UK UFO NETWORK Part 2

Mon, 16 Dec 1996 20:38:13 +0000
Source: UK UFO Network

Continuing from Part 1...

[W4]******

From: Duncan@life.com
Source: Focus magazine
Date: September 1996

Aliens

With the movie Independence Day bringing ETs into the limelight once again, Focus speculates on what sort of creatures might really be lurking out there...

By Sean Blair

Britain's top astronomer was furious - and a little frightened. Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Ryle believed what had happened would lead to only one thing; alien invasion!

The year was 1974, and Ryle had just learnt that the American National Astronomy and Ionosphere Centre had sent out a welcome message from its radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, aimed at the constellation Hercules.

Ryle's response was immediate. Didn't thc fools know what they were doing? He drafted an angry letter to the International Astronomy Union, demanding that no such message ever be transmitted again and asking them to officially condenm such hazardous actions. In an unknown and potentially hostile universe, Earth had drawn attention to itself, letting malevolent aliens know just where to find us.

The IAU never did condemn such transmisions. It was left to Frank Drake, director of the centre and pioneer of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative to explain that it was too late for future Nobel prize-winner Ryle to worry anyway. Radio and TV signals have already announced our presence to our galactic neighbourhood - to this day. Dixon of Dock Green and I Love Lucy are still speeding outwards at the speed of light.

Besides, Drake argued, any alien race that achieved interstellar travel would be sufficiently developed to reject war and aggression.

Drake speculates elsewhere that aliens are quite likely to have discovered the secret of imortality and other scientific gifts they will gladly share with their newly discovered terrestrial neighbours. Ryle never replied to Drake's letter.

This one sided exchange is interesting as it demonstrates the variety of opinion on what "they" might be like, if "they" are out there at all.

In medieval times, the skies were believed to be peopled by angels and devils. Our knowledge has grown exponentially since, but our view of alien entities still tends to centre on either benevolent superbeings or prospective evil invaders.

Until we get what SETI enthusiasts refer to as "The Signal", we cannot guess exactly what an alien would be like. The centuries of speculation about extraterestrials tend to reveal more about ourselves than ETs.

Serious scientific discussion about aliens really began in 1959, with the publication in Nature of an article suggesting signalling to aliens by microwave and, the following year, Frank Drake's first radio telescope scans of nearby stars to detect extraterestrial signals.

Before finding anything, you must decide what you're looking for - so SETI scientists have spent a lot of time over the past 30 years working out what aliens around any of the estimated 40 billion trillion stars in the universe might be like.

They are almost certain to use radio to communicate across interstellar distances, and they would be carbon-based, like all life as we know it.

Carbon is the only atom capable of forming sufficiently complex molecules to create life. Water would also be necessary for the biochemical reactions comprising living systems. It is assumed that aliens will be composed of individual biological cells broadly similar to our own.

In fact, NASA's Global Surveyor mission to Mars, to be launched in 1998, will look for calcium carbonate "skeletons" that could have been left by cells of micro-organisms, checking a theory that life once started on the Red Planet, too, but died before evolving as Mars began to grow cold and inhospitable.

While the exact nature of aliens is unknown, they must have ways of taking in nourishment, moving and reproducing and some sort of organ that houses intelligence.

Thought has also been given to the character of alien civilisations. Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev introduced a classification system in the 1960s that has become SETI standard. Human civilisation is a comparatively puny Type One civilisation, just about up to exploiting the energy capability of planet Earth. But maturer civiltsations could reach Type Two using the entire energy of their home star - or even Type Three, involving colonisation and exploitation of whole galaxies.

Around the same time, Frank Drake put together an equation to work out the number of alien species broadcasting in our galaxy. Taking into account all possible contributory factors, the Drake Equation has yielded answers varying from 10 million alien civilisations to a more modest few thousand.

Waiting for "Wow!"

So where are they? There have been numerous "answers" to the "Fermi paradox" since it was posed by Italian physicist and Manhattan Project member Enrico Fermi. Physicist Frank Tipler argues only enormous chance allowed life on Earth to arise - expecting it to happen twice is just too much to ask.

