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Posted on Friday, Aug 28, 2020 8:53 AM by Billy Cox With the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence expecting a transparent military audit on UFOs by December, the brass is warming up by blowing off its own foot. No sooner had the History channel wrapped the finale of its “Unidentified” second season last weekend, than John Greenewald’s Black Vault  detailed a bureaucracy’s determination to stonewall at the expense of its own internal logic. And in so doing, the Navy has demonstrated it won t hesitate to toss its own people under the bus to cling to an increasingly uneasy status quo. There comes a point when you ve gotten away with something for so long, you don t even care if EVERYbody sees you getting away with it/CREDIT: deviantart.comGreenewald’s coup, published Monday, is the latest dispatch from his long-running FOIA odyssey to learn more about the military’s UFO investigation, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. What it tells us is that the Defense Department not only continues to deny that former Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence agent Luis Elizondo ran the AATIP show, despite ample evidence to the contrary. The Navy’s counsel, Judge Advocate General’s Litigation Division, now says it can find – get this – “no evidence” that its own PIO stated for the record that “The AATIP program involved offices across the Department of Defense, including Navy.” Even though the Pentagon subsequently confirmed to Greenewald that, yep, the Navy PIO actually did issue “an accurate statement.” And blink, just like that, the Navy JAG just turned itself into a cartoon panel right out of “Family Circus.”Want more? The legal department also insists that all AATIP records – “if they ever existed,” and that covers all documents, photos, vids, emails, etc. – “may have been permanently transferred, destroyed or otherwise no longer able to be located by the (Initial Denial Authority).”May have been. But the Navy’s top legal eagle doesn’t even know for sure “if they ever existed.” Perfect.Anyone sitting on the Senate Intel Committee expecting a routine accounting of what the military does and doesn t know about The Great Taboo is naïve and should maybe recuse themselves to preserve the integrity of this inquiry. Yes, it’s fabulous that the Pentagon acknowledges it’s in damage-control mode now and needs a platform to reassure taxpayers that it’s on top of this longstanding national-security breach. On August 4, it established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, naming Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist to coordinate the effort. The bio suggests Norquist is a stickler for details. But the project will continue to operate under the Navy umbrella. Which means this is going to be a long slog, likely rutted with misdirection and evasion. U.S. Senators typically aren t all that hip on the alien abduction thing. Yet, with a Pentagon report on UFOs scheduled to reach lawmakers by Christmas, the To The Stars Academy operators behind the Unidentified series took a major gamble last Saturday by promoting the most controversial and least palatable aspect of the entire phenomenon/CREDIT: amazon.comIt’s not hard to figure why powerful corners of the defense establishment are still trying to discredit retired counterintelligence operator Elizondo. This is the guy who actually took his UFO assignment seriously enough to march his mission statement and those jet-fighter videos to the NY Times in 2017 after he couldn’t unclog his findings from the stovepipe and shoot it up the chain of command. Furthermore, this summer, Elizondo and History’s eight-part series left a trail of breadcrumbs so obvious for lawmakers to follow that even Mr. Magoo could read the map.The most promising trail leads to North American Aerospace Defense Command, which watches everything in the continental skies. NORAD uses an international treaty with Canada to shield its data from the prying eyes of FOIA. In Unidentified s S2E5, retired USAF Col. Jim Cobb and onetime Senior Command Director at NORAD’s base in Cheyenne Mountain went on camera to tell producers about an incident that left “the entire room  standing” in 2008.Sensors tracked a southbound blip without a transponder as it traversed the entire U.S. eastern seaboard. The bogey’s flight path into commercial corridors was so unnerving, multiple squadrons of warplanes were scrambled to investigate; unfortunately, the pilots may have had better luck on a snipe hunt. Which begs the question: How many unknowns like that are in the NORAD case files? And where’s the Air Force? Remember those guys?But Elizondo and his To The Stars Academy colleagues collaborating on “Unidentified” didn’t stop at NORAD. They didn’t stop with a presentation on UFOs’ unimpeded surveillance of American nuclear assets. Or with riveting personal testimony from dozens of military eyewitnesses, pilots, and other trained observers.In a flourish of chutzpah, knowing their target audience included buttoned-down Beltway wonks, the shot-callers decided in last Saturday’s season-ender to roll the bones and go full monty with alien abductions, the most radioactive element in the UFO spectrum. And how better to tee it off than with than a couple of USAF security-patrol veterans who bore witness to the famous “northern tier” wave sweeping Strategic Air Command bases in 1975? Stationed at South Dakota’s Ellsworth AFB, they recounted a simultaneous and life-altering missing-time incident visited upon them while checking out the penetration of America’s most restricted airspace by a UFO. In 2010, in an event live-streamed by CNN at the National Press Club, researcher Robert Hastings introduced Air Force veterans who shared eyewitness accounts of UFOs conducting surveillance on America s nuclear arsenal/CREDIT: al.comThe only reason we know about what happened to Ellsworth airman Mario Woods, and others like him, is because his story appeared last year in Robert Hastings’ Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed. Renowned as the researcher who convinced well over 100 veterans and contractors to share their stories of security lapses in his 2008 book UFOs and Nukes:  Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, Hastings himself was featured in S2E8.Hastings offered De Void a reminder that, since 2008, he had declined 18 invitations to appear on related shows prior to cooperating with History. On balance, he says, his aversion to overexposure in sensationalist formats finally paid off.“Compared to the vast majority of so-called UFO documentaries on TV,” he said from his home in rural Colorado, “I think the ‘Unidentified’ series was far superior. They very credibly presented multiple encounters by military personnel with these unidentified aerial phenomena, which is a very productive thing to do, in terms of promoting public awareness and education.”Some of his quibbles were widely shared, like the producers’ wasted-time formula of regurgitating what viewers had already seen immediately before the commercial breaks. However, despite his qualified endorsement of the series, other editing decisions left him “surprised and disappointed.”The most conspicuous flaw was excluding Hastings from the S2E3 episode “UFOs vs. Nukes. This is the guy who literally wrote that book. Instead, his face time was restricted to the abduction episode, and all connections to his UFOs and Nukes research was omitted. And even within those constraints, specific details of what Hastings saw, vivid descriptions of  confrontations with otherworldly beings, were omitted as well. For the record, he calls the producers choices “overly cautious.”Not that long ago, Hastings himself chose self-censorship over personal disclosure. He harbored a legitimate fear that discussing his apparent history of abductions – which became impossible to ignore after a camping encounter in 1988 – would damage his reputation as a researcher. But as his career neared a close, he decided to spill the beans in 2019. By then, however, interest in all dimensions of The Great Taboo had evolved light years beyond Reagan’s dog whistles on the floor of the United Nations. But with a lingering caveat.“Even though the media now has suddenly taken a serious interest in the UFO phenomenon, for most journalists, the abduction topic is still taboo,” he says. “As it is, I’m sure, with many people in government. It’s just a bridge too far for most people at this point.”Maybe TTSA insisted on including abductions in the series, however soft-pedaled the material, because the issue is getting too big to ignore inside influential circles. Hastings alluded to one possibility in an essay earlier this year. But, he adds, you can only thread that needle for so long.“I understand that people need to crawl before they walk. This is still a new and very strange and sometimes frightening subject for many, many people. And I understand that one needs to proceed slowly, in terms of presenting the evidence to the public and to congressional oversight personnel.