UNITED KINGDOM UFO NETWORK - PART 2

Mon, 25 Nov 1996 22:15:41 +0000
Source: United Kingdom UFO Network

{66} UNITED KINGDOM UFO NETWORK - part 2 - Members = 1,470

[W4]******

Source: The Express newspaper
Date: Thursday 24th October 1996

So is this the way the world will really end?

Apocalypse now or later? Another prediction on the extinction of ther human race is hanging over us. Seven experts explain how it could happen.

On Tuesday the end of the world was posponed. After studying the stars and genealogical tables from the Old Testament, a 17th-century Irish Archbishop predicted that life on Earth would come to a stop on the night preceding October 23rd. But it didn't.

We shouldn't relax yet, however: a 13-day difference between the Julian and Gregorian Calendars means that we could all meet our ends on November 4th.

It could all be over in a flash, or it might be a lingering, painful finale. To help us come to terms with our powerlessness at the hands of higher forces, we asked six leading scientists and a science-fiction author to envisage the end of life as we know it. Their conclusions show how science and fiction are never far apart.

Sir Martin Rees, Professor of Astronomy, Cambridge.

The most likely way would be if we were hit by a large meteorite. This would have a devastating impact on the Earth if, and when, it happened. We can be certain, however, that it will be all over when the Suns comes to the end of its life. This is some way off: it has been shining for 4 and a half billion years and will continue for a further 5 billion before its fuel runs out.

Then it will swell up to engulf the inner planets and vaporise any life on Earth, before shrinking to a faint, white dwarf star shining no brighter than the full moon today on whatever remains of our devastated solar system.

Russell Stannard, Professor of Physics, Open University.

We know the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang from the way that the galaxies of stars are still flying apart. But their gravitational attraction for each other is slowing down this motion. If, one day, it is strong enough to halt that motion, everything will be drawn back together into a Big Crunch. Curtains!

Meanwhile, the Sun and other stars will burn up all their nuclear fuel; their fires will die out and all will become cold. Planets will become frozen wastes; life everywhere will cease to exist. We call this the heat death of the universe.

Jonathan Tennyson, Professor of Physics, University College, London.

The Earth is under constant bombardment by debris from outer space. Most of this is small pieces of dust, which burn up high above us as shooting stars. But there are also huge lumps of rock and ice out there - formed when the solar system was created. What if one of these were to hit us? It is estimated that a one mile piece of rock would result in one in fourof us losing our lives. A bigger piece could well end civilisation. The problem is not the blast, but the big freeze as sunlight is completely blotted out by the dust. Crops would fail and we would starve. If you don't believe this, ask the dinosaurs.

Brian Aldiss, science-fiction author.

The world will end rather soon after mankind reaches Mars. A manned NASA mission will land on the Red Planet in AD2006 - 10 years time. It will find evidence of what appars to be fossil single-cell life and bring it back to Earth. The "fossil" is a hibernating bacteria and millions of years of hard living have given it strong predatory instincts. As it feeds, so it swiftly multiplies.

It eats protoplasm and can devour an average human being in 25 minutes. It will also gobble up animals, birds and fish. Within 10 years, there is no sentient life left on Earth. The bacterium adapts. It begins anew on grass, trees and forests.

Dr Norman Myers, Fellow of Green College, Oxford.

It is clear that the human race is at the edge of a precipice and that it faces a dire shock over the next 50 years, which may mean our numbers could begin to dwindle drastically. For example, there are more and more diseases to suffer from, due to the impact of travel and to the opening up of previously remote regions. The only suprising thing about the dicovery of AIDS is that we were suprised. The world is becoming a paradise for bacteria, spreading with ever-greater rapidity.

This particularly affects the growing number of malnourished. The world is running out of grain and reserves are at their lowest-recorded levels.

Robert Matthews, Physicist, Aston University.

I suspect the end of the world may begin with nothing more spectacular than a jumbo jet landing at Heathrow Airport.

Onboard will be a back-packer, who thought it would be fun to visit a really remote part of the world and ended up being bitten by some obscure insect.

After he gets back, he'll feel fine for years, and meet thousands of people. But then he'll develop fever and drop dead a week later from some haemorhagic disease that turns internal organs to syrup.

The cause will be traced to a new mutant strain of something like the dreadful Ebola virus, which killed hundreds in Africa last year.

But you'll be able to catch it just by breathing infected air - like cold viruses - and it will lie dormant inside you for years, like the AIDS virus, so it can spread to thousands before anyone even knows it exists. And that'll be that for humanity.

Dr Terence Kealey, lecturer in clinical biochemistry, Cambridge.