Or perhaps Earth is just out of step with our alien neighbours. We might have to wait millions of years for them to evolve - or else they are already extinct; perhaps all intelligent civilisations eventually destroy themselves, by war or by accident.

The idea that we are in space quarantine, either for our own good or theirs is a popular argument. As J G Ballard commented gloomily after the lunar landing, "If I was a Martian, I'd start running now."

Another possibility is that alien races are observing radio silence to avoid the attentions of predators - either hostile aliens or autonomous self-replicating probe robots (perhaps even sentient computer viruses existing as microwaves) hungry for raw materials and real estate. The existence of just one such threat might be enough to silence the galaxy - apart from naive young worlds like ours, broadcasting happily away.

Anyway, it isn't quite true to say SETI efforts have heard nothing for the past 35 years. There have been hundreds of suspect signals received - most famously the regular signal, originating from at least lunar distance and detected at Ohio State University Observatory in 1977.

This has gone down in SETI history as the 'Wow!" signal - from what the supervising astronomer wrote in the margin of the computer printout. These and other such unrepeated signals - SETI resechers call them "bumps in the night" - fit well with the idea of alien microwave communication - but unfortunately, they also fit more mundane explanations: secret military satellite transmitting on illegal fequences, reflections from space debris or equipment malfunction

But if The Signal does come for sure, will there be anyone still listening? Under pressure from a cost cutting Congress, NASA ended SETI research in 1993. Private research is precariously funded and Scientists have been reduced to appealing for money over the Internet. The Ohio State Telescope being pulled down this year - to make way far a golf course. At a time when interest in aliens is greater than ever - and the discovery of complex organic molecules and new worlds in deep space make their existence more likely - our chances of knowing for certain if they exist are getting slighter.

How aliens have always been in our nightmares

Notions of non-human intelegences stretch back thousands of years. The flrst imagined were animist nature sptrits of mountains, forests, rivers and seas. And a few of these spirits developed into gods.

With its waxing and waning dominating the night sky, the moon was naturally ensgrined in godhood by many cultures, and its movements became the basis of all calendars.

The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, in the fifth century BC, was the first to suggest the moon might not be another being but a world like the earth-and an inhabited one to boot. His opinion was later endorsed by the historian Plutarch and the writer Lucian. His A Tru History written in AD 165, has a hero carried to the moon by a whirlwind to meet the distinctly human lunar king and queen, who are warring over the colonisation of Jupiter.

The Renaissance marked a renewal of interest in the universe beyond Earth. The Italian writer Ariosto described a trip to an inhabited moon (this time via the fiery chariot of Elijah) in his 1532 poem Orlando Furioso. But while it was acceptable to suggest in fiction there were habitable worlds besides the Earth, saying so as fact was unwise.

Six decades on from Ariosto, the Italian monk Giordano Bruno declared, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earth's revolve about these suns... Living humans inhabit these worlds." The Catholic Church called on him to recant this cosmological heresy. When he refused, they burnt him at the stake.

But, a few years later, the invention of the telescope revealed the moon as an earthlike place, with mountains, craters and "seas", and spurring on speculation about life on other worlds Cyrano de Bergerac penned Voyages to the Moon and the Sun in 1647, and a pair of English bishops, Francis Godwin and John Wilkins, wrote their own visions of life on the moon -inhabited by inteligent human beings, as usual.

As astronomical knowledge progressed, the airless moon was abandoned as a possible home of life - although as late as 1835 the New York Sun newspaper claimed astronomers had seen flowers, trees and unicorns on the lunar surface.

This still left the rest of our solar system, however. In 1796 astronomer Pierre Simon de LaPace formulated the theory that it originated out of a gradually cooling cloud of gas, with the furthest planets in the solar system condensing first.

This meant the further from the sun a planet was, the older it was. It followed then that cloud-covered Venus was a young version of Earth literally a virgin world - while Mars, with its thin atmosphere, was seen as an elderly, dying planet.

Despite this, Mars was considered through out the 19th century as a probable abode of alien life. It had icy poles, suggestive of water, and seasonal movements of dark and light across its surface that were interpreted as vegetation - possibly cultivated fields. And then there were the canals...