“But ultimately that extra step is going to have to be taken, there’s so much credible data now confirming this aspect of the UFO phenomenon.”Whether or not it was the right call at this point remains to be seen. But Elizondo crew have just upped the ante. If in fact abduction material is waiting at the end of the trail, beyond the hardware, beyond the physics, it s not difficult to imagine admirals and generals burning the house down before giving that up. We got a sneak peek this week when they Navy wouldn t even confirm the obvious. Posted on Friday, Aug 7, 2020 9:08 AM by Billy Cox A thin ray of light peeked through a recent article in the New Yorker during a discussion with retired Johns Hopkins medical historian Gianna Pomata. The topic was pandemics, with a focus on the 14th-century bubonic plague that annihilated uncounted millions in Europe.The remedy for affliction 700 years ago was “scholastic” medicine, in which empirical analysis took a back seat to blaming more abstract forces. Faculty at the University of Paris said the fleas-and-vermin-borne plague was triggered by “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the fortieth degree of Aquarius.” “For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use” Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror/CREDIT: livescience.comThe protracted Black Death, and the futility of mitigating it with contemporaneous solutions, produced what Pomata called “an accelerator of mental renewal,” which not only wrenched medicine away from astrology. The purge also seeded a revolution in astronomy, seafaring exploration and the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance.Grasping for parallels between the rebirth of ideas that reinvented the world seven centuries ago and what might happen on the other side of COVID-19 clearly seems twisted and cruel. The unremitting sickness, death and corruption filling the American leadership vacuum have turned our institutional norms to glass, and any historical analogy would skew more toward Rome than Florence. Yet, something familiar, and radical, is afoot a hunger for empiricism.The latest shoe dropped last week, when a planetary scientist from NASA-Goddard joined an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science to boost a discussion that’s been germinating for nearly three years now. Writing for Scientific American – at 175 years, the oldest periodical of popular science in the USA – Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra lobbied for an all-hands-on-deck inquiry into UFOs. In making their case for a way forward, they turned to the past, the way Pomata did in the New Yorker.Pomata saluted Italian poet Petrarch in her ruminations on the Renaissance, because it was Petrarch who reacquainted his own contemporaries with the earlier work of Cicero. Amid a republic in crisis, the Roman politico/philosopher had been its greatest orator, and Petrarch rescued his words from obscurity. Cicero s work proved must-read fare during the Enlightenment, and one of his books wound up on the nightstand next to President Washington’s bed. Said Pomata of Cicero’s letters to public figures of antiquity, “It could be like someone today disliking the present state of America and wanting to talk to Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King.”Here s a stretch, but not by much the Scientific American contributors did the same thing. They called on the legacy of a fearless, disaffected, 20th-century icon in their bid to “bring the phenomena into mainstream science.” Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra lambasted the “inadequacy of the methods” employed by the University of Colorado s infamous whitewash that awarded the U.S. Air Force an excuse to shutter its UFO project in 1969. And they issued a new call to arms by invoking the work of atmospheric physicist James McDonald. I am convinced that the recurrent observations by reliable citizens, here and abroad, over the past 20 years, cannot be brushed aside as nonsense, but rather need to be taken extremely seriously as evidence that some phenomenon is going on which we simply do not understand James McDonald, Congressional testimony 1968/CREDIT: youtubeIn a speech that should be mandatory listening for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with evaluating whatever data the Pentagon chooses to share on UFOs come December, McDonald went on a 40-minute tear against the competence and veracity of the USAF. His 1969 pitch, “Science in Default,” is noteworthy not only for its fastidious command of case details, but for its urgency over the Colorado study s abuse of resources and logic. But McDonald s earlier appeal for a conscientious audience at the House Committee on Science and Astronautics was lost to the epic violence of 1968.Half a century of wasted time. And we’re all neck-deep in stupid if we leave the fate of our inquiry solely in the hands of horse traders on Capitol Hill. Archived reports in the Pentagon could be useful, but Kopparapu and Haqq-Misra advocate aggressive and real-time research in hopes of discerning baseline patterns that might well prove predictive.The good news: data collection is already underway, from the Sky Hub startup using portable AI-driven platforms to To The Stars Academy’s sophisticated mobile app called SCOUT (Signature Collection Of UAP Tracker). Think media culture isn t evolving as well? Consider these shameful skank-bombs from the past few weeks:In June, MUFON executive director Jan Harzan got stepped on by vice agents for soliciting sex from an imaginary 13-year-old. In July, the Washington Examiner busted “Ambassador to the Universe” guru Steven Greer for apparently staging an offshore flare drop east of Vero Beach in 2015; Greer convinced his ambassadors-in-training they were watching UFOs become USOs. Last but not least, also last month: Trump lunged for his base again by praising a mask-denying, conspiracy-mongering Houston physician/Fire Power Ministries pastor who asserts that unnamed medications are being spiked with alien DNA.Not all that long ago, the messenger-class would’ve converted these events into fart jokes and more reasons to a) bash the UFO phenomenon and b) insult anyone gullible enough to follow the evidence. Fortunately, evidence for the magnitude of The Great Taboo is becoming so persuasive that these sideshows are being seen for what they are– distractions with zero bearing on the larger story arc.The July 23 New York Times update on the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, with those bell-clanging off-world vehicles not made on this Earth quotes, has been slammed and cheered for what it did and didn t say. Corrections? Yeah, so what, it s a complicated story, the Times owned it, and nobody s perfect. This is a game of inches, not yards. And each time the NYT publishes, the ball goes a little farther downfield. The payoffs are already self-evident:Gone are the rolling eyes during updates from this new frontier, the glib puns. No more X-Files soundtrack lead-ins. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, USA Today – legacy media is finally starting to play it straight. Between that and the History channel’s “Unidentified” series, which is targeting lawmakers and military veterans, a process is underway.The old ways cling tight, and there will always be pushback. “Humans are both a lying and a self-deluding species,” protests Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member Holman Jenkins, Jr. (who erroneously declared that UFOs avoid civilian air traffic corridors). “We are going through a particular bout of both right now.” That’s correct. But Jenkins and others of his persuasion are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.The ballot box may or may not determine the length of our new dark age. Science alone will not clear a path through the wreckage. But Scientific American s exhortations are on the right side of history. Maybe, with any luck, we can go down swinging:“We understand to an extent the nature of gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and gravitational waves. How? Because we have not dismissed the phenomena or the people who observed them.“We studied them.” Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2020 10:09 AM by Billy Cox From the Because I Don’t Feel Like Blogging About Jan Harzan That s Why Dep’t.:If you haven’t seen the Netflix reboot of “Unsolved Mysteries,” particularly episode 5, about the 1969 Labor Day incident known as the Berkshire UFO, give it a look, it’s worth your time. Even if the abduction stuff makes you cringe. There was one guy who jumped up on the table and exposed himself and said, If you wanna see something out of this world, Nancy, I ll show you something out of this world. I mean, it got that foul. Thom Reed/CREDIT: Unsolved MysteriesAs disturbing as the scenario clearly is, what’s even harder to shake is how the surviving eyewitnesses – the ones who chose to talk about it, anyway – were socially ostracized 50 years ago. The stigma was so forbidding that a now-elderly “experiencer” was in for an awakening after agreeing to go on camera. She knew she’d have to admit to her family, after keeping them in the dark since they were kids, what happened to her that hot September night. But when she finally broke the news, a son informed her that, yeah, they’d seen the same UFO themselves – but their grandmother discouraged them from telling mom the truth. Imagine a gorilla, that size, camped out in the family room for half a century.Most notably, there was the haunting case of Nancy Reed, who left New York City with her son for a Mayberry-paced life by buying a diner in small-town Massachusetts. But when the 9/1/69 UFO encounter turned their lives inside out, the family was openly harassed, tailgated, and ultimately driven out of town by