the desert. All navigate by GPS. And those are just a couple things that we do today and will continue as part of the Space Force.
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Article by Christopher Mellon February 18, 2020 (legion.org)
• This article is a plea to the US government written by Christopher Mellon (pictured above), a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Today, Mellon is an adviser to Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science’ and he serves as a contributor to HISTORY’s television series: “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.”
• Ever since the days of Project Sign in 1948 and Project Bluebook which ended in 1969, the US Government’s reports on UFOs were designed to debunk UFO sightings and discredit civilian UFO researchers. The government’s only objective was to reassure the public that no case “reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security,” and that there is “no evidence of developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.” The stigma the Air Force sought to create worked only too well, causing most US military and intelligence personnel to conceal rather than report UFOs – a self-blinding process that resulted in decades of lost data.
• But on December 16, 2017, The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing the existence of a Congressionally mandated Pentagon program to study UFOs. The article was accompanied by two declassified DoD videos obtained by Navy F-18 fighter pilots. The UFOs were seen in broad daylight by numerous Navy personnel and demonstrated revolutionary aeronautical capabilities. These reports were independently corroborated by sophisticated military sensor systems. And a Navy spokesman admitted that the Navy videos were neither a hoax nor secret US test aircraft. They were “UAPs” – ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’. With this short statement, the Navy upended the conclusions of every prior US government examination of the UFO phenomenon.
• There is nothing more compelling than hearing the Navy pilots’ stories firsthand. Navy pilot Commander David Fravor who encountered the ‘tic tac’ UFO off of California in 2004 and Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a Navy pilot who said that the UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months, have expressed how anxious they are to find out what technology these strange craft are using to defy the laws of physics, tumbling through nonsensical angles to maintain a dominant position. In the “Gimbal” video (off of the coast of Florida in 2015) posted by The New York Times, one of the pilots is heard to exclaim, “There’s a whole fleet of them out there!” He was referring to a V-shaped formation of smaller craft approaching the fighters as they observed a larger “mothership” in the video. At close range, these bizarre craft appear to be black cubes, the corners of which are touching the inside of transparent spheres a mere six feet in diameter. There are no discernible air inlets, exhaust, wings, or means of lift or propulsion, yet they have been tracked at supersonic speeds and seem able to remain aloft indefinitely. Fravor’s anonymous female ‘wingman’ pilot noted, “We didn’t stand a chance against it.” Navy F-18 pilots would not say that about any Russian or Chinese fighter.
• This should be taken to heart by DoD officials and Congress. Commander Fravor and his colleagues expect their nation to find out where these things come from, why they are here, and how they work. A handful of senators and representatives on national security oversight committees have sought briefings. Yet an obdurate DoD bureaucracy seems to be making almost no effort to determine the origin of these craft or their means of propulsion.
• If we knew for certain that the Russian or Chinese militaries had leapfrogged the United States technologically, there would be a public uproar for increased investigation and action. Such initiatives were spurred on by the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite in the 1950s and paid handsome dividends with thousands of new patents and the US taking the lead in science and technology. The only response we’ve seen to these UAPs has been the Navy updating and formalizing its reporting process. No major investigations have been launched. There is no indication that DoD or the intelligence community leadership is engaged at all.
• There is still no process for collecting and integrating pertinent UFO/UAP information among the myriad US agencies and departments. At the same time, the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology directed NASA to begin looking for “technosignatures,” i.e.: alien space probes. There is no denying the possibility that some UAPs encountered by our military are probes launched by distant civilizations. Inability to identify the radical UAPs violating our airspace is an ongoing intelligence failure, one that arguably requires written notification to the House and Senate intelligence committees pursuant to Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947.
• Indeed, there are things we could be doing. Analysts could review archived data of the ‘tic tac’ UFO incident in November 2004 from the Nimitz carrier strike group’s infrared radar system, or the International Monitoring System, or various space-based electronic sensors. Reviews of this kind for incidents occurring off the East Coast since 2015 should also be conducted. Direction from Congress or a senior administration official is all it would take to initiate the process. With little effort or expense, the Trump administration could request a National Intelligence Estimate on “anomalous aerospace threats”. Or Congress could fund an independent civilian panel under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.
• Our government’s failure to thoroughly investigate these UFO anomalies is due to our policymakers prioritizing political expediency over national security. This is a state of affairs reminiscent of the declining Roman Empire when the needs and concerns of troops in the field were largely ignored by self-serving politicians in Rome. Hopefully, support for our troops is one thing that still unites us.
On Dec. 16, 2017, The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing the existence of a congressionally mandated program to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The article was accompanied by two recently declassified DoD videos obtained by F-18 fighter pilots. On both occasions, the UFOs were seen in broad daylight by numerous Navy personnel, the reports were independently corroborated by sophisticated military sensor systems, and the unidentified aircraft demonstrated revolutionary aeronautical capabilities. For example, some of the craft were observed descending from altitudes above 80,000 feet, then hovering as low as 50 feet above the ocean before accelerating to hypersonic speeds from a dead stop.
David Fravor
As more information emerged, including the release of another official DoD UFO video, a handful of senators and representatives on the national security oversight committees sought briefings. At this point, the Navy and DoD could no longer conceal the truth.
Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, admitted that the vehicles in the declassified Navy videos are neither a hoax nor secret U.S. test aircraft: “The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP. In other words, they might be Russian, Chinese or even alien spacecraft. Whatever they are, they are real, they aren’t ours, and they continue to violate U.S. airspace with impunity.
With that short statement, the Navy upended the conclusions of every prior U.S. government examination of the UFO
Ryan Graves
phenomenon, from Project Sign in 1948 to Project Blue Book, which was terminated in 1969. Written when the Cold War was in full swing, these reports were designed to debunk UFO sightings and discredit civilian UFO researchers in order to reassure, rather than inform, the public. It is hardly surprising, then, that despite hundreds of cases defying explanation the Air Force concluded there was “no evidence of developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge” and that no case “reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.”
The only scientist assigned full time to Project Blue Book, astronomer Allen Hynek, expressed his contempt for these findings, calling the project’s statistical methods “nothing less than a travesty” and the attitude and approach within Blue Book “illogical and unscientific.” It is now obvious that the stigma the Air Force sought to create worked only too well, causing most U.S. military and intelligence personnel to conceal rather than report UFO/UAPs – a process of self-blinding that resulted in decades of lost data.
The evidence provided by DoD videos and radar is vital for intelligence analysis, yet there is nothing more compelling than meeting the Navy pilots and hearing their stories firsthand. In my conversations with Cmdr. David Fravor, his excitement was palpable and contagious, as were the fears of his anonymous female wingman when she described the surreal manner in which the UAP seemed to defy the laws of physics, tumbling through nonsensical angles to maintain a dominant position vis-à-vis Fravor’s F-18.
Internet talking heads like to cast doubt on these accounts, proposing spurious theories of ghost aircraft lacking transponders lurking in restricted DoD airspace. Clearly they have not interviewed the pilots and radar operators who encountered these objects at close range. Had they done so, they would find no ambiguity, doubt or confusion. Fravor’s wingman told me, and Fravor agreed, “We didn’t stand a chance against it.” I cannot imagine Navy F-18 pilots saying that about any Russian or Chinese fighter. These sobering words from badass Navy combat pilots should be taken to heart by DoD officials and Congress.
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Article by Sarah Pruitt January 17, 2020 (history.com)
• Like Area 51, the legend of Hangar 18 at Wright Field – now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – outside of Dayton, Ohio is one of flying saucers, extraterrestrial remains and even captured aliens secretly being held in a sealed and guarded warehouse called ‘Hanger 18’ or “the Blue Room”.
• Wright Field was home to the Air Force’s UFO investigation effort, Project Blue Book, from 1951 to 1969. Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican nominee for president in 1964, notoriously tried to gain access to the Blue Room through General Curtis LeMay, and was soundly rebuked. In 1974, a UFOlogist named Robert Spencer Carr publicly claimed that the Air Force was hiding “two flying saucers of unknown origin” inside Wright-Patterson’s Hangar 18. Carr claimed to have a high-ranking military source who saw the bodies of 12 alien beings as autopsies were being performed on them. A 1980 movie, Hangar 18, helped to cement the legend of Wright-Patt as a hotbed of the government’s UFO-related activities.