As far as we are concerned, the world will never end. The human race, in the form that we are in at the moment, will become extinct long before this world or the universe come to an end.

There is no mystery to our coming extinction, for species naturallyu evolve, which essentially means extinction. I do not believe we are going to become extinct in some dramatic fashion.

It is possible that the Earth will be destroyed by a meteorite, or a virus will kill us all, or that a lunatic in Beijing or Moscow will unleash nuclear Armageddon. But none of these is likely.

I believe that within a million years we will have conquered space travel and colonised other planets.

I also believe that the distances will be so huge that the inhabitants of individual colonies will evolve quite independently into different species. In time, the galaxy will contain hundreds of new species that originated from us.

[W5]******

Source: The Express newspaper
Date: Thursday 24th October 1996

By Jupitor, it's lifeless

Jupiter's largest moon has a thin oxygen atmosphere and may have auroras similar to the northern lights on Earth, researchers said yesterday. But there is no sign of life.

"All of the results that we have seen related to oxygen do not require nor imply the presence of life," said Doyle Hall, a Johns Hopkins University astronomer and leader of the research team, which is reporting its findings at a meeting in Tucson this week.

[W6]******

Source: Teletext - Strange But True
Date: 9th November 1996

The Weird World This Week

First it was strange lights in the sky, then it was fireballs; now its raining slime in Southern Tasmania.

A woman found blobs of white jelly outside her house in Kempton, about 25 miles north of Hobart, and a farmer found a paddock covered with it.

UFO experts suggested it could be fish eggs or jelly fish sucked up from the coast and brought inland by storms.

[W7]******

RELEASE: 96-159
STATEMENT FROM DANIEL S. GOLDIN, NASA ADMINISTRATOR

"NASA has made a startling discovery that points to the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago. The research is based on a sophisticated examination of an ancient Martian meteorite that landed on Earth some 13,000 years ago.

The evidence is exciting, even compelling, but not conclusive. It is a discovery that demands further scientific investigation. NASA is ready to assist the process of rigorous scientific investigation and lively scientific debate that will follow this discovery.

I want everyone to understand that we are not talking about 'little green men.' These are extremely small, single-cell structures that somewhat resemble bacteria on Earth. There is no evidence or suggestion that any higher life form ever existed on Mars.

The NASA scientists and researchers who made this discovery will be available at a news conference tomorrow to discuss their findings. They will outline the step-by-step "detective story" that explains how the meteorite arrived here from Mars, and how they set about looking for evidence of long-ago life in this ancient rock. They will also release some fascinating images documenting their research.

-end-

[W8]******

Source: The Sunday Times newspaper
Date: 11th August 1996

Hypersonic waveriders take off

An object reported as a UFO could be a wedge-shaped aircraft capable of 3,000mph.

By David Windle

A PROTOTYPE aircraft that learns to fly itself at five times the speed of sound was unveiled last week in America. Its futuristic shape has led to speculation that a secret full-size version of the plane could be responsible for UFO sightings.

The wedge-shaped LoFlyte (low observable flight test experiment) model is a product of joint research by Nasa and the US Air Force into ultra-fast planes capable of more than 3,000mph, a speed that would enable them to fly from New York to London in an hour.

The LoFlyte's design is known as a "waverider". Its wedge-shaped profile and sharp leading edges wrap the shockwave generated by high-speed flight around the fuselage while trapping a cushion of air below it. This design prevents air building up in front of the craft and slowing it down. The aircraft then "surfs" on a stream of air rather than having to plough through it.

The LoFlyte model has been designed to test the principle of the waverider design. Its flight-control software has been dev eloped by Accurate Automation Corporation of Chattanooga. This will teach the aircraft to fly itself after basic instruction from a pilot.

Robert Pegg of the hypersonic vehicles office at Nasa's Langley research centre says the software is needed to control a craft that could eventually travel at more than 3,000mph.

"At those high speeds, things happen so quickly that the pilot cannot control the aircraft as easily as at subsonic speeds," he says.

The aircraft's neural networks are designed to have more in common with the human brain than with computers. They consist of many separate chips that communicate with one another at high speed so they can learn, or be taught, how to react to varying situations.

John Pike, director of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC, closely follows developments in high-speed aircraft and believes that last week's unveiling could lead to an admission that a top-secret full-scale version of the plane is in operation.

"I continue to be puzzled by the vast number of theoretical studies into the waverider configuration that apparently have no basis in existing hardware," he says. "The public showing of the LoFlyte vehicle is very odd. It leads me to the conclusion that there may well be classified work going on in which that hardware exists."