the locals. It reminded me of the fear provoked by the Ray family story here in Florida in 1987. That’s when three AIDS-infected brothers, hemophiliacs who contracted the virus via contaminated blood, lost their home in Arcadia to an arson fire and were forced to relocate.Anyway, Nancy Reed is still alive, and still heartbroken over the way her dreams were mangled within a span of hours. And her son Thom’s resentment over the trauma – induced during the encounter, and subsequently exacerbated by neighbors – is no less acute today than it was in ’69. “My mother went to move here because this was her Norman Rockwell,” he told producers, “and it turned out to be Salvador Dali.”Fifty years ago, neither could have anticipated America s capacity for not only accommodating but celebrating tales of high strangeness. Or at least, not on the scale of interest that preceded the Alienstock hoopla last summer. Remember that? “Storm Area 51,” Matty Roberts, Let s See Them Aliens ? How an online brain fart by a California college kid blew up on the Internet and had residents of another sleepy little village wondering if crazy UFO people were going to turn their world into a Pieter Bruegel hellscape? And it wasn’t even an original idea.Converging in the desert for a rendezvous with celestial counterparts, I Rode a Flying Saucer author George Van Tassel set a prescient benchmark for outlier culture in the 1950s by promoting a series of “Space Brothers” events. Proud to be  wearing silly hats, crowds gathered at a massive quirk of geology called Giant Rock, in the Mojave, which drew a reported 11,000 people at its peak. But aside from a trove of cult-classic photos, Van Tassel’s spectacles dissipated into a one-off curiosity in fringeworld, in part because our government was actively trying to frame the lot of them as kooks. And it worked, during the Cold War. Just ask the Berkshire eyewitnesses. but what it is ain t exactly clear Alienstock drew an eclectic range of motivations to the desert in 2019/CREDIT: Billy CoxThe Alienstock legacy, however, is a bit more complicated. That s partially because the Defense Department has formally admitted UFOs are flying around upstairs and we have no idea what they are. And then there s the continuing litigation between Roberts and Little A’Le’Inn owner Connie West, of Rachel, Nev.It’s a messy little tussle over who owns the Alienstock trademark and who’s on the hook for the financial damages. But in a major departure from the Van Tassel era, the media branded last September’s pilgrimage to Rachel as a bust because the overflow crowds didn t materialize. And, like Giant Rock, many of those who did show up wore silly costumes, which gave the armchair QBs another reason to trivialize the draw.Those numbers are still up for debate. Initial estimates indicated 3,000 Earthlings congregated in Rachel. Connie West says final tallies from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s office placed the tally at 10,000 over the three-day weekend. Significantly, the hype was so clamorous that major brands like Budweiser and Arby s Roast Beef wanted a piece of the action. Which brings us to the point.A portrait of misery incarnate in 2019 – overwhelmed as she was about liability, security, supplies, and infrastructure, especially after former partner Roberts chickened out on her – West looks back a year later with more than a little nostalgia. And it’s not just because traffic at the Little A’Le’Inn is down 70 percent, and off by a whopping 93 percent with foreign travelers. It was because of what didn t happen.“It was the most wonderful gathering I’ve ever been a part of. Everything was so peaceful, everyone came with such a positive attitude,” she says. “Most everybody came prepared, because I couldn’t supply them with everything they needed. And they shared whatever they had with those who needed food or water or ice.”To hear West tell it, Alienstock held a mirror to a global subculture magnetized by the allure of America’s top-secret airbase and its UFO connections. When Bob Lazar spilled the beans about Area 51 in 1988, a year after her parents purchased the diner closest to it, the Little Al Le Inn became curiosity s most conspicuous beneficiary.For more than 30 years, residents of every continent but Antarctica have been rolling up to the doorstep of this wasteland mecca. West s kids, now 29 and 31, stay connected with visitors from across the globe. “I’ve got currency,” she says, “that doesn’t exist anymore.” After a hard day s night of chronicling emerging 21st century mythologies in the Nevada desert, yours truly bowed to peer pressure and joined the crowd/CREDIT: Billy CoxOne of her favorite stories involves a kid from Tasmania. He sent her a postcard when he was 9 or 10, they commenced to be pen-pals, and the kid kept ‘em coming, once a year. A decade or so ago, when the young Aussie turned 24, he actually walked through the door of the Little A’le’Inn. When he became a father, West says she didn’t hear from him again, not until Alienstock exploded on the Internet and another postcard arrived from Down Under. “Remember me?”Despite the ongoing legal hassles, by early 2020, West was ready to do it again in September. She liked the idea of a “safe place,” and not just for costumed exhibitionists. Having seen peculiarities in the skies near Area 51 herself, she wanted a communal venue where the affected could speak openly among fellow travelers, free of judgement, without headliners pushing narrow agendas. No arenas, no reserved seating, just scattered tents and lanterns and the smell of barbecue in the chilly night air, wafting beneath a canopy of sizzling stars. The kind of place that might’ve felt like home to Nancy and Thom Reed 50 years ago.So, add Alienstock II to the list of casualties in the scourge. However, should people want to drop in for an informal reunion in September, Connie West says they’d all be welcome, and its’ not just about the money. She sounds like everybody else: I miss my people. Posted on Tuesday, Jul 7, 2020 11:46 AM by Billy Cox Strange how memory works, the way our moments of joy, sorrow and everything in between blur into each other over the decades, until details once seared like hot irons grow cold and vague. Things we thought we’d never forget – how to tie a string to the leg of a June bug, the name of a first crush, the room where the baby took her first steps, so many images that remind us of who we are and where we came from – are just footprints at low tide now. After watching History s Unidentified series last summer, retired USAF Lt. Col. Larry Rider decided it was time to add his voice to the mix./CREDIT: Larry RiderAnd then there are those glimpses of things that have no direct bearing on our lives (or so we think, at first), things that seem to slide so fleetingly through our screens, so long ago, we sometimes wonder if they occurred at all. Yet they can persist, growing larger as the years roll by, with disproportionate heft and stature, until one day, almost impulsively, you decide, OK, that’s it – I’m not alone anymore. And I’m reaching out.That’s exactly what Larry “Kimo” Rider did last year at the conclusion of History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” series. He wasn’t one of these guys who had UFOs on the brain. What he’d had was a stellar career in aviation, an Air Force arc in which he commanded the F-4C Phantom, once America’s state-of-the-art fighter-bomber, into action over Vietnam. He became a glider instructor at the Air Force Academy after the war. His students included the likes of astronaut Story Musgrave, “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley Sullenberger, and glider altitude record-holder Jim Payne. Rider retired from active duty in 1984 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he spent 10 years as a civilian flight-simulator instructor.He can’t remember the exact date it happened. It was sometime between the death of his first wife in 1992 and his remarriage in 1996. He suspects 1994, maybe ’95. He was living in Phoenix. He was in the back yard of his condo, well before the March 13, 1997, “Phoenix Lights” incident set switchboards ablaze and made national headlines. It was late summertime, maybe. August? 9 p.m.? Dusk, anyway. He was taking a cigar break.It wasn’t an airplane, or at least, not like anything Rider had seen before. What he saw were extremely bright lights, 10, 15, maybe 20, arrayed in an absolutely silent, rigid, V-shaped formation; from his angle, they appeared to be lining the underbelly of a flying machine whose other details were indiscernible. The lights reminded him of halogen lamps.Rider guesses the thing was two to three miles away and, judging from the spread of the lights, maybe twice or three times the size of a Boeing 747. As it began to bank left, to the northeast, it was flying so low – 2,000 feet, maybe – that “no pilot in his right mind is going to maneuver a plane that big that far away from an airport,” Rider recalls. Phoenix s Sky Harbor airport was a good 10 miles off.He had watched fellow pilots get shot down over Southeast Asia; he had seen the spectacular crash of the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie bomber over the Mojave in 1966 when its wing was clipped in mid-air by an F-104. Bracing for the worst over Phoenix, Rider dashed inside to fetch his binoculars. When he returned, the thing had vanished.Ten seconds that s it. A 10-second performance. A good quarter century ago. But ask what he ate for lunch that day.