• The stories of Wright-Patterson go back to its alleged involvement in the cover-up of a UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. At the time, a Roswell Army Air Field press release said the Army had recovered a “flying disc” and sent it on to “higher headquarters” at Fort Worth. But Fort Worth immediately recanted the story saying it was only a weather balloon. Many UFO researchers believe that some of the debris from Roswell were sent to Wright Field and stored in Hangar 18.
• One military pilot, Oliver Henderson, told his wife that he flew a plane loaded with (flying saucer) debris, along with several small alien bodies, from Roswell to Wright Field. Children of another pilot, Marion “Black Mac” Magruder, claim that their father saw a living alien at Wright Field in 1947 and told them “it was a shameful thing that the military destroyed this creature by conducting tests on it.”
• The Air Force has categorically denied any of the rumors tying the Ohio base to UFOs and aliens. They even deny there is a ‘Hanger 18’ at Wright-Patt, although there is a ‘building 18’. In an official statement in 1985, the Air Force said, “There are not now, nor have there ever been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”
• And as to the crashed saucer outside of Roswell which the Army/Air Force later claimed was a weather balloon? In 1994 the Air Force changed its story, again, saying that it was actually debris from a surveillance “balloon device” (called “Project Mogul”) that was designed to spy on nuclear research sites in the Soviet Union. (see July 1994 USAF Roswell Report featuring the Project Mogul balloon explanation here)
As home to Project Blue Book, ground zero for government investigation of UFOs from 1951 to 1969, Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force
Jesse Marcel with “weather balloon” debris
Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, ranks up there alongside Area 51 as a subject of enduring speculation.
Many of the rumors surrounding Wright-Patt, as it’s known for short, involve what might have gone on inside a particular building, known as Hangar 18. UFO enthusiasts believe the government hid physical evidence from their investigations—including flying saucer debris, extraterrestrial remains and even captured aliens—in this mysterious warehouse, specifically inside a sealed, highly guarded location dubbed “the Blue Room.”
The legend of Hangar 18 goes back to the supposed crash of a UFO in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. According to a press release issued by the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) at the time, their personnel inspected the “flying disc” and sent it on to “higher headquarters.” A subsequent press release from an Air Force base in Fort Worth, Texas (assumed to be the aforementioned headquarters) claimed the disc was a weather balloon—a claim the Air Force acknowledged was untrue in 1994, admitting it had been testing a surveillance device designed to fly over nuclear research sites in the Soviet Union.
But in addition to Fort Worth, many UFO researchers believe some of the materials from Roswell were also transported to Wright Field after the crash and stored in Hangar 18, based on unsubstantiated reports from former military pilots. One, Oliver Henderson, reportedly told his wife that he flew a plane loaded with debris, along with several small alien bodies, from Roswell to Wright Field. According to the children of another pilot, WWII ace Marion “Black Mac” Magruder, their father claimed to have seen a living alien at Wright Field in 1947 and told them “it was a shameful thing that the military destroyed this creature by conducting tests on it.”
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Article by Darryn King January 7, 2020 (history.com)
• On the night of November 23, 1953, US Air Defense Command noticed a blip on the radar of a UFO in restricted air space over Lake Superior at the U.S.-Canadian border. An F-89C Scorpion jet, from Truax Air Force Base in Madison, Wisconsin was dispatched to intercept. The two crew members in the jet were the experienced pilot, First Lieutenant Felix Moncla, and radar operator Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson.
• In his 1955 book: The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Donald Keyhoe wrote about the incident calling it “one of the strangest cases on record.” According to Keyhoe, the Air Force jet had trouble following the UFO which kept changing course. Flying at 500 miles per hour and with ground control radar directing them, the Scorpion gradually closed in on the UFO. As the jet dropped from 25,000 feet to 7,000 feet to intercept, radar operators on the ground watch as the pair of radar blips merged about 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper Michigan.
• Once the two radar blips merged, the F-89 simply “disappeared from the ground statin’s radar scope, according the official 1953 Air Force Accident Report (see here). Then the radar return for the UFO itself ‘veered off and vanished’. The US Air Force, US Coast Guard and Canadian Air Force all conducted an extensive search-and-rescue effort. No wreckage or sign of the pilots were ever found.
• The Air Force put out an official news release to the Associated Press about how the Scorpion jet simply vanished from radar, and the Chicago Tribune published the story with the headline “Jet, Two Aboard, Vanishes Over Lake Superior”. But the Air Force retracted their original story, and claimed that ground control had ‘misread’ their radar. They insisted that the F-89 Scorpion had successfully intercepted the UFO, which they identified as a Royal Canadian Air Force C-47 Dakota flying some 30 miles off course. Then, according the revised story, the pilot Lieutenant Moncla was ‘probably’ stricken with vertigo and crashed the jet into Lake Superior. The Air Force attributed the ‘abnormal radar behavior’ to unusual “atmospheric conditions”.
• Canadian officials, however, said that no military flights had taken place in the area that night. Then, two separate Air Force representatives provided Lieutenant Moncla’s widow with contradictory explanations. One told her that the pilot had crashed into the lake, while the other told her that the jet exploded at a high altitude. The wreckage could not be found in the deep water of Lake Superior.
• Private civilian UFO investigators later discovered that all mention of the incident had been expunged from official military records. The Air Force’s National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena says, “There is no record in the Air Force files of sighting at Kinross AFB on 23 November 1953… There is no case in the files which even closely parallels these circumstances.”
• Private investigative UFO groups came up with two explanations. One said that the Air Force jet had crashed into the UFO’s protective beam and disintegrated. The other suggested that the jet had been “scooped” out of the air and taken aboard the alien spacecraft.
The night an Air Force jet mysteriously disappeared over Lake Superior—November 23, 1953—was a stormy one.
First Lieutenant Felix Moncla
Near the U.S.-Canadian border, U.S. Air Defense Command noticed a blip on the radar where it shouldn’t have been: an unidentified object in restricted air space over Lake Superior, not far from Soo Locks, the Great Lakes’ most vital commercial gateway. An F-89C Scorpion jet, from Truax Air Force Base in Madison, Wisconsin, took off from nearby Kinross AFB to investigate, with two crew members on board. First Lieutenant Felix Moncla—who had clocked 811 flying hours, including 121 in a similar aircraft—took the pilot’s seat, while Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson was observing radar.
The men would not return from their intercept mission.
What followed, according to Donald Keyhoe, the former Marine Corps naval aviator and UFO researcher who wrote about the incident in his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy—was “one of the strangest cases on record.”
F-89C Scorpion jet
Once airborne, Lieutenant Wilson had difficulty tracking the unknown object, which kept changing course. So with ground control directing the aviators over the radio, the Scorpion gave chase. The jet, traveling at 500 miles per hour, pursued the object for 30 minutes, gradually closing in.
On the ground, the radar operator guided the jet down from 25,000 to 7,000 feet, watching one blip chase the other across the radar screen. Gradually, the jet caught up to the unknown object about 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper Michigan, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, approximately 160 miles northwest of Soo Locks.
At that point, the two radar blips converged into one—“locked together,” as Keyhoe would put it later. And then, according to an official accident report, the radar return from the F-89 simply “disappeared from the GCI [ground-controlled interception] station’s radar scope.”
Donald Keyhoe
And then the first radar return, indicating the unidentified object, veered off and vanished too.
The United States Air Force, United States Coast Guard and Canadian Air Force conducted an extensive search-and-rescue effort. No wreckage, or sign of the pilots, was ever found.
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Article by Becky Little January 5, 2020 (history.com)
• In the 1950s, when Cold War anxiety in America ranged from Soviet psychological warfare to nuclear annihilation, LIFE Magazine published a story titled “Have We Visitors From Space?” that offered “scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” A few months later in the summer of 1952, newspaper headlines blared reports of flying saucers swarming Washington, D.C. During this period, the US Air Force said that reported UFO sightings jumped from 23 to 148.
• the U.S. government worried about the prospect of a growing national hysteria. The CIA decided it needed a “national policy” for “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic.” The CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate whether the UFO phenomena represented a national security threat.
• The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence collaborated with Howard Percy Robertson, a professor of mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology, to gather a panel of nonmilitary scientists. The Robertson panel met for a few days in January 1953 to review Air Force records about UFO sightings going back to 1947. The panel reviewed Project Blue Book investigators Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and J. Allen Hynek and concluded that many of these ‘unexplained’ sightings were actually explainable if you just got creative about it. The panel’s main concern was controlling public hysteria.