Reports of unidentified, triangular aircraft have risen in the past few years, leading some aviation experts to a similar conclusion to Pike's.

These reports fall into a category of their own, quite sepa rate to the vague "lights in the sky" variety.

Last year, a British Airways Boeing 737 flying from Milan to Manchester was involved in a near collision with a fast moving, triangular object over the Pennines.

Captain Roger Wills and first officer Mark Stuart ducked as the UFO passed within feet of their aircraft. Radar operators on the ground were unable to track the second aircraft, but both men decided to file an official "air near miss" report and also made sketches of the mystery plane.

The wedge-shaped aircraft they described and drew looked very much like a waverider. If that is what it was, the nationality of the craft remains a mystery because all American stealth aircraft are required in non-combat flight to carry radar beacons to allow air-traffic controllers to identify them.

There have been numerous sightings of triangular aircraft in a corridor that stretches from the Midlands, northwards. In Los Angeles and Holland, a very fast moving triangular aircraft is alleged to have caused "skyquakes", presumably as it punched through the sound barrier.

Manned, hypersonic flight was proved possible in 1961, during a test flight of an American research aircraft, the X-15. Six years later it achieved almost seven times the speed of sound and became the world's fastest aircraft. The following year the X-15 programme ended and with it, manned hypersonic flight.

The waverider concept was first proposed by a British scientist, Terrence Nonweiler, in the early 1950s while at Queens University, Belfast. Since then, the only full-scale aircraft known to have used the principle was the experimental 2,000mph XB-70 bomber, flown in the late 1960s in America.

[W9]******

Source: The Sunday Times newspaper
Date: 8th August 1996

So what's new, shrug the watchers on ET Highway

FROM GILES WHITTELL IN LOS ANGELES

AT THE Little A-Le-Inn on Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway, news of life on Mars was greeted not so much with excitement as with interplanetary ennui.

"Oh, really, they got proof now?" yawned Paula Clayton, proprietor of the only hostelry on route 375 through the hostile desert north of Las Vegas. "That was pretty much assumed round here. We are not alone."

Route 375, which used to be one of the loneliest roads in America, was officially designated ET Highway earlier this year and is to be adorned with signs welcoming passing aliens. Business at Mrs Clayton's motel, a UFO watcher's Mecca in the village of Rachel, has gone "completely crazy" since the road was renamed, though she and her customers were unaware of the news from Nasa's Martian rock experts until alerted to it by The Times.

Pushed on the subject, the inkeeper admitted word of fossilised microbes from Mars would "start a buzz in the UFO community". But the received wisdom among the conspiracy theorists and amateur astronomers who flock here is that alien creatures and craft are already the subject of a massive 40-year US Government cover-up.

An extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed to earth at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and has been stored ever since in a vault beneath 'Area 51', a secret Pentagon facility within the Nellis nuclear test range near Rachel, UFO enthusiasts fervently believe.

A gathering of 4,000 is expected in Rachel later this month to demand the opening to the public of Area 51, whose existence the Government acknowledged for the first time last year. That, says Mrs Clayton, is where to find the little green men.

[W10]******

Source: The Times newspaper
Date: 21st August 1996

It's space, Jim, but not as we know it

Anjana Ahuja

It's space, Jim, but not as we know it

If you thought the "life on Mars" story was a bit way out, you may want to skip today's column. Nasa has put together a team of scientists to look at fanciful space travel ideas.

The incredible concepts being considered by the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics programme at Lewis Research Centre in Cleveland, Ohio, include playing about with gravity to take short-cuts across space, and designing vehicles that move faster than the speed of light.

The ten-strong steering team got formal approval (but no money) last month, and has grown over the past year from the efforts of several individuals. They may sound like crackpots but are far from it. They included representatives from some of America's leading institutions such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, God dard Space Flight Centre, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Marc Millis, an aerospace engineer at Lewis who is heading the effort, says: "We are not promising breakthroughs but hope to show measurable, tangible and credible progress towards achieving breakthroughs."

One of the most startling ideas the team will try to tap into is that empty space is filled with energy. "Quantum mechanics tells us that you can never get absolute stillness," Millis says.

"So even empty space, such as the interstellar vacuum, is teeming with energy. In fact, it's been said that there's enough energy in a cubic metre of nothing to boil away the earth's oceans."

So why don't we see it? "That's what we have to find out," he says. "But there is growing experimental evidence that such vacuum fluctuations could exist." It's possible, Millis adds, that gravity and inertia are side- effects of those fluctuations. The interest in unfeasibly fast space travel is obvious. If rockets could move faster than the speed of light, or even anywhere approaching it, travel between the stars would become a possibility. If such travel were made possible, the journeys would probably be made by robots rather than humans.