“I thought, man, what did I just see? I knew instinctively this was not an airplane,” he says. “All I could figure was, I’d just seen a UFO.”In fact, mystery objects had been spotted over Phoenix well before the 1997 extravaganza, which was witnessed by hundreds of Arizonans, if not thousands. Rider had moved to Laguna Beach by then. When he first saw the footage replayed by the networks, recorded at the tail-end of a display that began more than 100 miles to the north and allegedly ended at the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, Rider knew right away he was looking at a flare drop. But that didn’t explain everything that came before, during the three hours callers began alerting authorities as the object cruised north to south.So he started paying attention to the phenomenon, the reports. And when last year’s “Unidentified” series ended with an appeal for more eyewitnesses, Rider fired off an email. After all, with the Navy F-18 UFO footage beckoning others to step out of the shadows, there was nothing to gain by holding back. Consequently, in the trailer leading up to Saturday’s premiere of Season 2, you can see a snippet of Rider on camera saying he completed “115 combat missions.” Although a direct witness to the Phoenix Lights in 1997, then-Gov. Fife Symington (left) ridiculed and ran away from it for 10 years before summoning the courage to own up to what he saw/CREDIT: tucson.comBy phone from his summer home in Colorado Springs, the part-time Sarasota resident says he doesn’t know how much of his testimony will actually make the program. How much, after all, is there to say about a 10-second event? And he never had another sighting, before or since, on duty or off.Still, he says, what a time to be alive, to see the fringe getting appropriated by the mainstream.“I would love to get involved in this (research) somehow. Not on camera,” Rider insists, “but to contribute something, or just to be a fly on the wall. This is fascinating.”It is indeed. But there s a flip side, too. Because it s hard not to think about all the time we ve wasted, about how much farther along the research path we might be today if folks with technical expertise and curiosity, like Larry Rider, could have been openly engaged 50 years ago. Now that we appear to be taking corrective measures, however halting and awkward, are we intrepid enough to follow the trail, wherever it leads? Posted on Tuesday, Jun 30, 2020 9:15 AM by Billy Cox It’s been a week now, and I keep waiting to wake up. Because when I think I m woke, the “Advanced Aerial Threats” section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 hasn’t done the disappearing ink thing. Which leads me to believe the Senate Intelligence Committee is serious about ordering the Pentagon to produce a legitimate audit of The Great Taboo, at least as it relates to national security. By December an unclassified report, with a possible “classified annex” at the end. It s been waaaay too long since Washington showed any  official interest in The Great Taboo/CREDIT: AdvertisingRow.comFirst reaction: What’s the catch? It can’t possibly be this simple. It s been 50 years since the closure of the U.S. Air Force “Project Blue Book” sham. Fifty years of official avoidance, denial, ridicule and stigma. More than 70 years since researchers with the original government analysis of UFOs, Project Sign, reportedly came back with the theory that the problem was “interplanetary.” And those conclusions – allegedly summarized in a document called “Estimate of the Situation” – were promptly rejected and buried by USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. At least, that’s the way it’s been framed since before most of us were born.It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this heretofore unthinkable directive issued by the Senate last week. It sounds almost, what, too normal, too pro forma, as if the most radical fishing expedition of our lifetime is simply a matter of good bureaucratic housekeeping. Yet, here we are, in a place no one could have predicted even a year ago.The “how” of why we’re here is the easiest part to figure. Without To The Stars Academy – which has been lambasted in small but obstreperous corners as the propaganda arm of some hidden hand – there is no “Advanced Aerial Threats” mandate in the Senate package. Period. For all of its flaws during and after its 2017 rollout, TTSA, guided most credibly by Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon, has accomplished the impossible. Can we all at least agree on that?Already, De Void has heard grumblings about the timing of the Senate’s move, coming just weeks before the second season of History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.” Some critics charge the series, which premieres on July 11, couldn’t have gotten a better marketing boost than a Senate inquiry. Which is true. And so what? If this is brainwashing, bring it on. What theory are they promoting? What do “they” want us to believe? Who are “they”? Game on. One of the weirdest things about the Senate request for military UFO data is the absence of a well-heeled constituency, queues of lobbyists, or even a donor class/CREDIT: viator.comThe more relevant question is, do 100 elected public officials, with limited demonstrable knowledge of this persistent mystery, have the long view on what they’ve gotten themselves into?Ostensibly, the Senate’s primary objective is to determine whether or not Uncle Sam is facing a technology gap created by “adversarial foreign governments.” The Senate also wants to include an FBI review of data collected on incidents over “restricted United States airspace” – not a bad idea to bring a civilian agency into the mix. But at what point will this push for interagency cooperation clash with their perceived proprietary interests?Consider the briefly famous Stephenville incident from January 2008, which suggested more about the military’s knowledge of tactical UFO behavior than about the UFO itself. Radar records retrieved from the FAA and National Weather Service (the Air Force would provide no records of its own) indicated there were no military interceptors in the air at all when the no-fly zone over President Bush’s “Texas White House” was apparently being challenged by an object without a transponder.We know, for instance, that on at least three prior occasions during the Bush administration, Air Force warplanes swarmed and forced down private pilots who were either lost or stunting as they violated the security perimeter above Bush’s place. We also know, thanks to the civilian radar data, that F-16s from Carswell Air Force Base came to within a mile of the same object(s) when it emerged some 65 miles to the northwest, an hour or so earlier. That’s when the intruder initially popped up over Stephenville, leaving a handful of eyewitnesses at separate locations in cattle country to report a massive and brazenly slow-moving flying machine cruising low over the plains.Were there no jet fighters in the vicinity of the Bush residence that evening because pilots had been waved off? Have there been briefings about potentially catastrophic UFO countermeasures? Because it wasn t as if the USAF had lost interest in the event. A FOIA-assisted reconstruction of that event assembled by Robert Powell and Glen Schulze implied the entire incident was being monitored by another plane, possibly an AWACS surveillance craft, circling high above at 41,000 feet. Wonder what those pilots would have to say?“The Air Force should be in the hot seat because they’re in charge of patrolling our skies,” says UFO historian Jan Aldrich. “I think they’re enjoying seeing the Navy in the hot seat.”Founder of Project 1947, which displays primary source documents on UFOs dating back to back to the early nuclear age, Aldrich called the Senate’s move a “bolt from the blue,” nothing he thought he d see in his lifetime. But is the political system structured to accommodate the complex legacy of this puzzle? Noting how the formal inquiry is directed primarily at the Office of Naval Intelligence, which confirmed the existence of its  Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, Aldrich offers a 1952 Look magazine story for perspective. It’s a map based on USAF data showing Cold War era UFO hot spots across the U.S.“It’s all over our defense installations,” the Army veteran notes of the historical UFO penetrations, “and in more than half a century, nothing has really changed.” Furthermore, says Aldrich, many of “the best” UFO cases, like incidents involving the old Strategic Air Command, never made it into Blue Book. Will lawmakers care about going that deep into history?And there’s a clause in the “Advanced Aerial Threats” section indicating the need for “an official accountable” for “an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government, regardless of which service or agency acquired the information.” That’s bigger than huge. It’s the key. Who might that person be? Military or civilian? An Edward Condon or a James McDonald? It would be a pleasant surprise to learn that anyone inside the Beltway knows either of those names. and then, like a miracle, the coronavirus went away, unemployment plummeted to 3.5 percent, the races lived in harmony, and they all lived happily ever after. /CREDIT: search.alexanderstreet.comAmerica is facing reckonings on many fronts – science, the economy, race, income inequality, health care, sociology, and issues we haven’t even begun to recognize. And now, finally, apparently, this. Are we capable of getting it right? Are there any honest brokers out there with the integrity to steward a fair and dispassionate accounting of history’s most explosive story? Or is it already too late for that?De Void isn t convinced this whole thing isn t an extended old-school dream sequence, doomed to end on the clatter of teletype or an urgent voice-over from a Movietone newsreel: Bulletin! Putin Blows Up Capitol Dome, President Not Informed! UFO Senate Report Delayed! Failing that Christmas is coming. Ready or not. Posted on Monday, Jun 15, 2020 7:55 AM by Billy Cox The admiral at the center of controversial notes describing his inability to access a classified UFO research program says the documents are bogus. Furthermore, he says the alleged author of those notes, physicist Dr. Eric Davis, never interviewed him.