British Military UFOs

…The current electric saucer, which formed part of Team MIRA at the recent MoD “Grand Challenge” ambush-sniffing tech contest, can normally stay up for just two and a half minutes. The new Fenstar 50 is expected to manage up to an hour, carrying a payload of 5kg - a quarter of its all-up weight. GFS aims to keep the total weight under 20kg, as this is the most that the CAA allows under model aircraft rules. Any more would take the company into the hugely more onerous certification regime for full-sized aircraft.

Even at 20kg, however, the Fenstar 50 will be significantly bigger and more capable than one of its main rivals, the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) from Honeywell. The MAV uses a ducted fan rather than a GFS-style Coanda surface, but this offers similar advantages - neither vehicle has projecting helicopter-style rotors. Both of them can thus fly about happily in between buildings, and perhaps in and out of doors and windows etc. Both could be very useful as reconnaissance machines for soldiers, especially in dangerous urban combat - indeed Honeywell’s machine has already seen action in Iraq. The MAV runs on a two-stroke petrol engine like the Fenstar, and offers similar endurance, though it weighs just 7.25 kg and can barely lift a pair of cameras. - theregister

Hacker loses extradition appeal

A Briton accused of hacking into secret military computers has lost his appeal against extradition to the US.

Glasgow-born Gary McKinnon was said to be “distraught” after losing the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. He faces extradition within two weeks.

The unemployed man could face life in jail if convicted of accessing 97 US military and Nasa computers.

The 42-year-old admitted breaking into the computers from his London home but said he sought information on UFOs. - bbc

The wheels of justice move slowly. He claims he found photo evidence of UFOs.  It seems more likely that he found some false information set up to catch snoopers. Sometimes it seems to me that the US government actually wants everyone to believe it is hiding information about aliens and UFOs.

In 2006, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed to NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon. NASA’s documents consisted of printed news articles from the Slashdot website, but no other related documents. This is consistent with NASA employees browsing internet articles about Gary McKinnon, the records of which are public domain. The records have been uploaded to the internet for review, and can be downloaded from theblackvault.com.

UFO by the moon

Are UFOs a threat to national security ?

On the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2006, pilots and airport employees at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago saw a disc-like object hovering over the tarmac for several minutes. Because nothing was tracked on radar, the Federal Aviation Administration did not investigate. Yet radar is not a reliable detector of all aircraft. Stealth planes are designed to be invisible to radar, and many radar systems filter out signals not matching the normal characteristics of aircraft. Did it really make sense to entirely ignore the observations of several witnesses? A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community. - mystery

A degree in strange flying objects alien no longer

TALK of UFOs is often dismissed as fanciful, but at one Australian university at least, it has entered the realm of academia.

Melbourne University will this Saturday confer the first Australian doctorate of philosophy in ufology, the study of unidentified flying objects, upon Martin Plowman, a culture and communication student.

Science fiction buffs would be quick to realise that those who don’t quite catch his name will be able to quip: “Dr Who?”

Mr Plowman is writing a book on the subject that is due out in November. First-hand experience of UFOs has eluded him and he maintains a healthy scepticism about their existence.

Often people have mistaken comets, aircraft or birds for UFOs, he said, but “when I meet someone who says they’ve seen something strange, that’s fair enough because maybe they have. I don’t know what it is, though”.

Someone he met in Melbourne claimed to have been kidnapped by Martians. “They seem like something has happened to them,” Mr Plowman said. “The first time you meet an abductee as they are called, it can be quite confronting because they are trying to come to terms with it … it is something that can stay with people a long time.”

The last abduction claim in Melbourne was 15 years ago; Kelly Cahill claimed to have flashbacks of being taken by strange creatures at Narre Warren, Mr Plowman said. - canber

Police swamped by wave of UFO sightings

A BUNCH of balloons sparked fears at the weekend that Scotland was being invaded by aliens.

Police were swamped with phone calls from locals worried about strange lights floating over their homes.

But inquiries soon revealed that planet Earth was safe. It turned out that guests at a party in the area had been tying candles to balloons and releasing them into the sky.

Police said: “It’s a game where people make a wish and release the balloons, hoping their wish will come true. We had call after call saying it was UFOs.”

Cops in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, received more than a dozen calls about the “aliens” on Saturday night.  - dailyrecord

Fake Flying Saucers

A friend pointed out aerospaceweb.org’s fake flying saucers info via email and commented, “Why is someone faking US and Nazi built “flying saucer” photos?  Are they in some way trying to obfuscate the truth of ET-built craft?”