In 1877 Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was the first to see what we now know to be the optical illusions of dark channels stretching across the Martian landscape, but it was American Percival Lowell who made them his own.

>From his private observatory in Arizona he mapped more than 500 hundred canals, crossing at dark spots dubbed "oasis".

Despite objections from other astronomers that they couldld see nothing, Lowell depicted, in books such as 'Mars as the Abode of Life', an advanced but dying Martian civilisation, combating the drying out of their world with global irrigation.

There were already many suggestions on how we should contact our potential neighbours.

Back in 1820 German mathematician Karl Gauss had suggested cutting a huge and bizarre pattern of Pythagorean triangles into the forest of Siberia, while 50 years later, French physicist Charles Cros mooted the idea of a network of sunlight-reflecting mirrors stretched across Europe.

In the 1890s psychics also got in on the act, claiming they had already made mental contact with denizens of the Red Planet.

Mystery radio signals

The new medium or radio was also pressed into service, with both Marconi and Tesla briefly believing they had picked up signals from Mars or elsewhere. (In fact, what they had heard were "whistlers" long-lasting electromagnetic waves produced by lightning flashes.)

Then, in the years following Lowell's death in 1916, studies of the Martian atmosphere showed it was colder than Antarctica, and too thin for any human-like form to breathe. Shifting colours on the surface were revealed as simply dust storms, and "canals" as tricks of the light.

The culture of the 19th century had constructed an imaginary civilisation in its own image. In the age of the Panama and Suez canals, canal- building was seen as the hallmark of an advanced civilisation.

The Martians were gone, but not forgotten. They lived on in the books of such authors as H G Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the fledging genre of "scientifiction". And the "Greys" of today's ufology are the great-grandchildren of 19th century Martians; with their wizened, spindly limbs, enlarged heads and apparent obsession with reproduction, they'd fit in perfectly on the low-gravity plains of Lowell's dying Mars.

Martians made a brief reappearance in 1938, when Orson Welles' New Jersey-set radio version of War of the Worlds caused mass hysteria among its audience, already disturbed by rumours of war.

The next time aliens entered popular culture was the 195Os when flying saucer sightings gave people something else to worry about besides the Cold War. But whatever they are, belief in ET visitors has never gone away. Forty years ago they were responsible for banal but well-meaning speeches about the dangers of nuclear energy. Today, they're stronger on random kidnapping and sexual assault than chit- chat-the perfect reflection, perhaps, of the Nervous Nineties.

Watchers of the kies: the alien hunters

Slashing NASA's SETI budget reduced the US deficit by just 0.0006 per cent but dealt a crushing blow to the alien hunters (the only country now sponsoring SETI efforts is Argentina). However, SETI has bounced back with the setting up of several private sector groups, including the New Jersey based SETI League and the SETI Foundation in California.

The SETI League has announced a new all-sky SETI programme, Project Argus, beginning in1997, which will use thousands of mini-satellite dishes set up by volunteers across the world. The SETI Foundation is also overseeing a search called Project Phoenix from Australia, targeting 200 stars, while the University of California at Berkeley is carrying on its long-running SERENDIP (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emmisions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations) project, with help from sponsors including scientist Carl Sagan.

Not that SETI enthusiasts have devoted all resources to the airwaves: some believe that aliens will be found by sighting actual artefacts, suh as Dyson Speheres - gigantic constructs surrounding individual suns - which will give off distinctive and detectable infrared patterns.

Another theory is that aliens will communicate by high powered lasers. Astronomer Stuart Kingsland has built a telescope in Ohio with a photon-counter to find laser pulses between the nearest 1,000 stars.

Making an alien: imagining life on the moon of 70 Virginis

A new planet, discovered last January around the star 70 Virginis, excited interest because its position suggested that water - and therefore life - could have developed there. But what would such life be like?

Life as we envisage it couldn't develop on the planet itself, which is similar to Jupitor but 6.4 times as big, though probably also has solid moons.

Imagine an Earth-sized moon orbiting the planet every 2.6 days. With an orbital radius of ope million km, it's distant enough to escape being broken up by the planets massive gravity.

One side of the moon always faces towards the planet, and is distorted by tidal forces.