“It’s all fiction,” says former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Thomas Wilson, from his home in Virginia. “I wouldn’t know Eric Davis if he walked in right now.” My memory is not foggy. Of all the stuff on the Internet, the only thing which is accurate is, I did have a meeting with (Edgar) Mitchell in 97 or 98, when I was Vice-2 Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson/CREDIT: WikipediaPosted on Imgur last year, the 15 pages of typed notes,  often referred to now as the Core Secrets memo, were presented as the rough transcripts of a conversation between Wilson, shortly after retiring from the Navy, and Davis, on 10/16/02. The nut graph of Core Secrets, if true, would confirm some of the darkest suspicions about the UFO phenomenon – that research is being undertaken and walled off by private contractors, to the extent that not even insiders at the most elite levels of military intelligence have the proper security clearances to review the evidence.Davis, who famously researches the sorts of exotic technology often observed in UFO behaviors, has never affirmed or denied his ostensible authorship of Core Secrets when pressed over the past year. He did, however, tell the New York Post in May that the documents were leaked by the estate of the late astronaut and Apollo 14 moonwalker Dr. Edgar Mitchell.But in his first public statement on Core Secrets, Wilson rejected the entire premise of the meeting and his role in it. The notes indicate that Wilson and Davis rendezvoused in Las Vegas, inside a car attended by three uniformed military personnel, in the parking lot of the Special Projects Building of defense contractor EG G.“I’m not saying that sometime, somewhere, I never met (Davis), but I certainly don’t know him, I don’t remember him, and I definitely did not sit with him in a car for an hour in Las Vegas,” Wilson told De Void.“You may also see in those notes where I came with two other naval officers, a lieutenant and a lieutenant commander, and a petty officer who was driving the car. I was not even in the Navy then. And the Navy was certainly not ferrying me around in a car at that point.“Those notes are really detailed – it’s like somebody wrote a fiction piece,” Wilson said. “But it never happened, trust me. There are so many things in those notes that are demonstrably inaccurate. And I don t know how I could prove it, but I haven’t been to Las Vegas since 1979, 80.”Wilson said he hadn’t gotten around to reading the Core Secrets docs until someone brought them to his attention within the past week or so. He said his catch-up crash course included watching researcher Richard Dolan’s YouTube overview of the contents and their implications. Wilson called that synopsis “silly.”One thing in the notes that is true, Wilson added, is that he and Mitchell did meet face to face. Wilson said he couldn’t remember the date, but Core Secrets alleges the meeting occurred in 1997, when Wilson was Vice Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shortly before becoming the DIA director. He acknowledged that the subject of UFOs and special access programs did come up. But he reiterated what he told De Void in 2008, that he wasn’t interested in going down that rabbit hole.“I don’t remember the details, but they [Mitchell was accompanied by UFO researcher Steven Greer] said there would be evidence in black programs, and would I be interested in chasing it down,” Wilson said. “I told them I had far too many things to do.“I’m not saying there are no such programs because I don’t know. I didn’t check or follow up. It might not have been a waste of time for somebody (to pursue), but I did not have time to waste, believe me. At the time I was up to my eyeballs in Bosnia and Kosovo and Korea and Iraq and, you name it, terrorism. So I didn’t feel I should spend my time well, I had enough black programs I had to deal with.”In 1996, Mitchell told me he was pursuing leads that UFO “information is now held primarily by a body of semi- or quasi-private organizations that have kinda spun off from the military intelligence organizations of the past.” He called those arrangements “dangerous” and added:“Imagine an organization that has a black budget, an unquestioned source of funds, reports to no one, and has this exotic technology that they can keep to themselves and play with.” He also said that if NASA had prior knowledge of ET contact existing within the government, and we were sent into space blind and dumb to such information, I think it is a case of criminal culpability. Mitchell repeated some of those allegations in 2008 on CNN’s Larry King Live. Without mentioning Wilson, Mitchell said he had talked with “an admiral” who “had found the people responsible for the cover-up and for the people who were in the know and were told, I’m sorry, admiral, you do not have need to know here and so, goodbye.”Upon learning 12 years ago that Wilson had immediately rejected those allegations, Mitchell said he was “shocked,” but he refused to challenge the discrepancy. “I do not wish to engage him on this matter,” Mitchell said.Wilson’s repudiation of the Core Secrets narrative is consistent with what a handful of his contemporaries – either mentioned in the Core Secrets notes or involved in the relevant chain of command in 1997 – have told De Void.Former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Oke Shannon, former Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Noel Longuemare, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and USAF Gen. Joe Ralston, and former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Dr. Paul Kaminsky, have all stated they have no knowledge of the Core Secrets version of events.As to the broader subject of UFOs, Wilson remains skeptical. Over the course of his long military career, Wilson said he knew of countless initially unusual sightings that turned out to have prosaic explanations, many of them submarines. But the Pentagon’s recent verification of videos showing F-18s in pursuit of UFOs have lowered his guard somewhat.“I looked at those Navy videos with some interest,” he said. “I don’t know what they saw. It’s interesting, for sure.”Eric Davis could not be reached for comment. Posted on Monday, Jun 1, 2020 11:26 AM by Billy Cox Uhh, yeah. It s a little hard to concentrate on The Great Taboo right now. Cities on fire like it s 1967 again. Coronavirus body counts surging into six digits. A new business initiative celebrating Elon Musk. These are things we can’t ignore.But as time passes, we ll come to see them as variations of familiar themes. And when that happens, we will find ourselves confronting something genuinely unprecedented, a room-sized gorilla beginning to break its social quarantine, the implications incapable of being wished away. And for that, we can thank the increasingly engaged Fourth Estate – mainstream and outliers alike – in its accelerating quest for clarity. And the blades of inquiry are getting sharper. The world is coming to an end! Legacy media and a digital-only website are duking it out for UFO scoops!/CREDIT: medium.comThree weeks ago, in what hopefully signals the beginning of old-fashioned deadline competition, Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick at The War Zone scooped the New York Times, by a single day, on the results of a FOIA for UFO incident reports collected by the Navy Safety Center. Both teams of reporters were attempting to acquire official paperwork behind the 2015 “GoFast” and “Gimbal” encounters videotaped by pilots assigned to the USS Roosevelt. Instead, the fishing expedition landed eight previously unknown reports logged by Navy pilots operating along the Eastern seaboard over a 10-year span.Significantly, records from the Roosevelt encounters were not included. Wonder why? That s called red meat.Steven Greenstreet at the New York Post has been circling back into the archives to fill in the gaps of missing history. Most recently, his video chat with physicist and Pentagon UFO research consultant Dr. Eric Davis strayed into terrain that clearly made Davis nervous. So nervous, in fact, that a portion of the interview was deleted from the original clip shortly thereafter.In the redacted portion of the exchange, Greenstreet wanted to know more about the controversial “Core Secrets” notes that Davis is alleged to have made during his conversation in 2002 with just-retired Defense Intelligence Agency Director Thomas Wilson. In a bombshell of a revelation, the notes indicate Wilson was still pissed about being denied access to a classified program involving The Great Taboo.Confronted by Greenstreet, Davis held firm to the no-comment stance he assumed when the 15-page transcripts hit the Internet last June. But for the first time, he confirmed the source of the material. “They were leaked out of (Apollo astronaut) Ed Mitchell’s estate,” Davis told the Post, “and there’s nothing I can say about it.”Unless, maybe, the media keeps pushing.In fact, a few newsies have grown so tenacious that Luis Elizondo, the retired Army counterintelligence agent who set events in motion in 2017, tells De Void he wishes he’d met one of those journos before leaving the Pentagon to go public with the UFO material.