• According to former UK government UFO investigator, Nick Pope, the CIA was worried that “the Soviets would find a way to use the huge level of public interest in UFOs to somehow manipulate, to cause panic; which then could be used to undermine national cohesiveness.” The Robertson report itself supports this viewpoint, suggesting “mass hysteria” over UFOs could lead to “greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.”
• The Robertson report, which was released to the public in 1975 (see the Robertson report here), recommended debunking the notion of UFOs in the media content of articles, TV shows and movies in order to “… reduce the current gullibility of the public and … their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda.”
• News reporter and book author, Leslie Kean, points to a CBS television show hosted by Walter Cronkite in 1966, which a Robertson panelist claimed to have helped organize “around the Robertson panel conclusions”. The program focused on debunking UFO sightings.
• Between 1966 and 1968, the US Air Force commissioned another ‘scientific’ inquiry into Project Blue Book by physicist Edward U. Condon and a group of scientists at the University of Colorado. The Condon Committee concluded that UFOs posed no threat to the U.S., and that most sightings could be easily explained. It also suggested that the Air Force end Project Blue Book’s investigations into UFOs—which it did in 1969. (see Condon Report here)
• UFO researchers have suggested that the government never really allowed the Robertson panel, the Condon Committee, or even Project Blue Book to review the most sensitive ‘classified’ UFO sightings. This is directly supported by a 1969 memo signed by Brigadier General Carroll H. Bolender revealing the Air Force hadn’t shared all UFO sightings with Project Blue Book and would continue to investigate sightings that could present a national security threat after the project ended.
• Critics claim that the real goal of the Robertson panel, the Condon Committee, and Project Blue Book was never to identify UFOs, but simply to influence public reaction to them. If so, then the government must have had information about extraterrestrials it wanted to conceal.
• The secrecy involving national security issues gave the CIA and the Air Force the audacity to explain away UFO sightings as “natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.” An example of a cover-up of UFOs that continues to today is the CIA’s claim that over half of the UFOs reported in the 1950s and 60s were actually US spy planes. CIA National Reconnaissance Office historian Gerald K. Haines notes a CIA tweet in 2014 that read, “Remember reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ‘50s? That was us.”
Howard Percy Robertson
In January 1953, the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency had a thorny situation on its hands. Reports of UFO sightings were mushrooming around the country. Press accounts were fanning public fascination—and concern. So the CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate whether these unknown phenomena in the sky represented a national security threat.
The Robertson Panel
But there was something else.
At a time when growing Cold War anxiety about the Soviets ranged from psychological warfare to wholesale nuclear annihilation, the U.S. government worried about the prospect of a growing national hysteria. In the previous year, UFOs had begun to figure prominently in the public conversation. In April 1952, the popular magazine LIFE published a story titled “Have We Visitors from Space?” that promised to offer “scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” In July that year, newspaper headlines around the country blared reports of flying saucers swarming Washington, D.C. Between March and June that year, the number of UFO sightings officially reported to the U.S. Air Force jumped from 23 to 148. Given all the attention UFOs were getting, the CIA decided it needed a “national policy” for “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic,” according to government documents.
The Robertson report: The real enemy is hysteria
Edward U. Condon
To this end, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence collaborated with Howard Percy Robertson, a professor of mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology, to gather a panel of nonmilitary scientists. The Robertson panel met for a few days in January 1953 to review Air Force records about UFO sightings going back to 1947.
Project Blue Book, which had started in 1952, was the latest iteration of the Air Force’s UFO investigative teams. After interviewing project members Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the panel concluded that many sightings Blue Book had tracked were, in fact, explainable. For example, after reviewing film taken of a UFO sighting near Great Falls, Montana on August 15, 1950, the panel concluded what the film actually showed was sunlight reflecting off the surface of two Air Force interceptor jets.
The panel did actually see a potential threat related to this phenomena—but it wasn’t saucers and little green men.
“It was the public itself,” says John Greenewald, Jr., founder of The Black Vault, an online archive of government documents. There was a concern “that the general public, with their panic and hysteria, could overwhelm the resources of the U.S. government” in a time of crisis.
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Article by Simon Green December 26, 2019 (dailystar.co.uk)
• UFO researchers Blake and Brent Cousins, proprietors of the YouTube channel ‘thirdphaseofthemoon’, told the Daily Star that the Tic-Tac UFO video recorded by Navy pilots from the Nimitz carrier group off of the coast of San Diego in 2004 is reversed-engineered extraterrestrial technology that the US military has had for 30 or 40 years. Blake claims that pilots, airline passengers, and even he himself have seen this type of craft in the skies.
• Blake Cousins thinks that the Tic-Tac UFO is an example of secret military craft equipped with advanced alien technology that allows it to drop from an altitude of 20,000ft to just above sea level in a matter of seconds. Brother Brent believes the US Navy purposely identified the object as a UAP to hide from other countries the fact that our secret space program has this technology.
• Says Blake, “In my opinion, the tic-tac and that technology we have in our assets and they’re just not letting anyone know it’s in their assets.” “I have a feeling the whole Space Force program is using extraterrestrial technology that’s been around for a long time,” and that the US Space Force itself has secretly been in existence for years under the purview of the US Air Force.
• The existence of alien technology, and therefore aliens themselves, could be revealed if the Space Force is established next year. President Donald Trump has made it a priority to create Space Force as the sixth branch of the military, and the House of Representatives in Congress has already approved funding for the new military branch.
• “The tic-tac will be revealed to the public,” says Blake. “Will that be in 2020 when the Space Force is made public? I have a feeling it might.”
The technology behind the infamous USS Nimitz UFO incident could be revealed if the Space Force is established next year, a conspiracy theorist has claimed.
President Donald Trump has made it a priority to create the sixth branch of the military to combat threats in space.
Brent and Blake Cousins
It is penned to be established next year and that aim was given a boost this month when the House of Representatives approved a £562bn bill which included plans for the Space Force in it.
But there are those in the conspiracy world that believe the Space Force has been in existence for years, secretly testing alien tech and transforming it into military craft for the US Air Force.
Blake and Brent Cousins, of YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon , believe one such craft was the USS Nimitz UFO.
The UFO – which has been officially identified as an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by the US Navy – was described by two witnesses as somehow dropping from heights of 20,000ft to just above sea level in a matter of seconds.
It then shot off at speeds never seen before and hasn’t been spotted since.
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Article by Tom Rogan December 17, 2019 (washingtonexaminer.com)
• Is the government behind a conspiracy to cover up the proof of alien visitation to Earth? Is the government in cahoots with alien species? Why do our politicians like Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama make joking non-denials when asked about UFOs? Why does the military brass maintain its secrecy about UFOs?
• The Pentagon is concerned about UFOs appearing in the vicinity of nuclear weapons and reactors: on faraway Navy aircraft carriers where they often encounter Navy jets in the air; on Navy submarines deep in the oceans; and on Air Force nuclear weapons bases. As reported by UFO researcher Robert Hastings, UFOs have shut down nuclear weapons systems at U.S. and Soviet Union/Russian nuclear sites. This interference by UFOs has occurred since the (atomic bomb testing of the) Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Has humanity’s perfection of nuclear energy piqued someone or something’s curiosity in us?
• There is no indication that UFOs are hostile or that these UFOs are all coming from the same place. On the contrary, UFOs appear to be quite friendly unless provoked. But the demonstrated capabilities of UFOs – intelligently operated, instantaneously reaching hypersonic speeds; anti-gravity technology; cloaking technology rendering them invisible – makes the capabilities of the US military, and every other military on Earth, look like an absurd joke in comparison. If they intended to harm us, we wouldn’t stand a chance.
• It is clear that civilian and military government agencies maintain active UFO research programs, and even have meta-material from crashed UFOs in its possession. The Pentagon may want to keep what they know of UFOs and their advanced space-time technology a secret so that Earthly adversaries such as China and Russia do not gain this knowledge to use against us. So there are indeed some in the US government who know about UFOs, but don’t know how to deal with them.
• It is we the public that needs to keep pushing the issue. It will take time, but we’ll get to the truth eventually. After all, UFOs keep popping up. Considering their ability to cloak, it is apparent that they want to be seen by us.