Resultant crustal cracking may have spewed out hot gases to form an atmosphere, as well as water (some of which also came from comet impacts) creating an ocean, and volcanic minerals providing raw materials for carbon-based life forms.

70 Virginis is three billion years older than our sun, so life here has had twice as long to evolve. Micro-organisms feeding on undersea volcanic vents could develop into larger organisms. Evolution could be spurred on by a high mutation rate caused by radiation from the planet.

The planet's temperature and pressure is extremely high - water would have a boiling point of well over 100 degrees C here - so "Virginians" might be small and spiky to vent excess heat, with eyes and frond-like tentacles in all directions to locate nutrients.

Tidal forces could leave part of the moon high and dry every 1.3 days, causing Virginians to evolve a hard shell to prevent themselves being dried out - as well as intelligence to cope with the ever-changing enviroment.

The Virginians could maybe link brains via tentacles. The bigger the problem, the more join together. Alone, they are perhaps as clever as a cat; a dozen of them together, far more intelligent than a human being.

The alien makers

A hideous, slimy tentacled space invader staggers out of the Area 51 Lab - one of the stars of the 60 million dollar SFX-fest, Independence Day. But while you wouldn't want to meet monster maker Patrick Tacopoulous's creation in a dark alley, like all movie invaders, they're really not alien enough.

Even H R Giger's famous Alien design owes its shock factor to humanoid aspects. Taking a leaf out of Freud's book, he made the creature's vaious stages of life resemble human genitalia, from its vulva-style egg to the phallic head of the adult alien. Gigers latest work will be revealed this autumn, with the release of the latest Star Trek film, First Contact. He has redesigned the Borg, the alien from the Next Generation TV show, to make it look less human. The Borgs use time travel to change history and destroy the Federation.

In reality, any humanoid aliens will be in extremely short supply. The chances of another planet producing the same genetic sequence as ourselves is an estimated 5 x 10 to the power of 16,557,000 - enough digits to fill over a thousand pages of Focus.

Written science fiction has yielded some more credible aliens than films, but there are still limitations. SF writer and physicist Stephen Baxter has created some of the most original aliens of the past few years, including creatures made from dark matter and enormous beings made from the turbulent cells of a boiling ocean, but he argues that it is among the hardest things for a writer to do.

"My feeling is that real alien races will be just that: alien," says Baxter. "You only have to look at our 'cousins' on Earth, like the fossil creatures of the Burgess Shale, to see that."

Imagining the way an alien might think and communicate is a real barrier.

"I think communication will be much more difficult than we think - second only to the problem of recognising something as alive in the first place."

If you're looking for a credible alien, you should go to a xenobiologist like Jack Cohen, who works out how aliens would evolve. Xenobiologists ask themselves how evolution would solve problems presented by certain enviroments - high gravity worlds might give rise to flat, armoured creatures, while gas planets might serve as home to balloon-like "floaters".

The results of Cohen's studies have appeared in novels by Larry Niven and Brian Aldiss - but Cohen the script for any resulting movie would be dull.

"I'm sure aliens would be so different as to make interaction with humans unlikely," he says.

What happens when we finally hear The Signal...?

The '50s comics made it look so easy. The head alien steps out of his saucer parked on the White House lawn and says, "Take me to your leader!"

In real life, any communication is likely to come by radio, not rocket ship, but what then?

To address that question, a document called Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence was approved in 1989 by the International Academy of Astronautics and a host of other astronomy organisations.

It says information on any alien signal should be promptly released to other researchers and, once verified, to the entire world. When it comes to replying, it specifies that no return signal be sent until international consultations take place.

This is usually taken to mean that the decision on whether to reply (and what to say) should be mad by the United Nations, although it is arguable whether a unanimous decision on such a momentous issue would be reached. The design of the alien greeting plaque sent on Pioneers 10 and 11 led to controversy in 1972. Because the plaque showed a naked couple, NASA was accused by some of sending smut into space. The cultural and political divides that would open up debating the contents of a reply to aliens would undoubtably be far greater.