“I told him, I said dude, if I’d known you four years ago I probably would’ve hired you to come onto AATIP,” Elizondo says, alluding to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which studied UFOs for the Defense Department a decade ago. “He’s got sources that I would’ve gone to my grave thinking there’s no way in hell anybody will know who these people are. But he did.“And you haven’t seen anything yet.”Elizondo is referring to researcher Tim McMillan, who has singlehandedly converted Popular Mechanics from a featherweight on UFO matters into a formidable critic. In February, the former police lieutenant latched onto the DoD’s amateurish inability to get its stories straight concerning Elizondo’s duties with AATIP. As a result of McMillan’s reporting four months ago, the Pentagon felt compelled to admit that, yes, the subject of McMillan s inquiry was, in fact, an information manager for unspecified Special Access Programs.Well, probably sooner than later, Elizondo predicts, the DoD will produce a more accurate version in order to avoid having to send people to testify under oath. And that, he says, will prove once and for all he’s been on the level since jump street.“The truth keeps coming out, whether they like it or not,” he says from southern California. “At first it was like, no, you’ve got the name wrong, it’s ‘Advanced Aviation.’ No, it’s not, it’s ‘Advanced Aerospace.’ Then it was ‘But AATIP was never about UFOs.’ Yes, actually it was. ‘Well, the videos weren’t legally released, they were classified.’ No they weren’t, and here’s the documentation that proves it.“I’ve got no agenda other than to tell the truth. Everything I’ve said can be proved through documentation. You can’t keep a lid on this forever. The Department of Defense realizes the landscape is changing because people are FOIAing the hell out of ‘em now. And the last thing you want to do is get caught red-handed lying to the American people – there are laws and rules against that.”Technically, yes, but lately, laws and rules in this country seem more like suggestions than mandates. Anyhow, Elizondo plans to leave a few more “Easter eggs” for the press to follow when History’s second season of “Unidentified: Inside America s UFO Investigation,” kicks off on July 11. And the former classified ops veteran who was invited in 2008 by then Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper to join the Pentagon makes no bones about it – he consults with his former colleagues about what is and isn’t fair game when he puts stuff out there, whether it’s documentary material or an imminent interview on national media.“What I’ve tried to do from the start is to destigmatize and further legitimize this topic to advance the conversation, to get the government to admit this is real, while at the same time not breaking either my security oath or the trust of the American people,” he says. “And it’s working. Maybe not as fast as some people would like, but if you look at just the last two years alone, we have collectively come further in this one moment in time than in the 70 years before that.” At the SCU Conference in 2019, erstwhile Army intelligence agent Luis Elizondo acknowledged that UFOs have shown some strategic interest in our nuclear capabilities. /CREDIT: Billy CoxElizondo says the release of the F-18 videos has created an irreversible momentum, “like a boulder going downhill,” following a path that can, at best, be only partially managed. He compares it to depressing an angled mattress in order to guide the direction of a bowling ball. “If you try to get in front of it,” he warns, “it’s gonna flatten you.”Nobody wants to get flattened. But the debate is growing so sophisticated that even traditional pillars of American journalism may soon find their reputations pancaked – or deemed irrelevant – by insouciant reporting. Case in point: the May 18 edition National Public Radio’s “1A.”Amid today’s suddenly target-rich environment, where plenty of insider participants (Eric Davis, anyone?) and military eyewitnesses are speaking on the record, NPR instead gave a platform to guests with bupkis to offer. One of them – Sarah Scoles, author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers – prefers to approach the issue with an anthropological filter. The other, utterly marginalized SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, admitted nearly two years ago that his discipline lacks the qualifications  to properly assess the UFO conundrum. So public radio wound up delivering a huge platter of empty calories for audiences with the luxury of time to waste.And then there are the outright curiosities. Take freelance troll Keith Kloor.Like an Inspector Javert sentenced to purgatory in a never-ending Whac-A-Mole karma, Kloor keeps managing to pop up in mainstream publications in order to hock loogies at UFO journalism. He obviously has no problems scoring gigs. Last year, his byline (“The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for An Obscure Pentagon Program – Did He?”) appeared in The Intercept, co-founded by Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald. Also in 2019, Kloor landed a piece (“UFOs Won’t Go Away”) in Issues in Science and Technology, the magazine arm of the National Academies of Science.Two weeks ago, he popped up again, this time in Wired, with an essay titled “Will The New York Times Ever Stop Reporting on UFOs?” Like the preceding companion pieces, Kloor’s work is the latest addition to the tired UFOs-as-hokum genre, with a fixation on Elizondo’s credentials. And he isn’t afraid to burn his sources to accomplish the mission.Led to believe Kloor planned an objective discussion on the first detailed independent analysis of the so-called Tic Tac UFO incident captured on video by Navy pilots in 2004, members of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies agreed to delay release of their evaluation to coincide with publication of Kloor’s article for NAS. Kloor had attended SCU’s weekend discussion of those results, prior to public disclosure, in 2019. But when Kloor went to press, he also delivered a swipe at those following the evidence to a conclusion that UFOs represent truly exotic and unknown technology. He characterized advocates of those notions as sensationalists who “seem to be working in the great American tradition of P.T. Barnum.”In slamming the NY Times’ 5/17/20 article on the eight new UFO-Navy reports uncovered through FOIA as “thinly sourced and slanted” – without mentioning The War Zone’s more comprehensive reporting a day earlier, which published online PDFs of those same Navy reports – Kloor actually thought it was significant that the Times didn’t work Elizondo into its reporting. Implying that the NYT  might be having second thoughts about Elizondo’s verisimilitude, Kloor cited his appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News interviews, and how “cable news shows still find him irresistible.”This is beginning to sound like the flailing envy of a man with a sense that the times are passing him by. Maybe Kloor’s auditioning to be a UFO expert on NPR. There’s obviously plenty of room for that voice. Fortunately for the rest of us, investigative journalism is starting to make That Voice sound more like a plea for attention than a rational argument. The marketplace for new ideas moves on. Posted on Tuesday, May 5, 2020 9:26 AM by Billy Cox Last week’s curious move by the Defense Department to post three now-famous UFO videos which had already been confirmed as authentic by the Navy seven months ago obviously raises all sorts of questions. A cry for help, maybe? Does it signal confusion or schism among the top brass about the need for a more proactive policy? Maybe it was an arbitrary impulse by some low-level nerd tired of coronavirus hogging all the headlines? Is someone trying to stir the pot here? Or is this just another random event baiting us to come up with a label?/CREDIT: navytimes.comWe’ll likely never know, but researcher Robert Powell, who was on the trail of the Tic Tac incident long before it had a name, has an additional set of questions. Only, these are for corporate news bigwigs – the BBC, CNN, Forbes, the NY Times, et al – who ran with the non-news press release like dogs with Frisbees.“The big agencies will at least talk to them on the phone, right?” Powell says from his home in Austin. “So, what kills me is, the media should be asking, OK, if you’ve got these videos, and you’re admitting that you’ve kept them all these years, and you’re admitting they’re unknown, and you couldn’t figure it out, well, where’s the radar data? Because that will tell you how fast these things are going and whether or not there’s any possibility they’re manmade. Where’s the radar data?”Access doesn t mean beans if you squander it. Last week, Reuters gave Trump some space to rant about how China wants him to lose the election.  