Millis and his colleagues are keen to bring in representatives from both industry and universities. The blue-sky research done by universities, he thinks, will be especially useful. There will be an invitation-only workshop next year where interested participants could propose cheap, near-term research to get some of these ideas off the ground.

The team is aware that they are indulging in "Star-Trek" science, but add that, so far, they have not used any taxpayers' money. "The response we have had for this programme has been favourable," Millis says.

"I think that a lot of people will be keen on these big projects. Daniel Goldin, the head of Nasa, asked the Marshall Centre to come up with some long-term propulsion plans, and we decided to look at ideas which are very far from fruition but may be possible one day."

Indeed, now could not be a better time to talk about big space projects. There is speculation that the discovery of fossilised bacteria in a Martian meteorite will encourage the Americans to kick-start the space race - this time to find more evidence of life.

The willingness to countenance crazy ideas is bolstered by the fact that, over the past few years, scientists have found evidence for phenomena once regarded as myth, such as black holes. Millis says: "Sure, some of the ideas may not work but we won't know until we try."

[W11]******

Source: Florida Today newspaper
Date: Sunday 3rd November 1996
From: duncan@life.com

MARS UPDATE BEFORE THE LAUNCH

Mars image stirs up debate once again

By Billy Cox

" It started out as an odd little blip tumbling to Earth amid an avalanche of photographic data being downloaded from Mars by the Viking orbiter in 1976. In the 1980s, it began peeking in from the fringes, from books lining the "New Age" shelves and checkout counter tabloids.

Today, the so-called Face on Mars is firmly embedded in the convoluted mosaic of the conspiracy culture, an arena where rumor and institutional wisdom are entwined in hidden agendas.

And it is moving people to action.

On Wednesday, emboldened by talk-radio exhortations and spirited debates in cyberspace, activists plan to picket NASA facilities at Kennedy Space Center and Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., during the launch of Mars Global Surveyor. The disaffected want the space agency's latest Mars probe to rephotograph The Face and other peculiar images on the desert of Cydonia. Never mind that NASA officials stated their intentions to do just that.

"We need to keep the pressure on," says local demonstration organizer Joe Jordan of Port St. John "This has gotten big, real big. I'm getting phone calls as far away as Utah and California from people who want to know how to find KSC."

Leading the charge will be Richard Hoagland, author of The Monuments of Mars, which charges The Face and nearby formations are artificial megaliths. Tonight at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Hoagland promises to deliver even more revelations.

"NASA's not even running the show," says Hoagland from his residence in Weehauken, N.J. "This is not about assigning white hats and black hats to anybody. We're going to be linking space policy to administrations that goes all the way back to Kennedy."

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., somewhat exasperated NASA spokesman Don Savage is left to disseminate the Official Position.

"I'd like to find some way to dispel this whole conspiracy thing within NASA," says Savage. "This notion that we're governed by the Brookings Report it's absurd. Our policy has always been one of openness.

"You're telling me that scientists who get evidence of extraterrestrial life or intelligence aren't gonna go out and publish that? There's no way. It'd be the biggest finding ever. It'd put their names right up there with Galileo and Newton. No way it could be kept a secret."

Welcome to Cydonia, and the repercussions of science by proclamation.

'A trick of light and shadow?'

Viking photo 35A72 raised eyebrows immediately when it scrolled onto JPL monitors during that Bicentennial July. A mile-long mesa in the northern hemisphere appeared to be staring straight up at the spacecraft.

But JPL investigators attributed the anthropomorphic features to a "trick of light and shadow" that disappeared after a subsequent photo was taken at a different sun angle. And that was that. Until 1979.

Still curious about the image, Goodard Space Flight Center systems engineer Vincent DiPietro scoured the archives for the NASA analysis. He couldn't find it. What he found was a previously undisclosed photo, 70A13, showing the same mesa at a different sun angle from 35A72. The second photo was more revealing than the first, suggesting the facial features of the shadowed mesa were bilaterally symmetrical.

Working with colleague Greg Molenaar, DiPietro subjected the images to computer analysis and published his results in a booklet called Unusual Martian Surface Features in 1982. It argued that this mesa ap-peared to have a sphinx-like hairline, features suggestive of teeth, and an eyeball in a socket. Furthermore, located nearby on the Cydonia Plain were a number of monolithic-looking formations including a five-sided pyramidal object with buttressed foundations reminiscent of architecture.

More researchers independent of NASA zeroed in.