Astronomer Patrick Moore, among others, has urged that all politicians be left out of it - while Alabama sociologist Donald Tartar suggests those who first detect a signal immediately reply with a code word. The code will also identify all future messages from the discoverers, so the aliens will know which ones are worth listening to.

The other question pondered by SETI researchers about First Contact is the risk of profound culture shock. The extreme differentness of aliens might drive us to collective xenophobia or, if their achievements are sufficiently ahead of ours, we might plunge into a despairing apathy so severe it might mean extinction.

[W5]******

From: NASANews@hq.nasa.gov

Subject: Station's First Module Assembled\; Ready for Testing
Date: Monday 9th December 1996

STATION'S FIRST MODULE ASSEMBLED; READY FOR TESTING

The first major component of the International Space Station (ISS) has been completed on schedule and on budget.

Russia's Khrunichev Industries, working under contract to NASA's ISS prime contractor, The Boeing Company, has completed assembly of the Functional Cargo Block, or FGB, which will be launched in one year and will provide initial power and propulsion for the ISS.

The FGB, a 20-ton pressurized spacecraft, will be launched on a Russian Proton vehicle in November 1997.

"The first piece of Space Station is on track and will be ready to launch in just twelve months," said Virginia Barnes, FGB program manager. "The people of Khrunichev worked hard to make this happen, and we are all excited to be playing such a crucial role in this new chapter of space exploration."

In May 1997, the FGB will be transported from Moscow to the Baikonur launch complex, where it will undergo final checkout and testing, and be mated to the Proton rocket.

"Most of the subsystem hardware has been installed including the propulsion system, the onboard computers, lighting power supply, solar array orientation system, thermal controls, fire detection, and guidance, navigation and control," said Barnes. "The subsystems will now undergo functional testing until the FGB is transported to the launch site."

A week after the FGB launch, an interconnecting node module, built by Boeing in Huntsville, AL, will be launched from the Kennedy Space Center, FL, aboard a Space Shuttle. Astronauts will link the two modules in space, signaling the beginning of the largest space-based construction project in history. The FGB will provide orbital control, communications and power to the node.

During this period, the FGB will control the motion and define the altitude of the Station's orbit. Later in the assembly sequence of the Station, as additional modules are added, the FGB will serve as a storage and experimentation facility. In addition, its external fuel tanks will continue to be used throughout the lifetime of the Station.

"This is an exciting time for the FGB team," said Barnes. "In the next 12 months we will be preparing to launch and to unite our two countries in building the International Space Station."

In August 1995, Boeing Defense & Space Group and Russia's Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, signed a $190 million contract for all phases of development and production of the spacecraft.

[W6]******

Source: Mufon UFO Journal
Date: November 1996

THE ORDEAL OF JOHN FORD

by Elaine Douglass

The arrest June 12 of Long Island New York UFO activist John Ford is deeply troubling. Founder in the mid-8Os of the Long Island UFO Network (LIUFON), Ford became known for his relentless investiga- tions of UFO events and for his startling al- legations that alien craft had come down on Long Island tree times in recent years and been retrieved by federal and local authori- ties.

The Suffolk County Long Island Police Department is one of the agencies John ac- cused. John said the police helped recover a fiery object witnesses told John came down in Long Island's Southaven Park in 1992. John made this claim at public meetings up and down Long Island, and he held a demonstration at Police Headquarters.

About a year ago scary things started happening to John Ford. He repeatedly phoned friends and said someone was ha- rassing him and maybe, he thought, trying to kill him. Was there a campaign to desta- bilize John Ford?

If so, it reached its climax June 12, when John was arrested in a sting operation in- volving phone taps and a "wired" paid in- formant. Police charged John with conspir- acy to murder and possession of radium without a license. Suffolk DA James Catterson told news reporters John Ford planned to murder an individual by the name of John Powell, head of the Suffolk County Republican Party, by putting ra- dioactive radium in his toothpaste.

An improbable charge, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, the DA seemed unable to re- strain himself in the media following John's arrest. He sponsored two press conferences, compared John to the Unabomber, and made additional charges against John for which no indictments were subsequently re- turned. Amid a flood of sensational news, John's bail was set at half a million dollars. Naturally, he hasn't been able to raise it.