Hmmm…

The original:

The original

I’m impressed. Great image manipulation. The white plane was completely removed and replaced by clouds which did not exist in the original photo. Lots of work.

Source of the [Fake UFO] Photos

We’ve finally identified the origin of the modified photos described above as coming from the website usafflyingsaucers.com. The site purports to provide evidence that the US Air Force built and tested four different disk-shaped aircraft during the 1950s and 1960s. Illustrating the site are several computer generated drawings, models, and images of the flying discs superimposed into pictures of actual planes. Both the site and the illustrations appear to be the creation of Michael H. Schratt.

Schratt says that the information presented on the site comes from a writer named Jack D. Pickett. According to Pickett, he was asked to visit MacDill Air Force Base in Florida in 1967 to write an article on historic aircraft. Among the planes he says he saw stored at the base were these four saucer-shaped aircraft, and he also claims the base gave him access to hundreds of photos and videos of the craft. Despite this information, Pickett says the Air Force later decided to prevent him from publishing his article about the planes and they have remained a secret to this day.

While we cannot dismiss his story out of hand and the existence of these flying disks may be confirmed someday, there is presently no evidence to corroborate the tale. Perhaps more importantly, the pictures created to support these claims ought to be clearly marked as computer generated conceptual images…. The only disclaimer pointing out the conjectural nature of the site appears on one page in very small text that is easy to overlook. …

Note that the site usafflyingsaucers.com expired in January 2006 and is no longer available. An archive of the old site can be found at WayBackMachine.com. A brief overview of many of its claims including additional diagrams can also be seen here.
- answer by Greg Alexander, 30 December 2005

Astronaut’s alien claims fall short, says UFO researcher

A former NASA astronaut stunned the scientific world and divided UFO watchers when he claimed last week that UFOs and aliens do exist.

In 1971 during the Apollo 14 mission Edgar Mitchell became the sixth man to walk on the moon.

Thirty-seven years on he says he’s just one of a handful in the space community who has been briefed by US military and intelligence officials on the existence of aliens.

But UFO believers says these revelations may have done their cause more harm than good. Keith Basterfield is co-director of the Australian UFO research network and is author of several books on UFO sightings in Australia.

He says he believes Dr Mitchell may have damaged the work of serious scientific researchers into UFOs due to the former astronaut’s broad claims and his inability to source what he’s presenting as fact.

“Dr Mitchell declines to name the sources he is getting this information from,” Mr Basterfield says.

“It’s always an unnamed source, or a source close to the Minister of Defence. You cannot take that as evidence of fact.

“He’s making those statements, obviously he’s gone public with them, but there is always doubt that the sources he is talking to aren’t playing the disinformation game with him.” - abc

Someone is lying about aliens. Is the lie that they don’t exist, or that they do exist? I wonder if we will ever know for sure.

Topanga Canyon UFO

My boyfriend and I were on our balcony when I looked up and noticed a stationary object in the sky. We live east of Los Angeles where we have been among many to see UFO’s of the San Gabriel Mountains. This is our fifth sighting this year but this is the first one we have on tape… and during the day. We noticed that it had it’s own light source and was very still for a few minutes and then eventually coasted away. It is not a balloon or anything I have seen before. Red and white orbs zig zagging through the sky at night have been the what we’ve seen… until this. It was around 3pm and appeared to look like a sperm. … - Frankwarren

This is a second video of the same sighting. This UFO just seems to blow around in the wind, right? I’m guessing a Chinese lantern with a tail attached:

Our garden was buzzed by a UFO!

BOB and Christine Bird were enjoying a lazy summer evening in their garden when they claim a UFO swooped low over their bungalow.

The astonished South Molton grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren, had been sitting in the back garden for about an hour before they spotted the “orange blob” slowly moving towards them at around 10pm on Saturday night.

“It started to slow down above us and it wasn’t that high up, at least it didn’t seem like it,” Christine, 57, told the Gazette.

“As it began to move over the house, my husband went indoors to get his camera. My daughter and I went to the front door and suddenly this ‘thing’ started to move.

“It went up at about a 40-degree angle and shot straight into the sky so fast. It was still quite light and you could actually see the orange colour getting smaller before it disappeared among the stars.

“Even now, what we all witnessed is so hard to believe that we can’t stop thinking and talking about it. - ndg