At the end of the interview, the news agency managed to throw in a question about the Pentagon’s decision to post the F-18 UFO footage. Typically, what Trump said I just wonder if it’s real. That’s a hell of a video” was meaningless. They got him to say something.Reuters should’ve gone deeper, but they should all go deeper. Before the To The Stars Academy formed in 2017 and helped spur the release of two of those Navy videos to the New York Times, Powell was trying to gets his hands on radar and communications data from the 2004 naval encounter. He queried everybody: the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Office of Naval Research, the Marine Corps, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Naval Sea Systems Command, the Naval Air Facilities Engineering Command, the Naval History and Heritage Command.When all was said and done, in 2016, not a one of those sources could produce radar data. But the videos were evidently important enough for the military to retain. Weird. But not, evidently, weird enough for the media to ask for the complete set of records, or to demand to know why they re not available.By the way, Powell – who went on to publish a 270 page analysis of the Tic Tac Incident with fellow researchers at the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies – will be hosting SCU’s upcoming first-ever podcast, which sounds interesting.It’s a wild tale about the alleged 1957 explosion of a UFO over the shallows of the Brazilian coastal municipality, Ubatuba. Long story, but the bottom line is, some of the purported debris survived and wound up in the U.S. In 2017-18, Powell got his hands on the material and analyzed its composition. On Wednesday at 3 p.m. Pacific/6 p.m. Eastern, he will discuss the results in a livestreaming podcast available at https://youtu.be/NamnxaADugoUbatuba is just one of multiple projects SCU has been working lately. And it’s also worth noting that, in 2015, two years before the Navy videos surfaced, SCU released its analysis of surprising government UFO footage acquired in 2013 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).Known as the Aguadilla video, the nighttime sequence recorded with thermal imaging contains no communications chatter like the Navy vids, and no eyewitnesses have stepped forward to explain on the record what they saw, as some Navy pilots have done with their own encounters. On the other hand, unlike the F-18 images, Aguadilla shows the object interacting with its environment, slicing into the water, and splitting in two as it emerges. Also unlike the Navy footage, Powell was able to acquire radar records, from the FAA. “Plus, it also has a lot more background objects you can reference against it,” Powell says.So it’s a valuable clip. But it was forwarded to SCU after it became obvious to at least one still-anonymous crew member that, alas, nobody up the chain of command was interested. Not interested in a bogey without a transponder flying so close to the local airport that it resulted in the delay of another flight. Got it. Yet, the CBP argued the original footage was too sensitive to release to the public, and it squashed De Void s FOIA with a denial in 2016.Thus, given the Pentagon’s newfound, or at least superficial, glasnost over The Great Taboo, and the videos’ implicit acknowledgement that we have gaping holes in our security perimeter upstairs, De Void has appealed to CBP to reconsider its decision to withhold Aguadilla. Who knows? Maybe there s more than one contagion in the air these days. Posted on Monday, Apr 27, 2020 9:43 AM by Billy Cox I am in denial about many things, most immediately over the onset of another early summer in Florida. Denial means refusing to close the windows and submitting to air conditioning, even as my armpits go damp with sweat. I wear rubber gloves and a bandito’s bandana across my airholes at the supermarket, more to keep from getting scolded than to concede any fears of inhaling lethal pathogens. I am in denial over the prospects that, due to economic and digital pandemics beyond my control, my newspaper career is nearing an end. The global financial system was long overdue for correction and fumigation, but until the coronavirus showed up, nobody had the standing or the audacity to slay the bulls/CREDIT: foreignpolicy.comI am also in denial about the reality behind the Coca-Cola fairy tale, about how, if extended a smile and a catchy jingle, clashing cultures would join hands and learn to sing in perfect harmony. I’m not a total idiot, OK, I never bought the whole Earth Day marketing pitch. But. As the sun set over the 20th century, Iran and Iraq did quit shooting at each other. And Soviet troops did pull out of Afghanistan. And the Germans did tear down the wall. And Nelson Mandela did go from prison to the presidency of South Africa. And Sinn Fein did make peace with the Unionist Party. On Easter. And Leningrad did change its name to St. Petersburg. And the PLO did shake hands with Israel’s Prime Minister, who probably knew in the back of his mind it would cost him his life. And within that succession of glittering moments, it was tempting to think this was, indeed, what the end of history could look like.Even now, amid the ruins, the better angels can still put on a show: Exhausted scrubs emerging from ventilator hell into fevered applause. Fingers of the afflicted and the grieving pressing into the glass that separates them. Italians singing arias through the tears, from their balconies; a quarter million Brits responding to their National Health Service s appeal for volunteers; Chinese docs and nurses packing up for Italy and Iran to engage the coronavirus head-on, again. On and on and on.And yet, when it comes to organizing a coherent, united, international front against a common threat, we see the tribal wagons circling around their own again, same as it ever was.Waiting for an American posse that will never arrive, the United Nations struggles to issue a guiding vision for a way forward. A scheduled video conference between G20 leaders on Friday was called off at the last minute due to U.S. and Chinese squabbling over the scapegoating of the World Health Organization. Members of the already fragile European Union didn’t wait for a coordinated containment strategy; instead, they decided individually about when and for how long to seal national borders. The EU served up a “heartfelt apology” over its prolonged silence to Italy’s pleas for medical equipment on the front end of the crisis. And today, the Union remains paralyzed over debt-sharing solutions to dig the lot of them out of this mess.Even as COVID-19 began radiating out of Wuhan, China continued hoarding information about what it knew, and when it knew. In March, with the virus descending onto the subcontinent, India and Pakistan traded artillery fire. India reported the highest number of ceasefire violations in two years. Pakistan touted its shootdown of an Indian drone. In my particular case, with my athletic history, if I were infected with the virus, I would have no reason to worry. I would feel nothing, or it would be at most, just a little flu or a little cold Jair Bolsonaro/CREDIT: usnews.comThe relatively low numbers in South America will rise as it slides into autumn. Argentina had moved swiftly to close its borders, where under 4,000 people have been infected and fatalities are below 200. But next door in fascist Brazil, more than 60,000 cases are on file, and the death toll has climbed past 4,200, even as President Jair Bolsonaro exhorts crowds of admirers to defy the lockdown movement.And through it all, as international economies and institutions puke money and careers, a “perfect storm” of lies and paranoia about COVID-19 has swamped social media, perpetrated by free-agent anarchists and state players alike. And that’s the world stage. Main Street USA? Spiders in a jar, fear v. science, middle-finger salutes to authority. A solid one-third of us are ready to dance, right over the cliff, with a chief executive who fantasizes about eradicating the disease with injections of disinfectant.You know where this is headed, right?“In a way, this is our alien invasion,” futurist author Amy Webb told NPR earlier this month. “This virus is essentially malware, attacking the source code of humanity. This should be something that brings us all together. It’s strange to me that it’s not. This is the time, this is the cause, this is the reason, to get Silicon Valley and Wall Street and Washington, D.C., in lockstep together.”