Two years ago Sunday, the New York Times broke the stunning story of a secret Pentagon program to study unidentified flying objects. That story led me to delve into this strange world. I’ve learned some interesting stuff about UFOs (“unidentified aerial phenomena,” or “UAP,” as the Pentagon refers to them) since then. But there’s one problem.
The United States government makes it very hard to figure out what and where UFO-related stuff is going on.
Is that because the government is behind some great conspiracy to cover up the proof of alien visitation to Earth? Is it because the government is in cahoots with alien species to create human-alien hybrids?
Perhaps, but I suspect not.
What I believe is really going on here is that the few individuals in the U.S. government who know about this issue believe the phenomena might be a threat. And that they don’t know how to deal with it.
So, what informs the government’s fear?
Well, first off, the nuclear issue.
If you ask a Pentagon representative about a specific UFO incident, as I did most recently last week, you’ll get a boring response like: “Our aviators train as they fight. Any intrusions that may compromise the security of our operations, tactics, or procedures is of great concern. As the investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena sightings is ongoing, we will not discuss individual sighting reports or observations.”
By “aviators,” the Pentagon is referencing the particular frequency with which UFOs tend to interact with U.S. naval aviators operating off aircraft carriers. But what the Pentagon is leaving out is why the UFOs tend to run into those naval aviators. And that cuts to the heart of why the Pentagon is concerned about UFOs.
Because the government’s assessment, though they won’t admit it, is that the UFOs are popping up near the aircraft carriers due to those carriers being nuclear-powered. Note also that UFOs also like to pop up near nuclear submarines and Air Force nuclear weapons bases. Now recognize that this paradigm has been occurring since the Manhattan Project operations at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and also at nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and Russia.
Oh, and as Robert Hastings documents, these UFOs have sometimes even temporarily shut down U.S. nuclear weapons systems. Interesting, right?
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Article by MJ Banias December 17, 2019 (popularmechanics.com)
• Fifty years ago, the U.S. Air Force closed its UFO investigation program, Project Blue Book. Its initial predecessor was Project Sign, created in 1947 (after Roswell). The problem with Sign was that it allowed for the notion that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. So the Air Force replaced it with Project Grudge in 1949. It was shut down in 1951 as it labeled all UFOs as hoaxes, although they couldn’t explain 25% of them.
• So in 1952, in the wake of UFOs being spotted over Washington D.C., the Air Force initiated Project Blue Book which investigated up to 15,000 UFO cases, up to one-third of which couldn’t be explained. According to author Mark O’Connell, when it became evident that the project was unable to determine whether these UFOs were a threat to the nation, Blue Book’s mission became one of ‘making the UFOs go away’.
• In 1953, the government formed the Robertson Panel to look at UFO reports. The panel of academics and scientists concluded : 1) UFOs posed no national security risk; 2) the National Security Council should actively debunk UFO reports and make them the subject of ridicule; and 3) UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity.
• In 1968, the Air Force and the University of Colorado’s ‘Condon Report’ determined that all UFO incidents were delusion, hoaxes or natural phenomenon. “The committee recommended that the Air Force get out of the UFO business,” O’Connell says. And the Air Force was more than happy to do so. Project Blue Book was shut down.
• Australian UFO researcher Paul Dean told Popular Mechanics “… the other three branches of the armed forces, continued to accept UFO reports,” predominantly from military personnel. These UFO reports were secretly investigated.
• Today, the political and academic stigma surrounding UFOs created so many years ago by the Robertson Panel is beginning to erode. Rational UFO discourse is on the uptick as organizations begin to muster support to engage in actual scientific studies of aerial anomalies.
• David O’Leary, creator of HISTORY Channel’s Project Blue Book, says that on a cultural level, there now seems to be a positive shift in how UFOs are viewed by the mainstream public. O’Leary told Popular Mechanics, “I think that for the first time, there’s sort of a conscious awakening to what’s happening.” Says O’Leary, “… privately, the U.S. government wants to study this (UFO) phenomenon, and it takes it very seriously.” O’Connell agrees, noting that this creates the general impression that “… if it’s okay for the government to be interested in the phenomenon, then it ought to be okay for the average Joe to be interested as well.”
Fifty years ago today, the U.S. Air Force announced the closing of its most famous UFO investigation program, Project Blue Book. While the government’s goal was to “make UFOs go away,” it forced a community to take matters into its own hands. And it worked: If the events of this year alone are any indication, UFOs remain as hot of a topic in the general conscience than ever. But we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Blue Book.
In 1947, due to a string of “flying saucer sightings,” the Air Force began its campaign to understand the UFO phenomenon. Quietly, it put together a project, known as Sign, to investigate reports of UFOs. According to some researchers, one of Sign’s alleged final reports, commonly known as the “Estimate of the Situation,” openly favored the notion that flying saucers were extraterrestrial in origin.
While the report has never been released to the public, and is probably more mythological than real, many within UFO circles believe that Sign’s closure and replacement with the short-lived Project Grudge in 1949 attempted to engage in the active debunking of UFO incidents. The Air Force also eventually shut Grudge down in 1951, declaring that UFOs were hoaxes and misidentification—yet admitted that roughly 23 percent of the cases it investigated were unexplainable.
In 1952, the Air Force initiated its final UFO investigation, the now-famous Project Blue Book. Initially led by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, in nearly two decades, it collected between 12,000 and 15,000 cases and was designed to be a fair and honest look at the UFO situation, succeeding where Sign and Grudge had failed. But while initial intentions may have been good, the project quickly went bad.
Blue Book Breaks Down
In 1953, a year into Blue Book’s run, the government formed the Robertson Panel to look at UFO reports, in the wake of a string of odd aerial objects being spotted over Washington, D.C. the previous year. Comprised of academics and scientists, the panel concluded in its classified report that UFOs posed no risk to national security, and proposed that the National Security Council actively debunk UFO reports to ensure UFOs become the subject of ridicule. It also recommended that UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity.
“Strictly speaking, Project Blue Book was formed to determine whether UFOs represented a threat to our nation,” Mark O’Connell, author of The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs, tells Popular Mechanics. “Over time, when it was evident that Blue Book was utterly incapable of answering that question, its mission became one of ‘making the UFOs go away.’”
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Article by Brett Tingley October 29, 2019 (thedrive.com)
• For the better part of a century, the most advanced laboratories under control of both the armed forces and the academic world have been trying their best to harness “anti-gravity” and extremely advanced next-generation propulsion technologies. The U.S. military and the federal government have been formally researching these radical concepts since the 1950s, and according to research by “The Warzone” on TheDrive.com website, those efforts have continued to this day. And since this information comes from unclassified sources, there is definitely more than just what is represented here.
• In 1956, the New York Herald Tribune published a series of articles by Ansel Talbert naming research institutes that were studying the secrets of anti-gravity in the 1950s by focusing on electromagnetism, high speed rotation, and various methods of reducing an aircraft’s mass. Nearly every major aerospace company at the time was involved in some way with researching “the gravity problem”: Convair, Lear, Sikorsky, Sperry-Rand Corp., General Dynamics, and Avro Canada. While some of the brightest minds in aerospace engineering and physics were devoted to studying gravity at the time, no working anti-gravity technologies ever came from these endeavors. Talbert noted that “the biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some … scientists to believe that things which seem amazing can really happen.”
• Grover Loening was the first aeronautic engineer hired by the Wright Brothers. After a forty year career, he was decorated by the United States Air Force for his work as a special scientific consultant. Said Loening, “I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism that works.” “Much the same line of reasoning that enabled scientists to split up atomic structures also will enable them to learn the nature of gravitational attraction and ways to counter it.”
• The US Air Force established its own anti-gravity research project early on. Joshua N. Goldberg served as a research physicist at Wright-Patterson’s Aerospace Research Laboratories from 1956 to 1962 where dozens of theoretical studies were produced. Some have claimed, however, that the Air Force-funded laboratories were set up merely to investigate reports of Russian anti-gravity research as a result of ‘Sputnik’-shock”.
• Wright-Patterson’s anti-gravity research concluded in the early 1970s with the passage of the Mansfield Amendments that limited military funding of research to that which had a direct relationship to a specific military function. Following the Mansfield Amendments, the Department of Defense’s research strategy shifted more towards the proposal-grant model seen at university and private laboratories today. The scientists at Wright-Patterson moved on to long careers in academia where they continued their research for the Air Force.