Erol Torin, a Defense Mapping Agency cartographer, found geometric regularities including equilateral triangles, a tetrahedron reflected in the positioning of the objects; peculiar formations kept getting "hits" under fractal analysis, employed by military researchers to locate camouflaged targets that don't fit into the natural terrain.

Imaging specialist Mark Carlotto's case for non-random distribution of the facial features made it into the Journal of Applied Optics in 1988. "

[W12]******

Source: Florida Today newspaper
Date: Sunday 3rd November 1996
From: duncan@life.com

Author brings theories to BBC

By Billy Cox

Richard Hoagland's skills of elocution, have landed him sophisticated audiences at two NASA facilities Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Lewis Research Center in Ohio (twice) and the United Nations. And when discussing his three-hour presentation set for tonight at 7 on Brevard Community College's Cocoa campus, he emphasizes one word. free. "And I tell you one thing. It ain't cheap being free. But the last thing I need right now is people ac-cusing me of trying to make a quick buck."

Tonight, the author of The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever promises to deliver the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories a connection between the alleged artifacts on Mars, the pyramids and sphinx of Giza, Atlantis, and a space program up to its eyeballs in a secret parallel universe since the Project Mercury era.

"This is literally the focus of what our research has been leading us to for 15 years," says the 50-year-old resident of Weehauken, N.J.

"The numbers paint a stark and unforgiving picture of a set of priorities that are radically different from what we have been told for 35 years. Mars Surveyor has been launched according to those numbers, and that's why I'm coming down."

As convoluted as it might sound, tonight's pitch isn't even close to Hoagland's most far-out idea.

In the 1970s, the aerospace writer and former consultant to CBS legend Walter Cronkite came up with the idea of sending an interstellar greeting card from Earth to ET. Bolted to a plaque aboard the Pioneer spacecraft, the message exited the solar system in the 1980s.

On Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Kennedy Space Center's Gate 3, Hoagland plans to join a demonstration "NASA About Face" coinciding with the launch of Mars Global Surveyor.

[W13]******

Source: Florida Today newspaper
Date: 16th October 1996
From: duncan@life.com

NASA to take world to Mars via Internet

By Todd Halvorson

"CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Coming soon - and almost live - to a computer screen near you: NASA's return to the Red Planet.

Plugged into the power of the Internet, NASA said Wednesday it will take the whole computer-connected world along to Mars next year as one agency spacecraft swings into orbit around the planet and another touches down on its cold barren, desert-like surface.

Look for near-real time color pictures of the wind-swept world as well as up-close glimpses of a six-wheeled rover meandering around an ancient Martian riverbed.

Not to mention a daily Martian weather report.

"There will be a virtual presence on Mars so everybody in America - and for that matter around the world - can participate (in the missions)," said NASA administrator Daniel Goldin.

"By sitting in your home and looking at the video screen on your Internet connection, in almost real time you'll be able to see (Mars)," he said.

"Almost real-time" because it takes 20 to 40 minutes for broadcast signals traveling at the speed of light to make the trip between Mars and Earth.

The Return to Mars show will be beamed back to Earth from two NASA spacecraft, which will be the first to visit the planet in two decades.

One - the Global Surveyor - is to be launched Nov. 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Station and will go into orbit around Mars on Sept. 11, 1997.

The second - the Mars Pathfinder- is to be launched from Cape Canaveral on Dec. 2 and will land upon a riverbed known as Ares Valles on July 4, 1997.

The Pathfinder lander - as well as a small cart-like rover it will dispatch - will send back color pictures of a region once deluged in two weeks by a flood 1,000 times greater than all the water in the Mississippi River.

The other craft will be sending back color pictures of a more global scale as it orbits and maps Mars over 687 days, or a full Martian year.

The "almost live" action will be playing at two Internet addresses:
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/ and http://mgs-www.jpl.nasa.gov/

And you can expect some controversy.

NASA says it will immediately post pictures taken by the Global Surveyor as it flies over a region called Cydonia, where some claim Viking spacecraft photos show pyramid-like structures and a "Face on Mars" carved by ancient civilizations.

Said NASA project scientist Arden Albee:

"We think we have done all the things we can possibly do within the framework of this mission to try to address this question of the "Face on Mars." So we hope that we'll be able to satisfy the people who have been asking questions about this."

[W14]******

Source: Teletext
Date: Sunday 24th November 1996

The Weird World This Week

The FBI is investigating a report that the co-pilot of a Pakistani plane saw "something unusual in the sky".

Pakistan International Airlines Flight 712 had just taken off from John F. Kennedy Airport when the co-pilot reported seeing "a strange streak of light".

The plane was on a flight path similar to that taken by TWA Flight 800, which crashed just after take-off last July.

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