“This” may not be an exact replica of the sequel to “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” but it sure smells like the dress rehearsal. For a growing fatalistic niche, “this” has been a long time coming. Psychology Today updated the end-times scenario in 2018 by adding rogue artificial intelligence to the list of possibilities. Only, the article, “Unification by ‘Alien’ Invasion,” opened with a televised exchange, four years earlier, between Bill Clinton and Jimmy Kimmel.The ex-president, wrote the authors, “finished the interview with a curious sentiment. ‘It may be the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours,’ he said. And by ‘it,’ (Clinton) meant an alien invasion from outer space.”That was a still-mildly novel assertion from a politician in 2014, but it could be excused as a rhetorical flourish, the same way it was when Ronald Reagan addressed the United Nations in 1987. PsychToday reminded newbies that No. 40 employed the same metaphor at the ass-end of the Cold War. “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world,” he told Earthlings, before seguing into an argument for the abolition of nuclear weapons.Coronavirus has ripped open a lot of scabs, created bleak new storylines, and stripped us of our longstanding fable about global unity when threatened by a non-human Other. Events over the past 2.5 years, and the mainstream media’s coverage of them, have yet to make a strong case for UFOs as a clear and present danger, at least not overtly. But like termites, emboldened researchers keep gnawing away in the shadows of the enervating COVID-19 drama monopolizing global news cycles.Slowly, surely, the story behind the Pentagon’s secret UFO program continues to surface in piecemeal fragments. And, like so much else in Washington now, the Department of Defense is in a pickle, unable to respond to the UFO dilemma, except with confusion, contradiction, and obfuscation. The Great Taboo is beginning to swim in the mainstream: How many of us perked up at the mention of the USS Roosevelt during its quarantine fiasco, not so much for the flattop s activities in operations Enduring Freedom and Desert Storm, but for its role in documenting UFOs off the Florida-Georgia coast in 2015? Greetings from the U.S. Army, Gort. Sorry, but representatives from the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force aren t here today because they can t agree on how to write a press release /CREDIT: Lansingcitypulse.comReady it or not, we’re getting a preview of the probable chaos ahead when and if governments across the world come to their senses, lose their minds, and speak with one voice in admitting that, yeah, our state-of-the-art weapons platforms are, at the very least, being dreadfully outclassed by advanced technologies no power on Earth has the ability to counter.We’ve already seen what a mere terrestrial virus can do to markets confronted with the specter of vulnerability and powerlessness. Last week, the invisible scourge even turned petrodollars into Blockbuster Video. What’s next? How about a national conversation right now on “free” energy …The UFO story is on hold, but it’ll wait. It always waits. We can cross our fingers and hope it goes away, like a miracle. But unless the Three Wise Men come bearing pallets of incense, gold, and myrrh, our present course is unsustainable, and the price of denial keeps getting higher and higher. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick Posted on Monday, Mar 16, 2020 10:10 PM by Billy Cox The Defense Department is expected to release more information about a terminated program that was tracking unidentified flying aircraft. Can the Pentagon say whether it has any evidence that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth? Jeff Schogol, Task and Purpose I have nothing on that today - Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman Nor do I Rear Admiral William Byrne, Jr.                                                                                                                      2/19/20, PBS News Hour*Wednesday morning, and I am sitting in the diner where, in 1956, Elvis drove up in a pink Cadillac and ordered three eggs, three slices of bacon, pan-fried potatoes, two orders of toast and three glasses of milk. Our newsroom in Sarasota has just been placed under an informal and open-ended quarantine. Things are upside down right now. At least this joint feels familiar. When Elvis blew into the Waffle Stop in 56, he told his server, Ma am, your skirt should be shorter because your gams are too pretty. At least that s what erstwhile waitress Edith Barr-Dunn told me in 2007/CREDIT: Billy CoxLately, I ve been spending a lot of time reading about the sentience of plants – their “neurobiology,” as heretic botanist Stefano Mancuso puts it – and it got me to thinking about non-human intelligence. Well OK, no, actually, I thought about non-human intelligence first, then read the books, so sue me, whatever. Anyhow, I got to thinking about how maybe we aren’t any closer to figuring out what’s behind the UFO thing than we were 50 years ago because we can’t get out of our own heads and think like “they” do. We can’t even communicate in a meaningful way with other intelligent species here on Earth – cetaceans, cephalopods, how many are there?Well, after consuming Richard Powers’ 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, after watching the stunning and overlooked documentary “Fantastic Fungi,” I m definitely adding plants to that list, too. I got  to wondering what, specifically, if anything, living organisms that occupy the same material plane as we do while simultaneously experiencing time and space in a completely alien manner might share with us. And how might that download take place?Cut to the chase: In February, after considerable reflection, I spent a weekend attending and participating in psychedelic ayahuasca ceremonies outside Orlando. Something happened, but I haven’t been able to process it. Or write about it, yet. It’s kinda thrown me off my game, and De Void’s been growing weeds for more than a month now.During the inertia, however, I have been paying attention to the niche news, and I see where Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA) is just one of a growing number of lawmakers doing self-quarantine. I never like to get morbid, but I do wonder what would happen in the event of a worst-case scenario.On Super Tuesday, Brownley’s incumbency was good enough for a whopping 61.9 percent of the vote in California’s District 26 primary, where the top-two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, square off in November. Republican Antonio Sabato finished a distant second with 38.1 percent. Registered Democrat Bob Salas, the retired USAF captain who has testified to and written about being on duty when UFOs took 10 Minuteman missiles offline at a SAC base in 1967, collected barely 7,000 votes, not enough to scratch a fraction of a percentage point.So: If Brownley can’t perform her duties, would Sabato become the automatic winner? Or would Salas advance to second place and get to campaign again? Maybe work that UFO-nukes angle back into the political season?Just wondering.I’ve also been keeping up with social media threads. One comment that stuck with me posited the idea that maybe our Plague-triggered global anxiety could be a dress rehearsal for what happens if and when the G-7 heads of state concede a) ET is real, b) ET has unimpeded access to our atmosphere and our oceans, and c) there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Covid-19 panic is like having a three-month hurricane without bad weather or power outages or freighters on top of strip malls. /CREDIT: news.com.auObviously that would be a destabilizing confession, which would put their own authority in jeopardy. On the other hand, De Void would like to think an ET panic wouldn’t stoke images of mass diarrhea so I could at least find toilet paper. Somewhere. That would be an improvement over this jam I’m in right now. But the other hypotheticals aren’t so far-fetched, and they remind me of a conversation I had in 1995 with the former PIO of Project Blue Book, who later became the mouthpiece for the entire Air Force in 1971-74.We were discussing the Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control, the 1993 edition. The manual wasn’t an official government document, but one of the co-authors was a career firefighter, and the info was so thorough it was being distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It had a section titled “The UFO Threat – A Fact,” which made small ripples of news back then. The Guide cited Part 1211, Ch. V, 14 Code of Federal Regulations, which gave NASA the authority “to quarantine under armed guard any object, person or other form of life extraterrestrially exposed.”Bill Coleman, retired USAF colonel and a literal former neighbor in Indian Harbour Beach, said he doubted NASA had the legal right to enforce those sorts of detentions, because it would probably violate the Posse Comitatus Act. And in fact, after touching bases with NASA, I learned the space agency had formally, without fanfare, already renounced that obligation, back in 1991.Anyway, Coleman said military colleagues had gamed out several crashed-UFO/contact scenarios, and the top priority was always the same.“You’re dealing with the very real risk of unleashing an Andromeda Strain situation,” he said. “Not only are you going to have to isolate your people on the scene, you’re also talking about evacuating a very large perimeter around it. You’re also going to have to hibernate out there. You can’t risk moving people who might also expose others.“Finally, you’d have to collect the alien tissue samples fast. Because you’re going to have to destroy the source, by burning.”Burn the source – of the most important story of our age. Wonder if those protocols are still in play, or if they ever were. What if just one of the crash-retrieval stories is true but the hazmat suits failed to secure the hot zone? What if they blundered in unprotected? What would motivate anyone in the loop to tell the truth?Screw it, nobody lives forever. Slap some bacon on that plate. Ma am.Nice catch, Giuliano Marinkovic

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