• In 1972, Franklin Mead, then Senior Aerospace Engineer with the Air Force Aerospace Research Laboratories, published ‘Project Outgrowth’ – a technical report discussing advanced propulsion concepts ranging from traditional rocket propulsion to “anti-gravity propulsion”. Two main approaches to anti-gravity in the report were “gravitational absorption” and a “unified field theory” which unites electromagnetism and gravitation. Mead and his group believed that these types of breakthrough propulsion concepts may be possible once materials sciences caught up with concepts developed in theoretical physics.
• In 1988, a New York lab submitted a concept report to the US Air Force at Edwards AF base which discussed the Biefield-Brown effect, where electrical fields produce propulsive forces. In 1989, a similar report explored the interactions between gravitational, electrical, and electromagnetic fields, resulting in the ‘Mach effect’. It also explores the concept of inertial mass variation using a rotating cylinder filled with mercury. While much of the research cited is still in its infancy, says the report, “… chemical propulsion is reaching its theoretical limits and nuclear propulsion has political difficulties.’ …[I]t is more likely that gravitational and electromagnetic studies will lead to future breakthroughs… (as well as) more recent low temperature fusion work.”
• A 2006 study compiled at the request of the US Air Force Research Laboratory and published by the American Institute of Physics claimed that next-generation propulsion may be achieved sometime within the next three decades. The study predicts that power systems will come in the form of field propulsion by inducing mass fluctuations using high-frequency electromagnetic fields.
• With the recent announcement of a partnership between the ‘To the Stars Academy’ and the US Army, the Army plans to explore the same principles the USAF has studied for decades: mass manipulation, electromagnetic metamaterial waveguides, and quantum physics.
• In 1996, NASA invited some of the brightest minds in physics and aerospace engineering to propose radical new ideas to propel spaceflight into a new paradigm. The program’s director, Marc Miller, noted that “it is known from observed phenomena and from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism, and space-time are inter-related phenomena” that “…have led to questioning [whether] gravitational or inertial forces can be created or modified.”
• In 1997, NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field held a conference on breakthrough propulsion concepts with titles such as “Inertial Mass as a Reaction of the Vacuum to Accelerated Motion”, “Force Field Propulsion”, and “The Zero-Point Field and the NASA Challenge to Create the Space Drive”. Among the students attending the conference may have been Salvatore Cezar Pais, the inventor of the Navy’s recently submitted anti-gravity ‘UFO’ patents. Many of the concepts in Pais’ patents are similar to those which were researched at Wright-Patterson and other facilities in the 1950s and are still being explored today by academic and independent laboratories such as Lockheed Martin.
• A 2007 private sector publication found a connection between electric and magnetic fields, writing that there is a “possibility to manipulate inertial mass” and potentially “some mechanisms for possible applications to electromagnetic propulsion and the development of advanced space propulsion physics.” A 2010 Air Force-funded study at the University of Florida produced a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle” with “no moving parts” and “near-instantaneous response time” that “was able to hover a few millimeters above the surface for (about three minutes)”.
• For years, various branches of the Armed Forces have been actively researching metamaterials that can propagate high energy electromagnetic fields. Navy budget documents show that between 2011 and 2016, the Navy conducted research into the “dispersion and control of electromagnetic waves in the microwave region, using fabricated metamaterial structures”. Starting in 2017, the Navy changed its project reporting to make it more difficult to know whether this metamaterial research continues today.
• The long and detailed history of interest by the U.S. military and the scientific community in this exotic field has resulted in significant amounts of research that spans nearly seven decades. All this occurred in spite of the fact that scientists realized as far back as the 1950s that the topic was largely taboo and often scoffed at by the larger scientific community.
• But anyone familiar with military research and development knows that there is a vast trove of projects, associated data, and technologies the public has yet to be shown and may never be shown. As the US Air Forces ‘Project Outgrowth’ document states: “We are just beginning to understand the true nature of space and to attempt to utilize this environment for our propulsion needs. …[N]ot until man truly becomes a creature of space will the restrictions imposed on his imagination be removed and radically new propulsion concepts devised.”
Decades-old questions about the potential existence of fantastical anti-gravity propulsion technologies have resurfaced following the Navy’s own disclosure of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena and our own original reporting on a series of bizarre patents assigned to the U.S. Navy that seem to defy our current understanding of physics and aerospace propulsion. While the discussion continues over whether any such technologies are feasible, the truth is that the theoretical concepts behind them are anything but new. In fact, the U.S. military and the federal government have been formally researching these radical concepts since the 1950s, and according to our own research, those efforts have continued on to this very day.
In our dive into what seems like something of a bottomless rabbit hole of government studies into this exotic scientific realm, we have collected a body of research, news reports, and firsthand accounts. These establish the fact that the types of “anti-gravity”, propellantless propulsion, and mass reduction technologies described in the Navy’s recent “UFO” patents are at least based on more than 60 years of peer-reviewed research conducted and published by the likes of the American Institute of Physics, NASA, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
While we can’t say that any of this research led to actually being able to harness “anti-gravity” or extremely advanced next-generation propulsion technologies to any useful extent, the most advanced laboratories under control of both the armed forces and the academic world have certainly been trying their best to get there for the better part of a century. Also, keep in mind that all of this information comes from unclassified sources, and there is definitely more of it than just what is represented here. We can only wonder how much work has been done in the classified realm on what was once openly considered the next massive revolution in aerospace technology.
The Martin Company’s Early Foray Into Anti-Gravity
In terms of the Air Force’s early anti-gravity research, one intriguing first-hand account comes from Dr. Louis Witten, who was a professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati from 1968 to 1991. Throughout his career, Witten conducted research into gravitation, quantum gravity, and general relativity. The last one of these is the theory first put forward by Albert Einstein that proposes that gravity is essentially a warp or curve in the geometry of space-time caused by mass.
During a roundtable discussion titled “Recollections of the Relativistic Astrophysics Revolution” held at the 27th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in 2013, Witten recounted his own work on what he somewhat puzzlingly refers to as “the discovery of anti-gravity.”
In his portion of the roundtable, Witten recalls being recruited by George S. Trimble, then serving as Vice President for Aviation and Advanced Propulsion Systems at the Glenn L. Martin Company, which evolved first into Martin-Marietta and eventually merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin. The project for which Witten was recruited would come to be known as the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) and was officially founded in 1955 by George Bunker, president of Martin, with the goal of advancing aerospace science and development.
“The vice president [Trimble] had the wonderful idea which was to develop anti-gravity,” Witten says, noting he immediately balked at the proposal. “When he tried the idea in public, you can imagine the greeting he received from scientists. So he said to himself ‘those poor bastards, I’ll show them.'” Despite his skepticism, Witten ended up accepting Trimble’s offer to join the powerful Martin executive’s pet project.
Throughout his short speech given at the roundtable, Witten says that even though he faced ridicule within the scientific community for his research, there was no shortage of people who would tell him they knew how to achieve anti-gravity.
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Article by Simon Green October 23, 2019 (dailystar.co.uk)
• US Navy jet cockpit video of a ‘tic tac’ UFO off of San Diego in 2004, and released by the New York Times in 2017, has become one of the most talked-about UFO sightings in history. In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters podcast (see entire 36:09 minute video below), Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt who was in charge of the helicopters on the USS Princeton (pictured above), part of the Nimitz carrier battle group, reveals that soon after the mysterious tic tac UFO was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of US Air Force personnel landed on his ship to retrieve secret information.
• The Air Force personnel “weren’t assigned” to the carrier. When they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside. They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which grounded the helicopters. Weigelt says he couldn’t say “whatever box it was” that the Air Force personnel took away. But they logged it out and were directed by a higher authority to take it. “[W]e couldn’t fly our aircraft until we got them back… (because) [t]here was no way we could safely fly our aircraft in a battle group.”
• Weigelt said that the Air Force personnel then left the ship by a rigid-hulled inflatable boat, and forced the USS Princeton to harbor at a marina, something that was unheard of. Said Weigelt, “I’ve done a lot of cruises in my time in the military and never once did we pull in during a work-up to a harbor for any reason whatsoever.” “I’ve never even seen a ship anchor in the mouth of the harbor.”
• When the podcast’s host, Dave Beattie, suggested that the Air Force personnel may have removed more video footage of the UFOs, Weigelt agreed. “There’s no doubt in my mind that these guys were looking for data on the UFOs.”