In the meantime, the UFO community, unused to investigators being arrested and charged with crimes, has met this unsettling drama with a stunned silence. Nor has John, on advice of his attorney, issued any state- ment in his own defense other than his plea of not guilty.

Not mentioned in the newspapers was John's claim of harassment, of himself and others in LIUFON: auto accidents (too many), vandalism of cars, and a physical at- tack on LIUFON member Joe Mazzuchelli, who was arrested with John June 12. Mazzuchelli says last winter four men dragged him out of John's truck, beat him up, and warned him to "stay out of our busi- ness.

Such are the allegations in this case. What is the truth? Is UFO investigator John Ford a potential murderer? Or is John the victim of a political arrest? Was he set up by people local to the Island or higher-people who got a little tired of John Ford's inces- sant allegations?

What were John's allegations? As any- one familiar with John knows, they were radical. For example, John believed that in 1989 Americans forced down an alien craft over Moriches Bay Long Island. He believed that in 1992 an alien craft crashed in Southhaven Park on the Island. And he considered the possibility that in 1995 another mysterious object came to earth in the Pine Barrens area of the Island and that "diversionary fires" were set to dis- tract public attention.

John claimed the technology used to down the alien craft in 1989 came from Brookhaven National Laboratory on the Island. Based on his sightings investiga- tions, John concluded UFOs were making regular flights over populated Hudson Valley and Long Island, much to the con- sternation of the coverup, which decided to do something about it. John further believed the Long Island police, fire, parks and other local agencies were commandeered by the federals to assist in these emergency opera- tions and then, naturally, gagged.

John claimed he had "sources" in the Police and Fire Departments who privately told him information on which he built his cases. And there were non-confidential wit- nesses, members of the public, who told John, for example, about a fireball coming to earth in Southhaven Park, about fire truck and police cars that night, and that the Park was closed afterward. Yet the Fire and Police Departments denied it and the Park director said the Park was never closed. The details of John's cases are too numerous to cover here, but one treatment of the Moriches Bay case can be found in Len Stringfield's Status Report VI.

The thing about John was he wouldn't shut up. He went all over Long Island talk- ing about a coverup of UFO events in which local authorities were deeply implicated. John founded LIUFON about 1985. >From then on, he maintained a hot line. He inves- tigated sightings and abductions. He held public meetings. He talked to the press. He sponsored conferences. He held demonstra- tions, he published a newsletter, he leaflet- ted. John was tireless. I know John Ford, and he is the most determined UFO investi- gator I ever met.

He also has flaws, plenty of them. He is stubborn, for example. Yet John Ford's friends all attest he lived a moral life and never, as far as anyone can remember, threatened another person with bodily harm. According to John's attorney, John Rouse of Central Islip, "You can't believe how many people have called me to say they can't en- vision John Ford killing anyone, or even conceiving the intention."

Murder wasn't in John's character, peo- ple say, and breaking the law wasn't John's style. John Ford was a law and order advo- cate who spent most of his career as a Court Officer in the Suffolk County court system. John knew the law and how to use it. John was litigious, not violent. If John Ford had a gripe against you, he'd sue you in a minute.

Nor is John stupid. Even the Suffolk DA called John a "mastermind." If John was go- ing to kill someone, would he use radium? It hardly kills people fast. Readers will re- call the famous radium dial painters of the l920s who licked radium paint brushes for 40 years before they got cancer.

Yet the DA would have us believe that John's "murder weapon" was radium. Toothpaste goes fast in a household of four people, like that of alleged murder target John Powell. Was Ford going to break in and put radium in Powell's toothpaste every week for 40 years until Powell got cancer?

And would an individual who thought people were watching him leave illegal ra- dium in the back of a pickup truck in front of his house? I repeat, John knew the law.

The charges against John strain credibil- ity, but that didn't seem to embarrass the DA. As I mentioned, Catterson was so eager to incriminate John that he made several se- rious charges at his press conferences for which no indictments were returned. "This," says attorney John Rouse, "is called poison- ing the jury pool."

