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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