A US Navy veteran who was on board the USS Princeton when a UFO was spotted by fighter pilots has revealed a group of mysterious officials boarded the cruiser soon after to retrieve secret information.
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
It led to the Pentagon admitting to having a top-secret programme devoted to looking at the existence of extraterrestrial objects.
The incident – which showed a tic-tac shaped UFO performing manoeuvres never seen before – took place off the coast of San Diego.
While the pilots had taken off from the USS Nimitz, they were part of a larger battle group which featured the USS Princeton.
Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt was in charge of looking after the helicopters on board the Princeton at the time of the incident.
In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters, he revealed that soon after the mysterious aircraft was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of United States Air Force personnel landed on his ship.
Ryan explained that this group “weren’t assigned” to the carrier and, as soon as they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside.
They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which meant they could not fly.
36:09 minute interview with Ryan Weigelt (‘The Nimitz Encounters’ YouTube)
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Article by Oli Smith September 8, 2019 (express.co.uk)
• Blake and Brett Cousins of ‘thirdphaseofmoon’ YouTube channel has received multiple photos from multiple witnesses who have seen a strange triangle-shaped craft in the vicinity of the Portland Air National Guard Base (PANG) in Oregon. (see 10:16 minute video below)
• Conspiracy theorists suggest the aircraft could be a super-secret stealth spy airplane, while others point to “reverse-engineering” linked to alien contact. “You can rule out any photoshop because these new, crystal-clear photographs show the sharp edges and the motion involved.” “Could this be proof of reverse engineering?”
• The triangular aircraft have been linked to the infamous TR-3B Black Manta developed for the US Air Force as part of a secret black project. One viewer suggested that it could be a new stealth drone, the XQ-58A. Other viewers remarked, “This is definitely NOT a TR3B! It looks like an F45.” One viewer commented, “[T]hey want to be seen.” “[I]t’s… how they control disclosure”.
Conspiracy theorists believe they have found the clearest evidence yet of alien contact. Alarming photographs and multiple eyewitnesses spotted a bizarre aircraft close to a top-secret US military base. Multiple eyewitnesses spotted the aircraft as it flew above the Portland Air National Guard Base (PANG).
The “triangular ship” near the PANG base in Oregon has raised suspicions of a bizarre US military test.
Conspiracy theories suggest the aircraft could be a super-secret stealth spy airplane, while others point to “reverse-engineering” linked to alien contact.
Blake and Brett Cousins of thirdphaseofmoon, who posted the pictures in a clip this week, cited “multiple accounts” from a number of onlookers in the area.
They said: “We recieved multiple eyewitnesses from residents in the area.”
They continued: “You can rule out any photoshop because these new, crystal-clear photographs show the sharp edges and the motion involved.
“I mean, look at the inner chamber inside this craft. This area has been known as a hotspot for strange sky sightings. Could this be proof of reverse engineering?”
10:16 minute video of triangular craft over the PANG Base, Oregon (thirdphaseofmoon YouTube)
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China is painstakingly implementing a 100-year strategic plan aimed at overtaking the United States as the world’s dominant superpower or hegemon by 2049 according to Michael Pillsbury’s authoritative 2015 national best seller, The Hundred Year Marathon. Pillsbury’s keen insights not only provide a foundation for understanding how China plans to supplant the US, but how it is covertly responding to the existence of secret space programs developed by the US military industrial complex, and what China plans to do in response in order to achieve dominance both on Earth and in space.
Pillsbury is a China expert who has worked with the US Department of Defense, State Department, and Congress for over four decades, since 1975. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has had unrivaled access to top Chinese military and political leaders during his professional career and is very familiar with the policies and plans of China’s ruling Communist Party elite, especially the military hawks who exert great influence behind the scenes. Currently, Pillsbury is a top advisor to President Donald Trump on US-China relations.
Pillsbury begins his highly detailed book by describing how top Chinese leaders cunningly use the historical period of the Warring States (475-221 BC) to develop their strategic planning for engaging with the US. In short, the Warring States period was a time when up to seven ethnic Chinese kingdoms competed amongst themselves for hegemony and dominance over their rivals.
Pillsbury explains how a ruling hegemon (the US in contemporary times) would be undermined by an aspiring hegemon (China), by means of stealth, cunning, and deception as practiced by different kingdoms during the Warring States period. He cogently explains how such goals require long term thinking by China as the aspiring hegemon that lacks the political and military power to directly confront the ruling US hegemon until it has been sufficiently weakened by internal and external strife.
Chinese military and political leaders began their 100-year marathon in 1949, Pillsbury explains, after the victory of the Communist Party and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Initially, China relied on the Soviet Union to help it industrialize and to modernize its vast military. After their political falling out in the 1960’s and military clashes along their shared borders, China’s Communist Party began secret overtures to the West.
It was Chairman Mao who covertly reached out to President Nixon, Pillsbury points out, and not the other way around as many erroneously believe. Initial relations between China and the US were genuinely positive since both had much to fear from the Soviet Union. All that changed with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Chinese school textbooks changed dramatically. Previously positive descriptions of US history and democratic ideals, which had been extensively cited by Chinese students at the Tiananmen protests, were now overwhelmingly negative. Future generations of Chinese students were indoctrinated to believe that the US has been humiliating and abusing China since the mid-1800s.
Previously positive descriptions of President Lincoln (1861-1865), for example, were now overwhelmingly negative. Pillsbury explained how Chinese students came to be taught the ridiculous proposition that Lincoln was busy undermining China’s sovereignty, during the US Civil War. Essentially, China’s Communist Party was ensuring that there would be no repeat of the Tiananmen Square protest were the youth were citing positive US democratic ideals and personalities, which had been deeply embarrassing to Party elders.
Pillsbury then explains how China opened its doors to western industries and economic innovation as part of its modernization effort. Using strategies taken directly from the Warring States period, the Communist Party feigned openness to democratic political ideals, while ruthlessly clamping down on ethnic minorities and political dissidents, and blocking genuine democratic reforms.
The goal was to lure Western nations into a false sense of complacency where the common assumption was that China would inevitably change in the future as its huge economy opened to Western influence. Pillsbury emphasized that such future democratic changes were a chimera since the Chinese military and political elite were driven not by Western ideals, but by their understanding of what history revealed about how an aspiring hegemon needed first to undermine and then supplant a ruling hegemon.
He points out that China had no intention of helping the US and its allies establish a stable world order, but instead aimed at undermining it so as to usher in a world order where China would be the dominant power.
Pillsbury provides many examples of how China has assisted various rogue states and groups around the world, such as Afghanistan’s Taliban. Just as the U.S. secretly used extremist groups to weaken the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now China was covertly doing the same through economic development and arms supplies to nations that challenged US policies.
As far as economic development is concerned, Pillsbury explains how China is at the forefront of industrial espionage, counterfeiting efforts, theft of intellectual property, hacking and other unscrupulous practices. The goal is to help China’s state-owned enterprises (which numbered over 140,000 companies in 2011), cheat, steal, manipulate, and outmaneuver Western companies that establish a commercial presence in mainland China.
When it comes to outer space, Pillsbury explains how China has been using these unscrupulous practices to develop its own conventional space program, with the goal of projecting a military presence into space. While the Trump administration is in the midst of creating the Space Force as the sixth branch of the US military, China has had an “Aerospace Force” up and running since 2014.
China’s Aerospace Force was created as the fifth branch of Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) as explained in an article titled “China’s Military Creates New Space Force” published in The Diplomat by Zachary Keck on September 10, 2014. A speech by President Xi was summarized by a Chinese space expert cited by Keck as a clear endorsement of Chinese militarization of space in response to US and other nations already having done so:
The United States has paid considerable attention and resources to the integration of capabilities in both air and space, and other powers have also moved progressively toward space militarization… Though China has stated that it sticks to the peaceful use of space, we must make sure that we have the ability to cope with others’ operations in space.
The problem is that Pillsbury, and the US public more generally, is largely unaware of the extent of the US military’s true presence in outer space, and mistakenly assume that Space Force will be the official start of US militarization of space. However, as I have extensively documented in my Secret Space Program Book series, both the US Air Force and the US Navy have independent secret space programs that have projected their respective military power deep into space.
These two parallel US military-run space programs have been in operation since the 1970s, while the general public was hoodwinked into believing that the only US presence in space was through NASA’s civilian-run space program.