Catterson's overstep raises questions: Did the DA believe he had more evidence against John than he ended up with? How good is the remaining evidence? Is it possi- ble the DA never thought he had evidence to convict John of anything, and that in- stead, the purpose of the arrest is simply to ruin John Ford's reputation and wipe him out financially with legal bills?

The purported case against John rests on the taped conversation made in John's house the night of his arrest. According to police, the wired informant engaged in con- versation with John and Joe Mazzuchelli about doing away with Powell and another local politician via the radium in the tooth- paste route. After this the police, who were waiting outside, burst in and arrested John and Joe.

The tape has now been released on dis- covery. "It's unintelligible," says Preston Nichols, John's friend in LIUFON. "All I can clearly hear on that tape," Nichols says, "is the informant talking and John laughing like whatever they're talking about is a big joke."

Attorney John Rouse doesn't disagree. He's waiting for an "enhanced" version of the tape to see if the conversation becomes clearer. Rouse warns, however, that John's situation is serious. If a jury believes the DA's charges, John Ford could get 25-75 years at an upstate NY prison.

As for the radium, it was allegedly found outside in John's truck. Outside is where the police were, waiting and listening to the in- formant talking with John and Joe. Could the police have planted the radium?

And finally, unless John was to be en- couraged and entrapped, why use an infor- mant at all? If the police believed John was plotting a murder, why not bug his house for a couple of weeks and get the whole scoop? The answer might be that the purpose of the informant was to lead the conversation in an incriminating direction.

I have in my files a letter from the Suffolk County Police Department, dated April 1993. I wrote to them, at John's re- quest, complaining about police violations of LIUFON member's civil rights. They had been leafletting near Southhaven Park and going house to house looking for wit- nesses-constitutionally protected activity. The police stopped them and ordered them out of the area. This was the kind of thing John did, and this was the kind of response he got from the Suffolk Police, as far hack as 1993.

There is plenty of reason to think the Suffolk Police were "out to get" John Ford. And no member of the UFO community can be confident they understand the arrest of John Ford if their only source of informa- tion is the sensational media reports orches- trated by the Suffolk DA.

That is why John's colleagues, including myself in Washington, DC, LIUFON vice president Steve lavarone, and Tony West, Richard Jones, Preston Nichols, and Joe Zuppardo in New York, Don Jernigan of Ohio, and Kelly Freeman of Florida, have organized the John Ford Defense Committee. Our purpose is (1) to give peo- ple true information on the arrest of John Ford, and (2) collect funds and other re- sources essential for John's defense.

My support for John Ford, and the sup- port of the other members of the Defense Committee, is based on our convic- tion that John did not, would not, and could not conspire to murder anyone. On this point our support is complete and total.

As for John's allegations, I speak only for myself and not for other members of the Defense Committee. I always found John's allegations hard to believe but impossible to dismiss-because John had evidence and what he claimed was perfectly possible. Taken as a whole, what John Ford's claims suggest is a low intensity military conflict between the United States and the aliens. Is that possible? Yes it is.

Just because John's allegations "fit" doesn't make them true. But the fact is, John had evidence. John claimed three events on Long Island.

Even if he was wrong on two of them, if he was right on only one, John had a tiger by the tail. If so, it's no surprise somebody would try to destroy John Ford.

And there's that curious coincidence about Moriches Bay, which more than a few persons have pointed out. Moriches Bay is where John said the United States brought down an alien craft in 1989, and Moriches Bay is where TA Flight 800 mysteriously crashed in August. The cause of that crash, readers are aware, has so far eluded federal investigators, and in particular investigators are unable to explain the reports of more than 20 persons who say they saw an unac- countable light streaking toward Flight 800 before it went down.

John Ford is the first UFO investigator to be seriously persecuted by the authorities. Shall we sit idly by while our colleague's life is destroyed? If John Ford is silenced, who is next? Contact the John Ford Defense Committee at web site www.iwaynet.net/~pic or email elaine26@juno.com

The Committee needs funds for John's legal defense and donations of several kinds: a psychiatrist expert witness; profes- sional audiotape analysis; and a Long Island-based legal investigator. Please also write personal letters to: John Ford (8-29- 48), Suffolk County Jail, 100 Center Dr., Riverhead, NY 11901.

Continuing in Part 3...


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