China, however, is well aware of the truth behind covert US military space operations once it began sending satellites into Earth orbit in the 1970s. China’s growing space surveillance capacities allowed it to track US military space operations, especially the construction of secret military space stations operated by the USAF and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
In Book Four of my series, the USAF Secret Space Program, I discuss 825 declassified NRO documents that show how the USAF and NRO used the allegedly discontinued Manned Orbiting Laboratory project as the cover for sending laboratory modules into space that could be configured to establish Von Braun type space stations, i.e., modules assembled into a circular configuration.
These secret USAF/NRO space stations provide ideal weapons platforms capable of extending US military force all over the planet from the high ground of space. China, like other major nations with satellite surveillance capacities, is well aware of the USAF/NRO space stations and their potential military capabilities.
China insists that it is only attempting to match the US militarization of space, but given the gap between the development of the US military’s presence in space, and China’s more recent efforts, it will take China many years to catch up. This is why Pillsbury’s book is important since it outlines the unscrupulous practices China is willing to adopt in order to bridge the gap in space technologies.
For example, the real scandal behind the hacking of the Hillary Clinton email servers during her tenure as Secretary of State (2009-2013), is the role played by China, and the likelihood that it was all part of an elaborate pay-to-play scheme to leak classified space technologies. As I have written previously, Clinton had security access to Talent Keyhole space technologies classified within Special Access Programs (SAPs) and discussed these in emails stored on her servers.
This was corroborated by no less than the Inspector General for the US Intelligence Community who identified the various security levels of emails stored on Clinton’s hacked servers:
To date, I have received two sworn declarations from one [intelligence community] element. These declarations cover several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, and TOP SECRET/SAP levels. According to the declarant, these documents contain information derived from classified IC element sources.
Pillsbury’s conclusions dictate the different steps the US needs to take to stop China from achieving its goals, which appear very sensible given what he has outlined. His influence can be seen in President Trump’s increasingly tough policies on China, which have ushered in a new era in US-China relations.
Despite the incisive analysis provided by Pillsbury, there are a number of deficiencies in his book which largely reflect a conventional world view that nation-state behaviors are driven by public officials nominally in charge of major political, military and economic institutions.
Pillsbury shows no understanding or recognition of the existence of a Deep State and how it manipulates public officials to pass policies that promote a hidden agenda. A good example is how President Trump’s first two years in office were hamstrung by Russia collusion claims that poisoned prospects of Trump and Putin collaborating to solve major world problems. The Deep State had no intention of the US and Russia collaborating on the world scene and used compromised public officials to promote a false narrative that was aided and abetted by the mainstream media.
Most disturbing is growing evidence that the Deep State is actively assisting China in its covert efforts to lie, steal and cheat its way to technological parity with the US both on Earth and in outer space. It’s no accident that Clinton and other leading US politicians such as Joe Biden and Diane Feinstein have been accused of helping China gain access to sensitive technologies, which is precisely what the Deep State wants as QAnon has been revealing for well over a year.
Is it a good or bad thing if China continues to use unscrupulous practices to catch up to what the US military has secretly developed and deployed in space? From a Chinese national security perspective, it is entirely understandable why China is doing whatever it can to bridge a technological gap in outer space since this gap makes China vulnerable to US political and military pressure.
From the US national security perspective, China is a totalitarian communist state that is profiting from the West’s naivety in opening their economies in the forlorn hope that China will usher in democratic reforms. The danger is that as China grows into the world’s largest economy, it will use its economic clout to prop up repressive political systems that will be natural allies to its one-party totalitarian system.
China’s totalitarian system is something that the Deep State desperately wants to expand onto the world stage since a concentration of political power will be far easier to infiltrate and take over than democratic political systems with their complex system of checks and balances, as exemplified in the US.
That is why the Deep State is currently helping China bridge the technology gap with the US, and helping them develop a secret space program that rivals what the US Air Force and Navy have secretly developed. Space is where the real battle between the ruling hegemon (US) and the aspiring hegemon (China) will be determined, and where China’s plans to supplant the US as the ruling hegemon will be ultimately resolved.
• A 2013 story by Babak Taghvaee in Combat Aircraft magazine claimed that Iranian fighter jets have encountered mysterious ‘CIA spy drones’ flying over Iran’s nuclear power sites looking for an atomic weapons program. In 2012, one of these ‘flying robots’ reportedly also shot down an Iranian F-14 fighter jet attempting to intercept it.
• Tehran’s two major nuclear reactor facilities at Bushehr and Arak and an enrichment plant at Natanz became public knowledge in 2002. In 2004, Iran deployed a task force of refurbished fighter jets to prevent an attack on those facilities by ‘Western forces’ concerned that these facilities could be used to assemble atomic weapons. The Iranian jets encountered what it believed were CIA drones with “astonishing flight characteristics.”
• Apparently, these ‘CIA drones’ were able to jam radars and navigation systems, hover, fly at night, and fly “outside of the atmosphere” at speeds of up to Mach 10. Also, these drones emitted a blue light that led to their nickname: “luminous objects”. Taghvaee writes, “In several cases … F-14s faced them but were unable to operate their armament systems properly,”. One fighter jet taking off to intercept a luminous object on January 26, 2012 mysteriously exploded, killing both crewmen. Taghvaee implies the alleged drone was somehow responsible.
• Do the US Air Force and the CIA have a secret stealth drone that is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic flight while the American military’s best fighter jets struggle to reach Mach five? Probably not. These unmanned aerial vehicles’ flight characteristics and capabilities are far beyond what any known drone can achieve. So then, what are the Iranian F-14s chasing up there?
Iran is the only other country besides the United States to operate arguably history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft, the F-14 Tomcat. And the Islamic republic has worked the twin-engine, swing-wing fighters hard.
The F-14s played a major role in Iran’s war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Iranian Tomcat pilots were the only ones to successfully employ the F-14’s long-range, heavyweight AIM-54 Phoenix missile to shoot down enemy planes.
In the decades after the war, Tehran repaired and upgraded the surviving F-14s, scouring the globe for parts in defiance of a U.S. government embargo.
The Americans retired their F-14s in 2006, but around 40 of Iran’s Tomcats remain active. Their main role is defending Iran’s nuclear sites. It’s a mission that has brought the interceptors in close contact with some very mysterious aircraft, according to a bizarre and fascinating 2013 story in Combat Aircraft magazine by reporter Babak Taghvaee.
The Iranians believed the objects were spy drones belonging to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, sent to sniff out Tehran’s suspected atomic weapons program. But they attribute to these alleged unmanned aerial vehicles flight characteristics and capabilities far beyond what any known drone can achieve.
And in 2012 one of the alleged flying robots reportedly also shot down an F-14 attempting to intercept it. Or at least some Iranians seem genuinely to believe so.
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• Navy pilots recently interviewed by The New York Times and appearing in the History Channel documentary series: Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, reported detecting several UFOs during flight training between 2014 and 2015. Their radars detected these UFOs flying at hypersonic speeds at altitudes just over 9000 metres (30,000 feet), despite having no obvious means of propulsion. UFO sightings along the Southeastern US coast and in the Persian Gulf have been reported by six Navy pilots. One of the pilots, Lt. Danny Accoin, said, “It seemed like (the UFOs) were aware of our presence because they would actively move around us.” None of the pilots suggested that the UFOs were alien in origin, however.
• Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extra-terrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations,” such as “bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”
• As a rule, the more mundane explanation for UFO sightings is the logical one. The US Air Force’s Project Blue Book collected more than 12,000 sightings between 1952 and 1969. All but 6% were “explained” astronomical, atmospheric or human phenomena. The US National Science Foundation’s Project Ozma monitored two stars: Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for six hours a day from April to July 1960. No signal was found.
• Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) said the UFOs could be drones from rival countries. Shostak also noted that these pilots began spotting the UFOs after their plane’s radar system was upgraded, which suggests that the sightings might be due to some software bug. SETI began as a government program under NASA, and continued as a private effort in 1993 when funding from the US Congress ended.
• The SETI Institute in a joint project with the University of California, Berkeley, built 42 individual telescopes that function as a single massive instrument to observe up to 1 million nearby stars for radio or optical signals. Dubbed the Allen Telescope Array, it began observations in 2007. Italy’s University of Bologna also has a radio SETI search, and Harvard University in Boston has an optical SETI search. So, while the US Air Force’s detection of UFOs might not be aliens visiting the Earth – the various SETI efforts around the world might just one day lead to such a discovery.
• [Editor’s Note] Once again, the Deep State institutions are lining up to debunk what Navy pilots are seeing with their own eyes. Seth Shostak and SETI along with Harvard-Smithsonian, are leading the charge toward abject unenlightenment and disinformation surrounding the extraterrestrial/UFO phenomenon. Despite the overwhelming evidence of UFO’s, or ET-controlled drone UFOs which is most likely, that are routinely operating in our skies, the Deep State is pushing hard to make sure that the mainstream public does not take this seriously, and to disregard it all as a ‘glitch in the technology’. ‘There’s nothing to see here. We have it covered. Move along. Move along.’
According to recent media reports, between 2014 and 2015, US Navy pilots detected several Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) during training. Their radars detected these UFOs flying at hypersonic speeds at altitudes just over 9000 metres, despite having no obvious means of propulsion.
In total, six pilots who were stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt during that time period spotted UFOs during flights along the Southeast coast of the US, The New York Timesreported late last month.
Two of the Navy pilots interviewed by The New York Times have also appeared in the new History Channel documentary series: Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, which also premiered late last month.
The objects had “no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,” Lt. Danny Accoin, one of the pilots said. “It seemed like they were aware of our presence because they would actively move around us.”
Accoin had told the Times that although tracking equipment, radar and infrared cameras on his aircraft had detected the UFOs twice, he was unable to capture them on his helmet camera.
Meanwhile, Lt. Ryan Graves, the other pilot featured in the documentary said that a squadron of UFOs followed his Navy strike group up and down the eastern coast of the US for months. After the USS Theodore Roosevelt was deployed to the Arabian Gulf in March 2015, the UFOs reappeared.
Such accounts would surely fire up the imagination of those of us who are fascinated by the thought of extra-terrestrials visiting our planet. However before we get too excited about this prospect, it’s worth noting that none of the pilots interviewed by the Times suggested that the UFOs they detected were alien in origin.
So, what were they? Well, the pilots themselves thought that they might have been part of a highly-classified drone programme using cutting-edge technology. There are other possibilities.
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• Former high-ranking US defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science’ are asking: ‘why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?’ Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”
• In the past century, more than a few UFO sightings have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called the bright orange UFOs flying along the French-German border “foo fighters”. During the Korean War, soldiers claimed that a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with radiation poisoning.
• In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UFOs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites of the past to active nuclear naval fleets in the present. “All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” said investigative journalist George Knapp.
• “There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of the Pentagon UFO study program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
• Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book: UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, says that ‘Nuclear-adjacent’ sightings go back decades. Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.
• In late 1948, “green fireballs” were reported in the skies near atomic laboratories in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. A declassified FBI document from 1950 mentions “flying saucers” measuring almost 50 feet in diameter near the Los Alamos labs. Over a dozen workers from the Nevada desert atomic test site told Knapp that UFO activity was commonplace.
• In the 1960s and ’70s, repeated UFO sightings emerged at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a storage site for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. At one such sighting in 1967, former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas reported several of those missiles becoming inoperative, or “unlaunchable”, at the same time that base security reported seeing a glowing red object, about 30 feet in diameter, hovering over the facility.
• In December 1980, the US Air Force secretly housed nuclear weapons in 25 fortified bunkers beneath the Royal Air Force base at Bentwaters in Suffolk, England. USAF master sergeant Ivan Barker saw an object on radar having remarkable speed and maneuverability, covering 120 miles in a matter of seconds. He looked out of the window and saw a craft hovering over a water tower. “It was between about 1,500 and 2,000 feet high. The thing was…at least a city block…in diameter,” said Barker. Barker says it was shaped like a giant basketball, with portholes around the center, from which lights were emanating outward. “I was shocked… There was nothing aerodynamic about it. Basketballs don’t fly.” Then in a second it was gone. But Barker didn’t report the sighting to his superiors. “You don’t understand what the Air Force did to people who reported UFOs,” he said.
• Colonel Charles Halt was the deputy commander at RAF Bentwaters that night. Halt led a patrol to investigate the strange colorful lights seen descending into the nearby Rendlesham Forest. He saw a red light moving horizontally though the trees, “obviously under some kind of intelligent control.” A laser-like beam, he said, “landed 10-15 feet away from us. I was literally in shock.” Then the object flew north towards the base. Says Halt, “We could hear chatter on the radios that the beams went down into the weapons storage area.” The Air Force generals closed the case without investigation.
• In recent years, the US Navy has reported several UFO encounters off of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Navy F-18 fighter pilots saw UFOs almost daily for several months between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2015 along the Eastern seaboard between Virginia and Florida. “Wherever we were, they were there,” said Ryan Graves, an F-18 fighter pilot who holds a degree in aerospace engineering. The objects appeared in three shapes, Graves says—some were discs, others looked like a cube inside a sphere, while smaller round objects flew together in formation. All lacked visible engines or exhaust systems. Some tilted, mid-flight, like spinning tops, as seen in cockpit video. One UFO almost caused a collision by zipping dangerously between two jets. Graves said that the UFOs also appeared in the Persian Gulf.
• In November 2004, Navy pilots and radar operators from the USS Nimitz carrier fleet saw a 40-foot long tic-tac shaped object flying just above the ocean, 100 miles off the coast of California near San Diego. When F-18 fighter jets were scrambled to approach the object, it accelerated and easily outran the supersonic Navy craft.
• Chris Mellon, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence said that a carrier battle group being shadowed by UFOs all the way across the Atlantic to the Middle East “makes an extremely compelling case for the existence of technologies we didn’t think were possible.”
• There is an increasing openness in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to taking these sightings seriously as potential threats. In April 2019, the US Navy announced that it was updating its guidelines for how pilots and personnel should report unexplained aerial phenomena—making it easier for military members to report sightings to superiors without facing stigma and backlash. And now Congress has taken more interest in these UFO briefings.
• George Knapp says there is more UFO activity now than he has seen in three decades. Knapp notes that personnel at the military facilities, bases, ships and submarines where nuclear weapons are built, tested and deployed “have seen these things”. “Are they all crazy?”
Why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?
Those are questions being asked by a team of high-ranking former U.S. defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science. The team has been investigating a wide range of these sightings—and advocating more serious government attention.
Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”
Throughout history, unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) have shocked, frightened and fascinated sky watchers. And in the last century, more than a few have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called them “foo fighters”: strange orange flying lights by the French-German border. During the Korean War, some soldiers claimed a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with what, to some, resembled radiation poisoning.
Less known: In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UAPs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites to active nuclear naval fleets.
“All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” says investigative journalist George Knapp, who has studied the UAP-nuclear connection for more than 30 years. Knapp has gathered documentation by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to the departments of defense and energy.
“There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of a covert team of UAP researchers operating inside the Department of Defense. The program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), received $22 million of the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget in 2012, The New York Times reported. Elizondo now helps lead To the Stars’ investigations.
The UFO-nuclear Connection Began at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.
Nuclear-adjacent sightings go back decades, says Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Hastings says he’s interviewed more than 160 veterans who have witnessed strange things in the skies around nuclear sites.
“You have objects being tracked on radar performing at speeds that no object on earth can perform,” Hastings says. “You have eyewitness [military] personnel. You have jet pilots.” Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.
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The AFOSI investigation also contradicts the Pentagon’s claims that Luis Elizondo, the man who says he ran the Pentagon’s UFO program, called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, never worked on UFOs at all.
from the University of Michigan, worked as both a defense attorney and in the offices of the attorney general — oh, and he’s been married to the same woman for 46 years and raised a reportedly happy and functional family.
Many of the rumors surrounding Wright-Patt, as it’s known for short, involve what might have gone on inside a particular building, known as Hangar 18. UFO enthusiasts believe the government hid physical evidence from their investigations—including flying saucer debris, extraterrestrial remains and even captured aliens—in this mysterious warehouse, specifically inside a sealed, highly guarded location dubbed “the Blue Room.”
have been: an unidentified object in restricted air space over Lake Superior, not far from Soo Locks, the Great Lakes’ most vital commercial gateway. An F-89C Scorpion jet, from Truax Air Force Base in Madison, Wisconsin, took off from nearby Kinross AFB to investigate, with two crew members on board. First Lieutenant Felix Moncla—who had clocked 811 flying hours, including 121 in a similar aircraft—took the pilot’s seat, while Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson was observing radar.
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
